Recently Watched Films 2019

[henriq]

New year, new movies. Get watching!

[walto]

[Piano Mouth]

Koreeda - I Wish (2011)



Mr. Koreeda, a contemporary Ozu really, shows us a story of a family who is separated by divorce, in a comedy about the kids taking a long distance trip by themselves to reunite with each other. Really looking forward to seeing Shoplifters, his new film, which won a major award at the Cannes film festival this year.

[walto]

Had to watch the movie from which these outtakes came again. So freaking funny.....


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0le3GWyW-k

[henriq]

Nagisa Oshima - Boy (1969)

Another great one by Oshima: a tale of a family of con artists faking car accidents for quick cash settlements, dragging their two boys up and down the length of Japan in the process. And since it is Oshima, family is of course thrown into very acerbic question. The titular boy's real mother is off somewhere out of frame, the father, a battle scarred veteran, having gone off with another woman, siring an illegitimate child with her. The one thing holding them together is the hustle: the very brittle stitching of propriety and accumulation this construes leaving a lot of astringent room for fantasies of flight and vengeance, surprising eruptions of love, care and tenderness. But dark, very dark: the cunning symbolism of death and trauma faked and deferred for profit - no real escape possible, just the horror of more of the same. When death finally appears it is fittingly on Hokkaido, at the northernmost end of Japan, at an end of the world. A deft staging of postwar Japan, with simultaneous prosperity and posttraumatic despair. Actually, Oshima's family brings to mind nothing so much as the town in Kurosawa's Yojimbo, the blasted, keening facades of that burgh crumbling around the yakuza turf wars. Oh, and great use of sound and Hikaru Hayashi's music, awesome cinematography (the snowy landscapes of Hokkaido!) and colour schemes. Oshima towers, more and more!

[Piano Mouth]

Andrew Bujalski - Support the Girls (2018)



His latest since the terrific Computer Chess I think, is this dramedy about a manager of a family friendly titty bar in Texas. Some OK moments, nothing too dramatic, some memorable odd ball characters, though all the men in the movie are scum.

[henriq]

Les Blank - A Poem Is A Naked Person (1974)

Oh, what an absolute beauty of a film! Poetic and resonant, loosely following Leon Russell in the environment he inhabits and creates. Seldom has the French word milieu felt more appropriate: a place and space in the middle of everything, equally open to currents and tendencies from all directions, no extremes of aesthetic or ideologic definition and contention. Conventional rockumentary arcs are absent, no one tour or one album recorded, but tours, studio sessions, concerts, groupies, a wedding gig, sideman duties for other musicians, walk-ons from George Jones, Willie Nelson and many others. Equally, the South that Blank maps is mellifluous, almost palimpsest in the many layers of its portrayal. Lots of shots of food and festivals, fishing, bathing, water - and of course the gothic, a snake eating a chicken (and a philosophy of said in voiceover), geese thrown from pickups and hunted and caught by locals, the couple attending and photographing, with nerdy zest, all demolitions in Tulsa, the guy at a parachuting competition toasting the people of Oklahoma and then proceeding to eat the beer glass, and on and on. Of course, this mirrors in many ways the effortless amalgamation in Russell's music of country, bluegrass, soul, gospel, so that the art and the landsape give each other, without effort. Awesome shots on stage of the band, in the studio, a gospel congregation in full thrust. A real utopian piece of filmmaking, wondrous to behold.

[Dan Warburton]

First time in nearly a decade someone pipped me to the post starting the film thread Good on ya, Henrik - and Happy New Year to all. Brought the New Year in with some high culture..



Larry Charles, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, 2006

Still great fun, but rather alarming in these Trumped-up times. Anyway, it (the film viewing) can only get better from here

[henriq]

First time in nearly a decade someone pipped me to the post starting the film thread Good on ya, Henrik - and Happy New Year to all. Brought the New Year in with some high culture..



Larry Charles, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, 2006

Still great fun, but rather alarming in these Trumped-up times. Anyway, it (the film viewing) can only get better from here

Crap, just wrote a massive post on Fosse's Sweet Charity only to have it disappear in a logout. Probably more than it's worth. Short version, and by far the best bit in all turgid 150 minutes of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcrZIK3gqbU

Are you back from the holidays, Dan?

