Recently Watched Films 2019

[Dan Warburton]

Manuel von Stürler, Winter Nomads, 2012

800 sheep, half a dozen sheepdogs, three donkeys and a shepherd and his young wife (? partner?) crossing Switzerland in wintertime to fatten up the beasts for bossman farmer, who meets the couple from time to time with his trailer to pick out the 50 or so healthiest looking specimens and whisk them off to the abbatoir. Along the way, they camp (heroic, given the weather), drop in on a few friends to take a quick shower, enjoy a Christmas meal of foie gras and oysters in the moonlight and generally seem to be very happy. I think of them from time to time as I sweat on tube trains trying in vain to read the latest Google News feed on Trump or Brexit.

[Dan Warburton]

Guy-Marc Hinant & Dominique Lohlé, Rage, 2017

Stylish but rather strange documentary (of sorts) on.. well, is it on acid house? (If so, it's sadly lacking in any historical context - paging Simon Reynolds, you'd be better off re-reading his Energy Flash) Or on anarchism? (You get 17+ minutes of erudite discussion of Proudhon and Bakhunin before you even hear a TB 303..) Or on the 303 itself - there's a whole section which constitutes little more than a tutorial? Add to that several leisurely 360° right-to-left slow pans à la Straub / Huillet, and a closing section which shows a bunch of kids throwing fireworks at each other, and you've got a jolly mix indeed. Free torrent at KG, HD too, sounds ace through my Bose QC35s

[henriq]

Gaspar Noé, Climax, 2018

Holy shit....! Words fail (for the moment, will try to write later after a drink.. but not sangria.. ) Definitely Noé's best since Irreversible, that's all I'm saying for the moment. 1080rip going FREE at KG, don't miss it folks.. more anon

Merde alors...! Après vous, mon ami, I'm interested to hear your take on it. But dude...

[henriq]

John Carpenter - In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

OK, now I have to read the book!

[Antoine]

Le Vénérable W. (The Venerable W), Barbet Schroeder, 2017
Barbet Schroeder portrays Ashin Wirathu, a buddhist monk who leads an anti-muslim movement in Myanmar. Though not as fascinating as his other portray-documentaries (Jacques Vergès, Idi Amin Dada), it puts light on the rohingyas situation while facing the strange rhetoric of W: buddhism + speech of hate/terror... not so far from the ISIS he denounces.


The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Joel and Ethan Coen, 2018
Six short stories in the West. I enjoyed this one a lot: pure Coen Bros elements + a nice rendition of a tales book.

[Piano Mouth]

An Elephant Sitting Still - 2018 Hu Bo



A fantastic 4 hour long film from Hu Bo who I think passed away before it was released. The film follows the stories of a handful of intermingling characters in the span of what seems to be in a day or two on the outskirts of Beijing. It's a story of the city and its people, the general pessimism of daily life, the inanity of rudeness in people, and the short tragedies that occur. It's rather bitter, but the things that happen in the each scene are really interesting, and almost kind of fun to watch and dissect. The soundtrack is really outstanding, you gotta check it out. The music in the film is really dope, and takes you on another trip.

[Steve Minkin]

GUN CRAZY (1950) -- Great! But that's old news here.

Anybody seen the remake from 1992?

[Dan Warburton]

No.. but can it possibly hold a candle to the original? Great looking film - thanks for the heads up on The Sniper too, will be reporting back on that shortly

[henriq]

Nicholas Ray - In a Lonely Place (1950)
Alan Arkin - Little Murders (1971)
Gaspar Noé - Climax (2018)

No, really. I feel a wax philosophical coming on. Draw a line and follow it, isn’t that what he said?

KG freeleech week been and gone and a strange garden of new movies blooming on my harddrive. And weird but telling textures emerging from the programming of these films the last few days. Three excellent movies, and three evolving ways of thinking about rooms, spaces of exposition and performance, and cinema.

