Recently Watched Films 2019

[Dan Warburton]

Alain Cavalier, Libera me, 1993

Another extraordinary work from Cavalier, shot on a shoestring budget and almost entirely in close-up and lit by 60W bulbs, and completely without dialogue. All the more impressive since its subject is painful: resistance against an unnamed totalitarian state, torture, death.. Even killings take place without the slightest groan of human anguish. But we're not talking silent movie, far from it: Cavalier's mics are as close as his camera, picking up the slightest sound - a knife cutting through bread, a shirt being buttoned, even a leaf being pressed in a book. It's tempting to think the film was made as a direct comment on what was going on in ex-Yugoslavia at the time (some of the director's handpicked non-actors look somewhat Slavic, you might think), but the theme is universal. A powerful document.

[henriq]

Stanley Kubrick - Full Metal Jacket (1987)

Stanely Kubrick used to mean the world to me - and let’s not spit on that: quite possibly the one director that got me started as a cinephile. But that was then. After the pioneering examples of filmmakers like Jon Jost, Eric Rohmer, the mighty Fassbinder, Kubrick looks humourless and indulgent, the films bloated and empty. More and more that’s what fascinates me about cinema: the way the frame and technical palette of a film shrinks or expands with the money involved. The utopian militance of a Jon Jost shooting a film for no money, or money he scraped together himself, or RWF shooting a film in under a week and remaining at a brilliant constant throughout a supercharged career - anything will look flabby, indecisive and decadent next to such exemplars. But Kubrick especially - with two notable exceptions. Barry Lyndon works beautifully, the technical-aesthetic framework chiming with the subject matter in an elegant fashion. Full Metal Jacket inverts and depletes the conventions of the war film. Bill Krohn, in a fine, perceptive essay (published in Zone: Incorporations, Zone Books 1992) notes a tripartite structure of the film, with the training on Parris Island stomping out a tightly knitted terrain, narratively, psychologically, aesthetically: a terrain that then dissipates when the actual war takes centre stage in the second part, and then returns with some force in the ending scenes in the ruins of Hue city. (Interesting how Kubrick manages to shoot a Vietnam story as an urban combat film - no jungle to be seen, just a few potted palms on the Shepperton grounds). The motility and muscularity of the war film voided and scattered, only to return as in a dream faced with a teenage sniper raining death and terror on the soldiers toward the end. The power of the film resides in the scattering and fragmentation, the staid exegesis of the director’s lauded depth of field defunct and leaving the soldiers milling about in the foreground: no release or escape into other depths, but caught in the glare of a film crew shooting them for a tv doc. I love that sequence, one of the best things about the film. Funny, once again I drift back to Alan Clarke: set the Vietnam of Full Metal Jacket next to Contact: fruitful, no? I think a lot of Kubrick acolytes sort of sneered at this (though I wasn’t around then and did no research now - am I wrong here?), and instead opted for the superbloat that was Eyes Wide Shut. Not for me, this remains a favourite, the rest I can mostly do without.

[henriq]

Patrice Chéreau, Intimacy, 2001

Definitely one of the best films I've seen all year (and as I've just passed the 500 mark, yippeeyay, praise indeed). Mark Rylance and Kerry Fox, magnificent performances. I see though that not everyone liked it (the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw was obviously put off by the sex scenes, poor lamb) - but this review is about in line with my way of thinking https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/11/movi ... tango.html Again, magnificent use of sound - yes, London is noisy - and splendid editing. Nice Marianne Faithfull cameo too, as a bonus.

I'll second that sentiment, I think this ties with Martin et Léa for best movie of the year. Awesome cinematography, astounding performances, the complexity of all the stages and spaces worked through, and an emotional punch to take your breath away. Sorely missed, that man.

[Dan Warburton]

Erick Zoncka, Julia, 2008

Career best (discuss) performance from Tilda Swinton as dangerously unstable alcoholic Julia, whose reckless spur-of-the-moment decision to kidnap a millionaire's grandson leaves her on the wrong side of the law and the wrong side of the border. Was it (is it?) really that easy to drive right through the fence into Mexico? Surely not (and arguably a fault that rather detracts from the credibility of the whole affair) - but it doesn't spoil a well-written and engrossing film.

