Recently Watched Films 2019

[Dan Warburton]

Tom Gries, Helter Skelter, 1976

Steve Railsback's portrayal of Manson is indeed extraordinary (he was pretty awesome in Elia Kazan's The Visitors four years earlier too) in this 1976 telefilm - the best of all the Manson dramatizations so they say, but I don't have any intention of watching them all to make a comparison - but Nancy Wolfe's Susan Atkins is equally chilling. George DiCenzo's portrayal of prosecuting magistrate Vincenzo Bugliosi was described as rather dry, but I thought it was just fine myself. You can probably guess that my reason for watching this is the imminent release over here of the latest Tarantino, so I thought I'd swot up on the facts before the credits roll.

[henriq]

Anthony Mann - Man of the west (1958)

Excellent, this. I never knew Gary Cooper was such a fine actor - haven’t really looked for that matter. Here he plays a reformed gunslinger whom a train robbery strands, together with a lady singer and a cardsharp, in the middle of nowhere. Forced to make their way by foot, they come across a cabin populated by the living ghosts of Cooper’s past. Cooper gets roped into the gang for a big score, with violent results. Great acting all around: Lee J. Cobb is sublimely hammy and quite scary as the withering patriarch of the group; Jack Lord as young cousin Coaley is great; and Royal Dano is nasty without saying anything. An acting and staging that works both literally and conceptually: the sort of muscular filmmaking where you can sort of smell the pathology and drama long before it is spelled out. Think John Sturges with Bad day at Black Rock: Spencer Tracy gets off the train in Death Valley, and just through the tension and unease surrounding him you will sense the open secret and shame tying the whole town together. In Mann’s film, the train spits out Gary Cooper, detouring into his own past. Fascinating and not just a little prescient is the way group pathology mirrors individual pathology: Cooper doesn’t immediately find his footing in the old nasty ways, indeed never quite does, but the rest of the clan act as embodiments of his hidden, forgotten, being and mentality: with the lustful violence, the sneering sexuality that forces Julie London’s Billie to strip under gunpoint (still some ways off full frontal humiliation, but what a scene!) The director moves under the same historical banner as Hawks - group dynamics, energies and pathologies explored with that man too, but Mann feels a lot more bitter and acerbic. Peckinpah is not a long way off, and indeed one wonders what he would have been without Mann’s pioneering example. Prescient, as I said: I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Nick Cave and John Hillcoat knew about this when they did The Proposition, and I can practically guarantee that Clint Eastwood knew it inside out for The Unforgiven. This even points, a little bit, to Cronenberg with A History of Violence: a hidden history and person that comes crashing back into life with devastating force. I love these avant la lettre discoveries, this late in the day.

[Dan Warburton]

What do you say, I'll watch the latest Bong and write something so you don't have to?

As you wish mon ami! I'm rather looking forward to Parasite, now that a decent set of subs has been posted. Have fun with Eugène Green - I started with La Sapienza; if you like that, go for the others.
Yes, that Anthony Mann is great - all his westerns are - haven't seen that for a while. Meanwhile, we were back in Estonia again last night - seen this? You should.



Martti Helde, Risttuules ("In the Crosswind"), 2014

The tableau vivant - getting actors to freeze and exploring the space with a camera, as if you were able to get inside a painting or photograph and move around - has featured in Pasolini's La ricotta, Godard's Passion and several films by Raoul Ruiz, but it's never been as explored as rigorously and impressively as it is here. Helde's film, telling the story of and based on letters by Estonians deported to Siberia after 1941 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonia#Second_World_War), is simply extraordinary. Brief clip in the trailer here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMA64t1Pg40 But, like the giant pig in Okja, technical wizardry for its own sake means jack shit. The story related in these extracts from real letters - and what a beautiful spoken language Estonian is - moves (in both senses of the word), and Helde's use of the tableaux vivants is its perfect cinematic counterpart. Very fine film, strongly recommended. Brief interview here https://www.muurileht.ee/en/in-the-crosswind/

[henriq]

As you wish mon ami! I'm rather looking forward to Parasite, now that a decent set of subs has been posted.

