Recently Watched Films 2013

[Hayao Yamaneko]

we appreciate it, Dan!

Definitely. I don't watch a great many films, but a very substantial chunk of the best films I've seen in the last few years came to me from thread, and in most cases from one of your reviews. It's a public service!

[Dan Warburton]

Thanks for the kind words - if it's a public service am I entitled to some kind of index-linked pension? Meanwhile, I wouldn't add this to your want list unless you're some kind of masochist



James Toback, Fingers, 1978

Pauline Kael seemed to like it, but I didn't. Had high hopes for it, too - this is the movie Jacques Audiard remade as De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté (see above) - but for once the remake is better than the original. Way better. (It seems I'm in the minority saying this, from what I read. So be it. Fingers is one of Monsieur Godard's favourite movies, apparently. But he liked that schlocky Vincente Minnelli thing a few pages up too, so wtf). Masterly performance from Harvey Keitel? Huh? If you'd never seen him in Mean Streets or Bad Lieutenant, I seriously doubt you'd be inclined to put his name on a list of the top ten actors of his generation based on this performance - he spends his time either looking dumb or barking his head off, and it isn't the furiously targeted anger that Scorsese and Ferrara can get out of him. It's Toback's fault, as both director and writer - there's nothing in the character of Jimmy for Harvey to get his fabled Method Acting Chops on: I just don't feel the schizophrenic tension he's under - family, moral, spiritual, even (concert pianist mother or gangster father? right or wrong? Jewish or Catholic?) - and the piano playing comes across not as the central image of this struggle but as a kind of woolly subplot. If fact, everything in the film comes across as a woolly subplot, from Jim Brown's party pimp (nice crunching sound when he smashes the two girls' heads together though) to Tisa Farrow's anaemic Carol (Mia's sister's acting career came to an end two years after this, and I'm not surprised), to Jimmy's sexual dysfunction (a lame Freud For Dummies symbol of his moral dilemma, if ever there was one). As for Michael Gazzo's Ben, are we really supposed to think this guy's a feared Mafia boss? Not with that voice, or with some of the genuinely hilarious lines Toback gives him. Maybe I'm way wrong and it is a kind of twisted screwball comedy, as Kael seems to think, but the extreme violence and gore of the killings, when they come, seem to work against that hypothesis. And as for Keitel's beatbox - well it's just asking to get smashed up with a baseball bat. Oops wrong film - that was Radio Raheem's in Do The Right Thing. Danny Aiello's in this one too, as it turns out, but he doesn't do much. The film doesn't do much, either.

[Matt Wuethrich]

Ahmed El Maanouni, Trances, 1981

This has come out in a restored version as part of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation project (Masters of Cinema has done a Blu-Ray set and I think the first Criterion installment was just released). It’s a romanticized portrait of the Moroccan band Nass El Ghiwane, mixing concert footage with interview segments, some staged street encounters with their public, landscapes and rare footage of musical theater pieces from 1970s Moroccan television. The concert scenes (with some great crowd shots) and the ritual excerpts are where it’s at but the film works beautifully as a whole. It lifts you up with these guys and shows in great relief the charisma they possess.

[Matt Wuethrich]

Ivan Passer, Intimate Lighting, 1965

One of Kieślowski’s favorite films apparently, and it’s not hard to see why. This is a short (70 minutes) but oblique slice of the normal lives of some pretty ordinary people in a Czech village. Dynamically it’s flat and almost detached, so much so that you might miss what is going on inside of and between the characters, which is a lot. When we were done my wife announced she was somewhat underwhelmed but the next admitted much of it had stayed with her. The details live on, especially the impromptu butchering of Mozart (pictured above) and the final meal.

[Dan Warburton]

Romolo Guerrieri, The Sweet Body of Deborah, 1968

Another convoluted tale of wife and husband plotting to claim each other's life insurance, complete with de rigueur plot twists, fake murders & suicides (the ending is remarkably similar to that of Usual Suspects, actually, though I doubt Bryan Singer knew this film) and gratuitous topless stripper. I've read a few rave reviews of Carroll Baker's performance, but I wasn't blown away myself. Nice cheesy soundtrack, but a bit too much Tchaikowsky.

