Recently Watched Films 2013

[leroysghost]

Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí - Un Chien Andalou (1929)

still one of the most overrated films of all time, especially considering how almost all the good bits were recycled for L'Age D'Or. still, it's hard to totally discount a film with an underarm fixation, a car crash fetish, and a doorbell that consists of arms coming out of a wall and shaking a martini. that last bit in particular shows an impressive use of the silent film medium (tellingly absent from a google image search) that is not readily apparent in the charmingly haphazard technical aspects of the film. you can tell Buñuel was going somewhere.


Luis Buñuel - L'Age D'Or (1930)

obviously one of the great films, what is there to say that hasn't been said before. a similarly impressive use of film medium here, although this time with sound. i particularly like the scene where throat clearing is the only intelligible moment of the speech given by a Majorcan to mark the founding of Rome. the use of music (especially Tristan And Isolde) is similarly well implemented. good use of boredom too.


Luis Buñuel - Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (1933)

when i last saw this one it struck me as the least dated of the three, though i had not seen the other two in some time. now i'm inclined to feel the opposite. unfortunately it seems my assumptions of the films parodistic qualities came mainly from the poorly dubbed english version instead of from intention on Buñuel's part (as this aspect seems wholly absent from the subtitled version). the proclamations against fascism in particular date the film horribly. the on screen shooting of the goat (despite the narrations claims to the contrary) is still a great and incongruous moment of absurdity.

[Dan Warburton]

Great triple bill there, for sure. Chien Andalou is a bit of a bore, I agree - maybe Dali's "fault" more than Bunuel's, but I'm not sure who did what. Recently went to the huge Dali retrospective exhibition at the Pompidou Centre and was pleasanly surprised by the paintings once again and bored by his excursions into cinema (the various silly happenings, the TV commercials.. still like the dream scene from Spellbound though). Meanwhile, had a lot of fun with this one last night



Billy Wilder, One, Two, Three, 1961

No wonder Cagney had to retire after this - the poor bugger barely pauses for breath. In fact, the gags come so thick and fast that you begin to tire after a while (fatigue sets in when Horst Buchholz is fitted out for his society wedding); some of them make you cringe, some are Hollywood in-jokes (the references to Public Enemy, Little Caesar and of course Ninotchka, which Wilder co-wrote), but most of them still fizz merrily. Sure, we know which side of the Iron Curtain Wilder's on, but he manages to take the piss out of Germany and America quite efficiently too. Some cool location filming in West Berlin - though that Brandenburg Gate was reconstructed in Munich - and you have Joan Crawford to thank for the Pepsi bottle (see IMDb trivia).

[Dan Warburton]

F.W. Murnau, Sunrise, 1927

Who needs words? At point the intertitles literally dribble away down the screen. The gloriously moody Movietone soundtrack (Hugo Riesenfeld or Willy Schmidt-Gentner - not sure who did what - anybody know?) also swipes chunks of Wagner (Siegfried Idyll), Strauss (Johann) and Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette (later to become Hitch's signature tune) but gets really wild and Ives-like in the city scenes, where it superimposes waltzes and polkas as daringly as the director overlays images. The more you stop to think about the camera moves (how on earth did they film that swamp scene tracking shot?) the more impressive the whole thing becomes, even if, when all's said and done, it's a bit of a lame story (country good city bad - and those nasty city girls smoke too, yeeurgh). Those were the days when it wasn't enough to tell your lead actor to look burdened with guilt, you had to put lead weights in his boots.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Jiro Dreams Of Sushi, -, 2011

Who wants to know the name of the fool who made that. Silly, shallow stuff made almost insufferable at times by its soundtrack (mostly Glass). There are few opinions on imdb that reflect what I thought of the film, but here are some of them:

It seemed more like a advertisement movie and a flick to show out great Jiro is at making sushi. Like it's a movie to boost Jiro's status cause all he does is brag about himself and others around him praise his methods constantly throughout this movie.

he pays lip service to the problems concerning the environmental impacts of over fishing and the reliance on seafood.

There are some mouth-watering scenes of the painstaking food preparation, which will appeal to those people currently hooked on the raft of television cooking shows

Mouth-watering is a word I would not have used, but, sure, it looks good.
That people should find it interesting is beyond me.