Well, seeing as you HATE Okja (capitals not out of place right?) and really didn't like Snowpiercer it seemed you might need a bit of relief, that's all.

Have fun with Eugène Green - I started with La Sapienza; if you like that, go for the others.

Will do!

Yes, that Anthony Mann is great - all his westerns are - haven't seen that for a while. Meanwhile, we were back in Estonia again last night - seen this? You should.

Yeah, Mann is two for two with me right now - have you seen Men in war? Blown away by that recently, might write it up a bit. I'll check out the Estonian thing too, if I don't already have it somewhere. The collection is bulging, let me tell you.

And re KG: quick ethics question - since we both complained about the Frankenheimer, will they pick up on that and take it down, or should I report the torrent? Bad form, grouchy, what?

[henriq]

And re KG: quick ethics question - since we both complained about the Frankenheimer, will they pick up on that and take it down, or should I report the torrent? Bad form, grouchy, what?

UPDATE: Never mind, torrent deleted, new one up for free now.

[henriq]

John Frankenheimer - The Holcroft Covenant (1985)

Well, at least it was free. Or not that bad, though it does have some of the most awful fucking music I have heard in a long time. Droll and inelegant, it works fine, once, on a a boring late summer Wednesday. The plot, adapted from a Robert Ludlum novel, concerns a trust fund set up by nazis at the end of the war, and the son of one of them, an architect played by Michael Caine, coming into control of it some forty years later. The trust is enormous, and fears are expressed that the money will be used to foment a fourth reich, by Caine or the other two trustees, all three sons of nazis. Who will be the bad guy? The script has you guessing for quite a bit. An effective thriller, everything streamlined, be it action, terror, or levity. Some of it is even set in Berlin, allowing the director some gratuitous nudity from the red light district, but a gratuity that is even felt to be necessary. Probably one of the gifts of the eighties to cinema, the linearity and economy, everything has to feel like it has to be there. Funny, I just finished watching Smiley’s People, and it is a nice to see three actors from that series in this one. And they are a delight: Bernard Hepton, Mario Adorf and Michael Lonsdale. Lonsdale does his usual walking on eggshells, acting as though the text will give him papercuts if he isn’t exceptionally careful with it, and brilliant for it of course. Mario Adorf goes the opposite way, does the jovial larger than life, impossible not to be charmed by him. Bernard Hepton does MI-5 gent quite well, and Victoria Tennant does her usual pale self. Anthony Edwards is a little too much the English gentleman, as always. Perfectly enjoyable, not sure if I’ll watch again.

[Dan Warburton]

Also on the other thread Mark created specifically for this movie



Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon A Time.. In Hollywood, 2019

I like reading the review aggegrator over at Rotten Tomatoes, especially the negative write-ups (the ones with a green splat next to 'em), if they happen to be of a film I enjoyed. Or, if it's something I didn't care for, I'm curious as to why others thrilled. I like to check out the opposing point of view, which probably explains my aversion to social media, wondering why people would willingly subscribe to a system that provides information and opinion that only reflects their point of view on everything and little else. Case in point, I'm seriously anti-Brexit but I've spent plenty of time lately reading Dominic Cummings' blog. So here are three green-splat review of QT's penultimate (if we're to believe him when he says he's going to retire after ten movies) film - and I was so relieved it didn't begin with a huge screen with The Ninth Film Of Quentin Tarantino in red Django typeface:

https://www.salon.com/2019/07/30/once-u ... ist-worst/
https://altfilmlens.wordpress.com/2019/ ... ns-review/
http://ex-press.com/2019/07/26/review-o ... hollywood/

