hell yes. i know the words to la marseillese since they made us sing it in school (long story). so of course i was singing along with the prisoners ha ha ha ha. a touching detail is i thought the man who requests la marseillese is supposed to be english, right? i loved that.

most haunting though musically was the children's song they play with the flutes and sing later... "il était un petit navire..." fucking brilliant. and it works with that scene in the mountains. check the lyrics here- all kinds of disturbing and awesome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_était_un_petit_navire

that song is stuck in my head since last night.

one of the remarkable things outside the story for me is that jean gabin had such a strange face-- almost flat, no crevices, looks like carved in rock or something. plus it was a gigantic head. then i realized he had a strong resemblance to john wayne (not so evident in the poster). then teh woman's face is the same type as his.

i have seen la regle du jeu and i remember images from it (wide shots of a large estate and a ballroom and people outside etc) but strangely enough i can't recall a thing about the story! (i must have watched it drunk, ha ha, and i'll have to rewatch it soon).

A good friends wife was checking in to a Paris hotel when Joan Crawford walked up to the counter. According to her, Crawford is still living like the alter-ego.

We don't pay for HBO, but will try and watch the mini-series......my wife loves Kate Winslet.

I'm assuming by 'is' you mean 'was', cos she's been dead since the 70s.

Still not seen this movie. Really should get around to it.

Ummmmmmm - my bad......my friends wife ran into, Joan Collins :o

Not so good at these old movies and the stars from back when.

Watched Fire In The Sky last.night and I thoroughly enjoyed.it.. I liked how the drama of the first half of the.movie.is the tensions between the main charaters.and the town's people who dont believe their encounter story. The central.plot it the potential murder.case theyre all facing and worse being lynched. They saved all the kick ass alien freak out shit for the end.. of course the ending kinda sucked, rather melodramatic and rushed.. its like, why is Mike more disturbed than Travis and how did Travis miraculously bounce back when it looked like he was facing being institutionalized!

yes you should! it's most excellent.

anyway, recently saw:



"blackboard jungle" (1955) - originally i looked this up purely on anthropological grounds: i had been listening to broadcast a lot and figuring out the lyrics "your father was a teddy boy" i found about about some teddy boy riots (and other youth riots) which were caused by this film. turns out it's pretty awesome! yes a bit of 50s cheesiness is inevitable but overall great.



"parfait amour!" aka "a perfect love" (1996) - aka "quel dull!!" ha ha. i generally like catherine breillat's movies and her unflinching look at sex and relationships, but this one was sooo boring!!! since i was already caught in the story i had to watch it at double speed in order to finish-- still a chore. in retrospective yes, there were some interesting ideas there, but just terrible execution for my taste.

<3

We've been on a Netflix Gilmore Girls marathon. Who has time for movies?!

STILL ALICE

Filmed theater, mostly. Some chick gets early Alzheimer's.

Julianne Moore always struck me as a solid, respectable actress, but she knocks it out of the park on this one. It's something of a career defining performance, not unlike Deniro's in Raging Bull. Amazingly, she does nothing and gets everything across. I watched it twice: the second time, I mostly just watched her eyes which is where all the action takes place.

A great film marred by two things: a out-of-place bit of Hitchcockian suspense, and the presence of Kristin Stewart, who basically shows how NOT to act. It's so "hey dig me," whereas the scenes with Moore and Alec Baldwin are great because they just do their subtle thing and you sort of forget they're acting, which seems an appropriate style for a realism film like this. Kristin Stewart's desperate attempt to prove she's a real actress might totally ruin the movie for some people, which is too bad.

Hobbit:Journey

and

Hobbit: Smaug

will see the new one in theater.

