Recently Watched Films 2018

[Dan Warburton]

Lynne Ramsay, You Were Never Really Here, 2017

Comparisons with Taxi Driver abound (online, at least), but whereas Schrader's script for de Niro was quite wordy, and Scorsese's film (arguably) reflected the malaise of an entire generation rather than the anguish of a solitary sufferer, Joaquin Phoenix's Gulf War vet Joe here is, it seems, even more withdrawn and tortured than Travis Bickle. He certainly doesn't say much. Living alone with his ageing and somewhat mentally challenged mother - the references to Psycho are significant - Joe earns his living by rescuing missing girls.. not so much a hired gun as a hired hammer (his weapon of choice..). Needless to say things get complicated when one his clients falls to his death in mysterious circumstances - to say much more would spoil the fun. Intriguing to see on IMDb that the user reviews are either 9's or 10's - or 1's and 2'. Seems this is one you'll either like (I did) or loathe. You decide.

[walto]

Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester by the Sea, 2016

I recommend you give it another go, Mark - I think Affleck works wonders with a difficult role, not just in terms of the character he has play (and what he's gone/going through) but in what he has say and leave unsaid. I think Carver would have been quite satisfied with the screenplay. The scene above - the final brief encounter between Lee and Randi (one can only wonder why Michelle Williams got second billing - she's barely present in the film for a quarter of an hour - must have a good agent) is a case in point. Anyway, if you want a second opinion (or third, after Walt's comments last year): https://fourthreefilm.com/2017/02/manch ... y-the-sea/

I agree that this is very good, but, once again, not as good as Lonergan's brilliant Margaret, which I urge you to catch.

[Dan Warburton]

Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester by the Sea, 2016

I recommend you give it another go, Mark - I think Affleck works wonders with a difficult role, not just in terms of the character he has play (and what he's gone/going through) but in what he has say and leave unsaid. I think Carver would have been quite satisfied with the screenplay. The scene above - the final brief encounter between Lee and Randi (one can only wonder why Michelle Williams got second billing - she's barely present in the film for a quarter of an hour - must have a good agent) is a case in point. Anyway, if you want a second opinion (or third, after Walt's comments last year): https://fourthreefilm.com/2017/02/manch ... y-the-sea/

I agree that this is very good, but, once again, not as good as Lonergan's brilliant Margaret, which I urge you to catch.

I did - it was great http://ihatemusic.noquam.com/viewtopic. ... et#p272884

[walto]

Aha. Missed that. Thanks.

[Claud601]

Can anyone point me towards a dl wth audio? Seems very hard to find

[Dan Warburton]

Can anyone point me towards a dl wth audio? Seems very hard to find

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070300/
Karagarga has it (surprise) - an old rip but screenshots look OK. No subs, I think. I'll snatch it and let you know if any good. You (we) could, of course, always buy the DVD. It seems it's available in both Zone 1 & 2 over at Amazon.

[Claud601]

Can anyone point me towards a dl wth audio? Seems very hard to find

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070300/
Karagarga has it (surprise) - an old rip but screenshots look OK. No subs, I think. I'll snatch it and let you know if any good. You (we) could, of course, always buy the DVD. It seems it's available in both Zone 1 & 2 over at Amazon.

Cool thanks

[Dan Warburton]

Robert Hossein, Les salauds vont en enfer, 1955

Dunno about you, but when the door to hell is opened by Marina Vlady as she is here (just 18, but with the same number of films already to her name), well, as we say round these parts, j'suis un salaud, quoi. It's an odd film, starting out as a hardboiled prison movie, complete with punishment beatings, suicides and a pretty violent escape, but morphs rather amazingly into a kind of Theatre of the Absurd, with protagonists Reggiani and Vidal oscillating wildly, Didi / Gogo-like, between love and hate. And the photo above tells you where they both end up. Vous avez dit bizarre?