In a Lonely Place. An exemplary noir. Exemplary in that the pathology of the main protagonist isn’t merely introduced as a framing device, a lazy introduction to an otherwise conventional narrative. The fine Gun Crazy falls a little bit short in this respect: beautifully shot and acted as it is, the pathology of John Dall is introduced in the beginning but not really carried through in the film. It erupts of course, as all repressed energies always erupts in noir, but feels more like a framing device around a somewhat conventional crime caper. Not so with Ray’s film: the place of the title is both the place of killing and murderous passion and the place that Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame create for themselves in their doomed love. Everything happens here: pried and spied on by the police, liking him for a murder he didn’t or maybe did commit, Humphrey Bogart is incessantly haunted by himself, by posttraumatic distress and steely violent energies – Gloria Grahame becomes a witness to this, beset by doubt and fear to the point that the denouement carries little importance: love becomes impossible, Bogart won’t or can’t slow down to receive it. A little reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Suspicion in this way, but without the tacked on happy ending. Expertly paced and written, an absolute classic.

Little Murders. Pushing even further into a dark and hysterically charged interior, answering of course to the conditions of theater in which it evolved, adapted by Jules Feiffer from his own stage play. I like being late to stuff: this was a revelation. The movie renders both the malice of the sixties and New York in the early seventies through hysterically funny monologues, and also through a nearly pathological physicality - think the weird touching and tussling of the Newquist family, Donald Sutherland’s hippie congregation, Alan Arkin’s end-of-his-tether soliloquy. And the interiors permeated by the violence and ennui of the gritty metropolis – the sound of Elliott Gould being beaten up outside the apartment that opens the film and the love story within it, the breather phone calls, the sniper killing Marcia Rodd – grief and violence carried and tracked beyond the point of containment and propriety. Slapstick, but philosophical and existential, as maybe all slapstick or noir is?

Climax. I’ll open by saying that this is some of the best choreography I’ve ever seen captured on film. By no means am I an expert on the subject, but this throws back to classics like An American in Paris or Silk Stockings, blowing poseurs like von Trier and Luhrmann and any and all Hollywood hacks in between completely out of the water. (Ooh really, Richard Gere can tap? No he can’t.) About time, we need new benchmarks for the capture of dance and movement on film! The premise: a company of street dancers and choreographers from metropolitan France and Germany are sent out to a school building somewhere in a snowed in French territory for three days of rehearsal, romance and fucking. A spiked sangria has things spiralling way out of control, to shattering effect. Self-consciously deconstructive but all the same effective in its construction, it opens with a bloody aftermath shot overhead, a credit sequence playing over it, seguing into the casting of the troupe, then moving into an amazing choreography and the afterparty with the LSD sangria, moving into yet more dancing ending up in another credit sequence (”A film by Gaspar Noé. Music by…”). And then – enter at your peril – the aftermath when the acid hits and things get really weird. Energies completely unhinged in the Scope’d frame, technique unleashed. Believe it or not, but this is the first of Noé’s I’ve seen, so the gimmickry feels fresh. The overhead shots of both the blooded woman in the opening and the dancing before the mid-film bookend works great (who knew that a dancer’s hair seen from this vantage could look so aggressive?) as do the upside down tilting of the camera tracking in and out of writhing flesh, bodies hanging from the ceiling like weird flesh stalactites. There is probably a politics here – the frame feels borrowed a bit from Godard (think the neon lit party in Pierrot le Fou, the garbage men’s manifesto in Weekend) but I’m not sure I take it seriously or if I do that I like it. Though kind of cool to proclaim it "Un film francais et fier de l’etre" with nary an ethnic frenchman in sight. Do you have a take on this, Dan? (Sorry if I pipped you to the post here, I couldn’t wait). Maybe more, following my own thought here, a politics of the frame and its expressive potential, tracking both itself and the undoing of it, the simultaneously liberatory and destructive power of bodies in movement. Anyway, easily a contender with Cavalier´s Martin et Lea for movie of the year.

