I've seen parts of it. Actually considered playing the whole thing in the background during one of my gigs. So I started looking into it, but stopped for some reason. I can't recall why, actually. Gotta watch it again, this time in its entirety.

Recent ones:

It Follows: Beautifully eerie atmosphere, stellar score. I was a tiny bit disappointed by the change of approach towards the nature of the creature midway through. For all its freshness it seems like some currently popular horror movie tropes were still fair game. Bit of a shame, but maybe I was expecting too much. Apart from that, it's a gorgeous movie that more than succeeds in creating its own distinct world.

The Babadook: Another recent horror movie that has been getting a lot of praise. Partly I can see why. I thought that some of the scenes did indeed invoke a strong feeling of uneasiness. The depiction of one of the characters's slow decent into madness was masterfully done. It was also quite tense at certain points without resorting to cheap jump scares. There are some things that stuck out like a sore thumb though. The child-character was insufferable at the beginning. During the first half of the movie, he was an extremely unlikeable character. Later on, some possible explanations for his behavior emerge, but by that point the damage had been done. Some of the things that were supposed to be scary were also very hit-or-miss. I even found myself chuckling at things that were meant to be eerie. The psychological horror angle was great, but some things kept me from fully buying it. Overall I'd say I recommend it though.

The Night Of The Hunter: Yes, it was actually the first time I've watched it. And to be honest, I'm kind of shocked I wasn't able to enjoy it as much as I'd hoped to. It's one of the most universally acclaimed films of all time, yet it didn't fully wow me. I can't really point my finger on it though. Was it the constant change of tone? Did I think Robert Mitchum's performance was too over the top? Was it the fact that the gullibility of some of the characters was so off-putting to me that I wasn't fully able to suspend my disbelief? Or maybe it was the cheesy ending? I did love the dreamlike quality of the visuals though.

I've never once made it all the way through MARIENBAD, and I've tried quite a few times. Either sleep or something more interesting interrupted me. Usually sleep. I started to watch in ten minutes chunks. Then five. Then said fuck it. What's weird is I like just about everything else he did. MURIEL is underrated and I thought the recent YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHING YET was good.

*thumbs up*

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: Finally got to watch it in its entirety. I remember only seeing the ending a few years ago. I thought it was pretty longwinded. Sure there were some nice touches, but overall it didn't really do much for me. But maybe a lot of this is due to the terrible German dub. I usually avoid dubs, but it just so happened to be on tv and there was no other option.

Being There: Peter Sellers is amazing in this. And there's something about combining calm, almost meditative cinematography with biting satire.

The Panic In Needle Park: Needed my summerly fix of gritty 1970s-1980s New York-based movies. A young Pacino showing his early acting potential. It started out with deeply flawed but likeable protagonists and spiralled into something way more sinister. It did stretch a bit at certain points but a fine movie overall.

The Conversation: This has got to be one of my all-time favorite suspense-based movies. Hackman is great and the sound-editing plus forboding visuals make for a haunting viewing experience. Coppola had quite a run in the 70s.

haven't watched it yet, but there's a new-ish (2oi4) Roy Andersson one out

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1883180/?ref_=nm_knf_t3

can't wait, as I can't think of anyone who more correctly sees modern man in all his ridiculousness and subtleties. You should watch the trailer for it! "A shrimp sandwich and a draught beer for free"

SLEEP DEALER (alex rivera, 2008) - great little fucking cyberpunk-ish movie. clearly derivative but also original-- a good straighforward script that makes great/funny critiques of border economies. acting and directing and production values may be a bit bantamweight but hey, the movie delivers for my taste. i thought the writer/director was mexican but turns out he's from nueva york. so he's rudy after all! good yob. watchit, ése.


that was the american remake of antonioni's "blow-up", wasn't it? i haven't seen it. seen blow-up maybe 3 times? gets better each time. blow-up is actually an adaptation of julio cortázar's "las babas del diablo," which is a really good & strange short story you should probably read if either a) you read spanish or b) can get a good translation. not sure what languages you read but seeing as how he ended up living in france maybe the french translations are good/personally supervised. maybe. but anyway. cortázar. impressed me a lot when i was a lil' kid.

It's not really a remake of Blow-Up, but Coppola said he was influenced by it and both are dealing with similar issues. It was a key-influence on some of the themes, but the approach of each respective film is quite different. Both gravitate towards secretly uncovering something by means of technology. But The Conversation is a lot more focused on the dangers of the technology in question. It's a movie about wire-tapping after all. And Gene Hackman's protagonist couldn't be more different from David Hemmings's Thomas. He's a careful, increasingly paranoid religious man who is starting to question the implications of his profession. The Conversation is a slow-moving, but incredibly tense and atmospheric film. The visuals are gritty and beautifully arranged. Combined with the sound of the recordings, there's always the notion of an ominous presence in the background. I think you might like it.

