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September, 2019 movies watched-

The Great K & A Train Robbery (1926)
- Nothing but a good time from the westerns list.

Broken Blossoms (1919)
+ A very heavy movie for it's time.

Asphalt (1929)
Recommended for those looking for an early noir.

The Cameraman (1928)
Maybe my favorite Buster yet.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916)
More than any other silent film I've seen, it's one hurt by time.

The King's Speech (2010)
+ A good movie but not best picture material.

Safety Last (1923)
- An easy watch with plenty of good gags.

Booksmart (2019)
Good, nothing special.

Way Down East (1920)
The 4th D. W. Griffith/Lillian Gish collaboration that could potentially make my list for the Pre-30's countdown.

Hell's Hinges (1916)
Excellent watch for old western fans.

The Unholy Three (1925)
One of the silents I was most looking forward to and it did not disappoint.

The Broadway Melody (1929)
Not bad, but I believe it's the lowest rated best picture winner.

The Phantom of the Opera (1925) Repeat viewing
+ Love it in parts but not as a whole.

The Navigator (1924)
Good but I think I'm getting Buster burn out.

True Grit (2010)
Totally enjoyable but it felt a bit off to me.

The Lost World (1925)
Lots of fun.

Greed (1924)
+ One of the best of the silent era.

Life (1999)
- Funny with good feeling.

Seven Chances (1925)
Maybe I'm not getting Buster burn out.

A Dog's Life (1918)
A nice way to spend 33 minutes.

A Page of Madness (1926)
+ Didn't love the movie but loved the experience.

Total September viewings-21
Total 2019 viewings-136



½

Judy (2019) Goold
Unless you can name five Judy Garland songs off the top of your head (not including “Somewhere over the Rainbow”) this film probably isn’t for you. This is a bleak, pessimistic dirge (with tiny moments of grace) set near the end of her life when she was unemployable. Drinking brings out all her emotional demons; she is still smarting that a [b-l-e-e-p] studio head stole her childhood. The film opens as she becomes homeless; the legendary singer flies to London basically to get fired.

½

The Silence of the Lambs* (1991) Demme
This is a sly feminist rant about a young woman slightly disadvantaged by all the slinging testosterone in the macho world of man hunters. Through hard work and dedication, this little bird quietly girds and toughens herself up and wins her moment of triumph and the reward of the delicious nosh at the pupa nursery. For some reason I found the characters directly addressing the camera a little annoying this time around. Also the film is missing a huge chunk to the story: the girl suit is endlessly primed through-out the film but is never revealed (granted it would be utterly disgusting to look at) still the film is missing that essential scene.

Vortex (2019) Gan
This is a Chinese thriller about a mechanic who gambles away his paycheck every week until he is up to his neck in debt and at the mercy of his bookie. With its raised subway and Gondola system the city of Chongqing features prominently. There is a lot of happenstance in the film; e.g., when he has to throw a duffel bag full of money into the river, a life preserver magically appears right beside him before his toss; or when he steals the car, he finds a duct taped kidnap victim locked in the trunk. The little girl is excellent, all she has to do is purse her lips and look forlorn and the gambler can’t abandon her. There are also some discernable differences in film standards, when the little girl gets between stuntmen, they really throw her around.

Emma Peeters (2018) Palo
Having organized her life around fruitless auditions and acting classes, Emma decides to chuck it all in on her birthday. The expiration date for any actress is 35; if you haven’t made it by then you never will. She uses her last seven days to tie up the loose ends, say goodbye to her friends and plan her (hopefully painless) suicide. This is kind of a cute rom-com.

★★★

The Young Lieutenant* (2005) Beauvois
The daughter of a super cop returns to head the homicide division after a leave of absence. She could have easily become the Chef of police but she loves actual police work too much. She loves fighting for the victims and nailing bad guys. The previous resident of her new office has hung expensive whisky bottle cartons on the walls like trophies and the first thing she does upon entering is to rip them all down. She hasn’t had a single drop of alcohol in 733 daysI loved that she was always surrounded by booze. There is a social aspect of unwinding and knocking back a couple of pints after work; she has to sit there perched on her bar stool with the ice cubes melting in her club soda, watching everyone else get ripped. Plus as a formality everyone offers her a free tumbler. She keys on the brimming enthusiasm of a rookie Lieutenant from the sticks. She takes him under wing realizing only later, if her only child had lived he would be the same age as he is now. Even though she is as tough as nails, there is a suggestion that the horrible things she sees (and does) as a murder investigator in Paris, is the thing that slowly eats away at her soul.