[Dan Warburton]

Monster post, thanks for this.Yes, we need a decent HD rip of Little Murders, terrific film. I had a few ideas on Climax but I thought I'd wait to give it a second go before sharing them. Then again, it's not the kind of movie you want to watch twice in a row, is it? So, wtf, let's have a go. Spoilers ahoy. Be warned. First up, it's a welcome return to form after the torpid self-indulgence of Enter The Void and the dreary lethargy of Love. (I still think Seul contre tous is his best, but whatever.) Climax is clearly in two halves - which is why he lets the credits roll halfway through before the acieeed kicks in - and I prefer the first part, if only for its technical prowess. The opening dance sequence is stunning, perhaps the most exciting ensemble choreography I've seen since, uhh, West Side Story? And the ensuing prowling long takes catching dialogue along the way are just as impressive, especially considering that, apparently, Noé just let his cast wing it. Hats off once more to (DP) Benoït Debie, then. The tightly framed set of duo conversations, which serve to set up the relationships between the characters that will soon be destroyed, establishes a sense of foreboding - you just know Omar and his pal are going to get up to no good. It's Lord of the Flies all over again (the director also likens it to Kubrick's 2001 in reverse, man turning back into ape), not that any of these characters are demure little choirboys to start with.
Part two, beginning with that not-at-all-subtle overhead shot of the sangria, is where it all fucks up, in every sense: relationships, plotlines, spatial and sonic coherence all foutent le camp, and Debie's camera ends up literally upside down. We never really find out who spiked the booze, or why - I reckon it was the director, actually - and when it's all over and done with and the camera floats lazily above the bodies, you're left feeling emotionally bludgeoned (who could not feel something seeing a pregnant woman kicked in the belly before slashing herself open, even if we know all along it's only a movie?). Yet after the dust settled - about an hour after I posted my capsule comment above - I began to wonder what the point of it all was. Noé certainly relishes his reputation as provocateur, and likes to play Tarantino film fanboy games with his adoring public (check out the films the opening interview sequence namechecks, all those VHS cassettes of Gaspar's favourites sitting either side of the telly), but behind the flashiness and noise I don't feel much depth (quite unlike Pasolini's Salo, which is supposedly Noé's all time number one, yikes). Just because something is shocking and disturbing doesn't necessarily make it profound (replace "shocking" with "slow" and you have my thoughts on Bela Tarr too). Climax is terribly impressive - I wonder what it's like on a big screen with a killer sound system - but awfully (unrepentantly) banal. Which I guess makes it depressingly appropriate for the times we live in. (Though one thing we haven't discussed is why the director chose to set the story in 1996.. any thoughts on that, Henrik? Apart from the obvious one, that the music was better back then )

[henriq]

We never really find out who spiked the booze, or why - I reckon it was the director, actually - and when it's all over and done with and the camera floats lazily above the bodies, you're left feeling emotionally bludgeoned (who could not feel something seeing a pregnant woman kicked in the belly before slashing herself open, even if we know all along it's only a movie?).

I sort of like the German girl for it, that was the supposed politics I didn't care for. Lesbian, frigid and hypersexual at the same time (tearing her top off in the dance, pissing on the floor, won't engage with the girlfriend) spiking the drink to enjoy watching everyone tear themselves to pieces. She's the one with the "friend" with the LSD eyedrops. Germany fucking with France - what, the war? Vichy? - or Greece or anywhere for its own cold enjoyment. Or I'm reading too much into it.

Noé certainly relishes his reputation as provocateur, and likes to play Tarantino film fanboy games with his adoring public (check out the films the opening interview sequence namechecks, all those VHS cassettes of Gaspar's favourites sitting either side of the telly), but behind the flashiness and noise I don't feel much depth (quite unlike Pasolini's Salo, which is supposedly Noé's all time number one, yikes).

