Recently Watched Films 2018

[Dan Warburton]

Henry Jaglom, A Safe Place, 1971

Based on a play he wrote at the Actors Studio for his then partner Karen Black, Jaglom went well and truly overboard with the montage (they don't make movies like this anymore), shooting at least ten times as much footage as he would actually need, including Orson Welles doing magic tricks and trying to make animals in a zoo disappear. A fine period piece from that galaxy far far away when hippies were young and Jung was hip. Once more I wonder how the history of cinema might have turned out had Tuesday Weld not turned down Lolita, Bonnie and Clyde and Rosemary's Baby, to name but three. Fine stuff, bring your own substances.

[Dan Warburton]

Theo Van Gogh, 06/05, 2004

Van Gogh's Interview was remade - very well too - by Steve Buscemi, but there is, alas, little chance of this first-class thriller getting the same treatment, as it's based so closely on (and incorporates footage of) real events surrounding the assassination of controversial Dutch opposition leader Pim Fortuyn in 2002. A shame perhaps, as the tale of double agents and informers linked to sinister forces in the Secret Service, uncovered unwittingly by a tabloid photographer who just happened to be taking pics of a soap star right next to where Fortuyn was shot dead, is intriguing, well acted and superbly filmed / edited. The fact that enfant terrible Van Gogh, who expressed not a little admiration for some of Fortuyn's views on radical Islam, was himself shot and stabbed to death two years later makes it all the more poignant (a bonus documentary included with the KG rip points some accusing fingers at the same Secret Service for - maybe - being in cahoots with Van Gogh's killer themselves..). Fascinating though that angle is, the film can be enjoyed without having to trawl through the background. Excellent piece of work, strongly recommended - but, judging by how difficult it was to find a screenshot using Google, not as well-known as it deserves to be.

[henriq]

I take it you're familiar with Pauline Kael's review of this - if not, here 't is https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2017/12/2 ... line-kael/ Interested you chose to compare it to Dirty Dozen (and is it, as you say, really "cool to like" that one? Dunno, but I seem to recall it caught a lot of flak at the time too..), instead of, say, Death Wish. What do you make of the later Harry films? "Wistful" isn't the adjective that comes to mind though I see what you mean. I like this film very much too, and as Kael's review makes clear, the SF locations are a big part of that. I should check out the Hoberman you mentioned.

Wistful might be a tad off, yes... And Hoberman does catalogue a number of scathing criticisms of Dirty Dozen, so I stand corrected on that point. It really is a great book: a fascinating survey of the hocketing vacillation between violence, war, politics, media and cinema during the years of Vietnam and Watergate. And check the movies discussed: Major Dundee, The Wild Bunch, Joe, Bonnie and Clyde, Dirty Harry, The Chase. A great read, must revisit myself soon. I should say I haven't seen Death Wish, not a great Bronson fan - though it must be miles better than the hideous Exterminator movies, steer well clear. Re: the later Harry films, watched this last night



Clint Eastwood - Sudden Impact (1983)

and liked it a lot. We've moved into the eighties and a bit of way from the taut kinetics of the Siegel film. Not that Eastwood isn't every bit the filmmaker that Siegel is, but the envelope is more Police Academy than before. We get a farting bulldog, petty thugs and mafia heavies appearing in droves to kill Harry, plus cartoony hyper-evil villains. But no matter: at core it is a dark tale of rape and revenge, retribution and justice. Sondra Locke and sister gets gang raped by local criminals, leaving the sister catatonic and Locke set on steely revenge. The local police chief's effeminate son, pressured into participating in the rape, gets consumed by guilt and to handle the situation dad cover things over, gets a handle on the situation that sees the criminals wander about in freedom and the sisters neatly excluded from the expediency of justice. The boy late in the film becomes the endpoint of a very neat triangulation, but I won't spoil too much. Pat Hingle's police chief prefigures in many ways Gene Hackman's later role in Unforgiven, as the figurehead of a very American social order where whores and horses get used and know their place. It's astounding how much Eastwood, the arch-conservative, packs into these, and other, movies: there is nuance and resonance, hesitations and crippling doubt in his supposed vigilantism, and this marks them as great art. (All the more galling that a smart critic like Jonathan Rosenbaum apparently - this is from memory, I should research a bit - couldn't bring himself to applaud Unforgiven, or maybe Mystic River, just for the fact that Eastwood is who he is. "It's who you give it TO!", as Borgnine yelled in The Wild Bunch). So, summing up the politics of this: either you kill with glee and relish, as in Dirty Dozen, or you do it because you are backed into a corner, powerless and ranged out of social sight and mind. The more I write about it the more I like it: I'd like to put it in the same neighborhood as Boisset's Dupont Lajoie (not quite there though) or even, maybe, close to Schlöndorff and von Trotta's The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum. Tip! as they say.

