Recently Watched Films 2013

[jon abbey]

FWIW, I read Higgins' other best known book not too long ago, Cogan's Trade, and wasn't into it, even though I am a big fan of that area (crime/noir/whatever you want to call it). give me Chester Himes or Jim Thompson or Charles Willeford, this one was more towards Elmore Leonard territory (who I also am not a fan of).

[Dan Warburton]

Yes, figures, Leonard described the book (Coyle) as the best crime novel written, or something along those lines.

[MRS]

Upstream Color (Shane Carruth, 2013)

My blood isn't up to spill the usual drivel. Highly recommended to all reading if not without dross or disaffected, attractive white people. Nematodes, pigs, humans. . .temporally fucked. My better half pronounced the field recording artist as God about halfway through. What music and sound and Carruth does all of it. Looking forward to taking it in again after a while. All I got.

[Matt Wuethrich]

Peter Yates, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, 1973

Thanks to Matt W for pointing me to this and Lao Tsu Ben for linking that pinksmoke article, very informative.

My pleasure. I had a feeling people here would be into it. And that pinksmoke article is very persuasive; it's what got me to finally pick the film up actually. Nice write-up, too, Dan,

Even the Dave Grusin soundtrack - and I'm a fan - feels too lite and brite, somehow.

It did feel out of place, but maybe that was the point? Everything in that film feels like it's just in the right place, so someone had to hear what a mismatch it was. Maybe it was meant to be an ironic stab at films that romanticize crime? To me it just highlighted the low-down nature of all the characters.

And thanks to Dan (and Lao Tsu Ben) for bringing up this one:



Nicholas Ray, Bigger Than Life, 1958

I was struck by all the dissonance in this one: the nearly constant presence of the melodramatic (at times almost saccharine) orchestral score to accentuate the moments of disintegration; the garish 50s technicolor cut with thick expressionist shadows straight from the 20s; Mason's ill-fitting double-breasted suit and his sad attempts at machoness by playing football; the austerity of the suburban world that seems more claustrophobic than comfortable, even when shot in widescreen. Ray even gets a little surreal when Mason goes to the hospital for the first time for x-rays. Couldn't find a screen shot of the nurse feeding him the (probably) radioactive liquid while the doctor gazes at his innards. This had to be pretty weird mainstream cinema in 1956.

[Matt Wuethrich]

Jan Němec, Diamonds of the Night, 1964

Two teenage boys escape into the forest while on their way to a concentration camp, loosely based on Arnošt Lustig's novella Darkness Casts No Shadow. Bleak and brief (at just a hair over 60 minutes) but full of cinematic ideas. There's essentially no dialogue and Němec doesn't study the boys' psychologies as he depicts them as animal entities. There's some great handheld camera work in the forest (a la Ivan's Childhood), The editing is used initially to insert a series of brief flashbacks (which work mostly as memories or at least impressions of such) but once the film gets halfway through the editing is a lot more destablizing to the narrative. By the end, you're not quite sure what has happened to the boys. I do think that another careful watching might yield a resolution.

My better half pronounced the field recording artist as God about halfway through

And then there's the sound (by František Černý). If your better half was into field recordings in Upstream Color (which I want to check out), then there's much to love here. Every breath, twig-snap, slurp of stream water, bit of birdsong and (later, to much discomfort) the sounds of old German men chewing sausage is captured vividly and pushed way upfront so that image and sound often seem the equal. This focus on the image and the non-verbal just enhances the boys' animal nature. Wonder what Chion makes of this film. Dan?

[MRS]

My better half pronounced the field recording artist as God about halfway through

And then there's the sound (by František Černý). If your better half was into field recordings in Upstream Color (which I want to check out), then there's much to love here. Every breath, twig-snap, slurp of stream water, bit of birdsong and (later, to much discomfort) the sounds of old German men chewing sausage is captured vividly and pushed way upfront so that image and sound often seem the equal. This focus on the image and the non-verbal just enhances the boys' animal nature. Wonder what Chion makes of this film. Dan?

Thanks Matt, you had me at the b&w larch forest footage of Ivan and the sound of chewing sausage. To be clear, the central character (as in the middle third of Upstream Color) is actually a field recording artist/collector/manipulator. And an experimental pig farmer. My gal suggested he was in fact God in the course of plot. I can't remember him having any dialogue. You should see this, I will check out the Němec for sure.

