Recently Watched Films 2020

[Dan Warburton]

Shion Sono, Strange Circus, 2005

Wiki: "School principal Ozawa Gozo rapes his daughter, Mitsuko, after she sees her parents having sex. Her mother Sayuri witnesses the rape. Gozo now rapes both of them as he pleases, while his family is undermined by incest, suicide, and murder. This is the erotic novel that novelist Taeko, who uses a wheelchair, sets out to write. She is assisted by Yuji, a young man who is actually on a mission to uncover the reality of this story of Taeko's past, and of the locked room in her apartment. But the reality and truth beneath the Grand Guignol nightmares Taeko creates might be too much to bear." I daresay a few more viewings might clear up some of the doubts I have about the sequence of events, and what's "real" and what's "imagined", but I found it all rather tiresome after a while, so won't be returning to it - I really don't care a toss for any of these people. And when he whips that chainsaw out.. well, I started laughing. And, as an ex-girlfriend of mine once said (she was talking about sex, but it applies equally well to horror films too), "if one of us starts laughing, something's gone wrong"

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Brick and Mirror, Ebrahim Golestan, 1964

The film that supposedly invented Iranian arthouse cinema. Means were said to be lacking - crew was composed of only four or five guys - but it doesn't show : spectacular cinematography with a hypercontrasted black and white that gives a striking nocturnal sight of neonlit Teheran in the sixties. The movie stalls a bit in the middle-section, which has us stuck with the two or three main protagonists (baby cries are featured a-plenty) in a small studio apartment for a little more than thirty minutes. It's still masterful, though, with moments of intimacy that one feels, even if one doesn't know anything about it, are pretty rare in Iranian cinema. How's that ? It's an effect of the considerateness, the not ponderous solemnity of Golestan's directing. The documentary shots of an orphanage at the end crowns the film's singularity : deep and simple at the same time, with a pure, unadorned glance synonymous with poetry.

[Steve Minkin]

I'm enjoying the unusual steady diet (for me) of home-cooked meals with my wife while we catch up on movies, so I'm glad to have more to report here, Dan. Also enjoying the extra walks with my wife and our dogs, and the extra reading time -- currently revisiting Shakespeare's poems during the plague, and not just the sonnets.







SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK (2012) – (David O Russell)

Outstanding romantic comedy! Almost every character in the film is near the edge, on the edge, or over the edge. It's a rare movie that can deal unflinchingly with serious issues like mental illness and provide as many genuine laughs and Aha!-smiles as this one does. An unusual movie that succeeds because of some great performances.

Bradley Cooper – yes, Bradley Cooper -- plays a bi-polar substitute teacher getting out of an asylum for beating up the man he caught in the shower with his wife, wrestling with taking his meds, staying out of the loony-bin, and obsessively determined to reunite with his wife.

Jennifer Lawrence is the woman he runs into, neurotic and depressed over the death of her husband, which she responded to by screwing everybody in the office. She delivers a bravura performance, for which she won the Academy Award, sharp elbows, cutting words, achingly vulnerable, calculating, all in seconds.

Robert DeNiro is Bradley's character's father, a bookie whose whole life revolves around the Philadelphia Eagles, superstitious to the extent that he believes the actions of the people around him affect the outcomes of the Eagles games, OCD, and yet conscious of need to close the distance between himself and his son.

The finale revolves around a parlay bet involving an Eagles game and a dance contest, and descends into schlock only at the very end, by which time – after all the stress of being around all these crazy people – we're ready for it.

A great rom-com with serious underpinnings, and a great date movie.

[Steve Minkin]

HELL OR HIGH WATER (2016) – A genuine cops and robbers story, tightly focused on the personalities of the two bank robbers and the two cops chasing them. Fine movie, nominee for Best Picture Oscar, great bleak west Texas look, strong soundtrack by Nick Cave and others. And although the film contains the long silences that the flat, treeless landscape evokes, the script is peppered with many clever, laugh-out-loud lines.