From here on, if you haven't seen the film, don't read the following. No, please. There's no point discussing this film if you don't mention the ending, really. Just as QT rewrote history in Basterds (Hitler and his inner circle got blown away) and Django Unchained (the slaves burnt down the plantation), in Once Upon the four Manson Family hippies pick the house next to Sharon Tate's, which happens to belong to Rick, Leo DiCaprio's character, and get wiped out themselves by Leo's trusty sidekick stunt double Cliff (Brad Pitt). Then, when it's all over and Pitt gets trolleyed off to hospital to recover from a stab wound in the thigh - which didn't stop him beating one of the hippy chick's head to a bloody pulp in what must be the most vicious headbashing since Irreversible - Leo nips next door for cocktails with Sharon, Abigail, Jay and Wojciech.

I wonder what this will all mean to anyone unfamiliar with the Manson Family backstory, and with the received notion that the Tate killings, along with the Altamont festival four months later, were somehow pivotal moments in history (Hollywood history, American history, world history...), somehow as significant as the King and Kennedy assassinations that preceded them. The assumption is that Manson ordered his goons to go to 10050 Cielo Drive because Terry Melcher (whose lack of interest in Manson's music basically put an end to his dreams of pop stardom) used to live there. It just so happened that Terry had moved out and the place had since been rented to Roman Polanski and his young bride. Bad luck. So why did the Tate killings assume such epochal importance? Was it because she was an actress "on the cusp of world fame"? Or because she was eight months pregnant? Not much mention is ever made of the four other victims that night, and the two unfortunate LaBiancas the following night. Indeed, if it had been the LaBiancas on August 9th, would the story have gone viral, as we say today? I doubt it. There's a nice exchange between Manson and prosecutor Bugliosi at the end of Helter Skelter (don't know if these were the words really spoken, but I like to think so) - as Charlie is being led away to the cells, he stops to speak to the prosecutor:
"I almost did it, didn't I? I almost pulled it off, almost made it." ["it" being the apocalyptic Helter Skelter race war he dreamt of kickstarting] To which Bugliosi replies:
"No, Charlie, you weren't even close. You killed some people, that's what you did. You accomplished murder. You took a bunch of sad kids, human flotsam, and you played jailhouse games on them. That's it, Charlie. You're not even important anymore."

That's the point. I suspect the reason Quentin chose to depict Sharon as little more than a wide-eyed, starstruck Barbie doll having fun watching herself in her own movie (pretty dire, too, that scene from The Wrecking Crew) is that he probably doesn't care much for the story either. The Tate murder is just a peg to hang his circus on. But in choosing this particular event as the anchor for his story - though to be fair, the film is more "about" Pitt and DiCaprio's declining careers, and of course QT's own obsessions, from spaghetti westerns to Italian cop films to exploitation flicks to Red Apple cigarettes to feet - he runs the risk of losing (confusing? alienating?) those who don't remember or never learnt what went down that night. Which means that the movie seems to have been made more for people of Quentin's generation and older, nuts like me who, once the blood alcohol level has crossed a certain threshold, will start spouting lines from Pulp Fiction (and Monty Python, and Fawlty Towers, and Snatch...) in inebriated nostalgia. We've all grown older together - how many times while watching did I think "Christ, s/he's really aged.." watching the Tarantino veterans trot out on parade: Kurt Russell, Zoe Bell, Michael Madsen, all, like me, older, fatter, greying and wrinkled.

So, for old QT heads like me, I have to say I enjoyed myself. Typically self-indulgent, of course, certainly at least twenty minutes too long, rather suspiciously lacking in good quotable lines (my favourite being Pitt's reply when he returns young hippy Pussycat back to the Spahn Ranch), accompanied by a predictably fine soundtrack, with solid performances from the lead actors and some truly impressive cinematography. Tarantino's masterpiece, as some of journalists gush? I don't think so, myself, but I'd say it's the best thing he's done since Basterds.