[Dan Warburton]

Me too, both of them. Meanwhile, as I only found out she'd died two days after the fact and didn't open an RIP thread for her, here's my favourite (so far) film starring the late, great Bernadette Lafont:



Nelly Kaplan, La fiancée du pirate, 1969

And what a wonderful film it is, a kind of Jacques Tati nightmare vision of petty, ugly France profonde, in which Marie, daughter of a gypsy living in a shack in the forest (the mother is dispensed with by a hit and run driver early on - you should see her "funeral"), gets her revenge on the pathetic slobbering hypocrites of the village (with only one exception, the men in this film are little more than beasts) by.. making them pay. Won't say any more - but Kaplan's impeccably tailored script manages to make telling points about serious contemporary issues - sexism, feminism, prostitution, corruption, consumerism - so deftly you almost don't notice them. A total delight, easily up there with the best Godards, Truffauts and Chabrols.

[Dan Warburton]

King Vidor, Duel in the Sun, 1946

Lurid, stupid fun, as one reviewer put it. Jennifer Jones (Mrs Selznick) rolls her eyes, tosses her head, and rolls and tosses just about anything else she can, but you'll still fall off your chair laughing as she crawls through the dust to die sprawled across Gregory Peck's pecs. Some spectacular shots, what with a train crash and about a zillion horses racing around, but it's all a glorious waste of time and money.

[Matt Wuethrich]

Jean-Luc Godard, Bande à part, 1964

Guess I'm working my way backwards a little bit, starting with Czech New Wave then moving on to one of its sources. As it is for many, this was the first Godard I've seen and despite all the ink spilled over his career, I still wasn't prepared for how free this felt and, despite its dark undercurrents, how much fun it was. It's not hard to see why a film such as this affected (and continues to effect) so many. I will definitely be returning to this one soon.

However, I thought this comment by Michel Chion (in an interview with Dan W at PT) was interesting:

"Godard doesn't interest me much, though I've analysed many of his films. Too rhetorical. Godard is someone who creates audiovisual paradoxes. The cult of paradox is a kind of snobisme. There are many major figures in literature who use paradox effectively, like Oscar Wilde, but others I don't like. Sasha Guitry's quite popular in France, but he doesn't do anything for me. Things like "it's because I'm honest I'm a thief". Paradoxes like that don't interest me. I don't care for that mechanical side to paradox."

I suppose a lot of the formalist, almost meta-maneuvers here (e.g. the minute of silence that isn't actually a minute) could be seen as superficial tricks (or simply as mechanical) but it seems Godard takes this techniqueto the level of the action as well. I mean, how could one NOT like the dance scene or the comedy of Arthur and Franz trying to get that ladder up against the house? The latter is part Buster Keaton, part tragedy. Working out which (and not coming to a conclusion) is part of the attraction.

[P. Wretch]

Jerzy Skolimowski, Deep End, 1970

What a cracker - hope they're all going to be as good as this - easily as good as Blow Up, and sharing that same slightly surreal quality, the bemused outsider's view of Swinging London (though, amusingly enough, very little of the film was actually shot there - most of it was filmed in Munich!).

I'm afraid I can't quite share your enthusiasm for this one, although I approached it with high hopes. The camerawork and production design are indeed impressive, but for all its arty credentials, the film as a whole frequently has the air of a low-rent sex comedy, which is clearly how the original trailer marketed it (the Sun crowing that the bathing room scenes were 'enough to make Mrs Whitehouse ban carbolic soap' - I was reminded of something like Confessions of a Window Cleaner as much as Blow-up). Jane Asher is good, but John Moulder-Brown's mumbling adolescent lead is impossible to take seriously (he's no Jean-Pierre Léaud), and the result is tonally awkward, although that may be what Skolimowski intended. (The scene with Diana Dors moves from farce to something more darkly lurid.)

Everyone involved seems to consider it a masterpiece, though, so maybe I need to look at it again.

[presquepartout]

Greg Mottola - Clear History

Basically a feature length episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. At times it was hilarious, and the ending is perfect Curb, but the plot drags and sometimes loses focus.