A poor family is about to lose their farm, the older brother just got out of jail again, the younger brother is divorced from the mother of his children, and the brothers' mother is dying. Oil has recently been discovered on the property, so the younger brother is desperate to keep it for his boys. So he enlists his criminally out-of-control brother in his scheme to rob several local banks and buy the family farm.

Chasing them is a grizzled Jeff Bridges as a Texas Ranger a few months from retirement, and his Comanche/ Mexican Ranger sidekick.

Beautifully done, character-centric movie, great visuals and script, stays strong by staying small.

[Wombatz]

i am not. the fire within, louis malle, 1963. it's one of those movies that are supposed to be pointless, so what can you say, it's a work of art. the thing looks great, of course, beautiful textures of faces etc., but as the character has lost his early 20s spunk 10 years later, is boring and too bored to grow up a little, so the film must be the same ... him inevitably offing himself in the end means following the proper laws of tragedy, more art. no existentialist views of man alone in whatever involved, nor any closer studies of depression/alcoholism ... just the face to watch, oscillating somewhere between martin kippenberger and alain delon, it overstays its welcome (when jeanne moreau can't help but cut through the fog in her short appearance, being too much of a person, that's probably the film's only inconsistency) ... nice gesture of defeat at the end, when our character finishes his f. scott fitzgerald book before himself ... and fitzgerald is so much better on that feeling when the alcohol grows stale and the friends conventional that it makes you wonder how many pages of him you could have read instead of watching this (no worse than any of the gatsby etc movie versions, admittedly). we also saw:



damsel, david and nathan zellner, 2018. my wife being a huge wasikowska fan was totally smitten, despite this being a western. i thought it was a bit forced, but making fun of all the more modern arthouse tropes (from the piano to plenty of tarantino) is alright with me ... while i'm not enough of a film buff to catch half of that, especially spoofing the slowness of such movies provided some fun (not like italo westerns do, working comic relief into the suspense, but working absurdity into the texture of (albeit not naturally flowing) slowness). gorgeous landscapes, every shot a prospective holiday trip. robert pattinson is hard to watch. but mia sure looks good on a horse. not essential by any standard tho.

(btw, the complete family watched groundhog days around christmas (first time for me) and was thoroughly entertained. i always wondered if this or the more uncompromising star trek tng timeloop episode came first, the answer is star trek, but since the movie had a long production history, there probably was no direct influence)

[Steve Minkin]

(btw, the complete family watched groundhog days around christmas (first time for me) and was thoroughly entertained. i always wondered if this or the more uncompromising star trek tng timeloop episode came first, the answer is star trek, but since the movie had a long production history, there probably was no direct influence)

There are several old, anthologized sci-fi stories from the 1950s that use the same basic plot, and pre-date both of these.

[Dan Warburton]

Yves Boisset, Folle à tuer, 1975

Another entertaining and colourful if somewhat implausible thriller from Boisset, with Marlène Joubert on the run with the child she's supposed to be governess of (nasty little brat at first, but he turns out OK in the end) pursued by Thomas Milian as the hitman on their trail. Super cast - Michael Lonsdale, Jean Bouise (I've yet to find a film with Jean Bouise in it that isn't good) and Victor Lanoux. Gorgeous locations, remind me to go back to Nice when all this COVID-19 lockdown's over

[Steve Minkin]

THE DAWN WALL (2017) – It took them nineteen days to do it, but this is story of Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgenson completing the first free climb up the Dawn Wall of El Capitan. It took a week for Kevin to complete Pitch 15 after Tommy had done it, but Tommy waited for him to catch up.

Tommy had been a pro climber since his teenaged years. On a sponsored climbing trip to Kyrgyzstan, he and his two fellow climbers were kidnapped by rebels and held hostage for six days. At one point, when they were only guarded by a single rebel, Tommy pushed him off a cliff, and they escaped.
The thought of having killed somebody plunged him into a depression. (He later learned the rebel survived the fall.) Tommy then cut off an index finger in a power saw accident, which everybody thought would end his climbing career.