Bitter Moon* (1992) Polanski
A man regales a fellow passenger on a Mediterranean cruise about the great love of his life. He opens with the meet cute on a city bus in Montmartre (a district in Paris exclusively reserved for tourists) when he is thrown off the bus for being gallant, as it pulls away the beauty stares at him framed in the rear window; however, just below her on the bus is a large advertisement for the “Oh la la” escort service, suggesting his intoxication may not be with her person but rather the shape and hue of her dress (which has its own visual arc in the film, ending up later as a shiny latex skin). This serial romancer shows her the door when he finished with her, but she refuses to leave, agreeing any crumb of affectation he deigns to give her will be enough. He takes this as a personal challenge to fathom just how much cruelty and rejection she can endure. His story is a farce, hers is a tragedy. Hugh Grant plays the conservative stiff-upper-lip Englishman totally disgusted by the story, yet he hangs on every twist and turn, believing the little tramp will be his reward for listening. Unless you can pull out all the gallows humour in the situations and the sight gags (on the cruise ship she stays in the DS cabin [“déesse” is French for goddess]) you are going to find this film a bit of a slog.

Luce (2019) Onah
A popular straight-A student, out of boredom or idle amusement, wants to see if he can get one of his teachers fired for being annoying. On the surface this is about identity but this is another ode to the cold blooded sociopath; so the ending is wrong that shows him burdened with crippling regret and worry, he has pulled the wool over the eyes of everyone in the story; except for the one person who sees him for who and what he really is. He is a master manipulator of people (when his mother begins to doubt his version of the events, notice how he subtly pushes her away by switching to her first name.) Luc(ifer) has a great future ahead of him.

Story of a Love Affair (1950) Antonioni
A wealthy industrialist marries a young beauty, then after seven years of marriage, decides to have her past checked out, which is clearly an example of why one should let sleeping dogs snooze. The gumshoe he hires notices everyone in her home town is strangely tight lipped until he stumbles upon a suspicious death. The young man from her past (penniless then and penniless now) travels to the city to get their stories straight, which rekindles their romance. Although this is a Film Noir/crime drama, the first feature film by Antonioni is already imprinted with his restless loneliness and alienation.

God’s Comedy (1995) Monteiro
Through the swirl of the Milky Way, from the other side of the universe, God watches with interest an Ice cream emporium in Lisbon, Portugal, The man in charge lives to make gourmet ice cream and his work is a labour of utter love. A single moment of inattention from one of the ditzy shop girls could ruin the ice cream parlour’s sterling reputation; so he is obsessed with their personal hygiene and cleanliness, (although this may be just be an excuse to run his fingers through their hair. This is definitely Art House with its long takes, slow reveals and leisurely pace. With his leather bound scrapbook of thoughts, at first he appears to be a trichophiliac who gets a little too greedy for his own good.

The Goldfinch (2019) Crowley
A young boy is orphaned after an improbable tragedy and the only person he can name is a kid in his class, so Children’s Services shows up at their expensive New York apartment, asking for a favor. What was to have been just a few days stretches into months and on the eve of being officially adopted, his ne’er do well father pops up and whisks him off to the barren Nevada desert. Years later, when he returns to Big Apple, he bumps into the rich kid who would have been his brother and learns the goofy/angry father was bipolar. There is a nice echo from the emotionally removed mother in the past to her entitled daughter in the present that has no problems marrying him, just as long as he knows she will never love him. The eponymous painting is a great metaphor; the bird is tethered to its perch with an airy chain. I loved the limited adolescent point of view, in his quest to set things right our hero never has quite enough information or insight to make sense of the world around him. He lives in a thicket of emotional theft longing for the moment of forgiveness.