Jem Cohen - Museum Hours

Absolutely gorgeous film, and it makes me want to go to Vienna, though it can be a tiresome viewing.

[Dan Warburton]

Don Siegel, The Big Steal, 1949

Nice, tight snappy noir comedy teaming up Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer again (they're just as good together here as they were in Out Of The Past) wth William Bendix in hot pursuit. Siegel goes over the top on the car chase, and there are several daring camera moves here and there - the young drector was clearly having fun making it. Great ending too. Tip for potential investors: I wouldn't recommend the Universal Cinema Classics DVD version I picked up last week in England, a 1991 colorized version that looks decidely odd, like an old postcard left out in the sun too long. Fuzzy image too.

[Dan Warburton]

Jerzy Skolimowski, Deep End, 1970

I'm afraid I can't quite share your enthusiasm for this one, although I approached it with high hopes. The camerawork and production design are indeed impressive, but for all its arty credentials, the film as a whole frequently has the air of a low-rent sex comedy, which is clearly how the original trailer marketed it (the Sun crowing that the bathing room scenes were 'enough to make Mrs Whitehouse ban carbolic soap' - I was reminded of something like Confessions of a Window Cleaner as much as Blow-up).

I don't think the two films are all that different, if you scrape the carbolic soap off the surface

John Moulder-Brown's mumbling adolescent lead is impossible to take seriously (he's no Jean-Pierre Léaud), and the result is tonally awkward, although that may be what Skolimowski intended. (The scene with Diana Dors moves from farce to something more darkly lurid.)

I think you've nailed it with "darkly lurid". I suspect also that the tonal awkwardness was intentional - even if it isn't, it doesn't bother me. Wouldn't go so far as to call it a masterpiece, but I thought it was very fine.

So's this -



Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, L'enfant, 2005

[ananas]

This ain't California (Marten Persiel, 2012)

a documentary about skateboarding in GDR, worth seeing

[Dan Warburton]

Theo Angelopoulos, Το Βλέμμα του Οδυσσέα, "Ulysses' Gaze", 1995

I wanted to like this, but just couldn't. It's at least an hour too long for starters, though it's a question neither of length – regular posters here don't have to be reminded of my fondness for Jacques Rivette – nor tempo, although I am rather suspicious of folks who assume that because something is slow it's necessarily profound (the jury's still out here on Béla Tarr). Judging from how he hams up his oh so poetic monologues, I wonder if Harvey Keitel isn't one of the them. In any case, he seems miscast and looks shabby and half-asleep throughout. The fact that Maia Morgenstern pops up all over the place to smother him with kisses is also rather disconcerting. I have no problems with sequences that slip without warning from "reality" into "dream", but Saura and Bergman do them better - Bergman obviously being something of a reference for Angelopoulos, casting Erland Josephson and namechecking Persona. But string orchestras playing torpid sub-Gorecki in the foggy ruins of Sarajevo and psychiatric hospital inmates wandering shellshocked into the gloom (why is everything in this film so grey?) don't do much for me. Liked the image of the giant Lenin statue sailing up the Danube though.

[Dan Warburton]

Harmony Korine, Spring Breakers, 2012

The one line that comes up, and with truly astonishing frequency on the first page of the IMDb user reviews (I do enjoy my little daily scrolls through other people's abject cretiny) is "I wish I could have those 94 minutes of my life back." Huh? What would you have done with them, ducon? Read a poem by Rilke, or a short story by Raymond Carver? Listened to a late Beethoven quartet or a Morton Feldman piano piece? Dipped into Pascal's Pensées? Seriously doubt it. Nobody stuck a gun in your mouth and forced you to watch until the end – cinemas do have exit doors, and televisions and computers off switches, you know.
What makes this such a delight for me, and evidently such a frustration for the jackasses on the IMDb threads, is that there's nothing in Korine's deceptively minimal script or his direction to indicate any moral pros and cons whatsoever. There are no hero(in)es here – not even Faith, despite being "jacked up on Jesus" (great line), but no outright villains either. Certainly not Alien (google "James Franco Alien Hairstyle" and have a ball, y'all). I wonder what Korine makes of Jean-Luc Godard's famous line "les travellings sont affaire de morale" (which, as Jonathan Rosenbaum points out, was itself swiped from Luc Moullet: "la morale est affaire de travellings"). And I wonder what JLG would make of the poolside piano and Britney Spears song. Benoît Debie's photography is gorgeous, and the near-omnipresent soundtrack counterpoints the wild and wacky editing most effectively – you don't need to go more than a minute beyond the lollipop blowjob opening sequence to realise this is not standard Hollywood fare. If I had my 94 minutes back I'd happily watch it all again.