[Dan Warburton]

Alex Cox, Revengers Tragedy, 2003

Stabbings, poisonings, incest, necrophilia - revenge! The Senecan bloodbath of this 1607 tragedy (so near the knuckle at the time it was published anonymously - I used to see it attributed to Cyril Tourneur, modern research now sides with Thomas Middleton) is a spaghetti western in all but name, and setting it in a modern city - Liverpool, ten years from now - makes perfect sense. More sense, in fact, than the Mexico City of Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, because the rough edges of Jacobean English sound better in Scouse than in they do in American. And Frank Cottrell "24 Hour Party People" Boyce's incorporation of modern slang (I love Stephen Graham's "fuck off, you cheap pair of bastards") works wonderfully. Great casting throughout - watch out for Derek Jacobi's Duke, a truly scary cross between Karl Lagerfeld and Brick Top in Snatch. Should be required viewing on any high school English Lit course. Good man, Alex. http://www.alexcox.com/dir_revengerstragedy.htm

[Dan Warburton]

Mervyn LeRoy, Little Caesar, 1931

Certainly worth the price of a cigar for Edward G. Robinson's snarling Caesar Enrico Bandello, but it hasn't aged as well as Scarface, somehow. One senses the actors, Robinson apart, hadn't yet quite got used to hearing themselves speak; Glenda Farrell is uncomfortable as the only woman credited in the film (you'll have to look on IIMDb for any information about Ma Passa and Ma Magdalena), and Douglas Fairbanks Jr is pretty wooden as Rico's trying-to-go-straight sidekick Joe Massara (bet that's not him dancing, either), but that's probably because the script doesn't give either of them much to go on. Rico gets all the good lines, but Thomas Jackson's oily, cynical detective Flaherty (who's just as creepy as one of the gangsters) has a few good ones. What's most interesting about pre-Code Hollywood is its flirtation with subjects that would later be swept under the carpet: there seems to be a clear homosexual subtext here, and Robinson teases it out from underneath the gruff surface with remarkable subtlety - quite apart from the disparaging remarks Rico makes about women, you only have to watch him preening himself in front the mirror in his tux, or the tears in his eyes when he realises he can't shoot Joe.

[Mo Noyz]

Flight

Denzel Washington (as played perfectly by Denzel Washington) is an airline pilot who makes a miraculous in air save while high off his ass on booze and cocaine. John Goodman revises the role he's played in several other movies to good effect, and while his screen time is very limited he essentially steals the show. Don Cheadle is at his hand-wringing best but is hamstrung by a rather mundane script. There is also a throwaway plot line between Denzel and some semi-cute redhead that can't act. They fuck one night. He gets really drunk the next night. She leaves the next morning leaving a note behind that makes Denzel throw a bottle against the wall.

Two hours and fifteen minutes later Denzel Washington broken by the nonexistent pressure of being asked if the flight attendant he was fucking had been drinking before the flight being investigated, in which she died, breaks down in melodramatic fashion and admits it was he who had been drinking!! And that he was a hopeless drunk.

While there was nothing good about this movie, I enjoyed it for what it as. Which wasn't much. I would recommend the first 20 minutes because the flight and crash are somewhat well done and the action is gripping in a non-Bruce Willis way. But, after that I'd suggest moving on since the crash is nothing more than a metaphor for what has just happened with the story.

[Antoine]

And it ends with a sermon/thanks god/amen, which is quite boring.

[Mo Noyz]

*sound of jet flying overhead as camera does slow, dramatic zoom on Denzel Washington so he can deliver his penultimate line. Cut to black. Roll credits*

[Dan Warburton]

