[_slavo_]

I have like 10 Asian movies that I haven't seen yet.
Some obscure Korean detective stories, a Chinese romance flick or two and some Japanese movies too.
I will stay in my hometown until Dec 29th and until then I will do nothing else than watch these movies and eat.

[!@#$%!]

seen a couple of great things lately:

 

repulsion (polanski, 1965) - awesome horror movie. not gore porn like these days but more psychological. catherine deneuve is both gorgeous and creepy here. also, marcello's girlfriend from la dolce vita is here playing her sister... yvonne... something.

 

the magician (bergman, 1958). oh, bergman, how could you make such beautiful filmed plays! you were like the chinese wood carver... great story and screenplay and characters.
max von sydow, bibi andersson, ingid thulin, the guy from scenes from a marriage who also plays uncle isaac in fanny and alexander... the priest from winter light... great cast. damn, i had never even heard of this but it is such a gem.

^^ both of these on beautiful criterion discs

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

I watched The Saint yesterday, it was really good, 90s Val Kilmer was all really good flicks. .. there was also a Cheech and Chong marathon so i saw that too

[LifeDistortion]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

seen a couple of great things lately:

 

repulsion (polanski, 1965) - awesome horror movie. not gore porn like these days but more psychological. catherine deneuve is both gorgeous and creepy here. also, marcello's girlfriend from la dolce vita is here playing her sister... yvonne... something.

Repulsion is great, a must-see, even if some refuse to watch Polanski.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by LifeDistortion

Repulsion is great, a must-see, even if some refuse to watch Polanski.

i still travel in jet planes though they were invented by nazis. that is to say the work and the person are two different things. actually his apparent obsession with rape makes the movie even more disturbing though. i wonder what happened to him while he was hiding from the nazis.

anyway, just watched...

 

HILARIOUS. the longer it lasts the funnier it gets. great movie.

[gmku]

Just added Repulsion to my Netflix queue. Can't believe I've never heard of this one before.

We have RED and MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT waiting for us to get to.

Almost through the Gilmore girls series. Wow, Season 7 is a freaking mess. Worthless. Really entertaining show up until this point though. And always interesting to see how many continuity mistakes these TV shows have: In a Season 6 show, Logan is in the hospital, and in one scene featuring a conversation between Logan and Rory, the close-ups clearly show that he is lying not in his hospital bed but at home in his apartment, and then the final long shot of the scene shows them in the hospital room. It was surreal. You just have to scratch your head, like, are TV directors/editors really that lax, just don't care, just don't see?

[ilduclo]

I put Aaltra on my Netflix list, thanks for the recco. I watched Life of Brian and Rare Exports on Exmas (tradition!) And watched the Turing movie with Benny Cumberbatch. He's a hell of an actor! I didn't much think of Keira Knightly in it, she's too pretty to be that role, makes it pretty unbelievable. I always liked Mark Strong, and he's pretty strong in this, but the guy's gotten plugs, which are real obvious and kind of ruins him in a WW2 movie, huh?

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by gmku

Just added Repulsion to my Netflix queue. Can't believe I've never heard of this one before.

We have RED and MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT waiting for us to get to.

magic in the moonlight was entertaining but not "ooooh"-- one of his light comedies. is red the kieszlowski one?

Originally Posted by ilduclo

I watched Life of Brian and Rare Exports on Exmas (tradition!)

ha ha ha life of brian-- perfect! haven't heard of rare exports but now i'm curious

anyway, just watched--

 

FRANCES HA (noah baumbach, 2013)

this one is about being a white girl stuck in a post-college phase in brooklyn. it's a whole lot like "girls" but in movie form (it even had some cast members from "girls") . it was strange to find the director was noah baumbach-- i thought it was someone much younger when it started-- it felt a bit like andrew bujalski circa 2005 . oh, baumbach cowrote it with greta gerwig which is probably why. i like greta gerwig-- she's like this adorable giantess, and her character here will make you cringe and be sad a lot for her. but it's not a tragedy. oh, hollywood! i want to see the tragedy version of that story now. kinda like melinda & melinda.