I've been meaning to ask, are you a big Bergman fan? You seem to have patience for the slow stuff. I don't, but I make an exception for a man I consider on par with any other truly great artist of the 20th century, like Stravinsky or Picasso.

i see. i might check it out... thanks!

if you haven't yet, then see "the lives of others" about a stasi wiretapper (it's a german movie). eh, you've probably seen it already.

I like Antonioni but I've never been able to get into Blow Up. Compared with his earlier films it's dated quite badly. Certainly some scenes just make me cringe. I suppose you could say that about the swinging 60s generally but it does increasingly feel more to me like a symptom of that time rather than any real analysis of it.

antonioni always specialized in portraying empty worlds

I loved every one of his films I've seen so far. Love me some Bergman. I do have patience for slow-paced stuff that doesn't necessarily feel slow. There are plenty of movies that aren't the most eventful in terms of plot points or busy imagery/action, but keep you intrigued through their atmosphere and little touches here and there. Technically speaking, The Conversation actually did have a slower pace than most other Thrillers, but never did it feel slow to me. It's just a perfect mix of tension and character development that made it a great experience. I did find the pacing of films like Stranger Than Paradise or, as mentioned before, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance off-putting though. But I do have to admit that the first one does have its own charm nonetheless. I guess whether a film is just slow-paced or actually feels slow is a very subjective thing.

Yes, loved it!

Yeah, but when I watch Blow Up I come away thinking it's a bit of an empty film, which I never do with L'Avventura, or L'Eclisse or any of his Italian films up till then. Blow Up for me seems to suffer from the same problem as Zabriskie Point in that I'm not convinced Antonioni ever really got the culture(s) he was commenting on, so wasn't able to say anything particularly interesting about it/them.

Another big problem with both films I think is that I'm not sure the cast understood him at all. He benefitted enormously from having Monica Vitti in those earlier Italian films. She seemed to instinctively get what he was doing and it could be argued that his films always suffered when she wasn't around. Certainly Hemmings (a competent actor at best) seems totally out of his depth and even Vanessa Redgrave has admitted she felt inhibited by Antonioni's reputation and unsure what he expected from her.

I saw Blow Up when I was a teenager and it seemed absurdly out of date to me, that could have been due to my age at the time but my gut feeling says not. I've had L'Avventura on my shelf for a while, maybe I'll watch it soon.
I'm going to watch Journey to Italy tomorrow, which I'm quite excited about.

his actors were not vitti? sure. the culture gap? maybe. empty film? doesn't feel like that to me at all. if anything i've grown more fond of it once i got past the titillation of the first viewing. the movie is not about the apparent (and now-dated) "cool." it's (for me anyway) about the emptiness behind it.

here 2 different reviews: one from 1966, another from 1998 (this last one by ebert).

the one from '66 calls the performances "excellent," and ends like this:

How a picture as meaningful as this one could be blackballed is hard to understand. Perhaps it is because it is too candid, too uncomfortably disturbing, about the dehumanizing potential of photography.

ebert makes some awesome points too, such as this one which maybe addresses toilet's teenage impressions:

Young audiences aren't interested any more in a movie about a "trendy" London photographer who may or may not have witnessed a murder, who lives a life of cynicism and ennui, and who ends up in a park at dawn, watching college kids play tennis with an imaginary ball. The twentysomethings who bought tickets for "Blow-Up" are now focused on ironic, self-referential slasher movies. Americans flew to "swinging London" in the 1960s; today's Londoners pile onto the charter jets to Orlando.

anyway, i am a little tired to compose a full argument and it's been a while since i last watched so i don't have everything at my fingertips it but i leave you with these links which are much more articulate than i could be right now (or maybe ever):

http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?...B467838D679EDE

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/gr...e-blow-up-1966

ebert gave it a 4/4. i would too if i used those numbers.

I get its point I just never thought it was a particularly interesting one. By 66, the 'emptiness' argument had already become something of a pop cultural staple (the Stones Satisfaction, Richard Hamilton's collages, etc) and I'm not sure Antonioni adds much to it. As for the film itself, we can agree to disagree about the acting. Some obviously think Hemmings did a good job while I'm not convinced, but that's a subjective point on both sides. For me Blow Up ultimately remains a movie in Antonioni's second or even third tier (not a massive criticism given how much I like a lot of his other films) but an interesting curiosity in terms of 60s film overall - although, as an analysis of the era/scene, I put it below Nic Roeg's Performance or even Richard Lester's The Knack.

