Recently Watched Films 2019

[Dan Warburton]

Joe Dante, The Movie Orgy, 1968

Truly awesome five-hour (well, four and three quarters.. the last fifteen minutes are blank, like one of those phantom runout tracks they used to put on CDs) mashup of cheesy 50s sci-fi, sitcoms and what now seem to us today as amazingly stupid duck-and-cover public information shorts and commercials for everything from laxatives to tampons. Richard Nixon makes a few choice appearances, but don't expect too much anti-war imagery - Dante's tongue's firmly in his cheek, as it was in his later masterpiece Small Soldiers, and the way this one builds to its multiple apocalyptic climax, with giant women ripping roofs off, giant locusts invading downtown Chicago, giant tarantulas and gila monsters. It's a blast - I watched it over several days, next time I might try it all the way through non-stop. With some Bufferin to hand. Here's a taste https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7fp4v8bTEo

[henriq]

Watching my ratio literally circling the drain. All at once not necessary or advisable, but certainly fun. Pace or overload? You choose, I know where I stand, at least today.

Looks like you had a great viewing weekend, I shall have my own look.

[Dan Warburton]

Watching my ratio literally circling the drain.

Give over, take advantage of today's temporary freeleech! Looks like some good stuff there.. And you can further screw up yr ratio with this:



André Delvaux, Rendez-vous à Bray, 1971

Always so good to know that there's more out there to discover - damn, this has been sitting on my hard drive for six years and I've only now got round to discovering it.. Magnificent, in every way. Exquisitely filmed by Bresson's longtime DP Ghislain Cloquet, magnificently acted by all concerned - Mathieu Carrière, Bulle Ogier and of course Anna Karina - superbly scored and lit, it's a real treasure. Don't take my word for it: here's JR
https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/1976/ ... us-a-bray/ and if you want a second opinion in French, this
http://www.dvdclassik.com/critique/rend ... ay-delvaux Now on a Delvaux hunt, tally-ho.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Funnily enough, I was looking today for Delvaux' name, only remembering that Fanny Ardant plays in one of his films. Works of his had been similarly gathering dust on my hardware once, was often somewhat compelled to watch them but never took the plunge. Thanks you for reminding me the name and also to watch them sometime.





Body Double, Brian De Palma, 1984

Watching it, I understood better where last year Under The Silver Lake came from. The latter is almost an update of De Palma's film but while De Palma is supposed to be at its most derivative here (which is saying a lot), crossing Vertigo and Rear Window, I find him considerably less stale. De Palma's mix of elegance and vulgarity finds a perfect counterpart in Pino Donaggio's lush, luscious score, and the film made me conscious of one of De Palma's immense advantages over some of his contemporaries, as a director entrenched first and foremost in the visual. That's what filmmaking is supposed to be about, ain't it.
So there is a grand pleasure to be had in the way he organizes the walks and moves of his characters, it makes obvious some semblance of geography in a way that is both fun and lovely.

Here, De Palma saves the languorous camera for the sleek, expensive settings, such as the Beverly Hills shopping mall called the Rodeo Collection, and there's not only no comic buzz-the camera seems wowed, impressed. The voyeuristic sequences, with Wasson peeping through a telescope, aren't particularly erotic; De Palma shows more sexual feeling for the swank buildings and real estate.

Here is Pauline Kael being too literal and prosaic. That De Palma gives the same amount of attention to the surroundings as he gives to, say, Melanie Griffith, is precisely what makes the film interesting. Also, the film is quite funny.

[henriq]

Dario Argento - 4 Flies on Grey Velvet (1971)