Recently watched Interview With A Vampire which for some reason ive always been obsessed with.. Platoon which is one of the hands down best Vietnam flicks.. Raw Deal which I always thought was a totally underrated Arnold movie..

i try to watch a movie a day (can't always manage) but lately these have been remarkable in one way or another:

the man without a past (2002)


(the actual movie does NOT look washed out like this)

what can i say. kaurismäki rules all. i don't think there's a movie by him i don't love. his usual themes and motifs and aesthetics are here. it's never gonna be "oh, thrilling action and great effects" but damn, great fucking humans and a lovely, hand-made cinematography, plus great music.

chico & rita (2010)



the love story was pretty bleh, but the look into mid-century cuban music was amazing (even w/ the falsification of some dates making a certain bolero "appear" 11 years before it was written). holy fuck i loved the music here. and lovely voices. also a great graphic recreation of ancient times.


bad lieutenant port of call new orleans (2009)

[no picture cuz we can only post 4]

a lot less boring than the original bad lieutenant (which i never finished because zzzz). starts pretty depressing and suddenly, holy fuck, it's HILARIOUS. i thought there was something wrong with me for laughing at this shit but no, it's what herzog intended. you think you should be horrified but instead you laugh & laugh. great job. nicolas cage is the greatest live cartoon ever.

frank (2014)




ginger devil office drone rockstar wannabe meets eccentric experimental band. i ended up liking the music, particularly carla azar on drums. probably a great narrative for all sygers i'd imagine. not sure how much i would have liked it without the actual music though.

a nos amours (1983)

a crazy jumbled story that jumps through years in the life of an emotionally stunted teenager/young adult. as a "plot" movie, not much to say; as a kind of petit-bourgeois neorrealism, on the other hand, fantastic stuff. great lines of dialogue throughout and great performances.



i sort of feel like the character of... wasser name... sandrine bonnaire... is recycled decades later in "blue is the warmest color" but to a very different end... sort of, 2 paths of an unrefined sensualist (maybe it was the spaghetti that made me think of it, ha ha). the director maurice pialat, who also played the dad, was great as the dad, dispensing philosophy among the unworthy.

also caught stuff like:

guardians of teh galaxy. - ssssokay... redeemed by some humor. but overall nothing special.

looking for eric - rises from tv-episode quality by featuring a series of hallucinations featuring eric cantona. makes me regret not having known about cantona in his day. but other than than, a bit of "meh" film with nice people in it. i think it began promisingly and ended a bit too pedestrian and that was my problem with it.

ps- okay here's the picture from he greatest cartoon on film because dammit he deserves to be shown

That lizard scene is classic.

Edge of Tomorrow- fucking idiotic and I'll probably never watch it again, but I wasn't bored one second.


Looking for mid-80s to early 90s indie classics, preferably American. (Let's pretend I've already seen Clerks and Slackers.) Suggestions?

trying to think what qualifies as indie -- basically, the money (can get picked up by large distributors though) which allows creative control. free from big studios. the mid-90s brought us the explosion of sundance & the "big indies". these days, hard to tell what's what.

sodherberg: sex lies & videotape (i didn't like it that much but it has its place in history)
tarantino: reservoir dogs / pulp fiction
rodriguez: el mariachi (the original one, not the one wih banderas)
tsukamoto: tetsuo, the iron man
sayles: brother from another planet + other stuff i haven't seen
jarmusch: stranger than paradise / down by law / mystery train / night on earth / dead man
whitman: metropolitan / barcelona / last days of disco (this goes a but past mid-90s but they go together)
kaurismäki: ariel / leningrad cowboys go america / the match factory girl / la vie de boheme / drifting clouds
waters: crybaby/ serial mom
cohens: blood simple / miller's crossing / raising arizona/ barton fink
van sant: drugstore cowboys / my own private idaho / to die for / (was good will hunting "indie"? i hate that movie but it was "big")
cronenberg: the fly / dead ringers / m. butter fly / crash
haynes: superstar / safe
burton: scissorhands / ed wood
linklater (you didn't mention this): dazed & confused
smith (you didn't mention either): mallrats, chasing amy
anderson: bottle rocket
lee: school daze / do the right thing
almodovar: too many films to mention
merchant-ivory: same thing

(i gotta go but i'll keep adding later)

serious question: when is a "foreign" movie an "indie"? e.g. fassbinder, jarman, greenaway? always? [oh i just noticed the "mostly american" note-- still...] also: i'm including releases from 1983 up to 1997 (except when noted) (so no fassbinder)


ferrara: bad lieutenant (i didn't like it but it's a "classic") + some other stuff
hartley: the unvelievable truth / trust / simple men / amateur / flirt / henry fool
russell: spanking the monkey / flirting with disaster

Damn it. Aside from some of the kaurismäki, I've seen every single one of those fucking movies.