[keep poppin pimples]

i hate the title of this book, but the concept is quite nice. going in i've only seen three, ugetsu, WR: mysteries of the organism and twin peaks: fire walk with me, and it was interesting to see what the people had to say about them, but there are mega spoilers in all three chapters i read so i'm not gonna read the other parts yet.

trying to figure out how to choose what to watch next, not sure if i wanna look up synopsis or just watch the ones directors i've heard of chose

 

[demonrail666]

Annie Hall and Manhattan.

Mixed feelings watching these again. Annie Hall (while brilliant) does have a tendency at times to sound like a script made up of one-liners. Manhattan, on the other hand, is an absolute masterpiece that seems to get better as I get older.

Annie Hall = 4/5; Manhattan a solid 5

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

i still travel in jet planes though they were invented by nazis. that is to say the work and the person are two different things.

thats not true.. the nazis invented both jet propulsion AND rocketry using slave labor from the concentration camps. Indeed Van Braun had personally requested thousands of Jewish prisoners, its said he was also personally involved in overseeing such. Im not saying don't travel by jet, just saying in that instance we can't necessarily make such distinctions, the evils perpetuated by the Nazis as re directly interconnected with their technology developments through the use of slaveclabor

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

Annie Hall and Manhattan.

Mixed feelings watching these again. Annie Hall (while brilliant) does have a tendency at times to sound like a script made up of one-liners. Manhattan, on the other hand, is an absolute masterpiece that seems to get better as I get older.

Annie Hall = 4/5; Manhattan a solid 5

i haven't seen those in a long time. i remember annie hall a lot better, having seen it repeatedly. what i remember of manhattan is the hemingway girl in black and white, and she buys him a harmonica or something? the whole thing about him having to be less cerebral. things fade in memory. i should watch that again. i was probably high when i saw it because i remember the people i saw it with and they were never ever sober.

i saw this the other day:

 

DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID (Buñuel, 1964). Buñuel is so weird sometimes I think he turned a straightforward story into a bunch of broken scenes to mock the bourgeoisie, but what was fantastic about this film was Jeanne Moreau-- what an amazing face! A masterpiece really (her face, not the movie). I looked for a photo to post here but none really catch the movement of those eyes--the disc cover does a good job though.

[LifeDistortion]

Sushi Girl- Major Tarantino influences, which could be a detractor or a reason to watch, it was a fun movie to watch either way.

[tw2113]

Real Genius and My Boyfriend's Back.

[evollove]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

Annie Hall and Manhattan.

I watched it about a week ago after having not seen it in about a decade. But I've watched it perhaps 30 times in my life. It struck me too as being too joke-heavy but then I remembered it came right after Love and Death, and it suddenly seemed miles more mature.

For some meat, think of it as a revisionist flick, like so many other 70s classics. It's an anti-romance film, subverting the genre in a number of ways.

And it's a technical knock-out. Look at how he frames that JFK/Alice Porchnick scene (although that might be all Gordon Willis for all I know). I swear it's as graceful as Renoir.

And it also initiated what I am coming to believe is one of the great cinematic wonders of the last blah blah blah. Allen's work from Annie Hall all the way to Bullets Over Broadway...that streak is jaw-droppingly good and might only be fully appreciated when he dies. (Coming sooner than we think, folks.)

The duds? Midsummer's Night Sex Comedy, Alice, Shadows and Fog, perhaps September. As duds go, those are pretty good.

And the winners? The rest, mostly. Those light things like Danny Rose, Radio Days and Zelig bristle with energy and imagination and do their little thing perfectly.

He pretty much mastered the "dramady," Hanna and Crimes particularly. (The "and" duo.) But I'd throw Purple into that category. Man, that gut-wrenching ending!

I think Hanna and Crimes look "classic" in their warm autumnal way, as classic in my mind as b and w. The neglected Husbands and Wives is also one of my favorite looking films. I could just fall into those colors.