Lech Kowalski, East of Paradise, 2005

The first half of this is a truly gripping 50-minute monologue in which the director's mother, in her 80s, describes how she was taken from her home in Eastern Poland in 1939, sentenced to hard labour in a Siberian gulag and then - when the Soviet authorities suddenly decided that Poles were on their side against Hitler - released and left to find her own way home in boxcars full of typhoid-ridden refugees who were forced to eat the lice from their own heads to survive. No fancy cuts away to photographs of the period (as if anyone could have taken any) - Kowalski knows full well we've all seen similar images of WWII genocide, and lets words tell the story and us to imagine the images. Occasionally the camera pans to the bleak unadorned walls of his mother's apartment, or to dead leaves on the windowsill, but that's about it. Eventually, overcome with emotion, she decides she can't go on. Fade to black.
Cut to Lower East Side one-eyed junkie celebrity John Spaceley cooking up for breakfast in a squalid apartment with only a mangy dog for company, then skateboarding through Downtown traffic and throwing up on the sidewalk as he goes - an extraordinary scene, because there's something so graceful and elegant about the arc of white vomit. Suddenly, from the stasis of the monologue, everything is action, movement, colour (though there's nothing remotely attractive about the New York Kowalski shows: this is what Travis Bickle dreamt of washing away), as Kowalski looks back at his own life as a filmmaker on the margins, from his apprenticeship in the mafia-run porn cinemas of 42nd Street to his epochal documentaries on punk D.O.A. (1980), the homeless of New York (Rock Soup, 1991) and drug addicts (Story of a Junkie, 1987). But the power of his mother's story continues to resonate: it's the lice we think of as we watch Spaceley shoot up yet again, it's the vast, black Siberian forest we see as Kowalski's camera pans across the urban wasteland of the East Village.
An absolutely extraordinary piece of work, strongly recommended but not for the faint-hearted.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Flight

Denzel Washington (as played perfectly by Denzel Washington) is an airline pilot who makes a miraculous in air save while high off his ass on booze and cocaine. John Goodman revises the role he's played in several other movies to good effect, and while his screen time is very limited he essentially steals the show. Don Cheadle is at his hand-wringing best but is hamstrung by a rather mundane script. There is also a throwaway plot line between Denzel and some semi-cute redhead that can't act. They fuck one night. He gets really drunk the next night. She leaves the next morning leaving a note behind that makes Denzel throw a bottle against the wall.

Two hours and fifteen minutes later Denzel Washington broken by the nonexistent pressure of being asked if the flight attendant he was fucking had been drinking before the flight being investigated, in which she died, breaks down in melodramatic fashion and admits it was he who had been drinking!! And that he was a hopeless drunk.

While there was nothing good about this movie, I enjoyed it for what it as. Which wasn't much. I would recommend the first 20 minutes because the flight and crash are somewhat well done and the action is gripping in a non-Bruce Willis way. But, after that I'd suggest moving on since the crash is nothing more than a metaphor for what has just happened with the story.

This sums up perfectly how inoffensively bad the movie is. Until the ending, which is just plain wrong.



A Severed Head, Dick Clement, 1970

The film looks good and makes perfect use of Lee Remick. Whether or not she plays well is an altogether different matter, but one cannot deny that she put a lot of energy in whatever she was doing. It's the fact that it is an adaptation of an Iris Murdoch's novel ("a harbinger of The Sexual Revolution" according to wikipedia), which she had already adapted into a play (not a very good sign), which got me interested in the first place. As a bedroom comedy (not my favorite genre), it's far less interesting than Mazursky's Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice; the similarities are numerous, though, except that, as anyone would have seen this will say, this one is typically "English and dry". One could add, as a consequence, "more perverse". The art direction is good but reeks too much of the theater. Not worth altering his ratio on kg, even if I don't care, since I have a friend who buys accounts by the dozen (I know, it's not very "ethical"). When you come to think of it, it's strange that Under The Net was never made into a film, you would think that the BBC, at least, did it.

[Mo Noyz]

I think the worst part about the ending of Flight was the burst out of your skin feeling that "it took us two hours and fifteen minutes to end up here??!!"

Denzel Washington has become the king of turd movies.

[Dan Warburton]

Alexander Mackendrick, Sweet Smell of Success, 1957

"The main incentive to see this movie is its witty, pungent and idiomatic dialogue, such as you never hear on the screen anymore in this age of special-effects illiteracy," wrote Andrew Sarris. Sure, being a bit overwritten never did much harm to All About Eve, A Face In The Crowd or Network. This is just as good, and maybe even more cynical. Burt Lancaster's JJ Hunsecker is a truly awesome screen villain, and Tony Curtis (who I've never been all that impressed with) does a damn good job with an exceedingly difficult role, fawning obsequiously to JJ and bullying everyone else. Great location shots of New York by night, and cool to see the Chico Hamilton Quintet in action too.