[walto]

Couldn't resist the zillionth views of the two splendiforous Forster/Bonham-Carter/Graves movies, Room With a View (Ivory, 1985) and Where Angels Fear to Tread (Sturridge, 1991). That is the comfort food of we (us?) middle-brow, Edwardophile Anglophiles. Love them both so much.

Might have to rewatch Handful of Dust too. Gotta get some Waugh in there.

[Dan Warburton]

Are you back from the holidays, Dan?

Yessir. The cathedral bells are ringing out in the early evening drizzle and am just enjoying a kir and thinking about writing up some of the KGFTs I've seen in the last couple of days. Watch this space.. Is that Fosse any good?

[Claud601]

Best thread here. Much appreciated

[henriq]

Are you back from the holidays, Dan?

Yessir. The cathedral bells are ringing out in the early evening drizzle and am just enjoying a kir and thinking about writing up some of the KGFTs I've seen in the last couple of days. Watch this space.. Is that Fosse any good?

Well, not really. It does have a few things good in it, The Rich Man's Frug of the YT clip being the best, but you also get Sammy Davis Jr doing a groovy hippie priest, Big Spender and the Broadway goodies that come with them. Loads of beauty and professionalism in these bits. But it is a star vehicle for Shirley MacLaine, and she can't act, can't really sing (though I've heard a lot worse) and can kind of dance. Add a bloated length - who needs 150 minutes of it? - messy, unfocused direction (Fosse's first, mind you), and it's not really worth it. Go for Cabaret and All That Jazz.

[Dan Warburton]

Best thread here. Much appreciated

Just about the only thread here - thanks for the kind words!

[Dan Warburton]

Jean-Claude Brisseau, Les savates du bon dieu, 1999

Glorious - despite the date, much of it feels like it belongs a decade or so earlier.. with a storyline that swings from noir to fairytale it's in the same subset as Diva and the first three Caraxs (or should that be Caraxes?). It's also clearly a grandchild of A bout de souffle and Pierrot le fou, not to mention a distant transatlantic cousin of Bonnie and Clyde. If you like any or all of the abovementioned, you'll love this. Brisseau's rep took a mighty hit a few years back when he was sent down for casting couch abuse, but you'd be denying yourself an oeuvre of extraordinary finesse and beauty if you refuse to subscribe out of political correctness. And don't tell me that former mining town Saint Etienne is as ugly as Rochdale - it looks gorgeous here. Recommended.

[Dan Warburton]

Gerhard Benedikt Friedl, Hat Wolff von Amerongen Konkursdelikte begangen? ("Did Wolff von Amerongen Commit Bankruptcy Offenses?"), 2004

Up for grabs for ages as a Featured Torrent over at KG, and sorry I took so long getting round to watching it. Can do no better than quote the quote (from IMDb I think) on the site where I snatched the screenshots: "The most remarkable discovery in recent German-language cinema: Gerhard Friedl’s first feature is a hypnotic visual puzzle at the interface of documentary, essay film and pulp fiction. On the soundtrack: an unflinchingly ‘objective’ account of the labyrinthine genealogies, criminal involvements and afflictions of Germany’s economic leaders in the 20th century. On the screen: pans and tracking shots through European financial centres, production sites and landscapes. The sheer depth and crispness of these images is a treat in itself; a transformation into cinégénie of what artists like Candida Höfer or Jeff Wall have done by means of still photography. At times, image and sound are aligned, at others they just miss each other. They invariably suggest correlations. Paranoia? Irony? Can the prosaic, criminal state of affairs of a modern economy be depicted at all? Pierre Rissient, the French film historian, puts the film where it belongs: 'Fritz Lang would have loved it!'"
So, I suspect would Straub and Huillet. I certainly did. You try it.

[Dan Warburton]

Alan Clarke, Stars of the Roller State Disco, 1984

Quoting from this longer and recommended article on the late, great Clarke (Christ, it's only the 12th of January and I'm already getting too lazy to write myself ) https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/alan-clarke/ : "His films of David Leland’s Psy-Warriors (81) and Michael Hastings’ Stars of the Roller State Disco (84), which depict the training of military assassins and the plight of unemployed youths respectively, were videotaped on studio sets—a gleaming white prison-cum-torture chamber complex (with a pre-Guantanamo aura), a futuristic sleep-in roller disco—rendered as alternate realities. The rhythmic repetitiveness of each endows it with the quality of a never-ending nightmare." The idea that the young unemployed - those without a home, or who choose to leave it or not return to it - should find themselves literally going round in circles on roller skates in a hideous windowless foyer until summoned to the guichet to accept (or not) whatever dismal menial work Thatcher's Britain dredges up for them is truly chilling, and as awful as the instrumental disco trash the poor buggers have to endure, with or without the painkillers and other drugs provided by the trendy in-house doctor. Nightmarishly brilliant. Want to add your twopenn'orth, Henrik, as our resident Alan Clarke expert?

