28 Film Discussion Threads Later

[Kurious Jorge v3.1]

Petulia is Lester's masterpiece.

[balmakboor]

Weekend:

Zack and Miri Make a Porno
Pasolini's The Decameron
The Small Back Room
The Burmese Harp

Damn. I guess I was off by a week on Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri... Oh well, something to look forward to next weekend. Pretty week opening weekend in my town, unless you're a diehard Saw fan.

Actually, I admit I haven't seen any of the Saw films. Have I missed anything? My daughter keeps telling me I should see at least the first two.

[MadMan]

New Bunnies (http://www.starz.com/promotions/bunnies)

Grindhouse, No Country For Old Men, and Goodfellas are all pretty hilarious. "I had two dreams, and then I woke up."I love all of those.


As an eight-year-old or as a gay?Bam!


Good news all you homosexuals amongst us; Peter Travers has found the movie for you!Hilarious.

Damnit I liked Indy 4. You people are haters. Haters! :P

So far Halloween 4 is meh. Sure there's some cool kills, but its clear that this picture lacks the fantastic smothering tension of the original.

[Spinal]

Damnit I liked Indy 4. You people are haters. Haters! :P

I liked the part when Cate Blanchett threw a monkey. That was cool.

[Kurosawa Fan]

I love Help!. I used to watch it weekly as a kid.

[Stay Puft]

What is your avatar from, KF?

[Kurosawa Fan]

What is your avatar from, KF?

It's a colorized picture from the graphic novel Blankets. If you haven't read it yet, I'd strongly suggest doing so.

[Cult]

Watched Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven last night, and was I ever blown away. I liked Head-On, but this is miles ahead of that. The amateurish, experimental stylistic flourishes are gone in place of purposeful (but still beautiful) shots, and real character development. Not to mention the story is incredibly moving, intelligent and thought-provoking without trying too hard. I highly recommend it to you guys. Haven't added it to my year-end list yet, but I'm sure it will be top ten.

Next up is Millennium Mambo.

[Stay Puft]

It's a colorized picture from the graphic novel Blankets. If you haven't read it yet, I'd strongly suggest doing so.

Thanks, I'll keep it in mind.


I liked Head-On, but this is miles ahead of that.

:eek:

I love Head-On. Can't wait to see this one.

[Kurious Jorge v3.1]

Eh, the double or triple twist at the end of Witness For the Prosecution left a sour taste in my mouth because the movie, despite incorporating elements of comedy, was pretty straight-faced as a drama, and although I dug the initial shock, the two that came after the initial twist pretty much lifted the rather effective courtroom drama into absurd comedy.

It goes down with Angel Face as the two films of 50's Hollywood I've seen that were totally awesome up until their hokey endings.

[MadMan]

I liked the part when Cate Blanchett threw a monkey. That was cool.At least we have that. Fair enough, heh.

After checking Criticker I realized that I have seen 10 Vincent Price movies. I had no idea I've seen so many movies from the man. I also didn't realize that I have seen five movies from some random dude named Dwight H. Little, who directed Halloween 4. Needless to say he's not a good director from the five films of his I've seen.

Halloween 4 does have an awesome, chilling and really cool ending. Too bad the moments that are actually good are far and few in between. I expect a Jason flick to be mostly about the cool kills, but considering how great the original Halloween was and how good the second one is its a shame that the later Halloween films were weaker. I have seen some of the 3rd flick, and I liked what I saw though. I must say that Halloween 4 is fairly meh overall, although I liked some of the dream scenes as well. Those were alright.

[Rowland]

But, to be fair, all that obnoxious family connection stuff is intensely stupid. Yes, it felt embarrassingly forced, and to make matters more confounding, the sequence with Indy in the quaint suburban town revealed as artifice before it's decimated by a nuclear weapon, in essence signaling the beginning of an era that would witness the gradual deterioration of the nuclear family, seems to me the beginning of a much more interesting movie, one that doesn't end with a banal wedding sequence reaffirming the endurance of the family unity.

[Boner M]

Eh, the double or triple twist at the end of Witness For the Prosecution left a sour taste in my mouth because the movie, despite incorporating elements of comedy, was pretty straight-faced as a drama, and although I dug the initial shock, the two that came after the initial twist pretty much lifted the rather effective courtroom drama into absurd comedy.
I sorta agree, but then there's that quick reaction shot of Laughton wearily ignoring the histrionic spectacle; it's completely priceless and almost singlehandedly makes the switch to absurd comedy seem welcome.

[Sven]

I sorta agree, but then there's that quick reaction shot of Laughton wearily observing the histrionic spectacle; it's completely priceless and almost singlehandedly makes the switch to absurd comedy seem welcome.

Laughton owns that movie. Everything is built around him. It's a beautiful performance.

[MadMan]

Southland Tales=What the hell did I just watch? I get that its all about the end of the world, but I'm fuzzy on most of the other things that happened. I think I liked it....I'm not sure.

[The Mike]

Southland Tales=What the hell did I just watch? I get that its all about the end of the world, but I'm fuzzy on most of the other things that happened. I think I liked it....I'm not sure.

You didn't like it. Nobody likes it. Anyone who claims they like it is simply unclear as to what liking entails. :evil:

[MadMan]

You didn't like it. Nobody likes it. Anyone who claims they like it is simply unclear as to what liking entails. :evil:Hmm, the more I think about the film, the more I think that I actually did like it. There is not a single film on this planet that at least someone likes.

[baby doll]

Why is 'darker' an indication of quality? I don't get it.I wouldn't say darker stories are automatically more interesting than lighter ones, but similarly you might say ambitious films aren't automatically better than unambitious films. Taking Noah Baumbach as an example, Kicking and Screaming (1995) and The Squid and the Whale are both well executed, light, unambitious features that are instantly forgettable. Margot and the Wedding is the first interesting film Baumbach's made in large part because it tackles some really dark material, and the cinematography by Harris Savides is accordingly darker than Robert Yeoman's work on The Squid and the Whale. (It reminded me of Interiors.) Look at it this way: no one would want to see Jurassic Park if the dinosaurs stayed in their pens and didn't eat anyone. Margot and the Wedding is the first Baumbach film where some one gets eaten.

[Boner M]

I wouldn't say darker stories are automatically more interesting than lighter ones, but similarly you might say ambitious films aren't automatically better than unambitious films. Taking Noah Baumbach as an example, Kicking and Screaming (1995) and The Squid and the Whale are both well executed, light, unambitious features that are instantly forgettable. Margot and the Wedding is the first interesting film Baumbach's made in large part because it tackles some really dark material, and the cinematography by Harris Savides is accordingly darker than Robert Yeoman's work on The Squid and the Whale. (It reminded me of Interiors.) Look at it this way: no one would want to see Jurassic Park if the dinosaurs stayed in their pens and didn't eat anyone. Margot and the Wedding is the first Baumbach film where some one gets eaten.
The Squid and the Whale isn't 'light' by any stretch. Using dark cinematography to reflect dark material isn't a particularly interesting strategy, nor does it make Margot more interesting than Squid. Jurassic Park is not a Noah Baumbach film.

[Watashi]

I don't remember Nicole Kidman eating anyone in Margot at the Wedding.

Then again, I did miss the last 10 minutes of that wretched film.

[baby doll]

The Squid and the Whale isn't 'light' by any stretch. Using dark cinematography to reflect dark material isn't a particularly interesting strategy, nor does it make Margot more interesting than Squid. Jurassic Park is not a Noah Baumbach film.Obviously it's not a novel stratedgy to compliment dark subject matter with a dark look. Ozu's Tokyo Twilight has a much darker palette than Early Summer, and in Floating Weeds the cinematography gradually darkens over the course of the film as the drama builds. It's something all filmmakers do.

In relation to Kicking and Screaming, The Squid and the Whale is a bit more substantial, but not very. It's hardly a harrowing tale when the worst thing that happens to the protagonist is that his parents get a divorce. The characters in Margot at the Wedding are nastier and more interesting.

[baby doll]

I don't remember Nicole Kidman eating anyone in Margot at the Wedding.

Then again, I did miss the last 10 minutes of that wretched film.Doesn't the neighbor kid take a bite out of Nicole Kidman's son?

[Boner M]

In relation to Kicking and Screaming, The Squid and the Whale is a bit more substantial, but not very. It's hardly a harrowing tale when the worst thing that happens to the protagonist is that his parents get a divorce. The characters in Margot at the Wedding are nastier and more interesting.
I hate to repeat the consensus opinion, but I found Margot uninteresting largely because the characters were so nasty. If I watched any five minutes of the film I'd probably find it incisive and realistic, but over the entire duration there's no sense of scale for these moments to register as anything other than well-observed vignettes; it kinda reminded me of Thirteen in the sense that kids probably do indulge in all the deviant activity depicted in the film, but over the span of a few weeks it's just overkill. Similarly, there's no flow to Margot; with all the feelings on the surface for the entire duration, none of the nastiness ever cuts deep.

The other thing that rang so false about it was how self-consciously 'European' it was in tone. It never feels as if Baumbach's absorbed his influences; he's merely imposing his reference points over the precedings and expecting truth to surface (the Rohmer-evoking title & Pialat-esque time jumps and elliptical editing feel especially contrived).

[baby doll]

I hate to repeat the consensus opinion, but I found Margot uninteresting largely because the characters were so nasty. If I watched any five minutes of the film I'd probably find it incisive and realistic, but over the entire duration there's no sense of scale for these moments to register as anything other than well-observed vignettes; it kinda reminded me of Thirteen in the sense that kids probably do indulge in all the deviant activity depicted in the film, but over the span of a few weeks it's just overkill. Similarly, there's no flow to Margot; with all the feelings on the surface for the entire duration, none of the nastiness ever cuts deep.

The other thing that rang so false about it was how self-consciously 'European' it was in tone. It never feels as if Baumbach's absorbed his influences; he's merely imposing his reference points over the precedings and expecting truth to surface (the Rohmer-evoking title & Pialat-esque time jumps and elliptical editing feel especially contrived).I think you're over-estimating Baumbach's grasp of film history when you cite Pialat as an influence. I get the impression that he never got further than 70s American cinema, Rohmer and Truffaut. As far as Rohmer's concerned, without him, there wouldn't be any American independent cinema after 1989. I fail to see how this film is any more indebted to his work than Kicking and Screaming or The Squid and the Whale, especially in light of how much Baumbach has grown as a stylist and a storyteller. Even detractors of the film like Michael Sicinski recognize it as a giant leap forward in terms of "communicating on a genuinely visual level."

In regards to the characters' behavior being overkill, it's a movie. In a film, things have to happen much more quickly than they do in real life. Is it overkill in Psycho that Janet Leigh robs a man on Friday afternoon without any kind of premeditation, and then on Saturday evening decides to turn around and give the money back before she's brutally murdered on Saturday night? In the case of Jack Black molesting the girl in Margot at the Wedding, maybe in real life there would be a greater period time between him staring at her, then molesting her, and then being found out and recieving a beating from the girl's father (probably several months at minimum), but if the film can compress that sequence of events into a couple of days, it's all the better because it results in a more compelling story.

[Winston*]

Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan was quite good. Solid Sci-Fi film. Not being a Star Trek guy that's really all I get out of it.

When Kirk says this:

Of my friend, I can only say this: of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most... human. That's pretty patronising, no? As if humans have a monopoly on goodness and self-sacrifice. If I were a member of some developed Alien race, I'd be pretty pissed off I think.

[B-side]

Actually, I admit I haven't seen any of the Saw films. Have I missed anything? My daughter keeps telling me I should see at least the first two.

The first one I remember enjoying, but they pretty much get progressively worse as they go. Basically, no, you're not missing anything. Unless you're a huge gore fan or are a major sucker for a twist, then you're probably best off skipping them entirely.

[Morris Schæffer]

Karen Allen's character was a real disappointment. And she certainly had something to do with that. But, to be fair, all that obnoxious family connection stuff is intensely stupid. It was dumb with Sean Connery in the third film and it's even worse here.

Well, the family dynamic in Indy IV was ultra-banal indeed, but Connery and Ford had wonderful, genuine chemistry together.

@Rowland: I too still can't believe Indy IV ended with a goddamn wedding.

[Barty]

Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan was quite good. Solid Sci-Fi film. Not being a Star Trek guy that's really all I get out of it.

When Kirk says this:

Of my friend, I can only say this: of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most... human. That's pretty patronising, no? As if humans have a monopoly on goodness and self-sacrifice. If I were a member of some developed Alien race, I'd be pretty pissed off I think.

It's not really referring to his goodness, so much as his compassion. Spock would deny compassion because it is a human emotion, however Kirk is saying through his actions he is the most compassionate human he has ever known.

[Winston*]

It's not really referring to his goodness, so much as his compassion. Spock would deny compassion because it is a human emotion, however Kirk is saying through his actions he is the most compassionate human he has ever known.
So since Kirk is asserting that compassion is what makes Spock human, all Alien races in the Star Trek universe have no inherent compassion? Still seems pretty racist IMO.

[Boner M]

I think you're over-estimating Baumbach's grasp of film history when you cite Pialat as an influence. I get the impression that he never got further than 70s American cinema, Rohmer and Truffaut. As far as Rohmer's concerned, without him, there wouldn't be any American independent cinema after 1989. I fail to see how this film is any more indebted to his work than Kicking and Screaming or The Squid and the Whale, especially in light of how much Baumbach has grown as a stylist and a storyteller. Even detractors of the film like Michael Sicinski recognize it as a giant leap forward in terms of "communicating on a genuinely visual level."
Naw, I'm pretty sure he's well aware of Pialat... if Squid quotes The Mother and the Whore then I'm sure he'd at least be familiar with Eustache's contemporaries. If not, then let's just say the Dardennes, who he's mentioned in interviews (and whom cite Pialat as their greatest influence), and seems to be echoing in some of the over-the-shoulder handheld photography in Margot.


In regards to the characters' behavior being overkill, it's a movie. In a film, things have to happen much more quickly than they do in real life. Is it overkill in Psycho that Janet Leigh robs a man on Friday afternoon without any kind of premeditation, and then on Saturday evening decides to turn around and give the money back before she's brutally murdered on Saturday night? In the case of Jack Black molesting the girl in Margot at the Wedding, maybe in real life there would be a greater period time between him staring at her, then molesting her, and then being found out and recieving a beating from the girl's father (probably several months at minimum), but if the film can compress that sequence of events into a couple of days, it's all the better because it results in a more compelling story.
Well... obviously. I think you've missed my point, or I wasn't clear enough. Anyway, there's a difference between Psycho and an ostensibly naturalistic film like Margot. Resorting to Sicinski again, I found his description of Joe Swanberg's Nights and Weekends and some of the more undisciplined m-core practitioners fits Margot to a tee:

Its practitioners treat scrupulous simulacra of inarticulate behavior as an end in itself, as though they honestly don't recognize that art entails shaping, forming, providing a viewpoint on the subject at hand. It means finding an outside, not just fashioning a rank simulacrum of observable anthropological data.

Just sub 'inarticulate behaviour' with 'nastiness' and you've got a fair summary of the film's shortcomings.

[baby doll]

Naw, I'm pretty sure he's well aware of Pialat... if Squid quotes The Mother and the Whore then I'm sure he'd at least be familiar with Eustache's contemporaries. If not, then let's just say the Dardennes, who he's mentioned in interviews (and whom cite Pialat as their greatest influence), and seems to be echoing in some of the over-the-shoulder handheld photography in Margot.Eustache's La Maman et la putain was his only hit in the US, and to the best of my knowledge, the only film of his to be favored by Pauline Kael--something that can't be said for any of Pialat's films. So I find the likelihood of Baumbach having encountered his work prior to the Criterion DVD of À nos amours fairly slim.

Also, do we need to isolate a particular influence to explain the film's handheld style? Couldn't Baumbach and Savides be, you know, rational agents who made a decision in response to a given situation without consciously imitating another filmmaker? Here, and in The Squid and the Whale, the movement of the camera adds some visual excitement to what are, after all, very dialogue-heavy films. I'm sure he could've figured that out without the Dardennes or Pialat to help him out.


Well... obviously. I think you've missed my point, or I wasn't clear enough. Anyway, there's a difference between Psycho and an ostensibly naturalistic film like Margot. Resorting to Sicinski again, I found his description of Joe Swanberg's Nights and Weekends and some of the more undisciplined m-core practitioners fits Margot to a tee:

Its practitioners treat scrupulous simulacra of inarticulate behavior as an end in itself, as though they honestly don't recognize that art entails shaping, forming, providing a viewpoint on the subject at hand. It means finding an outside, not just fashioning a rank simulacrum of observable anthropological data.

Just sub 'inarticulate behaviour' with 'nastiness' and you've got a fair summary of the film's shortcomings.Naturalistic-schmaturalistic, it's a dramatic construct, no different from Psycho or any other narrative film, fiction or documentary. And unlike the two Andrew Bujalski films I've seen, which go nowhere dramatically, Margot at the Wedding is a model of narrative economy.

[dreamdead]

Troll 2, eh? What a piece of junk that skirts the line between comical and sad less than I thought. You get a grasp of what the director wanted to achieve, something that is lacking from Manos or Samurai Cop, but the execution is stilted in every instance. It's embarrassing to watch, but for me it never rises to the superlative heights of Samurai Cop or Manos. Instead, it just kind of makes its shittiness apparent.

The Incredible Hulk is all about mechanics. Mechanics of plot, of character, and of climax. The one solid moment is when Liv Tyler sees Norton appear through a doorway for a second. It captured the existential despair that would accompany such a weight for one's love. However, that kind of wordless visual dynamic is undermined by appeals to genre expectations and the uninvested action climax, and the film betrays the visual grace that Lee's version made so prevalent.

Jon Jost's All the Vermeers in New York, however, is a flat out masterpiece. A quiet, recursive study of how time and city architecture impact the isolated individual, Jost studies how enclosure and enclosed spaces envelop the individual, and how the individual tries to find comfort in a capitalistic economy. Alternating between a purely visual rhetoric and a dialogue-based rhetoric, the film asserts its ambition and achieves every bit of its vision. Masterful, and exemplary of truly independent filmmaking.

[Boner M]

Naturalistic-schmaturalistic, it's a dramatic construct, no different from Psycho or any other narrative film, fiction or documentary. And unlike the two Andrew Bujalski films I've seen, which go nowhere dramatically, Margot at the Wedding is a model of narrative economy.
:frustrated:

Do you really think I don't know that the film's a dramatic construct? My argument was that Baumbach uses a veneer of naturalism (handheld camera, natural light, references to other masters at this kinda thing) to convince us that what we're seeing is raw emotional truth when really it's just - to my eyes - a facile cruelty-fest.

[Sven]

That last baby doll post is the wrongest post I've ever read on this site.

Firstly, you do you realize that Baumbach is a New Yorker, right? And you do realize that, as a New Yorker, he is privvy to an incalculable amount of cinema, both distributed by American distributors or merely playing Independent or art house circuits, right? You cannot, I will repeat, CANNOT assume what he has or has not seen. It is simply incorrect to do so.

Secondly, (for the record, I have not seen MatW) the handheld camera technique, much like 99% of cinema technique at this point, is inextricably linked to influence. Savides and Baumbach do not live in a vacuum. They are not (I assume, because nobody is) creating a new cinematic language. They are operating within the aesthetic constructs that others have innovated. To deny that fundamental element is to admit an ignorance of the way art functions. We do not need to isolate his influence, but we must recognize it.

Lastly, B-man covered it already, but you do yourself a great discredit to assume that B-man does not understand that the picture is a construction. Naturalism is a construction.

[Cherish]

I just saw I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK, and loved it.

Some of the criticism I’ve read says it doesn’t work for American audiences, because we can’t laugh at the mentally ill. I think I laughed out loud only a couple of times, but I smiled a lot. I also grimaced, cringed, and cried. It’s not a standard comedy. Critics have misused Park’s description of the movie as “a breath of fresh air” to describe it as light-weight. But abandonment, psychosis, suicide, and revenge are weighty topics, and there’s a tremendous amount of sadness in this movie. It is ultimately optimistic, and has a happy ending, so it is a comedy in the classic sense. But, why pigeon-hole it?

IMDb says that Il-sun “thinks he can steal other people’s souls.” Where did that come from? He’s playing a game with the other inmates, that involves pseudo-hypnosis, but until he meets Young-goon, and the movie gets a little magical, he’s only playing a game.

I was struck by the way the patients could experience and adopt each other’s delusions, culminating in the wonderful “yodeling” sequence. I know that sharing psychoses is fantasy, but it’s a beautiful fantasy, and moves the story clearly into fairy tale territory.

Who else has seen this? What did you think?

[balmakboor]

Me thinks someone has greatly underestimated The Squid and the Whale. I found it a work of great complexity and honesty. If one were to compare it to more acclaimed works like Ordinary People or Interiors, I feel it comes out the clear winner on all accounts.

[Grouchy]

I just saw I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK, and loved it.

Some of the criticism I’ve read says it doesn’t work for American audiences, because we can’t laugh at the mentally ill. I think I laughed out loud only a couple of times, but I smiled a lot. I also grimaced, cringed, and cried. It’s not a standard comedy. Critics have misused Park’s description of the movie as “a breath of fresh air” to describe it as light-weight. But abandonment, psychosis, suicide, and revenge are weighty topics, and there’s a tremendous amount of sadness in this movie. It is ultimately optimistic, and has a happy ending, so it is a comedy in the classic sense. But, why pigeon-hole it?

IMDb says that Il-sun “thinks he can steal other people’s souls.” Where did that come from? He’s playing a game with the other inmates, that involves pseudo-hypnosis, but until he meets Young-goon, and the movie gets a little magical, he’s only playing a game.

I was struck by the way the patients could experience and adopt each other’s delusions, culminating in the wonderful “yodeling” sequence. I know that sharing psychoses is fantasy, but it’s a beautiful fantasy, and moves the story clearly into fairy tale territory.

Who else has seen this? What did you think?
I have, and I loved it too. I laughed out loud as much as I shed a few tears by the very end, actually. I agree with pretty much everything you say. It also has one of the most shocking opening scenes in recent movie history.

Who said that about Americans not being able to laugh at the mentally ill? That's the goofiest thing I ever heard. Who created South Park? A fucking kraut?

[Cult]

Who else has seen this? What did you think?

I have, and I didn't like it at all. I thought the idea was cute, but the execution was very grating. I found the attempts at humor were obnoxious for the most part, and the stuff that should have been touching just fell flat for me.

[Grouchy]

Ok, so I've been to a sort of festival in my fim school. I first attended the NYU program:

It's Not Just you, Murray! is notorious for being the first thing Scorsese ever shot and completed and for already featuring his trademark dolly shots and people talking into the lens of the camera. Good stuff, broadly a comedy about Italian inmigrants and their funny ways of getting rich.

Five Feet High and Rising is a tender short film about growing up. It features a Puerto Rican kid who meets a girl and tries to find her with only the broad knowledge of the corner she lives in. Both kids are very skilled with their acting and pretty much everyone comes off as natural. I guess director Peter Sollett must have heard about Pialat, because he abuses the handheld style a lot. I also thought this was a lot longer than it needed to be - at 29 minutes, it's easy to get tired of it.

http://www.clevelandfilm.org/images/blob/film_images/ArtsDesireNewPic1.jpg

Art's Desire. Good animation, but nothing very original. Picasso's Guernica, tired of living in constant war, cruises the art gallery looking for more peaceful paintings.

The Wormhole is well done, but so bland and melodramatic I couldn't care for a second. It's about a kid who loses his brother in a beach holiday, the subsequent mess his parents marriage become, and a grandma who's a physics teacher and by mistake explains to him that wormholes can make him travel in time. The idea is good, but it's just too fucking cheesy. Even so, I gotta reiterate it's very well done. The grainy cinematography is a smart choice for the subject matter, and every actor very visibly puts his heart and soul into it. It just needed a little more restraint.

Five Deep Breaths was the best short in the anthology. It's about a group of black friends testing their guts and loyalty when they take revenge against a dangerous dude who hit the sister of one of them. It's so expertly directed I just can't fucking get my head around the fact that the director, Seith Mann, apparently has only directed TV after his graduation. The ending, when all revelations come to a clash and that features long staring, is devastatin. I loved the camerawork, loved the actors, the soundtrack, and the editing that sometimes makes you jump as if you're actually taking part of the tense situations.

The bottom line - my film school sucks. I look at the graduate short films we do, or the scripts that win the yearly contests, some of which never actually get made, and all I see is a bunch of rich cocksuckers thinking they're Eric Rohmer or something. Instead of the pretentiousness and the lack of talent I see everyday in my mates, these shorts (well, ok, only five out of many I haven't seen, one by Martin Scorsese no less) reveal an actual desire to tell stories and convey feelings and a certainty from the directors about what they're trying to achieve.

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2007/08/20/isidoreisou460.jpg

And speaking of French turd-eating, the other thing I saw at the festival was something called Venom and Eternity, a "revolutionary" film made by Isidore Isou (only thing he ever made) which spends no less than 10 minutes with explanatory credits about how we're about to see a "different" kind of film and that in Cannes, people were so pissed about it that they had to be stopped by fire hoses. It goes like this:

Part I - Guy gets out of cineclub, walks through Paris. V.O. with the guy in a heated discussion with a bunch of people about the art of cinema.

Part II - Incoherent images. V.O. tells a love story between the guy in the first part and some girl called Gabrielle.

Part III - Scratched film stock. Screaming. 50 minutes.

Then it's back to more credits. Its redeeming factor is that since it was made in 1951, it's uniquely its own avant-garde movement and has nothing to do with surrealism or early cinema novo.

[Izzy Black]

Isn't mise-en-scène always, to a large degree, decorative?

If this were true, then we would have some pretty flamboyant cinema all across the boards. Quite the contrary, we have someone like Kubrick whose mise-en-scene is clinical, capacious, symmetrical, and sometimes even austere. Decorative is the best adjective to describe Anderson's. It is decorated with an abundance of ornamentation and aesthetic primary colors, and while pretty, there is nothing in his mise-en-scene that does a whole lot beyond drawing our eye to its assuming style.


As for his colour palette, as in most films, it's an indication of tone. A more sombre, Eastwood-esque look would hardly suit a film like The Royal Tenenbaums. That said, he's hardly pumping out light weight fare. Seeing The Life Aquatic With Steve Zsissou again the other night, I was struck by how unlikeable the Bill Murray character is.

I understand his color palette, but the point about the color palette, and his mise-en-scene, is that it achieves very little beyond the self-evident. Yes, the self-evident is what you have already pointed out and have reiterated again here: It screams style - but only superficially. It does, to a certain extent, add "flavor" to the deadpan and dysfunction of his characters, but it does not cut deep, nor do his stories.


Dead Man is much darker and more ambitious than anything Allen's even attempted.

By this standard, Tim Burton is a genius and Allen is a lightweight. No - I do not find Dead Man more ambitious than Zelig - or even Annie Hall for that matter. Dead Man is a respectable film, but I would not call it superior to a film like Hannah and Her Sisters or Manhatten.


I don't what uncinematic means. If style is simply the physical substance of a motion picture--light, shadow, camera placement, sound, montage, acting style--then no film is more or less cinematic than any other.

If this were the case, then you would not call Wes Anderson one of the most stylish directors today. A filmmaker can be more cinematic and stylish than another, as you well agree. What is more, a filmmaker can embrace and make great use of cinema as a formal medium or not. If there is no self-conscious style to be had, and what we are left with is tricks of the trade, conventional shot setups, and a complete disregard for cinematic technique, then we can call such uncinematic, lacking in style, and utterly banal.


There is, however, such a thing as boring direction. But in Brooks' case, there's a lot to admire on this front--admittedly more so in his early films, where he pursued his long take style more vigorously. Still, his later films are hardly by-the-numbers. Even in a film as late as Mother, his tendency towards longer than average shot lengths and relatively few close-ups help move the performances towards greater realism. (He relies on music more heavily here, and employs it more conventionally--especially in relation to Modern Romance--and I suspect it's as a result of studio interference.)

Longer shots? Where? How are his shot-lengths inconsistent with those of the dramas that were shot in the 80s? How does his style remotely compare to Allen's - who uses forth wall breaks, long-takes, single takes of dialogue as opposed to traditional shot / reverse shot setups, baroque color palette, and shows regard for pictorial compositions? Relatively longer shot lengths than average do very little to set apart or establish any distinctive meaningful style on behalf of the filmmaker, and I am pretty sure his films do not qualify even on this mark. He is a pretty lazy filmmaker and any director could do what he does. Lay a good script in his lap and you get more or less the same film as any director could make. He has nothing interesting to say about cinema. He shops around for Woody Allen-esque scripts and you can only have respect for the fact that he has a good sense of drama and humor. Woody Allen should charge The Muse and Mother for outright plagiarism. Citing Brooks is only a credit to Allen's influence and worth.


In relation to Allen, I think his earlier films, especially Real Life and Modern Romance, are a lot edgier than anything I've seen by Allen. Brooks doesn't care if we like him (or at least he didn't then). When has Allen ever burned down some one's house?

Edgier? I am siding with Crimes and Misdemeanors - because clearly you are not referring to anything cinematic here. We have the same neurotic middle class angst in Allen, which is really the staple of his career, to which Brooks derives (and hence why he is referred to LA's Woody Allen). I have yet to see Brooks shoot a scene like the visit to the murder scene sequence in Crimes and Misdemeanors. The anxious tension is built up in almost Kubrickian fashion as a Schubert String Quartet plays in the background and Martin Landau's character walks somberly toward the apartment. The audience gathers and shares his sense of dread as he approaches upon the building, and then the music climax's as he arrives at the scene, standing above the woman to which he had prior pledged his love. The music itself highlights the ironic contrast of bourgeois classicism to the shady, mobster depths for which Judah has fallen sway to. The level of moral guilt and crises in the film, let alone this sequence, is never matched by Modern Romance. The film underscores religious subtext, to which Allen directly wrestles with philosophically in the film, and juggles autobiographical concerns of infidelity, life, and death. Brooks' films are impersonal and quite simply unoriginal. Allen's treatises on modern romance, moral infidelities, art, sexuality, and death have been explored in his cinema for years and with great philosophical rigor. He never neglected cinematic exploration either, working with the best cinematographers in film and etching out his own cinematic style.


Thanks for the recommendations. I'm also pumped to see The Driller Killer, Ms. 45, Body Snatchers, The Funeral and Go Go Tales.

What does he have to say that's so important? There's a fine line between genius and madness? Diet pills are just as bad as heroin? Death is really change, and when you die you become something else?

I'm less interested in what he says that how he says it. Stylistically, Pi was no less distinctive than Rushmore--admittedly, a little rough in spots, but still an impressive first film. Requiem for a Dream, with a bigger budget, was a much slicker, more confident film, but it was also less ambitious. And The Fountain retreats completely into a more conventional style.

You use "ambitious" a lot, but without elaboration. In what way was the film less ambitious? The film presents us with 4 repugnant characters that are likely to most, unidentifiable. At least in the first film, we could fathom his conflict of genius and madness, and feel sympathy for his paranoia (and the film also somewhat awkwardly provides us with a nice resolve/hope with a love interest), but in Requiem, all hope is lost, and Aronofosky tells the story of four characters on a downward spiral of self-destructive decline. The film is relentless in the torture it puts through its characters and audaciously asks us to care. What the film asserts, however, is not that it is a film of dramatic development, but that it is more a distant, objective observation of obsession, more so than his first film. It is interesting to look at this film in contrast to the third, which is an entirely subjective account of obsession. The plight of the protagonist is so personalized and melodramatic, we are pulled into sharing sympathy, but toward the middle of the film, we begin to lose sight of him; his obsession becomes too alienating for us to relate, and his decline is inevitable. What all of these films share is the element of delusion. In Pi, he is delusional of his own madness, experiencing hallucinations and unable to make sense of things going on around him; his paranoia indicates conspiracies and plots against him everywhere. In Requiem, while we have three youth deluding themselves of faux-happiness and greener pastures, we have a woman obsessed with self-image and going on television. We begin to see the television literally meld with reality. This is what we see in his films - the melding of fiction and reality - to the point that we are uncertain as to the veracity of their experiences, and indeed, our own. His modernist approach is the tale of isolated individuals bent on self-destruction, but his postmodern sensibility is the highly subjective, relativistic approach he takes to this theme. Similar to other postmodern stylized films such as Atonement and Domino, we enter into the perspectives and point-of-views of the protagonists, and the formal elements of the medium take on a literalization of subjectivity; this use of form to explicate meaning in challenging ways is something that I do not think Wes Anderson successfully does with his aesthetic. Yet, what impresses about his last two films is the progression of theme, which goes contrary to your claim of lacking "ambition." The first film gave us a hopeful resolve, but by Requiem he has moved into complete fatalistic despair. In the third film, he goes beyond the traditional hopeful resolve to explore delusion as a form of transcendence. In the absence of literal hope, the self-delusion is placating.


I'll concede he has a strong sense of atmosphere, but in terms of plot, I found Collateral disjointed and episodic to the point that I could never get as involved in the story as I felt I should've. The film takes place over a single night and I can't reall how many people get shot, but it some how lacked urgency.

Collateral, much like Miami Vice, is less about story and more about exploring spatiality - or the lack thereof - and identity in the modern metropolis. This is why we are confronted with themes of working-class extortion, corrupt fortune 500 companies, multiculturalism, stagnation or social immobility, and moral complacency in an alienating post-industrial world, where all individuals are linked by a complex web or system of repetition, crime, and cyclical duplicity. These themes permeate Mann's work, and he communicates them, most usually, with great reliance on visual. An excellent scene, for example, is when we see Max and Cruise's character in the Taxi, both faces visible within the deep field of view of the HD camera frame, and a coyote walks across the road as both characters in a moment of serene solidarity are taken aback by the mysterious beauty and irony of wildlife displaced from its natural environment, which immediately after we are shown commercial images and product placement advertisement, eventually blurred out by the lens. Claire Denis comes to mind when I consider Mann's worldview, but his emphasis on crime as it interrlates to these themes is what pronounces his point of view.


The Insider is both more ambitious and more compelling as storytelling, so I'm not sure why I found it so forgettable. Maybe I need to give it another look. I'll get around to Heat one of these days, but I dunno about Miami Vice. If Mann wanted to do it "right," why allude to the TV show at all?

I am not sure Mann wanted to do it "right" at all. There is a great essay on Miami Vice (though I am still not a huge proponent of the film) on Senses of Cinema that covers much of the themes I discuss above, particularly the "system" approach of Mann's worldview, and a self-reflexive subversion may have been exactly what Mann had in mind, which is encompassed in the film's in media res non-titled opening and the film's a cold, objective stylism.


By "European tradition," I guess you mean he's aping Rohmer more than sex, lies & videotape and Stilman's own apings of Rohmer's style. And I'm not sure how Barcelona, an American neo-con's view of American foreign policy, isn't uncritical.

I do not mean he is aping anyone, and if he were aping someone, it definitely would not be Rohmer. You are all over the place with your references, but they are always awkward and tenuous. There are more accurate references out there if you want to talk about Stillman. His films are elegies to bygone eras, showing fleeting moments in times, and examining self-perceived social identities. Each of his films examine with sympathy individuals living morally dubious lifestyles, but who are so deep and limited within their own worlds that they must create tentative interlocking relationships and meaning within their setting. In The Last Days of Disco, we see the nostalgia for an era that was both at once escapist and liberating, and haphazard and vain. This is where we get the criticism of bourgeois lifestyle in Metropolitan, but yet sympathy for individuals who endeavor to make sense of their status in spite of their ignorance to everything outside of their insular world. There is a childlike innocence to all of his films. His criticism is clearly found in the dialogue exchange on conservativism versus liberalism in Barcelona (which I am assuming you completely missed the point here). In the film, he clearly shows his conservative protagonist completely fail at defending his unsustainable position against his interlocutor. Yet, as in his other films, Stillman still has sympathy for his character, and illustrates the frustration and stubbornness in the character's belief that he is right, despite being unable to present sufficient counter-arguments. His staunch capitalist protagonist is an identity for which he relates, but at the same time, he offers criticism without degrading him. This is the charm of Stillman's cinema that you do not see in many places. If he has a true American counterpart, it would be Richard Linktar, and certainly not Kevin Smith (but, to be fair, I grant that you have not seen The Last Days of Disco.)

[Izzy Black]

It's not that Hartley doesn't take risks (The Girl From Monday supplies plenty of evidence to the contrary), but I wish he'd be more ambitious or at least darker.

It seems you are stuck between, and oscillating between, a position of merit constricted to ambition and darkness. Both of which are entirely vague and suspicious criticisms, and yet you hinge your entire arguments on them. It seems cinema must be drenched in a Bela Tarrian/Dead Man-esque Gothic dread to impress, but two filmmakers you defend, Wes Anderson and Albert Brooks, are anything but "ambitious" and "dark." They play to their bases, or in Brooks' case, Allen's base.


The connection between Nichols and Labute has more to do with their respective attempts at filmed theatre than their themes. Neither one is particularly impressive as a stylist, but Labute's content is darker and more critical.

We have had many filmmakers film "theater." Labute is not the benchmark. Far from it, even.


Closer is a film about "unlikeable" people for audiences who need like the characters, or at least having empathy for them, to enjoy the film. Labute's original screenplays usually have one nice character, but that doesn't let the others off the hook so much as provide a point of referrence for their awful behavior.

I did not like any of the characters in Closer. Labute's cinema is decidedly manipulative, and it rests completely on the pitiful benevolence of his naive, tortured heroines/heroes. The connection, again, is weak. Closer's dramatic realism is pointed toward an examination of modern relationships. His intent is not to fabricate so as to politicize or argue philosophically, as Labute's is. Yet, neither one is less significant than the other. Nichols is more concerned with characters that are struggling to liberate themselves from bourgeois lifestyle and find happiness. We have seen this going all the way back to The Graduate. Yet, as with most of his films, the result is usually one of well-meaning and good intentioned characters doomed by failed aspirations and conflicting dilemmas.


I found Enemy of the State to be a shopworn, sub-post-Watergate paranoia thriller (and if the connection was lost on anyone, the film cops to it by casting Gene Hackman) that I started to forget before it was over. Man on Fire was racist and absurd, but more importantly, Scott's mise-en-scène, outside the action scenes, was insufficiently decorative with the camera craning around two characters standing in a room before moving into alternating close ups as quickly as possible.

I find Enemy of the State, and his most recent, Deja Vu, interesting self-reflexive reflections on time, cinema, and leftist hyper-anxiety. He has carved out a niche of high-concept stylized films with overt formal interpretations on theme. His visual speaks more substance than his characters. I cannot say the same for the aforementioned.


I'd rank both of them higher than Allen. Each has a distinctive style, and with both, I'm not sure where they can go from here.

Allen has a distinctive style. Malick, I would rank above Allen. Jarmusch, at best, stands alongside him.


I have little use for Anderson's Bottle Rocket, but Rushmore was a major stylistic breakthrough. The Royal Tenenbaums was more ambitious and more refined (slicker), but where was there to go from there?

What exactly is ambitious about The Royal Tenenbaums? What does this film accomplish?


The Life Aquatic is a darker film, and it breaks new ground thematically in terms of self reflexivity (there's plenty to chew on with regards to the filmmaking process itself, and how everything becomes fiction). And as Michael Sicinski noted at the time of the film's release, Anderson's style is less rigid here. But The Darjeeling Limited, though masterfully executed (which is more than I can say for The New World, which is a bit of a mess and a bore), takes very few risks.

I grant The Life Aquatic is his best film, but you will have to do some work here to explain to me how much there is to chew on. What substance there is here, is scarcely found elsewhere in his films. He is a lightweight - plain and simple. He does not have a whole lot to say that is of any particular relevance, originality, challenge, or really, major value. He is a dramatist with a quirky flamboyant canvas. He is a fashion magazine filmmaker.

[Izzy Black]

Thanks for the recommendations. I'm also pumped to see The Driller Killer, Ms. 45, Body Snatchers, The Funeral and Go Go Tales.

All worthwhile, though I am not a huge fan of Body Snatchers.

[Qrazy]

Holy verbose batman.

[Ivan Drago]

You didn't like it. Nobody likes it. Anyone who claims they like it is simply unclear as to what liking entails. :evil:

I love it actually. Sorry to break your belief.

[Duncan]

Forewarning, I'm not entering a labourious discussion. Just wanted to say that I think Anderson's mise-en-scene is much more than decorative. It is perpetually nostalgic, and almost every "quirky" piece of set dressing reveals something about the characters and their relationships. One of the reasons Anderson's bright aesthetic is effective is that the things it expresses are actually very dark. It is expressive of failure, depression, alienation, betrayal, and the awfulness of realizing those ideal days of childhood are never coming back, never existed at all. I have no idea how Atonement is better at performing a "literization of subjectivity." I don't buy that at all. Every corner of every frame in Anderson's films is a literization of subjectivity. Furthermore, his mise-en-scene takes on multiple meanings when considered from the multiple perspectives of his characters. So we don't have to go through this tired re-filming of the same scene from a mansion window. We remain in the same shot and consider what portraits hanging on the wall mean to each person in the room. Much better, imo.

[Dead & Messed Up]

I love it actually. Sorry to break your belief.

After it was over, I thought it was okay. The more I thought about it, though, the more I began to loathe it. Loathe it to its core. Which is not to say I disrespect Kelly, who took a big gamble. I just think it was a gamble that didn't pay out.

At all.

[Philosophe_rouge]

The Faculty (Robert Rodriguez, 1998)

Hilarious if seen with other people, craptacular seen on your own. It is like Invasions of the Body Snatchers, but with more CGI, and in high school… though I always assumed all teachers and students were zombies anyway, so, there really isn’t that much of a difference. It’s still pretty funny, and I mean, any movie that crystal meth saves the day isn’t that bad. Jon Stewart is the best part, and the funniest moment comes during the credits when he miraculously has survived his death with apparently serious pirat-y injuries. As I said, a fun, cheesy movie to see with friends but really not all that great.

5/10

Hatchet (Adam Greenl, 2006)

Again aiming for the funny but horrific thing, but it’s actually not as good as the Faculty. Though, it has it’s advantages nonethless. Set in New Orleans during spring break, some guy can’t get over his ex and all the boobs remind him of her, so he’s all sad and whiny. He’s like “You know what? I’m going on a swamp tour! THat’ll cheer me up!!!” Little does he know, there is a crazy fleshed out ghost on the loose hacking at people with a hatchet! THE HUMANITY! This film is extremely forgetteable, and not very funny or scary. It has some totallyl awesome kills though. So I recommend it about as much The Faculty for that.

5/10

[Rec] (Jaume Balagueró & Paco Plaza, 2007)

A divisive horror film, I can easily understand why someone would not like this film, but it was still probably my favourite of the night (though not saying that much). Filmed with a first person camera, and done in a hyper “realistic” style, it immediately turns off a lot of viewers. It’s a fairly effective entry in the genre however, relying on slow build ups and using the obscured images to heighten the effects. Also, the fact that the film still delves into fantasy certainly helps distract from their attempt at gritty “zomfg this stuff is so fucking real”. Most of the film is pretty good, but the final few scenes are HUGE WTF/OMG I want to pee my pants horror. Seriously, it’s worth seeing the film for the end… though admittingly part of the blow is lessened by the incessant Quarantine trailers. Doesn’t soften the sheer creep factor of that scene though. Reminds me of Se7en and Silence of the Lambs if they were absolutely crazier, and out of this world. Like, seriously scary shit.

7.5/10

The Stepfather (Joseph Ruben, 1987)

Terrible 80s cheese, like, not even so bad it’s good cheese. It’s really boring and predictable. The deaths aren’t that cool, and they don’t even go all out with the bad. It’s almost as if they wrote the whole movie around a few lines that sounded cool, but they’re not even THAT cool. Just so bleh.

3/10

The Mist in b&w (Frank Darabont, 2007)

Doesn’t quite hold up to a second viewing,though part of this might be due to me watching it at 5 am. The black and white really does improve on the film’s look, the monsters especially looking a whole lot better when not purple. Though, even this was imperfect… I got really distracted as the gradient of sharpness and contrast shifted very often from shot to shot. It’s something I don’t really notice, but it stood out here. Though really well transferred from colour to black and white, it’s stilll pretty obvious it was shot in colour most of the film. Doesn’t quite capture the right look, though it’s better than most. The film itself is as bleak as ever, though the lack of unlikeable characters really wore on me this time. More difficult to get involved when everyone is an ***. The ending is as wonderful as ever. I love how the millitary becomes a much crueller and frightening monster than anything monstrous that cam from the Mist itself. Very well done. Again though, too bleak for the morning.

7.5/10

[Watashi]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1080659/English-beauty-dies-roof-plunge-marriage-split-John-Hustons-son.html

[Lucky]

I love it actually. Sorry to break your belief.

I do too. Well, love is a strong word. But I often get urges to rewatch it and I like it more each time.

[Grouchy]

Philosophe, Hatchet disappointed me too. Sure, the violence was there, but the cast was goofy and the monster kind of boring. Amazingly forgettable stuff, too. I don't remember most of it, and I'm trying to.

[Rec], on the other hand, is incredible. I also see how someone could hate it, but I'm very glad that someone isn't me. The final scene needs to be in some kind of Horror canon. You're right, it's a lot like Silence of the Lambs, only a lot more terrifying. It's also a movie that deserves a theater viewing.

[Izzy Black]

Forewarning, I'm not entering a labourious discussion. Just wanted to say that I think Anderson's mise-en-scene is much more than decorative. It is perpetually nostalgic, and almost every "quirky" piece of set dressing reveals something about the characters and their relationships.

Perpetually nostalgic? Hmmm. That seems like a pretty heady statement. I am willing to grant the possibility of your argument, but going on recollection, I do not see much there. I can see, for example, how in The Royal Tenenbaums the dress has some significance with regard to Ben Stiller's character and his sons, but this does not say a whole lot about cinematic technique and style. What I suspect, rather, as I initially noted in my post, is occasional irony and thematic tie, but it is really very significant.


One of the reasons Anderson's bright aesthetic is effective is that the things it expresses are actually very dark. It is expressive of failure, depression, alienation, betrayal, and the awfulness of realizing those ideal days of childhood are never coming back, never existed at all.

Anderson's films are overtly and self-consciously about archetypal characters wallowing in their own self-pity, and rarely does Anderson inquire beyond his character archetypes. In some cases, I see visual irony or "flavor" or "flair" added to the dysfunction of the characters, but I am not seeing a whole lot going on beyond the obvious melodramatic histrionics.


I have no idea how Atonement is better at performing a "literization of subjectivity." I don't buy that at all.

On Atonement (which, I thought we discussed when I initially posted this? Not sure if it was you):


One of the immediately recognizable traits about Wright's cinema, specifically with Atonement, is that he casually changes from subjective points-of-views to objective observation. The tracking shot exemplifies an example of the spectator's gaze merging with the subjective dreamscape reality of Robbie's experience. Unafraid to break from the plot-action progression of the story and linger on thematic imagery, Wright, in another instance, focuses on the horribleness of the men's wounds. The function in these two sequences seems to play into the characters' psychology, but I think the lingering is more cinematic than that. The director seems more interested in capturing the sense of milieu and reality of war's destruction (rather than its exploitative action -- no cathartic violent sequences to be found here for the male gaze) to emphasize the film's theme of interdependence, injustice, and perseverance. In the hospital scene, the film breaks from the focus on the single character (though significant in bringing her elitist class perceptions down to a human level of understanding others) and exemplifies the broader pictorial interest in the theme. Robbie's walk with his group during the war was actually supposed to be much longer at the director's wish to further explore the despair and environment, but I believe producers wanted it cut down.

Although I did devote nearly an entire essay on this point, I can certainly elaborate more if you are still curious on what I mean by this claim.


Every corner of every frame in Anderson's films is a literization of subjectivity. Furthermore, his mise-en-scene takes on multiple meanings when considered from the multiple perspectives of his characters. So we don't have to go through this tired re-filming of the same scene from a mansion window. We remain in the same shot and consider what portraits hanging on the wall mean to each person in the room. Much better, imo.

What do you mean that his mise-en-scene takes on multiple meanings? In what way?

[Sven]

The missus and I are about to embark on Being There. Her first, my third. My prediction: love on both fronts. It's one of my favorites, and it seems like her kind of thing. Harold and Maude is her favorite movie, so here's hoping Ashby can deliver for her again.

[MadMan]

That last page makes me feel quite lazy when it comes to film discussion.

[Ezee E]

every Israfel post makes me feel new to cinema

[Duncan]

On Atonement (which, I thought we discussed when I initially posted this? Not sure if it was you):


One of the immediately recognizable traits about Wright's cinema, specifically with Atonement, is that he casually changes from subjective points-of-views to objective observation. The tracking shot exemplifies an example of the spectator's gaze merging with the subjective dreamscape reality of Robbie's experience. Unafraid to break from the plot-action progression of the story and linger on thematic imagery, Wright, in another instance, focuses on the horribleness of the men's wounds. The function in these two sequences seems to play into the characters' psychology, but I think the lingering is more cinematic than that. The director seems more interested in capturing the sense of milieu and reality of war's destruction (rather than its exploitative action -- no cathartic violent sequences to be found here for the male gaze) to emphasize the film's theme of interdependence, injustice, and perseverance. In the hospital scene, the film breaks from the focus on the single character (though significant in bringing her elitist class perceptions down to a human level of understanding others) and exemplifies the broader pictorial interest in the theme. Robbie's walk with his group during the war was actually supposed to be much longer at the director's wish to further explore the despair and environment, but I believe producers wanted it cut down.

Although I did devote nearly an entire essay on this point, I can certainly elaborate more if you are still curious on what I mean by this claim.
I remember. Haha, I guess I was just trying to bait you a little there.


What do you mean that his mise-en-scene takes on multiple meanings? In what way? Take the scene where Chas confronts Royal in the games closet. Royal is distracted by some happy memory. Chas has no desire to reminisce over these games. This little exchange takes about 3 seconds, as Royal is interrupted before he can even finish a line. Since we are not told exactly what memory these characters do or do not want to recall we are invited to put ourselves in the shoes of each character and imagine why they would react to the sight of these games in the way that they do. When we consider them from Royal's perspective they represent a time when he and Chas were not fully estranged, and perhaps a stepping stone back to a meaningful relationship. If we consider them from Chas' perspective the games could represent those times when Royal would cheat at Monopoly by stealing money from the bank. Or, perhaps they could represent a genuinely happy memory that he and his father share, but that he wants to suppress because it would conflict with the contempt he currently feels towards Royal.

I think moments like this pop up in Anderson's films quite frequently. I like them because they are not forceful (as literally filming a scene from the perspectives of different characters is) but they are gently nuanced in the way that they invite audience participation. The camera never really deviates from objective observation of these events (with strong exceptions like the suicide attempt), but the viewer makes their own associations between character and object, displayed emotion and hidden one, based on whose subjectivity they decide to inhabit.

[Watashi]

Why aren't you a professional film critic, Israfel?

[Sven]

She didn't like it. :sad: "The pacing switched from deliberate to taxing, I grew tiresome of the characters, and I don't know what it was supposed to mean."

[Raiders]

The Stepfather (Joseph Ruben, 1987)

Terrible 80s cheese, like, not even so bad it’s good cheese. It’s really boring and predictable. The deaths aren’t that cool, and they don’t even go all out with the bad. It’s almost as if they wrote the whole movie around a few lines that sounded cool, but they’re not even THAT cool. Just so bleh.

3/10

bah, Bah, BAH! This is a great, great film. Among the most underseen/underrated thriller/horror films I have seen.

[Watashi]

Being There >>>>>>>>>>>>> Harold and Maude

[Yxklyx]

Planet Terror is a masterpiece of cinema.

[MadMan]

If I have the time this week or during the next I will try and do justice to Peeping Tom with a review. Cause that movie is fantastic. One of the best horror movies I've ever seen, really.

[Ezee E]

Gunnin' For That #1 Spot is surprising in the fact that all those high schoolers that were projected so high turned out to be first round picks in this year's NBA Draft. Other than that, I don't see much else in the movie worth noting.

[baby doll]

:frustrated:

Do you really think I don't know that the film's a dramatic construct? My argument was that Baumbach uses a veneer of naturalism (handheld camera, natural light, references to other masters at this kinda thing) to convince us that what we're seeing is raw emotional truth when really it's just - to my eyes - a facile cruelty-fest.But isn't that also true of the Dardennes, who also employ handheld cameras, natural light and referrences to Bresson (particularly the ending of L'Enfant), but within that framework, sometimes find room magic, like the fortune teller scene in La Promesse, and other elements that aren't strictly realistic?

[Boner M]

But isn't that also true of the Dardennes, who also employ handheld cameras, natural light and referrences to Bresson (particularly the ending of L'Enfant), but within that framework, sometimes find room magic, like the fortune teller scene in La Promesse, and other elements that aren't strictly realistic?
No. Different ends.

[baby doll]

That last baby doll post is the wrongest post I've ever read on this site.

Firstly, you do you realize that Baumbach is a New Yorker, right? And you do realize that, as a New Yorker, he is privvy to an incalculable amount of cinema, both distributed by American distributors or merely playing Independent or art house circuits, right? You cannot, I will repeat, CANNOT assume what he has or has not seen. It is simply incorrect to do so.As Boner M said earlier, he cited La Maman et la putain specifically, not Mes petites amoureuses or some other, less well known Eustache film. That film had, for a three and a half hour subtitled film, a fairly wide release and was championed by mainstream reviewers, so if even if Baumbach has seen that, it doesn't mean he's seen any other Eustache film, or anything by Garrel or Pialat whose work hasn't been as widely distributed. Maybe he has, but I wouldn't assume it.


Secondly, (for the record, I have not seen MatW) the handheld camera technique, much like 99% of cinema technique at this point, is inextricably linked to influence. Savides and Baumbach do not live in a vacuum. They are not (I assume, because nobody is) creating a new cinematic language. They are operating within the aesthetic constructs that others have innovated. To deny that fundamental element is to admit an ignorance of the way art functions. We do not need to isolate his influence, but we must recognize it.I'm not claiming they're reinventing the wheel, but how many filmmakers think of Griffith when going in for a close-up? By now handheld camerawork is such a common technique that trying to isolate any specific influence is impossible. Simply because he takes the camera off the tripod doesn't mean he's citing Pialat.

[baby doll]

No. Different ends.What ends?

[Sxottlan]

Huh. No discussion anywhere about the Jennifer Hudson family massacre (as I like to call it)?

[Boner M]

What ends?
You tell me.

[baby doll]

If this were true, then we would have some pretty flamboyant cinema all across the boards. Quite the contrary, we have someone like Kubrick whose mise-en-scene is clinical, capacious, symmetrical, and sometimes even austere. Decorative is the best adjective to describe Anderson's. It is decorated with an abundance of ornamentation and aesthetic primary colors, and while pretty, there is nothing in his mise-en-scene that does a whole lot beyond drawing our eye to its assuming style.Isn't Kubrick's clinical, capacious, symmetrical austere mise-en-scène itself decorative?


I understand his color palette, but the point about the color palette, and his mise-en-scene, is that it achieves very little beyond the self-evident. Yes, the self-evident is what you have already pointed out and have reiterated again here: It screams style - but only superficially. It does, to a certain extent, add "flavor" to the deadpan and dysfunction of his characters, but it does not cut deep, nor do his stories.What should his colour palette and mise-en-scène be cutting into?


By this standard, Tim Burton is a genius and Allen is a lightweight. No - I do not find Dead Man more ambitious than Zelig - or even Annie Hall for that matter. Dead Man is a respectable film, but I would not call it superior to a film like Hannah and Her Sisters or Manhatten.Except Burton's content has never matched his flamboyant production design. Dead Man is a film about the destruction of the American landscape and its indiginous people. Zelig touches on Jewish assimilation (a worthy subject), but I found it hindered by the pseduo-documentary approach. Annie Hall, Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters are all terrific films, but they have less resonance.


Longer shots? Where? How are his shot-lengths inconsistent with those of the dramas that were shot in the 80s? How does his style remotely compare to Allen's - who uses forth wall breaks, long-takes, single takes of dialogue as opposed to traditional shot / reverse shot setups, baroque color palette, and shows regard for pictorial compositions? Relatively longer shot lengths than average do very little to set apart or establish any distinctive meaningful style on behalf of the filmmaker, and I am pretty sure his films do not qualify even on this mark. He is a pretty lazy filmmaker and any director could do what he does. Lay a good script in his lap and you get more or less the same film as any director could make. He has nothing interesting to say about cinema. He shops around for Woody Allen-esque scripts and you can only have respect for the fact that he has a good sense of drama and humor. Woody Allen should charge The Muse and Mother for outright plagiarism. Citing Brooks is only a credit to Allen's influence and worth.There are long takes o' plenty in Real Life, Modern Romance and Lost in America. The most obvious example is the scene in Modern Romance where Brooks takes a bunch of 'ludes and stumbles around his apartment, playing records and making phone calls.

Mother might be said to be Allen-esque in that its subject is Jewish neurosis (I haven't seen The Muse), but compare Brooks' more generous treatment of Debbie Reynolds' character with the caricatured Jewish mother in Oedipus Wrecks. Brooks allows us to empathize with both characters' points of views, in contrast with Allen who has us identify completely with his character and treats the mother as an overbearing caricature.


Edgier? I am siding with Crimes and Misdemeanors - because clearly you are not referring to anything cinematic here. We have the same neurotic middle class angst in Allen, which is really the staple of his career, to which Brooks derives (and hence why he is referred to LA's Woody Allen). I have yet to see Brooks shoot a scene like the visit to the murder scene sequence in Crimes and Misdemeanors. The anxious tension is built up in almost Kubrickian fashion as a Schubert String Quartet plays in the background and Martin Landau's character walks somberly toward the apartment. The audience gathers and shares his sense of dread as he approaches upon the building, and then the music climax's as he arrives at the scene, standing above the woman to which he had prior pledged his love. The music itself highlights the ironic contrast of bourgeois classicism to the shady, mobster depths for which Judah has fallen sway to. The level of moral guilt and crises in the film, let alone this sequence, is never matched by Modern Romance. The film underscores religious subtext, to which Allen directly wrestles with philosophically in the film, and juggles autobiographical concerns of infidelity, life, and death. Brooks' films are impersonal and quite simply unoriginal. Allen's treatises on modern romance, moral infidelities, art, sexuality, and death have been explored in his cinema for years and with great philosophical rigor. He never neglected cinematic exploration either, working with the best cinematographers in film and etching out his own cinematic style.Crimes and Misdemeanors plays it safe by not showing Martin Landau pulling the trigger himself. Match Point is clearly superior. Admittedly, Brooks has never made anything that dark, but the characters he plays in his first three features, Real Life, Modern Romance and Lost in America are all highly unlikeable.


You use "ambitious" a lot, but without elaboration. In what way was the film less ambitious? The film presents us with 4 repugnant characters that are likely to most, unidentifiable. At least in the first film, we could fathom his conflict of genius and madness, and feel sympathy for his paranoia (and the film also somewhat awkwardly provides us with a nice resolve/hope with a love interest), but in Requiem, all hope is lost, and Aronofosky tells the story of four characters on a downward spiral of self-destructive decline. The film is relentless in the torture it puts through its characters and audaciously asks us to care. What the film asserts, however, is not that it is a film of dramatic development, but that it is more a distant, objective observation of obsession, more so than his first film. It is interesting to look at this film in contrast to the third, which is an entirely subjective account of obsession. The plight of the protagonist is so personalized and melodramatic, we are pulled into sharing sympathy, but toward the middle of the film, we begin to lose sight of him; his obsession becomes too alienating for us to relate, and his decline is inevitable. What all of these films share is the element of delusion. In Pi, he is delusional of his own madness, experiencing hallucinations and unable to make sense of things going on around him; his paranoia indicates conspiracies and plots against him everywhere. In Requiem, while we have three youth deluding themselves of faux-happiness and greener pastures, we have a woman obsessed with self-image and going on television. We begin to see the television literally meld with reality. This is what we see in his films - the melding of fiction and reality - to the point that we are uncertain as to the veracity of their experiences, and indeed, our own. His modernist approach is the tale of isolated individuals bent on self-destruction, but his postmodern sensibility is the highly subjective, relativistic approach he takes to this theme. Similar to other postmodern stylized films such as Atonement and Domino, we enter into the perspectives and point-of-views of the protagonists, and the formal elements of the medium take on a literalization of subjectivity; this use of form to explicate meaning in challenging ways is something that I do not think Wes Anderson successfully does with his aesthetic. Yet, what impresses about his last two films is the progression of theme, which goes contrary to your claim of lacking "ambition." The first film gave us a hopeful resolve, but by Requiem he has moved into complete fatalistic despair. In the third film, he goes beyond the traditional hopeful resolve to explore delusion as a form of transcendence. In the absence of literal hope, the self-delusion is placating.Requiem for a Dream is less ambitious because the content is more conventional. In relation to Pi, Aronofsky's style is slicker and more refined, but he's not breaking any new ground.

Also, if they were "unidentifiable" (a sweet, lonely Jewish mother who has a Snake Pit breakdown unidenfiable?), why would we care about their downfall.


Collateral, much like Miami Vice, is less about story and more about exploring spatiality - or the lack thereof - and identity in the modern metropolis. This is why we are confronted with themes of working-class extortion, corrupt fortune 500 companies, multiculturalism, stagnation or social immobility, and moral complacency in an alienating post-industrial world, where all individuals are linked by a complex web or system of repetition, crime, and cyclical duplicity. These themes permeate Mann's work, and he communicates them, most usually, with great reliance on visual. An excellent scene, for example, is when we see Max and Cruise's character in the Taxi, both faces visible within the deep field of view of the HD camera frame, and a coyote walks across the road as both characters in a moment of serene solidarity are taken aback by the mysterious beauty and irony of wildlife displaced from its natural environment, which immediately after we are shown commercial images and product placement advertisement, eventually blurred out by the lens. Claire Denis comes to mind when I consider Mann's worldview, but his emphasis on crime as it interrlates to these themes is what pronounces his point of view.Maybe I'm just slow, but I thought it was a thriller.


I do not mean he is aping anyone, and if he were aping someone, it definitely would not be Rohmer. You are all over the place with your references, but they are always awkward and tenuous. There are more accurate references out there if you want to talk about Stillman. His films are elegies to bygone eras, showing fleeting moments in times, and examining self-perceived social identities. Each of his films examine with sympathy individuals living morally dubious lifestyles, but who are so deep and limited within their own worlds that they must create tentative interlocking relationships and meaning within their setting. In The Last Days of Disco, we see the nostalgia for an era that was both at once escapist and liberating, and haphazard and vain. This is where we get the criticism of bourgeois lifestyle in Metropolitan, but yet sympathy for individuals who endeavor to make sense of their status in spite of their ignorance to everything outside of their insular world. There is a childlike innocence to all of his films. His criticism is clearly found in the dialogue exchange on conservativism versus liberalism in Barcelona (which I am assuming you completely missed the point here). In the film, he clearly shows his conservative protagonist completely fail at defending his unsustainable position against his interlocutor. Yet, as in his other films, Stillman still has sympathy for his character, and illustrates the frustration and stubbornness in the character's belief that he is right, despite being unable to present sufficient counter-arguments. His staunch capitalist protagonist is an identity for which he relates, but at the same time, he offers criticism without degrading him. This is the charm of Stillman's cinema that you do not see in many places. If he has a true American counterpart, it would be Richard Linktar, and certainly not Kevin Smith (but, to be fair, I grant that you have not seen The Last Days of Disco.)Why is that a reach to compare Stillman to Rohmer? Both are conservative filmmakers who make dialogue-driven films. It's less awkward to compare Stillman to Rohmer (as many reviewers have) than to look at Hollywood product through the lens of "exploring spatiality." (Postmodernism will not make the plot tighter or more compelling.)

In Barcelona, the protagonist fails to defend his views with his cheesy red ant/black ant metaphor, but then Thomas Gibson shows up at the end to make the case more articulately. And then they all go to America and eat hot dogs. What am I missing?

[B-side]

Oh dear. Lot of words. Words scare me.

[baby doll]

It seems you are stuck between, and oscillating between, a position of merit constricted to ambition and darkness. Both of which are entirely vague and suspicious criticisms, and yet you hinge your entire arguments on them. It seems cinema must be drenched in a Bela Tarrian/Dead Man-esque Gothic dread to impress, but two filmmakers you defend, Wes Anderson and Albert Brooks, are anything but "ambitious" and "dark." They play to their bases, or in Brooks' case, Allen's base.I don't think it should be controversial to say that films which are about something--in the case of Dead Man, the treatment of Native Americans by European settlers--are more interesting and resonant than films about nothing at all. Robin Wood wrote a short piece on Away From Her for CineAction! in which he said it was well executed but too safe as the subject matter is entirely apolitical.


We have had many filmmakers film "theater." Labute is not the benchmark. Far from it, even.

I did not like any of the characters in Closer. Labute's cinema is decidedly manipulative, and it rests completely on the pitiful benevolence of his naive, tortured heroines/heroes. The connection, again, is weak. Closer's dramatic realism is pointed toward an examination of modern relationships. His intent is not to fabricate so as to politicize or argue philosophically, as Labute's is. Yet, neither one is less significant than the other. Nichols is more concerned with characters that are struggling to liberate themselves from bourgeois lifestyle and find happiness. We have seen this going all the way back to The Graduate. Yet, as with most of his films, the result is usually one of well-meaning and good intentioned characters doomed by failed aspirations and conflicting dilemmas.You say "manipulative" like it's a bad thing. And I'd hardly say the deaf woman in In the Company of Men is benevolent. She just gets screwed over.

The connection, or the contrast rather, is that Closer might seem nominally edgy next to most mainstream fare because the characters aren't likeable, but they're not as interesting as the characters in Labute's Your Friends and Neighbors, which also consists of a series of conversations and monologues between affluent white characters. Watching Nichols' film, I wanted the characters to be meaner to each other.


I find Enemy of the State, and his most recent, Deja Vu, interesting self-reflexive reflections on time, cinema, and leftist hyper-anxiety. He has carved out a niche of high-concept stylized films with overt formal interpretations on theme. His visual speaks more substance than his characters. I cannot say the same for the aforementioned.Déja vu is an impressive film and obviously self reflexive (it's all about light, the very matter of cinema). Also, unlike Enemy of the State, which I found shopworn and derivative, it has an interesting story.


What exactly is ambitious about The Royal Tenenbaums? What does this film accomplish?In relation to Anderson's first two films, it's his first set outside of Texas and has a much larger cast of characters. If he's playing to his base, that's only because Rushmore was so singular that it invented a whole new base to play to.


I grant The Life Aquatic is his best film, but you will have to do some work here to explain to me how much there is to chew on. What substance there is here, is scarcely found elsewhere in his films. He is a lightweight - plain and simple. He does not have a whole lot to say that is of any particular relevance, originality, challenge, or really, major value. He is a dramatist with a quirky flamboyant canvas. He is a fashion magazine filmmaker.As I noted earlier, The Life Aquatic is a film about the filmmaking process and how everything becomes fiction. The underwater scenes deliberately look fake, the intertitles are the same font as the onscreen text in Szissou's documentaries and the score often sounds like temp music. When we see clips of Szissou's films, there's an ambiguity about how much is being staged for the camera.

And you say dramatist like it's a bad thing. Maybe he doesn't explore postmodern spatiality, but his narrative structures are sound.

[soitgoes...]

I think the only thing goofier than the grin on my face while watching The Saddest Music in the World would be the film itself. Holy crap, what a wacky-ass beautiful film. Bravo, Mr. Maddin! Isabella Rossellini with beer-filled glass legs... I can't believe this hasn't been thought of before.

[Arthur Seaton]

Huh. No discussion anywhere about the Jennifer Hudson family massacre (as I like to call it)?
On Match Cut? I'm not surprised.

[Boner M]

On Match Cut? I'm not surprised.
What's this supposed to mean

[balmakboor]

If I have the time this week or during the next I will try and do justice to Peeping Tom with a review. Cause that movie is fantastic. One of the best horror movies I've ever seen, really.

Yes it is. I look forward to your thoughts.

[Ezee E]

What's this supposed to mean
I think it was mentioned in some thread somewhere. Possibly Random Thoughts.

I don't know what the comment is suppose to mean though. Sounds passive-aggressive.

[balmakboor]

I'd always read, heard, figured that The Small Back Room was minor P&P, but damn if it isn't as great and brilliantly crafted as any other. The long climactic sequence is as detailed and riveting as anything they've done. And the expressive B&W cinematography is the best I've seen from them. Really cool film.

[Kurosawa Fan]

Huh. No discussion anywhere about the Jennifer Hudson family massacre (as I like to call it)?

I posted about it in the News Thread in OT.

[Arthur Seaton]

Sorry, I didn't mean anything by my earlier comment. Just looking at the uber-intellectual discussion on the page on which Sxottlan's comment appeared makes me think that the denizens of this thread aren't American Idol fans or fans of Dreamgirls and therefore probably don't care as much as those of us who are.
(I thought her Oscar was well-deserved.)

Maybe I should have said that I wasn't surprised not to see anything on the FDT regarding this matter. The News thread seems like a more appropriate Match Cut fit.

Sorry again.

[Ezee E]

Sorry, I didn't mean anything by my earlier comment. Just looking at the uber-intellectual discussion on the page on which Sxottlan's comment appeared makes me think that the denizens of this thread aren't American Idol fans or fans of Dreamgirls and therefore probably don't care as much as those of us who are.
(I thought her Oscar was well-deserved.)

Maybe I should have said that I wasn't surprised not to see anything on the FDT regarding this matter. The News thread seems like a more appropriate Match Cut fit.

Sorry again.
Don't make that mistake again. We won't tell you what happened to the last person that made two mistakes.

[Sven]

Sorry again.

I think mostly (at least with me) it's like... how does one have a discussion about such a tragedy? Particularly, why should we focus on it solely because they were the family of a celebrity? I hope I'm not yet so infatuated with the fame cult that I feel the need to revolve my discussions around their personal tragedies. That's tabloid stuff.

Naturally, I'm very sorry for her loss.

[Grouchy]

Seen Bruiser. Not bad, George. Not bad at all. This is the first non-zombie film I've seen from Romero, and it does hold up, mainly due to a very strong central performance by Jason Flemyng - try acting your way like that through a blank mask - and scenery chewing by Peter Stormare. However, the revenge plot is predictable and the film is so fast and short, it's over by the time you're getting excited about it, although it does have a grand finale with The Misfits. Like in his Dead trilogy, Romero very obviously chooses his targets (this time, yuppie culture and metrosexuality) and attacks them with no mercy. I also liked the cinematography, which in some scenes became a key element, foreshadowing events and contributing to the suspense. It's strange that this came out roughly the same year as American Psycho, for they cover much of the same ground. In fact, I think this film is a lot funnier.

[Melville]

Seriously??? I mean, she's good for a 4 year old, but that Ocean painting looked no better than the 60 Minutes painting, and it wasn't even close to the paintings in her first show. Not a chance that those first paintings were made without influence of someone else. Every painting she did on camera was basically the same technique. She showed none of the skill needed to create those early works.
Ocean certainly isn't a great painting, but it's decent. It contains enough variation, use of contrast (both between colors and shapes), and recurring motifs to make it believable that Marla painted the others as well. Also, I just checked Marla's website, and it contains videos of her painting three other paintings (http://www.marlaolmstead.com/videos-Feb2007.html), all of which are better than Ocean and one of which is in a markedly different style. But in any case, it seems specious to argue over the true creator of the paintings based on their quality; a single painter will obviously produce paintings of varying quality, and since abstract painting is mostly about design, a bad design can make a painting look like it was made by a different person. What's important about the home video is that it shows Marla painting very purposively, without coaching, and ending up with a painting with at least some design complexity.

Given that fact, I don't think the movie really gave us any reason to doubt that Marla was doing the painting. The only evidence it provided was the 60 Minutes footage, which certainly suggested that Marla's father is a glory hound and that he is probably more responsible for helping her learn how to paint, and giving her suggestions on what to paint, than he admits...but so what? Artists don't work in a vacuum, and if Marla received guidance from her father, then she is still the creator of those paintings. And the movie didn't give us any evidence that the father did anything more than provide guidance, so I really think its emphasis on his alleged role was a bad idea. I would have been much more interested in the film if it had focused on the dearth of craft in modern art (at least in modern "high" art), and how people perceive that dearth—what does it mean to call a child an art prodigy when their art mimics art that already, at least sometimes, mimics children's art? Why are we so fascinated by child prodigies in the first place?—or if it had focused on the role of the creator in modern art—given that so much of modern art consists of the concepts behind it, or the artist's personal abstract expression of him or herself, rather than consisting of craftsmanship, who is the "author" of a work when one person tells another what to paint?

[Amnesiac]

Artists don't work in a vacuum, and if Marla received guidance from her father, then she is still the creator of those paintings. And the movie didn't give us any evidence that the father did anything more than provide guidance, so I really think its emphasis on his alleged role was a bad idea.

I think the point was that so many people were buying her art on the basis that she alone was the artist. In an absolute sense, with no outside assistance whatsoever. I think this was the idea that people had in their head and an idea that certainly fueled her status as a 'child prodigy'. It was part of the allure, the possibility that she could have made these paintings all by herself. Some of these people weren't buying a painting, but a testament to the ingenuity and brilliance of a child. Understandably, I suppose, people felt betrayed.



or if it had focused on the role of the creator in modern art—given that so much of modern art consists of the concepts behind it, or the artist's personal abstract expression of him or herself, rather than consisting of craftsmanship, who is the "author" of a work when one person tells another what to paint?

These are interesting ideas. I'm not totally convinced that the film doesn't inevitably point to these kinds of subjects or questions. It's not the driving force behind the documentary, but these kinds of thoughts and inquiries inevitably come up when engaging with the film.

[Melville]

I think the point was that so many people were buying her art on the basis that she alone was the artist. In an absolute sense, with no outside assistance whatsoever. I think this was the idea that people had in their head and an idea that certainly fueled her status as a 'child prodigy'. It was part of the allure, the possibility that she could have made these paintings all by herself. Some of these people weren't buying a painter, but a testament to the ingenuity and brilliance of a child. Understandably, I suppose, people felt betrayed.
This is all true, and this is what the film should have focused on: people's response to the possibility that the "prodigy" tale they were buying was a lie. Why they bought the paintings, and why they were so outraged by the story behind the paintings being (allegedly) a lie, seems much more interesting to me than the director awkwardly accusing the parents of lying.


These are interesting ideas. I'm not totally convinced that the film doesn't inevitably point to these kinds of subjects or questions. It's not the driving force behind the documentary, but these kinds of thoughts and inquiries inevitably come up when engaging with the film.
It definitely points to these subjects, but it doesn't have much to say about them. I think the story provided an opportunity to explore a lot of interesting ideas, but the director chose to sideline them in favor of a banal "human interest" story: "is the father lying? You decide!"

[Amnesiac]

I think I see your point.

It's been a few months since I last saw the film but I seem to remember it going out of its way to at least touch upon that notion of betrayal (over having bought a work from a pseudo-child prodigy). But not in any comprehensive sense, no. The film did always return to the idea of the parents and the ostensible deceit going on there ... but, in that sense, it also offered another interesting facet that I didn't expect to see going in. That is, this whole idea of the responsibility that hangs on the filmmaker in a situation like this, and whether or not he or she can remain detached from the subject matter at hand. He avoided asking the hard questions and potentially ruining the happiness of this family because he got implicated into the events, and the people, he was recording. He became attached. The anxiety and moral crisis of the director was kind of intriguing, in that sense.

Or maybe I'm remembering it as being more intriguing than it actually was. I guess I just saw it as a sort of a reminder that documentaries can never be a strictly point-and-shoot affair. Nor can a documentarist ever take his human sensibilities out of the situation. It is an interesting example of what can happen when you point the camera on people - as in, what happens to those people and what happens to the people behind the camera. Was the father acting awkward simply because he was aware the camera was on him and he was uncomfortable? Should the director have pushed the question of deceit harder or are his scruples to be admired? That sort of thing was interesting.

[balmakboor]

Yep, The Burmese Harp is one terrific movie. It reminded me of something by John Ford in its use of music. It may even be my favorite Japanese film so far.

[Ivan Drago]

Planet Terror is a masterpiece of cinema.

Quoted and repped for truth.

[megladon8]

Goldfinger's reputation as the best in the series still baffles me to this day.

Especially when the one before it was so clearly superior.

[Melville]

Weighing in on the meandering debate from the last couple pages...

Regarding Darren Aronofsky, and Requiem for a Dream specifically, Israfel wrote

The film presents us with 4 repugnant characters that are likely to most, unidentifiable...
and later

This is what we see in his films - the melding of fiction and reality - to the point that we are uncertain as to the veracity of their experiences, and indeed, our own. His modernist approach is the tale of isolated individuals bent on self-destruction, but his postmodern sensibility is the highly subjective, relativistic approach he takes to this theme. Similar to other postmodern stylized films such as Atonement and Domino, we enter into the perspectives and point-of-views of the protagonists, and the formal elements of the medium take on a literalization of subjectivity; this use of form to explicate meaning in challenging ways is something that I do not think Wes Anderson successfully does with his aesthetic.
First off, I don't see what's repugnant or unidentifiable about the characters in Requiem for a Dream. They're self-destructive people who yearn for an ideal life. Isn't much of modern literature and film, from Dostoevsky to Scorsese, based on the identifiability of such characters? Admittedly they are slightly less self-aware of their self-destruction than is the typical modernist hero, but doesn't their cluelessness make them pitiable rather than repugnant?

Second, I think your statement about Aronofsky's style, that it melds fiction and reality in a postmodern way, is actually far more true of Anderson's style. Aronofksy uses a hyper-subjective style (e.g. by strapping the camera to the characters' chests, splitting the frame to show the mental distance between two characters, violently shaking the image when a character screams) to evoke the characters' subjective states of mind, thus "literalizing their subjectivity" in the film's form, as you say, but what is post-modern about that? It seems like high modernism, a la the stream-of-consciousness writing of the '20s and '30s. The author disappears behind the subjectivity of the characters. Requiem provides a semblance of objectivity by repeatedly flashing between its various characters, thus giving us something like a birds-eye-view of them, but the fugue of despair that it creates with this method is no more postmodern than the large-scale picture of human interrelationships presented in something like Ulysses. The ever-more-rapid cuts between the characters reveals an overall picture of the increasing similarity between the subjects' subjectivity as they slide into utter despair, but each scene is completely rooted in its subjective form. That's pure modernism, not postmodernism. I'm a huge fan of that kind of evocation of subjectivity via form, but it's hardly a "challenging" approach at this point (though admittedly it never seemed to take off in film as much as it did in literature).

Anderson's style seems both more postmodern and more complex in how it relates fiction to reality. In his films, as Duncan said, the characters yearn for a kind of whimsical world of yesteryear. But the form of the films insists that this whimsical world is the actual world of the films themselves. The symmetric compositions, the slow motion, the art direction littered with personal mementos, and the costumed characters all present the world as something contrived, something fictional; this effect is heightened in Tenenbaums by the narrator reading the story from a whimsical little book, and in The Life Aquatic by the similarities between Zissou's films and Anderson's film, as baby doll mentioned. And this fictional world isn't just any fiction: it has precisely the sense of a whimsical, ideal world that the characters yearn for (and which probably never existed); at the same time, as Duncan noted, all of the mementos and costumes encapsulate the characters—not in their entirety, but in their storybook dimensions. In a sense, the characters have secreted their desires and essences into the style of the film itself. Thus, the style surrounds the characters with the world that they are perpetually searching for, adding to the sense of bittersweet melancholy that pervades the stories. But the style is also extremely overt, and as you say, it draws attention to itself. This makes sure that we see the world not merely as it relates to the characters, but as it relates to Anderson himself. The world is presented as his creation as much as it is the ether of his characters' wistful yearnings. But rather than the authorial voice taking precedence over the characters' subjectivity, as in much of traditional pre-modern storytelling, here the authorial voice and the characters' subjectivity meet in the film's form and perpetually play off each other within it. This is most exemplified by scenes like Margot's arrival on the bus in Tenenbaums. Margot comes toward us in slow motion, her arrival set to music; we see her as the idealized image that Richie wishes for. But the characters' conversation (and both earlier and later events) ensures that we see this moment through a bittersweet lens; we know the characters are deeply unhappy, and that the film's presentation of this moment is a reflection of their desires rather than a fulfillment of them. At the same time, the narration, the costumes, and the overt style insist that the entire scene is an artifice. But this artificiality is not ironic. It is the author's voice, and the author's voice carries all the wistful melancholy of the characters themselves; he beckons us to sympathize, to wish for this artificial world even as we see it as an artifice. Unlike in Aronofsky's style, where the form gives us the characters' subjectivity in as direct a manner as possible, in Anderson's style we are presented with multiple layers of fiction and reality.

[Mysterious Dude]

Goldfinger's reputation as the best in the series still baffles me to this day.

Especially when the one before it was so clearly superior.
I'm baffled that anyone can prefer one James Bond film over any other. They're all basically the same.

[megladon8]

I'm baffled that anyone can prefer one James Bond film over any other. They're all basically the same.


A large quantity of them, yes, but there are several that break the mold.

Plus it'd be just silly to say that they're all of the same quality.

[Qrazy]

I'm baffled that anyone can prefer one James Bond film over any other. They're all basically the same.

Several are substantially worse than the rest.

[megladon8]

This seems a little fraudulent...

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/516BYGMQTJL._SS500_.jpg

[MadMan]

Goldfinger's reputation as the best in the series still baffles me to this day.

Especially when the one before it was so clearly superior.Its one of the best Bonds, and I actually thought it was the best for a while. I now think From Russia With Love is the best. Goldfinger is Top 5 Bond material though.

And I love the Bond series. Action films are good fun. What, cinema can't be enjoyable?

Oh and Prince of Darkness just might be one of John Carpenter's best films. Man was that a freaky experience.

[Stay Puft]

I'm baffled that anyone can prefer one James Bond film over any other. They're all basically the same.


Not all of them feature this:

http://www.eccentric-cinema.com/images2003/movie_pix_a-i/dad-13.jpg

[megladon8]

I'm with you in your love for From Russia With Love, MadMan.

It's not only the best Bond film, but one of the defining films of the 1960s.

And i also agree with you on Prince of Darkness. That footage of Satan in the doorway still gives me the heebie-jeebies.

I need to get that one on DVD.

Anyways, double-agreement = rep. Don't spend it all in one place.

[Amnesiac]

The symmetric compositions, the slow motion, the art direction littered with personal mementos, and the costumed characters all present the world as something contrived, something fictional; this effect is heightened in Tenenbaums by the narrator reading the story from a whimsical little book [...] In a sense, the characters have secreted their desires and essences into the style of the film itself. Thus, the style surrounds the characters with the world that they are perpetually searching for, adding to the sense of bittersweet melancholy that pervades the stories.

Using this opportunity to think out loud. Is The Royal Tenenbaums a film about characters searching for an impossible, fairy-tale world where they can finally find some sort of cathartic peace? I suppose in many ways it is. Characters desiring something which is either long past, dead, or never came to fruition in the first place (in that sense, it's sometimes less about nostalgia and more about the frustrations of desire... both of which lead the characters on the same search for this impossible world of catharsis, reconciliation and wish-fulfillment).



This is most exemplified by scenes like Margot's arrival on the bus in Tenenbaums. Margot comes toward us in slow motion, her arrival set to music; we see her as the idealized image that Richie wishes for. But the characters' conversation (and both earlier and later events) ensures that we see this moment through a bittersweet lens; we know the characters are deeply unhappy, and that the film's presentation of this moment is a reflection of their desires rather than a fulfillment of them. At the same time, the narration, the costumes, and the overt style insist that the entire scene is an artifice. But this artificiality is not ironic. It is the author's voice, and the author's voice carries all the wistful melancholy of the characters themselves; he beckons us to sympathize, to wish for this artificial world even as we see it as an artifice.

Hm. This is a pretty convincing argument. I like it. I always loved that scene between Margot and Richie, but I've never seen it interpreted in this way.


Unlike in Aronofsky's style, where the form gives us the characters' subjectivity in as direct a manner as possible, in Anderson's style we are presented with multiple layers of fiction and reality.

Yeah. That's an interesting distinction.

[Bosco B Thug]

Seen Bruiser. Not bad, George. Not bad at all. This is the first non-zombie film I've seen from Romero, and it does hold up, mainly due to a very strong central performance by Jason Flemyng - try acting your way like that through a blank mask - and scenery chewing by Peter Stormare. However, the revenge plot is predictable and the film is so fast and short, it's over by the time you're getting excited about it, although it does have a grand finale with The Misfits. Like in his Dead trilogy, Romero very obviously chooses his targets (this time, yuppie culture and metrosexuality) and attacks them with no mercy. I also liked the cinematography, which in some scenes became a key element, foreshadowing events and contributing to the suspense. It's strange that this came out roughly the same year as American Psycho, for they cover much of the same ground. In fact, I think this film is a lot funnier. Yeah, not bad, but just barely more than average. It does have ambitions. Romero's avant garde tendencies do show up on occasion and the Misfits finale is nice and surreal and expressive, but the film overall is pretty mundane.


bah, Bah, BAH! This is a great, great film. Among the most underseen/underrated thriller/horror films I have seen. Wow, never heard this one touted before. I will seek it out now.


If I have the time this week or during the next I will try and do justice to Peeping Tom with a review. Cause that movie is fantastic. One of the best horror movies I've ever seen, really. Glad you enjoyed it, it's an interesting and colorful film, isn't it? Quick, answer! Peeping Tom or Psycho?

Semi-re-watched Peeping Tom on TCM, too. Yeah, I have to think about it too...

[MadMan]

I'm with you in your love for From Russia With Love, MadMan.

It's not only the best Bond film, but one of the defining films of the 1960s.I agree that its one of the best films of the 60s. Its the only Bond film to get a 100 from me.


And i also agree with you on Prince of Darkness. That footage of Satan in the doorway still gives me the heebie-jeebies.

I need to get that one on DVD.Yeah the dream sequence was creepy. The green goo stuff is cool as well.


Anyways, double-agreement = rep. Don't spend it all in one place.Wahoo!

Bosco Peeping Tom is better than Psycho. By about, oh, 7-8 points. I just realized that out of the 7 films I've seen from 1960, five of them are horror. Awesome. 1960 was a good year for horror from what I've seen, and "Tom" stands a good chance of cracking my Top 20 list. Which I should finish this week so I can then edit it next year.

[Kurious Jorge v3.1]

I watched There Will Be Blood with my mom. She thought it was stupid.

Everyone should think about re-evaluating it now.

[Amnesiac]

I watched There Will Be Blood with my mom.

Speaking of Anderson, he was at the Sans Sebastian Festival receiving an award for There Will Be Blood. He even talked about the prospect of doing a new film. His answer was great - he spent the summer lazing about ("being a bum") and he's been distracted by this and that. In other words, don't expect a new film too soon. Unfortunately! :sad:

You can check out the clip where he mentions all of this here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDsp7mvem6I). Also, if you can block out the Spanish dubbing in the later half of the clip, you'll notice that Anderson states that he and Day-Lewis have plans to collaborate again in a few years. Here's hoping that pans out.

Also, I'm looking for a more complete clip of his comments at the festival. I'd be really grateful to anyone who could find something of the sort.

[Hugh_Grant]

I watched There Will Be Blood with my mom. She thought it was stupid.

Everyone should think about re-evaluating it now.
My mom was unimpressed as well. She hated the score. Now that's crazy talk.

[Ezee E]

My mom liked it.

Anyways, Denver Film Festival released their lineup. Here's my plan:

Evening with Richard Jenkins
Waltz with Bashir
Tokyo!
The Desert Within
The Class
3 Monkeys
Donkey Punch
Surveillance

[Duncan]

...he beckons us to sympathize, to wish for this artificial world even as we see it as an artifice. Well said.

[Duncan]

I watched Passchendaele over the weekend. I won't say it didn't get me choked up, but Jesus is it ever manipulative. It takes Western civ.'s biggest symbol (Christ on the cross) and milks it for all its sentimental worth. I suppose these nationalistic films have a place, and I think there's some value to playing up Canadian heroism to Canadians, but it's not really what I'm looking for in a film. Though it has a "child" going to war, it totally misses why Vonnegut gave Slaughterhouse-Five the subtitle The Children's Crusade.


edit: actually, now that I think about it, this movie kinda sucked.

[Ezee E]

Elite Squad comes out on DVD this week. Sweet!

[Grouchy]

I'm baffled that anyone can prefer one James Bond film over any other. They're all basically the same.
Huh, even you must know that's not true.

And Bosco, I might have been a tad too positive about Bruiser. It's entertaining, but very forgettable and, like I said, maybe because its plot twists are so predictable it feels like it's over in a heartbeat.

A better movie is Fred Dekker's Night of the Creeps. Man, what a blast. I definitively got big Landis and Raimi vibes from the camera-work, and both directors (along with every other major Horror guy) are honored with character surnames. The plot is pure insanity, combining a slasher axe killer with a cop revenge subplot, an alien invasion, and creepy crawlers straight out of Cronenberg's Shivers. Dekker comes off as a huge film buff and he never takes his material too seriously, while at the same time providing some tense scare scenes. There are many similarities between this and Monster Squad, although Creeps is by far the more excessive and better film. This is the first time I recognized actor Tom Atkins (from Halloween III and The Fog) and I gotta say, he's fucking great and amazingly versatile despite his tough guy looks. I'll be rewatching this one for kicks anytime I feel like it.

Oh, and having seen the two alternate endings, the cemetery one is the winner.

[Winston*]

My mum hated There Will Be Blood also. Just fyi.

[Ezee E]

Sounds like my ma is the coolest ma of all.

[Scar]

I told my buddy to watch There Will Be Blood w/o his wife. I told him it was a slow burn of a movie.

Did he listen? No.

Twenty minutes in: "This is boring, I can't believe Rob told you to watch this."

Repeat every 20 minutes.

[Sven]

My mother liked it about as much as I did. "Good acting, but otherwise long and dumb." Her words.

[Cult]

I watched Clueless last night for the first time since I was 10 or 11. Still fun as heck. And things I never got back then but chuckled at now:

-"My plastic surgeon says to avoid activities where balls fly at my nose" "Well there goes your social life"

-"The preferred term is hymenally challenged"

-Travis donating his bongs to the relief fund. I just thought they were sculptures...or something.

[Raiders]

My wife and my whole family loved the heck out of There Will Be Blood. My family is awesome.

[Dead & Messed Up]

I watched Clueless last night for the first time since I was 10 or 11. Still fun as heck. And things I never got back then but chuckled at now:

-"My plastic surgeon says to avoid activities where balls fly at my nose" "Well there goes your social life"

-"The preferred term is hymenally challenged"

-Travis donating his bongs to the relief fund. I just thought they were sculptures...or something.

"Why learn to park when everywhere you go has valet?"

:lol:

It's a very funny, surprisingly heartfelt movie.

[Ezee E]

I always figured people reacted to Clueless back then as they act to Juno today.

[Cult]

I always figured people reacted to Clueless back then as they act to Juno today.
It's still held up, as evidenced last night for me. I doubt Juno will, but then again I didn't like it to begin with.

Low blow comparison there.

[Cult]

Also, "back then"? You're making me feel old for remembering people's reactions to something in 1995.

[Dead & Messed Up]

I always figured people reacted to Clueless back then as they act to Juno today.

I haven't seen Juno, so I can't attest to its status, but my memory of Clueless is that people found it a funny teen comedy. Nobody was singing its praises to the rafters.

However, I do think it's emerged as the teen movie to beat for the nineties era.

[Ezee E]

Also, "back then"? You're making me feel old for remembering people's reactions to something in 1995.
Sorry for the awakening.

[Milky Joe]

I haven't seen Juno, so I can't attest to its status, but my memory of Clueless is that people found it a funny teen comedy. Nobody was singing its praises to the rafters.

However, I do think it's emerged as the teen movie to beat for the nineties era.

It and Can't Hardly Wait were the best teen flicks to come out of the 90s, by my money.

[Ezee E]

Clueless sure, but the other one...

[Milky Joe]

The other one... what? Is awesome? Yes, I agree. :)

[Dead & Messed Up]

There aren't many great movies about teenagers. I'd say the list goes something like American Graffiti, Dazed and Confused, Clueless, and probably Ghost World.

[Amnesiac]

Paul Thomas Anderson's first film, the short The Dirk Diggler Story (http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=33186).

I've actually been wanting to see this one for a long time now. Figured that some of you might want to take a look. Oh, and if anyone has a link to Cigarettes and Coffee, I'd really appreciate it.

[Spinal]

There aren't many great movies about teenagers. I'd say the list goes something like American Graffiti, Dazed and Confused, Clueless, and probably Ghost World.

Fucking Amal
City of God
Los Olvidados
Heavenly Creatures
Y tu mama tambien
Fat Girl

[Rowland]

I don't think I'd show There Will Be Blood to anyone I know. Maybe I'm just cynical... and besides, my moderate enthusiasm for the film was rooted more in respect than actual enjoyment.

[MadMan]

The Serpent and the Rainbow was a solid horror film that I kind of enjoyed, although the last act completely descended into a very strange sort of craziness. I realize that the more I see from Bill Pullman, the more I think that he's a decent actor, maybe even a serviceable or good one. In any case I think he adds something to this movie, as the voodoo angle ranges from eerie to silly. I can't imagine that the book this movie was inspired by is anything like the movie, and from what I've read on message boards the movie is mostly fiction. Oh well.

[balmakboor]

There aren't many great movies about teenagers. I'd say the list goes something like American Graffiti, Dazed and Confused, Clueless, and probably Ghost World.

My faves are Over the Edge and Paranoid Park.

[megladon8]

The Tingler was actually pretty good. William Castle's gimmicky filmmaking is in full swing here, to the point where - towards the end - he actually stops the movie to tell the audience to scream. But on the whole it was a good little horror film with some definite downfalls.

First of all, they shouldn't have shown the monster. Showing the x-rays would have been enough, or even the scene where he pulls it out of a body and we see its silhouette behind a curtain. But even "for the time", the effects used to show the monster are bad, bad, bad.

Second, there's a twist at the end that strengthens some of the film (mostly Price's character), but simultaneously weakens another character, and the logic behind said characters' actions with regards to the twist are never fleshed out, resulting in it feeling tacked on.

But it's a really cool idea for a movie - what if fear (that is, the emotion itself) were a physical entity in our bodies which could cause physical damage, or even death?

[MadMan]

I love The Tingler. My thoughts:

http://www.mondo-digital.com/tingler.gif


The Tingler(1959)

There may never be another film promoter quite like William Castle. Yes he made films as well, but he also showcased a natural ability and a genius flair for coming up with ways to get people to see his films. Gimmicks and crazy promotions were all part and parcel of his trade, and to top that off he wasn’t that bad of a director although his movies were on the cheesy side. Yet they were largely entertaining regardless, and all of them dealt with the supernatural to some degree, along with man’s ability to do harm to others. The Tingler somewhat mixed both, although the creature is both very real and yet a part of people’s imaginations.

Vincent Price here plays the protagonist, a rarity since he normally portrayed and became famous for playing screen villains. As a doctor obsessed with fear, he goes to great lengths to prove his theory about fear, even scaring his unfaithful wife and going on an LSD trip in what is a rather crazy and frantic scene. This is all in an attempt to locate the tingler, a creature that feeds upon fear and then crushes its victims to death unless they scream. It looks like an earwing straight out of hell, and due to the fact that it’s a plastic puppet it looks more disgusting than scary.

No, the more freaky and creepy moments of the film stem from a part of the film where a woman is being scared out of her wits by persons unseen. Some of those moments in this part are very cool as well, and bear Castle’s frequent use of fake gore which was also featured in House on Haunted Hill(1959) as well.

Overall I think this film deals with the issue of fear in a rather interesting way. The creature is simply a manifestation of fear, and thus illustrates how its very possible for one to die of fright. Castle played into this idea furthermore in this film by having buzzers installed in some theater seats to replicate the feeling of being attacked by the tingler. Thus, he not only scared the crap out of the audience members, but also showed that fear is largely all in your head. Well until Price removes a huge bug thing from your spinal column. For scientific purposes of course. 81

[Grouchy]

The Serpent and the Rainbow was a solid horror film that I kind of enjoyed, although the last act completely descended into a very strange sort of craziness. I realize that the more I see from Bill Pullman, the more I think that he's a decent actor, maybe even a serviceable or good one. In any case I think he adds something to this movie, as the voodoo angle ranges from eerie to silly. I can't imagine that the book this movie was inspired by is anything like the movie, and from what I've read on message boards the movie is mostly fiction. Oh well.
That craziness at the end, while awesome, is completely at odds with the rest of the movie and is more like something out of the Evil Dead films. Both Pullman and Michael Gough are both very good in it, though.

My mom hasn't seen There Will Be Blood.

[megladon8]

Great write-up, MadMan.

Your description of the tingler as "an earwig straight out of hell" is spot on.

It kind of reminded me of those worm-thingies in The Wrath of Khan.

[Izzy Black]

Isn't Kubrick's clinical, capacious, symmetrical austere mise-en-scène itself decorative?

It seems you did not read my response. The use of "decorative" is to point to an aesthetic that is embellished by uneconomical ornamentation. For example, when you enter into an empty and unfurnished bedroom, you would not say that it is decorated. A room can even be self-consciously undecorated. This is not a radical claim here. We may also use 'decoration' in the context of where one might say any intentional artistic creation is decoration, but that would only be applicable in our case when bypassing my very clear elaboration of use, which you have done. A decorative mise-en-scene would stand in extreme contrast, to say, realism.


What should his colour palette and mise-en-scène be cutting into?

You have an odd penchant for simplistic reduction. The "cut" is not literal. The issue is that I find that his cinema does not ring intellectually or emotionally deep.


Except Burton's content has never matched his flamboyant production design.

Here, the concern is that Burton is both "dark" and "ambitious" in only a superficial sense, and neither descriptions say anything of inherent worth with regards to cinema. In fact, darkness as an inherent attribute of greatness is a rather dubious assumption. Ambition, on the other hand, is relative; Burton is largely unambitious and safe where it matters as far as I am concerned.


Dead Man is a film about the destruction of the American landscape and its indiginous people. Zelig touches on Jewish assimilation (a worthy subject), but I found it hindered by the pseduo-documentary approach. Annie Hall, Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters are all terrific films, but they have less resonance.

Zelig is a progressive film that really introduces the mockumentary style of filmmaking, thus playing on the notion of fiction and reality and examining filmmking form in the process. It is generally regarded as one of his most ambitious films, and to which you, ironically, dismiss for being psuedo-documentary, even though this is precisely the film's element of merit and the similar thing you seem to revere Anderson for below. It seems to me to be an inconsistent argument.


There are long takes o' plenty in Real Life, Modern Romance and Lost in America. The most obvious example is the scene in Modern Romance where Brooks takes a bunch of 'ludes and stumbles around his apartment, playing records and making phone calls.

Again, it seems you did not read the points of my argument. In the 80s, many films had sequences with long-takes. Modern Romance is plagued by fairly short medium shots. It has a few shots in between these that are longer than its shorter shots, but these shots are no longer than the average shot length in say a Robert Altman or Woody Allen film. Again, you have neglected to say anything meaningful about Albert Brooks' alleged cinematic style, while clinging to a rather suspicious reverence for alleged longer takes than average as some testament to style that supersedes the general banality and conventionality of his shot selections. He is choc full of obligatory establishing shots, inter-cut dialogue shooting, and medium shots. He is a stock filmmaker with a stock filmmaking method. You put the same screenplay in any other director's lap and you get pretty much the same result. He has contributed nothing to cinema visually; Woody Allen, on the other hand, has had an eye for visual his entire career, and I am sure we can go down the examples.


Mother might be said to be Allen-esque in that its subject is Jewish neurosis (I haven't seen The Muse), but compare Brooks' more generous treatment of Debbie Reynolds' character with the caricatured Jewish mother in Oedipus Wrecks. Brooks allows us to empathize with both characters' points of views, in contrast with Allen who has us identify completely with his character and treats the mother as an overbearing caricature.

You mean Woody Allen's short film in the director ensemble film New York Stories? You compare one of Brooks' popular feature length films to one of Allen's most limited due to its scope. I do not find the Jewish mother in Crimes and Misdemeanors or Hannah And Her Sisters exactly caricatured. In fact, he is much sympathetic to this points of view. What is more, as in Hannah, we see Allen's own arguments against the absence of God somewhat challenged by the traditionalism of his Jewish parents, with his father rejoining that did not know how the microwave worked either, but he still uses it. The Jewish mother and family at the dinner table in Crimes also have conflicting points-of-view about morality, the Holocaust, and indeed, Jewish identity. To say Woody Allen's Jewish mothers are mere caricatures is a bit disingenuous. They are no more deprecated than the rest of the characters in his films and are often contradictory and human.


Crimes and Misdemeanors plays it safe by not showing Martin Landau pulling the trigger himself.

What? How is this playing it safe? There is nothing inherently "safe" or "ambitious" about pulling the trigger or not pulling the trigger. The key is examining context. In this context, what we have is a realistic portrayal of bourgeois angst. The alternative would undermine the central character's entire dilemma. The entire film is structured around Landau's character attempting to his hands clean from the entire mess to preserve his status. The fact that he goes to his mobster brother in order to pull strings raises far more issues about upper-class impersonality and stereotypes of the scheming Jew. In fact, his working-class brother is almost painted with a sense of honor in his unabashed honesty and frankness. I find this far more provocative and controversial than the Hitchcockian, easy-reward suspense simplicity you would suggest here.


Match Point is clearly superior.

Or, clearly not. Match Point fits nicely into a genre: Dramatic suspense thriller. Crimes and Misdemeanors fits the Allen genre of his own making. Match Point is a respectable film, but I most would not claim that it is more ambitious than Crimes and Misdemeanors. In fact, the criticisms of Match Point come directly from the fact that it treads familiar territory.


Admittedly, Brooks has never made anything that dark, but the characters he plays in his first three features, Real Life, Modern Romance and Lost in America are all highly unlikeable.

Again - bogus criticism. They are unlikable - and? The films are dull. The unlikable individual has been a staple of modernist cinema. We can go right down the line of American New Wave filmmakers and etch out hallmark examples. As such, unlikable characters are hardly a thing of challenge. Brooks is forgettable. You wont see his name alongside the auteurs he apes within respectable critical circles anytime soon.


Requiem for a Dream is less ambitious because the content is more conventional. In relation to Pi, Aronofsky's style is slicker and more refined, but he's not breaking any new ground.

You rely heavily on these unsupported tautologies. The content is conventional, but that is to say nothing of my argument on Pi's conventional narrative mechanics and Requiem's progression of theme and style. Breathless' content is conventional, but that says nothing inherent about the film's ambition.


Also, if they were "unidentifiable" (a sweet, lonely Jewish mother who has a Snake Pit breakdown unidenfiable?), why would we care about their downfall.

Not a very wide audience can relate to a drug-addiction so extreme that it results in submission to gang-rape, an amputated arm, and shock therapy. These characters are incredibly unlikable and deep within a cesspool of immobilizing despair, but that is not to say we cannot have any concern for them. We have empathy, but not sympathy. They are still human beings, but they are not very identifiable either. What is more, I never said we do care about their downfall. In fact, I contrasted this film with the third film in the manner in which we are pulled into caring for the character because of his strong melodramatic plight.


Maybe I'm just slow, but I thought it was a thriller.

American cinema is defined by the genre film. Michael Mann works in the tradition of his contemporaries. His film is no more just a "thriller" as Hitchcock's film are, or Scorsese's films are crime dramas. Yes - they wear these sleeves, but the American auteur has worked within the genre film and used them as cinematic canvases to mount larger themes for ages. Godard devoted his career to commenting on this tradition. We can go down the line and see this - Francis Ford Coppola, John Ford, Milos Forman, Abel Ferrara, Martin Scorsese, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and David Lean. The genre film was largely what separated American cinema from European cinema, at least in the weak sense, but that has changed some. Thus, to reduce Mann's cinema to mere "thriller" is to do the man a great disservice, not to mention my arguments.


Why is that a reach to compare Stillman to Rohmer? Both are conservative filmmakers who make dialogue-driven films. It's less awkward to compare Stillman to Rohmer (as many reviewers have) than to look at Hollywood product through the lens of "exploring spatiality." (Postmodernism will not make the plot tighter or more compelling.)

It is not a reach to draw similarities between Stillman and Rohmer anymore than it is to draw similarities between Woody Allen and Stillman, as there are some. (Although, calling Stillman a conservative is complicated given that his parents were Democratic politicians and he has been a self-described socialist of the 19th Century Fourier tradition, as opposed to Marxist, which was autobiographically carried over to the main lead in Metropolitan.) Yet, it is a reach to say that Stillman is "aping" Rohmer, when Stillman's cinema has little to no direct connection to Rohmer at all. As for Michael Mann, see my arguments above, and make a real defense of my initial argument instead of tossing them aside dismissively as though citing Hollywood product suggests something inherent about a lack of cinematic rigor, when the very same product gave us Welles, Hitchcock, and Altman. Moreover, you can find a great deal of literature discussing much of the very same themes I discussed above with regards to Mann's cinema. He has cited the postmodern paintings by Eric Fischl and Robert Longo as an influence to his cinematic style; an example being (inspired by one of these paintings) the scene in Heat where Deniro's character stands in a modernized metallic-hued condo with an oversize window view of the ocean as his gun rests on the table next to him; both captured expertly in the frame, and the table being perhaps the only piece of furniture in his quintessentially vacant home. The visual space says much about his loneliness and the demands of his work-obsessed criminal vocation in a decaying modern society. There is no stretch in my arguments about Mann. It is the backbone of his cinema.


In Barcelona, the protagonist fails to defend his views with his cheesy red ant/black ant metaphor, but then Thomas Gibson shows up at the end to make the case more articulately. And then they all go to America and eat hot dogs. What am I missing?

You are referring to a different scene, but no, Dickie Taylor's analogy at the end was in reference to anti-Americanism. The analogy about US foreign policy was in fact completely shot down in the initial scene. After Ted explains the ant metaphor, Ramone cites illegal "ant" landing strips in foreign countries and the absurdity of substituting ants for human beings, and then Fred splats the ants with a rock, but the rock fails to kill all the ants as they climb on top of it. In the following scene, Ted says, "That was really terrible - I was trying to convince them to look at Americans in a new way. In one stupid move you confirm their worst assumptions" and Fred responds, "I am their worst assumption." What you have described as the endorsement of uncritical patriotism really amounts to satirical humor.

The scene I initially was referring to, however, is at the first party scene where Ted dissents against Ramone's accusation that the USS Maine was sunk internally preceding the Spanish-American war. Ted responds tenuously with the knee-jerk and inarticulate argument, "Lies! All lies!" to which everyone around him rejects. After, he decries Fred for not backing him up and alleges that he made a complete fool of himself. Fred humorously assures him that only 20 people saw.

Thus, what you missed in both this scene and the other scene is the clear satire. The entire film is laden with satirical jabs at both anti-Americanism and overt patriotism. The anti-Americanism is charged for groundless journalistic assumptions, terrorism, and speculation, and Americanism for interventionist foreign policy, stateside violence, and cultural ignorance. There are several self-deprecating lines of dialogue with regards to the intelligence of Americans. Another funny exchange is when Fred says to a woman inquiring on American violence that shootings in America just means they are "better shots" not that they are more violent than other people. We can see irony with Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco as well. As in Metropolitan, we have lines like "I really hate snobbery" and the thought that Luis Buñuel The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie would finally "tell the truth" about the bourgeoisie. The strictly conservative readings of Whit Stillman's films are just as short-sighted as the strictly liberal readings. In reality, Stillman's cinema is about the loss of innocence, moments passed, the importance of interpersonal relationships and virtuous living, which are neither pure "conservative" principles nor "liberal." The reason Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy are such pervading influences is because they represent the kind of 19th Century liberalism and value system that informs his cinema.

[MadMan]

Great write-up, MadMan.

Your description of the tingler as "an earwig straight out of hell" is spot on.

It kind of reminded me of those worm-thingies in The Wrath of Khan.Hey, thanks. On occasion I actually bother to write something. I do write a lot, but most of it doesn't get posted. Due to laziness.

Yeah it does kind of look like a gigantic version of those worm things in Wrath of Khan. Those really freaked me out. Damn that Khan, sticking nasty critters in people's ears that end up eating their brains and stuff.

[Izzy Black]

I don't think it should be controversial to say that films which are about something--in the case of Dead Man, the treatment of Native Americans by European settlers--are more interesting and resonant than films about nothing at all. Robin Wood wrote a short piece on Away From Her for CineAction! in which he said it was well executed but too safe as the subject matter is entirely apolitical.

It is not controversial to say that a film about something is more interesting and resonant than films about nothing. But then again, that is not what you said. You have been arguing for films that are "ambitious" or "dark," sometimes interchanged with "edgy." I find none of these adjectives inherently valuable or particularly descriptive of anything.

I recognize that you are a political kind of writer, and I am typically sympathetic to this approach to cinema (and have been charged of the same). In general, I am pointed toward a progressive cinema of any kind, but this need not necessarily be political, although often times it can be, and is. Away From Her I reviewed rather dismissively, but I am not convinced leftist politics would have saved the film. I found its political non-sequiturs distracting of course, and thus by inclusion, negative to the overall merit of the film. Yet, this is not quite the same as docking the film for being apolitical when it need not be political. Nor is this the same as holding Sarah Polley to the litmus test of a radically political film simply because of some statements she has made in interviews and in public life. In fact, a completely insular, solipsist, apolitical type of film would be far more interesting to me coming from this young director given this knowledge than something that would unequivocally confirm my expectations. What is more, this can give rise to more nuanced and subtextual political interpretations and make her cinema all the more personal and intriguing. Politics is important, but a philosophical, self-reflexive, aesthetically progressive, or deconstructive cinema of great value can also be of rich flavor, importance, interest, and resonance.

As such, I am not sure we are so far from disagreement on this mark, but I am wary and skeptical of your use of terms like "ambitious" and "dark," which seem awfully non-analytical and vague at times. I am also less demanding of politics in my cinema.


You say "manipulative" like it's a bad thing. And I'd hardly say the deaf woman in In the Company of Men is benevolent. She just gets screwed over.

I say manipulative as though it were accurate - nothing else. I enjoy Labute's cinema precisely for its moral and narrative machinations. As for the deaf woman, she is not blameless, but she is a rather good person and as the male lead in The Shape of Things, is a bit naive. He creates incredibly likable and unoffensive characters that are screwed over and tortured - not just any arrogant or immoral schmo. It is easy to feel sympathy for their plight. The deafness in In The Company of Men is clearly used as a sympathy device.


The connection, or the contrast rather, is that Closer might seem nominally edgy next to most mainstream fare because the characters aren't likeable, but they're not as interesting as the characters in Labute's Your Friends and Neighbors, which also consists of a series of conversations and monologues between affluent white characters. Watching Nichols' film, I wanted the characters to be meaner to each other.

I have explained above that unlikable characters are a staple of cinema. There is nothing inherently "edgy" about it. It depends on the circumstances as to whether or not an unlikable character is of great challenge or value. In Closer, these characters are not presented for us to dislike or hate. These characters, as many have written, are reflections of different corners of ourselves in modern relationships. The contrast, as I note above, is that Labute is making characters that are contrived and archetypal to his plans, whereas Nichols endeavors to make characters that are accurate, not pointedly reprehensible. As a result, these characters are deeply flawed, self-conscious, occasionally ruthless, but mostly well-intentioned and searching for happiness. This is not the same as Labute's cinema. His characters are entirely misogynistic, amoral or immoral, and egocentric. The selfishness in Closer is connected to the desire happiness, and it is challenged by moral choices. The characters in Labute's cinema rarely undergo moral crises or dilemma. His antagonists are typically flat characters on a pointed and guiltless quest of destruction for self-fulfilling means. The characters in Closer wrestle with their emotions and moral impulses, even if they are ultimately childish and vain. Nichols attempts to paint an accurate picture of ourselves - the modern relationship - whereas Labute is more a philosophical provocateur of a certain type of person. I do not find that they have very much in common. To me, Labute comes closer to the philosophical endeavors of Lars von Trier, and Nichols to the classicism of, say, Bergman.


Déja vu is an impressive film and obviously self reflexive (it's all about light, the very matter of cinema). Also, unlike Enemy of the State, which I found shopworn and derivative, it has an interesting story.

We agree on Deja Vu, and as for Enemy of the State, it is true Tony Scott has an inclination toward pastiche and derivation.


In relation to Anderson's first two films, it's his first set outside of Texas and has a much larger cast of characters. If he's playing to his base, that's only because Rushmore was so singular that it invented a whole new base to play to.

Unfortunately, I do not find the switch of location and ensemble particularly ambitious. It regresses, I believe, in terms of its thematic/cinematic scope. The base he plays to is the indie crowd.


As I noted earlier, The Life Aquatic is a film about the filmmaking process and how everything becomes fiction. The underwater scenes deliberately look fake, the intertitles are the same font as the onscreen text in Szissou's documentaries and the score often sounds like temp music. When we see clips of Szissou's films, there's an ambiguity about how much is being staged for the camera.

Yes - I see the allusion, which is why I consider Aquatic to be his most interesting film, but it is all just very suggestive, is it not? I can see the faux-nature of the fiction of cinema as an allusion in the film, but I am not sure it says a whole lot about anything. It is not a terribly new thing to say that cinema is fictional and artificial. Brecht opened the floodgates and Godard, Welles, and Herzog jumped on board decades ago. The question is - where is he going with it? - If anywhere?


And you say dramatist like it's a bad thing. Maybe he doesn't explore postmodern spatiality, but his narrative structures are sound.

It is ironic to note your conservativism with regards to theme. Above, you talk about an imposed politicization and edgier dynamics with regards to Sarah Polley, and here you are content with the safe. The issue is that sound traditional narrative structures are rather dull to me. I do not find he has anything really interesting or relevant to say.

[Izzy Black]

I remember. Haha, I guess I was just trying to bait you a little there.

Take the scene where Chas confronts Royal in the games closet. Royal is distracted by some happy memory. Chas has no desire to reminisce over these games. This little exchange takes about 3 seconds, as Royal is interrupted before he can even finish a line. Since we are not told exactly what memory these characters do or do not want to recall we are invited to put ourselves in the shoes of each character and imagine why they would react to the sight of these games in the way that they do. When we consider them from Royal's perspective they represent a time when he and Chas were not fully estranged, and perhaps a stepping stone back to a meaningful relationship. If we consider them from Chas' perspective the games could represent those times when Royal would cheat at Monopoly by stealing money from the bank. Or, perhaps they could represent a genuinely happy memory that he and his father share, but that he wants to suppress because it would conflict with the contempt he currently feels towards Royal.

I think moments like this pop up in Anderson's films quite frequently. I like them because they are not forceful (as literally filming a scene from the perspectives of different characters is) but they are gently nuanced in the way that they invite audience participation. The camera never really deviates from objective observation of these events (with strong exceptions like the suicide attempt), but the viewer makes their own associations between character and object, displayed emotion and hidden one, based on whose subjectivity they decide to inhabit.

It may be a valid interpretation, but at the same time, it could be interpreted objectively as well. It could be that their memory of the games are not so far off from each other. It could be that the games represent to both characters a moment of connection and realization of a lost relationship for them both. The scene is suggestive enough to go your direction, perhaps, but I tend to interpret this in a more objective sense with very little other cues to go on. I must say, however, I am not as interested in these moments of suggestion as much as I am as a cinema that attempts to literally communicate emotions and feelings through cinematic form and technique. What you have pointed out here, for example, says more about written narration and story than technique. Its effect is mainly dramatic, which is worthwhile, but in my view, also limited.

[Izzy Black]

Melville, thanks for the response. I shall respond to you soon.

[MacGuffin]

Holy shit, man.

[MadMan]

That kind of discussion deserves its own thread. Not to be lost here. And because its too serious for this thread anyways, heh.

[MacGuffin]

I watched On the Waterfront today for the third time, and I think it might be great, but mostly because of the performances: both Brando and Saint are terrific, especially when together. Still, I'm not too big of a fan of the overbearing score, and for me, there is so much going on, I still feel like I have barely scratched the surface of the movie.

[Mal]

Israfel Senòr Paragraph.

[Mal]

I don't think I'd show There Will Be Blood to anyone I know. Maybe I'm just cynical... and besides, my moderate enthusiasm for the film was rooted more in respect than actual enjoyment.

My grandfather said that TWBB was the kind of movie that was ... made by people who "smoked that marijuana"

[megladon8]

My grandfather said that TWBB was the kind of movie that was ... made by people who "smoked that marijuana"


Your grandfather is awesome.

[Mal]

Your grandfather is awesome.

My grandfather is a racist and used to give me pennies for my birthday when I was a kid. Asshole.

[Ezee E]

My grandfather is a racist and used to give me pennies for my birthday when I was a kid. Asshole.
welcome back.

[megladon8]

Vincent Price doing acid was definitely the highlight of my evening.

[MadMan]

Vincent Price doing acid was definitely the highlight of my evening.I think according to IMDB.com it was the first time LSD use was depicted on screen. And yes that part of the movie was awesome. Price was straight out trippin'.

[Dead & Messed Up]

I watched some of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull again, since my roommate got a pirated copy. I stick by my opinion that it's a reasonable diversion. Of course, that makes for a crushingly disappointing Indiana Jones experience.

Then again, it's much, much better than the leaked Darabont script.

[megladon8]

I watched some of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull again, since my roommate got a pirated copy. I stick by my opinion that it's a reasonable diversion. Of course, that makes for a crushingly disappointing Indiana Jones experience.

Then again, it's much, much better than the leaked Darabont script.


Really? I haven't read the Darabont script, but I admit I assumed it was better.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Really? I haven't read the Darabont script, but I admit I assumed it was better.

I shit you not, it reads like fan fiction. Indy gets drunk and steals the Peruvian idol from the first Indy flick...from his own museum...by using a bag of sand on a weight sensor.

Yeah.

[transmogrifier]

I shit you not, it reads like fan fiction. Indy gets drunk and steals the Peruvian idol from the first Indy flick...from his own museum...by using a bag of sand on a weight sensor.

Yeah.


That sounds better than ANYTHING in the actual movie. I kid you not.

[dreamdead]

Paul Andrew Williams' London to Brighton is stunning work, and hopefully an emerging of a new British voice. Cast with typically Bressonian non-actors, the film charts a prostitute and a young girl who struggle to escape her pimp, and from the stranger who's sent the pimp after her. In this way, Williams starts to examine the social structure inherent to these conditions of living, and the film assumes a gritty tone that is apropos while never feeling stifling. Instead, the film allows its characters and settings time to breathe so that possible cliched material can assume an aura all its own. Because of this, the only real flaw comes in the film's climax, when plot catches up to character and the film starts to telegraph plot strands. Still, until that point the film is a wonder.

John Boorman's The Tiger's Tail is two films in one, and it suffers because of that. On one hand it documents the present conditions in Ireland, with the rift between the poor and the wealthy more prominent than ever and tracing the ennui that accompanies that milieu. On the other hand, it offers a trite story of doubles, chance, and representation, all of which offer Brendan Gleeson ample acting time, but which amount to little that hasn't been explored in other, better films. There are some dazzling sequences (a shift to a black and white embrace of the two Gleesons is amazing), but Boorman seems unclear of which story he wanted to highlight.

[Grouchy]

I shit you not, it reads like fan fiction. Indy gets drunk and steals the Peruvian idol from the first Indy flick...from his own museum...by using a bag of sand on a weight sensor.

Yeah.
That sounds totally fucking awesome. Where can I find the script? Drew's Script-O-Rama?

[Sven]

Kitano's Hana-Bi just gets better and better and better. I've seen it four times now and each time is like a revelation. Matter of fact, that's how all of his films are.

[Dead & Messed Up]

That sounds totally fucking awesome. Where can I find the script? Drew's Script-O-Rama?

It's been systematically removed from the interweb, but I could e-mail it to you.

That said, I can't imagine how that could be awesome, except in some horribly campy sort of way.

[dreamdead]

Kitano's Hana-Bi just gets better and better and better. I've seen it four times now and each time is like a revelation. Matter of fact, that's how all of his films are.

Definitely. I love how he fragments so much of the early part of this film, slowly unfurling it so that narrative connections become clear. Musically and thematically his best, though I know your preference to his softer side. And while the links to Kitano's own tragedies are a little too neat, I think it's one film that reveals so much of what is good about auteurism. I need to make this one a group watch with friends this year.

[Grouchy]

It's been systematically removed from the interweb, but I could e-mail it to you.

That said, I can't imagine how that could be awesome, except in some horribly campy sort of way.
Couldn't be campier than the film that came out. I sent you a PM with my e-mail address.

Re-watched Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast last night. Amazing film, but something puzzled me a bit - I clearly remember the opening titles being hand-written on a chalkboard by Cocteau's hand, yet the DVD copy I rented had very traditional credits instead. IMDb doesn't mention anything on it.

[Yxklyx]

I didn't realize until now that the final red room scene in Twin Peaks is an homage (or stolen from) the doors scene in Bava's Kill Baby Kill.

[Sven]

In Spy Game, the Rocky Mountain Way music cue to the Vietnam flashback is the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life. I can't believe they did that!

[megladon8]

Puzzlehead was a very unique, very odd little film. Certainly not a horror in any way, shape or form, so if you're interested in it, don't go in expecting that.

A man named Walter creates a robotic being in his image, named "Puzzlehead". He slowly teaches Puzzlehead how to be human, but when he begins letting Puzzlehead out of the house to run errands, the woman Walter has secretly loved (seemingly for a while) falls for Puzzlehead.

The result is basically a deceitful love triangle, with a subtly bleak ending.

I can't say I'm rushing to watch it again, but I'm glad I saw it, and it's one of the strangest films I've seen in a while.

[Rowland]

A second viewing of Sunshine has improved my opinion of it considerably. I no longer see the final act being nearly as problematic as I argued last year in the old Sunshine thread. Thoughts to come, along with catch-up for the rest of my recent viewings, all of which have thankfully been positive.

[Kurosawa Fan]

A second viewing of Sunshine has improved my opinion of it considerably. I no longer see the final act being nearly as problematic as I argued last year in the old Sunshine thread. Thoughts to come, along with catch-up for the rest of my recent viewings, all of which have thankfully been positive.

This is a far more accurate opinion.

[Cult]

I'm taking a break from Persona after about ten minutes (something came up). I'll assume it gets better, because all that junk at the beginning was uber pretentious. Unless of course it all ties in with the rest of the movie, then I'll shut up. But, it kinda reminded me of Illeana Douglas' short in Ghost World.

[megladon8]

I think Sunshine was one of the best movies of 2007.

Definitely going to be a BluRay purchase.

[Raiders]

I'm taking a break from Persona after about ten minutes (something came up). I'll assume it gets better, because all that junk at the beginning was uber pretentious. Unless of course it all ties in with the rest of the movie, then I'll shut up. But, it kinda reminded me of Illeana Douglas' short in Ghost World.

:|:|:|:|:|:|:|:|

[MacGuffin]

I'm taking a break from Persona after about ten minutes (something came up). I'll assume it gets better, because all that junk at the beginning was uber pretentious. Unless of course it all ties in with the rest of the movie, then I'll shut up. But, it kinda reminded me of Illeana Douglas' short in Ghost World.

Rep.

[Raiders]

Rep.

:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes: :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes: :rolleyes::rolleyes:

[Ezee E]

I'm taking a break from Persona after about ten minutes (something came up). I'll assume it gets better, because all that junk at the beginning was uber pretentious. Unless of course it all ties in with the rest of the movie, then I'll shut up. But, it kinda reminded me of Illeana Douglas' short in Ghost World.
Ha. It's funny because I can picture that as I nearly had to do the same thing.

But do watch it all the way through. You'll understand.

[The Mike]

Its one of the best Bonds, and I actually thought it was the best for a while. I now think From Russia With Love is the best. Goldfinger is Top 5 Bond material though.

And I love the Bond series. Action films are good fun. What, cinema can't be enjoyable?

Oh and Prince of Darkness just might be one of John Carpenter's best films. Man was that a freaky experience.

I'll agree with both on From Russia With Love, though I wouldn't call it my fave Bond. I'd probably have at least two up on it, and there are a couple I can barely recall I might prefer to it.

But I'll agree with Meg on Goldfinger...not among the best in my eyes.

And, Prince of Darkness OWNS. I freakin' love that movie. I used to pitch it to my friends as a movie with a "Vat o' Satan". 90% of the time, it worked every time.

Man, I might have to buy that DVD again. Mine's OOP and there's a remastered version now. :eek:

EDIT: Nevermind, it's not been remastered. They need to get on that ASAP.

[Spinal]

This website is freaking out on me. It's showing me posts where people are dismissing Bergman movies as pretentious after watching just 10 minutes. Maybe I'll try rebooting.

[Spinal]

Rep.

Aren't you the one who has Twentynine Palms is his top ten?

[MacGuffin]

Aren't you the one who has Twentynine Palms is his top ten?

It is one of my favorite movies.

[Cult]

This website is freaking out on me. It's showing me posts where people are dismissing Bergman movies as pretentious after watching just 10 minutes. Maybe I'll try rebooting.
I said something came up, and that I hope it gets better when I can resume it. Jeez.

Besides, that opening sequence was pretentious even if the rest of it is deft and amazing, as everyone seems to say it is. So, that's neither here nor there.

[Raiders]

Besides, that opening sequence was pretentious even if the rest of it is deft and amazing

No, it isn't. Not at all.

[Spinal]

I said something came up, and that I hope it gets better when I can resume it. Jeez.


Did you really expect that post to be greeted warmly? :)

[MacGuffin]

I hate to keep bringing it up, because I know the majority probably don't care what I think, but could On the Waterfront be one of the best movies ever made? I don't know. I keep trying to think of a duo with better onscreen chemistry than the one we have here, and to think that they actually hated each other on the set! Plus, it is just beautifully photographed: the placement and use of shadows, the backdrop of the waterfront in the distance; and oh: how 'bout that industrial ambient soundtrack? It sure is awesome, too bad I can't say the same about the score itself. Otherwise, perfect maybe? I don't know. I'll see how a fourth viewing treats me in the future. For now, yes.

[Cult]

Did you really expect that post to be greeted warmly? :)

I expected something more like E's response. Or maybe encouragement that the beginning stuff has a point.

[thefourthwall]

Paul Andrew Williams' London to Brighton is stunning work, and hopefully an emerging of a new British voice [...] the only real flaw comes in the film's climax, when plot catches up to character and the film starts to telegraph plot strands.

I, too, hope to see more from Williams; I thought this film was excellent. As for the "flaw," I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean. The climax of the film is exactly what makes the film interesting and noteworthy because it tells a new tale.


John Boorman's The Tiger's Tail is two films in one, and it suffers because of that. On one hand it documents the present conditions in Ireland, with the rift between the poor and the wealthy more prominent than ever and tracing the ennui that accompanies that milieu. On the other hand, it offers a trite story of doubles, chance, and representation, all of which offer Brendan Gleeson ample acting time, but which amount to little that hasn't been explored in other, better films. There are some dazzling sequences (a shift to a black and white embrace of the two Gleesons is amazing), but Boorman seems unclear of which story he wanted to highlight.

I'm not sure there are enough Evil Twin movies being made these days. And while I agree that the narrative is patchy at times, stretching continuity and believability, I don't think Boorman's issue is that he waffles between two stories, rather that he is trying to use the one as a vehicle for the other--the tail of the title being a reference to the declining Celtic Tiger that was the strong, growing economy of Ireland in the late 90s-early 00s. I think a second viewing/smarmy article could show a good reading of it on a more allegorical level, but if it's that much work to find, I suppose the film itself isn't especially strong.

[balmakboor]

I expected something more like E's response. Or maybe encouragement that the beginning stuff has a point.

I wasn't exactly head-over-heels for Persona. I mainly watched it a while back because Robin Wood suggested it was the prototype for films like Fight Club and Mulholland Dr. When it was over, I nodded my head in semi-agreement and sealed it up in its red envelope.

I'll give it another look some day. For now, it's one of those "great" films that failed to win me over, much like Sunrise.

[Cult]

...much like Sunrise.

Maybe the heat will be off me for a minute now. :P

I need to watch that soon, though.

[megladon8]

Hammer Studios' The Mummy wasn't too great. The best part was the make-up/costume - definitely the best mummy I've seen on screen.

But it's dumbly written, slowly paced (in the bad way), and not put together very well.

I'm glad that Terence Fisher improved, and went on to become one of Britain's greatest directors.

Certainly not one of Hammer's finer productions.

[Yxklyx]

Hammer Studios' The Mummy wasn't too great. The best part was the make-up/costume - definitely the best mummy I've seen on screen.

But it's dumbly written, slowly paced (in the bad way), and not put together very well.

I'm glad that Terence Fisher improved, and went on to become one of Britain's greatest directors.

Certainly not one of Hammer's finer productions.

Yeah, it was pretty dreadful. The story is not altogether interesting to begin with - it's all uphill from there. Actually, his best films (except for The Devil Rides Out) came out before this one.

[megladon8]

Yeah, it was pretty dreadful. The story is not altogether interesting to begin with - it's all uphill from there. Actually, his best films (except for The Devil Rides Out) came out before this one.

I haven't seen much of his stuff outside the Hammer productions.

But yes, Horror of Dracula and Curse of Frankenstein are both much better.

How was his Hound of the Baskervilles with Cushing and Lee?

[balmakboor]

Maybe the heat will be off me for a minute now. :P

I need to watch that soon, though.

Oh, I've felt that heat around here before. Many love it. I just think the mid-section is a mess.

[Qrazy]

I hate to keep bringing it up, because I know the majority probably don't care what I think, but could On the Waterfront be one of the best movies ever made? I don't know. I keep trying to think of a duo with better onscreen chemistry than the one we have here, and to think that they actually hated each other on the set! Plus, it is just beautifully photographed: the placement and use of shadows, the backdrop of the waterfront in the distance; and oh: how 'bout that industrial ambient soundtrack? It sure is awesome, too bad I can't say the same about the score itself. Otherwise, perfect maybe? I don't know. I'll see how a fourth viewing treats me in the future. For now, yes.

It's definitely exceptional. The dramatic excellence in Kazan's films elevates them to another level. Do check out A Face in the Crowd, Baby Doll, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Panic in the Streets and Splendor in the Grass if you haven't. Oh and A Streetcar Named Desire goes without saying of course. Unfortunately a re-watch of East of Eden actually left me somewhat underwhelmed. It's alright but seems a lot shorter than it ought to be. The Last Tycoon, Wild River, Viva Zapata! and Pinky are all somewhat interesting in parts but also deeply flawed. Boomerang is solid entertainment but not that impressive.

I still need to see (particularly looking forward to the bolded):

# The Visitors (1972)
# The Arrangement (1969)
# America, America (1963)
# Man on a Tightrope (1953)
# Gentleman's Agreement (1947)
# The Sea of Grass (1947)

[Kurious Jorge v3.1]

I wasn't exactly head-over-heels for Persona. I mainly watched it a while back because Robin Wood suggested it was the prototype for films like Fight Club and Mulholland Dr.

The only similarity it shares with Fight Club is the spliced in cock. I can't see any other connection.

Mulholland Drive on the other hand, oh yes...

[The Mike]

How was his Hound of the Baskervilles with Cushing and Lee?Not great, sadly. Good production values, and Cushing is solid, but I strongly prefer the Rathbone/Bruce version for telling the story and having more fun.

[Melville]

The prelude in Persona definitely serves a purpose, though it makes a lot more sense in a second viewing. But even on my first viewing it got me thinking, and it sets the tone very well. I don't see anything pretentious about it.

[Grouchy]

How was his Hound of the Baskervilles with Cushing and Lee?
Solid but nothing to get too excited about. Cushing should have done a lot more Holmes films, though. I think Fisher's greatest works were in Hammer Films. I did see this thriller by him once called So Long at the Fair. It was pretty good, reminded me of The Lady Vanishes, but less comedic and focusing more on paranoia.

I saw this German drama film, Four Minutes. It's extremely well made but instantly forgettable. I think part of it is that the script, while skilfully written, refuses to compromise itself. Let me clarify - it's about an extremely gifted pianist convicted for murder and an old piano teacher at the prison who tries to break through her shell and exploit her talents. But even though the prisoner girl is depicted as violent, we only see her attacking those who try to harm her, and the teacher is a nice, "safe" sorta ex-Nazi who is also outed pretty soon as a closet lesbian, just so we like her a little more and forgive her vanilla racism. I came away thinking that this kind of European movie is often the same as Hollywood feel-good shit with only an added "edge" in the style and mature content departments. At the end, everyone gains an easy redemption for their sins even though the fate of the girl is ambiguous. The director is pretty good, and the final scene (which explains the film's title) was very exciting on its storyboarding and editing. The actresses were also both very convincing.

[megladon8]

Speaking of paranoia and Hammer films, perhaps one of the very best Hammer films I have seen is one called Paranoiac, starring Oliver Reed.

Surprisingly chilling, and deals with some very taboo subject matter.

[The Mike]

Speaking of paranoia and Hammer films, perhaps one of the very best Hammer films I have seen is one called Paranoiac, starring Oliver Reed.

Surprisingly chilling, and deals with some very taboo subject matter.Agreed. I wouldn't put it on par with Devil Rides Out or Horror of Dracula, but it's close.

Have you seen Night Creatures? That one's a total blast.

[megladon8]

Agreed. I wouldn't put it on par with Devil Rides Out or Horror of Dracula, but it's close.

Have you seen Night Creatures? That one's a total blast.


I have not. I'll put it on my list!

[Cult]

Okay, so, Persona:
Are we to assume the boy from the beginning is her son, caressing her image? Or is it just random could-be-whatever-you-want-it-to-be symbolism?

This is only my second Bergman, after the decidedly more straightforward Through a Glass Darkly--so I'm not familiar with his recurring themes, style, etc. For the record I do think it turned out quite good, but not exactly the masterpiece I was expecting. The visual rhyming was poetic and powerful enough, we really didn't need quite so many hysterical, dramatic BiBi Andersson monologues.