[Dan Warburton]

the pioneering examples of filmmakers like Jon Jost, Eric Rohmer, the mighty Fassbinder

An intriguing triumvirate - at the risk of fucking up your weekend altogether and requesting a lengthy essay on the subject what would you say these three have in common? Jost is, after all, to quote that great Monte Cazzazza line "very widely unknown" - I've only seen Last Chants (neglected masterpiece sure) and his little Godard documentary. Recommendations, please, amigo!

Alan Clarke: set the Vietnam of Full Metal Jacket next to Contact: fruitful, no? I think a lot of Kubrick acolytes sort of sneered at this (though I wasn’t around then and did no research now - am I wrong here?)

You mean Clarke got flak at the time from Kubrick fans? I doubt many people saw the Clarke film at all when it came out (not in the cinema, TV only, and BBC 2 at that) - the only things of his that made a splash at the time, I recall, were Made in Britain and Scum. Splash meaning angry letters to the Times from excreting ex-servicemen along the lines of the "Wreckers of Civilisation" anti-TG screed. Events in Northern Ireland were then, as now, somewhat taboo. Don't mention that border! As for Full Metal Jacket, I remember an extraordinary hype when it was released, the kind of publicity blitz only Tarantino gets these days. Never cared for it much.

the superbloat that was Eyes Wide Shut. Not for me, this remains a favourite, the rest I can mostly do without.

Agree on EWS, that's one I definitely won't be returning to. Still have a soft spot for the others, though, even if 2001 and Clockwork Orange have always been a bit overrated. The early noirs are awesome.

[henriq]

You mean Clarke got flak at the time from Kubrick fans?

Erm. no. I see now that grammar got away from me a bit: I meant that Full Metal Jacket wasn't seen as a total success by Kubrick fans. Come to think of it, I might could have based this on one single thing remembered from the Swedish press around the release of Eyes Wide Shut . And I meant to compare Kubrick with Clarke.

[henriq]

I will return with lengthier reply in a bit...

[henriq]

(researching...)

[henriq]

An intriguing triumvirate - at the risk of fucking up your weekend altogether and requesting a lengthy essay on the subject what would you say these three have in common? Jost is, after all, to quote that great Monte Cazzazza line "very widely unknown" - I've only seen Last Chants (neglected masterpiece sure) and his little Godard documentary. Recommendations, please, amigo!

(Screw my research, I wanted to find a quote from Chris Marker's AK - what a beautiful testament to the filmmakers' craft that is - re economy of means. Check for yourself, the cheeky quote about games of billiard and battle scenes)

Well, what I think they have in common is a question or theme of expediency. Fassbinder's films aren't low budget, but he got them made in something like two weeks, the studios liked him for this, gave him more money to do another - that's how he supported his own manic pace and got three or four films made every year. And, as I wrote, at a consistently high quality: of the thirty or so films of his I've seen, only one is out and out bad, and that's Niklashausen Fahrt - an embarrassing mashup of Godard and Ken Russell, stay away. For the rest, they range between interesting to outstanding: amazing how he could work with much the same crew and actors, the same kind of textured interiors and heightened melodrama, and it still doesn't feel formulaic or repetitive. Rohmer found a lean way of working - you have the box set, those watercolors aren't lying. One guy for camera, one for lighting, one for sound, the director and then the actors: shooting in Marne la Vallée, Cergy Pontoise, Buttes Chaumont, whatever cramped Paris garrets he would need (check out L'amour l'apres-midi: a very visible boom mike in one of the scenes) or which street or café was needed. I'm not saying his films were low budget or slapdash: an extraordinary amount of time went into planning, rehearsal and script, but the shooting itself feels lean and fast. Track this tendency though to friend and acolyte Barbet Schroeder with Nos virgen de los sicarios: plop down in what must be one of the most violent and dangerous cities in the world - those corpses are real - to shoot your film, recruit local actors and street talent, and all kind of shuddering and contingencies are felt within the frame. (Unlike a far off example like Herzog with Fitzcarraldo: the heroism and strife is felt exponentially more in Burden of dreams than the film itself). And Jost is a true independent: the guy who would live cheap, drive a truck or work as a mailman or anything, raise the money to buy his own equipment, fund his films in much the same way. I actually don’t know that this is the way he works, but watch a film like Angel City, and know that the budget was $5000, and that most of it probably went towards renting the airplane and pilot for the aerial shots of Los Angeles. The rest you solve with videography, in the computer; shoot in front of murals; shoot from your own car; write and record your own narration. For my other recommendation, that would be The Bed You Sleep In, I wrote about that here a few months ago. These are the only two Josts I’ve seen, awesome both.