[Dan Warburton]

Sylvester Stallone, Paradise Alley, 1978

Yes, that is Tom Waits chewing the fat with Sly (this was Tom's film debut, but he doesn't get to do much). Stallone wrote the script in the early 70s, but it was only accepted for production a) when he changed the principal protagonists from African-Americans to Italian-Americans and b) when he hit the jackpot with Rocky. I'll be honest and say the only reason I bought this one was because Jonathan Rosenbaum mentioned it was the first film young Leos Carax had reviewed for Cahiers du Cinéma (that review, and comments on it, is here http://torontofilmreview.blogspot.fr/20 ... carax.html) - how about that for snobisme - but I was completely won over. The dialogue is bright and sharp, the decor and lighting garish and flamboyant and there are several truly inspired shots: the rooftop race over the credits sequence, the scene where Victor hurls the block of ice down the stairwell and most notably the final wrestling apocalypse, in which it seems to be raining on the ring (though we're inside) - what is this, Tarkovsky? Wow! Beautifully choreographed falls by pro wrestler Terry Funk, water splashing everywhere (Ritchie nicked this for Snatch, btw). And the desperately sudden and clearly false happy ending is as brutal as the hospital bed hugs of Ray's Bigger Than Life. Terrific. Armand Assante is just fine as Lenny, but imagine what might have been if Stallone had been allowed his first choice, Pacino. Can't understand why the film bombed so spectacularly at the box office - I think it's a little gem myself. Going dirt cheap at Amazon, eight shopping days left to Xmas, treat yourself

[Dan Warburton]

Vera Chytilova, Ovoce stromů rajských jíme ("Fruit of Paradise"), 1970

Don't know what to make of this, to be frank - you can't help admire the amazingly creative cinematography and the use of colour and sound, but quite what it's all about is rather hard to figure out. OK, Garden of Eden, Eve eats the forbidden fruit and it's all downhill from there on, but I wonder what the director intended - she talks about second-level allegorical meanings (rape, living a lie, etc) directly connected to the Soviet crackdown on Czechoslovakia (as it was at the time) while the film was being made, but as the final work was banned as soon as it came out I wonder how many people got the chance to ask those questions for themselves. To give it its due, it hasn't aged as badly as some of the other experimental / New Wave pics made around the same time, probably because it's so damn inscrutable. Must give it another go at some stage.

[Dan Warburton]

Clive Donner, Rogue Male, 1976

Raising a glass to the recently departed Peter O'Toole (though to be honest I thought he'd died ages ago!), we watched what he himself considered his best film. Adapted by Frederic Raphael (a great script, therefore) from Geoffrey Household's 1939 novel, which Fritz Lang had already had a go at in Manhunt, it's a splendid tale, perfect for O'Toole, the quintessentially eccentric English gentleman who "has a pot at Adolf", is brutally tortured, manages to escape but is hunted to the wilds of Dorset, where.. no, won't spoil it for you. Best chase movie since The 39 Steps. Shame this was a TV-only movie, and that the only DVD transfer was pretty substandard (and still frighteningly expensive). Could do to be nicely restored and - for those for whom English isn't the mother tongue - subtitled. O'Toole has some great lines. So does Harold Pinter, who plays his lawyer. John Standing also great as the villain. If you can snatch it somewhere online, do so.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

I would like to watch that, but I could do with a better copy than the one that is to be found on Kg. I guess we're stuck with it for the time being.
I haven't been watching many movies lately, but since I have been reading some Charles Willeford the last few days, I thought I could give this a try:



Cockfighter, Monte Hellman, 1974

and considering its reputation and that the scenario was penned by Willeford himself, I must say I was rather underwhelmed, which is also part of the point I suppose. Besides thinking to myself for the entirety of the movie that the book must be better (which, as foolish as it is, cannot be helped sometimes), I also thought that it was lazy, and save for the awkward, mute performance by Warren Oates, not a very convincing one I think, I didn't find much to be interested in. I was glad to see Troy Donahue, but he is so peripheral to the movie, he hardly matters. So is Charles Willeford, who doesn't act very well (hear him shouting at Oates), and so are in fact all the characters in the movie, Warren Oates' included; Harry Dean Stanton is his usual weary self, who graced so many of those kind of movies that people would qualify as low-key. I was frequently reminded of Herzog's Stroszek, which elicits similar mixed feelings in me, but which I prefer. The ending is rather moving, but I couldn't make out what Oates says:"She loves me no more" (as the rather bad French subtitles that I found hinted at) or "She loves me Omar", as wikipedia suggests it.

No! But as a big Willeford fan I must check it out! Did anyone ever make a film of High Priest of California? Russell Haxby's one of my favourite psychos..