There has to be some cool Sundance-y thing I haven't seen yet.



Greenaway's probably indie, Four Weddings and a Funeral not. I'm not sure how the powers that be figure this stuff out.

I hate when someone wants me to watch an "indie movie". My definition of "indie movie" is a movie with too much talking, not enough money for interesting plot points, boring sets borrowed from a relative, and dealing with the very specific and tedious concerns of whatever was up the filmmakers ass that day he wrote the "screenplay."

Shallow Grave 1994 Danny Boyle
Swimming with Sharks 1994
Repo Man 1984

indie just means made outside the big movie studios. today, that includes a bunch of big movie studio subsidiaries (it all started when disney bought miramax in the mid 90s). even shit like "the passion of the christ" is an "indie" movie. i haven't seen that, btw, but might some day just cuz monica bellucci.

reason i asked about foreign film is because in europe there are well-established production facilities (the bbc, cinecittá, etc) but many also get serious support from their culture ministries, etc. so, are all of them "indie" or are none of them "indie"? maybe this definition does not apply outside the usa.

e.g., shallow grave, which is thematically and estehetically very much a 90s "indie" movie, was funded by publicly-owned channel four (it wasn't a lot of money in that budget, but still...)

and then-- hong kong? china? bollywood? the iranians? how do the economics of filmmaking work there? i have no idea.

as for your quest for unearthed gems-- i'll try to throw more names later. have you seen "paris is burning"? great documentary.

Never saw "Paris is Burning." We have a winner.

---

I think it's a spectrum. One side is studio financed, produced, and distributed films. The other is what Cassavettes did with Woman Under the Influence, which is pony up the cash to produce it (along with Peter Falk chipping in) and then actually book the theaters himself to distribute it. The only way to get more indie is to build the theater yourself.

I think a lot of films fall inbetween. Something that cost fifty bucks to make in someone's backyard might get picked up by Warner Bros. Studios, for example. There are a bunch of ways to combine financing, production and distribution.

I'm guessing here, but I think depending on the film or filmmaker, the "indie" part of the ratio might be emphasized in the press release. A street cred thing. Maybe another film will try to ignore the film's ignoble beginnings and emphasize the major backing that eventually arrived. A "Hey, I can be a big player too" thing.

---

Finally occurred to me to just look up a list of Sundance winners and runner-ups. Watched PARTING GLANCES (1986). Steve Buschemi plays a gay. Deals with AIDS long before PHILADELPHIA. A bit boring.



I won't necessarily disagree with this, and I'm sure this phase of mine will end soon. After all, indie films have their own cliches and all cliches get old after awhile.

It's just that when I see a low-budget, character-driven film (actually shot on film), I know some people worked really hard against some tough odds to get the thing made. The amount of effort they put into something they care about is touching, inspiring and punk. Even if I do fast-forward through most of it.

oh yeah! like hardware, the terminator, repo man, moon, pi [moon pie] (sets definitely borrowed from a relative), a scanner darkly... platoon... sin city... fucking indies!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indepen..._for_Best_Film

I've been watching a lot of various "A Christmas Carol" versions. A holiday tradition of sorts for me.

Already some great films mentioned, but here's a few I'd add to the list (if they can be found, some of these are not on DVD but can be found if one looks hard enuf online.....)


1. "Laws of Gravity" (1992) directed by the great Nick Gomez, one of my very favorite films of all time
2. "Zebrahead" (1992) directed by Anthony Drazan
3. "City of Hope" (1991) directed by John Sayles
4. "Nadja" (1994) directed by Micheal Almereyda (awesome moody B&W vampire film)
5. any Jon Jost but especially "All the Vermeers in NY" (1991) and "The Bed You Sleep In" (1993)
6. "Imaginary Crimes" (1994) another Drazan film with Harvey Keitel
7. "Clean, Shaven" (1994) directed by Lodge Kerrigan
8. "Smoke" (1995) and "Blue In the Face" (1995) by Wayne Wang
9. "Daughters of the Dust" (1991) by Julie Dash
10. any Victor Nunez but especially "Rubi In Paradise" (1993) and "A Flash of Green (1984)

