Fishing from the Dead Pool

[Grouchy]

Awakening of the Beast (1970, alternatively titled Sadistic Ritual) is the movie I chose to watch in mourning of José Mojica Marins a.k.a. Coffin Joe, the Brazilian legend of Horror films. Here's the catch, though - I'd already watched the official Coffin Joe trilogy, made up of At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1963), Tonight I'll Possess Your Corpse (1967) and the late Embodiment of Evil (2008), but I was aware Marins had written and directed (as well as starred in as Coffin Joe) many other Horror flicks. So, what were those movies about, if not good old Coffin Joe's relentless pursuit of the perfect woman to further his lineage with? Well, prepare yourself to be as surprised as I was. At the start of this absolutely insane motion picture, a group of psychiatrists shot in dramatic B&W chiaroscuro are heatedly bullying one of them over his claim that drugs lead to depravity. This doctor tells a number of exemplary stories about sex and drugs, which run a wild gamut of meanings of the term "depravity", from consensual orgies to rape in the workplace and a really strange one where a rich lady spies on her young daughter having sex with the black butler while she does cocaine and caresses a donkey's head (!). We see all of these in lurid flashbacks, often taking place in the same abandoned warehouse location. Mojica Marins plays himself and sits at the table with the psychiatrists, although by his own admission it's unclear why he would be enjoying such scholarly company.

After this first half of the film the psychiatrist is suddenly accused of doing illegal experiments on subjects by administering them LSD, and apparently he has admitted as much in his latest book. The accused party proceeds to tell his story in flashback mode. As he was finishing his book on drugs and the human subconscious he caught the end of a TV interview with Mojica Marins, a so-called "trial of the people" where Marins and his alter ego Coffin Joe are tried for obscenity and compared unfavorably with more prestigious Brazilian filmmakers like Glauber Rocha and Anselmo Duarte. Somehow the interview inspired him to find four drug addicts (characters taken from the first half of the film, including the coke fiend rich lady with the donkey fetish) and offer to pay them to take LSD, a proposition the four junkies all happily agreed to. The psychiatrist bought a film poster for The Strange World of Coffin Joe (1968) and injected LSD in their veins as they were contemplating it, which we can all agree would make anyone trip balls. The four subjects then descend into Hell with Coffin Joe as a guide/host and the whole film goes technicolor! There is all kind of wonderful weirdness in this last act, but my favorite are a series of smoking assholes with grotesque faces painted on them. We then go back to the framing story and the psychiatrists are about to hang their colleague when he sweeps the rug from under them by revealing (with the accompanying evidence) that he only injected his subjects with plain water, which could have provoked an embolism, I guess, but definitively did not cause the hellish visions they experienced. So, he reveals, drugs are not the cause of depravity (and I guess he should pulp his latest book) and are not dangerous if taken in moderation - the real darkness lies in the human soul and drugs are just an excuse. Everyone goes home happy and the argument is revealed to be a very artistically lit TV panel. The film ends on a close-up of a smiling Mojica Marins yelling "cut" at the camera.

This film showcases everything that made Coffin Joe so special. Even considering his modest funding and commercial approach (which is referenced often in the film, with the real-life Coffin Joe Horror comic books included in the opening titles and as part of the plot, as apparently all drug addicts read them) the guy was an auteur who brought a philosophical approach to Horror. He wasn't subtle and his messaging is often murky as all his films end up being excuses for lysergic glimpses of Hell, but damn if there isn't substance to them. Included below are a film poster which you definitively shouldn't admire under the influence of LSD and a link to his first and most highly regarded film with English subtitles. You can thank me later by finding me a woman who's worthy to carry my seed and further my lineage.

[Dukefrukem]

Oh man. I can't tell if these movies are my jam.... Only one way to find out

[Grouchy]

For Kirk Douglas I watched Seven Days in May, the fifth of his seven team-ups with Burt Lancaster. It's a dystopian political thriller with both feet firmly stepped in a Cold War climate that imagines what a coup d'etat in the US might look and feel like. The film is interesting enough, with a lot of talent behind and in front of the camera, but it failed to grab me for some reason. It might be that it's a dialogue heavy work where most of the conflict comes from elaborate ideological exchanges between characters that all feature an exaggerated degree of nobility, or that I didn't find a lot of the situations presented plausible. It nevertheless has a couple of great scenes and despite this being Kirk's homage I have to admit Burt completely steals the film as the general hell-bent on making America great again. His confrontation late in the film with Friedrich March who plays the elected president, while being one of the moments I'd qualify as implausible, is an acting and directing show-stopper. The scenes with Ava Gardner playing Lancaster's spurned mistress are not as good, though no fault of the actress - they are simply there to have some love innuendo in what's otherwise a very sober movie, I guess. As a Frankenheimer film I'd rank it below Ronin and as a Douglas-Lancaster flick, probably below Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Oh, well. Can't all be complete winners.

