Recently Watched Films 2018

[Dan Warburton]

Lewis Allen, Desert Fury, 1947

I can't do any better than this review http://www.pulpserenade.com/2014/06/mov ... -1947.html in describing this as a "western-noir-soap opera steeped in hardboiled gay camp" Great fun

[Dan Warburton]

Basil Dearden, The Assassination Bureau, 1969

Based on an unfinished Jack London novel, this is another one of those glitzy, overblown all-star Anglo-American comedies (think Those Magnificent Men.., Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), combining ridiculously lavish sets (check out Philippe Noiret's Parisian maison close), expensive location shoots (Venice, Vienna, Zürich..) and surprisingly poor back projection (that zeppelin, hahaha) to no great effect. Of course, Oliver Reed and Telly Savalas are as good and as predictably suave as you'd expect, but Diana Rigg is a disappointment. She was sexy as hell as Emma Peel, so why does she spend the whole movie trying to be Julie Andrews?

[walto]

Because of "I Know Where I'm Going" and "Major Barbara" I've always had trouble thinking of Rigg as a sexpot. With or without Emma Peel's stretch pants.

[Dan Warburton]

John Carpenter, Christine, 1983

Quoth IMDb trivia: "To simulate the car regenerating itself, hydraulic pumps were installed on the inside of some of the film's numerous Plymouth Fury "stunt doubles", a mock-up in plastic that looked more like metal on camera than actual metal as it bent and deformed. These pumps were attached to cables, which were in turn attached to the cars' bodywork and when they compressed, they would "suck" the paneling inwards. Footage of the inward crumpling body was then reversed, giving the appearance of the car spontaneously retaking form." But the groovy special effects are only part of the fun - this is a thoroughly enjoyable and well-crafted movie, with solid performances from all (Keith Gordon, yeah! - and of course Harry Dean Stanton).. but especially Christine

[Dan Warburton]

Tod Browning, The Unknown, 1927

Did Lon Chaney really learn to light a cigarette with his feet, or was it his stunt double? Whatever, this is a splendid piece of work, even if I'm stuck with the 49-minute BFI version (nice print, music a bit meh) instead of a 63-minute version that is supposed to exist, somewhere. Two thumbs up, as the guys used to say.. or rather, a double thumb up - you'll understand that if you've seen the film, and if you haven't.. do

[Dan Warburton]

Jacques Rivette, La Bande des quatre, 1989

Better to go with the French title, in case a film entitled "The Gang of Four" leads you to assume erroneously that you're in for a documentary on the later stages of the Chinese Cultural Revolution or a biopic about that most splendid post-punk group from Leeds - but no, this is another one of those quintessential mysterious Rivettian tales of a group of young actresses who get involved in some shady (and never fully explained) plot about harbouring an escaped criminal.. There is, of course, no shoot'emup dramatic dénouement, and the film lasts, of course, about twice as long as the classic noirs that young Rivette reviewed as a Cahiers critic. You may also remember Ed Howard's excellent long lost blog post (now alas without screenshots) http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.fr/2009/ ... -four.html which puts it better than I ever could: "This is a pure celebration of acting as the finest art: the art of finding (and embracing) the mystery and drama in life."

[Dan Warburton]

Mike Nichols, Wit, 2001

"You've got cancer." Bam! So you know where you are right from the opening line. And the Doc makes it clear Emma Thompson's not going to make it until the end of the film. This has been a KG Featured Torrent for ages, and sitting on my hard disk for several years. Hardly surprising - when the wife asks "so what are we going to watch tonight?" and I reply "how about a film about a middle-aged spinster professor of 17th century metaphysical poetry dying of ovarian cancer?".. well, I finally talked her into it. And very fine it is too - if nothing else, it should have you racing off to read John Donne, and that's one of the best things you can do with your time, imho. http://goyacinema.blogspot.fr/2015/02/a ... -2001.html

[Dan Warburton]

Lisandro Alonso, Liverpool, 2008

Return visit - and I really think this is one of the finest films of recent years. Dying for a decent HD print. I love everything about it: the stately pace - that Bressonian skill of holding the shot just so long - the light, the colours (rusty reds, dingy dark greens, snow white) and the story, which you work out for yourself. Truly excellent, can't recommend it highly enough.