So, the question for a Kubrick from this disparate array of films and filmmakers: how dare you shoot Scatman Crothers walking through the hotel kitchen in the Overlook eighty-five times?! What is gained that wasn’t there on the third, fourth, tenth take? Or Eyes Wide Shut: in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest continuous film shoot (400 days!), people scrambled for ways to get fired. Tom Cruise walking into a room to pay his respects to a dead patient, then sitting down with his daughter - that probably took weeks to shoot, a simple A-B-C that Fassbinder and DP Michael Ballhaus could get done in a couple of hours. At least with something like Bertolucci’s Il conformista, where there isn’t a leaf blowing that hasn’t received direction (as a friend succinctly put it), you could understand it, about a hundred different layers that had to click for every scene - then eighty-five would feel justified, but not so for Kubrick.
Or: realising that for Apocalypse Now, they had to napalm the same amount of jungle in the Philippines two times because the camera wasn't working the first time. Great film, but decadent much?
Or: did you know that for Midnight Run they had to go to fucking New Zealand to shoot the one scene where Charles Grodin saves Robert DeNiro from the raging water, because apparently the water in Arizona was too cold? Carbon was definitely not a thing in the eighties...
(Feel like I’m getting off on a rant here, I should stop)

[Wombatz]

schnabel's van gogh film, at eternity's gate. very well done in a way, goes by more quickly than the usual violent dialog about genius, madness, and lack of success, the viewer often following the artist walking around the landscape (though that's heavily dramatized; i suspect vincent would have known some kind of work routine and not swooned over the picturesqueness of nature every minute of the hour), sometimes taking the artist's place (you can tell from the vaseline on the lower half of the lens). of course i have opinions on lots of details (the gauguin actor was hollow, mads mikkelsen fun, theo had too visibly dyed hair), especially the historical details ... but since schnabel has said it's not really a film about van gogh the question is: how much is there in his painter's view on painting? it doesn't help that the film is not about van gogh, as it lacks specificity: movie vincent's brush always hectically gestures over the canvas while in van gogh's real paintings the brushstroke is ornamental (not this cliché of always searching pokearound). the biggest problem for me was that for schnabel/van gogh painting is perception put directly onto the canvas, a bit strange because that's not what schnabel himself does ... in the film gauguin argues painting what the mind's eye sees, but that's still copying an image rather than work on your own style, means, and effects like real painters do ... except for more direct expression vincent wants visible brushstrokes, rapid and full of energy, which sound more like de kooning than van gogh ... so in the end that's as hackneyed as anything kirk douglas might have embodied (must rewatch) and i didn't get much out of this film.

(also seen cronenberg's videodrome, which is incredibly bad in its (pretend?) wide-eyed naivite about the shocking new video medium (plus james woods fails at carrying a movie (though i like him as a baddie now and then)). i got more pleasure out of some italian bud spencer and terence hill vehicles the boys wanted to watch ... they all seem to begin very awkward, the violence a bit too serious, the jokes too flat, then slowly everything goes over the top (plus lots of nice location shooting in the most interestingly dated non-places (for budget reasons, i presume) to keep me reasonably entertained.)