The industrial definition of indie (especially American indie movies) is a distraction. most people looking for those movies are just looking for a certain type of film, in terms of feel and theme: something not overtly genre based (or if it is, a tendency to deal with it ironically, ie Tarantino: Coens, etc) and leaning towards contemporary 'realist' subject matters. It's probably better just to think of a lot of it as American youth-oriented arthouse cinema. There are obvious examples that contradict that but generally, when I think of an American Indie movie, that's what I'm thinking of. Sofia Coppola would make 'indie' movies regardless of who financed them, IMO.

the funding aspect is all about creative control

take for example "hardware" -- in the dvd issue there is extensive commentary about the liberties richard stanley was able to take because of the structure of the production and his relation with palace pictures which wa sbasically born of this undergound movie theatre where all the weirdos hanged out. with the picture done, it took forever to get dvds made because of clusterfucks in the distribution deal (much like "el topo" was for so long in distribution limbo).

see, robert rodríguez to me is the definition of an independent-- fucker shoots whatever he wants, doesn't bother to go to hollywood and shoots in his own backyard.

now if people are mixing up the terms arthouse and independent then we're losing vocabulary.

part of the problem is that arthouse films were always independent but when the big studios saw the earning potential (mid-90s) they either snapped up companies like miramax and fine line or started spinning off their own independent/arthouse subsidiaries (fox searchlight, sony classics). arthouse still looked like arthouse, and terminator got slicker.

but economics do matter-- a lot. the superstructure is determined by the base, ha ha ha. buts seriously. big studio pictures are done by committee. independents, at least in theory, are truer to a director's vision.

Please note I put "indie" in quotes. By this I refer not to films made independent olf the studio system, but to films marketed as "indie" so that people will see them. Like when food is labeled "organic"

The term "indie" used to refer to the shit movies I mentioned earlier is fairly recent and did not exist nor apply to movies like Repo Man, Terminator, Platoon, etc...


Like "indie" rock. it USED to mean bands released by small independent labels. and now it means softy, acoustic instrumentation and some pussy fuck whining about his bullshit emotions with as little ROCK in it as possible.

ha ha ha. very true.

added later: but part of the problem is that with the advent of "big indies" (e.g. tarantino) indies themselves have become a lot more mainstream in their requirements.


if you're talking about the marketing label then you're probably right, though (real) independent movies have existed since the dawn of time (e.g., united artists was founded in 1919). fucking marketers!

ps- i just found out that "gone with the wind" was an independent movie.


i still think of independent in terms of economics, but the word that gets on my last nut is "alternative"-- alternative to what, when it's all the same old recycled shit? e.g., coldplay. ha ha ha ha. fuuuck.

LAWS OF GRAVITY downloading a good clip, as is PARIS IS BURNING.

ZEBRAHEAD and ALL THE VERMEERS not so much.

Both RUBI and FLASH are on youtube.

Local library has IMAGINARY CRIMES.

Thanks. Now I couldn't be happier that it's a wet, miserable day.

^^

another movie i remember from that era was "go fish." i remember liking it a lot when in was new but on rewatch i found it kind of laughable in its didacticity. eh, if you're in the mood for lesbian theory in st mark's place circa 1994 check it out (but if you hate it you've been warned).

you've probably already seen hardware which is british and not american but otherwise fits your definition. if you haven't-- on the one hand it's a very derivative cyberpunk film (plagiarizes a lot from its predecessors) but on the other hand it manages to give its own particular kind of finger to the world.

the year punk broke! you've heard of that? ha ha

anyway here's an obscure short from new zealand from around 80s/90s which can serve as an appetizer for your features:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMD41cHN1oo

--

ETA: my favorite hangover film. so soothing. use it as palate cleanser.

http://vimeo.com/66720845

ETAA: while not american or "indie" greenaway from that era is pretty great... belly of an architect / cook thief wife etc / pillow book (some people hate pillow book but the sight of vivian wu in that film is enough for me to induce altered states). also: since you got recommended the wayne wang/paul auster films (those are more late-90s) that reminded me of an auster-based film from 1993, "the music of chance," which was pretty good-- imdb says its directed by one philip haas--who also did angels and insects (can't be the composer, can it?). also (free association) noam chomsky's "manufacturing consent" is from that era if you wanna look @ another docu.

I can't tell if you mean they aren't/weren't indie cos they very much were.