Castle in the sky (1986) Miyazaki
The shots looking up at the drifting clouds . . . the aerial shots looking down at the earth . . . the moments of falling . . . floating . . . and gliding . . . one can almost feel the wind billowing on your face in this children’s anime. It gains by the tiny suggestions of adult things. The girl creeps up on her trench coat wearing nemesis about to club him over the head with a wine bottle, then cuts to a look-alike knocked over by the gun battle raging in the hallway outside then cuts back to him laid out on the floor. This cutting cleverly saved thousands of unfortunate incidents where three or four year kids watched the film then whacked someone over the head with a beer bottle. The castle in the sky is bizarrely called La Puta, isn’t that Spanish for “she who loiters at night on street corners”?

The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019) Nilson & Schwartz
Zak (a young man with Down’s syndrome) has fallen through the cracks and lives misfiled as a resident in an old folk’s home. He watches an old tattered VHS wrestling tape at least ten times a day. He has one dream in life, making it to the Salt Water wrestling school in Florida and becoming a professional wrestler. After another failed escape attempt (when he spots an opening, these attempts tend to done on the spur of the moment) he is flagged as an escape risk and transferred to a room with additional security features (like bars on the windows) his new roommate is completely sympathetic to his plight and supplies him a fool proof escape plan. This is sweet because his adventure is entirely dependent upon meeting all the right people at all the right times. When Zak finally blows that Popsicle stand (coated head to toe in butter to shimmy through the bars) hot footing it down the street in just his skivvies in the early morning mist, you are rooting for the guy.

Lady J (2018) Mouret
Lady J is bemused when a knavish libertine comes to visit her estate; even though he has pressing business in Paris, he can’t be torn away from their riveting heart-to-hearts and long daily strolls together. She must have something going for her because the weeks turn into months with ne’er a flagging of interest on his part. Although a visiting Parisian confidante points out the obvious, he can’t show his mug back in Paris until after he’s consummated the affair. Still it must be something like love because they become a couple. Until the day, in order to tease out more of a commitment from him, she announces that she is becoming a little bored with him and she is thinking of moving on. (There are only faint traces of Mouret’s patented deadpan absurdity in the film and this is one of them.) He immediately falls to his knees and smothers her hands in hot kisses then disappears in a cloud of dust like the roadrunner. She plops down on the sofa afterwards: what just happened here? They were together for years and remain affectionate; unfortunately, the lady holds a grudge and she wants her pound of flesh.

Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present (2012) Akers & Dupre
This is a documentary of the retrospective and a performance piece the artist did at MoMA in 2010. Abramović re-invents that classic museum moment of staring down at a work of art (someone in the film says the average time spent in front of the Mona Lisa is 30 seconds.) One of the first participants to sit across from her is Ulay, once a lover and close collaborator; the piece itself is an iteration of their “Nightsea Crossing”. At the end he reaches across the table (and the years) and clasps her hands, the scruffy grandfather of performance art with his grizzled beard still unheralded and avant-garde; while the grandmother of performance art in her tailor-made medieval robe (her long grey hair meticulously dyed jet-black) has gone mainstream and commercial. It’s hilarious that the same gallery goers that would camp out overnight and line up around the block to enjoy a situational cuddle with the artist would be repulsed by the self-harm and violence of her earlier pieces. I loved her inventiveness with its simple emotional resonance; it doesn’t hurt that the object of heartrending beauty the artist is gazing at is the person in front of her.

Official Secrets (2019) Hood
After enduring the media barrage of elite politicians openly lying to the public night after night Katherine (a British espionage translator) shares a routine memo from the NSA asking for any dirt they can use to blackmail and strong arm certain recalcitrant countries into voting for a UN Resolution officially sanctioning the 2003 attack on Iraq. There are three different threads in the film; her personal battle; the legal story; and how the incident played out in the media. There are some delicious Orwellian moments like when an investigator suggests (slyly) to Katherine that he has also stood at the Ground Zero Peace memorial in Hiroshima and found it emotionally devastating, then asks: are you in favor of (mass murder) war? Or she learns that when one is charged under the official secrets act: they sit at both tables. She has agreed (one has to sign the confidentiality agreement in order to work there) to appoint them also as her official legal defence team . . . in their prosecution against her. In the terms of the specific parts of a story, the resolution section here is probably the best one I’ve seen all year.