[henriq]

Arthur Hiller - Silver Streak (1976)

One for the bin! Not a good one, even if it is set on a train. Though, what do I expect, directed by Arthur 'Love Story' Hiller and scripted by Colin '9 to 5' Higgins? Does it get more MOR hackwork than that? Unbelievably awful, really. Granted, on paper the train is a nice setting for a thriller, the different cars and compartments, no place to hide and so on, and in this Gene Wilder even falls off a couple of times and clambers back on, which makes for a droll rhythm of sorts. But of course, this isn't a thriller, or rather tries to go for all the demographics at once: a bit of thriller, with the ridiculous fucking premise of McGoohan as an international supercriminal art impressario (no really - if you haven't seen this, count yourself lucky and take my word for it), mawkish love story (Jill Clayburgh is gorgeous though), road movie, buddy comedy, action movie, even disaster flick with the runaway train at the end, distasteful - even for the period - blackface slapstick, you name it. Were audiences back then really that dumb, that this would sell? The young turks of New Hollywood must have been rolling on the floor laughing at the pitiful, self-satisfied crap that Old Hollywood put out at the same time. So, if you want trains, go for The Lady Vanishes or Buster Keaton, if you want heist, trains, and English baddie, go for The Taking of Pelham 123, if you want Pryor/Wilder, go for Stir Crazy (at least it gets there in 90 minutes, and showcases a lot more of Pryor's comedy than Wilder's) - but this? Pee on from height. An embarrassment.

[Mo Noyz]

El Camino - 2019

Eh...

I suppose it was somewhat fun to revisit long lost characters from one of the better series in tv history, especially for those of us who’ve yet to invest their time in Better Call Saul. Unfortunately, it turned out to be more of a revolving door of “yeah, remember this one” nostalgia cameos that really had no chance of becoming anything approaching a coherent storyline. More like a warped version of a Jerry Lewis Telethon. If they’d simply stuck with a storyline revolving around Skinny Pete, Badger, and Jesse I think there would have been a good movie there.

Either way, the acting was great, the story was nearly nonexistent, and I really wish Gilligan had reconsidered the whole goddamn affair.

Kind of worth it, but kind of not. If you loved Breaking Bad and choose not to watch this, don’t worry, you aren’t really missing anything.

[jon abbey]

I've said it since the show was still going on, before any spinoffs were actual ideas, that the one they needed to do, more than Saul, more than Jesse, was one on the Salamanca family, set before BB. now that would have been amazing and still probably could be.

agreed that El Camino was quite unnecessary, although the Dr. Hook song/singalong/context almost made the whole thing worthwhile on its own.

[walto]

Arthur Hiller - Silver Streak (1976)

One for the bin! Not a good one, even if it is set on a train. Though, what do I expect, directed by Arthur 'Love Story' Hiller and scripted by Colin '9 to 5' Higgins? Does it get more MOR hackwork than that? Unbelievably awful, really. Granted, on paper the train is a nice setting for a thriller, the different cars and compartments, no place to hide and so on, and in this Gene Wilder even falls off a couple of times and clambers back on, which makes for a droll rhythm of sorts. But of course, this isn't a thriller, or rather tries to go for all the demographics at once: a bit of thriller, with the ridiculous fucking premise of McGoohan as an international supercriminal art impressario (no really - if you haven't seen this, count yourself lucky and take my word for it), mawkish love story (Jill Clayburgh is gorgeous though), road movie, buddy comedy, action movie, even disaster flick with the runaway train at the end, distasteful - even for the period - blackface slapstick, you name it. Were audiences back then really that dumb, that this would sell? The young turks of New Hollywood must have been rolling on the floor laughing at the pitiful, self-satisfied crap that Old Hollywood put out at the same time. So, if you want trains, go for The Lady Vanishes or Buster Keaton, if you want heist, trains, and English baddie, go for The Taking of Pelham 123, if you want Pryor/Wilder, go for Stir Crazy (at least it gets there in 90 minutes, and showcases a lot more of Pryor's comedy than Wilder's) - but this? Pee on from height. An embarrassment.

I can't remember. Is this one of the five or six consecutive movies in which some director makes Clayburgh dance around in her underwear?

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Rather inadvertently, I watched two films in a short period of time that were in the same tradition of slapstick comedy, derived from Chaplin and also, since we're in France, Tati. Swiss clockmaker films, one could dub them, but also definitely french.
So first we have



Les Favoris de la lune, Otar Iosseliani, 1984

It was his first film in France since his departure from Georgia and it's kind of marvelous how Iosseliani already got a sense of frenchiness and parisianness together. We follow the more or less obscure actions of several protagonists from different classes whose stories are peripherally interconnected. There is almost no dialogue or they are barely audible, merged into a soundtrack that is assembled with a care, a meticulosity that is rare, where little ditties or folkloric tunes either heard in the distance or given the spotlight play an important role. Iosseliani's ambition seem to offer a cross section drawing of Paris at the beginning of the eighties. In a way, this film foreshadows the cinema of Wes Anderson but one can sense what has been lost in between, to the extent that Anderson, in spite of his eagerness to do well is stuck in some kind of infancy stage. Here there is some living matter that is kind of bubbling behind Iosseliani's exquisite stylization.