[Dan Warburton]

Luc Moullet, Une aventure de Billy le Kid aka A Girl Is A Gun, 1971

IMDb sez this lasts for 100 minutes, but the version I saw runs for only an hour and a quarter, not that I'm tempted to check out a longer version. The whole thing is pretty silly - I like films that take off other genres, and appreciate Moullet's wry sense of humour elsewhere, but this spoof / parody / détournement is a waste of time. The English dubbed version is hilarious, with American actors voicing their characters in deadly earnest, while Léaud in the French original delivers his lines as only Léaud can, fast and flat (even Léaud fans will find this annoying, I suspect). Hard to see how this could appeal to fans of either conventional, spaghetti or comedy westerns. But it's nowhere near as bad as this -



Claude Chabrol, Les innocents aux mains sales, 1975

I'll refrain from saying anything about Romy Schneider's bare back (though you might argue that as the whole film is about sexism and misogyny, I'd be falling into a trap cleverly laid by the director); suffice it to say she's nice to look at but as an actress she's not a patch on Stéphane Audran, not that she could have done much with the convoluted (and, surprisingly for Chabrol, frequently vulgar) script drawn from another second division série noire novel. Is Chabrol doing a Moullet here, deliberately fucking with noir conventions or just plain inept? I'm afraid I think it's the latter, but I'd welcome a chance to discuss it with Ed Howard, who gave this a much more positive write-up on his blog.

[jon abbey]

Last time I said something about Romi Schneider's bare back in these pages I had my botty smacked by the Thought Police

presumably you mean this post:

http://ihatemusic.noquam.com/viewtopic. ... 50#p186550

to which I only see leroysghost saying he's putting it in his queue because of that. so what are you referring to?

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Last time I said something about Romi Schneider's bare back in these pages I had my botty smacked by the Thought Police

presumably you mean this post:

http://ihatemusic.noquam.com/viewtopic. ... 50#p186550

to which I only see leroysghost saying he's putting it in his queue because of that. so what are you referring to?

It's not hard to find. I didn't know this juicy bit of conversation.
I agree with you on Billy The Kid, except that in my case, it made me drop Moullet completely. His brand of petty irony is not my cup of tea. The locations are great, though. I saw it at the Centre Georges Pompidou, he presented the film, telling stories about how Leaud would have several gulps of rosé before each take. Léaud's wife taught philosophy in my high school, so I've had more than my share of anecdotes of the kind.There was Jeanne Balibar too, who said something about how she loved geography when she had been studying to enter the Ecole Normale Supérieure. I don't know what I was thinking by going there.
One last, unimportant thing, it's Romy, not "Romi".

[Wombatz]

F.W. Murnau, Sunrise, 1927

The gloriously moody Movietone soundtrack (Hugo Riesenfeld or Willy Schmidt-Gentner - not sure who did what - anybody know?) also swipes chunks of Wagner (Siegfried Idyll), Strauss (Johann) and Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette (later to become Hitch's signature tune) but gets really wild and Ives-like in the city scenes, where it superimposes waltzes and polkas as daringly as the director overlays images.

Riesenfeld. Apart from the carnival montage I don't much like the soundtrack, though, seems to do its best to make a stuffy melodrama out of a gloriously artificial movie. If I remember correctly, there are churchbells when he changes his mind in the boat? Urgh. (Favorite moments might be the streetcar out of nowhere and the first time George O'Brien smiles.)

Yesterday I watched Hands of Orlac (1924)



and kept thinking Thelonious Monk would have handled the situation rather better. Favorite moment is the Nosferatu homage Veidt (former Caligari lead) goes into when he learns his hands are those of a murderer:

[mudd]

Last time I said something about Romi Schneider's bare back in these pages I had my botty smacked by the Thought Police

the "thought police" have given this thread up for hopeless, but it would be pretty awesome if everybody maintained the effort to avoid descending into fratboy mode.

also try not to belittle the valid reactions of other people years later when they aren't around to defend themselves. obviously.

m

[jon abbey]

One last, unimportant thing, it's Romy, not "Romi".

not unimportant, that's why I didn't see that exchange on my search (although I vaguely remembered it).

[yonhosago]

die hard 5

the best part was 5 minutes before the ending, when a statue of Lenin appears to "colour" the nth explosion.