[Alastair]

anyway, good or bad, none of these realizes the full potential of sherlock holmes. is there a film which does that?

Have you seen the British TV adaptations with Jeremy Brett as Holmes? Granada TV did all the short stories and the novels in the 80s/90s. I have fond memories of them.

[Wombatz]

Have you seen the British TV adaptations with Jeremy Brett as Holmes?

his face rubs me the wrong way, it's like a cross between edward everett horton and hermann goering.

Did Lon Chaney really learn to light a cigarette with his feet, or was it his stunt double?

looks like another person's legs ... huge lon chaney fan, though, his film without feet (the penalty) is even better.

[Steve Minkin]

COFFEE AND CIGARETTES (2003) -- Quirky even for Jarmusch. Meta-quirky. A series of eleven vignettes involving two or three people each, physically centered on the presence of the title ingredients and checkerboard patterns, and emotionally overwhelmed by the awkward tensions implicit in the characters' subtle rivalries and failures to connect. The segments vary in quality, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts -- there's a unifying look (overexposed b&w), some common aspects (medicine and music, unexpected role reversals, Tesla, one-upmanship), and an overall sense of stasis rather than any time-related vector. My favorite segments were the opener with Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright, Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan, Cate Blanchett and Cate Blanchett (!), and this one below, Tom Waites and Iggy Pop.

[Dan Warburton]

Louis Feuillade, Vendémiaire, 1918

I've been stockpiling series by the remarkably prolific Feuillade, but this is the first one I've had time to watch attentively. Actually, this is not a series in the same way that Les Vampires, Tih Minh and Judex were, but a two-part story set in Feuillade's heartland, the vineyards of Southern France. The first half tells the tale of two escaped German soldiers who infiltrate a band of migrant grapepickers, steal the wages from the safe and try to pin the blame on a widowed gypsy mother; the second a story of how Louise, one of the migrant's daughters left up north in Maubeuge, smuggles her husband François out from under the eyes of the drunken, leering moustachioed Boches. Remarkably open and honest filmmaking, which makes the few moments of technical bravura (notably a splendid reverse tracking shot as François sets out to find his father-in-law, with one of the German baddies slinking into the frame behind him) even more notable. You can see why the Nouvelle Vague directors - notably Rivette - loved him.

[Dan Warburton]

Martin Ritt, The Black Orchid, 1958

Well, my super new BluRay rip looks beautiful, and does full justice to Robert Burks' splendid cinematography, but as melodramas go this can't hold a candle to Douglas Sirk. Anthony Quinn gives a fine performance, but there's something too good to be true about him (shades of Borgnine's Marty), and Sophia Loren, though widely acclaimed for her performance, doesn't actually have much acting to do. We never really get to the bottom of her character, and fail to understand why she became so detested after (apparently) pushing her husband into a life of crime to provide her with the niceties of life. We certainly have no idea why Quinn's daughter Mary - a pivotal role in the drama, but played unconvincingly by Ina Balin - hates her so much. Mary's stupid stubbornness precipitates the only real tension in the film, but it's hard to feel any sympathy for her (when Quinn finally slapped her I punched the air, honest). And the gooey reconciliation, where the two Italian ladies finally bond over how to cook Daddy's sausages correctly (the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, indeed), followed by an equally ridiculous (and ridiculously fast) happy ending, doesn't get any hairs standing up.