Le Grand Amour, Pierre Etaix, 1969

Pierre Etaix is also described as an heir of Tati. The film is set in Tours - there is also a special sense of place but this time it is French province that takes centre stage - and is supposed to revisit the rather passé but always enjoyable tradition of the théâtre de boulevard as it was perfected by Feydeau but in a slapstick way. What strikes right away when you launch the film in a unprepared way is how swarming with visual ideas it is. Isn't it what cinema is mostly about ? Cowritten by Jean-Claude Carrière, definitely one of our best movie writers, it is patently inspired by cartoons and comics and you see the same meticulosity at play as in the above-mentioned film : for instance, the interiors and their paraphernalia seems to have been accumulated after a lot of years by the bourgeois couple that you see in the film, not in the few months preceding the movie. Check it out, especially for its dream sequence where the bed of the main protagonist turns into some sort of car that drives him along the Indres-et-Loire countryside, coming across all sort of dreamers (?) wearing their pajamas.

[Dan Warburton]

Know and love the Etaix, and will definitely check out the other one! Thanks Ben, always nice to read your posts. Meanwhile, if you're peckish -



Nanni Moretti, Bianca, 1984

The giant Nutella jar is indeed funny, but much of Moretti's humour, like that of Marco Ferreri, is so leftfield it's pretty disturbing. An acquired taste, perhaps - but a genuine original. Slowly and surely working my way through the filmography, more to follow. Won't say much more about this one for fear of spoiling it

[Dan Warburton]

Leni Riefenstahl, Olympia, 1936

I don't know why this one seems to get mentioned so often in the same breath as Triumph of the Will, because it's nowhere near as impressive, either for what it shows or the way it goes about showing it. I suppose it's tempting to read some sort of white supremacy thing into the footage of chaps running around in the altogether and jumping into a pond and whatnot, but the most part this is just a collection of highlights, albeit very well filmed, from the 1936 Olympics, and there are as many black folks (oops, should we now say "people of colour"?) as Aryans. Could easily be half as long. Have to admit, I don't find sport all that interesting to start with, though

[Dan Warburton]

Werner Herzog & André Singer, Meeting Gorbachev, 2018

To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I can do no better than recommend this excellent documentary. Maybe some of Herzog's typical eccentricities annoy, like recalling the fact that the Austrian nightly news led with a story on garden slugs on the day the Iron Curtain was breached between that country and Hungary, but the overriding good sense and humanity of the filmmaker and his illustrious subject is sincere and compelling. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/revie ... ew-1140265

[Dan Warburton]

Jonas Mekas, As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Glimpses of Beauty, 2000

The simple pleasure of being with good friends, sharing food and wine in a summer picnic in Central Park.. There's something at one and the same time universal and yet intensely personal about Mekas's five-hour long megamix of home movie footage, interspersed with snippets of classical music (Parsifal pops up a few times), lo-fi piano and accordion noodling and Mekas's own at time touching commentaries. "I don't make films, I just film." Fair enough - but I guess there was some sort of method to his splicing it all together. Then again, maybe not. The result is one of those wonderful sprawling American epics, like Cage's diary, Williams' Paterson and Henry Darger's Vivian Girls. Or the mighty Walden.

[Dan Warburton]

William Richert, Winter Kills, 1973

Despite a stellar cast - John Huston, Sterling Hayden, Eli Wallach, Anthony Perkins, Dorothy Malone and even Toshiro Mifune (and not forgetting Jeff Bridges as the unwilling hero) - this rather silly revamping of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy plot doesn't really convince. If you've seen Chinatown, you know from the outset who the big baddy is (remember Noah Cross). Yawn. https://unobtainium13.com/2013/11/20/44 ... m-richert/