Actually, in its circumscribed fashion, quite excellent. Of course, the narrative is exceptionally patchy, even for a giallo. Michael Brandon in the lead is just awful, Jean Pierre Marielle is a delight, but he would be anywhere. But this is not really a question of ineptitude on the part of the director, more a stratagem common to a lot of exploitation filmmaking, and also the thing that connects exploitation to the arthouse. An example like Cohen's Perfect Strangers: Brad Rijn in the lead is crap, but no matter, he looks great and sexual on the streets of Tribeca. You get the sense that the camera glances off him and the other actors to shoot the real subject of the film, New York in all it's messy colour and glory. Or Cronenberg with Scanners. Stephen Lack cast for his beautiful eyes more than anything else, Patrick McGoohan drunk out of his skull and struggling to stay upright: but the composition around them, so to speak, textured and beautiful, Howard Shore's awesome music, production design and cinematography all top notch. Actors as necessary tent poles to guide the eye towards the suspended architecture surrounding and carrying them. In the present film, the flimsiness in the orchestration of the story serves to amplify and accentuate the unease and paranoia of the violence, unwittingly maybe, but still. The killing and stylised violence more a question of montage and pictorial elegance than any psychological motility, a motility the actors aren't equipped or instructed enough to handle. Film as animated photography, I think Argento elaborates on this point somewhere, unhinged from any limbic, expressive economy. Mimsy Farmer's beheading in slow motion at the close of the film the most gorgeous I have yet to see in an Argento. Just a for instance. Alors, my think piece for the night.

[Dan Warburton]

I was thinking of paying a return visit to this myself, seeing it on the list of Temporary Freeleeches over at KG. Wish I had watched it instead of



Sharunas Bartas, Seven Invisible Men, 2005

Search wherever you like, but you're not likely to find any review of this film much longer than the following: "There’s a car theft at beginning of the aggressively dreary pic, but the real crime is that all the characters have been robbed of their potential by mostly unstated political, economic or emotional circumstances. Running the gamut from sorrow to woe, their lives are riddled with regret. Nonetheless, the natural landscape of this territory to the south of the former Soviet Union can be staggeringly beautiful. As pic moves toward its draining, visually stunning conclusion, several generations end up sharing a sodden evening in a subsistence-level wooden shack in the middle of nowhere. Viewers will be grateful to emerge from the theater anywhere but there." Well, yes. I suppose a better quality rip might show off the barren steppes to more advantage, but - although I've enjoyed several Bartas features very much - I rather doubt I'll be paying a return visit. As another reviewer puts it: "Bartas'clearly intentional inarticulateness and his overt rejection of narrative make Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr, to whom he is sometimes compared, seem positively Spielbergian by contrast. Even the most obdurate aesthetes will find it tough to make a case for this film, or for Bartas' future as a film-maker if he continues in this direction." OK, well, I'll try his later stuff.. later.

[Dan Warburton]

Robert Guéduigian, Les neiges de Kilimandjaro, 2011

Simple, straightforward, good honest cinema. Well-written, well-acted, and often quite moving. I spend so much time watching "difficult" films it's almost as if I feel I should somehow be ashamed to admit I enjoy watching something as conventional as this. Well, I'm not And, no it's not the Gregory Peck thing, and it's got nothing to do with Hemingway, either. Victor Hugo, if you must know.

[henriq]

Robert Guéduigian, Les neiges de Kilimandjaro, 2011

Simple, straightforward, good honest cinema. Well-written, well-acted, and often quite moving. I spend so much time watching "difficult" films it's almost as if I feel I should somehow be ashamed to admit I enjoy watching something as conventional as this. Well, I'm not

Nor should you be, Guéduigian is awesome. I actually met him and Ariane Ascaride at the Gothernburg film festival several years ago, when they ran a series of his films. Very nice man, beautiful films. Ki lo sa, if you don't know it, I remember as great. And La ville est tranquille moved me to tears.

[Dan Warburton]

Michel Deville, A cause, à cause d'une femme, 1963

Jacques Charrier's principal claim to fame would seem to be, if googling is your thing, that he was once married to Brigitte Bardot. But until he drifted out of cinema toward the end of the 60s his own good looks graced a few fine films - Carné's Les tricheurs, Chabrol's L'oeil du malin and Mocky's excellent debut Les dragueurs. In this joli marivaudage he plays Rémi, falsely accused of murder and not particularly worried about it as he's protected, pampered and pursued by several beautiful girls (Odlie Versois, Mylène Demongeot, Marie Laforêt and Jill Haworth..). The story - like the characters and probably the director and his scriptwriter Nina Companeez too - refuses to take itself seriously, which you could also say of two early New Wave classics (Godard's) A bout de souffle and (Truffaut's) Tirez sur le pianiste. One wonders how Deville's work might have developed had he been part of the Cahiers clique instead of having cut his teeth with veteran director Henri Decoin. Anyway, I thought it was delicious.