[MadMan]

I really liked Seven Days in May. I thought it was one of Frankenheimer's best. Also it seems a bit more relevant these days.

[Grouchy]

For Stuart Whitman I watched Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines; Or, How I flew from London to Paris in 25 Hours 11 Minutes. This bloated title precludes an equally bloated blockbuster comedy about the early days of aviation and its pioneers. The premise is simple and tantalizing in a Wacky Races sort of way - a British newspaper tycoon is persuaded by his daughter (Sarah Miles, an Amelia Earhart wannabe and suffragette) and her fiancé (James Fox) to offer a prize for an international air race between London and Paris, which of course must be won by a Brit. The cast of characters and actors then hears about the prize from all across the globe, including a womanizing Frenchman (Jean-Pierre Cassel), a bumbling German Coronel (Goldfinger's Gert Fröbe), a fly-crazy U.S. cowboy (Whitman), an Italian millionaire (Alberto Sordi), the Japanese guy (Yujiro Ishihara) and another posh Brit (Terry-Thomas) who becomes the Dick Dastardly of the picture. This is one of those long, expensive 1960s productions with a musical intermission. And there are a lot of interesting aspects to it, mostly the effort spent in portraying real vintage planes taking off and landing - this must have been a hell of a shoot, apparently made even more grueling because Whitman and Miles (who have their fair share of romantic scenes since the Yank attempts to steal the girl from the Brit) hated each other's guts after what Wikipedia describes as an "ill-timed pass" on Whitman's part.

Ultimately, the movie fails not because of its length but because it balances its many, many sub-plots and characters unwisely. There's no real villain to the piece, for example. Terry-Thomas is a thug who sabotages his enemies but he has no personal stake against any of them, and the Germans are made the subjects of constant ridicule - we must remember this is a film made by people who actually fought in WWII. More egregious is the treatment given to the Japanese guy, who is portrayed as the best pilot of them all but crashes immediately after take-off when his machine is sabotaged and completely disappears from the film. It's clear the writers didn't know what to do with the character and the culture, and there's a mention of "poisoning his chop suey" which I'm not sure if it was intended as a mistake on the part of the characters or genuine ignorance. The best character is the Italian Conte played by Alberto Sordi - his are the only scenes that got honest chuckles out of me, and also, well, he's an excellent comedian. Benny Hill is also in the movie for a couple of shots, a waste of another brilliant performer.

Overall, this is an artifact of a bygone era as much as the planes it's filled with, not without its charms but lacking real entertainment value.

[Grouchy]

Max Von Sydow shines in Through a Glass Darkly, the most stage-bound film I've seen from Bergman and one which, not surprisingly, became a theater play afterwards. I mean stage-bound in the best possible sense - it has a defined three-act structure, four brilliantly played characters on holiday on an island, and even a play-within-a-play. The plot concerns Karin, Von Sydow's character's wife, who has just been released from a psychiatric hospital for what we are led to understand is severe (and apparently receded) schizophrenia, going off to this island resort with his husband, father and younger brother. This young brother in particular has a severe case of incel-itis which provokes his subsequent mysoginia and some spicy brushes with his sister. This film literally has everything - conversations with God, a typically Bergman-ish domineering father who is also a surrogate for God, deep focus conversations, incest... It's to Ingmar's credit that none of it feels forced. I must confess I was more impressed with Harriet Anderson than Von Sydow himself - her breakdown scene is very believable. I mean, I haven't been around that many schizos, but I'm willing to bet they act a lot like this during an episode. Another highlight is (as usual with Bergman) Sven Nykvist's sharp, expressive black and white cinematography. I dare say Nykvist was essential to all of Bergman's films actually working on screen, since his framing often makes us feel the inner conflicts of the characters whereas the abundant, intellectual dialogue only serves to illustrate them. I did not expect the film to end the way it did but it felt appropriate and, if not subtle, it confirmed what I thought about what the father figure meant in the story. It appears The Berg later regretted this ending and judged it a cop-out. The film constitutes a loose thematic trilogy with Winter Light and The Silence.