Yosemite and El Capitan in particular had been central in Tommy's life growing up and through his climbing years. He had climbed every existing trail up El Capitan and was blazing new ones. The Dawn Wall had always been considered impossible, and became his obsession.

The scenes of Tommy and Kevin climbing or camped on a tiny portaledge overhanging nothing are hard to take your eyes from. Having acrophobia, as I do, enhances the thrill of a movie like this. But I think most folks with a pulse will enjoy this tough and exhilarating sports story.

[Dan Warburton]

Ropes? Wimps! Try this one, Steve

Jimmy Chin & Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Free Solo, 2018

No problem finding a jawdropping screenshot for this one.. I just hope Alex Honnold lives long enough to enjoy his Vegas house and watch this with his wife and children one day - but as many of his rockclimbing friends fell to their death and it doesn't look like he's ready to retire in the foreseeable future we'll just have to keep fingers crossed. What's striking is how.. well, ordinary the guy is. Hats off too to Chin and his team of climber / photographers: it's an amazing document of an amazing feat

[Antoine]

About climbing, seen in lemonde.fr (sorry, in french) :

L’ivresse des sommets vous manque ? Pour proposer de l’évasion aux montagnards confinés, les alpinistes du groupe militaire de haute-montagne basé à Chamonix (Haute-Savoie) partagent gratuitement leurs vidéos de pérégrinations en altitude.

Depuis mi-mars, ils en ont ajouté vingt-sept nouvelles sur leur chaîne YouTube. Au programme : Grandes Jorasses, Eiger, Kamet… Tout y est, même le récent Changabang, les miroirs d’une répétition. Un film de cinquante-deux minutes de Jean-Pierre Tauvron, qui retrace l’ascension de ce sommet caché dans l’Himalaya indien, à l’altitude jugée modeste par les spécialistes (6 864 m) mais d’une très grande difficulté qui justifie le peu d’ascensions depuis la première, qui date de 1996.

+ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMEXoCofcW0&t=2079s
And youtube channel : GMHM

[Steve Minkin]

MILES DAVIS: BIRTH OF THE COOL (2019)

A documentary that disappointed me at first but eventually won me over. Birth of The Cool is a favorite album of mine, and I had hoped the film would be an in depth exploration of those historic recordings, going into the background with the Claude Thornhill band, the nucleus of the MJQ, etc., and there was none of that. It was apparent early on that this was going to be a quick and necessarily superficial chronological survey of Miles' music and life. Since I knew all the music and most of the biography, I figured this was going to a bore.

But what the film has going for it is a wealth of great archival photos and videos, and the chronological sequencing gives one a long-term view of the development and ageing of the subject, his wives and associates, many of whom were interviewed recently. It was almost like one of those speeded up nature shots of trees growing, landscapes changing through the seasons. By the end, the overall effect was an exhilarating summary of the music and the man, more satisfying than I would have guessed early on. The compression of that much material into so relatively short a time-frame made for a long-view of Miles that was impressive.

The interview and material covered does a nice job of balancing the admiration with what was most regrettable in the man. The ex-wives and fellow musicians who are interviewed flesh out both.

The film would make an excellent introduction to Miles. And it's a refreshing, fast-paced review for those of us for whom he has been a central musical figure in our lives.

[Steve Minkin]

MERRY MAIDS OF MADNESS (2016) – Very charming and unusual little indie film, with a cleverly done Shakespeare hook. A woman (Beatrice) skips out on her wedding (to Benedick) to get a sandwich she was craving, following which she checks herself into the Stratford Home for Rest and Rehabilitation, filled with other young women who have Shakespeare-themed names and pathologies – Juliet is lovesick for a boy who crashed her party, Tonya sees fairies, Kate is a shrew, Lady B is homicidal (and begins every day by screaming "Jimmy Stewart had no anus" forty times), Viola dresses in her dead brother's clothes, Ophelia is aquaphobic, etc. The Home is colorful and well-lit and, other than the obligatory mean head nurse and the crummy food, seems like a pleasant place to rehab.

It's a fun romp, filled with Shakespearean allusions, a creative daffiness, and a down-to-earth warmth.