[Yxklyx]

Is the Rathbone Hound of the Baskervilles available on DVD? I know Netflix doesn't have it.

[Raiders]

we really didn't need quite so many hysterical, dramatic BiBi Andersson monologues.

Huh?

[The Mike]

Is the Rathbone Hound of the Baskervilles available on DVD? I know Netflix doesn't have it.

It should be, unless it's gone OOP. I know it's one of those remastered Holmes DVDs they came out with a few years back.

[Grouchy]

we really didn't need quite so many hysterical, dramatic BiBi Andersson monologues.
I hope you're not talking about the sex tale on the beach, because that's one of the best scenes in the history of cinema.

Besides, there are two women. One of them doesn't talk. I think it's acceptable if the other one talks more than her.

[Cult]

I hope you're not talking about the sex tale on the beach, because that's one of the best scenes in the history of cinema.
God forbid. No, I wasn't.


Besides, there are two women. One of them doesn't talk. I think it's acceptable if the other one talks more than her.
Um, yes, of course. But her acting got hammy pretty frequently. "I'm just so indifferent!" *slap slap slap* I guess Persona is too much of a sacred horse for people to respond with anything other than shock, insults or sarcasm when it's even mildly questioned.

[Raiders]

God forbid. No, I wasn't.


Um, yes, of course. But her acting got hammy pretty frequently. "I'm just so indifferent!" *slap slap slap* I guess Persona is too much of a sacred horse for people to respond with anything other than shock, insults or sarcasm when it's even mildly questioned.

Well, I didn't understand your comment, so hence my "huh?" I guess I could have said more, but it properly conveyed my reaction.

I'll do this as a peace offering for my own take:

http://matchcut.org/viewtopic.php?t=7971&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=2400

(scroll to the bottom of the page)

[Yxklyx]

This is only my second Bergman,...

I think you should have started with The Seventh Seal.

[balmakboor]

I think you should have started with The Seventh Seal.

LOL

Or were you serious? I would've said Wild Strawberries.

[Stay Puft]

As long as you don't start with the Serpent's Egg, like I did. Waste of time.

The Virgin Spring is pretty great, though, and probably not a bad place to start. But I wouldn't know, I'm still new to Bergman's films.

[Amnesiac]

I actually just watched The Seventh Seal for the second time. I feel I took away a lot more from it this time, especially due to Peter Cowie's commentary.

http://www.morethings.com/fan/seventh_seal/seventh-seal-176.jpg

An interesting quote from Bergman, one I am sure most of you are already familiar with: "I was afraid of this enormous emptiness. But my personal view is that when we die, we die, and we go from a state of something to state of absolute nothingness. And I don’t believe for a second that there’s anything above or beyond or anything like that, and this makes me enormously secure."

Cowie's commentary brought this quote, as well as a lot of other interesting ideas, to my attention. For instance: does Bergman hold a vicious contempt for the Church? I have seen Fanny & Alexander and it is my favorite film of his. Does the death of the snaky Seminarian by the Black Plague, and the Bishop's own comeuppance in Fanny & Alexander confirm that Bergman has a problem with the disciplinary hand of religion? I don't know enough about his biographical details to confirm this. But, if it is true, perhaps this is tied to his nearly nihilistic statement about life and death. Religion can only stand to him as a lie, a frustrating futility, a disillusioning fallacy. Like the Knight, I think Bergman wishes he could believe, but he needs more than faith to go on. His epistemological appetites, a prelude to The Age of Reason (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Reason) (then again, this is a diestic, not atheistic, text - but the same desire to view the Church with skepticism and favor reason instead, is there), forbid him from being able to find salvation in faith alone. Knowledge, even if it is knowledge of emptiness, is what Bergman takes comfort in.

Then again, what to make of the absence of the silent, innocent girl - who is even willing to give her would-be rapist a sip of water - from the dance of death at the end? Despite the Knight's tortured doubts, and the Squier's stone-faced acceptance of the emptiness of the after-life, does faith still hold some significance in Bergman's universe? Has it saved this silent girl, this icon of innocence, from an eternal dance with Death?

Cowie's commentary has also emphasized the opposing views that the Squier and the Knight embody. The Squier carries a shrewd sense of skepticism about him. He is able to acknowledge the absurdity of any conception of the after-life - be it God, Satan or otherwise. Having done so, he can only recommend to the viewer that he or she revel in the triumph of living. To protest death, rather than revere it. Like Bergman, the Squier sees the joys of the after-life as a bankrupt notion.

There are a lot of striking scenes in this film, but being more aware of these opposing views between the Squier's pragmatic perspective and the Knight's hope for proof of divine salvation, the scene where they watch the girl get burned seems to be the most intense. It has been said that Bergman, posing these questions of implacable death and the meaningless thereafter, was making a bold move. That it shocked, and downright aggravated, individuals who were unaccustomed to finding this kind of subject matter in a film. If this is true, I feel that the girl burning at the stake seems to be the most effective demonstration of the perils of mortality, and the paranoia, uncertainty, or callous acceptance of nothingness, that can often go with it. A window into the uncertainty and ambivalence of the mortal human being. A heavy concept, but it's all over The Seventh Seal, and most strikingly so in this particular scene.

Bergman has called the film an oratorio, wherein many characters ask the same question: what is the meaning of life? I doubt the film offers a definitive answer. And I also doubt that I have exhausted the merit of the film in these few paragraphs. But, this is by no means a review or an analysis. I just wanted to get a few thoughts off my mind, as this film struck a deeper chord with me the second time around.

[soitgoes...]

As long as you don't start with the Serpent's Egg, like I did. Waste of time.

The Virgin Spring is pretty great, though, and probably not a bad place to start. But I wouldn't know, I'm still new to Bergman's films.I started with The Seventh Seal, but looking back, I'd say that The Virgin Spring is probably the best place to start from what I've seen.

[Ezee E]

Bergman has a few different phases in him, so it's tough to say where to start.

I still think it's best to start with The Seventh Seal. However, I have yet to see Virgin Spring, but that shall change pretty soon.

[Amnesiac]

I regret buying The Seventh Seal (which, incidentally, was also my first Bergman feature) a long while back because of that new Bergman box-set that came out last December from Criterion.

[balmakboor]

I agree. The Virgin Spring would be a pretty good place as well. I'd also say that Fanny & Alexander would be a decent entrance point.

[soitgoes...]

Bergman has a few different phases in him, so it's tough to say where to start.
Well his "middle" period (from Seventh Seal to or just after Persona) is generally considered his strongest, most indicative of his style. Of this period The Virgin Spring would be, in my eyes, his most accessible film. Not only is it accessible, but it's down right great to boot. The Seventh Seal isn't a bad place to start. It would probably be my second or third choice.

[balmakboor]

My sister-in-law just sent me this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX40RsSLwF4

Pretty good.

Vote.

[MadMan]

The Seventh Seal is the first (and only one I've seen so far) Bergman film. I thought it was great despite its rather stark and depressing material. Chess would be a lot cooler if Death played against people more often :P

[megladon8]

The Seventh Seal was the first foreign film I ever actively saught out. I think I was 12 or 13.

Still holds a lot of sentimental value for me, as it sort of opened an entire world of movies to me. Plus, it's freaking brilliant.

[Rowland]

Mindhunters (Renny Harlin, 2005) 62

Sheer B-Movie mayhem. Penned by Wayne Kramer (Running Scared), this laughably absurd high-concept riff on Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None shares that movie's go-for-broke gusto, rules of logic be damned, so that it keeps the viewer engaged less by stimulating our intellect than by unadulterated shamelessness in how implausibly it will twist the narrative and off its characters. Don't get me wrong, this movie is retarded, but it's also frequently ingenious in its crafty way. There isn't even a feigned attempt at sketching characters as more than one-dimensional puppets, nor does it strive for any thematic relevance - Kramer and Harlin push that all aside in favor of orchestrating a series of delirious setpieces strung together by snappy montages and bouts of rote paranoia-induced in-fighting between the gaggle of generic characters. Speaking of Harlin, his direction is the chief reason this material works, as he keeps the dopey proceedings chugging along at a rapid clip and demonstrates a keen visual flair - seriously, this schlock looks better than most of what comes out of Hollywood. Finally, kudos to whoever composed the score, which had me bopping my head and humming along throughout, and to LL Cool J's deliciously cheesy one-liners. I'd take this over Harlin's drably asinine Cliffhanger any day.

[EyesWideOpen]

Sam Mendes to direct a Preacher movie. http://www.variety.com/article/VR11...&query=preacher

[Rowland]

Stuck (Stuart Gordon, 2008) 77

A genuinely gritty "Grindhouse"-style movie to put the actual Grindhouse to shame, this pleasingly compact dark comedy exudes a rough, low-budget vibe that grounds the proceedings and bucks cinematic trends in a most satisfactory imanner. Gordon mines lots of laughs out of this sensationalistic material without losing sight of its inherent pathos and sociological implications. Indeed, Gordon trusts the intelligence of his audience by saying an awful lot pertaining to class in our society without explicitly spelling it out, instead letting the narrative speak for itself. Furthermore, he demonstrates empathy for all of his characters by rooting even the most despicable of the characters' actions in relatable human fallacy and convincingly tying them into his timely social allegory. Besides all the intellectual stuff, this is an immensely tactile picture, with blunt depictions of sex and gruesome violence, the latter breaking the barrier of cooly detached desensitization to be genuinely upsetting, serving not to titillate gore-hounds but to imbue the constant suffering at hand with resonance. Finally, this is easily the funniest movie I've seen all year, which goes a long way towards helping the medicine go down, and it does so without debasing the viewer or the characters. I recognize a trend amongst some of my favorite movies of the year that this picture shares, the trend being a call for perseverence in the face of a seemingly hopeless, festering society. How apt this feels, given our political climate.

[soitgoes...]

Weekend possibilities:

The Eel (Imamura)
Happy Together (Wong)
The Willow Tree (Majidi)
Brand Upon the Brain! (Maddin)
The Assassin (Chang)

[Watashi]

Weekend:

Happy-Go-Lucky
Changeling
Shaoh
A Zed and Two Naughts

[Scar]

Weekend:

Cabelas
Metal Gear Solid 4
Football
and probably a chick flick or two

[megladon8]

Rowland, did you see Stuck on DVD?

Fans of the film are quite upset, because more than 10 minutes was shaved off for the DVD release.

I'd really like to see it, but I'll hold off because a) it's pricey, and b) I'd like to see the "real" version of the movie, if it ever comes around.

[Morris Schæffer]

Mindhunters (Renny Harlin, 2005) 62

I'd take this over Harlin's drably asinine Cliffhanger any day.

Never! But funny how things work sometimes. Kilmer's death scene was hilariously freaky!

[Boner M]

The Furies
Night and the City
An Autumn Tale
Tulpan
Spontaneous Combustion
The Grandmother and a few other Lynch shorts that I haven't seen

[megladon8]

Boner, please let me know how The Furies is!

I've been wondering about that one...

[Boner M]

Boner, please let me know how The Furies is!

I've been wondering about that one...
Shall do.

[balmakboor]

Up Next

Scenes From a Marriage
Saw
Dans Paris
Zack and Miri Make a Porno

[Raiders]

Mindhunters is absolute bollocks. I'd rather Harlin just never made another movie.

[Epistemophobia]

Scenes From a Marriage
Woo!


Saw
Ugh...


Dans Paris
Ooh.


Zack and Miri Make a Porno
Ehm.

Quite the mixture you have there.

[Ezee E]

Elite Squad
Harold & Kumar Go To Guantanamo Bay
Rachel Getting Married
Zack and Mirk Make A Porno
Homicide: Season 1/2

[Raiders]

Weekend:

Changeling
The Furies
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
Choose Connor

[dreamdead]

Weekend (aka everything through next Thursday);

Drifters (for realzies)
Killer of Sheep
Ordet
The Flight of the Red Balloon

[Kurosawa Fan]

Joaquin Phoenix Retiring from Acting (http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/joaquinphoenix_blog.html)

Well that's a surprise. If he wasn't joking, which I'm not convinced he wasn't.

[Bosco B Thug]

Spontaneous Combustion Dude!!! Hooper movie? Okay, so the film is uneven as hell and the ending really sinks it, but there are some nice stretches of greatness in between shorter moments of badness and Hooper goes at those good moments with artistic flair, so it's really not bad, as its reputation makes it out to be, and has a lot of merit. And its Kiyoshi Kurosawa endorsed.

[Ivan Drago]

My weekend consists of one of these two double features:

W.
Zack and Miri Make A Porno

or

Max Payne
Appaloosa

[Rowland]

Rowland, did you see Stuck on DVD?

Fans of the film are quite upset, because more than 10 minutes was shaved off for the DVD release.

I'd really like to see it, but I'll hold off because a) it's pricey, and b) I'd like to see the "real" version of the movie, if it ever comes around.I downloaded a screener torrent, so I'm not sure if it was the full-length cut or not. Thanks for the info.

[Rowland]

Mindhunters is absolute bollocks.Damn skippy.

[balmakboor]

All the Vermeers of New York -- 93

I've been curious about Jon Jost's work for a while. He's one of the most independent of independents. Not much of his work is easily available though. I should probably grab this and The Bed You Sleep In off Netflix while I can.

[balmakboor]

My weekend consists of one of these two double features:

W.
Zack and Miri Make A Porno

or

Max Payne
Appaloosa

Considering I thought W. was much better than Appaloosa and I think Zack and Miri looks much better than Max Payne, I'd say go with option 1.

[Rowland]

Mad Detective (Johnny To & Wai Ka-Fai, 2008) 71

Formal verve and narrative playfulness are the driving forces in this inventively conceived thriller. To keeps us hanging on desperately as his film careens along, jumping through time and changing perspectives (doubly complicated by the condition of the lead character) without explicit warning, instead relying on elegant visual storytelling to keep the narrative flow exciting and smooth while mirroring the mind state of the titular mad detective. Specifically, detective Bun possesses a sixth sense that allows him to see and listen to characters' "true selves", visualized by To as literally different people occupying their space from Bun's perspective. For instance, a timid, sycophantic detective is visualized from Bun's POV as a shrill bitch accusing him of insanity, which is how the detective views Bun from behind his polite veneer. Respectively, Bun cusses the woman out and punches the detective in the face, to the bafflement of everyone else in the room. Later in the film, the antagonist is revealed to have multiple personalities (six or seven to be exact), which To has lots of fun playing around with. Sadly, most of them aren't given distinct identities beyond their appearance as a group, which feels like a missed oppurtunity. Furthermore, To develops several subplots that cumulate in a diliriously executed climax in a house of mirrors that is more clever than it is emotionally involving or even coherent. Nevetheless, I suspect a second viewing may clear up this particular issue. Between this and Exiled, To strikes me as one of our most exciting working cinematic storytellers.

[Amnesiac]

A Zed and Two Naughts

Supposed to be very weird from what I've heard.

[dreamdead]

I've been curious about Jon Jost's work for a while. He's one of the most independent of independents. Not much of his work is easily available though. I should probably grab this and The Bed You Sleep In off Netflix while I can.

I would definitely recommend it. His work here oscillates between a completely invisible and completely direct film aesthetic, which itself is interesting. Add to that the layers of social commentary about spatial, time-, art-, and architectural construction and it becomes a positive delight. It's fun, too, because there are parts that are here specifically to alienate, yet their power recursively acts to further the interest in the ideas as they're presented. It's a singular style that Jost reveals (this is the first of his work that I've seen), and it's one that is masterful in its articulation of cinematic repetition.

That said, of the group of (film) students I watched it with, I had the highest positive reaction, so it is rather divisive.

[Winston*]

Mad Detective (Johnny To & Wai Ka-Fai, 2008) 71

I watched this last night and really enjoyed it until the end, at which point I don't think I understood what happened.

[Rowland]

I watched this last night and really enjoyed it until the end, at which point I don't think I understood what happened.Before Bun died, he witnessed the birth of another personality in his young protégé, essentially his own calculating female similar to that of the antagonist, one to supervise the scared child that was his dominant personality. In the end, the film reveals itself as the evolution of his protégé into the very same conflicted, self-delusional murderer as the antagonist, the inciting incident even mirroring that of the antagonist. The final shot is a metaphor for this moral confusion, as he switches guns between all the dead bodies, trying to construct a coherent scenario for the scene of the gunfight.

As I said in my mini-review, it's all very clever, but I'm not sure it works on a visceral level, at least as of my first viewing.

[Winston*]

Thanks. I basically got it last night, but the abruptness of it coupled with my falling asleepedness made me not quite sure.

I don't like the ending as I think about it, too calculated, kills the emotional resonance. Too much like something that would appear one of those nineties post-Tarantino bullshit movies.

[Rowland]

Thanks. I basically got it last night, but the abruptness of it coupled with my falling asleepedness made me not quite sure.

I don't like the ending as I think about it, too calculated, kills the emotional resonance. Too much like something that would appear one of those nineties post-Tarantino bullshit movies.Yeah, the ending is the only part of the movie I have significantly mixed feelings regarding. It could have worked better if the groundwork had been laid with more coherence. Otherwise, the rest of the movie is gangbusters.

[megladon8]

The Abominable Dr. Phibes was good fun. Great set design. I wish the picture had been better cleaned up for the DVD, because it boasts some stunning visuals which would have greatly benefitted from a better transfer.

Quite funny at points, with an unsettling end.

All in all a good film, that one.

[Boner M]

Dude!!! Hooper movie? Okay, so the film is uneven as hell and the ending really sinks it, but there are some nice stretches of greatness in between shorter moments of badness and Hooper goes at those good moments with artistic flair, so it's really not bad, as its reputation makes it out to be, and has a lot of merit. And its Kiyoshi Kurosawa endorsed.
Yeah, it was your review and KK's endorsement that led me to renting it. Not expecting greatness, but I hope it's at least kinda neat.

[megladon8]

One of my biggest movie pet peeves:

People who walk into a movie with 30 minutes left, and complain because it doesn't make any sense.

[Ivan Drago]

One of my biggest movie pet peeves:

People who walk into a movie with 30 minutes left, and complain because it doesn't make any sense.

My biggest movie pet peeve:

When people bitch and moan during the movie about it being boring, and then scream "THANK YOU!" or "THANK YOU JESUS!" after it's over. This happens a lot in my Race and Racism in American Cinema class - when we were watching a 5-minute clip of a Martin Scorsese interview about Gangs of New York, the people around me were doing just that. They did the same thing when we were watching an 8-minute clip of The Birth of a Nation. It's five to eight minutes of your life, good fucking God.

[Stay Puft]

The Abominable Dr. Phibes was good fun. Great set design. I wish the picture had been better cleaned up for the DVD, because it boasts some stunning visuals which would have greatly benefitted from a better transfer.

Quite funny at points, with an unsettling end.

All in all a good film, that one.


Love it. One of my favorite Vincent Price flicks.

Sequel's not as good, but has a couple fun moments.

[megladon8]

I was surprised how much seemed to have been lifted directly from it by the Saw franchise.

[Kurious Jorge v3.1]

Kicked off Halloween by watching Donald Cammell's White of the Eye....unfuckingbelievably terrible film, but hilarious. A small sample of dialogue:

Danielle White: Dad exploded the bed.
Joan White: Danielle, are you okay?
Danielle White: Dad's wearing a bunch of hotdogs.