[Dan Warburton]

You should watch the first Death Wish if only for the Herbie Hancock soundtrack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PozTnnkwZ5g - as far as the Terminators go, well, I love the first two! (Prefer the first one though - Arnie's much more fun as a baddie than a goodie..) Haven't seen - and won't see - the later ones.

[henriq]

You should watch the first Death Wish if only for the Herbie Hancock soundtrack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PozTnnkwZ5g - as far as the Terminators go, well, I love the first two! (Prefer the first one though - Arnie's much more fun as a baddie than a goodie..) Haven't seen - and won't see - the later ones.

No no, EXterminator, horrendous vigilante fascist dreck. Robert Ginty - I think he's in Ashby's Coming Home - remade himself as action hero in the eighties and put out this trash. Don't ask me how I know...

Terminators 1 and 2 are awesome! Total action classics, belongs in the Library of Congress registry. The rest of the franchise is not worth your time.

[henriq]

Johnnie To/Wai Ka Fai - Mad Detective (2007)

Brilliant concept, a detective that can see the inner personalities of people walking about as clear as the light of day, and can thus sniff out hidden motives and architectures behind crimes investigated. A police detective goes missing in the woods - eighteen months later his gun starts figuring in different crime scenes, and the titular mad detective gets roped in out of semi-retirement to help out. A massive nod to Kurosawa's Stray Dog, and very deftly textured - I like how the different persons the detective sees are brought out in the cut, not through some CGI massage of the image, thus sidestepping the conventional telegraphing. All of a sudden you will have seven different people in lockstep with each other on a city street, rather than the one you see intercut with these seven - the effect is slightly vertiginous and very nice. Also interesting how none of the apparitions actually stand in for dead people, save one - I won't tell which. No Sixth Sense this, no trite and overworked thinking on trauma, loss and mourning (heavy concepts, but you know what I mean). And a very cool reworking of the hall of mirrors from Lady from Shanghai. Whets the appetite for more To.

[henriq]

Masaaki Yuasa - Mind Game (2004)

What in hell? - young ineffectual manga artist runs across his grade school crush on the tube, goes with her to the family restaurant only to get accosted by thug who means to rape the girl, cowers ass up in the corner, gets shot through said ass by rapist, dies (?) and ends up in limbo, finds a will to power and life, pushes back through the partition between life and death, shoots and kills rapist, beats the crap out of the local yakuza in a car chase that sees him and two girl companions off a bridge and into the gaping maw of a cosmic whale?! - no shitting. Film orchestrating every variety of adolescent power fantasies and imagination through a relentless mashup of every style of animation from hieroglyphics (thereabouts, at least) through 3D CAD drawing in a veritable "tsunami of consciousness" as per Philip Brophy: http://www.philipbrophy.com/projects/rs ... ght_C.html. There is always a wondrous plasticity to Japanese animation, and this movie accentuates that to an intense degree. If Studio Ghibli is Clint Eastwood, then this is Takashi Miike. Think the brittle folding of reality, dream, nightmare and bloodcurdling violence in Audition. Crazy experience, treat yourself and check it out.

[walto]

Don Siegel - Dirty Harry (1971)

So, watched this again and enjoyed it immensely. San Francisco has probably never looked as beautiful, the pace is brilliant, sleek and hesitant. The action scenes, when they slowly emerge and erupt, are kinetic and brittle, explosive and beautiful. Everything moves as in a haze, a haze which pervades and in a way questions the supposed politics of the film. Funny - and I'm probably overstating the case, born as I am eight years after this was released - that this film sort of filters through history as a sort of fascist tract, morally dubious at best. (For the best of this, check out J. Hoberman's magisterial The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties). There is truth to this: Andy Robinson's Scorpio is coded hippie with his long hair and peace sign belt buckle, a bit androgynous and queer with those big lips and girly bemused eyes. But compare this to a movie like Aldrich's Dirty Dozen, a movie that has always been cool to like, and something becomes glaringly wrong with mainstream movie culture. The uneaxamined politics of that one, the America - Fuck Yeah! expediency of taking a bunch of murderers and rapists, train them (and procure the necessary prostitute retinue to keep them lubed and happy) and send them of to kill a bunch of nazis. Or send them to Southeast Asia, or Iraq whydontcha - see how easy it is to transpose the tonalities of DD to any number of military theaters and the unquestioned, gleeful machismo becomes distinctly unpleasant. Harry Callahan, meanwhile, is wistful while macho, riddled with doubt and regret. Recall the great scene with Harry and Reni Santoni's wife leaving the hospital - Why do you stay in this? I don't know, I really don't - and the ambiguities become as sharp as his suit. There are probably reams of stuff waiting to be written on Clint Eastwood and the fissures within the conservative male code, and this is my little contribution to it.