[Piano Mouth]

Straight Time



Dustin Hoffman is out of jail and on probation and decides to visit some old friends to do some naughty crimes. Gary Busey and Harry Dean Stanton show up and come along for the ride. Full of spaghetti dinners, and 70s dive bars, there is not an ounce of glamor or glitter in a rather entertaining crime spree film.

Everybody Knows



Penelope Cruz. Javier Bardem. One family. One wedding. One kidnapping, in this suspense thriller set in rural Spain (Catalan?) with fine supporting cast. What starts off as a family wedding and a party and lots of drive down dirt roads past vineyards, turns into a story about a little girl's kidnapping and everyone's suspect.

[Dan Warburton]

Mario Bava, Shock, 1977

Daria Nicolodi and John Steiner are pretty wooden, but the demonically possessed kid is good, and the music, by a soon-to-be-disbanded group I've never heard of called I Libra excellent. Coming as it did after things like The Exorcist, and, as it was its director's last work, it's tended to get overlooked but it's very well made. Plenty of blood and some really fine camera work. As in the above!

[Dan Warburton]

Sacha Guitry, Le mot de Cambronne, 1937

She only says one word, yes, but - shit - it's a good one https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merde (see para 2)

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder, 1944

Wanted myself a fix of old, dependable noir and since I had never seen Double Indemnity...
James L. Cain adaptation, Raymond Chandler writing, and Billy Wilder at the helm of it, what could have gone wrong ? And it's predictably very good, especially the script with all its twists and turns. Wilder, as it is often the case, lacks some visual flair and the direction is perhaps a bit too stilted at times. The film is also a little too verbose at the beginning ( I am amazed at how much breath some bits of dialogue seem to require), even in its peculiar hard-boiled way, except for the excellent tirades by Edward G. Robinson, whose performance everyone is rightly raving about. Fred MacMurray, described everywhere as the regular American macho man, is also surprisingly good as his character becomes more and more complex. The bromance with his colleague is what tops it off. The story makes room for nuance, and Barbara Stanwyck's femme fatale has in the end a stab at sincerity too, which is satisfying.

[henriq]

Enzo Milioni - La sorella di Ursula (1978)

A softcore giallo, e tanto merda! Pure crap, but kind of entertaining. The sex is plentiful and thoroughly unconvincing, GOD-AW-FUL music - but the locations and cinematography are beautiful, and the flimsiness of the exceptionally patchy narrative is almost worth a look just to see how it can, and shouldn't, be done. Almost modernist, inadvertently: a woman undressing into full frontal nudity to the hilariously bad music, the staging of a weird pause - like they only wrote about an hour of script and were desperate to stretch it out and show as much flesh as they could. Oh well, if such floats your boat, by all means check it out. The story - two repressed sisters, one a psychic, plopping down in an awesomely decadent hotel/nightclub (I think I liked the set design more than anything!) and in the middle of a drug ring and murder mystery - generic to say the very least. A great thing about the temporary freeleech over at KG: this didn't cost me a dime, and enough seeders jumped on this to make me feel ok about chucking it as far into oblivion as I can.

[Dan Warburton]

Lovely! Looking forward to this too! Did you grab this one, Henrik?



Leslie Libman & Larry Williams, Brave New World, 1998

Really pigging out on these limited freeleeches over at KG - and here's one I'd never have thought about snatching if it hadn't been offered to me a on a plate: a tasty, cheesy, triphoppy airbrushed teevee adaptation (loose adaptation) of Huxley's novel, with American beauty boy Peter Gallagher as Bernard Marx, Leonard Nimoy (those are his real ears this time) as Mustapha Mond and Miguel Ferrer Jr. in Bob Morton-mode as DHC. For all its deviations from the plot of the original - an assassination attempt, the beefing up of the Bernard / Lenina relationship into full-blown True Romance beach ending, wtf! - it's eminently watchable and avoids the deadly dull seriousness of Radford's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Hell, if it gets some spotty hiphop kid off his ass and reading Huxley - or, dare we dream, Shakespeare? - mission accomplished, imo. Apologies for crappy screenshot.. as you can see, this is - to quote Monte Cazzazza, "very widely unknown"

[Dan Warburton]

Patrick Leung, Beyond Hypothermia, 1996

No great expert nor fan of Hong Kong action films, but there's plenty of blood and noodles flying around in this stylish little thriller. Shame about the gooey music, but I guess that's par for the course in HK. A bit like the candy floss soaking up blood in the gutter. https://brightlightsfilm.com/patrick-le ... LfgT6Tgo_4