I agree with you there. "Look at me, I'm cine-literate!" - but what the hell does Fritz Lang or Harakiri or La maman et la putain have to do with this movie? Maybe Kenneth Anger, ok, but it feels like a frame all the same. You would hope that any grown up cinephile can see through it.

(Though one thing we haven't discussed is why the director chose to set the story in 1996.. any thoughts on that, Henrik? Apart from the obvious one, that the music was better back then )

Dunno, really. Maybe to throw us music geeks a bit more for a loop? A quick look: Aphex Twin's Windowlicker wasn't released until 1999, the COH track Mad playing over the actual end credits came out in 2008. I think what it probably is is he wants us to look in all directions at once: the movie library around the telly, music a little out of period, German-austerity-euro-crisis (I might have fallen for it, come to think of it) - the frame rickety and tenuous, carrying but not containing the energies of the bodies in it. You are left with a glorious spectacle of autoerotic exuberance, psychosexual malice and decay. To soundbite a bit, seem I liked it a lot more than you.

EDIT: Spoofing and trolling readability, a nice meta touch?

[Dan Warburton]

Well at least we're having a good time here



Leo McCarey, Love Affair, 1939

1939 was, as we all know, a great year for American cinema, but this one's best left on the shelf imo, despite an impressive list of folks who were involved in making it (Dmytryk, Delmer Daves, Rudolph Maté..). Boyer is awesome in Gaslight, but here his French arty playboy character (" I 'ave never worked a day in mah life!") is often annoying, and Irene Dunne's goody two shoes heroine as hard to swallow as the plot. Of course, I seem to be in the minority thinking this, judging by the 9s and 10s I see over at IMDb, even though I'm not averse to the RomCom and love a good melodrama (speaking of which, McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow is awesome, easily as good as Ozu's Tokyo Story which it inspired). But this one just doesn't jerk the tears. Feel free to disagree.

[Dan Warburton]

Nanni Moretti, Caro diario, 1993

The still above comes from the scene in the film where Nanni sings and dances along with Silvana Mangano in Anna (a total delight! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH3Zx9BJYpQ), but there are plenty more memorable - and often inexplicably touching - moments in the film. As usual Rosenbaum says it better than I can, so here he is: https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/g ... oid=886132

[Dan Warburton]

Lucio Fulci, Non si sevizia un paperino, 1972

Return visit - finally persuaded my giallo-sceptical spouse to try one - and enjoyed it just as much as before. Crazy story, daft zooms in and out, deliriously over-the-top gore effects and wonderfully trashy Ortolani soundtrack. A host of giallo regulars - Florinda Balkan, Barbara Bouchet, Tomas Milian here with sleazy moustache - and J&B whisky galore. Cheers!

[Dan Warburton]

Russ Meyer, Good Morning and... Goodbye!, 1967

"I did all my own costuming. I got up hours ahead of time to put those costumes together. I would just go out with a big bag and collect rose petals! I was late one morning for breakfast, and Russ -- he would sit at the head of the table -- he said, "Where were you?!" I shook the bag and said, "I was in the woods cutting down my costume!" I'd tape rose petals in my hair, on my breasts, and between my legs, and that would be my costume. I glued dead bugs on my cheeks and put green sticks and moss in my hair." So writes Meyer regular Haji (above) of her role as Sorceress, which consists of running around barefoot in the desert adorned with twigs and seducing Stuart Lancaster so he can find his mojo, go back home, ball his wife at last (Alaina Capril has some great bitchy lines to go with her great bitchy lines) and then kick the crap out of the meaty construction worker who'd been balling her before. Hilarious voiceover intros and outtros as usual, but not on the same level as Faster Pussycat or Beyond The Valley. Kinda goes without saying, that

[Steve Minkin]

STAN AND OLLIE (2018) -- Disappointing. Steve Coogan and John C Reilly are fine in their parts, their wives (Shirley Henderson and Nina Arianda) are even better, and the movie takes an affectionate look at the iconic duo's late career tour of England in the 1950s in hopes of generating funding for another movie. Some of their classic comedy bits are reenacted both on stage and in 'real life,' and the strains of the business and personal sides of show business are explored frankly. But the film never came to life for me, the comedy bits weren't funny (perhaps because of the semi-grim setting of the rest of the film) and the drama of ensuring that 'the show must go on' didn't generate enough excitement. Not the film I had hoped to see, although it's getting lots of props out there.

