Rate The Last Movie You Saw

The movie that turned me into a "cinephile".

I have so much to say about this film I am struggling with where to begin and how much to include without crashing headlong into TLDNR territory. So I will start here with my hot takes and then maybe say more in a second post or maybe wait for discussion, I'm not sure.

The Hot Takes:

Every once in a while I see a movie that reminds me of why I love "cinema" (in the Martin Scorsese context) and not just "movies" (in the Marvel context).
This piece of cinema makes me crave more. It is not just a masterpiece, it is a daring masterpiece. There is so much art to this film the term "art film" should have been coined with this in mind.

If this were the only film Agnes Varda ever made, she should be considered an "auteur". And I don't think I've seen a movie with this much auteurship released in the last 20 years. I am willing to be proven wrong.

I have often felt that great films are great independent of their stories. Meaning that they are such high art in their imagination and their craft that the story could be about basket-weaving and they would still be great films. Conversely, I have often felt that films with great stories but without true art in their craft can only be very good. This film reinforces that feeling. One could make the case that there is simply not enough going on here to be interesting. I would say, first, that there is a whole lifetime of human emotion going on here and, second, that it doesn't really matter what the story is because this film is art.

No one has ever used mirrors as a thematic device as effectively as they are used in this film.

I kinda wanna see everything Agnes Varda ever made now.

And perhaps my hottest of takes, given that I have now seen only one of her films, on the topic of Agnes Varda, I expect that I agree with Roger Ebert, that if she had had a dick, she wouldn't be the "godmother of the French New Wave" she would be one of its greatest stars if not its greatest.

Is that enough hyperbole for ya?

Real Genius - 1985

Buffalo '66 - 10/10
One of my very favorites. Very unique, and definitely the funniest movie I've seen.

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An American Werewolf in London (1981)

I will unhesitatingly vouch for it. It is one of those films that grips you right from the beginning.

I actually wanted to use a different image from it, but this is the most common one that pops up when you search for images from the film. I almost find it a bit on the nose (with the upside down Christ), but it does show the film's excellent flair for composition/lighting.

I highly recommend that you check out Le Bonheur, which one critic called "a horror movie wrapped in sunflowers". To me it slightly edges out Cleo from 5 to 7.

I'm gonna need more Cleo discussion from you than that, I've been waiting for you to comment.

Always Shine, 2016

Meet Beth. She's beautiful and blond and she's an actress. Beth has appeared in many cheesy horror/thriller type films (we meet her as she auditions for a director who wants to make sure that she will agree to the "extensive" nudity that the art requires). Beth is docile and a compulsive people pleaser.

Now meet Anna. She's beautiful and blond and she's an actress. Anna has appeared in . . . a handful of shorts. Anna is confrontational and direct.

During the course of the film, the two women, who are long-time friends, go to spend a weekend together in a gorgeous house owned by Anna's aunt. As the weekend wears on, tensions between the two women grow as the pressures and reality of the film industry and interpersonal conflict keep rearing their heads.

The strength of this film is the strong duo of performances from Caitlin FitzGerald and Mackenzie Davis as the two actresses and its knowing critique of the mechanics of Hollywood. The film begins with several men auditioning Beth for a role in which she tearfully tells a man that he can touch her if it means he won't hurt her ("Don't worry, we'll make you look beautiful," the director assures her in referring to what sounds like an extended sequence of sexual assault). From there, the way that the women regard themselves and each other is frequently filtered through the male gaze (a man at a bar, a director they both know, a local bartender). This gaze is not always imposed on the women--they consciously seek it out for validation.

I have to admit, though, that I felt a bit let down by this one. While the critique of Hollywood feels on point and its portrayal of the way that women are put in competition with each other for male approval is well observed, in the end the message feels a bit obvious and trite. Look pretty, tell people what they want to hear, don't be too assertive, and you'll get along just fine. There is never a sense of dependence developed between the women, or a sense of why they are even friends in the first place. Because every scene revolves around competition or jealousy, it doesn't surprise or even hit all that hard when one of them finally snaps.

I really enjoyed the way that the two main characters were filmed (especially one scene where Anna flirts with a man at a bar and the camera keeps literally cutting Beth out of the conversation) and the way that the scenery was filmed. There is plenty of style here, just ultimately not a message that feels revelatory.

I did a big write up of it a little while ago.

I basically agree with everything that you wrote. I am shocked (SHOCKED!) frankly at how peripheral mentions of Varda have been in all of my "cinematic life".

One of my favorite shots was actually when she's sitting in the park and she's on this bench that's in the shade, but just a few feet behind her is this sun-drenched field with trees and birds. I'm not sure I've ever seen depression (of the acute or chronic variety) better captured in a single image.

The Fountainhead



Among the worst classic Hollywood films I've seen, thanks almost entirely to the script by Ayn Rand, for which she demanded not a single word of dialogue be changed. It's fascinating that this could be seen as her rugged individuality and genius if she had any accuity for crafting dialogue but to call it tin-earred would be an insult to tin. Like Neil Breen before her, one wonders if she ever actually spoke to another person or bothered to say any of it outloud before sending it off.

The film, like all works of ideological propaganda, the film relies on a carefully constructed artificial society in order to create the conditions necessary for it's ideology to hold up to scrutiny. It's "Straw Man" the movie, where all the characters speak as puppets for Rand to either prop up or tear down, with no bearing on actual societal concerns and institutionalized issues that would impact this scenario.