[Grouchy]

I knew I had seen Crocodile Dundee at some point but remembered next nothing about it, and the other movie with a more or less central role for Mark Blum was Desperately Seeking Susan which was a lot fresher in my memory. It's kind of bizarre that this was such a huge cultural phenomenon during the '80s - I remember my Mom loved it and during my childhood plenty of people around me referenced it. It's really... kind of bland. Seriously, I would even go as far as saying it lacks conflict. It has two distinct halves, both playing on the "fish out of water" formula... The first is the city reporter adrift in the Australian outback and sort of promises an adventure movie that never comes to fruition, while the second is pure '80s "romantic comedy" with Dundee in NYC. This latter half brought back the childhood memories, specially the scenes where Dundee can't understand what the bidet is for and when he greets everybody he sees in the streets. But the movie as a whole is curiously lacking drive. It's like they just shot scenes they thought would be funny but neglected making a compelling story. Rod Ansell, the real-life poacher that inspired Dundee, lost a multi-million dollar lawsuit against Paul Hogan and later descended into meth addiction, paranoia (he apparently thought the Masons were controlling his life) and ended up dead shooting it out against the Australian cops. Oh, well. Now there was a better movie.

[MadMan]

I really like that one, but the second one is more fun. The third Dundee movie sucks.

[Skitch]

I also grew up with the phenomenon that was Crocodile Dundee, so I picked up on VHS. I was surprised that the original was kinda dull, and the second one was more fun. Certainly didn't feel that way back in the day.

[Grouchy]

Stuart Gordon double feature! I figured the guy was important enough (and neglected by the mainstream, as genre directors often are) to make it two movies this time. Plus, I'm on fucking quarantine.



First off was Dolls, a pulpy, fun supernatural thriller which could have easily been a Tales from the Crypt TV film. The film shows Gordon's talent for playing off eccentric characters against one another, as a group of people (a little girl with her abusive father and stepmother, a fat, childish man and a couple of sexy punk rock girls) seek shelter from a storm in what is quite clearly a haunted house, owned by a couple of old toy makers. Hilarity and gruesome killer dolls ensue. The cast of virtually unknowns (at least to me) fares quite well, with the old couple being particularly memorable. I know many casting directors who'd kill to find an old lady with such a peculiar, unnerving gaze. The movie doesn't deviate too much from the stereotypes of these kind of movies, but the resolution is surprising enough to make it enter the director's canon of goodies.




King of the Ants is a 2003 fick with a DTV feel that's seriously one of the most fucked up stories I've ever seen. It's about a drifter who is a bit of a sociopath and gets recruited as P.I. and later assassin by a gang of construction mobsters led by one of the non-Alec Baldwins, with gruesome and twisted results. The Gordon who would go on to make the darkest comedies imaginable (Edmond and Stuck) begins to show his evil head here and, like Eli Roth wrote in his instagram eulogy, he knows exactly what buttons to push to make the audience squirm. I've always had a huge crush on Kari Wuhrer and she's in some of the lamest erotic thrillers ever made, so it's nice to see her in a solid movie because she's a good actress to boot. However, I wouldn't put this among Gordon's best work - the ending in particular felt perfunctory and rushed. Not bad, just badly executed, and unlike some of his other projects, the low budget really shows here. By the way, this was one of The Asylum's first productions before it went full mockbuster and Sharknado.

[Grouchy]

Ever since I started this thread I've seen a fair share of good flicks, but few would become lifetime favorites - maybe only the one that motivated it (Pit Stop) and Eyes Without a Face to an extent. But I sure will be revisiting House by the late Nobuhiko Obayashi. It's the kind of film that's hard to explain or even defend - either you become enamored with its zany wavelength or not. But from the opening scenes where the girl's film composer father says Leone liked his score better than Morricone's I knew its sense of humor would be after my own heart. The visual style of the whole thing is so insane, filled with collages, handmade animation and jarring special effects of all kinds. It makes sense the director was known for his TV commercials, and if you've ever seen Japanese advertising you know how deranged it can get. Apparently Obayashi wrote the script based on ideas by his infant daughter, as he believed that adults "only think about things they can understand" while children "can come up with things that can't be explained". The brainstorming really worked as far as I'm concerned. House is a movie in which it's impossible to predict what will happen next. While the surface plot is about a group of young schoolgirls vacationing at the haunted house of a professor's mysterious aunt, I believe like many Japanese fiction it's really about the ghosts of Hiroshima and, in fact, there are a couple of atomic bomb visuals. But this is as far as I can rationalize it. House needs to be seen and experienced. It's my kind of Godard, a lot less boring and much more beautiful.