[Antoine]

The French, William Klein (1982)
This documentary, shot by the great William Klein, captures Roland Garros 1981, behind the scenes. A gathering of tennis legends (Borg, McEnroe, Lendl, Evert, Navratilova, Noah, Vilas, Nastase, Connors.. to name a few) in a not so professional world. Old fashioned and fun.


Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, Alexandra Dean (2017)
For sure, that's quite a story, as Hedy Lamarr escaped the nazis and became an Hollywood star, while inventing a frequency-hopping tech that you'll find today in your GPS, wifi, etc. But curiously, as interesting is the story, the documentary is quite traditional in its construction and lacks cinema.

[walto]

If Beale Street Could Talk (Jenkins, 2018)

I never read the Baldwin book, but I found the movie very sloooow. It's full of long, speechless close-ups and justified distress. It has the feel of one of those "jazz movies" of the 1960s, which it could likely have been mistaken for if it were in black and white and Jenkins had thrown in a heroin scene. Although it is extremely earnest, there are a few humorous moments. One is an early ensemble involving two families--one Bible thumpers, the other modern-day pragmatists. One of the latter ends up calling one of the former a cunt and threatening to bite off her adam's apples. Another scene is funny largely because it features James Franco's little brother Dave playing Levy, a yarmulke-wearing landlord who is willing to rent to the black couple because he believes in love. There's no plumbing though.

One half of the protagonist couple, KiKi Layne, does a nice job as Tish, the other, Stephan James, has a very nice body as Fonny. But I got tired of looking at him anyhow: so many plaintive stares. Regina King is quite good as Tish's mom, but I think the best performance in the film, one that is Oscar-worthy, is by Brian Tyree Henry of Atlanta fame. He's terrifyingly anxious as Danny--completely broken by his experience in "the slammer." Oh, there's also a white cop who is a Simon Legree level shithead here, and manages to snarl appropriately.

I've heard it said that the movie is "beautifully shot," but to me it looked mostly like very tight close-ups of faces with nothing going on except the attempted expressions of a ton of love, hope, concern, or anger. There's a long sex scene--and even that is made boring. Anyhow, I guess it's good to be regularly reminded how badly African Americans are treated in the U.S.

[Full Disclosure: one of the people I went with liked it a lot; one thought it was a little slow but not as bad as I claim; and one is the type that just likes to agree, so he didn't say anything.]

[Dan Warburton]

Tony Richardson, Tom Jones, 1963

Albert Finney, RIP. (I've given up starting separate RIP threads here because a) they very rarely go further than one or two posts and b) as I've said before, the longer I go on, the more famous cinema folk around me will be popping their clogs) Damn, I love this film.

[Dan Warburton]

Peter Greenaway, Goltzius and the Pelican Company, 2012

Saith Wiki: "The film is based on the life of Hendrik Goltzius, a late 16th-century Dutch printer and engraver of erotic prints. He seduces the Margrave of Alsace into paying for a printing press to make and publish illustrated books. Goltzius promises him an extraordinary book of pictures of the Old Testament Biblical stories. Erotic tales of the temptation of Adam and Eve, Lot and his daughters, David and Bathsheba, Joseph and Potiphar's wife, Samson and Delilah, and John the Baptist and Salome. To tempt the Margrave further, Goltzius and his printing company will offer to perform dramatizations of these erotic stories for his court." Echt Greenaway, full of naked bodies, often covered with ink, superimposed supersymmetrical tableaux vivants, erudite verging on the pretentious script, etc etc. But one of the director's easier to follow works. If you know and like Greenaway, you'll find much to enjoy.