★★★½

Manhunter* (1986) Mann
The character arcs between of the antagonist (a serial killer becoming the red dragon) and the largely hidden arc of the protagonist are almost identical right down the emotional and physical scarring, both are avid dreamers. Hannibal Lector gives a helping hand to both fledging dragons. Note Will Graham’s incidental cruelty: he falls asleep on a commercial flight with his grisly crime photos on his lap with a little girl sitting beside him. He baits his hook with a slimy tabloid reporter. He walks his aim up Dollarhyde’s body with (instant kill Teflon) bullets before the head shot. There is a great moment when Will realizes they share a passionate hobby of kill videos together. I loved the use of windows and mirrors (showing the white dragon emerging) until this mere reflection explodes fully materialized out of a pane of glass into Dollarhyde’s house.

The Verdict* (1982) Lumet
An old friend gives a lawyer a paper bag full of money for a couple hours of work in a malpractice suit. This guy is so down at out he no longer chases ambulanceshe chases hearses (they are easier to catch) plus there is usually a decent outlay of finger food at the wakes. There is a great use of the (then) newfangled Polaroid camera where he sets the pictures on the foot of her bed in the hospital ward and waits for the image to develop . . . what also emerges is the stark revelation that this will be his final case, he’s finished after this. She needs someone to fight for her; he decides to go out slugging. This is just great story of redemption well told. If you have an eagle eye, you can spot a young Bruce Willis (who hasn‘t begun to shave yet) working as an extra who manages to strategically plunk himself right behind the plaintiff's sister and husband during the courtroom scenes.

Bright Star (2009) Campion
Mr. Brown loves to proclaim loudly that Miss Fanny Brawne is a pathological flirt and a menace to anyone in a uniform or a pair of trousers. He has her number and she most certainly has his: he’s a dunderhead. Together they form a triangle with John at the apex; both are in love with his great talent and opposed to the other’s bad influence on him. Fanny is expected to marry well and so she shall. The only time her mother is remotely concerned is when they watch him behaving strangely in the garden with Fanny and her little sister comes into the kitchen explaining that John is pretending to be a bumblebee and her mother comically rushes out to save her daughter from the sting of poetry. John knows (as does everyone else) that a relationship is out of the question plus he wouldn’t inflict his great pennilessness on her. They both know they will never be together, they are taking what Jack Foley and Karen Sisco in Out of Sight called a “time out.” Their time together is rendered with ethereal imagery and visual runners. This is a wickedly ironic, had John lived, the Brawnes would have only rated a mention in the official tome of his life as a family that resided briefly next door to him during the Hampstead period.

A Colony (2018) Dulude-De Celles
A coming of age story set in about the same narrative space as Eighth Grade, although there is an additional whammy here of a recent move to farm country (a last ditch attempt by her parents to save their crumbling marriage) and she doesn’t know a single soul in her new school. She spends the first week hiding out in toilet stalls and abandoned classrooms. This also suggests that school can be a way of removing the difficult task of forming your personal identity and education supplies scholarly factoids one can memorize and trot out occasionally to shut down any serious questioning; particularly in the history class where the students learn how the white man rescued the savages (despite living quite nicely without the white immigrants for centuries) and lifted them out of their astonishing ignorance. The native boy is visibly angry the teacher allows the racist running commentary from the Peanut gallery during the lesson.

★★★★½

Tomorrow (2015) Dion & Laurent
I was always wondering (until this film) whether or not the moment would come during a climate documentary when they would actually mention the obvious, that climate disruption isn’t going to be a minor inconvenience. As a species we have left the (11,500 year old) Holocene- and entered the Anthropocene period (which is incompatible with continued human existence). The impetus for this film comes from a 2012 report that mentioned the sixth great mass extinction event on earth is now underway. In a nutshell: all the poison and pollution we pump in the atmosphere will eventually return to surface acidifying the oceans in the process. As the oceans die they will gradually lose the ability to produce oxygen, slowly asphyxiating the life forms on earth dependent on it. That said, this documentary about how a sustainable future can be possible is hopeful and optimistic.