Just read it. I have to say I was surprised to find that Russell Haxby is not a psycho in the sense Willeford's antiheroes are usually, as he doesn't kill anybody during the course of the novel.

[Dan Warburton]

I would like to watch that, but I could do with a better copy than the one that is to be found on Kg.

If you find one somewhere, holler. It's a bit like those old Sun Ra albums - the recording quality is shite but you listen to the music instead.

Cockfighter, Monte Hellman, 1974

I must say I was rather underwhelmed, which is also part of the point I suppose. Besides thinking to myself for the entirety of the movie that the book must be better (which, as foolish as it is, cannot be helped sometimes), I also thought that it was lazy, and save for the awkward, mute performance by Warren Oates, not a very convincing one I think, I didn't find much to be interested in.

Dunno, I've always (always - ha, seen it twice) enjoyed this. But I'm a bit biased - Oates can do little wrong for me, and Willeford's one of my favourite writers in that genre (agree, no great shakes as an actor). Interested to know what you mean by "lazy" - understated, I'd say.

I was frequently reminded of Herzog's Stroszek, which elicits similar mixed feelings in me, but which I prefer.

Ha, the house on wheels, you mean? Or the dancing chickens

No! But as a big Willeford fan I must check it out! Did anyone ever make a film of High Priest of California? Russell Haxby's one of my favourite psychos..

Just read it. I have to say I was surprised to find that Russell Haxby is not a psycho in the sense Willeford's antiheroes are usually, as he doesn't kill anybody during the course of the novel.

Yes, I think "psycho" is the wrong word.

Meanwhile, enjoyed these two yesterday



František Vláčil, Ďáblova past ("The Devil's Trap"), 1962

If you like The Seventh Seal and Day of Wrath you'll probably like this. Fine acting, great camerawork. Sound design a bit crude - reverb, man! - but the music is good, and mixed well. KGFT, up for grabs, allez-y.




Cédric Klapisch, Un air de famille, 1996

Absolutely love this. Not a line out of place, smashing cast and some cool camerawork to boot (love the mirrored pillars in the café - great decor too.. Fassbinder would be proud). My goodness, has it been 17 years already? I remember when this came out first time round.

[Matt Wuethrich]

František Vláčil, Ďáblova past ("The Devil's Trap"), 1962

If you like The Seventh Seal and Day of Wrath you'll probably like this. Fine acting, great camerawork. Sound design a bit crude - reverb, man!

If you think he uses a lot of reverb on this one, check out Marketa Lazarová , definitely Vláčil's best. He uses it in such excess (plus all the dialogue is dubbed) that all the sounds forma kind of parallel stream to the images and are not necessarily part of them. You're never sure if it's dialogue you're hearing, some internal monologue or a narrator.

[Dan Warburton]

Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, Chronique d'Anna Magdalena Bach, 1968

I'm amused to see how much genuine anger this film has managed to provoke over the years. True, it's still an austere experience: more or less static shots (the camera dollies in and out from time to time) of Bach's music played in situ by musicians in period costume, intercut with brief and rapid extracts from the diary of his second wife and the occasional extract from letters by the composer himself. But when the performer is Gustav Leonhardt what more do you want? Action? There was little in Bach's life: nearly fifty of his sixty-five years spent as a veritable musical civil servant, rarely straying out of a radius of 40 miles. Two marriages, the second of which, to Anna Magdalena, brought him 13 children of whom only 6 grew to adulthood. A life dogged by petty problems, mostly pecuniary. Spats with colleagues, complaints about the quality of his singers, grovelling letters to his employers. We've grown so used to the idea of "composer as wild genius", a 19th-century notion (think Berlioz's Memoirs, Cosima Wagner's diaries..) lovingly tarted up by the likes of Ken Russell, that we forget that composers before the Romantic era were regular artisans no more than carpenters, gardeners and cooks. Leonhardt and Harnoncourt were among the first interpreters of Bach to pull away the romantic cobwebs and play the music straight - and, for the most part, quite fast (compare the opening chorus of the St Matthew Passion here to the ponderous oh-so-profound reading by Klemperer) - and their no-bullshit approach was clearly in line with Straub's vision. When the director says that the wall behind Gustav Leonhardt is as much cinematographic matter as the musician himself, he's deadly serious. It took him ten years to get the film done the way he wanted, and he stuck with it. No sell-out, no compromises. Look. Listen. You'll be surprised how much there is to see and hear.