[MadMan]

I love that batshit crazy movie. If only more ghost movies were as fun as that one.

[Morris Schæffer]

I probably prefer The first croc dundee. I appreciated that the fish outta water story drove The movie whereas in The sequel it’s just a generic story with a few bad guys. Hogan was a real Grizzled man, here’s a cool pic of him around early 1970 working on the Sydney harbour bridge.

[MadMan]

I agree that the first flick is better. I have a foundness for the second Croc flick due it having been shown on TBS a ton years ago. That is a really cool pic btw Morris.

[Grouchy]

Watched for regular bad guy Allen Garfield, The Patriots is a somber kind of spy film, the type that focuses more on the human cost of espionage than its thrilling aspects, but that's not to say it's without some effective suspense - just think more John Le Carré than Ian Fleming. The direction by Éric Rochant is subdued and even somewhat languid. The film focuses on Ariel Brenner, a young kid determined on joining the Mossad and defend the state of Israel. Not much is given to us by way of motivation or personal background, although I suppose most Jewish viewers understand this type of nationalism immediately. An initial third focuses on Brenner's initial training which includes an exercise where he has to establish a friendship with a random individual at a hotel - I can't remember where but I read about a situation like that before so it must be based on some actual training. Then we get to his first mission, which is based on the intelligence behing what Israel calls Operation Babylon and the final third which is a dramatization of the events behind the Jonathan Pollard scandal in which an American intelligence analyst leaked US state secrets to the Israelis. So, despite an early title card that claims the entirety of the film is fictional, its roots are firmly based on real-life scenarios. I enjoyed this a lot - not all of it is well handled, particularly a love affair with a prostitute that seems to end randomly despite the enormous importance given to it by the script. But it's a different type of film to watch and blatantly critical of Israel, which I guess maybe accounts for some of its lack of popularity.

[Grouchy]

Early in The Color Purple we can see Spielberg name-dropping Dickens and Oliver Twist, and his movie on racism and abusive black-on-black relationships does feel very Dickensian. A sprawling narrative covering many years in the life of a black woman (Goldberg) slowly gaining a sense of self worth, it's surprisingly un-manichaean for Spielberg standards. Sure, Danny Glover plays a horrible human being, but the character is at all times very human and not a movie villain. I watched this for the cinematographer Allen Daviau, and his work here is nothing short of spectacular - both in the exterior scenes which clearly bear John Ford's enormous influence and in the artistically lit interiors the movie is very successful at transporting the audience to the time and place. Spielberg was also at the height of his powers as a storyteller here. Every scene leads spectacularly into the next one and the film's tone is always involving and melancholy - that being said, it does suffer a bit because of its length towards the end. But the opening five or six scenes are a cinematic masterpiece, brutal as fuck yet eminently watchable. After watching it I found out that plenty of vitriol was raised at Spielberg's downplaying of the lesbian elements of the novel. As for that, the filmmaker stated "I basically took something that was extremely erotic and very intentional, and I reduced it to a simple kiss. I got a lot of criticism because of that". Spielberg is definitively not a filmmaker who's very interested in sex on screen, and for readers of Alice Walker's book, that might have been a whole turn off. But he nails every other aspect of a complicated story, and one has to wonder which other filmmaker would have embraced such a film (and managed to secure the funding for it) back in 1985. This was his first serious drama and it's a film I never expected to enjoy as much as I did, to be honest.