[Dan Warburton]

Stanley Donen, Two For The Road, 1967

Finney and Hepburn drive south through France as their marriage disintegrates and the film cuts back and forth to the same journey made on four (maybe five?) prior occasions. Something of a virtuoso exercise, and at times it happens at such dizzying speed you might lose track of which level you're on, Inception-like. Often the quickest way to find out where you are in the timeline is to check the hairstyles and clothes (Mary Quant, Paco Rabanne and Hardy Amies had a ball). The script, by Frederic Raphael (Far From The Madding Crowd, Eyes Wide Shut...), is tight and catty - how many Hollywood romcoms end with "Bastard!" "Bitch!"? - and at times so sharp it cuts. Much to laugh at, but I wouldn't call it a comedy. As an exercise in style (I wonder what the Average Shot Length is - we're talking Peckinpah-fast here) it's quite dazzling - what happens, I suspect, when hardened Hollywood pros are shunted into a screening room and made to watch Godard and Truffaut. But any movie that shows (albeit briefly) the unfinished acqueduct in Maintenon and the royal portal of Chartres cathedral is OK with me

[Dan Warburton]

Bong Joon-ho, Parasite, 2019

So far 100% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes, so no bitchy reviews to quote, sniff. Try this one https://www.indiewire.com/2019/05/paras ... 202143634/
Well, yes, it probably deserved its Palme d'Or - hard to fault the acting, script, cinematography and set design (dig the house..). But the last twenty minutes or so and the ending don't work for me. No spoilers, but happy to discuss with anyone out there who disagrees. If anyone out there's reading this. You likee, Henrik?

[henriq]

No spoilers, but happy to discuss with anyone out there who disagrees. If anyone out there's reading this. You likee, Henrik?

Sorry, got caught up with Jane Tennison and Preminger's Laura since last time. No way to fault Prime Suspect on the acting at least - Helen Mirren, Tom Bell! - and Laura glorious. Will have a look and engage!

[Antoine]

Bong Joon-ho, Parasite, 2019

So far 100% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes, so no bitchy reviews to quote, sniff. Try this one https://www.indiewire.com/2019/05/paras ... 202143634/
Well, yes, it probably deserved its Palme d'Or - hard to fault the acting, script, cinematography and set design (dig the house..). But the last twenty minutes or so and the ending don't work for me. No spoilers, but happy to discuss with anyone out there who disagrees. If anyone out there's reading this. You likee, Henrik?

Not much into it either, but since "Memories of Murder", I'm not a big fan of his cinema (haven't seen "Mother", though... could it be good?). Even the acting is quite vaudevillesque and annoying (best role is the one who stays silent: the house, as you mentioned).

[Antoine]

APOLLO 11 (2019) – An astonishing and unique documentary consisting of unseen footage of the moon landing in 1969. After all the other docudramas and documentaries, you'd think this would be a journey down well-traveled roads. But it is a revelation from the opening moments, when you realize that none of the Hollywood re-creations or previous documentaries came close to capturing the scale of what was involved. The opening shots are of the massive tank-like treads on the platform that moves the launch pad and rocket into position. And all those people and computers we see working at their stations – the actual number dwarfed anything I'd seen before, there were thousands of people working shifts around the clock for the nine days of the mission, and most of the sound of the film consists of geek-talk from them as they go about their business. And there were 10,000 extra vehicles in the vicinity of the launch – buses, cars, RVs – and people crowding motel balconies, beaches, parking lots, to set up their telescopes and cameras. There were cameras all over the place, so we ride the elevator with the astronauts up and into their capsule on the 35th floor, see up close the last minute repair of a faulty valve, follow the food vendors working the spectators . . . Other than the documentary footage and a few stills, the only visuals are basic line drawings explaining each phase of the journey, the rocket stages, the docking and undocking, the acceleration gained by orbiting, etc. The only other voices we hear are Walter Cronkite waxing grandly about the upcoming mission, the news of Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick (which briefly knocked the mission off the top of the news during its early days), reports on the lull in fighting in Vietnam, Nixon congratulating the crew, and the conclusion of the film with JFK's speech from 1961 vowing to get to the moon within the decade.