[Dan Warburton]

Felix Feist, The Devil Thumbs A Ride, 1947

"In The Devil Thumbs a Ride, a drunk salesman, Jimmy (Ted North) gives a ride to a hitchhiker Steve (Lawrence Tierney), an escaping murderer. He also picks up two young girls, and they all hide out in a beach house as the police close in." Can anyone play tough guy better than Lawrence Tierney? In barely an hour he really gets up to some mischief. Beware spoilers in the following https://shadowsandsatin.wordpress.com/2 ... -bad-idea/

[Dan Warburton]

Louis Malle, My Dinner With André, 1981

Seems that you either love this or hate it, looking at the (unusually long) IMDb punters' reviews. Can't say I hate it, but I won't be returning to it. André Gregory and Wallace Shawn insist they aren't playing themselves, but the stories Mr Gregory tells (with a few obvious exceptions.. the 6'8" monster and UFO-friendly roof) are indeed based on his own experiences, which sound at times so bizarre that you wish Wally would tell him to shut the fuck up and enjoy his quail. Dunno, if I'm going to watch a film that consists of two people just sitting talking to each other (I have several others of that ilk waiting to be viewed, btw) I expect at least an argument. Anyway, I must be missing something, given the volume of glowing reviews this has garnered. Any fans out there care to enlighten me? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Dinner_with_Andre

[Dan Warburton]

Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, 1964

"According to Barth David Schwartz's book Pasolini Requiem (1992), the impetus for the film took place in 1962. Pasolini had accepted Pope John XXIII’s invitation for a new dialogue with non-Catholic artists, and subsequently visited the town of Assisi to attend a seminar at a Franciscan monastery there. The papal visit caused traffic jams in the town, leaving Pasolini confined to his hotel room; there, he came across a copy of the New Testament. Pasolini read all four Gospels straight through, and he claimed that adapting a film from one of them "threw in the shade all the other ideas for work I had in my head.""
Thank God for traffic jams! https://www.patheos.com/blogs/chrisicis ... t-matthew/

[Dan Warburton]

Martin Scorsese, The Last Temptation of Christ, 1988

According to Wiki, a certain "Mother Angelica, a Catholic nun and founder of Eternal Word Television Network, described Last Temptation as "the most blasphemous ridicule of the Eucharist that's ever been perpetrated in this world" and "a holocaust movie that has the power to destroy souls eternally."" Yo! That sounds like as good a reason as any to give it a try. Actually, it's been languishing on a hard drive here for five or six years, but having thrilled at the Pasolini above during an Easter Weekend Christ Film Binge (also saw Kevin Smith's Dogma again, but I've already written about that one before so will skip this time), decided it was time for Scorsese. It's pretty awful. The Kazantzakis novel it's based on sounds like it could be worth reading - there are certainly some intriguing theological side-alleys to explore (so Judas's treachery was Jesus's idea all along? nice one!) - but I suspect Scorsese and Jay Cocks dicked around with Paul Schrader's script a little too much. The principal problem is the casting: Dafoe's not too bad, but that purry furry delivery annoys, but with a cast of disciples that includes notable Mafia Mean Streets heavies like Keitel and Victor Argo (you can take Harvey outta Brooklyn, but can't take Brooklyn outta Harvey, to misquote Isaac Hayes), it does, unfortunately, come across as a kind of Transatlantic Life Of Brian pisstake. Also without a doubt the worst ever performance by Harry Dean Stanton - I was so upset, this is one of my heroes - whose Big Speech as Paul is a fucking embarrassment. Makes even David Bowie (Pontius Pilate - at least it wasn't Sting as Marty originally intended) sound good. I imagine Scorsese must have been aware of the abundance of very American (and very NY) accents when he cast an unknown English girl as the Guardian Angel. Well, you can't imagine lines like that sounding good in a Shirley Temple twang. Or maybe he only chose Juliette Caton because her name rhymes with Satan. Go figure. Anyway, the omnipresent Peter Gabriel soundtrack (Pete invites all his buddies for a WOMAD spectacular - there's Shankar, Baaba Maal, Nusrat, Youssou etc etc.. talk about jobs for the boys) ruins many a moment, and the whole thing's about 30 minutes too long. http://decentfilms.com/articles/lasttemptation