[Dan Warburton]

Louis Malle, Black Moon, 1975

Whoa, what a great trip. Filmed - spectacularly, by the mighty Sven Nykvist - in and around Malle's own house in rural Quercy, this is a gorgeous, scary surreal journey into a child's world of creepy crawlies and nascent sexuality, where pre-adolescents daub themselves with make-up and sing the love duet from Tristan und Isolde and run half-naked through the gardens chasing a giant pig, a unicorn recites Shakespeare and a cantankerous bedridden old lady (the great German actress Therese Giehse) talks to a giant rat and demands to be breast-fed. It's a wonderland all right, as this fine essay from the Criterion box makes clear http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/ ... wonderland, and one imagines Malle cast 16-year-old Cathryn Harrison because of her resemblance to Tenniel's Alice. Goodness knows how he managed to film all the animals, which include a badger in the middle of a road, a piglet in a high chair and a low-flying eagle, and hats off to Cathryn for not batting an eyelid when that snake slithers under her skirt. And how about the shot above? Absolutely magnificent, if I haven't the faintest idea what it's supposed to mean. Check it out (the rip over at KG is outstanding, hint hint)

[Dan Warburton]

Aldo Lado, Chi l'ha vista morire? ("Who Saw Her Die?"), 1972

Classic giallo – I've just finished and very much enjoyed reading Mikel Koven's La dolce morte, which with some justification regards this as one of the best examples of the giallo filone – George Lazenby with his silly moustache plays a sculptor (!) turned amateur detective after his daughter is found floating in the canal (great location shots of Venice throughout – as atmospheric at Roeg's Don't Look Now). He wouldn't have had to bother if he'd kept an eye on her in the first place instead of sending her out to play while he banged his girlfriend, but never mind. As soon as the killer appears (POV shot, what Koven calls "killercam") the Morricone soundtrack comes roaring in. Yippee! Plenty of red herrings, as usual, but good solid terza visione stuff.




Jean-Marie Straub, Machorka-Muff, 1963

Cracking debut from Straub (ably assisted by his wife Danièle Huillet, of course), which manages to say more about post-WWII Germany in 18 minutes than most films do in an hour and a half, while still finding time to show the Bonn hotel waiter stacking plates and glasses one at a time on his tray. According to Jonathan Rosenbaum, Karlheinz Stockhausen was very impressed by the film when he saw it and wrote to Straub to say so. I can see why, too: there's the same, crystalline tight structure of a piece like Kontra-Punkte – outwardly cold, even forbidding, but richly rewards repeated viewings, as they say. Honest: I watched this three times in a row.




Robert Aldrich, The Legend of Lylah Clare, 1968

Since when do women wander around in the garden in their bras? What a fucking ridiculous film, but nobody does High Camp better than Aldrich, and as Roger Ebert notes, there is a certain grisly satisfaction in seeing how bad it can get, from Kim Novak's hilarious Zsa Zsa Gabor accent to Peter Finch's far-too-spirited delivery of dreadful lines like "you're moving like a deeply offended Tibetan yak". Though it's Borgnine who gets the best line: "'Films?' What the hell ever happened to movies? What do you think you're in, the art business?"

[Dan Warburton]

Claude Chabrol, Landru, 1963

Wickedly funny black comedy with Charles Denner as the notorious eponymous serial killer (go Google - even the wackiest details, like the police officer who slept on Landru's doorstep to arrest him in the early morning, are true), taking some of France's finest actresses - Michèle Morgan, Danielle Darrieux.. - on a one-way trip to his country house to be chopped up and cremated in his oven. Fabulous script by Françoise Sagan, terrific sets by Jacques Saulnier - why isn't this more well-known? (Terrible English subtitles on the KG rip, btw)

[Piano Mouth]

I recently watched two films by Claude Chabrol, La Beau Serge and La Ceremonie. Both were incredible.