For me, Bullets Over Broadway was something of a cutoff point. Some sort of magic deserted him after that very good film. As far as I'm concerned, he hasn't made a truly great film since. (Nope, still not sold on Match Point or Midnight, though I might give Vicky another try.) There were clever ideas, but they never seemed to work out. And of course there were bad ideas that never could (looking at you, Hollywood Ending, but you've got company close behind).

But whatever. Who else, for more than a decade, made films which are 95% good or masterpieces. EVERY YEAR! Genius? Cut the dross, concentrate on the good, and the answer is obviously yes.

[demonrail666]

My criticism of Annie Hall now seems overstated, but I did make it in the belief that it's still a brilliant film, just not quite as brilliant as it seemed when I first fell in love with it in my teens. Whereas Manhattan seems to have aged even better, perhaps because as I've gotten older its exploration of mid-life crises seems even more resonant than it did when I first saw it. I loved it then but, upon re-watching it the other day, I came to the realisation that I hadn't quite got it before. Plus I'm now more able to get some of the more literary jokes that, in my teens, sounded impressive but I never quite understood.

Either way, while I've not seen a lot of his more recent stuff, I agree that his 'middle period' (if we can call it that) stands up to any filmmaker from that era.

[evollove]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

Plus I'm now more able to get some of the more literary jokes that, in my teens, sounded impressive but I never quite understood.

I can't even begin to count the number of things I explored as a teen simply so I could understand an Allen joke. What's weird is the lines can sometimes be funny even if the viewer doesn't get the reference. Neat trick.

No, I agree that in Annie, Allen too often forces the joke. I'll go further and say some of the jokes don't work. Of all the "David" jokes he could've written, "David? That's a Biblical name. What does he call you? Bathsheeba?" strikes me as a not very good one.

I think by the time Manhattan rolled around, he had learned how to create witty characters. The jokes seem to come out of the character rather than the sense that Allen is forcing the jokes upon them, if that makes sense.

Oh yeah. Joke writing. One more area where Allen completely excels.

Man, I'm really gonna miss the guy after he taps off.

[demonrail666]

Yeah, some of the dialogue in AH just comes across as one-liners. "Call the lobster squad", etc, whereas with Manhattan it seems more natural, more conversational. Plus there's far less sight-gags. But as you said before, AH is a transition film; M seems more like him at ease with his new creative self. But it's a mark of his brilliance that we can find fault in a film that, were we not aware of the greatness that would follow, would probably count as one of the greatest comedies ever made ... and probably still is.

And like you, AH was pivotal in my broader cultural education. I read McLuhan straight after seeing it. But Manhattan literally changed my life, from sparking what's since become a life-long love for Gershwin, listening to (and loving) Louis Armstrong's Potato-Head Blues and generally concretising an obsession with New York that hasn't weakened since. I even made it an ambition to have dinner at Elaine's and was massively sad when I read it'd closed.

[evollove]

I wonder: was TAXI DRIVER (1976) or ANNIE HALL (1977) the more accurate portrayal of the city in the 70s?

[!@#$%!]

hey! nothing wrong with shadows and fog! great filmed play. and while alice is not up there with the best ones it's a good movie and also funny.

great observations there about his transition from stand-up to making humor part of the characters.

i'm going to have to rewatch manhattan again.

and don't worry guys, that new york no longer exists. started disappearing with giuliani and now it belongs to lena dunham & many finance bros.

---

anyway, yesterday i finally watched:

 

THE WIND RISES (MIYAZAKI, 2014). Well, fuck, he is done with films. Hard to judge this in those terms except to say it's a fitting end. a biopic that deals with the nature of creativity, a final display of his obsession with flying machines (Howl, Laputa, Porco Rosso, etc), and a supersad love story fit for La Traviata. Is it his "best" movie? Not sure anything can take the crown from the masterpiece that is Spirited Away, and this is different from what we've come to expect from the guy, but if you put aside your expectations and just watch the movie it is pretty great. Structurally maybe a bit jumbled as it hops ahead in years with the protagonists growing up, but where it excels is in the visuals and that inimitable Miyazaki magic. God damn, I'm going to miss the guy.

ps- werner herzog dubs one of the characters (we recognized him instantly and couldn't stop laughing).