The closest modern equivalent I can think of is God's Not Dead. They're both similarly vacuous, disingenuous and display a gob smacking ignorance of how humans actually... Human.

I gave it 1.5 simply because Patricia Neal's performance and Vidor's visual direction saved it from being a complete "hated it" experience.

Not awful, but one of the most boring sci-fis I've seen in recent memory.

When A Stranger Calls - 1979

Milk (2008)

While I've only seen one Varda (Cleo) so I'm not an authority on the matter, I do feel like she's not nearly obscure or forgotten as this discussion is implying. She's always at the vanguard of any list discussing great women directors and when discussing French New Wave, while not quite at the level of Godard or Truffaut, or Resnais, she would probably be placed right below them. For instance, Cleo has 2x the amount of ratings as Rivette's most popular work Le Belle Noiseuse and 8x the amount of Chabrol's most famouse, Le Beau Serge.

She's a fairly substantial, beloved and iconic filmmaker (and certainly an auteur).

Unless we're discussing degrees of adoration. Like, she should be more beloved than Godard types of claims. In which case, carry on.

I was hoping to get her set for Christmas but my friends and family neglected me on that front so it's a next sale purchase.

Kira's Reason: A Love Story, 2001

A woman named Kira (Stine Stengrade) has been in a mental health facility for the last two years following some sort of breakdown. As she attempts to return to life with her husband, Mads (Lars Mikkelsen) and their two children, her own demons and the resentments that Lars has been holding onto threaten to derail their reconciliation.

I always hesitate slightly to praise portrayals of mental illness if they aren't something that I am in some way familiar with. But I thought that Stengrade's performance as Kira was pretty exceptional--you see the way that different moods flicker through her (mania, anxiety, fear), and the degree to which she it not in control her her emotions.

The first third of the film focuses heavily on Kira's emotions as she returns home. Her anger and jealousy at discovering that Lars has hired a very pretty young woman to be a housekeeper/nanny. Her desperate need to reconnect with Lars on a physical level. And the way that everyday events can trip her over into a manic episode. A sequence in which Kira loses control while at a swimming pool with her children was painful to watch--especially as the response of the workers at the pool (manhandling her and cornering her) is exactly the wrong thing to do to calm her down.

The middle third focuses on Kira's behavior as she grapples with her new normal. The final third of the film moves into make-it-or-break-it mode as Kira helps Lars to host an important business dinner.

Something that I grappled with as the film went on was trying to understand how I was meant to regard both main characters. In particular, there seemed to be several times where the point of view seemed to be "Hey, these are two people in a lot of pain." But I took some issue with that as the behavior we see from Lars--including --seemed so much worse than anything Kira did. Kira is not in control of her actions, and this causes her a tremendous amount of pain. But Lars does things like . The film seemed to hold out on their reconciliation as a happy ending that the story is aiming for, but Lars was just so gross. It was depressing to see that Kira had no one who was really on her side, even her family.

While I was almost perpetually irritated at the whole domestic situation, I did like a few of the smaller moments in the film, such as when Kira connects with an older man at the business dinner who confides in her that his son is "mad", and Kira knowingly whispers to him "I'm a little bit mad." There is a sequence towards the end where Kira scrawls a letter to Lars on a paper tablecloth and it's a really neat sequence with some memorable lines ("I feel like you miss me even when I'm here").

Maybe it's "unfair", but I really had a hard time seeing Lars' behaviors the way that the film framed them (as symptoms of grief) and not as straight-ahead abuse, and that dinged my enjoyment of the film quite a bit.

A couple of rewatches I just haven't updated here.

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)

I'm probably a little generous here, but this one has the ingredients to be a good film. It doesn't succeed as well as one would hope, but it was a somewhat promising start for the trilogy. I wish it had had more focus on galactic politics.

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Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002)

I didn't remember this was so bad. It has some of the cringiest romantic scenes in cinematic history, and the whole story feels extremely forced and clunky. Its only redeeming quality is Amidala's torn shirt which gains the film an extra half popcorn (how sexist of me, I know).

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I have to go to bed so I can get up for work, but I am coming back tomorrow to talk more about this movie. There are so many things. I read as much of your write-up as I could while wanting to keep my viewing really fresh. Now I want to talk about it. I've already gotten another friend of mine to watch it since I saw it last night.

I don't know if you play video games but Bioshock is a story set in a artificial Randian society that has devolved to its natural conclusion once those conditions start to break down.

Well, I'm 48 years old and I'd heard of Godard and Truffaut when I was a teenager, yet I heard about Agnes Varda literally last month. So that's kinda what I'm going by.
Additionally, on the two movie forums I was on (and so were you) before this, I probably heard Godard and Truffaut discussed a hundred times and Resnais and Demy quite a bit as well, while I'd either never heard Varda mentioned or didn't see enough to remember it now.
Certainly, I haven't seen virtually any Varda films written up across the three forums over 15 years I've been on while how much Godard and Truffaut have I seen? I can probably name a dozen of their films I haven't even seen off the top of my head from all the discussions of them and ranking them and all that.
And I guess what I'm driving at is that Cleo, to me, was as good as any film I've seen by any other FNW auteur and maybe better. So where has Varda been hiding? I'm not talking about her being more beloved than Godard, but if she got 1/4 the mention that he and Truffaut do...

Hmm, looks like I'll have to take a look into this one. THANKS

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