[henriq]

Alan Clarke, Stars of the Roller State Disco, 1984

Quoting from this longer and recommended article on the late, great Clarke (Christ, it's only the 12th of January and I'm already getting too lazy to write myself ) https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/alan-clarke/ : "His films of David Leland’s Psy-Warriors (81) and Michael Hastings’ Stars of the Roller State Disco (84), which depict the training of military assassins and the plight of unemployed youths respectively, were videotaped on studio sets—a gleaming white prison-cum-torture chamber complex (with a pre-Guantanamo aura), a futuristic sleep-in roller disco—rendered as alternate realities. The rhythmic repetitiveness of each endows it with the quality of a never-ending nightmare." The idea that the young unemployed - those without a home, or who choose to leave it or not return to it - should find themselves literally going round in circles on roller skates in a hideous windowless foyer until summoned to the guichet to accept (or not) whatever dismal menial work Thatcher's Britain dredges up for them is truly chilling, and as awful as the instrumental disco trash the poor buggers have to endure, with or without the painkillers and other drugs provided by the trendy in-house doctor. Nightmarishly brilliant. Want to add your twopenn'orth, Henrik, as our resident Alan Clarke expert?

I shall watch and report back. I think I skipped that one, did all of them from the boxset chronologically, got impatient and jumped ahead to Contact and Psy-Warriors, both so brilliant I'm still snagging on them. Even though it's neither the season nor mood for acerbic and harsh stuff like Clarke's, I feel I must return to all of it. Did you see George's Room? Transfixingly great. Just a for instance.

[henriq]

Ingmar Bergman - Hour of the Wolf (1968)

Sort of a maudit Bergman, this - for years unavailable on home media in its native Sweden as the Swedish Film Institute didn't think it was any good (this from a friend). But recent years, and the just finished centennial, have seen a bit of a reappraisal. And a good thing too - it is one of his best, at least in this writer's opinion. It is very easy, here in Sweden, to grow weary of maestro Bergman, and lionised movies like The Silence don't do much for me. But the immediate period of this film, placed as it is in a triptych with the awesome En Passion ("The Passion of Anna") and Skammen ("Shame"), is a very fruitful one. It sees the director grappling with himself and increasingly dark materials. Skammen deals with war; En passion elaborates in sophisticated detail on love, passion, loneliness; and Vargtimmen, the present one, handles the ever present and important question of artistic creativity and expression. The portrait of Max von Sydow's insomniac artist becomes nothing so much as a treatise on writer's block: when the images won't come, will not touch and dance with each other, what demons and phantoms are let loose, what energies of memory, desire, or murderous resentment haunt the soul, even in a single tortured minute? This scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC-gEex84b0 is famous, and rightly so: time really grows dense and sluggish in this dark night, no matter how many times you watch it. This stunted motorik sets a stage populated by Bergman regulars like Erland Josephson, Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Thulin - but also a surprising, diabolical turn by Georg Rydeberg as Lindhorst. Very nice how the characters surrounding von Sydow and wife Ullmann are both real and at the same time embodiments of the figures haunting the artist's imagination - of dream and reality at the same time, they flicker and glide before the camera. And an awesome camera, too: shot by Sven Nykvist, rarely has a Bergman film looked more gorgeous. Or sounded better: one of only two of the director's movies scored by Lars Johan Werle (Persona being the other), the music and sound design here is amazing. Someone release this!

[Dan Warburton]

Great film - nice screenshot too!



František Vláčil, Shadows of a Hot Summer, 1978

Working my way through the KGFTs, this excellent feature is the story of a sheep farmer in the Czech mountains whose family, along with the local doctor, is held hostage by a five rogue pro/ex-Nazi Bandera guerrillas (1947.. go Google if you're not up on Ukrainian history). A slightly obtrusive soundtrack, but it's a compelling story and you'll want to know how it ends. So I won't tell you.