* = rewatch



A New Life (2002)

Vile experimental delirium that’ll appeal to much darker tastes. It often feels Lynchian, but the highly caffeinated cameraman, regular closeups, & out of focus shots give it a unique style.

The Plague of the Zombies (1966)

A small English town infested with chalky green zombies. It takes some time to get going, but has enough campy fun to be watchable for genre enthusiasts.

Four Murders Are Enough, Darling (1971)

A typically zany Oldrich Lipsky comedy, with an emphasis on comic book affectations. Fun with a wonderfully bombastic climax.

Beggars of Life (1928)

Two vagabonds troublesome adventure. Dark melodrama, thrills, and some action. Entertaining all the way through.




Valley of the Bees (1968)

A young man who grew up in a religious order seeks to return home. Well shot, dour medieval setting with a deadpan lead.





October, 2019 movies watched-

Flesh and the Devil (1926)
- A little more excitement would have been great.

Rocketman (2019)
More entertaining than good.

Climax (2018)
- My favorite of the 5 Gaspar Noe films I've seen.

Blood Diamond (2006) Repeat viewing
+ Action/thriller mixed with real world horror and it works.

Cruel Intentions (1999)
Wonderful trashy fun.

Monsters, Inc (2001) Repeat viewing
Better than I can rate it.

The Music Man (1962)
+ A better than average musical for me.

El Camino (2019)
As a Breaking Bad fan, I loved it.

High Noon (1952) Repeat viewing
+ I got more out of it this time.

Blood Simple (1984) Repeat viewing
+ One of my favorite Coen movies.

A Dog's Journey (2019)
- One of the better dog movies I've seen.

John Wick 3 (2019)
It was ok.

Ghostbusters (1984) Repeat viewing
Deserving of it's classic status.

Elmer Gantry (1960) Repeat viewing
Didn't think I could love it more than before but I did.

3 From Hell (2019)
+ Good fun even if not in the same class as The Devil's Rejects.

Total October viewings-15
Total 2019 viewings-151



Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
Haven't had much time for movies lately, but I managed to catch some.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) -




Look, guys, I'm all for progressive, but do we really need to make things all-inclusive? If the producers wanted to be really hip, they should have included a gender fluid Spider(wo)man, but no, they didn't have balls big enough for that. Also, the story is full of cliches I've seen in movies multiple times, and the flashy visuals are far from what I would consider pleasant. By the way, it's mildly amusing how Marvel made a watchable movie and the Internet is like OMG IS THIS A MASTERPIECE.

巨乳ドラゴン 温泉ゾンビVSストリッパー5 [Big **** Dragon: Hot Spring Zombies vs. Strippers 5] (2010) -




Just how hard is it to make those heavenly creatures known as Japanese girls look slutty? Answer: It's almost impossible. But guess what, the director nailed this one. Well, the title promises a lot, but the final outcome is an insult to any pure and serious appreciator of cinema. Sure, there are plenty of boobies to be found here, so if you're weak-minded enough not to be able to google "jav", you're probably gonna have a blast. Otherwise, just stick to Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead, a far superior exercise in Japanese sh*t cinema.

ユメ十夜 [Ten Nights of Dreams] (2007) -




You see, it's so sad to see old masters struggling to make a great film, and instead dabbling in technically competent yet underwhelming short stories. Not that Jissoji's and Ichikawa's stories were particularly bad... It's just that all the rest was but a mindless CGI fest trying to be as good as Hanagatami (2017), and needless to say, failing miserably. CGI monsters and jump scares were appealing when I was a kid. Now as an adult I demand something more refined.

風たちの午後 [Afternoon Breezes] (1980) -




It's not a coincidence this was made by the director of one of the best films of the 90s (March Comes in Like a Lion for those of you who are illiterate in quality Japanese cinema). The story's depressing, but also creepily beautiful, and the proto-Noisy Requiem (1988) ending is parallel to the finale of director's sophomore effort. I reckon Setsuko Aya is the cutest sapphic stalker in the history of cinema, and the movie is so much superior to some lesbian festival bs like Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013) it's not even funny. It's so depressing you have to dig so deep to find quality cinema anymore..
__________________
Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.