[MRS]

Decision at Sundown (Budd Boetticher, 1957)

What a luscious transfer, the women's hats, lips, grass. Roemheld's score keeps it tense, even when Noah Beery, Jr. gets too much time. The interiors, the bright hotel bar and hyper-Victorian garish rooms, you'd be hard-pressed finding space to set down a tumbler. Our man descends upon Sundown looking to put a cap in one Tate Kimbrough, and it's Tate Kimbrough's wedding day. Yes, Bart Allison (Scott) appeals to the officiant and throng that this marriage should indeed not take place, up there with Lone Starr. Scott's high American English sometimes doesn't compute, squeaky clean "-ing"s and such. The doctor's role is crucial and I'm not convinced, John Archer (Operating Thetan Anne's father), the only local on the fence, he looks like a refined Frankie Avalon and the voice is from a Chesterfield ad. Written into a corner, events grow more unfeasible, yet all of it transpires within a small boomtown square, Bart and Sam holed up at the livery stable, everyone else at the magnificent blue tavern across the street. I think this might end in a piano in the bushes scenario.

"For three years I've hunted Kimbrough but he didn't know it. Before I settle with him I want him to know he's being hunted."

[Dan Warburton]

Awesome. Time to revisit my Boetticher box, methinks. But couldn't resist this last night



Agnès Varda, Le bonheur, 1965

So light and yet so deep, as my university professor used to say of Jane Austen. Nice essay here, but if you haven't seen the film, beware spoilers http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/ ... -the-grass

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Harmony Korine, Spring Breakers, 2012

Where did you get that picture, Dan? It doesn't come from the movie or am I mistaken?
Otherwise, I already said how I feel about Spring Breakers. Did I mention that article over at the Pink Smoke? It sums up my thoughts quite well.

http://thepinksmoke.com/springbreakers.htm

The second part of the movie, which runs like a bizarre blaxploitation film is also too shabby to convince me. More or less conscious nods to Godard, and particularly Bande à Part are there, but does it make the film better? In my case, no - too much attitudinizing (though it works for me in, say, Wong-Kar Wai).

[Dan Warburton]

Where did you get that picture, Dan? It doesn't come from the movie or am I mistaken?

Um, I just google the film title and choose an image I like that's about the right size. Maybe right click on the address and do some research? Thanks for the pinklink – again. Some good points there. Like the Herzog footnote.

Meanwhile, thought I'd catch up on a couple of KG Fts -



Fred Haines, Steppenwolf, 1974

A brave attempt to film an unfilmable book, as frustrating and flawed as Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, and - no disrespect to Messrs Shore & Coleman - with a better soundtrack. George Gruntz's spidery psychedelic bebop works surprisingly well (it's fun to see the perennially weird Pierre Clementi miming to Charlie Mariano), more so than the – evidently - dated visual special effects. The Gilliamesque animation sequence is just about potty enough to convince, but the Mati Klarwein Magic Theatre and the garish colour filters are embarrassingly amateurish to modern eyes. (That said, those old Doctor Who episodes used to scare the pants off me in 1974, but it's hard in 2013 trying to convince your 14 year old kid that the original version of Tron is way better than the remake.) Shame, because Harry Haller could just be the best performance I've ever seen by Max Van Sydow, and Dominique Sanda – surely the most intriguing mouth in cinema history – perfect as Hermine.




Michael Kalesniko, How To Kill Your Neighbor's Dog, 2000

Yes, well, Robin Wright is always too good to be true, and the gagbarf obligatory happy end disappoints, but it's worth a look for Kenneth Branagh's grumpy, chain-smoking male menopaused playwright. The script is overloaded with tangy, cynical one-liners, and he knows just how to deliver them.