No Kids is an Argentinian romantic comedy that features the late great Horacio "el Negro" Fontova in a supporting role. It stars Diego Peretti in what is basically his signature role, an endearing loser trapped in some complicated relationship. This time he falls in love with sexy-as-hell Maribel Verdú, a woman from his past is very serious about her "No Kids" policy in life. So he hides the existence of his daughter (which is his entire world as he's a very responsible dad) from a previous marriage, a typical kid that appears in this type of movies that always has the upper hand on the grown ups, and this leads to increasingly complicated shenanigans. I have to admit I started out despising this film but it's not really bad - I mean, it's fluff but it's well written and all the performers seem to be having fun. It's just not my type of movie at all. Fontova plays Peretti's estranged magician father who has never been allowed to meet his grand-daughter, and MartÃ*n Piroyansky is also in the cast as the comic relief brother whose head is always on the clouds. Fontova seems to be picking up a paycheck here more than anything else, but his and Piroyansky's scenes are definitively the funniest. Overall, if you have really low expectations, this is a decent time-killer as it never becomes completely corny. But Fontova has much better performances in much worthier films, like Goodbye Dear Moon and Aballay, the Man without Fear, both by Fernando Spiner.

[Grouchy]

The main purpose of doing this thread is to a large extent randomizing my viewing of old films so as to get to zones where my taste and usual preference don't usually venture. And seeing as I had never, ever before seen a full Bollywood film I decided to go with some of Irffan Khan's Hindi output and thus I ended up with Talvar (Guilty), an epic neo-noir based on a true crime story, which was apparently exhaustively researched by the director even before she decided to do the movie. Khan starts as Kumar, one of those obsessive police officers whose views become increasingly sheltered and who grows more violent as the case proceeds. His role as protagonist of the movie comes late in the game, though, since a large half of the first chunk is just the murder case from the point of view of its long-suffering protagonists, a loving couple who wakes up to find their infant daughter murdered in her bed and whose role in the story becomes increasingly complex as the police and the media come up their own theories. The film then switches to his point of view when he enters the case, which I guess is a classic move in a "detective story", but comes poorly backed as far as character building goes - despite Khan's excellent performance Kumar's backstory and tribulations with his wife come off mostly as stereotypical. Other than that Guilty is an engrossing tale which features a passionate, angry criticism of Indian institutions and corruption and kept my interest though a bloated running time. It occasionally had a DTV look and it made me chuckle how a bottle of Ballantine's is a key element of the murder scene but they blur the label in every single shot. I guess it could also be intentional to give it a quasi-documentary feel. I didn't love it but it was a nice foray into a world of international filmmaking I've barely even touched so far.



Because of Shirley Knight I watched Petulia, a bombastic '60s joint with style to spare. The titular lady is played by gorgeous Julie Christie, a bubbly, unpredictable manic mod dream girl who bedazzles George C. Scott, a taciturn, sarcastic surgeon who navigates the modern lifestyle of swinging London with his "square" charm. Knight plays his ex-wife Polo who adds to Scott's increasing confusion. The film has a unique style as director Richard Lester experiments with unusual ways to edit scenes and introduces some rock documentary fast cuts featuring people like Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead. The story-line itself is loose but engaging, with Christie getting the juiciest part as she goes from joy to depression and disruptive behavior of all kinds, while Scott is more subdued but equally effective as a man torn between love and a desire for sanity. I'm making it sound like a comedy but despite having wit this is mostly a serious drama about emotional trauma. I read in Wikipedia that Steven Soderbergh is a huge fan of this film (and Lester's work in general) and it makes perfect sense. Just like most of Wes Anderson's filmography is a riff on Harold and Maude, the editing style and interest in fragmenting narratives found in something like The Limey are reminiscent of this.

[Grouchy]

John Laffia was the writer of the original Child's Play and he took over directing duties from Tom Holland for Child's Play 2, the movie that concerns us tonight. I have to come clean about the fact that I ended up watching the entire Chucky the Killer Doll saga, up until Cult of Chucky (2017) and only excluding the 2019 remake. I refuse to be judged by the quarantine time I spent on that. While I think Bride of Chucky is the best overall film, the first sequel by Laffia is the best of the original trilogy. The original is more straight up Horror with no humor while the third film is just clumsy overall and the worst of the entire series. Now, Child's Play 2 is no masterpiece, but I appreciate how dark it's willing to become. Andy's mom, the heroine of the original film, is completely out of the picture and implied to be institutionalized since none believed her killer doll story, and the kid's life is a living hell as he's sent to several foster homes which eventually pair him up with Kyle, played by Christine Elise, an early '90s rebel punk girl who's just a great character for this type of flick. Highlights of this particular entry include the opening credits with the doll being re-made in an assembly line (including some corporate characters that reminded me of those in Paul Verhoeven's Robocop) and the ending chase through the factory which is like Toy Story 2 gone mean and evil. Child's Play is actually a fairly respectable slasher saga, with a far better good to bad ratio than Halloween or Friday the 13th, and this is one of the better entries. Grace Zabriskie plays a social worker.