A system of cells interlinked
It's Minio!
__________________
“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” ― Thomas Sowell





Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) Kasdan
I didn’t know that The Rock’s patented eyebrow crock was a contractual obligation for all his films. Here "smoldering intensity" is written into the character he plays (literally on screen) as part of the avatar’s skill set. There’s a little bit of humor with Jack Black playing a 16 year old girl crushing hard on a fellow same sex player, but then Jack Black being funny isn’t exactly a stretch. The film actually tells the audience that each successive sequence will ramp up the dramatic stakes and danger to insane levels, although the audience can see this is clearly untrue. The penultimate level in the film has a girl walking up to two dimwits guarding an isolated tool shed in the sticks. High stakes? Doubtful.

I Confess (1953) Hitchcock
There is a nice bit of dish where Hitchcock’s daughter relates how she visited the set in Quebec City and watched the villain wrap up his final monologue in ten minutes then it took Monty “what’s my motivation?” Clift four long hours to emote a single reaction shot to it. I can only imagine the fire storm of protest this would have provoked in the pious 50s had the story been released in its original version. This film demands a re-watch because nowhere in the film do you learn the Priest and the woman had a bastard child together and the pesky lawyer was blackmailer, as is this is a Hitchcock film that has had its McGuffin surgically removed.

½

Here Alone (2016) Blackhurst
This is essentially a low budget Huis Clos set in the forest in a post-apocalyptic world filled with vicious flesh-eaters. She lives in the woods because cites are zombie central; the mere whiff of raw skin is like firing the starter pistol for the 100 yard dash finale at the Olympics. Returning from one of her supply runs, the heroine stumbles upon an injured man and his daughter on a roadside and nurses him back to health, which allows her to work through her guilt of having out lived her own family.

Jour de Fête (1949) Tati
During a civic holiday in a small French village some pranksters show the local mailman a stunt film being show in a side show carnival tent involving helicopter pilots and parachutists and tell him this America delivers the mail. The next day the mailman “goes postal” trying to replicate the American efficiency on his route. This is a whimsical homage to comedies of the silent film era.

The Petrified Forest (1936) Mayo
This contains two of cinema’s most unlikely romantic Romeos ever, a hobo and a mad dog killer. The hobo, not having eaten in a couple of days, stumbles upon a last chance roadside diner in the desert and orders a meal, figuring the lumps he is going to take will be worth it. The radio blares the real time updates on the massive state-wide man-hunt for a mad-dog killer (Humphrey Bogart channelling the most notorious outlaw of the day, John Dillinger.) The diner also happens to be the designated rendezvous point for him and his girlfriend. At the end, even though the coppers tell him his girl ratted him out; he immediately heads back into the town to bust her guns blazing out of jail. All of the main characters have retreated into past (The Petrified Forest) and live entirely in the faded memories of their youth. The only person in the film dreaming about a better future is the waitress. The hobo has an idea to make all her dreams come true.

The Lighthouse (2019) Eggers
On the jerking boat heading towards (cabin fever) island, a grey phallic symbol materializes out of the mist and the fog announcing the metaphorical cockfight about to unfold between a new hire, who has to do all the grunt work and the senior man puffing on his pipe all the while huffing how bloody useless and stupid he is. With a black and white photography that pulls out every nook and crag of their ghostly faces; the small rooms lit with kerosene lamps and matchstick flicks; and the 1.19:1 aspect ratio you are here for the art house cinematography.

★★★

Glengarry Glen Ross* — (1992) — Foley
The police are summoned to a real estate office to investigate the theft of a couple of phones and a clutch of winning lottery tickets locked in a desk drawer. The cops grill the salesmen one by one because the thief can only be someone inside the office. The winning lottery tickets turn out to be merely a list of suckers sent from the head office’s market research they will use for cold calls; basically worthless in the real world. The schlubs who man the desks are basically conmen selling swamp-land in Florida as the steal of a lifetime. Each stick of dialogue is like a chisel stroke aimed at the heart and eventually with enough hits your heart comes apart. There is a classic scene where the Alpha male establishes his dominance by “flashing” the loser mutts; a real man could sell a million dollar mansion on the hill to a homeless person. This is a wicked 'winner takes all' satire of neoliberalism.