[Dan Warburton]

Milos Forman, Valmont, 1989

Barely a year after Stephen Frears tackled Choderlos de Laclos' Les liaisons dangereuses, the French countryside was invaded once again by another film crew working on another big budget adaptation of the same work. For my money, despite a script penned by the genial Jean-Claude Carrière, Forman's film seems to drag. Twenty minutes too long, at least. Annette Bening's Mme de Merteuil is probably closer in age to the original character, but there's something viciously cougarlike about Glenn Close's performance in the Frears, while Colin Firth, Forman's Valmont, was better with a few years under his belt as Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, but maybe that's just the John Malkovich fan in me talking. As for the other ladies, Meg Tilly and Fairuza Balk just can't compete with Michelle Pfeiffer and Uma Thurman. Anyway, it's pretty, I suppose.

[Dan Warburton]

Joseph Strick, Ulysses, 1967

So. I finished the book last week, and I'm still reeling. (Steve, I did crosscheck with the Harry Blamires Bloomsday book every day, to better understand what I'd just read the night before. Also discovered the online - and ongoing?- version of the text at http://www.joyceproject.com/ which is a useful companion. But there's no substitute to reading - and reading aloud - the novel itself, which I will again. And again. Greatest reading experience since Gravity's Rainbow, which I've read three times.) With Molly's "Yes" ringing in my ears I went straight to Joseph Strick's 1967 film, and, though initially sceptical, was seriously impressed. First of all, if you haven't read the book, don't watch the film. That should go without saying, but whatever. If you have, you'll immediately see that Strick and Fred Haines did a very fine job, managing to include just about all the salient plot points and most of the most memorable quotations to boot. Obviously, a few things had to be left out - Milly, for instance - and a couple of chapters were neatly kaleidoscoped, but the night town section (Circe), which Joyce wrote as a kind of play, complete with jumpcut costume changes and stage directions, is where things really take off. I'd argue it was already crying out for cinema years in advance - and Strick goes to town, Ken Russell-style. Similar virtuoso editing abounds in the final section, based on Molly's celebrated stream(riverrun, more like)-of-consciousness monologue.Accordingly, the "first film in the UK to feature the word fuck" was banned for years, and was only passed by Irish censors in 2000 (!). Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind's ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent nature's incorrupted benefaction.

[Dan Warburton]

Josef von Sternberg, The Docks of New York, 1928

Splendid! Background reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Docks_of_New_York

[Dan Warburton]

James Whale, Bride of Frankenstein, 1935

Ha, Tim Burton must love this. It's good honest high camp fun ("Drink! Good!"), but nowhere near as great as the 1931 original.
More background reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_of_Frankenstein

[Dan Warburton]

Kenneth Branagh, Peter's Friends, 1992

Of course, with Branagh, Fry, Laurie, Thompson and Staunton on board you're guaranteed quality, if you happen to like this little clique of RADA / Footlights vets, but it's Sir Kenneth's onscreen wife Rita Rudner who amused me the most, and the script she penned with her offscreen hubby is sharp, and often very funny. But the ending, where Fry announces to the assembled company that he's HIV+, which back in 92 was tantamount to a death sentence, dates the whole affair rather alarmingly. A tad too twee for me.

[Dan Warburton]

Dennis Hopper, Colors, 1988

http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/colors/ ... ers-colors Fine review, fine film - great performances and a great soundtrack. Has aged well - and blows dross like Boyz N the Hood out of the window. Nice one, Dennis.

[Dan Warburton]

Ingmar Bergman, Shame, 1968

“The holy freedom of art. The holy slackness of art.” http://sensesofcinema.com/2014/cteq/shame/

[Dan Warburton]

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Othon, 1970

How about an obscure 1664 French play - itself based on a complex episode of Roman history - written in alexandrins but declaimed by non-French actors extremely quickly and with almost no emotion, shot on location in modern Rome? To quote Marguérite Duras in this fine review http://sensesofcinema.com/2017/cteq/othon/ : "To call a work obscure is just as disastrous as to call it a masterpiece of clarity: the text becomes burdened with a prejudice that prevents the reader from relating to it directly. The work is imprisoned." Up to you if you want to make the effort.