I always objected to "Being that this is a....." Would have liked "Seeing...." Otherwise excellent: I give it the long end of the stick.

[henriq]

I always objected to "Being that this is a....." Would have liked "Seeing...." Otherwise excellent: I give it the long end of the stick.

Not exactly sure what you're getting at here...? If you commend my review: thank you, and the film is excellent.

[henriq]

Not exactly sure what you're getting at here...? If you commend my review: thank you, and the film is excellent.

Sorry, now I get it, the speech! Yes, a little florid perhaps. Andy Robinson in an interview saying how he would be a very rich man if he had a dime for every time men all over the world had come up to him and recited the whole thing verbatim...

[walto]

Sorry, I should have added "357 magnum" at the end to be clearer.

I just don't like the expression, 'Being that blah blah'. (I guess it's short for 'It being the case that blah blah.)

But I like the movie anyhow--though it DOES sanction torture as a legitimate means of obtaining info.

[henriq]

But I like the movie anyhow--though it DOES sanction torture as a legitimate means of obtaining info.

You know, you're right there. I had never thought of that. There are quite a lot of elegiac portraits of ruthless men who does what needs to be done in Eastwood. And the politics of that is of course very suspect... Still, a great movie.

[Steve Minkin]

...and I'm all out of bubblegum."

Never saw the film, but love the clip, from a political site, the initial post on an open thread for tonight elections:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp_K8prLfso

[Mo Noyz]

You should watch the movie. Horrendous, but somehow entertaining. And one of the most iconic fight scenes ever committed to celluloid...

[walto]

Couldn't get through more than about a half hour of "Hot Tub Time Machine" (Pink, 2010).

I did laugh at one line though:

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/c0180d80-1 ... 998b47e40d

[Dan Warburton]

Ken Loach, Poor Cow, 1967

Loach's first full length feature, showing the seamier side of Swinging London. Hearing The Flower Pot Men singing "Let's Go To San Francisco" while watching British pensioners with no teeth sucking at Walls ice cream and freezing their rocks off on the prom at some godawful British seaside resort is priceless. Carol White (who later appeared in Loach's acclaimed Cathy Come Home and ended up unable to deal with fame and dying too early) gives a great performance, a kitchen sink Bardot par excellence. Terence Stamp is also on fine form too - extracts of this film were used by Steven Soderbergh for the flashback scenes in The Limey btw - but John Bindon is about as wooden as the Donovan soundtrack..

[Dan Warburton]

Louis Feuillade, Judex, 1916

Franju's later remake judiciously concentrated on events in the first half of the story - there's a limit to how many times the same person can be kidnapped - but, minor quibbles aside, it's a jolly good story. For those of you who like a good series

[Dan Warburton]

Louis Malle, Le Voleur, 1967

Not first division Malle, but certainly deserves to be better known, proof that Belmondo could act after all, as well as shin up drainpipes and jump over walls. And how can you not want to watch a movie that also features Geneviève Bujold, Francoise Fabian, Bernadette Lafont, Marie Dubois and Marlène Jobert?

[Dan Warburton]

Philippe Garrel, Liberté, la nuit, 1983

It's Garrel, so you know what to expect: black and white, slow, introspective, austere, emotional, with that rather annoying sub-Köln Concert piano soundtrack - there is a kind of drive-by shooting and a terrorist execution but don't let that fool you into expecting an action film. It isn't.

[Dan Warburton]

Frank Perry, Doc, 1971

Agree very much with the closing line of this review https://moviemahal.net/2016/06/16/doc-1 ... -perry-us/ :
"Doc is indeed an underrated Western but then so is the work of Keach and Perry."