Anyway, had a bit of a teen nostalgia-fest this past few days, watching films I loved when I was growing up.

The Warriors; The Wanderers; Mad Max II; Death With; Dawn of the Dead.

Loved them then, still love them now.

la dolce vita really wrote the book on that subject

=====

last night, or maybe it was the night before, saw fassbinder's "LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH". from 1969. his earliest film i could get on DVD.



i totally see the pre/post "sirk" (supposedly) transition. this film is dedicated to claude chabrol and eric rohmer and two other people whose names i didn't recognize/can't remember now, but more than rohmer it looks to me a strongly godard-influence movie with maybe a whiff of melville's gangster iconography.

cheaply made but not bad considering the times. some takes are just too fucking long but that i suppose goes with the movie. merchant of four seasons was made the following year and it's a huge leap in style-- not just the obvious use of color but the injection of overwrought emotion as well as the social critique that would characterize him later.

--

ps i think i realy like hanna schygulla in his films

It Follows
Wyrmwood
Crawl Or Die
The Battery

All Propa gud! buh

right, that's there too, and that is (maybe?) in the original cortázar story, which happens in paris to an amateur photographer-- not to a "cool" guy or in any kind of "scene".

but antonioni was famous for his portrayals of emptiness, which he definitely adds here. one theme, multiple variations.

one thing i just remembered is that the paris guy works as a translator. which very much speaks to what you said.

that is also in the antonioni movie-- the college kids "playing" tennis. regardless of whether or not that is an oxbridge tradition-- where is the ball? and funniest yet-- why do you hear it?

maybe hearing a tennis ball that wasn't there is what inspired coppola, though from antagon's description that was more of a non-subtle movie.

Saw It Follows last weekend, I think it might be the best new horror film I've seen in 10 years.

Watch Journey to Italy today, I liked it but don't feel inclined to say much more than that.

I also watched this film yesterday, it's surprisingly decent for the sort of thing it is, small-time crime caper with heart that works well with limited means, a very solid 7/10:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2724236/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

LOVED it!

Reminds me so much of Carpenters classic work. Atmosphere, cinematography, constant sense of dread trademark and even the soundtrack. Needless to say I had a 90 minute boner for the duration.

Off to watch Shutter Island and some Japanese horror called lesson of evil. Frightfest - film 4 peeps.

This movie is possibly the funniest movie of the year.

Oh there's a lot the two movies have in common... Especially in the different or changing experiences of "reality" and time. In inception, the further "in" they go, the closer they come to being trapped in a DMT-coma, a life experiences in minutes but feeling like decades ... In Interstellar, the farther "out" they go the closer they get to stopping time or even transcending it. it's the effect of relativity on time making the experience of reality different for everyone involved. It's a beautiful line of inquiry for a film maker to focus on. And it makes for some truly incredible drama.

It Follows was great yeah.

Recommend Starry Eyes as well.

INHERENT VICE (PTA, 2014)
- mostly it was very funny, with a twinge of paranoia and some minor brutality. i hand't realized where the movie was sourced, so i thought i was a great movie detective when i thought to myself "this reminds me of the crying of lot 49", which pony had just been reading, and i thought i'd bring it up in the book thread, and at the end i spot that it was based on a book by thomas pynchon ha ha ha. but i liked this movie better than i like pynchon (sorry fans). in any case beautifully shot. great cast and all. good paranoid plot. enjoyable all the way, except for a cringeworthy spanking scene and maybe the very end which i was like-- eh! it's not a better movie than there will be blood but i enjoyed it more than the master and i forget what else. watch it in a good screen.

This was surprisingly a really good 90s style thriller.. however the ending was just so absurd to almost ruin it all.

Opposite response here. I'm familiar with the book, and I was really looking forward to this, although I (like many) did kind of wonder how the hell a film adaptation of this thing was going to turnout. It's about as adaptable as Catcher in the Rye or Finnegan's Wake. But I saw the previews and liked what I saw, and I think PTA is one of the best directors out there.

But I thought it dragged and stuttered and was an overall disappointment. I think Jaquin Phoenix did a mostly great job as doc: his walk, his presence etc. but something about his delivery was offbeat in a literal way. Like, out of synch somehow. It got aggravating. Joanna Newsom was the best part. Brolin was ok, but there were some missed would-be great moments for his Bigfoot.

All in all, it probably shouldn't have been made. I did not dig.

Even when the filmmakers make it easy for Jolie, she still has a hard time actually acting out any emotional reaction other than slight amusement and slight annoyance.

This was not at all what I was expecting, but I think it may have been brilliant.
Ok, so the first ⅓ was exactly what I was expecting from a crime noir starring Ryan Gosling about a motorcyclist who robs banks to provide for his son, with music by Mike Patton and choice cuts by Suicide and others. It was Drive reminiscent. It was heartbreaking. It was brutally intense and sad and Gosling once again acted the shit out of the place.