[Dan Warburton]

John Sturges, The Satan Bug, 1965

Based on a story written by Alistair MacLean (though signed under the name Ian Stuart), which (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Satan_Bug_(novel) ) looks like it would have made a markedly different film had it been set in England. This one takes place in the California desert, like many great 50s sci-fi movies, but they were all in black and white - somehow, I don't tend to associate the dazzingly bright colours ot desert motel furniture with what is in fact a pretty dark story of a maniac who steals a flask of deadly poison that would, if released, wipe out All Human Life As We Know It within a matter of days. Rather topical in the light of the Salisbury nerve agent attacks of recent weeks. A little slow in places, and there are a few odd plot holes, but with a solid if not entirely stellar cast and a decent Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack it's not bad at all.

[Dan Warburton]

Jonathan Kaplan, Truck Turner, 1974

Quoth Wiki "Kaplan says the film was written for Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, or Ernest Borgnine. 'Larry Gordon at AIP said, "Well, we can't get any of them so now it's a black picture." Isaac Hayes was cast and that's how that came about.'"
It's a black picture, all right - and as far as I'm concerned this could be the best blaxploitation pic I've seen. Good story, excellent casting - in addition to Hayes, Yaphet Kotto is typically brilliant as pimpmeister Harvard Blue, and Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura!) fabulously hellbent on revenge, spitting out hundreds of juicy expletives - for once IMDb Parents' Guide hasn't even bothered to count the niggers, bitches and motherfuckers. Fine action shots, great editing. And of course you know who did the soundtrack.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb-7dTQgbU4 Right on!

[Dan Warburton]

Robert Wise, Odds Against Tomorrow, 1959

Apparently Jean-Pierre Melville saw this 120 times, and I see now traces of its influence clearly in his classic 60s crime movies. Noirs? Folks tend to refer to Welles' Touch of Evil as marking the end of film noir, whatever that is, but I'd be prepared to draw the line a couple of years later with this truly stellar movie. And it really is dark. It's another one of those "just one more big job and I'll be able to retire" tales - which means you know within minutes it's not going to work out and spend most of the movie waiting for the inevitable catastrophe. Only frustrated ex-cop criminal mastermind Dave Burke (Ed Begley) can stop Johnny (Harry Belafonte) and Earle (Robert Ryan) from literally blowing each other away, so you can guess what happens when he's shot dead at the scene of the bungled bank robbery. The screenplay, by Abraham Polonsky, is absolutely awesome - one of the best closing lines in the entire history of cinema, which I won't spoil for you - as is the John Lewis soundtrack, the filming, the editing.. bref, tout. Top 20 material, not a doubt.

[Dan Warburton]

Alain Corneau, Le deuxième souffle, 2007

It bombed at the box office and attracted a lot of flak from irate critics on this side of the Channel, scandalisés that anyone should remake a sacred cow of French cinema. Similar howls of anguish surrounded Van Sant's celebrated remake of Psycho. But Corneau is no fool, and would be the first to acknowledge that his own excellent Série Noire (see reviews passim) owed as much to Melville as Melville's 1966 Le deuxième souffle owed to transatlantic film noir. Cinema history's full of such recursive functions - Ford begat Kurosawa begat Leone begat Walter Hill etc - and Corneau & Co. are clearly having fun exploring them. To explore a few: first thing you notice is the garish use of colour filters throughout (is there any blue in this film at all?) - surely a deliberate homage to cinéma du look (Beineix, Besson, Carax). Then Monica Bellucci, whose decision (hers? I wonder) to go blonde and pout throughout outbardots Bardot, chaperoned by Eric ("I am not a man, I am Cantona!") Cantona, a perfect casting choice to reprise Michel Constantin's trusty bodyguard Alban. A title informs us that we're supposed to be in 60s Marseille, but of course we know we're not. And we also know that the hat had already gone out of fashion even when Melville made his Deuxième Souffle. Such savvy nods abound - yessir, we noticed how Auteuil straightened his hat in the mirror just like Delon did in Le Samuraï - and they're not exactly subtle. Setting the robbery in a warehouse at night in the rain (instead of on a sundrenched hillside as in the original), complete with slowmo shootouts and squibs-a-plenty reminds us that Melville begat Woo. And Gaspar Noé fans won't miss his acteur fétiche Philippe Nahon as the sadistic police chief (whose methods of torture were described in the based-on-true-events José Giovanni novel that inspired the film but never shown by Melville). Throughout, Corneau goes out of his way to exaggerate such differences, taking evident delight in irritating purists. And purists deserve to be irritated, at times.