By sheer coincidence, the movie I decided to watch for Jerry Stiller turned out to be The Ritz, a gay-themed '70s screwball comedy by Richard Lester, who also did the recently reviewed Petulia. The high concept premise is that a fat guy (Jack Weston) is married to an Italian mob lady whose father is dying and, since the father hates his guts, he orders his son Jerry Stiller to murder him. The fat guy takes a cab and asks for a good hiding spot and the driver takes him to a gay sauna hotel nicknamed "the Ritz", where all of the action takes place, since this film is based on a play by Terrence McNally, who also died recently. Stiller made the trip from the Broadway play to the film adaptation and I think we can see a lot of traces of what would eventually become Frank Constanza in his histrionic performance. F. Murray Abraham, though, is the one who truly steals the show as a charismatic Ritz guest who ends up playing a pivotal role in the proceedings. I'm curious how this comedy would play to a "woke" audience. The comedy is not homophobic at all, but it's altogether too frank and genuine for the exaggerated sensibilities that seem to be the vogue nowadays. Yet, for the 1970s, this was clearly no mom-and-dad movie. The Ritz is not a great movie, though, and it has a tendency to repeat itself towards the end. But it's worth a watch for sure.

[MadMan]

I haven't seen Child's Play 2 all the way through, but what I have seen makes me want to finish it at some point. Chucky putting a knife on his cut off hand was a cool touch.

[Dukefrukem]

Wife and I watched all of the Child's Play movies last Halloween... so no shame in watching them them in COVID19 era when I watched them willingly last fall.. The shocker... Cult of Chucky aint too bad.

Here are the rankings btw

1. Child’s Play 1988 ★★½
2. Cult of Chucky 2017 ★★½
3. Child’s Play 2018 ★★½
4. Child’s Play 2 1990 ★★
5. Child’s Play 3 1991 ★½
6. Seed of Chucky 2014 ★
7. Curse of Chucky 2013 ½

[Grouchy]

Ok... Few movies lately left me as ambivalent as the late Lynn Shelton's Your Sister's Sister. I'm a bit of a stranger to mumblecore, but whatever genre you choose to call it, the first two thirds of this feature some priceless filmmaking. The premise is that Jack (Mark Duplass) is invited by his friend Iris (Emily Blunt) to chill off at her family's cabin after he creates a bit of a scene at the anniversary of his brother's death. When he arrives there he finds it occupied by her sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), who also went there looking for some peace of mind after breaking up a seven-year-old relationship with a woman. Of course Iris will eventually join them. Three brilliant central performances, three well-developed characters and a story that achieves that elusive feeling of developing at their whim. There's an undercurrent of wonderful, quirky awkwardness in every scene that keeps one glued to the screen. And then a central plot twist happens... and the film is not nearly as good after that. I have no choice but to discuss it in spoilers.

[

Show Spoiler

Ok, so Hannah uses Jack, quite intentionally, to get pregnant quick, and lies to his face about it... and that sort of gets brushed off by all. Iris seems far more hurt that she meddled with her love life than by the gravity of what she actually did, and Jack should justifiably be furious. Instead the film ends as they have decided to become a modern family and look upon the pregnancy test together.

]

I should clarify I'm not morally outraged about this - it's not like I judge the movie politically incorrect and I can't deal with it, storywise. I just don't buy it coming from those characters the same way I totally bought into absolutely everything they did before that. There's also the matter that this third act is far slower and less dynamic than everything that came before. I think Shelton wrote her way into a great conundrum and then she just... forced the third act completely to fit the closing tone she was aiming for. Regardless, I had great fun with this film and it did inspire all this thinking and soul searching about the reasons I wasn't crazy about it.