But the rest of the film took unexpected turns to say the least. Like something written for a '30s pulp fiction short story collection, lives intertwine and stories overlap and everything unravels in all directions, with brief moments of salvation/redemption that, upon further reflection, become just unfinished tales of more unraveling.

Full of excellent performances (even by Eva Mendes), this film has a great deal of heart. It's so ambitious that I can't believe it all worked out so well. But despite how good it was, I longed for that first ⅓ to resolve and right itself, and get deeper and darker and grittier. If you're anything like me, you'll walk away with Gosling's performance and the devastating first third buried in your psyche.

Recommended. But don't expect another Drive.

yeah, whenever someone tries to make a movie about a book i love it's a massive disappointment. or almost-- i know there are exceptions but i can't recall what they are at the moment.

but since i don't really love pynchon, i saw this purely as a film-- and as such, it works really well. i do not worship in the cult of PTA, so i have no positive bias towards him, but i agree with most critics this is a very good movie--81% favorable on metacritic is no small feat, even in the face of marketing machineries. i don't mean to make an appeal to authority as a valid argument, but it has to count for something as in "i don't think i'm totally off the mark here."

though i get your personal view as well-- you already had pictures in your mind the movie had to live up to, and books are made of words, no movie can live up to that to that challenge.

i thought joaquín is pretty great, don't know what out of sync means. as for moments brolin missed, i suppose you mean abridgements in the plot-- but those are indispensable in film adaptations.

serial formats like TV are best to bring novels to the screen, whereas feature films are closer in structure to the short story or at most the novella. that is the one fundamental problem of book adaptations to feature films-- extreme time compression requires major butchery.

Yeah she played this role like it was a character in Fight Club..

Raging Bull

Probably a good film to watch if you kind of remember DeNiro as a pretty good actor but have forgotten just how good, after watching him more recently.

Oh God yeah... Also one of the single most depressing films ever made. I tend to think of Taxi Driver and Godfather II as DeNiro's defining moments, but Raging Bull never fails.

As for recent DeNiro (more than just "recent" ... more like post-Casino DeNiro) it's true that his work has gone to shit. I'm trying to think of his last great role, and all I have is Jackie Brown. I honestly think Meet The Parents might have been his signature cinematic moment of the 2000's. Yeesh.

Almost two decades of DeNiro:

1997--Jackie Brown, Wag the Dog, Cop Land (!!!Three very good movies, I'd say)

1998- Ronin, Great Expectations (respectable quality)

Then what happened?

99/00 - Analyze This, Flawless, The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle, Men of Honor, Meet the Parents (a mix of having fun and bad scripts)

01 - 15 Minutes, The Score (more bad scripts, this time masculine genre stuff)

And that's been his career since. Having fun and lame cop/crime films. With maybe Silver Linings an exception.

Seriously, what happened? Does he just suck at picking scripts? I don't think he's ever bad (sometimes coasting, but not "bad" exactly) but most of the movies he picks seem like such a waste of time to make.

Yeah, I'd love to get the inside scoop on what happened with him. I read somewhere that he got involved in some property investment thing that resulted in him having to go for the jobs that paid rather than took his interest. But who knows if that's true.

I forgot Wag The Dog. Brilliant! Great Expectaions was his last really dating role choice, I think, as that movie could have been extremely pitiful, and the part is a small but very important one.

His early '90s films were brilliant too. Awakenings, Goodfellas, Cape Fear.. He really crushed it back then, and was as much a living legend as Nicholson or Pacino. But yeah, aside from Silver Linings Playbook, which was still a pretty comfortable role for him, but one that he knocked out of the park even so, he's just been having a nonsense career since 2000.

A few thoughts:

• he hasn't been working with Scorcese, and he hasn't been able to establish the same sort of "home plate" relationship with any of Scorcese's modern counterparts.

• Scorcese has a new DeNiro figure in Leonardo DiCaprio, and he's turned him into a damn fine actor along the way.

• All the big character roles that might have gone to DeNiro, had he been of age, went almost directly to Russel Crowe (for a while) and Daniel Day Lewis, and such like, as soon as he 00's hit.

• remember how he had sort of a Christian Bale-like "difficult to work with" thing going on back in the day? That couldn't have helped.

Shit though, I miss him! He was my favorite actor for years. I know he's still got the chops, but Christ... Bruce Willis has aged more gracefully!

Poor Bob.

I'd love to know the reason for his decline. But if you wanna see a great actor really scraping the bottom of the barrel ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir791xwvOP4