[Dan Warburton]

John Huston, The Dead, 1987

I'll forgive Tony Huston for adding an extra character to Joyce's story, Mr. Grace, whose recitation of (here I'm quoting Wiki) an "eighth-century Middle Irish poem, 'Donal Óg' [...] acts as catalyst for the 'Distant Music' that provokes the memories Gretta and Gabriel discuss at the end of the film." It goes without saying that no film can ever fully do justice to what might be the greatest short story ever written in the English language, but as film adaptations go this is truly magisterial. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

[Dan Warburton]

Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris, 1972

Taking a swipe at Tarkovsky is, it seems, frowned on (how dare you!) - granted, this stuff is seriously deep, man, a-and the poor guy died too soon and.. etc. Of his seven films, Stalker and Solaris seem to have been placed upon impossibly high pedestals, well out of reach of us lowly mortals huddled below. And yet, for all its undoubted greatness - the image quality on the new Potemkine BluRay is absolutely astounding, the performances are top-notch, and so on.. - it doooes draaaag a bit during the last hour. Obviously that's part of its peculiarly Mahler slow movement vibe - start slow, and get slower: by the end of the last movement of the Ninth we're almost as dead as he is - probably because Tarkovsky loaded up the scene in the library with some serious historicoartisticophilosophico baggage (Stanislas Lem complained it was all too Dostoevskyan). I guess it all depends on what you want from your movies. Not that I wasn't moved, once more, by the extraordinary final scenes. But - this time - not as profoundly moved as I was by the Huston film above. Go figure. I'll skip the Lacanian Žižek reading, thankyouverymuch, the film is heavy enough as it is.

[walto]

John Huston, The Dead, 1987

I'll forgive Tony Huston for adding an extra character to Joyce's story, Mr. Grace, whose recitation of (here I'm quoting Wiki) an "eighth-century Middle Irish poem, 'Donal Óg' [...] acts as catalyst for the 'Distant Music' that provokes the memories Gretta and Gabriel discuss at the end of the film." It goes without saying that no film can ever fully do justice to what might be the greatest short story ever written in the English language, but as film adaptations go this is truly magisterial. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

I absolutely love this movie.

"I think he died for me." Heartbreaking.

[Steve Minkin]

John Huston, The Dead, 1987

I'll forgive Tony Huston for adding an extra character to Joyce's story, Mr. Grace, whose recitation of (here I'm quoting Wiki) an "eighth-century Middle Irish poem, 'Donal Óg' [...] acts as catalyst for the 'Distant Music' that provokes the memories Gretta and Gabriel discuss at the end of the film." It goes without saying that no film can ever fully do justice to what might be the greatest short story ever written in the English language, but as film adaptations go this is truly magisterial. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

I absolutely love this movie.

"I think he died for me." Heartbreaking.

My favorite short story (from my favorite book of short stories) and one of my favorite renditions of literature on film. Magnificent.

To be credible, Huston had to leave intact that long, sublime internal soliloquy at the end. And he did.

[Steve Minkin]

BEING THERE (1979) -- Peter Sellers, Shirley McLaine, Melvyn Douglas

I was so disappointed in the novel (which had been massively hyped as a comic masterpiece) 8 or 9 years earlier, that I skipped the film in the theaters, and never saw it until yesterday. Entertaining, pretty funny, fine performance by Sellers. I don't intend to reread the book, but I think the film may have served the concept better than the book did. Anybody who liked the book care to chime in?

[Dan Warburton]

Jean-Bernard Lévy & Marie Epstein, Peau de pêche, 1929

Some of the editing (Levy's?) is a bit heavy-handed - wheatsheaves cutting to wooden crosses in a WWI cemetery, get it? no? I'll do it again for you - but the archive footage of Paris is priceless, and the performance of Jimmy Gaillard as the young Peau de Pêche is delightful. Free torrent at KG, go get

[Dan Warburton]

Ernst Lubitsch, Design for Living, 1933

It seems very few actual lines from Noel Coward's risqué Broadway smash made it to Ben Hecht's screenplay, which I see some people at the time thought lacked the subtlety of the original (though compared to some the dross that we have to sit through in recent films, it's light and snappy enough for me), but there are still numerous eyebrow-raising moments in Lubitsch's typically snazzy ménage à trois. Notably Gary Cooper's "I loved you both!" (1933, wow.) Fun stuff, but in Myriam Hopkins' place I'd have gone for Cooper