TBH you've got to hand it to Miramax and Sundance for being able to get a bigger audience for those films. Films that only 5-10 years before would've struggled were able to get the audience they very much deserved. Whilst, as with every subculture, it's been taken, ravaged and morphed to an unidentifiable beast the indie is still alive. It's just that the major studios have pretty much bought all the more reliable indie ie/smaller film companies out there and it's difficult to find the greats now.

Actually that's wrong to a point. The internet has been a great help in finding the films we would never have seen or heard of before. And if we had it would only have been in film magazines then nothing more.

The first Terminator could be considered indie

"the terminator" (that was the original title) was produced by the hemdale film corporation, an indie british studio which also produced platoon. mira:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088247/...?ref_=tt_dt_co

pacific western productions was founded by cameron's then-wife

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemdale_Film_Corporation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gale_Anne_Hurd

that movie was indie as fuck

if you look @ the imdb article you'll see international distro was done by a bunch of majors depending on country

fact is big studios ran out of original ideas a long fucking time ago and they need the fresh blood that independents bring. what has changed is the way that has been systematized and "vertically integrated" since the 90s. you go to sundance these days and it's just like being outside of the chinese theatre on hollywood blvd but at freezing temps.

[wow, just found from wikipedia hemdale also produced made in usa]

Reservoir Dogs was a 'true' indie movie but Miramax was bought out by Disney straight afterwards so if we're being pedantic everything Tarantino did after that wasn't.

Ultimately though my point was just that the indie thing now refers more to a style than to a production model. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has better indie credentials than a movie like, say, Sideways yet I reckon that when most people think about indie movies, they're more likely to think of something like Sideways. As Rob says, it's now more a marketing term for a certain kind of movie, exploiting an audience that was found by films like Sex Lies and Videotape and Clerks.

sure, but the weinsteins kept running miramax until 2005 and they had a lot of freedom to run it mostly as they saw fit. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miramax#Disney_era

i'm not saying a lot wasn't destroyed though, but i believe tarantino did pretty much whatever the fuck he wanted.


that is true in the popular vocabulary, but that language mutation doesn't make an economic reality disappear. just like the current use of "sarcasm" for "tongue in cheek" hasn't ended the art of insulting with irony.


ha ha ha-- too true.

i wonder if cassavetes is turning in his grave

You're right. The economic reality doesn't disappear but that's my point. Indie (as opposed to independent) films are rarely part of that economic reality. Independent means one thing, Indie means something else. Sometimes indie movies are independent but they don't have to be. Same with music.

He probably has no more freedom at Miramax (either pre or post Disney) than Spielberg has at Universal.

Well said. It's like the relationship between rectangles and squares (the true nature of which might surprise you) ;)

Just kidding. I mean, I agree, but I don't really talk like that. I think like that, but that's because I'm usually envisioning a really pedo-looking old man saying things like that to children with a playful little wink.

Then I laugh to myself, and the people around me get quiet, save for a few merciful coughs that sound like they're coming from really far away. And then it's back to work!

Oh, and my last film was Guardians of The Galaxy.

Late to the party as usual, and not a big enough Marvel fan to have more than a casual respect for the comics. So I mostly went in blind.

Sadly, it was Marvel's best film ever. So much better than anything else. Like Avengers only not awful, with comedy that was intentional, and villains that were unique, and not plucked directly out of another film, in which they where equally disappointing.

But the writers need to do their research. Ronan, even with that pink e-bomb thing in the little sphere, would pose virtually no threat to Thanos, a villain of near Galactus-like proportions.

No way man. If thre's two directors whp have gotten to the stage where they can pretty do what they want and the studios know they'll make their money back it's Spielberg and Tarantino.

Tarantino helped Miramax become the powerhouse it did (and the vice-versa really) with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. After that Tarantino stayed making films for Miramax even when they were struggling and releasing films with no quality control and general tosh. The one thing the Weinstein brothers, in all their meddling and chopping up films, knew was to leave Tarantino alone cos he'd make them money every time.

How many other directors would be able to release films like Inglourious Basterds and Django and walk away knowing that's pretty much his image.

Spielberg? It's Spielberg and save for a coupla films he's always made a decent profit on his films. And in terms of Hollywood he's a pretty big guy over there and knows it.