The shots of the moon are extensive and mind-blowing. And you see Armstrong and Aldrin at work on the experiments they were assigned to do, collecting rock and soil samples, seismic testing, setting up lunar wind sensors, etc.

The docking of the Eagle (lander) and Columbia (orbiter) on the return flight is thrilling – you see the view from both vehicles, alternately and split-screen, with a backdrop of a magnificently wild lunar landscape. It will take your breath away.

I don't know what to say about the music by Matt Morton. My wife loved it and thought it added greatly to the film, and the critics who mention the music seem to agree with her. I thought the early orchestral drones were OK, but as they grew into synth-heavy techno-drones I found it annoying, unpleasant and unnecessary.

Still, an exciting and unique movie!

finally watched it yesterday, the images are superb... Interesting also is Collins' trip, alone with a huge pressure, out of sight N times.
Made me hope to be there for Mars, someday!

[walto]

So, for old QT heads like me, I have to say I enjoyed myself

Me too. Such fun!

[Wombatz]

so closing out the vacation we had another roger moore bond, octopussy, and while the plot was a bit pedestrian, the writing was much sharper (i spied george macdonald fraser on the credits), so this was jolly good fun. the kids also ordered a random bud spencer and terence hill staple, which mostly played in rio and had them as their own doppelgangers ... it was watchable. also, and just as watchable but more in a train-wreck kind of mood, without the kids, two by brian de palma:



dressed to kill (1980 ... in the first mad magazine i ever read there was a spoof on this, and i've never seen the movie, so ...) i'm quite surprised this seems to be regarded as a well done thriller in hitchcockian manner ... the best thing about it is that the hitchcock mannerisms are stripped of all sense and context and ridden hard for themselves (in total disregard to any semblance of psychological motivation) ... the museum scene is indeed kind of brilliant, with the loud steps as the only sound as our horny heroine follows around the dark stranger, but exactly because it falls apart into a formalist exercise ... also everybody acts differently, dickinson's constantly smoldering as if about to burst as vessel, caine overdoes his little pauses, the girl can't act but at least doesn't try, the geek boy is from a different movie, the cop like in a bad tv series etc. ... there's enough silly trash to make this quite entertaining (like now i understand how transsexuals function), though, which i can't say for



obsession (1976), which i watched because as a kid i had a huge crush on genevieve bujold, not least thanks to the above-mentioned alan rudolph) ... again the plot couldn't be more far fetched, in this earlier film de palma still seems uncertain whether to go for hitchcock or for sirk in his mannerisms, though, and the melodrama doesn't really fit well. thank god i watched a german dub so i was spared the surely execrable performance of bujold as an "italian." the driving force of the film is similar, as this time it's the male lead, cliff robertson, who stares all the time, but really he can't carry the film. a movie like made by a.i. at least i watched it to the end.

i stopped watching (too lazy to go to the other thread) spielberg's catch me if you can ... killed from the start by the framing devices and time leaps ... without the tension of a linear development, the film would have to be very good at portraying people to keep up interest, but it's not ... so i couldn't find a reason to watch this. even worse: her by spike jonze ... i would have thought joaquin phoenix was an interesting actor (though i'm not sure on what grounds, he also stunk in inherent vice, maybe whatever caesar he was in gladiator was good?), but here he is acting so cute as if to outcute amelie and i want to hit him for every tender inward chuckle ... didn't stick around long enough to be annoyed by scarlet johannson's (sp?) voice ...

[henriq]

even worse: her by spike jonze ... i would have thought joaquin phoenix was an interesting actor (though i'm not sure on what grounds, he also stunk in inherent vice, maybe whatever caesar he was in gladiator was good?), but here he is acting so cute as if to outcute amelie and i want to hit him for every tender inward chuckle ... didn't stick around long enough to be annoyed by scarlet johannson's (sp?) voice ...