[Steve Minkin]

The opera maven in our group posts this heads-up on The Met doing Shakespeare this week:
>> the Metropolitan Opera (Metopera.org) is showing a different HD broadcast online for free for about 24 hours every day, each available starting around 6 pm Eastern time. Today’s was/is Verdi’s Macbeth, in an excellent production with superstar Anna Netrebko, which will be available till about 3 pm our time Sunday. One of Verdi’s earliest Big Hits, very well directed here with a marvelously creepy chorus of suburban witches and three stellar solo scenes for Lady M., plus a powerful Banquo and Macduff. Mac himself is good but others have made more of the role.

More Shakespeare-based operas upcoming:

On Wednesday, April 8, Verdi’s Falstaff, which many consider his masterpiece. The production is stylish and often amusing, with a very good Falstaff and Quickly, an utterly enchanting Nanetta (Anne Ford, the daughter), but an amateurishly acted Alice Ford and an OK but undistinguished Ford. Musically strong, acting good but not great. Something you can still catch Thursday morning after M4M if you’re up for it.

On Friday, Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, a very tuneful treatment with an engaging cast but a somewhat prosaic (albeit lavish) production.

Personal recommendations: Macbeth is a must-see, Falstaff has good moments but not the ultimate realization, Roméo is more for the tunefully minded.<<

[Dan Warburton]

Return visit - absolutely brilliant, strongly recommended to all --

Quentin Dupieux, Réalité, 2014

I was underwhelmed by Wrong Cops but thought this one was absolutely superb - fine review here too http://www.indiewire.com/2014/09/venice ... ead-22295/ and for those who speak French (Lao Tsu Ben, wo bist du?) http://www.cinemateaser.com/2015/02/667 ... in-dupieux
So if you like movies that really mess with your head, as the title above says, combined with a distinctly weird surreal / postsomethingorother sense of humour (think Carruth's Primer or Lynch's Lost Highway crossed with something by Alex Cox and Michel Gondry), check it out!

[Lao Tsu Ben]

July Rain, Marlen Khutsiev, 1967

Impressionistic portrait of Moscow in the the sixties as an up-to-date, sophisticated European capital and its wistful young intellectuals. A semblance of plot, one of those love stories on the verge of finishing, is pushed into the background in an original manner while the viewer is provided with snapshots of the busy streets and their trolleys, scenes of a party with a dance reminiscent of Bande à part, melancholy Russian songs with the guitar as the sole accompaniment played by one character, along with American and French songs popping up in the soundtrack, a lively café, a picnic in a forest bordering a lake, a wake, etc.
It's probably a bit idealized while it tells of the end an era - Khrushchev Thaw - which suggests that the film, for transparent as it is sometimes, is more than it appears to be at first glance. The cinematography is splendid in a manner that feel casual for the time, with a predilection for sideways tracking shots and without the idiosyncrasy that distinguishes directors such as Tarkovsky or Antonioni (one is reminded of the latter in how it shows a modern love predictably hindered by miscommunication). Tenuous but interesting nonetheless.

[henriq]

Well, just to let you know that I'm still around in my semi-open home of Sweden - we watched this, natch. (Rentals on Netflix has gone up 4000% since the start of the pandemic...)



Steven Soderbergh - Contagion (2011)

Of course, in the grander scheme of cinema art, culture and life in general, a piece of shit. But in the smaller scheme of Hollywood product, quite alright. Peppered through, though, with actors I don't care much for. Matt Damon gormless as usual, Kate Winslet works fine. I don't know why I don't like Jennifer Ehle, but I don't, and I hatehatehatehatefuckingHATE Jude fucking Law, here as everywhere. And I could do without Marion Cotillard's idealist doctor walking away from it all. But Laurence Fishburne and Elliott Gould acquit themselves fine. Still, if you want a modern disaster film that really terrifies, check Spielberg's War of the Worlds instead. Actually, all the time and space I will give this. Stay healthy all, and I will return with frothier fare later.

[Steve Minkin]

THE SEARCH FOR ONE-EYE JIMMY (1994)

Rarely has so much talent been used to so little effect. This was a deservedly forgotten low-budget indie film that was later revived because so many of its players became stars. The plot is inane and awkwardly unspooled, the humor is mostly middle school boys bathroom level, and the shots of Brooklyn are unexceptional. But the movie is populated by Steve Buscemi, Samuel Jackson, Anne Meara, Sam Rockwell, Ray Boom-Boom Mancini, Jennifer Beales, Hoyt McCsllany, and John, NicK, and Aida Turturro. Not without its charms, but what a waste!

[Dan Warburton]

July Rain, Marlen Khutsiev, 1967

Impressionistic portrait of Moscow in the the sixties as an up-to-date, sophisticated European capital and its wistful young intellectuals. A semblance of plot, one of those love stories on the verge of finishing, is pushed into the background in an original manner while the viewer is provided with snapshots of the busy streets and their trolleys, scenes of a party with a dance reminiscent of Bande à part, melancholy Russian songs with the guitar as the sole accompaniment played by one character, along with American and French songs popping up in the soundtrack, a lively café, a picnic in a forest bordering a lake, a wake, etc.
It's probably a bit idealized while it tells of the end an era - Khrushchev Thaw - which suggests that the film, for transparent as it is sometimes, is more than it appears to be at first glance. The cinematography is splendid in a manner that feel casual for the time, with a predilection for sideways tracking shots and without the idiosyncrasy that distinguishes directors such as Tarkovsky or Antonioni (one is reminded of the latter in how it shows a modern love predictably hindered by miscommunication). Tenuous but interesting nonetheless.

I enjoyed this when I saw it last year -

Marlen Khutsiev, July Rain, 1967

Haven't (yet) seen Khutsiev's earlier films, but I was intrigued by this blurb over at Karagarga where this one was (is no longer, it seems) Featured: "This is the one-film Soviet New Wave. A unique blend of idealism and realism, heavily influenced by Antonioni, nothing like it was ever again achieved - or attempted - in the Soviet cinema as far as I know. The virtually plotless story of a young unmarried couple's involvement and eventual break-up is told as a series of finely-observed episodes which together form almost an encyclopedia of the time and the place. Among other things, it is a priceless portrait of a somewhat fantastic city which no longer exists. The film was made in 1966, soon after Nikita Khrushchev's downfall, when the new conservatives started to dismantle the small creative liberties won after the death of Stalin (and little used, particularly in the cinema). Although the film was not banned, it got only a token release on something like a hundred prints (drop in the sea at the time). The invitation from the Venice Film Festival was declined, and I suppose the film was little seen in the West, if at all. Even in Russia, although its reputation is now high, and it has thankfully been restored (sort of), relatively few people have actually seen it."
If the Antonioni connection isn't enough to pique your curiosity, how about Bande à Part (there's one dance sequence that is clearly an affectionate homage to Godard's legendary Madison)? Definitely worth a look. And a better quality rip too at some stage. https://bostonhassle.com/review-july-ra ... -khutsiev/

- and you've probably seen that a spanking new 720 rip of the director's earlier I am 20 is now up for grabs at the usual place..

[Dan Warburton]

Still, if you want a modern disaster film that really terrifies(...]

Er, I'll pass on that for the moment, if you don't mind, Henrik old chum

[Dan Warburton]

THE SEARCH FOR ONE-EYE JIMMY (1994)

Rarely has so much talent been used to so little effect. This was a deservedly forgotten low-budget indie film that was later revived because so many of its players became stars. The plot is inane and awkwardly unspooled, the humor is mostly middle school boys bathroom level, and the shots of Brooklyn are unexceptional. But the movie is populated by Steve Buscemi, Samuel Jackson, Anne Meara, Sam Rockwell, Ray Boom-Boom Mancini, Jennifer Beales, Hoyt McCsllany, and John, NicK, and Aida Turturro. Not without its charms, but what a waste!

Glad you got to this before I did - was tempted by the cast, but will pass.. Keep the crits coming, Steve!