The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant is only the second Fassbinder film I've seen, after Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. I told you this thread would expose my weak spots as a cinephile. It was on point that I picked this to honor Rainer Werner's muse Irm Herrman since it not only features her silent performance but it also features a sweet and unusual opening credits dedication "to the one who became Marlene here". It's based on a play by five acts also by Fassbinder and it shows - what the German director did was essentially storyboard his own play exquisitely and shoot it in uninterrupted takes. Thus we spend five scenes a few weeks or months apart inside the boudoir of Petra Von Kant, an alcoholic fashion designer and socialite who falls in love with a model who blatantly uses her. I gotta say, every actress in the all-female cast is incredible, and kudos to Herrman who became Marlene (Petra's submissive butler/servant), but Margit Casternsen in the titular role is just incredible and gets all the dramatic money shots and wardrobe changes. I'll freely admit it took me a while to get used to the pacing of its long, exhaustive dialogues, and I'll maintain the somewhat controversial (?) opinion that some close-ups of objects and characters could have seen some trimming, but the first hour of this film is a worthy investment into the operatic drama of the second, complete with what must become the literal definition of "every frame a painting", absolutely rocking those blinds.

[Peng]

I just watched Bunny Lake is Missing and loved it. As for the plot/ending divergence with the book, here you go.

[Skitch]

Wife and I watched all of the Child's Play movies last Halloween... so no shame in watching them them in COVID19 era when I watched them willingly last fall.. The shocker... Cult of Chucky aint too bad.

Here are the rankings btw

1. Child’s Play 1988 ★★½
2. Cult of Chucky 2017 ★★½
3. Child’s Play 2018 ★★½
4. Child’s Play 2 1990 ★★
5. Child’s Play 3 1991 ★½
6. Seed of Chucky 2014 ★
7. Curse of Chucky 2013 ½

Bride of Chucky is my personal favorite.

[Grouchy]

I just watched Bunny Lake is Missing and loved it. As for the plot/ending divergence with the book, here you go.

THANK YOU. It does sound like the novel is not worth the trouble.

[Grouchy]

Not a whole lot that I can say about Waiting for Guffman other than that it achieves the same kind of bizarre tone of This is Spinal Tap with community theater instead of heavy metal music. Fred Willard plays one of the most fleshed out characters, Ron Albertson, who along with his wife Sheila (Catherine O'Hara) are the key actor-singer-dancer team at the heart of the fictional play "Red, White and Blaine". They're truly hilarious together and I found his personality true to life in the sense that I know people like that IRL albeit more toned down, obviously. Guest has a tough act to balance here, because while the film, like Spinal Tap, finds comedy in a troupe of goofy artists, the members of the metal band are at least successful - their antics are funny because they're clueless and there's mention of their record not selling well, but at the end of the day they still fill their shows. The musical troupe of Guffman is made of losers and so the film runs the risk of being a little cruel when it centers on their crushed dreams of celebrity, kind of like The King of Comedy if Scorsese and De Niro had shown zero empathy towards Rupert Pupkin. So at the end I think it's only mildly successful as a comedy but it still has some damn funny scenes.



For Michel Piccoli I watched yet another Godard hole in my mental film library, Contempt... and this might be my favorite. I think what makes it stand out from the others is that (like in My Life to Live) the story is not completely devoid of human interest - there are characters and a dramatic conflict, and so the viewing experience is less academic and involving beyond the deconstructionism. This is not often the case with Godard and he seems very aware of it, as he announces on the uniquely cut trailer "the new traditional film by Jean-Luc Godard". Piccoli shines as cuckolded screenwriter Paul, who makes the mistake of leaving his gorgeous wife (B.B.) alone with sleazy American producer Jerry Prokosch (a wonderful Jack Palance), which causes a domino effect that crumbles their marriage when she interprets it as him offering her as a bribe to cement his career prospects and thus experiences the contempt of the title. It's unclear if this is actually the case, although the opening scene and Piccoli's performance generally indicate that the character is just emotionally detached and not really in love with anyone but himself. Both Bardot's presence in the film and the opening scene which features a close-up of her insanely beautiful ass are said by Godard to be mandates of producer Carlo Ponti and his American associates... but I don't know if I completely buy that. They seem integral to the story, which I don't think would work as well without opening on a love scene or with a less carnal movie star like Monica Vitti who reportedly wasn't interested. By the way, what an endearing presence Fritz Lang has - it's cool that he essentially agreed to spoof himself in another director's film, and it doesn't gel with the image one generally has of him as the quintessential tyrannical filmmaker.

Here's the unusual trailer, which functions as a summary of the film and features the awesome musical score Scorsese would re-use for the opening and ending of Casino: