Other People's Favorite Movies

[Melville]

Usually I choose what movies to watch just based on having heard good things about them. But I find that I end up watching a lot of movies that I just don't find very interesting. So I decided to make use of the wealth of recommendations provided by the top 100 lists that have been recently posted. I started with the four lists that most closely matched my own taste, deleted everything I've already seen, and ended up with a list of about one hundred movies. I'll review them as I see them. I doubt I'll watch all of them, since most of them will probably be somewhat difficult to find.

Here they are: Boner, dreamdead, Duncan, and Raiders' favorite movies that I haven't seen:

3 Women (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=168603#post16 8603) (Robert Altman, 1977) - 6.5
A nos amours (Maurice Pialat, 1983) - 7.5
A Tale of Winter (Eric Rohmer, 1992)
All the Vermeers in New York (Jon Jost, 1990) - 4
An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, 1962)
Assault on Precinct 13 (Carpenter, 1976)
Bad Boy Bubby (Rolf De Heer, 1993) - 9
Big Red One, The (Samuel Fuller, 1980) - 8
Blissfully Yours (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2002)
Blow Out (De Palma, 1981) - 6
Boxer from Shantung, The (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=226206#post22 6206) (Cheh Chang and Hsueh Li Pao, 1972) - 7.5
Butcher Boy, The (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=162548#post16 2548) (Neil Jordan, 1997) - 7.5
Cameraman, The (Keaton, 1928)
Charulata (Satyajit Ray, 1964)
Code Unknown (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=225994#post22 5994) (Haneke, 2000) - 7.5
Come and See (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=172629#post17 2629) (Klimov, 1985) - 8
Dawn of an Evil Millennium (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=158495#post15 8495) (Damon Packard, 1988) - 6
Dawn of the Dead (George A Romero, 1978)
Dog Star Man (Brakhage, 1964)
Double Life of Veronique, The (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=161343#post16 1343) (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991) - 9.5
Double Suicide (Masahiro Shinoda, 1969) - 8.5
Edward II (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=198442#post19 8442) (Derek Jarman, 1992) - 4
El Sur (VÃ*ctor Erice, 1983) - 8.5
Eureka (Shinji Aoyama, 2000)
Exterminating Angel, The (Luis Bunuel, 1962)
Fata Morgana (Herzog, 1971) - 9
Finding Nemo (Stanton, 2003)
Goat, The (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=158504#post15 8504) (Keaton, 1921) - 9
God Told Me To (Larry Cohen, 1976) - 6
Green Ray, The (Rohmer, 1986)
Heaven and Earth Magic (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=187246#post18 7246) (Harry Smith, 1962) - 4.5
High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963) - 6.5
Holy Mountain, The (Jodorowsky, 1973)
I, an Actress (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=158543#post15 8543) (George Kuchar, 1977) - 8
Il Posto (Ermanno Olmi, 1961)
In a Year of 13 Moons (Fassbinder, 1978) - 10
Innocents, The (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=168603#post16 8603) (Jack Clayton, 1961) - 7
Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954) - 6.5
Kes (Ken Loach, 1969)
Kill, Baby... Kill! (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=223990#post22 3990) (Bava, 1966) - 6
La Caza (Carlos Saura, 1966)
Last Life in the Universe (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, 2003) - 6
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)
La Ceremonie (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=227569#post22 7569) (Claude Chabrol, 1995) - 9
Leave Her to Heaven (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=168815#post16 8815) (John M Lewis, 1949) - 8
L'Eclisse (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=185888#post18 5888) (Antonioni, 1962) - 8.5
Les Rendezvous D’Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1978)
Life of Jesus, The (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=198117#post19 8117) (Dumont, 1997) - 7
L'Intrus (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=222544#post22 2544) (Denis, 2004) - 2.5
Long Day Closes, The (Terence Davies, 1992)
Long Goodbye, The (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=198498#post19 8498) (Altman, 1973) - 8.5
Los Olvidados (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=227504#post22 7504) (Buñuel, 1950) - 6
Love Streams (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=188159#post18 8159) (John Cassavetes, 1984) - 9
Make Way for Tomorrow (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=158582#post15 8582) (Leo McCarey, 1937) - 8.5
Martha (Fassbinder, 1974)
Masculin-Feminin (Godard, 1966) - 9
Mauvais sang (Leos Carax, 1986) - 7.5
Mikey & Nicky (Elaine May, 1976) - 9
Moonrise (Frank Borzage, 1948)
Ms. 45 (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=195096#post19 5096) (Abel Ferrara, 1981) - 8
My Neighbors the Yamadas (Isao Takahata, 1999) - 8.5
My Night at Maud’s (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=166270#post16 6270) (Eric Rohmer, 1970) - 8.5
News From Home (Chantal Akerman, 1977) - 8.5
None Shall Escape (André De Toth, 1944)
Oasis (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=187895#post18 7895)(Lee Chang-dong, 2000) - 8.5
Oh Dem Watermelons (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=158489#post15 8489) (Rob Nelson, 1965) - 9
Our Hospitality (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=168754#post16 8754) (Buster Keaton, 1923) - 8
Park Row (Fuller, 1952) - 7.5
Portrait of Jennie (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=163562#post16 3562) (Dieterle, 1948) - 8.5
Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001) - 6
Report (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=191142#post19 1142)(Conner, 1967) - 8.5
Ride Lonesome (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=191171#post19 1171) (Boetticher, 1959) - 5
Sans Soleil (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=185450#post18 5450) (Chris Marker, 1983) - 7
Sansho the Bailiff (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=191171#post19 1171) (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954) - 8
Satantango (Bela Tarr, 1994)
Satyricon (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=166270#post16 6270) (Fellini, 1969) - 4
Serene Velocity (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=168611#post16 8611) (Ernie Gehr, 1970) - 10
Seven Chances (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=168603#post16 8603) (Buster Keaton, 1925) - 5.5
Silence Before Bach, The (Portabella, 2007)
Something Wild (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=222537#post22 2537) (Demme, 1986) - 7.5
Southern Comfort (Walter Hill, 1981)
Stage Door (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=168603#post16 8603) (Gregory La Cava, 1937) - 7
Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984) - 8
Tall Target, The (Anthony Mann, 1951)
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=223990#post22 3990) (Liu Chia-Liang, 1978) - 4
Titicut Follies (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=158792#post15 8792) (Frederick Wiseman, 1967) - 10
Tokyo Twilight (Ozu, 1957)
Toy Story 2 (John Lasseter, 1999)
Waiting For Guffman (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=227570#post22 7570) (Christopher Guest, 1996) - 5.5
WALL·E (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=163507#post16 3507) (Stanton, 2008) - 6
Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) - 8.5
What Happened Was… (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=225737#post22 5737) (Tom Noonan, 1994) - 9
Whisper of the Heart (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=163737#post16 3737) (Yoshifumi Kondo, 1995) - 9
White Dog (http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?p=172910#post17 2910) (Fuller, 1982) - 5.5

First up is Make Way for Tomorrow, which I discovered is available on YouTube.

EDIT: I'll link each film to its review once I've reviewed it. Also, I included Sans Soleil even though I've seen it. It was on three of the four lists, so I figure my taste must have been broken when I watched it.

[Sven]

Will read with interest.

[Philosophe_rouge]

Interesting idea, and I'll be reading intently. Your first choice is amazing, and you have many other great films ahead of you. It should be a great experience.

[Watashi]

No one cares about my favorite movies. :sad:

[Watashi]

How can you have not seen Finding Nemo, Toy Story 2, and WALL-E?

[Melville]

No one cares about my favorite movies. :sad:
I think a few of your favorites are on there. Whisper of the Heart I partly want to see because you've been raving about it for so many years.


How can you have not seen Finding Nemo, Toy Story 2, and WALL-E?
I didn't like Toy Story or Ratatouille, which are the only Pixar movies I've seen, so I hadn't really bothered to see any more. I tried to rent WALL-E a couple times, but it was always rented out already.

[Watashi]

You are not human.

Leave these boards immediately.

[Melville]

Okay, never mind me saying that Make Way for Tomorrow would be the first thing I watched.

Oh Dem Watermelons (Rob Nelson, 1965)
I'm pretty sure this movie is a masterpiece. It begins with a still shot of a watermelon on a patch of grass. The edges of the film are blurred like in those old-timey daguerreotype photos (as in The Assassination of Jesse James). There's an old-timey song playing, in which a slave laments the death of his master, playing on the watermelon's traditional role as a signifier of black people and good old-timey southern slavery.

Then everything starts disintegrating. There's a flurry of scenes showing the watermelon in a variety of bizarre situations: it chases people down a street, falls out of a rocket, is sliced open and has animal organs pulled out of it, makes love to a woman (or vice versa), and is destroyed in any number of ways. This mirthful deconstruction of the watermelon's traditional signification is accompanied by an analogous change in style. The old-timey music transitions into a droning, repetitious pattern of tones (composed by Steve Reich), and the editing and cinematography become almost frantic. Near the end, there's a sequence of shots where the camera whips around so rapidly that the images are dissolved into abstractions reminiscent of Man Ray's rayographs in Emak-Bakia. Then there's a sequence of edits so rapid that it bests Eisenstein's most audacious montages. I think I saw a crucifix in there somewhere, but it might have been a telephone poll.

Amazing stuff. The playing with symbols, as well as the use of music to keep things lively, reminded me somewhat of Scorpio Rising, which is one of my favorites.

Here it is on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvs0-nPNha8

[Melville]

You are not human.

Leave these boards immediately.
Hey, now. I'm perfectly human. I'm just a human filled with hate.

[Melville]

Dawn of an Evil Millennium (Damon Packard, 1988)
A campy parody of campy horror and sci-fi movies (with a little fantasy and cop movie mixed in), it passes itself off as a trailer (or maybe a few trailers) for a bizarre b-movie epic. Its sheer randomness made for some funny moments—my favorite being the close-up of the volkswagen symbol—and its assortment of in-your-face visuals was amusing in itself. Overall, it's fun, if not spectacular.

Here it is on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W68yU3TlCBo

[Derek]

Oh Dem Watermelons (Rob Nelson, 1965)

Here it is on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvs0-nPNha8

Woah, this sounds awesome, better than Up for sure. I'll check it out ASAP.

[balmakboor]

That's quite a list. I've seen 33 of them and all were worthwhile. I've now seen 34 actually. Oh Dem Watermelons. Hmmm. It was interesting. I wouldn't much compare it to Scorpio Rising, one of my favorite films, though.

[Melville]

Woah, this sounds awesome, better than Up for sure. I'll check it out ASAP.
I think you'll like it for the Steve Reich soundtrack even if for nothing else. Unfortunately, I don't know if I've ever heard of Up. Unless you're talking about the Pixar movie or the documentary series.


The Goat (Keaton, 1921)
I've finally been convinced: Buster Keaton was a goddamn bonafide genius. This movie does away with all the hard-working-everyman-trying-to-win-the-girl stuff that I don't care for in his other movies, and pares itself down to nonstop, hilarious antics. The visual comedy is superb, perhaps the best I've ever seen. From Keaton riding on the front of a train directly toward the viewer, to him standing in front of an enormous wanted ad that fills the entire frame, the use of the camera was ingenious. Also, the cartoon distortions of reality, such as Keaton's control of the elevator via the dial that indicates what floor it's on, were wonderfully played off of Keaton's stoneface persona.

Again, here it is on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cw5vl7zqx0&feature=related

[Derek]

I think you'll like it for the Steve Reich soundtrack even if for nothing else. Unfortunately, I don't know if I've ever heard of Up. Unless you're talking about the Pixar movie or the documentary series.

I meant the new one, just to give Wats a hard time for pointlessly bringing up Pixar here.

I really like Steve Reich from the two albums I've heard, so I'll be interested to see how his music is used here. His leanings toward repetition make him a perfect candidate for an avant-garde film.

Oh, and I love The Goat. My favorite short film of his, unless you classify Sherlock, Jr. as a short.

[Melville]

That's quite a list. I've seen 33 of them and all were worthwhile. I've now seen 34 actually. Oh Dem Watermelons. Hmmm. It was interesting. I wouldn't much compare it to Scorpio Rising, one of my favorite films, though.
The use of semiotics struck me as being fairly similar. They both take standard cultural signs and symbols (and songs) and play with their meaning by putting them in unusual contexts. And they're both very energetic and fun, partially because of their heavy use of music.

[Qrazy]

Okay, never mind me saying that Make Way for Tomorrow would be the first thing I watched.

Oh Dem Watermelons (Rob Nelson, 1965)
I'm pretty sure this movie is a masterpiece. It begins with a still shot of a watermelon on a patch of grass. The edges of the film are blurred like in those old-timey daguerreotype photos (as in The Assassination of Jesse James). There's an old-timey song playing, in which a slave laments the death of his master, playing on the watermelon's traditional role as a signifier of black people and good old-timey southern slavery.

Then everything starts disintegrating. There's a flurry of scenes showing the watermelon in a variety of bizarre situations: it chases people down a street, falls out of a rocket, is sliced open and has animal organs pulled out of it, makes love to a woman (or vice versa), and is destroyed in any number of ways. This mirthful deconstruction of the watermelon's traditional signification is accompanied by an analogous change in style. The old-timey music transitions into a droning, repetitious pattern of tones (composed by Steve Reich), and the editing and cinematography become almost frantic. Near the end, there's a sequence of shots where the camera whips around so rapidly that the images are dissolved into abstractions reminiscent of Man Ray's rayographs in Emak-Bakia. Then there's a sequence of edits so rapid that it bests Eisenstein's most audacious montages. I think I saw a crucifix in there somewhere, but it might have been a telephone poll.

Amazing stuff. The playing with symbols, as well as the use of music to keep things lively, reminded me somewhat of Scorpio Rising, which is one of my favorites.

Here it is on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvs0-nPNha8

Horrible Garbage.

[Melville]

I meant the new one, just to give Wats a hard time for pointlessly bringing up Pixar here.
:) Gotcha. Agreed, then. (Though there are three Pixar movies on the list, and most people have probably seen all three, so his comment made sense in its context.)

[Melville]

Horrible Garbage.
Why are you always talking such nonsense?

[Qrazy]

Why are you always talking such nonsense?

Don't like watermelons.

[Derek]

Horrible Garbage.

Oh man, I can't wait for this now!


:) Gotcha. Agreed, then. (Though there are three Pixar movies on the list, and most people have probably seen all three, so his comment made sense in its context.)

D'oh, missed that. Oh well, if Wats can make fun of baby doll's predictability, I can poke fun at his. :)

[Spinal]

Gotta agree with Qrazy. That was excruciating.

[Qrazy]

Oh man, I can't wait for this now!


My opinion about this film > Your temporal existence

[Russ]

Of the three shorts posted, I had seen The Goat before. Good stuff. The others - not so much.

Taking a slightly different approach than Melville (and not to hijack the thread or anything), but I looked at everybody's Top 10 (from their 100 lists) for all the films I've yet to see. Strangely enough, it was almost 100 titles:

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin – (Lau Kar Leung, 1978)
The 400 Blows (Truffaut, 1959)
Alphaville (Godard, 1965)
American Psycho (Harron, 2000)
The Ascent (Shepitko, 1977)
Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson, 1966)
Badlands (Malick, 1973)
The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1966)
Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder, 1980)
The Blade – (Tsui Hark, 1995)
Blowup (Antonioni, 1966)
The Boxer From Shantung – (Chang Cheh, 1972)
Breathless (Godard, 1960)
Brick (Rian Johnson, 2006)
The Burmese Harp (Ichikawa 1956)
Catch-22 (Nichols, 1970)
Celine and Julie Go Boating (Rivette, 1974)
Children of Paradise (Carné, 1945)
Cinema Paradiso (Tornatore, 1988)
Cluny Brown (Lubitsch, 1946)
The Conformist (Bertolucci, 1970)
The Departed (Scorcese, 2006)
Doppelganger (Kurosawa, 2003)
Exotica (Egoyan, 1994)
F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1974)
Fata Morgana (Herzog, 1971)
The Fountain (Aronofsky, 2006) (2)
God of Cookery (Chow, 1996)
Gosford Park (Altman, 2001)
The Grand Illusion (Renoir, 1937)
Hana-Bi (Kitano, 1997)
Hiroshima Mon Amour (Resnais, 1959)
Husbands and Wives (Allen, 1992)
I am Cuba (Kalatozov, 1964) (2)
I Fidanzati (Olmi, 1963)
Ikiru (Kurosawa, 1952)
In a Lonely Place (Ray, 1950)
Jules et Jim (Truffaut, 1962)
Kikujiro no natsu (Kitano, 1999)
Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich, 1955)
La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960)
La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995)
Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais, 1961)
The Last Temptation of Christ (Scorcese, 1988)
Lawrence of Arabia (Lean, 1962) (2)
Le Samourai (Melville, 1967) (2)
Les Miserables (Lelouch, 1995)
Love Streams (Cassavetes, 1984)
A Man Escaped (Bresson, 1956) (2)
A Midnight Clear (Gordon, 1992)
My Life to Live (Godard, 1962) (2)
My Night at Maud’s (Rohmer, 1970)
Naked (Leigh, 1993)
Napoleon (Gance, 1927)
Nights of Cabiria (Fellini, 1957) (2)
O Lucky Man! (Anderson, 1973)
The Ox-Bow Incident (Wellman, 1943)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928) (4)
Persona (Bergman, 1966) (2)
Pierrot le fou (Godard, 1965)
Punch-Drunk Love (Anderson, 2002)
Ran (Kurosawa, 1985) (2)
The Red Shoes (Powell & Pressburger, 1948) (2)
The Rules of the Game (Renoir, 1939)
[safe] (Haynes, 1995)
Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi, 1954)
Sátántangó (Tarr, 1994)
Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock, 1943)
Short Cuts (Altman, 1993)
Stalker (Tarkovsky, 1979)
Sunrise (Murnau, 1927) (4)
The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan, 1997) (2)
That Thing You Do! (Hanks, 1996)
Three Days (Bartas, 1991)
Three Times (Hou, 2005)
Throne of Blood (Kurosawa, 1957) (2)
To be or Not to Be (Lubitsch, 1942)
Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
Touch of Evil (Welles, 1958)
Viridiana (Bunuel, 1961)
Week End (Godard, 1967)
Werckmeister Harmonies (Tarr, 2000)
Wild Blue Yonder (Herzog, 2005)
Winter Light (Bergman, 1962)
A Woman Under the Influence (Cassavetes, 1974) (2)
WR: Mysteries of the Organism (Makavejev, 1971)
A Zed and Two Noughts (Greenaway, 1985)
Zelig (Allen, 1983)


Since at least one Match-Cut regular thinks quite highly of the above titles (multiple mentions in parentheses), I figured I should probably give some of these a go. I have access to The Fountain and Fata Morgana so I have no excuse for not watching those. Seeing a lot of Godard titles here reminded me that I've never seen one of his films.

There were only 2 posters that I had seen every film in their Top Ten: The Mike and EyesWideOpen.

Many of these I've been meaning to see for awhile, especially that Greenaway film.

Tee-hee at seeing Brick on this list.

[Watashi]

Out of everyone's Top 10's, these are the ones I have yet to see:

35th Chamber of Shaolin
Alphaville
Andrei Rublev
Ascent, The
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Blade, The
Boxer from Shantung
Burmese Harp, The
Catch-22
Cluny Brown
Conformist, The
Doppelganger
Exorcist, The
God of Cookery
Godfather Part II, The
Halloween
Hard Day's Night, A
Haunting, The
Hiroshima Mon Amour
Holy Mountain, The
I Am Cuba
I Fidanzati
L'Atalante
La Dolce Vita
La Haine
Lawrence of Arabia
Les Miserables
Los Olvidados
Love Streams
Make Way for Tomorrow
Man Who Planted Trees, The
Man With a Movie Camera
Meshes of the Afternoon
Midnight Clear, A
Mind Game
My Life to Live
My Night at Maud’s
Napoleon
Nights of Cabiria
O Lucky Man!
Ox-Bow Incident, The
Passion of Anna
Pierrot le fou
Playtime
[safe]
Sans Soleil
Sansho the Bailiff
Slacker
That Thing You Do!
To be or Not to Be
Wages of Fear, The
Weekend
Woman Under the Influence, A
WR: Mysteries of the Organism
Werckmeister Harmonies

[Spinal]

Out of everyone's Top 10's, these are the ones I have yet to see:

Man Who Planted Trees, The


I gotta think you would love this one.

[Melville]

Taking a slightly different approach than Melville (and not to hijack the thread or anything), but I looked at everybody's Top 10 (from their 100 lists) for all the films I've yet to see.
Hijack away. If other people have similar ideas, feel free to post them (and reviews) here.

I thought that using a broad selection of lists, or using the final list that trans compiled, would end up being too similar to the way I was already picking movies to watch: seeing them on the They Shoot Pictures list, knowing that they're generally acknowledged classics, etc. It's rare to run into a real stinker that way, but I frequently end up somewhat bored.


Anyway, next movie:
I, an Actress (George Kuchar, 1977)
I don't really know what this movie is trying to do, but it's hilarious. George Kuchar, who seems to be kind of like a meta, avant-garde version of Ed Wood in his embrace of classic film melodrama, directs an actress giving an absurdly melodramatic monologue. His directions are ridiculously campy but seemingly serious. The girl trying to following his directions tries her best to overact his overacting, but she can't stop laughing at how ridiculous it is.

Maybe it's trying to provide some kind of commentary on the filmmaking process, maybe it's a send up of Hollywood melodrama, or maybe it's a self-commentary on Kuchar. I don't know. But it's damn funny.

YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOXpDCkOiCo

[Duncan]

I agree with Boner and Melville on the Oh Dem Watermelons question. Funny, interesting, kind of hypnotizing.

[Russ]

Out of everyone's Top 10's, these are the ones I have yet to see:

Man Who Planted Trees, The


I gotta think you would love this one.
Totally agree.

Hey Wats, if you can't find it, but are interested in seeing it, just pm me.

[Melville]

I agree with Boner and Melville on the Oh Dem Watermelons question. Funny, interesting, kind of hypnotizing.
:pritch:

EDIT: The Man Who Planted Trees is available on several websites; just search Google video. Great movie.

[SirNewt]

I know you probably want to stick pretty close to these lists, in case, ya know you want to ever actually finish this but I have to suggest seeing 'Floating Weeds'. I think it easily sits beside Tokyo Story as some of Ozu's best work.

[balmakboor]

That was dangerous. I watched I, an Actress -- which I loved -- and then spent the next hour watching John Waters, David Lynch commercials, and Bobcat Goldthwait.

[monolith94]

If Watashi hates the Man Who Planted Trees, the universe will implode. Fact.

[Raiders]

I, an Actress (George Kuchar, 1977)
I don't really know what this movie is trying to do, but it's hilarious. George Kuchar, who seems to be kind of like a meta, avant-garde version of Ed Wood in his embrace of classic film melodrama, directs an actress giving an absurdly melodramatic monologue. His directions are ridiculously campy but seemingly serious. The girl trying to following his directions tries her best to overact his overacting, but she can't stop laughing at how ridiculous it is.

Maybe it's trying to provide some kind of commentary on the filmmaking process, maybe it's a send up of Hollywood melodrama, or maybe it's a self-commentary on Kuchar. I don't know. But it's damn funny.

YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOXpDCkOiCo

Yeah, it's probably an odd choice for a top 100 list, but it is one of the most hilarious and entertaining eight minutes I have ever had. I think there's a lot to be gleaned from the direction Kuchar gives the actress, a kind of glimpse into how this sort of film is made and the dedication you can get from "fresh off the bus" talent. But really, it's just fabulously ridiculous and fun.

[Boner M]

Great to see some appreciation for Nelson's film; surely a highlight of the unbelievably fertile US 60's avant-garde. I wrote a review of it on the old site, but I think yours nails it, Melville. Good job!

Coincidentally, I played Dawn of an Evil Millennium to a bunch of friends at my housewarming last night. Never tire of it. btw, have you seen Peter Tscherkassky's Outer Space? It's on the "Experiments in Terror" DVD, along with the Packard. I think it might be more to your tastes. Here it is. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTarJ0Op7W8)

[Boner M]

Also, I think this thread will be rather overwhelming. It's strange to finally see people discussing all the obscure shit I watch. The jig is up, perhaps?!

[MacGuffin]

If you like Dawn of an Evil Millennium, which I haven't seen, you might like Reflections of Evil, which is just great.

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGrIlZ8_4_8

[Melville]

I know you probably want to stick pretty close to these lists, in case, ya know you want to ever actually finish this but I have to suggest seeing 'Floating Weeds'. I think it easily sits beside Tokyo Story as some of Ozu's best work.
I'm not a big fan of Tokyo Story, which is the only Ozu film I've seen. Hopefully I'll be more appreciative of his films on these lists.


But really, it's just fabulously ridiculous and fun.
Definitely. Have you seen Hold Me While I'm Naked? I thought it was equally great.


btw, have you seen Peter Tscherkassky's Outer Space? It's on the "Experiments in Terror" DVD, along with the Packard. I think it might be more to your tastes. Here it is. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTarJ0Op7W8)
I watched it when you posted the link to it a while back. I didn't like it then, but I remember absolutely nothing about it. I'll give it another look.


Also, I think this thread will be rather overwhelming. It's strange to finally see people discussing all the obscure shit I watch. The jig is up, perhaps?!
I'd say the jig is down. Or something. That watermelons movie seriously rocked. Also, I totally agree with your low score for Excalibur. That movie was risible.

[Melville]

Make Way For Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)
Maybe it's because my grandmother recently died, but I found this movie pretty heart-wrenching. Our failures and failings, the inconsiderate actions and condescending attitudes even amongst the best-intentioned people, the slow accumulation of guilt, the slow forging and slow disintegration of bonds between us—all of them are put up on the screen. And at the heart of it is a powerful love story about two people grown old together, loving each other all the more for their familiarity, their lifetime accumulation of shared experiences, and knowing they'll soon die apart.

My only criticism is that the dialogue is a bit too on the nose and the visuals a bit heavy handed. But the movie is wonderful nevertheless.

YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_MrZojHUdQ

[Melville]

Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, 1967)
A masterpiece. Yes. Seriously this time. The opening scene: a vaudeville show, the titular Titicut Follies, performed by the inmates and guards of a hospital for the criminally insane. These shows are presumably put on to give the inmates something to do, something to accomplish and perhaps take pride in, and as a way of integrating them into a normalizing social context. But this scene offers no justification: it shows only the performers, partly in shadows and singing away. In refusing to contextualize the performances as (feeble) attempts at socialization, we see them within a whole history of underlying carnivalry in society's modern attitute toward madness. They are condescending showcases. "Oh, listen to those madmen sing. Aren't they having fun, those poor madmen. What a show!"

One of the best scenes: a shot is held seemingly interminably as an enraged inmate stamps, naked, back and forth in his dark, barren cell, stopping once to hammer his fists against his barred window. It is riveting, the overpowering reality of a completely broken human being, fragile and enraged and despairing. The camera cuts to a closeup, presumably a few minutes later (though it could be any time), and the now-calm man informs an off-camera questioner that he was once a teacher; his sudden calmness and the facticity of his life history makes the weight of his despair and stifled rage all the more palpable and catastrophic.

This scene, and the film's hyper-realist style in general, insists on the textural reality, the painful human intimacy of what we're viewing. It is an attack on society's representation of madness, the representation exemplified by the vaudeville show. The film insists on the fleshy humanity of the inmates and the dehumanization they undergo in the institute.

Of course, even the "reality" that the film insists on is another very particular representation of madness. But the film's representation is self-reflexive: it makes an issue of representations. Indeed, the whole movie is a layering of representations. And at its center is the structure of the mental institution itself: the institution both passively representing society's conception of mental illness and actively participating in the construction of that conception, defining "mental illness" and forcing its inmates into the confines of that meaning.

EDIT: I forgot to include a link:
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzMzMDIxODg=.html

[Boner M]

This thread rocks harder than other threads.

[Melville]

This thread rocks harder than other threads.
Awesome. I must say, this is the best string of movies I've watched in months, maybe years.

[B-side]

I believe I shall do something similar. Considering I don't wanna steal your thunder, I'll just post my thoughts inside your thread. No worries, though, as my writing abilities are elementary compared to yours. There's also the possibility I won't do it at all.

[Melville]

I believe I shall do something similar. Considering I don't wanna steal your thunder, I'll just post my thoughts inside your thread.
Yeah, go for it.

I probably won't be watching any more movies until the weekend.

[Philosophe_rouge]

If Watashi hates the Man Who Planted Trees, the universe will implode. Fact.
Can any sane person hate this film?

[Russ]

Can any sane person hate this film?I would say "no".

But, with Wats, anything is possible. We shall see.

[Bosco B Thug]

That's a mighty fine looking master list, I just have to say. I'm excited for you seeing some of those films in there.

I don't think Oh Dem Watermelons is brilliant, but its a fine piece of novelty filmmaking definitely. I saw it in a program of avant garde shorts - big screen and before I had much of an idea of what 60s/70s avant garde filmmaking was - and I remember thinking that it didn't really fit. I think it's a bit too self-aware of its use of avant garde film tropes, without having the sincere belief in the artistry of those tropes. I think it's too much like a film student's parody of avant garde films, although I cannot knock it for its homemade musical arrangement and how seriously legit it gets in exploiting the fun in seeing watermelons being smushed in various ways.

[dreamdead]

Make Way For Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)
Maybe it's because my grandmother recently died, but I found this movie pretty heart-wrenching. Our failures and failings, the inconsiderate actions and condescending attitudes even amongst the best-intentioned people, the slow accumulation of guilt, the slow forging and slow disintegration of bonds between us—all of them are put up on the screen. And at the heart of it is a powerful love story about two people grown old together, loving each other all the more for their familiarity, their lifetime accumulation of shared experiences, and knowing they'll soon die apart.

My only criticism is that the dialogue is a bit too on the nose and the visuals a bit heavy handed. But the movie is wonderful nevertheless.


The criticism about the telegraphing dialogue is certainly true, but I rationalize my worries over that flaw by reminding myself of the basic structure of Hollywood scripts at that time. Little was ever left implicit (save for censorial material) in the 1930s when the scriptwriter and director could lay on the melodrama. McCarey doesn't escape this practice here, but neither is he as dependent on the melodrama as he is in something like Love Affair, which becomes so caught up in its on-the-noseness that it becomes utterly perfunctory today. People like Welles and the neo-realists fixed that sense in the 1940s, but it wasn't really the practice yet.

And I'm glad to see you coming around to Keaton. I could be stranded on a desert island with only his films and I'd be quite content.

Great thread idea, by the way. Looking forward to conversing on the films when I'm able.

[NickGlass]

I started with the four lists that most closely matched my own taste, deleted everything I've already seen, and ended up with a list of about one hundred movies. I'll review them as I see them. I doubt I'll watch all of them, since most of them will probably be somewhat difficult to find.

Here they are: Boner, dreamdead, Duncan, and Raiders' favorite movies that I haven't seen:

3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977)
Exterminating Angel, The (Luis Bunuel, 1962)
Finding Nemo (Stanton, 2003)
Kes (Ken Loach, 1969)
Masculin-Feminin (Godard, 1966)
My Night at Maud’s (Eric Rohmer, 1970)
Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984)
Waiting For Guffman (Christopher Guest, 1996)


Out of the films I have seen, which is, admittedly, roughly 1/6, I recommend watching these as soon as possible.

[Melville]

The criticism about the telegraphing dialogue is certainly true, but I rationalize my worries over that flaw by reminding myself of the basic structure of Hollywood scripts at that time.
I've never been a fan of judging a movie relative to the other films of its time. It makes me appreciate the filmmakers' talents, but it doesn't make me appreciate the movie any more.


And I'm glad to see you coming around to Keaton. I could be stranded on a desert island with only his films and I'd be quite content.
Yeah, I'm keen on watching more of his movies now. I'm hoping The Goat wasn't just a fluke. Do any of his other films have such a high concentration of gags and lack of story? The others that I've seen are The General, Sherlock Jr., and Steamboat Bill, Jr.


Out of the films I have seen, which is, admittedly, roughly 1/6, I recommend watching these as soon as possible.
Noted. Though I have a strong suspicion that I won't like the Bunuel or Jarmusch movies.

[Spaceman Spiff]

Noted. Though I have a strong suspicion that I won't like the Bunuel or Jarmusch movies.

Heh. Those are the two best movies from that select list.


3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977) - Haven't seen
Exterminating Angel, The (Luis Bunuel, 1962) - 9.5
Finding Nemo (Stanton, 2003) - 7.5 (there are better Pixar films)
Kes (Ken Loach, 1969) - 8.0
Masculin-Feminin (Godard, 1966) - A piece of shit
My Night at Maud’s (Eric Rohmer, 1970) - Haven't seen
Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984) - 8.5
Waiting For Guffman (Christopher Guest, 1996) - 7.5

[MacGuffin]

Masculin-Feminin (Godard, 1966) - A piece of shit


Do you care to elaborate, or just make outrageous claims?

[Qrazy]

Noted. Though I have a strong suspicion that I won't like the Bunuel or Jarmusch movies.

I don't like the Jarmusch. But the Bunuel is awesome.

[Qrazy]

I've never been a fan of judging a movie relative to the other films of its time. It makes me appreciate the filmmakers' talents, but it doesn't make me appreciate the movie any more.


Yeah, I'm keen on watching more of his movies now. I'm hoping The Goat wasn't just a fluke. Do any of his other films have such a high concentration of gags and lack of story? The others that I've seen are The General, Sherlock Jr., and Steamboat Bill, Jr.


Not really. Seven Chances, Out Hospitality and The Navigator all have that central romance which you seem to dislike. They're also all a step down from the three you've already seen. However, they all do have a fair share of excellent gags.

You'll probably have better luck with his shorts if it's the romance angle that bothers you.

[Duncan]

I'd try One Week. It's a good one.

[Raiders]

I'd try One Week. It's a good one.

That. And The Play House. The latter should have made my top 100 if I hadn't forgotten.

[soitgoes...]

And Neighbors.

[Spaceman Spiff]

Do you care to elaborate, or just make outrageous claims?

The latter. I'm sorry.

[Spaceman Spiff]

That. And The Play House. The latter should have made my top 100 if I hadn't forgotten.

Was this the one with all the different Keatons in the band? I love that short so goddamn much.

[Melville]

Thanks for all the Keaton recommendations. I'll check them out soon.


The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991)
Yet another terrific movie. It's an ethereal rumination on the profundities of sensuous experience, fate, and human interconnectedness. My two favorite shots come relatively early in the film. In the first of the two, one of the two central characters sings in a choir as it begins to rain. The other singers appear to scurry out of the rain in the background, but the singer in the foreground continues to sing, sublimely, before looking up and smiling almost ecstatically. The shot is framed tightly around her, such that the rain almost appears to come from nowhere--what's important is her immediate experience of it. There is an overwhelming glory in this moment, a transcendent experience of the moment, of the pure, immediate and sensuous experience of it and its infinitude. The second of my two favorite shots is a view of buildings through a window. A distortion in the image, caused by the glass, moves across the frame, stretching and smearing bits of stone and grass is in its passage. It is almost as if the film is revealing something mystical, something beyond our grasp, hidden within or between the quanta of our experience.

In some sense, the whole film is like these shots: a miasma of sensuous experience, built from stunning interplays of light and dark, colors and sounds. In several scenes, the immediacy of these experiences as experiences is brought home by first-person perspective shots. But the beauty of the movie comes not only from the beauty of its images and sounds, or the moments in our own lives that they evoke--those rare moments when we were suddenly clearly aware of the beauty in living and breathing and feeling---, but from its central narrative conceit of the double. The two central characters are identical in almost every way. Both are singers and both are of ill health. One dies while singing, and the other immediately afterward gives up singing. In these two characters, the film seems to suggest a metaphysics of sensuousness: it is as if there is an underlying quintessence, a great sea of joy and hurt and sounds and sights, and we all take part in it, almost as though our individual identities are simply ripples or agglomerations of this medium of raw experience.

At one point, a puppeteer puts on a show in which a dancer dies and is reborn as a butterfly, and we immediately think of this story's relationship with the two central characters: the one dies, the other lives by avoiding the path of the first, almost as if the experience of the one transmigrates to the other. Later, the puppeteer manipulates the surviving woman. With obscure cues, he draws her into loving him. She loves him nonsensically, with abandon. The question of human freedom is raised: if two people can be one, or one person two, if all is sense and mystery, then the notion of freedom is absurd. We are all parts of a vast sea, and the motions of this sea are ineffable. But we partake of the whole, and on occasion we catch a glimpse of it and feel that it is sublime.

[KK2.0]

The Goat was great.

[Bosco B Thug]

The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991)
Yet another terrific movie. It's an ethereal rumination on the profundities of sensuous experience, fate, and human interconnectedness. My two favorite shots come relatively early in the film. In the first of the two, one of the two central characters sings in a choir as it begins to rain. The other singers appear to scurry out of the rain in the background, but the singer in the foreground continues to sing, sublimely, before looking up and smiling almost ecstatically. The shot is framed tightly around her, such that the rain almost appears to come from nowhere--what's important is her immediate experience of it. There is an overwhelming glory in this moment, a transcendent experience of the moment, of the pure, immediate and sensuous experience of it and its infinitude. The second of my two favorite shots is a view of buildings through a window. A distortion in the image, caused by the glass, moves across the frame, stretching and smearing bits of stone and grass is in its passage. It is almost as if the film is revealing something mystical, something beyond our grasp, hidden within or between the quanta of our experience. Whenever I think back on this film, I am always taken aback by how thick an experience it is, how vividly I remember watching it for the first time. And how grand and sumptuous it is, yet how subtle and impenetrable it is. One thing that had to be pointed out to me is the fact that Veronika/Veronique never seems to return to a same room twice, even where she sleeps is mutable, and the sets never seem decorated or built logically, and now when I think about this fact, I'm just blown away with Kieslowski's craft.

Anyway, not only can I not make comparable any film to this film in terms of what it achieves, but I don't think Kieslowski's ever made anything quite as much of a challenge or as impressive a feat as this first theatrical film of his either. He's made better films. But it's like a "Whoa. How the hell did you pull this film off so well? So early in your career, never to really make a film like this again?" in his filmography.

It's exactly like Robert Altman with Images, which was also a very early theatrical film in the career of its director. He's made numerous masterpieces, but none so surprising a feat as this. He's made many, many better movies, but never has he made a film so good with such difficult, cryptic, hopelessly alienating material.

[soitgoes...]

Anyway, not only can I not make comparable any film to this film in terms of what it achieves, but I don't think Kieslowski's ever made anything quite as much of a challenge or as impressive a feat as this first theatrical film of his either. He's made better films. But it's like a "Whoa. How the hell did you pull this film off so well? So early in your career, never to really make a film like this again?" in his filmography. Am I missing something? This was made at the end of his career, and he had made theatrical films prior to this one.

[Bosco B Thug]

Am I missing something? This was made at the end of his career, and he had made theatrical films prior to this one.
Ooh... it seems he had.

Haha, my belief was all he's made was the Dekalog, Veronique, and the Three Colors films. My bad. Still, partial parts of my observation still stand... hopefully...

[Melville]

Anyway, not only can I not make comparable any film to this film in terms of what it achieves, but I don't think Kieslowski's ever made anything quite as much of a challenge or as impressive a feat as this first theatrical film of his either.
Yeah, I totally agree (except for the "first theatrical film" part...). I still haven't seen all of Dekalog, but this is definitely the most impressive thing I've seen from him. It's just so damn enigmatic and beautiful.

[Melville]

The Butcher Boy (Neil Jordan, 1997)
I found this one a bit grating at the beginning, with its incorrigible, smart-alecky kid, dysfunctional family, cast of colorful characters, wry narrator, and wistful, exaggerated style. But boy, was I wrong. As the story got progressively grimmer while the smart-alecky kid and wistful style remained ever the same, the contrast between them worked superbly, both becoming ever more entertaining in itself and powerfully emphasizing the protagonist's sad alienation from his friend and fall into madness. Very good stuff.

[Melville]

WALL·E (Stanton, 2008)
Yeah, Pixar just isn't for me. I liked this movie well enough (certainly a lot more than the other two Pixar movies I've seen), but it seemed overstated and dilute in a very typical "kids-movie" way. Things like the cockroach sidekick and the repeated reaction shots of Wall-E shaking in fear just seemed like such standard sops to a child audience, and they irked me somewhat. The whole thing was a bit too cutesy and simplistically sentimental for my liking, though it did have some effective moments of sentiment. I also just am not a big fan of the aesthetic in these computer-generated animations. It gives everything too much of a glossy sheen, and it lacks the pronounced character and verve that I prefer (e.g. in Betty Boop and early Warner Bros cartoons).

[Watashi]

Pixar movies are children's movies.

[Melville]

Pixar movies are children's movies.
Sure. And as such, they have some elements (and perhaps an overall style) that presumably work for their target audience but not for me.

[BuffaloWilder]

Pixar movies are children's movies.

And there's nothing wrong with that, although that depends on how you define 'children's film,' as I've said elsewhere - but I can see where Melville's coming from. Pixar's always been - save for Ratatouille, which was wonderful, and Toy Story, which I will always love - kind of uninteresting.

As far as their character aesthetic goes, they're very traditional - sometimes it works for them, and sometimes it doesn't, but they don't ever try to diverge from it.

[Melville]

Portrait of Jennie (Dieterle, 1948)
This actually reminded me of The Double Life of Veronique in how it painted life as a beautiful mystery. Unlike Veronique, Jennie discusses its themes explicitly, but what I'm more interested in is how it conveyed the mystery and the beauty in its visuals, with faces aglow in the darkness and huge green storm clouds in the sky. It definitely has some of the most gorgeous cinematography I've seen, especially in its use of light. The foggy scenes, dark shadows and concentrated light sources have the feeling of an old horror film, but here they have a subdued glistening quality, that when combined with the story creates a pervasive feeling of magical or wonderment, rather than spookiness or terror, in the unknown.

And Joseph Cotten was great, as always.

Standout moments: at one point, the stars audibly twinkle as they come into view from behind a cloud, followed by an overhead shot of Cotten on a snowy path in Central Park, a lamp glowing in the slightly foggy night. Later, as the titular Jennie falls asleep, just after her portrait has been completed, there's a brief shot of her as a painting. It's pure magic. Near the end, green lightning cuts the sky, and then everything becomes otherworldly-green, including rolling, foreboding clouds, huge, crashing waves, and a spiral staircase spiraling out of view and seemingly into the beyond (presumably Vertigo was influenced by at least two aspects of this film).

[dreamdead]

The more people write on Portrait of Jennie, the more I have a desire to revisit the film. It's one that I viewed when rouge was talking up the film back in '04, and while I saw all the same themes and visual ideas as she did, the skill with which they were performed never quite led me to rhapsody. It struck me as a solid film, but one in which it was confined to late-'40s style of the theme rendered explicit. That said, this review makes me want to return and see if its wonder can be more thorough the second time, especially in conjunction with Vertigo.

Great thoughts, and I love the singling out of individual moments.

[Melville]

It struck me as a solid film, but one in which it was confined to late-'40s style of the theme rendered explicit.
Yeah, the opening voiceover, especially, wasn't really necessary. And the film certainly doesn't have the enigmatic quality of Veronique. But it's wonderful nevertheless. I found that the bits where it gets a bit too explicit for its own good could kind of be "bracketed" in my mind and put aside from the rest of the movie; they aren't very deeply embedded into the proceedings.

[Raiders]

Yay! A film I love more every time I revisit it. Supposedly one of Bunuel's favorite films as well, which I find very cool for some reason.

[Melville]

Yay! A film I love more every time I revisit it. Supposedly one of Bunuel's favorite films as well, which I find very cool for some reason.
Interesting. I liked it more than anything I've seen from Bunuel (though I haven't seen a lot).

Can you point me to your thoughts on Wall-E?

[B-side]

3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977)
Blow Out (De Palma, 1981)
Come and See (Klimov, 1985)
Holy Mountain, The (Jodorowsky, 1973)
In a Year of 13 Moons (Fassbinder, 1978)
L'Eclisse (Antonioni, 1962)
Love Streams (John Cassavetes, 1984)
Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)
What Happened Was… (Tom Noonan, 1994)

I'm interested in your thoughts on any/all of these, particularly the Fassbinder as it's in my own top 5.

[Raiders]

Can you point me to your thoughts on Wall-E?

Click on the "burning emulsion" link in my sig. It's the top entry (of two) in that failed blog I started. I also have numerous additional posts in the WALL-E thread in response to other people's quibbles.

[Derek]

Click on the "burning emulsion" link in my sig. It's the top entry (of two) in that failed blog I started. I also have numerous additional posts in the WALL-E thread in response to other people's quibbles.

Just start posting new reviews there on July 6th of this year and no one will be the wiser.

[Melville]

The Play House...should have made my top 100 if I hadn't forgotten.
Just watched this. Pretty amazing.
Link. (http://video.google.ca/videosearch?q=The Play House keaton)


I'm interested in your thoughts on any/all of these, particularly the Fassbinder as it's in my own top 5.
I can't say I'm much of a fan of Fassbinder (or Altman, De Palma, Jodorowsky, or Antonioni), unfortunately. I'm definitely keen on checking out L'Eclisse and Weekend. I'd never even heard of the Noonan movie before compiling this list.


Click on the "burning emulsion" link in my sig. It's the top entry (of two) in that failed blog I started. I also have numerous additional posts in the WALL-E thread in response to other people's quibbles.
Hm. I agree with all your sentiments about the movie's themes. The execution just didn't work for me.

[Watashi]

I am convinced that Melville does not have a soul.

If you dislike Whisper of the Heart, I will hunt you down.

[Melville]

I am convinced that Melville does not have a soul.
I have so much love to give. I just don't know where to put it. Except into all these movies I'm raving about, I guess.

[B-side]

I can't say I'm much of a fan of Fassbinder (or Altman, De Palma, Jodorowsky, or Antonioni), unfortunately. I'm definitely keen on checking out L'Eclisse and Weekend. I'd never even heard of the Noonan movie before compiling this list.

So much indifference.:P

Fassbinder has only blown me away once, and that was with the film in question. That said, I've still got a lot to see. I'm, sadly, an Altman and De Palma noob. I've seen all 4 Jodorwsky films he hasn't disowned and loved them. I'm starting to warm up to Antonioni a bit more, though I've always liked him.

I'm interested in your response to Weekend as I don't know if you're familiar at all with Brecht's theater techniques. I watched it knowing nothing of Brecht and in retrospect, I regret it highly. I reacted to the film saying it was "cold and tedious". I was told a few times that that was the point, but it rang hollow with no context. The studying of Brecht gave me context. Too bad it came long after my viewing.:lol:

Obviously, it's not necessary to know of Brecht, but I'm very interested in hearing someone discuss the film through a Brecht lens, if you will.

[BuffaloWilder]

I can't say I'm much of a fan of Fassbinder (or Altman, De Palma, Jodorowsky, or Antonioni), unfortunately.


http://www.naturalux.com/SAD.jpg

[Melville]

So much indifference.:P

Fassbinder has only blown me away once, and that was with the film in question. That said, I've still got a lot to see. I'm, sadly, an Altman and De Palma noob. I've seen all 4 Jodorwsky films he hasn't disowned and loved them. I'm starting to warm up to Antonioni a bit more, though I've always liked him.
I'm indifferent toward Altman, Antonioni, and Fassbinder. De Palma and Jodorowsky I outright dislike. Jodorowsky, especially. I find his brand of surrealism obnoxiously glib and filled with superficial symbolism. The psychology in Santa Sangre struck me as inane. Pretty much everything about El Topo irritated me. I'm holding out some hope for The Holy Mountain, but I'm not expecting to like it.


I'm interested in your response to Weekend as I don't know if you're familiar at all with Brecht's theater techniques. I watched it knowing nothing of Brecht and in retrospect, I regret it highly. I reacted to the film saying it was "cold and tedious". I was told a few times that that was the point, but it rang hollow with no context. The studying of Brecht gave me context. Too bad it came long after my viewing.:lol:

Obviously, it's not necessary to know of Brecht, but I'm very interested in hearing someone discuss the film through a Brecht lens, if you will.
My knowledge of Brecht's theories extends only as far as Wikipedia will take it. So I certainly won't be discussing anything explicitly in terms of his theories any time soon. Generally I don't care for cold and tedious styles or distancing devices, so I'm not sure how I'll respond to Weekend.


http://www.naturalux.com/SAD.jpg
Man, I fucking HATE all those goddamn half-assed color gradients in modern computer-colored comic images. I'm not sure how prevalent they are now, but it seemed like every mainstream comic book was infected with them in the early to mid 90s. They make everything look like a pile of half-melted pastels. Whatever happened to flat colors? Or failing that, how about half-decent gradients with more then three tones? Gah.

[Qrazy]

So much indifference.:P

Fassbinder has only blown me away once, and that was with the film in question. That said, I've still got a lot to see. I'm, sadly, an Altman and De Palma noob. I've seen all 4 Jodorwsky films he hasn't disowned and loved them. I'm starting to warm up to Antonioni a bit more, though I've always liked him.

I'm interested in your response to Weekend as I don't know if you're familiar at all with Brecht's theater techniques. I watched it knowing nothing of Brecht and in retrospect, I regret it highly. I reacted to the film saying it was "cold and tedious". I was told a few times that that was the point, but it rang hollow with no context. The studying of Brecht gave me context. Too bad it came long after my viewing.:lol:

Obviously, it's not necessary to know of Brecht, but I'm very interested in hearing someone discuss the film through a Brecht lens, if you will.

I was thoroughly aware of Brecht's devices while watching Weekend. It didn't help the film. It was still very much rhetorical, politically irritating and socially condemnatory. If you want to see Brecht do Brecht read and/or watch Threepenny Opera (preferably a theater production... I have not yet seen Pabst adaptation, perhaps it's wonderful).

[Derek]

Week End is a very funny film. A lot of people seem to take it at face value, when Godard's wry sense of humor is really all over it.

[Qrazy]

Week End is a very funny film. A lot of people seem to take it at face value, when Godard's wry sense of humor is really all over it.

I don't see how a sense of humor makes it any less reductive.

[BuffaloWilder]

Man, I fucking HATE all those goddamn half-assed color gradients in modern computer-colored comic images. I'm not sure how prevalent they are now, but it seemed like every mainstream comic book was infected with them in the early to mid 90s. They make everything look like a pile of half-melted pastels. Whatever happened to flat colors? Or failing that, how about half-decent gradients with more then three tones? Gah.

...I went to Google Images and put in 'sad.'

:|

[Melville]

If you dislike Whisper of the Heart, I will hunt you down.
No need, because it was terrific.

Whisper of the Heart (Yoshifumi Kondo, 1995)
It's simple, direct, and heartfelt but never maudlin, with a serene atmosphere reminiscent of My Neighbour Totoro. It's a fairy tale version of love and life, capturing so many of the right elements and making them ring true, while smoothing over the rough edges of horror and despair. The ending was magnificent.

Completely dissimilar things that sprung to mind while watching this movie:

Just a Friend by Biz Markie (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMEPFZa4ZQo)

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.—Matt Groening

[Melville]

...I went to Google Images and put in 'sad.'

:|
Well, don't take it personally. The suckiness of the coloring is unrelated to you.

[Watashi]

Indeed.

[BuffaloWilder]

Well, don't take it personally. The suckiness of the coloring is unrelated to you.

Oh. Good.

Here. Have some Mazzucchelli and Richmond Lewis.

http://comiccoverage.typepad.com/comic_coverage/images/2007/12/11/year_one_3.jpg

[Melville]

Oh. Good.

Here. Have some Mazzucchelli and Richmond Lewis.


Awesome. You know Mazzucchelli is coming out with a new book this year?

[Watashi]

My favorite aspects of Whisper of the Heart is Kondo and Miyazaki amazing attention to detail. They capture rural Japan better than any live-action film than I can remember. My favorite shot in the entire film is a cutaway to Moon stretching and yawning by the fire during Shizuku's story being discussed. There isn't much significance to the shot, but it's so authentic and real, it really makes me forget that I'm watching an animated film.

That, and Country Roads.

[BuffaloWilder]

Awesome. You know Mazzucchelli is coming out with a new book this year?

I was unaware of that. What's all this, then?

[Watashi]

Did you watch it dubbed or subtitled? I think Lasseter's dubbing work is some of his best. After I viewed it dubbed, I couldn't switch back and I'm usually a purist of these type of things (Cowboy Bebop is another example of watching dubbed over subbed).

[Melville]

My favorite aspects of Whisper of the Heart is Kondo and Miyazaki amazing attention to detail. They capture rural Japan better than any live-action film than I can remember. My favorite shot in the entire film is a cutaway to Moon stretching and yawning by the fire during Shizuku's story being discussed. There isn't much significance to the shot, but it's so authentic and real, it really makes me forget that I'm watching an animated film.

That, and Country Roads.
Yeah, all the little detail were great. I love not just how much detail was put into it, but how much breathing room it gave the details. It added so much to the serene atmosphere to be able to just watch the kind of lived-in quality of it.

My favorite moments were probably the very ending, and the brief dream that the old man has of his lost love, with the light filtering through the leaves onto her dress like in an Impressionist painting.


I was unaware of that. What's all this, then?
It's called Asterios Polyp. I don't know much about it, but I think it's supposed to be coming out next month.


Did you watch it dubbed or subtitled? I think Lasseter's dubbing work is some of his best. After I viewed it dubbed, I couldn't switch back and I'm usually a purist of these type of things (Cowboy Bebop is another example of watching dubbed over subbed).
I started out watching it subtitled, but then I switched over to the dubbed version. The voice actors were great.

[BuffaloWilder]

It's called Asterios Polyp. I don't know much about it, but I think it's supposed to be coming out next month.


I'll have to check this out - partly to see how his style has evolved, since last I picked up something with his name on it. His art seems to be progressing more toward simplicity, now - in place of the detail found in his work on Year One.

[Melville]

I'll have to check this out - partly to see how his style has evolved, since last I picked up something with his name on it. His art seems to be progressing more toward simplicity, now - in place of the detail found in his work on Year One.
Yeah, the art in Asterios Polyp is really spare. I think he's going for a New Yorker kind of cartoony style.

[BuffaloWilder]

Yeah, the art in Asterios Polyp is really spare. I think he's going for a New Yorker kind of cartoony style.

More so or less than in Big Man?

http://www.metabunker.dk/wp-content/uploads/bigman_2_t.jpg

[Melville]

More so or less than in Big Man?

http://www.metabunker.dk/wp-content/uploads/bigman_2_t.jpg
I haven't read Big Man, but based on that image, Asterios Polyp looks to be a lot sparer. Or at least spare in a very different way. I've only seen one sample page from it, but it looks to be all very simple, clean lines (and very few of them), as opposed to the expressionistic, heavy and chunky style he developed in the early 90s.

Have you read City of Glass? His art rocks the house in that.

[Russ]

My favorite aspects of Whisper of the Heart is Kondo and Miyazaki amazing attention to detail.
Wats, have you seen 5 Centimeters per Second yet (or any of Shinkai's films)?

Not sure, but I'm thinking you might like it.

[BuffaloWilder]

I haven't read Big Man, but based on that image, Asterios Polyp looks to be a lot sparer. Or at least spare in a very different way. I've only seen one sample page from it, but it looks to be all very simple, clean lines (and very few of them), as opposed to the expressionistic, heavy and chunky style he developed in the early 90s.

More spare than Big Man? Oh, it is on.



Have you read City of Glass? His art rocks the house in that.

I've been meaning to pick that up for a while, but I always happen to get sidetracked by something featuring somebody or another with pointy-ears and a cape.

[Watashi]

I finally saw The Man Who Planted Trees and yes, it was wonderful. Very beautiful animation and wonderful narration by Christopher Plummer. It's quite a deep fable about the importance of a single life.

So the universe is safe for now.

[Watashi]

Wats, have you seen 5 Centimeters per Second yet (or any of Shinkai's films)?

Not sure, but I'm thinking you might like it.
I haven't seen that one, but I have seen Voices of a Distant Star which I absolutely love.

[Ivan Drago]

While looking through the "Post Your Top 100" thread to compile a list of movies I haven't seen from everyone's top 10 (which I'm not even going to post now because it's WAAAAY TOO long), I regret not posting a list in that thread. I didn't want to because I want to post a Top 50 Favorites list in a separate thread (as soon as my commentary-writing gets better). But I'm seeing that you guys ranked each other's lists, and ranked each other's favorite movies and I'm thinking "Man I regret missing that."

But my list probably would be ranked below eternity's knowing my reputation. :shrug:

[Melville]

My Night at Maud’s (Eric Rohmer, 1970)
I watched this last week and thought it was great, but I couldn't think of anything to say about it. I like its kind of easy understatedness. I like how the characters are so richly fleshed out almost entirely through the subtleties of their interactions and the notsosubtleties of their dialogues. I like how there are many first-person shots through the eyes of the main character early in the film, always carefully observing the woman he is smitten with, and how this leads into our own careful observation of all the characters in the remainder of the film. Also, the two women were pretty sexy.

Satyricon (Fellini, 1969)
Well, it had to happen eventually: a movie I outright disliked—a movie that consists of sex and gluttony and perversion and the grotesque, told in a sequence of dreamlike disjunctions...and which ends up being horribly boring. Its abstractions and mannerisms are so far removed from any human feelings, any humanity at all, that its ribald subject matter becomes empty. The story, drained of all context and emotion, feels like arbitrary events signifying nothing. The style is irksomely ostentatious.

[MacGuffin]

My Night at Maud’s (Eric Rohmer, 1970)
I watched this last week and thought it was great, but I couldn't think of anything to say about it. I like its kind of easy understatedness. I like how the characters are so richly fleshed out almost entirely through the subtleties of their interactions and the notsosubtleties of their dialogues. I like how there are many first-person shots through the eyes of the main character early in the film, always carefully observing the woman he is smitten with, and how this leads into our own careful observation of all the characters in the remainder of the film. Also, the two women were pretty sexy.

There's not much to say about this movie. I find the conversations to be impeccably staged and very interesting.

[Melville]

There's not much to say about this movie. I find the conversations to be impeccably staged and very interesting.
Well, there's plenty to say about the details of the conversations and their staging, and the film's conversational structure in general, and even the details of the plot (especially how the film withholds information—e.g., the "secret" that his eventual wife has). But, yeah, it certainly doesn't send my mind away reeling with ideas.

[MacGuffin]

Well, there's plenty to say about the details of the conversations and their staging, and the film's conversational structure in general, and even the details of the plot (especially how the film withholds information—e.g., the "secret" that his eventual wife has). But, yeah, it certainly doesn't send my mind away reeling with ideas.

Well, not for me, because the first time I saw it, I was too busy taken aback by all the philosophical ramblings rather than the structure itself. I'm probably gonna buy the Six Moral Tales set with the DD sale next month, so I'll definitely be revisiting it.

[Melville]

Well, not for me, because the first time I saw it, I was too busy taken aback by all the philosophical ramblings rather than the structure itself. I'm probably gonna buy the Six Moral Tales set with the DD sale next month, so I'll definitely be revisiting it.
Oh, yeah, I totally forgot about Pascal's wager. Man, I love that wager. (If you haven't read it, you should; it's only a couple of pages long). Also, now I remember that I originally intended to write all about that: how cleverly the film relates the wager to so many things, from God to communism to love (in which one chooses to have faith in the Other), and how well that leads into the ending, in which the protagonist wagers on love in favor of prying out his wife's secret.

[Raiders]

Satyricon (Fellini, 1969)
Well, it had to happen eventually: a movie I outright disliked—a movie that consists of sex and gluttony and perversion and the grotesque, told in a sequence of dreamlike disjunctions...and which ends up being horribly boring. Its abstractions and mannerisms are so far removed from any human feelings, any humanity at all, that its ribald subject matter becomes empty. The story, drained of all context and emotion, feels like arbitrary events signifying nothing. The style is irksomely ostentatious.

:pritch:

[dreamdead]

Oh, yeah, I totally forgot about Pascal's wager. Man, I love that wager. (If you haven't read it, you should; it's only a couple of pages long). Also, now I remember that I originally intended to write all about that: how cleverly the film relates the wager to so many things, from God to communism to love (in which one chooses to have faith in the Other), and how well that leads into the ending, in which the protagonist wagers on love in favor of prying out his wife's secret.

Yeah, I really need to read that wager. That is now today's goal.

What I found so revolutionary about Maud was the contemplation of spirituality amidst physical desire, and how Rohmer allows the two to interact dialectically throughout, never letting one dominate. And even though it's now an incredibly French bourgeois stereotype to have characters debate philosophy on film, I find such consideration fresh and invigorating to see ideas being considered so heavily. I need to revisit it, since the multiple revisits aren't burned in my mind like with Before Sunset (my old #1) but I'm pleased that you enjoyed it.:)

[Duncan]

Satyricon, as much as I like it, is one I definitely understand people not enjoying. I find it beautiful, funny, blissfully surreal.

[Qrazy]

Satyricon, as much as I like it, is one I definitely understand people not enjoying. I find it beautiful, funny, blissfully surreal.

I also like it. It's a bit like a La Dolce Vita except set in Ancient Rome and more bawdy and extreme.

[Melville]

I also like it. It's a bit like a La Dolce Vita except set in Ancient Rome and more bawdy and extreme.
Well, I didn't like La Dolce Vita either. But Satyricon didn't feel very bawdy or extreme to me. It felt painfully abstract. All the characters were just going through their motions, spouting meaningless dialogue amidst vast, empty abstract architecture. It felt so lifeless. According to wikipedia, Fellini's goal was "to eliminate the borderline between dream and imagination: to invent everything and then to objectify the fantasy; to get some distance from it." That's my problem with the film: it objectifies and puts itself at a distance from the fantasy. Distance is the last thing I want in a bawdy, surrealist dreamscape. It loses all the bawdiness, surrealism, and dreaminess that way.

[Qrazy]

Well, I didn't like La Dolce Vita either. But Satyricon didn't feel very bawdy or extreme to me. It felt painfully abstract. All the characters were just going through their motions, spouting meaningless dialogue amidst vast, empty abstract architecture. It felt so lifeless. According to wikipedia, Fellini's goal was "to eliminate the borderline between dream and imagination: to invent everything and then to objectify the fantasy; to get some distance from it." That's my problem with the film: it objectifies and puts itself at a distance from the fantasy. Distance is the last thing I want in a bawdy, surrealist dreamscape. It loses all the bawdiness, surrealism, and dreaminess that way.

Well more extreme in relation to Dolce Vita in that there's much more overt sexuality and violence. I'd rank it as a middle tier Fellini. I found the abstract approach interesting and many of the images and scenes lingered in my mind. Out of curiosity rank/rate Fellini?

[Melville]

Well more extreme in relation to Dolce Vita in that there's much more overt sexuality and violence. I'd rank it as a middle tier Fellini. I found the abstract approach interesting and many of the images and scenes lingered in my mind. Out of curiosity rank/rate Fellini?
I haven't seen much:

8 1/2 - 9
Nights of Cabiria - 8.5
La Dolce Vita - 5.5
Satyricon - 4

[Qrazy]

I haven't seen much:

8 1/2 - 9
Nights of Cabiria - 8.5
La Dolce Vita - 5.5
Satyricon - 4

I'm a big fan. If you want more vibrant bubbling with life surrealism check out Juliet of the Spirits and maybe also Toby Dammit just because it's sort of awesome. Amarcord isn't overly surrealistic but it's also vibrant and excellent as well.

Judging by your ranking of Nights of Cabiria you'll also probably like La Strada and I Vitelloni. I'd hold off on The White Sheik, Variety Lights and Il Bidone. On the other end of the spectrum I'd also hold off on And the Ship Sails On, Roma and Ginger and Fred. I really need to see the rest of his stuff.

Why don't you like La Dolce Vita?

[Melville]

Why don't you like La Dolce Vita?
I can't remember. I listed it in that thread of 'movies you got wrong', but Israfel assured me that I was right the first time. Mind you, he seems to be obsessed with Wittgenstein, so he's probably not to be trusted.

[Raiders]

Unlike Qrazy, I would actually make Il Bidone my next recommendation for Fellini. Perfect and touching little bit of late-period neorealism that strecthes beyond those boundaries but stays more grounded and "earthly" than his subsequent films. Probably my third favorite behind Nights of Cabiria and 8½.

[Qrazy]

Unlike Qrazy, I would actually make Il Bidone my next recommendation for Fellini. Perfect and touching little bit of late-period neorealism that strecthes beyond those boundaries but stays more grounded and "earthly" than his subsequent films. Probably my third favorite behind Nights of Cabiria and 8½.

It's a solid film, but it pales in comparison to the five above.

[Qrazy]

La dolce vita
La strada
Nights of Cabiria
8½
Juliet of the Spirits
Amarcord
Toby Dammit
I Vitelloni
The White Sheik

Satyricon
Il bidone
Ginger and Fred

And the Ship Sails On
Roma
Variety Lights

[Melville]

Thanks for the recs. I just watched 3 Women, and as usual with Altman's films, I was indifferent to it. I'll post some thoughts later.

[Melville]

Serene Velocity (Ernie Gehr, 1970)
Oh my God. Space is breaking. (http://www.ubu.com/film/gehr_serene.html)

[MacGuffin]

Serene Velocity (Ernie Gehr, 1970)
Oh my God. Space is breaking. (http://www.ubu.com/film/gehr_serene.html)

Yeah, I need to watch this. Supposedly, his Side/Walk/Shuttle is even better.

[Melville]

I'd be very interested in reading people's thoughts on these films, since I didn't really have many of my own.


3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977)
I was expecting something more surreal and experimental. The repeated shots of paintings and the shots through water seemed like a very banal way to give the film a dreamlike atmosphere and mythological overtones. The whole thing felt almost half-hearted. I always feel like Altman is too restrained; I demand abandon.


The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961)
The good: terrific cinematography. Wild-eyed Deborah Kerr. Creepy British kid with out-of-control hair.

The could-have-been-better: the film does a lot to associate the ghosts with reckless sexuality and deviant behavior, corruption of the youth and an affront to Britain's siff upper lip, which ties in very well with Kerr's mania. But I felt like a lot more could have been done with the theme. The film itself should have been a bit more reckless.


Seven Chances (Buster Keaton, 1925)
Where were the antics? As usual with Keaton, the love story was entirely void of emotion, serving only to prop up the very slight narrative. And that narrative felt schematic and unnaturally lengthened; there wasn't nearly enough material in the scheme to justify an hour runtime. The final chase was good, but it felt like everything else in the movie was there only to lead to that chase.

I guess I like Keaton only at a frantic pace.


Stage Door (Gregory La Cava, 1937)
This reminded me of Only Angels Have Wings in the way it creates a very particular locale in which all the residents teeter on the outer edges of life and sardonic wit. Unfortunately, it didn't match that film's atmosphere or emotional weight. Still, it was good.

[Raiders]

Stage Door (Gregory La Cava, 1937)

I'll try and get back to you on this one. I think it is a bit of a disservice to compare it to Hawks' film. They couldn't be more different.

[Melville]

I'll try and get back to you on this one. I think it is a bit of a disservice to compare it to Hawks' film. They couldn't be more different.
You didn't think the focus on the one locale, and the camaraderie and ironic defense mechanisms of the characters therein, were similar? Otherwise, I agree that the films were quite different, and it's probably unfair to say that Stage Door doesn't match the atmosphere of Only Angels Have Wings, since it's not trying to.

I guess the one thing that bothered me about Stage Door was the lack of depth it gives the character who commits suicide. That character carries a lot of the weight of the film's themes, and I thought she demanded more attention. It's fitting that she gets somewhat lost in the shuffle just as she did in the theater world, but I would have preferred slightly more focus on her.


Yeah, I need to watch this. Supposedly, his Side/Walk/Shuttle is even better.
Side/Walk/Shuttle sounds pretty awesome. You definitely should watch Serene Velocity. It was astounding.

I mentioned a while back that one of the things I love about 2001: A Space Odyssey is the way its ending uses film to show the evolution of humanity beyond the confines of our everyday understanding of space and time. Serene Velocity basically refines that idea to its essence. It shows us a well-defined space, a hallway, that it then completely breaks apart simply by cutting between different shots, and our whole feeling of space is broken apart at the same time. It's mesmerizing and overwhelming; I don't think I've been so overwhelmed by a movie since I saw The Son.

It's also something of an attack on what I think are some basic misinterpretations of cinema: the notion that film simply records "reality", and the opposite notion that film simply presents illusions, fabricated images that are pointedly unreal. The broken up hallway is clearly not simply a recording of the outside "external reality" of anything; it is an exploration of entirely different dimensions of that "outside" that we are in and of which we experience. At the same time, it is not presented as a "pure image", as a symbol or illusion; it is presented as as an exploration of the actual reality of the space, the limits and extensions of it—not in its empirical, "objective" dimensions, but on its dimensions of feeling and perception.

EDIT: Gehr said it better than I:

In representational films sometimes the image affirms its own presence as image, graphic entity, but most often it serves as vehicle to a photo-recorded event. Traditional and established avant garde film teaches film to be an image, a representing. But film is a real thing and as a real thing it is not imitation. It does not reflect on life, it embodies the life of the mind. It is not a vehicle for ideas or portrayals of emotion outside of its own existence as emoted idea. Film is a variable intensity of light, an internal balance of time, a movement within a given space.

[Bosco B Thug]

The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961)
The good: terrific cinematography. Wild-eyed Deborah Kerr. Creepy British kid with out-of-control hair.

The could-have-been-better: the film does a lot to associate the ghosts with reckless sexuality and deviant behavior, corruption of the youth and an affront to Britain's siff upper lip, which ties in very well with Kerr's mania. But I felt like a lot more could have been done with the theme. The film itself should have been a bit more reckless. Yeah, it's definitely a conservative adaptation. Not only is it based of the James story but it's pretty much directly adapted from a stage play adaptation of the James story by William Archibald, if you didn't know already. So I imagine Clayton had that extra impetus to stay staid and true to a very classical approach.

[MacGuffin]

Serene Velocity sounds amazing Melville, perhaps I'll try and watch it tonight.

As for The Innocents, I loved it. I especially liked the subtle encounters with the ghosts: the one in the hallway is one of the most holy shit moments in movies.

[Melville]

Yeah, it's definitely a conservative adaptation. Not only is it based of the James story but it's pretty much directly adapted from a stage play adaptation of the James story by William Archibald, if you didn't know already. So I imagine Clayton had that extra impetus to stay staid and true to a very classical approach.
Yeah, I wasn't aware of the play. But I haven't even read James story (though it's sitting on one of my bookshelves), so I really have no basis for comparison at all. Based on my very slight reading of James, I'm guessing that he expounded on the themes at great length but somehow avoided directly addressing them.


As for The Innocents, I loved it. I especially liked the subtle encounters with the ghosts: the one in the hallway is one of the most holy shit moments in movies.
Horror movies aren't really for me, I guess. Their "holy shit" moments typically have no effect on me.

[B-side]

I wish I had more to say regarding 3 Women right now as I rather liked it. I just found the whole thing rather eerie.

[Melville]

Our Hospitality (Buster Keaton, 1923)
I liked this one a lot. The more ambitious narrative and stunts were enough to carry the relatively slow pace; the waterfall rescue was all kinds of awesome. And I especially liked the strain of absurd social satire running throughout the film, from the abused wife attacking Keaton when he tries to defend her, to the central premise of the nonsensical family feud and Keaton doing everything he can to be his enemies' guest so that they will be honor-bound to not kill him. Great stuff.

[Melville]

This review probably needs to be made at least twice as long to make any sense, but I can't be bothered.

Leave Her to Heaven (John M Lewis, 1949)
This movie really looks like a movie. Its characters have a technicolor glow. The backgrounds often appear flattened (I'm not sure whether by matte paintings, a particular lens, or my poor eyesight), and the characters are often shot from a low angle; their figures leap forth from the background, free of its two-dimensional constrictions.

Everything has an air of the not-quite-real. Its probably the technicolor that does it. It's not the over-the-top color of Gone with the Wind, but a subdued yet still almost-garish one. Everything appears real, but the hues are slightly off, appearing like a moving painting. Most integrally, the technicolor of skin is tinged with an odd swirl of greens and greys amidst the pinks—the characters seem like models of people rather than the real thing.

Maybe all of this is in other movies too. But this one seems to exemplify it. And not just in the visuals, but in the way they amplify and define the film's whole movie-reality. When we first see the central female character, she stares, blank-eyed, at her soon-to-be-lover, exaggerating the effect of the color. Within a few minutes, the story moves into the world of glorious melodrama, and this female character is revealed to be the obsessive lover par excellence; she demands that she be the only object in her lover's world, that their entire existence must consist of only the two of them. She isn't just an obsessive lover: she's the idea of an obsessive lover, distilled and then mapped into its movie-dimensions. The whole melodrama-world is made a movie-world. It is a world of the irreal, an elaborate world of particular images, broad visual styles and characters, in which larger-than-life figures, and stars, operate as signifiers, the meaning of which we extract from the whole history of film.

[Spinal]

Seven Chances (Buster Keaton, 1925)
Where were the antics?

Are you freaking kidding me?

[Melville]

Are you freaking kidding me?
No? Other than the big chase scene (which admittedly occupied a good portion of the run time), I didn't see a lot of antics. (Keep in mind that I'm comparing this to The Goat, which was nonstop antics.)

[Spinal]

Are you equating antics with chase scenes? Because I'm equating antics with gags. And that film is non-stop gags.

[Melville]

Are you equating antics with chase scenes? Because I'm equating antics with gags. And that film is non-stop gags.
I'm equating antics with attention-drawing often wildly playful or funny acts or actions. The jokes in Seven Chances seemed more subdued. Also, I didn't see the non-stop gags. A lot of time is spent building up jokes. For example, Keaton asks a bunch of women to marry him, and they keep laughing at him. That's not very funny in itself; it only becomes funny when, in desperation, he starts asking completely random people on the street.

[dreamdead]

I'd be very interested in reading people's thoughts on these films, since I didn't really have many of my own.


3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977)
I was expecting something more surreal and experimental. The repeated shots of paintings and the shots through water seemed like a very banal way to give the film a dreamlike atmosphere and mythological overtones. The whole thing felt almost half-hearted. I always feel like Altman is too restrained; I demand abandon.

Stage Door (Gregory La Cava, 1937)
This reminded me of Only Angels Have Wings in the way it creates a very particular locale in which all the residents teeter on the outer edges of life and sardonic wit. Unfortunately, it didn't match that film's atmosphere or emotional weight. Still, it was good.

Sorry for late replies. Was out of town over the weekend.

My recollection of 3 Women has sadly faded since '06, when I viewed it and responded to it so highly. However, the moments that are embedded in my mind is the awesome beauty that both Sissy Spacek and Shelly Duvall rock throughout that film, and the female effort to secure place (as well as how fragile that definition ends up becoming). Duvall's constant talking, how little everyone else pays attention to her, and how she constructs any sense of (fake) communication even as she retains her monologic discourse. And though I agree that the painting is a dreary way to suggest dreaminess, I found the juxtaposition between the title (suggesting three) and the almost ephemeral third female lead fascinating, especially as it pertains to shifts in racial value and a commentary on voice(lessness). Ultimately, is the film as rich as something like Bergman's Persona which clearly is Altman's model? I don't think so, but I nonetheless recognize some of the values that Altman was trying to underscore in terms of women and representation in the 1970s...

Regarding La Cava's film--even though there are sufferings, namely as you've noted the lack of foundational coverage on the girl who commits suicide, it's a film that for me is especially fascinating in its gender study of lead women (Hepburn and Rodgers) who abandon any binding sort of male (financial) security so that they can gain their own private success. Though the film suggests romance, it is fully a facile sense of male privilege in this world. Here is a film that doesn't pigeonhole women into being a romantic foil, but instead reverses the tables. It seems almost one of a kind in this respect, and especially modern. Only a few too many reaction shots of the girls in the theatre during Hepburn's climactic speech prevent this from feeling like a modern film. Otherwise, a wonderfully cyclical and open film.

[Boner M]

Yeah, I'm with Spinal on Seven Chances. The inference that it doesn't move at a frantic pace (at least as soon as the pieces fall into place) is pretty much factually incorrect.

Dig what you wrote about Leave Her to Heaven. I find that for all its technicolor bombast and artifice that it's quite emotionally harrowing; it's a deft balance that Stahl manages. I think Tierney's performance has something to do with the film not collapsing under the weight of its unreality; easily her best work.

[Melville]

shifts in racial value and a commentary on voice(lessness).
Racial value? Evidently I missed something.


Here is a film that doesn't pigeonhole women into being a romantic foil, but instead reverses the tables.
True. I have a tendency to ignore the social relevance of movies—I tend to universalize everything.

Thanks for the thoughts.


Yeah, I'm with Spinal on Seven Chances. The inference that it doesn't move at a frantic pace (at least as soon as the pieces fall into place) is pretty much factually incorrect.
:confused:
Inference? From what am I inferring something? From the movie itself? Also, your face is factually incorrect.


Dig what you wrote about Leave Her to Heaven. I find that for all its technicolor bombast and artifice that it's quite emotionally harrowing; it's a deft balance that Stahl manages. I think Tierney's performance has something to do with the film not collapsing under the weight of its unreality; easily her best work.
Yeah, I didn't mean to downplay the emotional impact. I think in this case the movie-ness of the movie works really well with the emotions in play. And I pretty much always love movies about obsessive love.

[Boner M]

Inference? From what am I inferring something? From the movie itself? Also, your face is factually incorrect.
You said at the end of your review that you only like Keaton's films when they move at a frantic pace, thus inferring that Seven Chances was somehow slow. Which, for the most part, is factually incorrect.
JUST LIKE YO MAMMA!

[Derek]

I'm with Melville and his factually incorrect opinion. I found the first 2/3 of Seven Chances to be rather underwhelming, even gagwise, by Keaton's standards. I still like it, especially for the final chase, but I also thought there were less gags, or at least less that worked, than Sherlock Jr., Our Hospitality or his best short films.

[Duncan]

Imply, not infer. I think there's a Simpsons episode where Lisa chastises Homer on mixing them up.

[Boner M]

Imply, not infer. I think there's a Simpsons episode where Lisa chastises Homer on mixing them up.
Really? Wow. Me epic fail big time.

EDIT: (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/infer)

infer:
4. to hint; imply; suggest.

Hmm.

[Duncan]

Really? Wow. Me epic fail big time.

EDIT: (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/infer)

infer:
4. to hint; imply; suggest.

Hmm.

Well, then dictionary.com fails.

From google: infer (http://www.google.ca/search?q=define%3A+infer&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a) and imply (http://www.google.ca/search?q=define%3A+imply&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a).

Okay, here's the usage note from dictionary.com:


Usage note:
Infer has been used to mean “to hint or suggest� since the 16th century by speakers and writers of unquestioned ability and eminence: The next speaker criticized the proposal, inferring that it was made solely to embarrass the government. Despite its long history, many 20th-century usage guides condemn the use, maintaining that the proper word for the intended sense is imply and that to use infer is to lose a valuable distinction between the two words.
Although the claimed distinction has probably existed chiefly in the pronouncements of usage guides, and although the use of infer to mean “to suggest� usually produces no ambiguity, the distinction too has a long history and is widely observed by many speakers and writers. Personally, I think the sentence they quote as being evidence of "to hint or suggest" is actually evidence to the contrary. I think it still means the first definition: to derive by reasoning; conclude or judge from premises or evidence: They inferred his displeasure from his cool tone of voice.

[Qrazy]

Seven Chances and Our Hospitality both interest me less than Sherlock Jr. and Steamboat Bill Jr. and finally The General.

[monolith94]

And the cameraman, Qrazy???

[soitgoes...]

Keaton features ranked:

Sherlock Jr.
The General
The Cameraman
Our Hospitality
Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Seven Chances
College
Spite Marriage
The Navigator
Three Ages

[Qrazy]

And the cameraman, Qrazy???

Haven't seen it, I'll get on that. I also need to get on Chaplin's The Circus, Limelight and I think one other that I'm forgetting.

[Qrazy]

Sherlock Jr.
Steamboat Bill, Jr.
The General
Our Hospitality
Seven Chances
The Navigator

[MacGuffin]

I've only seen Sherlock, Jr. and Our Hospitality and loved both, but based on those, I can safely say that he's a way better actor than Charles Chaplin.

[Qrazy]

I've only seen Sherlock, Jr. and Our Hospitality and loved both, but based on those, I can safely say that he's a way better actor than Charles Chaplin.

And I can safely and heartily disagree.

[Melville]

Including shorts,

1. The Goat
2. The Playhouse
3. Our Hospitality
4. Sherlock Jr.
5. Steamboat Bill, Jr.
6. One Week
7. Neighbours
8. Seven Chances
9. The General

I definitely need to see The General again.


Really? Wow. Me epic fail big time.

EDIT: (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/infer)

infer:
4. to hint; imply; suggest.

Hmm.
You should avoid that usage, if only to avoid irritating me when I'm feeling unhappy and irritable. It only leads to confusion about whether you mean "infer" in its approved sense, or if you mean it in the sense of "imply". Merriam-Webster has a more informative note on usage than the one from Dictionary.com: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/infer


I've only seen Sherlock, Jr. and Our Hospitality and loved both, but based on those, I can safely say that he's a way better actor than Charles Chaplin.
What Qrazy said. Great avatar though.

[Melville]

I'm with Melville and his factually incorrect opinion. I found the first 2/3 of Seven Chances to be rather underwhelming, even gagwise, by Keaton's standards. I still like it, especially for the final chase, but I also thought there were less gags, or at least less that worked, than Sherlock Jr., Our Hospitality or his best short films.
:pritch:


Personally, I think the sentence they quote as being evidence of "to hint or suggest" is actually evidence to the contrary.
It's not clear from the sentence whether the speaker is inferring something from the proposal and then criticizing it based on that, or if in his criticism, he is implying something about the proposal.

[Melville]

Come and See (Klimov, 1985)
This was probably the film I was most looking forward to. I had heard that it was an extremely bleak film about the effects of war, but I didn't realize that it was also an extremely odd film about the effects of war. It makes me uncertain about what it's doing, about the meaning of its images and narrative—and it does so aggressively, not with a cold, ironic distance from its material, but with kicking and thrashing. It's full of jolting contrasts and stylistic flourishes. It opens with a child speaking in an unnaturally raspy voice, as if he were imitating the voice of a war-hardened soldier (or of war itself in the abstract). He seems to be playing a role. It's disconcerting in its degree of exaggeration. And he isn't just playing a role: he's facing the screen, directly addressing the audience, playing his role at me. But then all the characters seem to be playing roles; everything is painted in broad strokes and seems somewhat unnatural. That's especially true of the central character, who's face seems perpetually and unnaturally contorted. And that face is quite frequently staring at me. The artificiality is odd. It's purposefully different from the types of artificiality we expect at the movies. And it's directed at us, confrontationally, as if to make us uneasy, shake us out of our comfortable movie-watching state and make us look anew at the horror on display.

The unnatural tone is contrasted with scenes of very personal suffering and hypersubjective techniques. After the protagonist goes deaf from an explosion, the humming in his ears comes to dominate the soundtrack. But then, for a brief moment, as he struggles through a lake of mud, classical music plays. The classical music is not allowed to give a horrifying beauty to the image, as it would in, say, Schindler's List. It is cut short, only briefly breaking through the overwhelming hum. The strong contrast between the various moods, styles, and points of view in play are unsetting, making us look at the horror of the scene, the experience of the boy—and even the classical music and its usual role of accentuating the action in movies—with an unusual degree of uncertainty.

Earlier, there's a conversation that I found very off-putting in its unnatural dialogue. I wondered if it was intentional, if the characters were supposed to be putting on acts. In the next scene, one of the characters dances on a box in the rain. It's a mesmerizing, beautiful scene, one of the greatest moments of transcendence I've seen. But of course, the character is putting on a show. This time, her playacting is obvious. And in the next scene, a series of explosions send chunks of forest into the air and send the characters scrambling for safety. Again, the rapid shifts in tone, mood, and style are jarring, the juxtapositions forcing me to ponder all the scenes, the violence, the artificiality, the frailty of the transcendent moment amidst the hazards of war, but also the frailty of its depiction.

In the film's penultimate scene, the lead character, his face now permanently frozen in a look of dead-eyed horror, aims his rifle at a portrait of Hitler. With each shot fired, we see newsreel clips of Hitler run back in time. It's an odd moment in a film full of them. The overt metaphor is almost too simple, the look on the boy's face too fixed and exaggerated, but the force of the images, their uncanny backward movement, the shots of the gun, and the fact that the boy looks straight at us, somehow doubles back, past the simplicity of the metaphor, into the world of horror and pain that it represents. In the next scene, a group of partisan soldiers, those fighting against the German army, march through the forest. The scene is ethereal and tranquil, a moment of hope juxtaposed against the violent editing of the previous scene. Once again, the film doesn't allow us to respond to each scene with the obvious, "correct" emotions, with the feelings of sadness, indignation, and cathartic release that these two scenes might normally invoke. Instead, it insists that we respond to both scenes, together, in all their violent contrast, with thoughtful trepidation.

[Raiders]

Your rating for White Dog is just so, so wrong.

But uh, yeah, good stuff there with Come and See.

[Spinal]

I definitely need to see The General again.

Yeah, seriously. That is some odd stuff there, dude.

[BuffaloWilder]

Yeah, seriously. That is some odd stuff there, dude.

I loves me some of that, right there.

[Melville]

Your rating for White Dog is just so, so wrong.
Yeah, that's about the response I was expecting.


Yeah, seriously. That is some odd stuff there, dude.
It was the first of his films that I saw, many years ago. I'm guessing I'd like it a lot more now.

White Dog (Fuller, 1982)
This was the first time that Fuller's camp/pulp style rubbed me the wrong way (I had problems with Pickup on South Street, but only with its narrative). The acting is horribly unexpressive and hammy, and the script is equally horribly on the nose and simplistic. Its social commentary lacked the explosive impact and style of Shock Corridor's best scenes (e.g. the black racist's march down the hall, the virtuoso color scene). Without that explosiveness, it just comes off as a bit silly. The basic premise—a black animal trainer trying to cure a dog that was trained to hate black people—carries some relatively interesting subtext (racism lurks in the most innocuous things—even man's best friend—racism is not just learned, but specifically taught, etc.), and there were some nice touches (e.g., the design of the training ground, which is reminiscent of the Thunderdome and gives the retraining/deprogramming of the dog an air of no-holds-barred gladiatorial combat), but I'd prefer more depth and detail in its exploration of that subtext. I suppose that the extreme simplicity, almost purity, of the premise is part of the film's appeal, but it doesn't suit my inclinations, at least not in conjunction with the film's campy style. Anyway, despite the criticisms, I didn't think it was bad, it just wasn't up my alley.

[Qrazy]

Yeah, that's about the response I was expecting.


It was the first of his films that I saw, many years ago. I'm guessing I'd like it a lot more now.

White Dog (Fuller, 1982)
This was the first time that Fuller's camp/pulp style rubbed me the wrong way (I had problems with Pickup on South Street, but only with its narrative). The acting is horribly unexpressive and hammy, and the script is equally horribly on the nose and simplistic. Its social commentary lacked the explosive impact and style of Shock Corridor's best scenes (e.g. the black racist's march down the hall, the virtuoso color scene). Without that explosiveness, it just comes off as a bit silly. The basic premise—a black animal trainer trying to cure a dog that was trained to hate black people—carries some relatively interesting subtext (racism lurks in the most innocuous things—even man's best friend—racism is not just learned, but specifically taught, etc.), and there were some nice touches (e.g., the design of the training ground, which is reminiscent of the Thunderdome and gives the retraining/deprogramming of the dog an air of no-holds-barred gladiatorial combat), but I'd prefer more depth and detail in its exploration of that subtext. I suppose that the extreme simplicity, almost purity, of the premise is part of the film's appeal, but it doesn't suit my inclinations, at least not in conjunction with the film's campy style. Anyway, despite the criticisms, I didn't think it was bad, it just wasn't up my alley.

Indeed. That shot where the trainer stumbles across the dead man in the church and the camera zooms on his tear-filled eyes... ugh.

[Raiders]

I thought Winfield met Fuller's overzealous and impassioned style head on and gave a great and rather emotional portrayal (if not the emotion coming from him then from myself over his, and Fuller's, insistance that racism must be confronted and corrected, not shut out of sight). I don't think the screenplay is any more on-the-nose than anything Fuller tackled (I mean, let's face it, Shock Corridor has a black man make a KKK hood) and I don't think the film would have benefitted from a more nuanced portrayal. I think Fuller recognized that we all know racism and we all know how to make the argument against. I think rather Fuller set out to use "man's best friend" and the simplicity of the metaphor to plead for action and for an understanding that issues like this are so engrained in our psyche we must act, brazenly and without fear, to overcome them. It is in the simplicity of the film that makes it so powerful. Fuller was never one to mix words or go for shades of gray. He's like the poetic, artistic version of Stanley Kramer. Where Kramer made platitudes and PC films that begged us to care about the issue, Fuller visually demanded we take notice, baring however embarassingly on-the-nose the issues dear to his heart. It's the kind of bold-faced cinema I admire.

[Spaceman Spiff]

Agreed with White Dog. Very disappointing movie. Not quite sure what I was expecting (as I hadn't seen any Fuller prior) but I found it a really cheesy B-movie, as opposed to the scathing satire than I wanted.

I also just watched Serene Velocity, and I must say that it's brilliance is lost on me. Reading your blurb last page also doesn't really illuminate much (not that I don't understand what you're trying to say, but I'm not sure how you make the connection between the eradication of our notion of space and time with the repetition of the two shots.) Maybe it's because I'm technical-minded and a little too literal, but all I saw were two shots of the same hallway and nothing bowled me over. I also could have got the same experience from 1 minute of it as opposed to its 15+ minutes, but whatever. I'm filing this under the 'I don't get it' folder.

[Qrazy]

Agreed with White Dog. Very disappointing movie. Not quite sure what I was expecting (as I hadn't seen any Fuller prior) but I found it a really cheesy B-movie, as opposed to the scathing satire than I wanted.


On average this is what you should expect from Fuller. But The Big Red One and Pickup on South Street avoid the cheesiness more than most of his films do.

[Raiders]

Agreed with White Dog. Very disappointing movie. Not quite sure what I was expecting (as I hadn't seen any Fuller prior) but I found it a really cheesy B-movie, as opposed to the scathing satire than I wanted.

Satire? Why would you want that? I also don't think it being a B-movie has any real bearing on its ability to be scathing, which it is.

[Spaceman Spiff]

Satire? Why would you want that? I also don't think it being a B-movie has any real bearing on its ability to be scathing, which it is.

I was under the impression that it was a biting satire? I like that stuff. And I do think that hammy acting and corny set-pieces (the church scene was a bit of an eye-roller) detract from the potency of a film's message [and it's ability to... scathe, I suppose], if the film's message is serious (which it is).

[Spaceman Spiff]

On Serene Velocity:

I just watched it again Melville, and I think I get where you're coming from now. It's certainly a very interesting experiment, I'll give it that.

[this has been the easiest discussion for you ever, I imagine]

[Melville]

Fuller rated:

The Naked Kiss - 8.5
Shock Corridor - 7.5
White Dog - 5.5
Pickup on South Street - 5 (not cheesy, but the central romance was so nonsensical, and bordering on sexist, that the movie kind of fell apart for me)

Park Row sounds really interesting.


Indeed. That shot where the trainer stumbles across the dead man in the church and the camera zooms on his tear-filled eyes... ugh.
The trainer was pretty bad, but the female lead was much, much worse.


I thought Winfield met Fuller's overzealous and impassioned style head on and gave a great and rather emotional portrayal (if not the emotion coming from him then from myself over his, and Fuller's, insistance that racism must be confronted and corrected, not shut out of sight). I don't think the screenplay is any more on-the-nose than anything Fuller tackled (I mean, let's face it, Shock Corridor has a black man make a KKK hood) and I don't think the film would have benefitted from a more nuanced portrayal. I think Fuller recognized that we all know racism and we all know how to make the argument against. I think rather Fuller set out to use "man's best friend" and the simplicity of the metaphor to plead for action and for an understanding that issues like this are so engrained in our psyche we must act, brazenly and without fear, to overcome them. It is in the simplicity of the film that makes it so powerful. Fuller was never one to mix words or go for shades of gray. He's like the poetic, artistic version of Stanley Kramer. Where Kramer made platitudes and PC films that begged us to care about the issue, Fuller visually demanded we take notice, baring however embarassingly on-the-nose the issues dear to his heart. It's the kind of bold-faced cinema I admire.
Yeah, as I admitted a few posts back, I tend to ignore social relevance. If a film tackles a social issue, I prefer it to do so with deep analysis rather than simplistic, in-your-face metaphor. The reason I liked Shock Corridor a lot more than White Dog is that it was so punchy: it was a whirlwind tour of social issues, making a quick, forceful point about each. (I also just preferred the formal techniques of Shock Corridor, especially the color segment.) If White Dog had been like that, presenting its metaphor and message simply, in a short film or a segment of a longer film, I probably would have really liked it. But I didn't think there was enough depth in it to sustain the whole film.


I also just watched Serene Velocity, and I must say that it's brilliance is lost on me. Reading your blurb last page also doesn't really illuminate much (not that I don't understand what you're trying to say, but I'm not sure how you make the connection between the eradication of our notion of space and time with the repetition of the two shots.)
Hm. I'm not sure what you're missing. Our usual notions of space and time are based on our view of them (our visual field) from a single position and with a smooth movement forward in time. Even when we think of an "objective" viewpoint, it tends to be conflated with what we would see if we just stood there looking at something. And when we think of space and time from a scientific or mathematical perspective, it tends to be as a rigid structure through which things move. By alternating between the different shots, the film breaks down all these notions by not allowing us to see the hallway from the position of an idealized spectator, and it simultaneously makes the hallway into a fluid rather than rigid space. Also, I think the length of the film is essential, since the film's rhythm, particularly of its variations in lighting, serves to explore the moods of the space.

EDIT: I guess I should have responded to one post at a time, so I wouldn't have missed your last post.

[MacGuffin]

Also, I think the length of the film is essential, since the film's rhythm, particularly of its variations in lighting, serves to explore the moods of the space.

It should be worth-noting that the version floating around on the internet is an inproper framerate, and henceforth, not only the wrong speed, but the wrong length (the actual version is double the length of the one you are likely seeing). So, you're getting an idea for the movie, but you're not really seeing it the way the artist intended.

[dreamdead]

Come and See (Klimov, 1985)

Earlier, there's a conversation that I found very off-putting in its unnatural dialogue. I wondered if it was intentional, if the characters were supposed to be putting on acts. In the next scene, one of the characters dances on a box in the rain. It's a mesmerizing, beautiful scene, one of the greatest moments of transcendence I've seen. But of course, the character is putting on a show. This time, her playacting is obvious. And in the next scene, a series of explosions send chunks of forest into the air and send the characters scrambling for safety. Again, the rapid shifts in tone, mood, and style are jarring, the juxtapositions forcing me to ponder all the scenes, the violence, the artificiality, the frailty of the transcendent moment amidst the hazards of war, but also the frailty of its depiction.


Come and See has still been the best film I've seen all year. This moment you identify here, where the girl is clearly performing amidst this serene musical score and lilting, filtering sunlight, is among the most transcendent of images that I've seen. It's a totally orchestrated moment, but Klimov is so hyperaware of that fact that it becomes beautiful anyway in its pure unadulterated emotional manipulation.

Later scenes of the barn on fire, the child disappearing into the rolling mist, the horror of execution, all of that serves as counterpoint to this perfect moment early on. And even that is soon countered by the explosions. It's just a film that hits every note with a bullseye for me.

[Qrazy]

Come and See has still been the best film I've seen all year. This moment you identify here, where the girl is clearly performing amidst this serene musical score and lilting, filtering sunlight, is among the most transcendent of images that I've seen. It's a totally orchestrated moment, but Klimov is so hyperaware of that fact that it becomes beautiful anyway in its pure unadulterated emotional manipulation.

Later scenes of the barn on fire, the child disappearing into the rolling mist, the horror of execution, all of that serves as counterpoint to this perfect moment early on. And even that is soon countered by the explosions. It's just a film that hits every note with a bullseye for me.

I don't quite agree. I found it didn't quite congeal aesthetically. Although it's certainly the best, most honest and frightening depiction of the terrors of war I've ever seen. So when it does hit the bullseye (the barn scene for instance), it nails it.

[Ivan Drago]

I haven't seen Come and See since I first saw it 4 years ago. I still remember it and love it to this day, though.

[Melville]

In case anybody was wondering, I haven't abandoned this project. I just watched L'Eclisse, which was great, and I'll be watching Sansho the Bailiff in the next day or two. I'll post some thoughts later. (And I'll eventually post something on Sans Soleil.)

[Qrazy]

In case anybody was wondering, I haven't abandoned this project. I just watched L'Eclisse, which was great, and I'll be watching Sansho the Bailiff in the next day or two. I'll post some thoughts later. (And I'll eventually post something on Sans Soleil.)

Nice! Was that the one you decided to blind buy? Or did you blind buy both of those two?

So based upon this post did you rewatch Sans Soleil? Before your extended thoughts, did the rewatch improve your enjoyment?

[Melville]

Nice! Was that the one you decided to blind buy? Or did you blind buy both of those two?

So based upon this post did you rewatch Sans Soleil? Before your extended thoughts, did the rewatch improve your enjoyment?
I ended up blind-buying all four movies (La Strada, Pickpocket, Sansho, and L'Eclisse). I rewatched Sans Soleil quite a while ago (a month, maybe?). I appreciated it a bit more than on my first viewing, but I still didn't like it all that much.

[Pop Trash]

Agreed with White Dog. Very disappointing movie. Not quite sure what I was expecting (as I hadn't seen any Fuller prior) but I found it a really cheesy B-movie, as opposed to the scathing satire than I wanted.


I have to admit that White Dog isn't nearly as good as people make it out to be. I still like it (I'd give it a 7/10) but it does have an 80s TV movie vibe about it. I think Fuller fans willfully ignore its faults (the "cheesy" melodramatic acting and the cut-rate TV movie look about it) just because they really want to like it. Still, it has a potent, rough-edged, grandiose anger and I like the ambiguous ending.

[Raiders]

I think Fuller fans willfully ignore its faults ... just because they really want to like it.

:rolleyes:

Or some people just don't think acting is particularly critical here (I also really liked Winfield's performance) and the look seems appropriate, ugly or not.

[transmogrifier]

I think Fuller fans willfully ignore its faults (the "cheesy" melodramatic acting and the cut-rate TV movie look about it) just because they really want to like it.

And I think a certain kind of messageboard poseurs willfully make-up any old shit about a group of people and pretend it actually means something just because they want to be noticed on the said messageboard.

This game is fun!

[B-side]

And I think I wanna see what Melville thinks of my precious In a Year with 13 Moons. I'm fully ready to dole out several neg-reps for any score less than a 9.

[Pop Trash]

And I think a certain kind of messageboard poseurs willfully make-up any old shit about a group of people and pretend it actually means something just because they want to be noticed on the said messageboard.

This game is fun!

Shouldn't you be watching Knowing again right about now?

[Melville]

And I think I wanna see what Melville thinks of my precious In a Year with 13 Moons. I'm fully ready to dole out several neg-reps for any score less than a 9.
I don't know if I'll be able to find that one.


Sans Soleil (Marker, 1983)
I liked this a bit more on my second viewing, and I admire a lot of what it does, but all the qualms I had on my first viewing remain. First, I just found it aesthetically off-putting. I tried to ignore the narrator's voice, but I still couldn't help finding it irritatingly soft and subdued—a kind of syrupy affectlessness. Also, counter to what I remembered from my first viewing, I found the imagery entirely bland and unengaging. While it fits with the home-movie/travelogue idea, the cinematography shares the kind of flat lifelessness of the narration. The 'transcendent' image of the Icelandic children walking seemed, especially, to demand more evocative or striking photography. This bland aesthetic is presumably intentional, since Marker explicitly questions the reality of his images and his ability to communicate their meaning to his audience. So maybe he doesn't want the audience to be spellbound by the image of transcendence; maybe he wants to put us at a distance to consider what he's saying about what he's showing. Or maybe it's just me who isn't spellbound.

The editing is better, and I suspect that it's really the heart of the film, what people find most fascinating. The juxtapositions are occasionally quite striking, moving between disparate types of images, different types of constructed realities. And that brings me to what I actually like about the film, which is the basic philosophy that it expounds. Its intertwining of time with images is pretty good stuff: we build the past and future with our images, with our stories, signs and symbols. They create a common myth of history, of a meaningful reality outside the present, an underlying dreamscape of symbols. People asleep on the subway dream of images from television. The segments of the film set in Japan are the most interesting, casting it as a land where reality is explicitly constructed from a plethora of outward signs. And Marker is quick to remind us that these images, memories, historical time, are only ever a representation, never containing lived reality (for how can one remember thirst? as Marker questions); they are a tempting illusion that obscures the elusiveness of time itself; they exist only as a part of lived reality, as a staging ground for both personal and communal life. There's some other pretty good stuff in the movie (though it's a bit dim in my mind a month later). And Marker's techniques of exploring his multitude of images do a pretty good job of simultaneously exploring his ideas.

Unfortunately, all that is sullied by a few things. The film tends to exoticize foreign cultures, and even specific people, way too much, forcing them to play the roles of symbols. And the narration too often strives for poeticism: turns of phrase like "I've hunted it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter," "to repair the web of time," and "a temple consecrated to cats" just come off as twee to me, preventing me from really being interested in what the film's exploring. I just don't want to listen to somebody who talks about his "most beloved animals: the cat and the owl." But beyond this tone of poeticism, and much more irksome to me, was the stream of risible, striving-for-pithiness comments. For example, "All women have a built-in grain of respectability"; and far worse, "The unsurpassable philosophy of our time is found in Pac-Man. He's the most perfect graphic metaphor of the human condition. He puts into true perspective the balance of power between the individual and the environment." This faux-losophy occasionally teeters on the edge of obnoxious New-Ageism, such as when the narrator says he is surprised by his two dogs being unusually rambunctious on a beach, until he realizes that for the first time in 60 years, the year of the dog is meeting the year of water in the lunar calendar. Bleh. I don't know how seriously it's intended to be taken (hopefully not very), but it's just kind of irritating.

Anyway, yeah, I definitely admire enough of it to like it overall, but it's fraught with things that I strongly dislike.

[Qrazy]

Also, counter to what I remembered from my first viewing, I found the imagery entirely bland and unengaging. While it fits with the home-movie/travelogue idea, the cinematography shares the kind of flat lifelessness of the narration. The 'transcendent' image of the Icelandic children walking seemed, especially, to demand more evocative or striking photography. This bland aesthetic is presumably intentional, since Marker explicitly questions the reality of his images and his ability to communicate their meaning to his audience. So maybe he doesn't want the audience to be spellbound by the image of transcendence; maybe he wants to put us at a distance to consider what he's saying about what he's showing. Or maybe it's just me who isn't spellbound.

I do not think it is not intentional, because I found them to be exquisite images (for the most part). Although they are also rough, not slickly lit.


Unfortunately, all that is sullied by a few things. The film tends to exoticize foreign cultures, and even specific people, way too much, forcing them to play the roles of symbols.

This I think is on purpose.


And the narration too often strives for poeticism: turns of phrase like "I've hunted it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter," "to repair the web of time," and "a temple consecrated to cats" just come off as twee to me, preventing me from really being interested in what the film's exploring. I just don't want to listen to somebody who talks about his "most beloved animals: the cat and the owl." But beyond this tone of poeticism, and much more irksome to me, was the stream of risible, string-to-be-pithy comments. For example, "All women have a built-in grain of respectability"; and far worse, "The unsurpassable philosophy of our time is found in Pac-Man. He's the most perfect graphic metaphor of the human condition. He puts into true perspective the balance of power between the individual and the environment." This faux-losophy occasionally teeters on the edge of obnoxious New-Ageism, such as when the narrator says he is surprised by his two dogs being unusually rambunctious on a beach, until he realizes that for the first time in 60 years, the year of the dog is meeting the year of water in the lunar calendar. Bleh.

This is a reasonable criticism which I share.

[Melville]

I do not think it is not intentional, because I found them to be exquisite images (for the most part). Although they are also rough, not slickly lit.
You don't think it's not intentional?

[Raiders]

How is the narration in Marker's film any different from say, a Herzog documentary? Or do you also find faults with that?

[Qrazy]

You don't think it's not intentional?

Ah shite, I edited the first half of the sentence and forgot about the second.

I don't think it's intentional.

[Melville]

How is the narration in Marker's film any different from say, a Herzog documentary? Or do you also find faults with that?
In terms of voice, or in terms of content? I love Herzog's voice: his combination of calm dead-seriousness and German accent is great. In terms of content, Herzog definitely tosses out the occasionally silly remark, but it's more often funny than irritating; I can't help but like the almost absurd patness and simultaneous grandiosity of all his talk about the indifferent universe, especially in how well it combines with his tone of voice. But his narration definitely works best when it's contrasting with someone or something quite different, such as Kinski or Timothy Treadwell.


I don't think it's intentional.
That's what I figured.

[Melville]

Jesus. The ending of Sansho the Bailiff was brutal. First time in a long while that I've cried watching a movie.

[B-side]

I don't know if I'll be able to find that one.

I don't know where you live or what you have, but both Netflix and KG have it.

[transmogrifier]

Shouldn't you be watching Knowing again right about now?

Why?

[Melville]

I don't know where you live or what you have, but both Netflix and KG have it.
I live in a small city in southern Ontario. The Canadian equivalent of Netflix is pretty lousy. I recently upgraded my internet service, so I might consider joining KG sometime.

[balmakboor]

I find the images in Sans Soleil to be mesmerizing and the narrator (English version at least) to be one of its most seductive elements. It rises above his other two features I've seen largely because it has a consistent narrational voice. The Last Bolshevik and A Grin Without a Cat have mixed narrators and lots of interview voices and they feel less focused because of that. In spite of that though, I do consider both to be quite brilliant and essential.

[Melville]

L'Eclisse (Antonioni, 1962)

You know when you desperately want to say something but you're too wracked with anxiety to get it out, your mouth is filled with tongue, your throat aches, you feel a pressure in your chest and and a frantic energy in your frozen limbs, and the space around you weighs down, constricting you and seemingly engorged with its emptiness? Well, L'Eclisse does a damn fine job of capturing that feeling. In its opening scene, in which Monica Vitti ends her engagement, the characters barely talk, but the space around them won't shut up. In one shot, the camera slowly arcs around the faces of the two former lovers; unlike a still shot or a pan, the shot insists on the three-dimensionality of the space around the faces, makes us aware of it all around them. Monica Vitti is adrift in space. Objects are flattened and recessed around her (someone with some knowledge of cameras tell me how this is done), separated by an impenetrable distance full of space. She is the model of ennui, of aimless, unspoken miseries. Most everything in the movie is unspoken.

The characters go through their motions, they engage in ridiculous, empty amusements and activities: an embarrassing tribal dance in black face, the glorious frenzy of the stock market exchange. Should the fleeting love affair at the center of the story be included in that list? I don't know. It's a fine love affair as far as it goes. But it doesn't go far. At film's end there's a sequence lasting seven or eight minutes. The central characters are nowhere to be found in this sequence. There's nothing but space.

[Qrazy]

L'Eclisse (Antonioni, 1962)

You know when you desperately want to say something but you're too wracked with anxiety to get it out, your mouth is filled with tongue, your throat aches, you feel a pressure in your chest and and a frantic energy in your frozen limbs, and the space around you weighs down, constricting you and seemingly engorged with its emptiness? Well, L'Eclisse does a damn fine job of capturing that feeling. In its opening scene, in which Monica Vitti ends her engagement, the characters barely talk, but the space around them won't shut up. In one shot, the camera slowly arcs around the faces of the two former lovers; unlike a still shot or a pan, the shot insists on the three-dimensionality of the space around the faces, makes us aware of it all around them. Monica Vitti is adrift in space. Objects are flattened and recessed around her (someone with some knowledge of cameras tell me how this is done), separated by an impenetrable distance full of space. She is the model of ennui, of aimless, unspoken miseries. Most everything in the movie is unspoken.

The characters go through their motions, they engage in ridiculous, empty amusements and activities: an embarrassing tribal dance in black face, the glorious frenzy of the stock market exchange. Should the fleeting love affair at the center of the story be included in that list? I don't know. It's a fine love affair as far as it goes. But it doesn't go far. At film's end there's a sequence lasting seven or eight minutes. The central characters are nowhere to be found in this sequence. There's nothing but space.

To flatten the image you position the camera further away and then zoom in and frame the shot.

I'm glad you enjoyed Sansho and L'eclisse so much. So I take it you prefer Sansho to Ugetsu?

[Melville]

To flatten the image you position the camera further away and then zoom in and frame the shot.
Thanks. Does that keep one part of the frame (in this case, Vitti) unflattened?

EDIT:

I'm glad you enjoyed Sansho and L'eclisse so much. So I take it you prefer Sansho to Ugetsu?
I'd have to watch Ugetsu again. The ending and the
suicide
scene were the only parts that I really loved in Sansho.

By the way, all my ratings, and links to each writeup, are in the first post.

[Qrazy]

Thanks. Does that keep one part of the frame (in this case, Vitti) unflattened?

A lot of that depends on lighting. But with flattening I think we essentially mean the objects appear closer to each other. So I would guess (and this is just a guess, I don't remember the composition of the scene precisely) that Antonioni might use greater contrasts and shadows on Vitti's face in order to convey three-dimensionality while keeping background lighting smoother.

[Melville]

Heaven and Earth Magic (Smith, 1962)
A jaunty little man releases the souls of some mummies. From the mummies' sarcophagi, he takes some animals and a picture of some watermelons. A dog steals one of the watermelons, and some women chase it. One of the women visits the jaunty little man, who now seems to be either a jaunty little dentist or a jaunty little barber-surgeon. The woman is broken in half with a mallet and injected with some drugs. The drugs send her to heaven and/or a dream, which appears to be inside a head in a box. I'm guessing there's some kind of metaphor there. Anyway, there's a lot of weird stuff going on in that head. Later, there are two heads, each filled with twirling symbols. The heads dissolve and the symbols become wheels and gears. Definitely a metaphor.

The whole story's told with cut-outs. I suppose it's a stageshow depicting the workings of the unconscious mind and its symbols, universal or personal, frequently arbitrary. The jaunty little man seems to be running the show.

YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/user/90fredo90#play/user/91CDC5C31E468E0E/0/7Y165OYWzQc

[Melville]

Oasis (Lee Chang-dong, 2000)
I've sometimes wondered what life is like for people of low intelligence—not quite "mentally challenged", but just very dumb compared to the average person. In Oasis, the protagonist is such a character. His life is roughly what I might expect: somewhat alienated but desperate for inclusion, aimless, jobless, filled with petty crimes and the occasional outburst. But the movie doesn't make of him a type; he's a very particular character, exuberant, eating raw tofu. He's quite likable if you can forgive his occasional theft or molestation.

The main story consists of his romance with a woman suffering from cerebral palsy (I think). It seems like it could so easily fall into sap, a Hollywood-like version of oh-so-sympathetic people overcoming their disadvantages through their adorable love of one another. And I guess that is sort of what happens. But the film doesn't force it on us. It doesn't shy away from the characters' ugliness, moral or physical. Its aesthetic is raw and subdued, its characters well-delineated, their dialogue natural and unassuming. It avoids unseemly melodrama, steers clear of pablum. It has flights of fancy in which the woman imagines herself without her physical disability, but again, the moments never feel forced; they are contiguous with their surroundings, appearing as perfectly natural fantasies. All of this is essential, I think, in making the movie what it is: a very moving love story about two people who would usually only appear in a movie as figures of humor or condescending pity.

[Yxklyx]

Where is that top 100 of match cut thread?

[Duncan]

Damn, I don't remember some of those more painful moments from Sans Soleil. I'm a little scared to go back and rewatch it. But I feel like that dog/water thing on the lunar calendar is meant to be a joke.

[Melville]

Where is that top 100 of match cut thread?
http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?t=1904


Damn, I don't remember some of those more painful moments from Sans Soleil. I'm a little scared to go back and rewatch it. But I feel like that dog/water thing on the lunar calendar is meant to be a joke.
Could be.

[Yxklyx]

Where are the final results of the top 100 poll?

[Melville]

Where are the final results of the top 100 poll?
http://www.match-cut.org/showthread.php?t=1924

[transmogrifier]

Where are the final results of the top 100 poll?

UPDATED TOP 100

Top 10 is unchanged. Only big changes are shown, and new additions are noted in bold.

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. Citizen Kane
3. Mulholland Dr.
4. Rear Window
5. Apocalypse Now
6. Vertigo
7. City Lights
8. Taxi Driver
9. The Big Lebowski
10. Pulp Fiction

11. The Passion of Joan of Arc
12. In the Mood for Love
13. 8 ½
14. The Empire Strikes Back
15. Playtime
16. Blade Runner (+7)
17. Ikiru
18. The Good the Bad and the Ugly
19. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (+6)
20. Casablanca (-7)
21. F for Fake
22. Days of Heaven (+10)
23. Aguirre: The Wrath of God
24. Dr. Strangelove
25. The Conversation (+11)
26. Lawrence of Arabia (+13)
27. Raiders of the Lost Ark (+13)
28. The Third Man
29. Do the Right Thing (-8)
30. It’s a Wonderful Life (+15)
31. Seven Samurai
32. The Royal Tenenbaums (+11)
33. Once Upon a Time in the West
34. The Night of the Hunter (-10)
35. Annie Hall (-9)
36. Ran (-9)
37. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (-9)
38. Persona (+27)
39. M (-10)
40. Ordet (+20)
41. The Godfather
42. Sunset Blvd (-11)
43. Punch-Drunk Love
44. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (-11)
45. Alien
46. Fargo
47. The Shining
48. The General (-11)
49. A Zed & Two Noughts
50. Brazil
51. Heat
52. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (-14)
53. Sans Soleil
54. Young Frankenstein
55. Barry Lyndon (-14)
56. Aliens
57. Oldboy (+10)
58. Eraserhead (+11)
59. La Dolce Vita
60. Manhattan (+24)
61. Le Samourai
62. The Thing (+11)
63. Dawn of the Dead (+11)
64. The Thin Red Line (-18)
65. Se7en
66. The Apartment (-18)
67. Notorious (-18)
68. Eyes Wide Shut
69. Blue Velvet (+30)
70. The Battle of Algiers (+20)
71. Metropolis (+21)
72. No Country For Old Men (-19)
73. AI: Artificial Intelligence (-17)
74. Throne of Blood
75. Tokyo Story
76. Au Hasard Balthazar (+39)
77. My Life to Live
78. Amadeus
79. The Wizard of Oz (-17)
80. Bicycle Thieves (-17)
81. The Shawshank Redemption (-15)
82. A Clockwork Orange
83. Some Like it Hot
84. Raging Bull (+48)
85. The Spirit of the Beehive (+49)
86. Jaws
87. Rushmore (+51)
88. Dog Day Afternoon
89. The Graduate (-17)
90. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
91. The Last Temptation of Christ
92. Stroszek
93. Dead Ringers (+10)
94. There Will Be Blood
95. Saving Private Ryan (+13)
96. Night of the Living Dead (+14)
97. Andrei Rublev (+71)
98. L'avventura (+14)
99. Nashville (-23)
100. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (+13)

GONE:

Boogie Nights
Touch of Evil
Seven Chances
The Rules of the Game
Goodfellas
Hana-bi
The Truman Show
Once Upon a Time in America
Umberto D
Paths of Glory
Walkabout

[Ivan Drago]

trans, do you update that list on a regular basis? If so would it be a problem if I submitted my list to you whenever it's ready? Because I never did submit a list in the thread to begin with.

[transmogrifier]

trans, do you update that list on a regular basis? If so would it be a problem if I submitted my list to you whenever it's ready? Because I never did submit a list in the thread to begin with.

Sure, PM it to me when it's done (and you can put it in the original thread as well if you can find it)

[B-side]

Sure, PM it to me when it's done (and you can put it in the original thread as well if you can find it)

I actually ended up concocting a top 50 a bit after that was finished. I'll PM it to you.

[dreamdead]

Oasis (Lee Chang-dong, 2000)
I've sometimes wondered what life is like for people of low intelligence—not quite "mentally challenged", but just very dumb compared to the average person. In Oasis, the protagonist is such a character. His life is roughly what I might expect: somewhat alienated but desperate for inclusion, aimless, jobless, filled with petty crimes and the occasional outburst. But the movie doesn't make of him a type; he's a very particular character, exuberant, eating raw tofu. He's quite likable if you can forgive his occasional theft or molestation.

The main story consists of his romance with a woman suffering from cerebral palsy (I think). It seems like it could so easily fall into sap, a Hollywood-like version of oh-so-sympathetic people overcoming their disadvantages through their adorable love of one another. And I guess that is sort of what happens. But the film doesn't force it on us. It doesn't shy away from the characters' ugliness, moral or physical. Its aesthetic is raw and subdued, its characters well-delineated, their dialogue natural and unassuming. It avoids unseemly melodrama, steers clear of pablum. It has flights of fancy in which the woman imagines herself without her physical disability, but again, the moments never feel forced; they are contiguous with their surroundings, appearing as perfectly natural fantasies. All of this is essential, I think, in making the movie what it is: a very moving love story about two people who would usually only appear in a movie as figures of humor or condescending pity.

Glad to see that you enjoyed this one. The more I study it, the more I believe that this film is the Korean New Wave film par excellence. Its range of critique about the social hierarchies implicit in Seoul are solid, such as the way that Gong-ju's brother and sister-in-law abuse her disease for luxury and financial gain even as she remains in the dilapidated apartment. And the way that Lee manipulates us into first hoping that Jong-du and Gong-ju form a bond, only to then yank that kind of melodramatic arc from under us, so that we're left submerged in the tender yet ambiguous nature of a love story predicated on an act of violence, is quite haunting.

And the way that most of the fantasy sequences with Gong-ju are shot with one-takes, which simultaneously empowers her fancy as a state of pure desire and denies any kind of lurid manipulation of cinema (even though it is, exceedingly an act of manipulation) is a detail that I want to muse on more later. Apparently Korean audiences initially thought that Moon So-Ri only played the normal scenes, so Lee went out of his way to force the audience to consider, largely in single-take, the idea that this individual possesses all of the same intelligence and desire, even if her cerebral palsy prevents her from articulating it.

And as usual for Lee's filmmaking, the acting is incredible. I finally grabbed a region 3 copy of Secret Sunshine, so I'm looking forward to that in the next month or so...

The only false note is Gong-ju's unwillingness to say anything at the police station at the film's finale. I'm still trying to rationalize (beyond the obvious) why that would be the case...

[Melville]

Glad to see that you enjoyed this one. The more I study it, the more I believe that this film is the Korean New Wave film par excellence. Its range of critique about the social hierarchies implicit in Seoul are solid, such as the way that Gong-ju's brother and sister-in-law abuse her disease for luxury and financial gain even as she remains in the dilapidated apartment. And the way that Lee manipulates us into first hoping that Jong-du and Gong-ju form a bond, only to then yank that kind of melodramatic arc from under us, so that we're left submerged in the tender yet ambiguous nature of a love story predicated on an act of violence, is quite haunting.

And the way that most of the fantasy sequences with Gong-ju are shot with one-takes, which simultaneously empowers her fancy as a state of pure desire and denies any kind of lurid manipulation of cinema (even though it is, exceedingly an act of manipulation) is a detail that I want to muse on more later.

The only false note is Gong-ju's unwillingness to say anything at the police station at the film's finale. I'm still trying to rationalize (beyond the obvious) why that would be the case...
Very interesting thoughts. Gong-ju's silence at the police station didn't strike me as false, since she was trying to say something but couldn't get it out. She seemed very believably frustrated by her inability to speak under stress. However, it did seem false thatshe didn't later exonerate Jong-Du, once she had calmed down. Though it's possible that he still would have gone to jail for resisting arrest, assault, and destroying public property.

[Melville]

Love Streams (Cassavetes, 1984)
This is some kind of a brilliant movie. Cassavetes other films typically seem very hermetic—a small cast of characters in a very singular locale, a little self-contained world of histrionics and flagrant emotions. But here, the scope is broader, the characters travel about and interact with seemingly "ordinary" people. Much of the film has the vibe of a fish-out-of-water comedy: as if the characters from Cassavetes' other films woke up in their late middle ages, disoriented, probably hungover, suddenly realizing they are completely out of place in the world and that their children hate them. It's all very humorous. I laughed, anyway.

The basic plot tells of a brother and sister. The brother, played by Cassavetes, drinks heavily and sleeps with a different woman or two each night—his young son runs away from him in terror. The sister, played by Gena Rowlands, loves obsessively and suffocatingly, and is in the process of unwillingly being divorced—her daughter tells her, deadpan, that she hates living with her. Those scenes with their children are pretty funny.

Even when it's not outright funny, the film's got a sublimely woozy, jazzy atmosphere; not coincidentally, both of the main characters pass out within the first half hour or so. The pace is relaxed. Unless YouTube was up to some hijinks, there seems to be a lot of almost subliminal jump cuts, as if the movie is about to fall asleep. YouTube definitely contributed a foggy haze, though I think some of that must have been there to begin with. Early on, much of the dialogue consists of hilarious non-sequitirs. Cassavetes himself looks like a terminally exhausted demon jester, grinning devilishly while appearing to be on his last legs. The best scenes occur in the dark, with one or two light sources illuminating the characters, and some laidback jazz playing in the background. It's mesmerizing, watching these people go about their gradual self-destruction in such an easy atmosphere.

None of this is to say there's no poignancy to be had. No, there's poignancy aplenty. Only a few seconds after Cassavetes' son runs away from him, as Cassavetes takes a beating from his son's concerned stepfather, his son says repeatedly, pleadingly, that he loves him. The moment is all the more affecting for its abrupt switch from humor. And towards the end, Cassavetes' devotion to his sister becomes very touching.

That part, towards the end, is where the film gets strange, with the arrival of a lot of farm animals and a musical interlude. The animals, though they afford the film its comedic highlight, felt a bit too much like farce; they fit with the general tone, but they perhaps push that tone a bit too hard. However, the heightened absurdity becomes perfectly justified by the film's finale. Outside of a Herzog film, I'm not sure I've ever encountered such a transcendently absurd ending. It involves a thunderstorm, a goat, a naked man in a chair, and faces seen through rain-flowing windows. It feels like a culmination, a refinement of the unreal world that Cassavetes' characters inhabit, a world of incoherent emotions and mad gestures of love. At the same time, it feels just like the best moments in life, the moments that suddenly stand forth, when we're acutely aware of not only them, their feeling of reality heightened and scintillating, but also of all the moments that they contain, all the events in our lives that have led up to them. It's magnificent.

[Boner M]

I love how much you're getting out of my favorites list. Another great review, especially elating after a few relatively underwhelmed responses to the film from posters (although a B from Qrazy is pretty great, I guess).

[Qrazy]

I love how much you're getting out of my favorites list. Another great review, especially elating after a few relatively underwhelmed responses to the film from posters (although a B from Qrazy is pretty great, I guess).

'Tis.

[Melville]

Report (Conner, 1967)
I'm very interested in how a particular event in one's life can become a kind of center, around which everything else revolves. One experiences life in terms of that event; it lingers, sometimes underneath, sometimes atop each subsequent moment, perpetually coloring all of one's thoughts and feelings.

Report isn't quite about that, but it is a sort of filmic analogue of it. The central event, in this case, is the assassination of JFK. Video footage of JFK in his car is shown...then the screen collapses through a sequence of glitches into abstract flickers and finally pure blackness. Over everything, audio recordings detail the event. It's built up as something dreadful and momentous. More video footage of JFK in his car is shown...again and again, as if time is out of joint, as if this moment weighs down on all others, inescapably. We see a countdown, the kind that precedes the beginning of a film, but it just repeats, never reaching its endpoint. A flurry of footage follows: a bullfight, parades and war scenes, buildings and flags, advertisements, Frankenstein, mushroom clouds and the statue of liberty, a lightbulb bursting in slow motion and a boy falling out of a pool. All these entirely dissimilar scenes, images of Americana, images of film, images of alternative flows of time, are entangled with the assassination, ineluctably colored by it. Everything is viewed in terms of that one event. It claws everything toward itself, and it won't let go.

It's a powerful movie. It should be seen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeI_25S3YqY

[Melville]

I don't have much to say about these two. Warning: Spoilers ahead!

Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi, 1954)
I should have written something about this weeks ago, since it's now faded in my memory. For the first half hour or so, I was very put off by the schematic character development and didactic dialogue. But it's beautifully composed, the story's simple structure has the pointed beauty of a good fable, and eventually the characters' plights and transformations become quite moving. Highlights: the mother's voice carrying over the water, the ethereal suicide scene, and the killer ending, which brilliantly enfolded all the preceding humanity and tragedy.


Ride Lonesome (Boetticher, 1959)
I think this was too minimalist for me. It's a revenge story, but the revenge isn't mentioned until near the end, and then when the actual scene of revenge occurs, it's over and done with in a few seconds; the whole film is just over an hour long. Most of that runtime is concerned with character development rather than plot development or action, but the characters never seem more than quick sketches. Also, Lee Van Cleef's portrayal of the villain is embarrassingly, flamboyantly bad.

The one thing I really liked was the penultimate scene. It's a night scene in a forest. It has a great, serene mood, which works well with our knowledge of the revenge, and possibly other murders, that loom in the final few minutes.

[Raiders]

Ride Lonesome (Boetticher, 1959)
I think this was too minimalist for me.

I'm somewhat surprised you picked my list. We don't seem very similar in our tastes to me.

[Melville]

I'm somewhat surprised you picked my list. We don't seem very similar in our tastes to me.
I think it's more that your tastes are very eclectic, whereas my tastes are rather one-note, which I readily admit. Out of the 80 or so movies I've seen on your list, these ones I'd consider great:
1 Persona 1966
2 A Man Escaped 1956
3 The Conversation 1974
4 [safe] 1995
5 My Life to Live 1961
6 In a Lonely Place 1950
7 Werckmeister Harmonies 2000
9 The Ascent 1977
11 Vertigo 1958
13 Au hasard Balthazar 1966
14 Shock Corridor 1963
15 F for Fake 1974
20 Make Way for Tomorrow 1937
21 The Sweet Hereafter 1997
23 Days of Heaven 1978
25 2001: A Space Odyssey 1968
28 Dead Ringers 1988
29 George Washington 2000
31 The Man Who Planted Trees 1987
32 Throne of Blood 1957
35 The Servant 1963
39 Only Angels Have Wings 1937
40 Nights of Cabiria 1957
41 Portrait of Jennie 1948
42 Tropical Malady 2004
43 Repulsion 1965
46 The Spirit of the Beehive 1973
47 Shoot the Piano Player 1960
48 Come and See 1985
51 The Blue Angel 1931
56 I, an Actress 1977
57 Exotica 1994
60 Mouchette 1967
61 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 2004
63 Bigger Than Life 1956
67 Citizen Kane 1941
68 Aguirre, the Wrath of God 1973
69 Lawrence of Arabia 1962
71 Sansho the Bailiff 1954
72 The Passion of Joan of Arc 1928
73 Masculin-Feminin 1966
78 The Mascot 1934
79 8½ 1963
80 Force of Evil 1948
84 The Royal Tenenbaums 2001
91 The Thin Red Line 1998
96 There Will Be Blood 2007
97 A Zed & Two Noughts 1985
I think only Duncan's list has a higher percentage of movies that I love.

[Melville]

Ms. 45 (Ferrara, 1981)
With an absurd energy, abhoring tepidity, careening between humor and violence, its aesthetic pulpy, exaggerated, deliriously campy and gritty, with an acid depiction of gender politics that reaches its apex of off-kilter pathos with a drunken cuckold's confession of killing a cat, Ferrara's film slowly builds to its pivotal moment, when traffic lights smear on a rainy windshield as jazz explodes on the sountrack and two men die, and then it cuts to the killer, the titular Ms. 45, applying layer upon layer of red lipstick, transforming her big luscious lips into an abstract symbol of attraction—she's all symbol, a mute, silently suffering the indignities put upon her sex by a stream of men who just keep talking at her, finally ending up scantily dressed as a nun with flaming red lips, dishing out death with a .45 revolver, a mad confluence of archetypes, feminine purity and sexual object and bloody revenge—and once that lipstick goes on, the film never turns back, osculating on orbits somewhere past the edge of the ridiculous, climaxing with a bloodbath at a costume party set to blaring jazz, intercut with an argument about a vasectomy and a discussion of the price of buying a virgin for a night.

[B-side]

Ms. 45 sounds awesome. I wasn't big on Bad Lieutenant, though.

[Boner M]

Goddamn, that Ms. 45 review is a corker. Captures the tone and flavour of the film perfectly.

http://mono.whatevz.net/images/likeYau8lN.jpg Boner M. likes this

[B-side]

I decided to go for it. I'm watching it tonight.

[Boner M]

And I partially agree with you on Ride Lonesome; I thought the last ten minutes and especially the final shot - much more than the penultimate, which I strangely only remember now that you mention it - really lifted the film up for me.

The Tall T, on the other hand, rocked my world.

[Qrazy]

Ms. 45 (Ferrara, 1981)
With an absurd energy, abhoring tepidity, careening between humor and violence, its aesthetic pulpy, exaggerated, deliriously campy and gritty, with an acid depiction of gender politics that reaches its apex of off-kilter pathos with a drunken cuckold's confession of killing a cat, Ferrara's film slowly builds to its pivotal moment, when traffic lights smear on a rainy windshield as jazz explodes on the sountrack and two men die, and then it cuts to the killer, the titular Ms. 45, applying layer upon layer of red lipstick, transforming her big luscious lips into an abstract symbol of attraction—she's all symbol, a mute, silently suffering the indignities put upon her sex by a stream of men who just keep talking at her, finally ending up scantily dressed as a nun with flaming red lips, dishing out death with a .45 revolver, a mad confluence of archetypes, feminine purity and sexual object and bloody revenge—and once that lipstick goes on, the film never turns back, osculating on orbits somewhere past the edge of the ridiculous, climaxing with a bloodbath at a costume party set to blaring jazz, intercut with an argument about a vasectomy and a discussion of the price of buying a virgin for a night.

Run-on sentence.

[Milky Joe]

Run-on sentence.

Plus I don't think "osculating" really works there. :cool:

[Qrazy]

Plus I don't think "osculating" really works there. :cool:

Google images has this to say:

http://mars.prosoundweb.com/index.php/fa/5270/0/

[Melville]

Run-on sentence.
No it isn't, unless you think em-dashes shouldn't be used to set off an independent clause like that.


Plus I don't think "osculating" really works there. :cool:
Sure it does (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osculating_orbit). You guys are talking crazy.


Ms. 45 sounds awesome. I wasn't big on Bad Lieutenant, though.
Hm. I really liked Bad Lieutenant as well. What didn't you like about it?


And I partially agree with you on Ride Lonesome; I thought the last ten minutes and especially the final shot - much more than the penultimate, which I strangely only remember now that you mention it - really lifted the film up for me.

The Tall T, on the other hand, rocked my world.
How about The Tall Target?

[Qrazy]

No it isn't, unless you think em-dashes shouldn't be used to set off an independent clause like that.

How about The Tall Target?

The statement itself was a joke... but if you consider comma splices an error, which most people do, then it most certainly is a run-on sentence.

[Melville]

The statement itself was a joke... but if you consider comma splices an error, which most people do, then it most certainly is a run-on sentence.
Oh, I was thinking of a run-on sentence as two independent clauses joined without a conjunction. But I don't see a comma splice either. Where's the comma splice?

[Qrazy]

Oh, I was thinking of a run-on sentence as two independent clauses joined without a conjunction. But I don't see a comma splice either. Where's the comma splice?

With an absurd energy, abhoring tepidity, careening between humor and violence, its aesthetic pulpy, exaggerated, deliriously campy and gritty, with an acid depiction of gender politics that reaches its apex of off-kilter pathos with a drunken cuckold's confession of killing a cat, Ferrara's film slowly builds to its pivotal moment. Traffic lights smear on a rainy windshield as jazz explodes on the sountrack and two men die. Then it cuts to the killer, the titular Ms. 45, applying layer upon layer of red lipstick, transforming her big luscious lips into an abstract symbol of attraction.

I think you could start a new sentence here or here. But I really only meant the run-on comment jocularly so let's talk about the film instead. I think you may have liked it more than me but one thing that really stuck with me was that climax in the party. There was some great sound design there.

[Melville]

With an absurd energy, abhoring tepidity, careening between humor and violence, its aesthetic pulpy, exaggerated, deliriously campy and gritty, with an acid depiction of gender politics that reaches its apex of off-kilter pathos with a drunken cuckold's confession of killing a cat, Ferrara's film slowly builds to its pivotal moment. Traffic lights smear on a rainy windshield as jazz explodes on the sountrack and two men die. Then it cuts to the killer, the titular Ms. 45, applying layer upon layer of red lipstick, transforming her big luscious lips into an abstract symbol of attraction.

I think you could start a new sentence here or here. But I really only meant the run-on comment jocularly so let's talk about the film instead. I think you may have liked it more than me but one thing that really stuck with me was that climax in the party. There was some great sound design there.
Yeah, neither of those are comma splices; obviously I could have broken the one sentence into many, but that wouldn't have had the same effect.

The sound design at the party was awesome: great use of music, and I really loved the intercutting with the thematically-pointed conversations. The use of costumes in amping up the symbolism and exaggerated atmosphere was also a terrific touch.

[Qrazy]

Yeah, neither of those are comma splices; obviously I could have broken the one sentence into many, but that wouldn't have had the same effect.

Well I think that they are, particularly the second one. I could make a really long sentence and I could place the word and in between each sentence and I could continue doing this for a very long time and I could probably write an entire novel like this and it would still be a run-on and I think you see what I'm saying.

The sound design at the party was awesome: great use of music, and I really loved the intercutting with the thematically-pointed conversations. The use of costumes in amping up the symbolism and exaggerated atmosphere was also a terrific touch.[/QUOTE]

Definitely, have you seen much Ferrara? He's really grown on me. For the most part I find his drama to be the strongest element of his filmmaking.

[Melville]

I'll spoiler the grammar discussion because it's probably boring to most people.


Well I think that they are, particularly the second one. I could make a really long sentence and I could place the word and in between each sentence and I could continue doing this for a very long time and I could probably write an entire novel like this and it would still be a run-on and I think you see what I'm saying.
That would be grammatically incorrect, but if you put a comma before each of the relevant "and"s, then it would be perfectly fine. The following sentence is correct:

I could make a really long sentence, and I could place the word "and" in between each sentence, and I could continue doing this for a very long time, and I could probably write an entire novel like this, and Qrazy thinks it would still be a run-on, and I think you see what I'm saying.

A run-on sentence contains two complete sentences that are not properly joined by punctuation and/or a conjunction: for example, "I could make a really long sentence I could place the word 'and' in between each sentence". The sentence you wrote—"I could make a really long sentence and I could place the word 'and' in between each sentence"—would probably also be considered a run-on, since it needs a comma. A comma splice consists of two sentences joined without adding a conjunction: for example, "I could make a really long sentence, I could place the word 'and' in between each sentence". A comma splice might also be considered a type of run-on sentence. But as long as there's correct punctuation and conjunction, then it's not a run-on or a comma splice; it's just a sentence that you think is too long.

Definitely, have you seen much Ferrara? He's really grown on me. For the most part I find his drama to be the strongest element of his filmmaking.
Only this and Bad Lieutenant.

[Qrazy]

I'll spoiler the grammar discussion because it's probably boring to most people.


That would be grammatically incorrect, but if you put a comma before each of the relevant "and"s, then it would be perfectly fine. The following sentence is correct:

I could make a really long sentence, and I could place the word "and" in between each sentence, and I could continue doing this for a very long time, and I could probably write an entire novel like this, and Qrazy thinks it would still be a run-on, and I think you see what I'm saying.

A run-on sentence contains two complete sentences that are not properly joined by punctuation and/or a conjunction: for example, "I could make a really long sentence I could place the word 'and' in between in each sentence". The sentence you wrote—"I could make a really long sentence and I could place the word 'and' in between in each sentence"—would probably also be considered a run-on, since it needs a comma. A comma splice consists of two sentences joined without adding a conjunction: for example, "I could make a really long sentence, I could place the word 'and' in between in each sentence". A comma splice might also be considered a type of run-on sentence. But as long as there's correct punctuation and conjunction, then it's not a run-on or a comma splice; it's just a sentence that you think is too long.

Only this and Bad Lieutenant.

OK, so add the commas. It's still a run-on sentence. My mom has a master of fine arts in creative writing, and she told me this when I was a kid. I'm going to go with her on this one.

King of New York is a fun pulpy mafia film. The Funeral is a well acted mafia film with a few memorable scenes but the story and the scene setting aren't particularly exceptional. The Addiction is an interesting take on the vampire mythos but it gets a bit too philosophy-lite and tell not show at times. I didn't care much for R Xmas.

[Melville]

OK, so add the commas. It's still a run-on sentence. My mom has a master of fine arts in creative writing, and she told me this when I was a kid. I'm going to go with her on this one.

Your mom is wrong. Or you're misremembering her. No source I've ever read has suggested that a correctly-punctuated sentence becomes a run-on sentence when it gets really long; usually they explicitly state the opposite. Here are a few sources:
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/runons.htm
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/run-on-sentences.aspx
http://www.answers.com/topic/fused-sentence
http://www.yourdictionary.com/grammar/run-on-sentences.html
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/598/02/
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/run-on%20sentence

[Duncan]

I have no idea why comma splices are still considered errors. Read any contemporary novel, and I bet that you'll find at least one or two comma splices. In my opinion, the rhythm they produce often reads better than throwing in conjunctions everywhere.

[Melville]

I have no idea why comma splices are still considered errors. Read any contemporary novel, and I bet that you'll find at least one or two comma splices. In my opinion, the rhythm they produce often reads better than throwing in conjunctions everywhere.
Yeah, and most contemporary novels also occasionally keep the conjunction and drop the comma. But I think the general rule is very useful for keeping the structure of sentences clear, and for distinguishing between the use of a comma and a semi-colon. All the style guides I've looked at say that the rules are for academic or similar professional writing, and that knowing when to break the rules is an essential part of writing fiction (or anything else where you're going for stylistic effect). And part of the effect of a comma splice, at least for me, comes from the knowledge that it's breaking a traditional rule.

EDIT: wait, that first sentence might come off as if it's setting up a rebuttal of your point. What I meant is that I entirely agree that a comma splice is sometimes useful, but that the general rule against them is also useful.

[B-side]

Hm. I really liked Bad Lieutenant as well. What didn't you like about it?

Y'know, I don't really know. I just remember being rather indifferent and underwhelmed afterward. I'd say a rewatch is in order. I really liked Ms. 45.

[Qrazy]

Your mom is wrong. Or you're misremembering her. No source I've ever read has suggested that a correctly-punctuated sentence becomes a run-on sentence when it gets really long; usually they explicitly state the opposite. Here are a few sources:
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/runons.htm
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/run-on-sentences.aspx
http://www.answers.com/topic/fused-sentence
http://www.yourdictionary.com/grammar/run-on-sentences.html
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/598/02/
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/run-on%20sentence


Pretty sure I never said anything about length bit of a straw man on your part there, you just seem to have a number of independent clauses jammed into your paragraph. But I guess you're right after all that as long as it's a proper conjunction it's still structurally sound.

[Melville]

I'm way behind on my reviews here.

The Life of Jesus (Dumont, 1997)
The star of this film has a very interesting face. It's blocky and awkward, often squinting, and he frequently pulls it down into his neck like a hiding turtle, only to suddenly, trepidatiously look up with wounded eyes and a furrowed brow. It's a great performance.

The character he plays is a wounded young man—wounded more by aimlessness than anything else. He seeks nothing but sex and mindless thrills, stumblingly avoiding every serious issue or responsibility as best he can. He's epileptic, trapped in a body that he can't control, just as he, and all his friends just like him, are trapped in their aimless, circumscribed existence. He seethes with rage, intolerance, petty prejudice. He frequently harms himself in response, and eventually he turns outwards and harms others.

The small town where the characters live is barren, in a poor rural area of France; one of the most striking scenes features the world's least-attended parade moving through a grey, forlorn street. The final scene shows the protagonist, after fleeing from the police, lying in a grassy ditch and looking toward the sky. It evokes a longing for escape into some kind of freedom, freedom from this existence, from its frustrating, entangled facticity...in other words, an escape into peaceful nonexistence.

It's all pretty gloomy.

[Melville]

Edward II (Derek Jarman, 1992)
This is my second-least favorite kind of movie: characters who serve only as symbols, wandering around and speaking blankly in abstract sets. It's all pointedly artificial. As I've said before, the thing I most look for in movies is an evocation and exploration of human experience—not of objective social issues or the contingent facts of existence (though both of those can and should be encompassed as well), but of the form of experience itself, the raw sensuousness of it, the modes of its constant self-awareness, its awareness of others, and the existential conflicts born of its contradictions. I think movies, with their visceralism, and their ability to directly convey time and sense, have a unique power to do this, to produce profound movements and images of what it's like to be human. While I can certainly appreciate other things about movies, Jarman's film is diametrically opposed to what I most appreciate. It abstracts away from experience, it conveys all its ideas through symbolism: its abstract sets serve as an empty stage; the characters stand as symbols on this stage; the story is their free movement about the emptiness, unencumbered by the niceties of reality. It reminds me of Tarkovsky's criticism of Eisenstein's films as mere semiotic play; while I don't think that is actually true of Eisenstein's films, it is far more true here. I can easily see why others might like such an approach, such a free movement of symbols, and I can admire how it is used to make the story of Edward II into an atemporal allegory for the contemporary gay rights struggle...but I just don't like it.

[Qrazy]

Yeah I don't see myself like that. Jubilee is one of the worst films I've seen. Caravaggio I liked a bit more, but only mildly.

What's your first-least favorite kind of movie?

[Melville]

What's your first-least favorite kind of movie?
Pandering, cliched, commercial movies with no ambition—particularly the "chick flick" variety. Usually I avoid them, but recently I was subjected to The Nanny Diaries, and it was an extremely unpleasant experience.

[Qrazy]

Sounds about right.

[Melville]

The Long Goodbye (Altman, 1973)
This wasn't actually on any of the original lists that I'm working from. But Duncan mentioned at some point that it's his favorite Altman film, so I swapped out California Split for it. And I'm glad I did, because this movie is absolutely terrific: a wonderful re-envisioning of film noir, a study of melancholia and idealism, and a tour de force of sardonic wit. It has all the elements of noir, the desperate characters, labyrinthine plot, and seedy, pervasive criminal world, but it films them through the lens of the everyday, the lens of odd melancholy rather than that of fate-rife-with-doom.

Altman's overlapping dialogue bounces off and reinvents noir's characteristic pitch-black witty banter. Elliot Gould is perfect as Marlowe, the idealist perpetually confronting the ugly world: rather than Bogart's engine of wit and precise self-control in uncontrollable situations, Gould's Marlowe shambles around mumbling to himself, tossing off zingers almost under his breath, and always pining for his missing cat. By stripping away the layers of tropes endemic in film noir (not that I have a problem with those tropes; I quite like them, in fact), it reaches for the almost mundane underlying sadness.

All the actors, not just Gould, give great performances, especially Sterling Hayden as a Hemingway-esque self-destructive author, huge and gruff and masculine and despairing, all to a fault. He's the focus of the best shot of the movie: as Gould has a conversation in the foreground, Hayden wanders into the ocean in the blurred background. Eventually, we realize that he's drowning himself. Pretty sad stuff.

[Sven]

My favorite elements of The Long Goodbye are the pastel color scheme and the constantly roving camera.

[Melville]

My favorite elements of The Long Goodbye are the pastel color scheme and the constantly roving camera.
Yeah, I'm usually not a fan of Altman's visual techniques (with the exception of McCabe and Mrs. Miller), but I thought they were really good here. I remember quite a few shots standing out, but unfortunately, I'm writing these reviews a few weeks after watching the films, so I'm forgetting a lot of the details.

[Kurosawa Fan]

This rivals McCabe as my favorite Altman, though California Split is only a step behind.

[Philosophe_rouge]

This rivals McCabe as my favorite Altman, though California Split is only a step behind.

I guess I should hurry up on California Split, as McCabe and The Long Goodbye are my two favourite Altman's.

[dreamdead]

Far enough re: Edward II. I've only seen one other Jarman and it's never quite rivaled the grace and sense of play here. And though I'm a sucker for films that become mere semiotic plays, I thought the film achieved a fair balance of postmodern symbolism and Marlowe's language, which it's remarkably faithful to, Swinton's frigid performance excepted.

The film's atmosphere and, yes, commentary on gay identity both of the period and contemporarily are why I find the film valuable. I can understand critiques against it, though; sorry I can't voice my appreciation better. :sad:

[Melville]

sorry I can't voice my appreciation better. :sad:
Hah. No worries. You're still an analysis-superstar in my eyes. Though your score for Carnival of Souls is two or three points too low. (In regards to your question in the FDT, I can't say much about its story: I loved it for all its wonderfully creepy moments and especially for its atmospheric depiction of mental disintegration.)

EDIT: wait, after referring back to your post re. Carnival of Souls, I see that you asked about its character, not its story. In that case, I think that the sound and visual design in and of themselves do a good job of evoking the character's mental disintegration. The lack of exterior details and explicit character development didn't bother me: the mad organ-playing got the job done on its own.

[dreamdead]

Hah. No worries. You're still an analysis-superstar in my eyes. Though your score for Carnival of Souls is two or three points too low. (In regards to your question in the FDT, I can't say much about its story: I loved it for all its wonderfully creepy moments and especially for its atmospheric depiction of mental disintegration.)

EDIT: wait, after referring back to your post re. Carnival of Souls, I see that you asked about its character, not its story. In that case, I think that the sound and visual design in and of themselves do a good job of evoking the character's mental disintegration. The lack of exterior details and explicit character development didn't bother me: the mad organ-playing got the job done on its own.

Yeah, I think the film's low-fi approach to visual and aural design is certainly its best element. It attains a creepiness that does slowly envelop the narrative, even if I think that brooding nature is disavowed by the chase sequence that ends the film. And I like the culture clash that the film presents, with an organist stating that her job is to play the organ and not necessarily the church organ, a distinction that could have been played with more, though it's there a little as is. However, that same culture shock makes me wonder about why she'd be even remotely attracted to the scuzball across the hall, who exhibits the same masculine characteristics that brought her to her fate (unless Harvey means to suggest a certain unescapability of character). Overall, it's an interesting project, but my desire for psychological studies of character isn't what this film is about, so my interest wanes more than it should.

[Duncan]

The awesomeness of The Long Goodbye and California Split might have a lot to do with Elliott Gould. He pulls of the relaxed, sardonic thing better than anyone. Even when he's being kind of manic in CS, it's still a laid back manic. I like that.