Oh, couldn't agree more. One of the most inexplicable hypes in the history of cinema. Either he does the Method-ape bit all over the place, or the laid, laid, laidback-oh-so-cute thing. Awful, though no one is really forcing me to watch...

[Dan Warburton]

i stopped watching (too lazy to go to the other thread) spielberg's catch me if you can ... killed from the start by the framing devices and time leaps ... without the tension of a linear development, the film would have to be very good at portraying people to keep up interest, but it's not ... so i couldn't find a reason to watch this. even worse: her by spike jonze ... i would have thought joaquin phoenix was an interesting actor (though i'm not sure on what grounds, he also stunk in inherent vice, maybe whatever caesar he was in gladiator was good?), but here he is acting so cute as if to outcute amelie and i want to hit him for every tender inward chuckle ... didn't stick around long enough to be annoyed by scarlet johannson's (sp?) voice ...

Ha, you're a real glutton for punishment, Lutz

[Dan Warburton]

Abbas Kiarostami, Experience, 1973

Magnificent. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-f ... arly-films

[Dan Warburton]

Edmond T. Gréville, L'accident, 1962

Gréville's last film, based on a novel by (and adapted by) Frédéric Dard - so we're talking dark - is the tale of a young schoolteacher taking up her first post on a remote island off the coast of Britanny, where the local headmaster and his alcoholic wife are already in the throes of a marital crisis. The only other character of interest is a slightly deranged ex-Marine banging on about the Chinese, who happens to have a gun.. It wasn't a big box office success, hardly surprisingly since none of the characters is especially sympathetic, but it does deserve a decent print with subtitles. Fans of Clouzot and Chabrol will find much to enjoy. Hopefully Bertrand Tavernier's recent enthusiastic championing of the director, which has already resulted in a splendid DVD reissue of Remous, will eventually lead to something.

[Dan Warburton]

Sergio Martino, All The Colors of the Dark, 1972

Giallo heads drool from every available orifice at the mere thought of Edwige Fenech, and she is indeed very agreeable to behold.. But, unless someone invents an Oscar for Sighs and Whimpers, she's not likely to go down in history as a great actress. There's plenty for her to sigh and whimper about here - tortured by the memory of the murder of her mother, and temporarily impotent after a car crash that killed her unborn child, and eternally in fear of being pursued by a man with two very blue eyes and one very sharp knife, she's bounced between her husband, her sister (who recommends psychoanalysis, to hubby's displeasure) and a mysterious neighbour who whisks her off to.. a Black Mass! The eventual dénouement is typically Martino potty. But one doesn't watch an Edwige Fenech film for coherent plot and quality acting..

[Dan Warburton]

Olivier Assayas, Double vies, 2018

Probably Assayas' most Rohmerian film to date - i.e. dialogue-heavy - but unlike Rohmer, who frequently chose to set his films in provincial French locations, Double Vies is extremely almost aggressively Parisian (there's one scene where the dinner guests seem not to know where Laval is https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laval_(Mayenne).. unless the director just has his tongue in his cheek, hard to tell). It's a tale of a book publisher, Alain, (Guillaume Canet), his wife Selena (Juliette Binoche), a novelist (Vincent Macaigne, nice discovery for me), his girlfriend Valérie (Nora Hamzawi) and an ambitious young consultant Laure. Much of the discussion is about the future of publishing - e-books, e-readers, social media blabla - but also the ethics of writing novels whose characters and what they do is blatantly autobiographical and often embarrassing for the parties concerned. Because this is a French film haha it of course turns out that Alain has been screwing around with Laure, while Selena has been balling Léonard. So if this sounds like your cup of tea, go for it. I didn't dislike it, but I found the characters and much of the discussion dreadfully shallow and smartassed (again, very Parisian.. I teach folks like this every day). So I rather doubt I'll be returning.