[Dan Warburton]

Paul Verhoeven, Showgirls, 1995

Aw hell, why not, it's (still just about) Christmas.. It certainly doesn't deserve its 4.4 rating on IMDb - I gave it a 7 to try to redress the balance, though none of those points goes to Joe Eszterhas, who joins Oliver Stone in the Dead Hacks Society. [Somebody write an essay comparing Showgirls with Scarface, go on, please..] There's much to admire: the sets, costumes and makeup are wonderfully gaudy and glitzy (Vincente Minnelli would have loved it), and Jost Vacano's camera goes scurrying impressively after the tits and the monkeys in the dressing rooms, or swirls Ophüls-like around the characters in the rare moments any of them are standing still. Of course, none of this virtuoso dollying makes any sense at all - we're a long way from "le travelling est une affaire de morale" - but, who cares? You have to laugh - out of embarrassment as much as snickering guilty pleasure - when Lin Tucci's boobs plop out, or at the swimming pool fuck scene, or the dreadfully crude dialogue "not-tonight-I've-got-my-period" (wait a sec while I stick a finger down there and check you're telling the truth - yeeurghh). No point criticising Elizabeth Berkley for her acting when she has to deliver dialogue as dreadful as that (the poor dear has suffered enough: "Ever since those reviews for Showgirls it's like I was that woman in The Scarlet Letter. Except that instead of having to wear the letter 'A' for adulteress, I was condemned to wear an 'S' for "showgirl"). Last time this film came up for discussion here, Lao Tsu Ben mentioned one of Showgirls' more unlikely fans, Jacques Rivette - quoting from the same interview in which he dumped on la Winslet http://sensesofcinema.com/2001/16/rivette-2/. "Of all the recent American films that were set in Las Vegas, Showgirls was the only one that was real – take my word for it, I who have never set foot in the place!" he gushed. Hmm, what's real?

[Dan Warburton]

Elio Petri, Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto ("Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion"), 1970

I've had the Morricone soundtrack for about 30 years but have only now got to see the film. Great stuff, especially of course Volontè as the neofascist police chief who murders his mistress and.. enough spoilers. Try this for background reading
http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/cteq/inv ... suspicion/

[Lao Tsu Ben]

I would like to watch that, but I could do with a better copy than the one that is to be found on Kg.

If you find one somewhere, holler. It's a bit like those old Sun Ra albums - the recording quality is shite but you listen to the music instead.

Good analogy. I'm convinced.

Interested to know what you mean by "lazy" - understated, I'd say.

As to The Cockfighter, I'm feeling something a little spurious about this understatedness, I don't have the impression that Hellman is too imaginative with his illustration of Willeford's novel, but perhaps it's just me.

Paul Verhoeven, Showgirls, 1995

I don't remember what I might have said or not about the film, but I like it very much. I don't think there's much difference between this and what Verhoeven did in Holland several years before: gross provocation with an antipuritan streak.



Look Back In Anger, Tony Richardson, 1959

Interesting in how it initiates the tradition that will lead to such films as Naked (and their many points of comparison are not very flattering for either film). Look Back In Anger is an interesting film but lacks irony, much of it looks like camp to me. Perhaps Pauline Kael who wrote about it that "British understatement is gone; the case is marvellously overstated." but also "that it has fire. Jimmy paces like a tiger in the welfare state, and even if you think that the movie is basically incoherent and that he's an exhibitionist whose scorn of the heritage of the previous generation is infantile ranting, you'll have to admit that he has a voice-his abusive shouts and epigrams have the authentic ring of drama" would agree with me by now (while I find most the points she makes about the movie rather accurate). The film is just too unwittingly funny.




Dogfight, Nancy Sanvoca, 1991

While rapidly scanning the reviews on imdb, I saw that most people referred to that kiss scene, and were very impressed by it. The fact is that it is a kiss that feels real, that is, awkward for most people who are used to watch Hollywood movies, not teenagers kissing for the first time (a very private occurence indeed). Check it out anyway, the interplay between River Phoenix (who looks so much like Tintin) and Lily Taylor is wonderful, and I suppose it is no accident that they are/were some of the most soft-spoken actors in film.



Roadie, Alan Rudolph, 1980

I'm almost done with Alan Rudolph! Utterly enjoyable dumbness. It has Deborah Harry (whom I couldn't resist to put on the screenshot above), Meat Loaf (is he a sympathetic lead!), Art Carney, Roy Orbinson, Kaki Hunter (only Rudolph could come up with such an actress, cast in the same mold as Shelley Duvall and any other perky, super-skinny actress you can think of) and many others.
Read this article by Michael Ventura, who cowrote the script, for more information http://www.austinchronicle.com/columns/ ... 26/985428/

[99vadim]

Great stuff, especially of course Volontè as the neofascist police chief who murders his mistress and.. enough spoilers.

If you haven't seen this yet, check out Volonte in Petri's "The Working Class Goes to Heaven", for me this is the pinnacle of his acting skills, a true tour de force. I like to think about "Investigation of a Citizen.." as a Kafkaesque movie, definitely among the masterpieces of Italian cinema.