Juliet, Naked — (2018) — Peretz
The two main characters are birds of a feather; she has gone the safe route all her life and quietly done exactly what was always expected of her without protest. The rock star is the king of spectacular flame outs; his scenes in a music club bathroom and the hospital were almost painful to watch. If there is a wrong way to do something he is going to find a way to make it happen, about the only thing he does with a little foresight is that he has his heart attack at a hospital reception desk. Although this appears to be a light and frivolous rom-com, this is the heavy drama of two people coming to the metaphorical dead-end of their lives. They can either live on in quiet desperation self-medicating, or they can do the impossible and courageous; they can turn around and walk past the years and years of waste and try to salvage what remains of their lives.

The Criminal — (1960) — Losey
Johnny Bannion is the anti-hero in this hard boiled gangster film. He’s had years to think about the final score and when he gets out of prison in a couple of days, he’s going to make that happen. Unfortunately the underworld has changed in his absence, the old fence now belongs to new crime boss and instead of a polite gobble at his lucrative heist; he demands the whole enchilada. Most of his crew quickly end up in dumpsters when they refuse to fork over theirpromissory notes. The new boss sends him right back to prison as a way to loosen his tongue. A few weeks ago he ran the joint and now in his brief absence, he becomes the one with a target on his back scrambling to stay alive each day. There is a nice counterpoint between the clueless warden and a facilitating head guard with x-ray vision who knows exactly what is happening at all times but turns a blind eye to the outcomes.

The Naked Prey (1965) Wilde
I avoided this for years because at first glance this appears to be a one dimensional chase film, but there is an immediate reversal where the white hunter black heart character says that after their safari he is going to hang a shingle in the slave trade (the film takes place in 1880s Africa) and become fabulous rich. He then has to immediately choke down his own bitter bile. With the true nature inserts of big cats running their next meal to ground, the African shrub-land is shown to be a hostile place; simply stepping into a gopher hole and coming up lame probably means you’ll have to suffer the nightmare of watching yourself being eaten alive before nightfall. In reality the bush-men probably run for days chasing down their prey, yet put a skinny white dude in front them and they all suddenly become hilariously knock-kneed, asthmatic and unable to find the business end of their spears and arrows.

Sudden Fury (1975) Damude
A no-budget nail biter set during a pleasant ride through the countryside where a hen pecked husband thinks he is going to get his rich wife to fork over the cash for his latest get rich quick scheme. The two main characters here are typically nice Canadians just trying to be helpful. The husband can’t be a bad guy and always improvises his way forward by buying time until the very last moment possible when he is forced to be nasty. There is a hilarious bit where he knows his plan is foolproof (cottage country dies after the summer) so there won’t be a single annoying passer-by to help his wife yet at the same time he thinks his wilderness lodge idea will turn a healthy profit in this vehicular dead zone.

Belle and Sébastien (2013) Vanier
A children’s adventure film where a small French village is hunting a beast that is snacking on their sheep, they suspect a horribly abused dog gone feral. The small boy (who probably should be riding a school desk) spends all his time helping his uncle with the goat herd and playing on the mountain. He comes face to face with the beast several times and never once does it try to eat him. Eventually Belle loses her fear of boy and coaxed into a mountain stream, the dark mastiff with matted fur comes out the other side all fluffy and snow white. At the same time the Nazi’s arrive in the village and set up an outpost to cut off an escape route to Switzerland.

Each Dawn, I die (1939) Keighley
I liked this prison drama because certain medieval tortures like the being put on the rack, being boiled in oil, or being buried alive (the hole) disappeared with the advent of civilization, although solitary confinement still persist in certain backward sadistic nations: immolation is a great behavior modifier. After revealing their various crimes to the public, a crusading journalist, James “You dirty rat” Cagney gets sent to prison by the same criminal forces being powerful enough to stitch him up. This eerily echoes the fate of another crusading journalist whose crime blotter almost exclusively featured the open criminality of some of the world’s most powerful organizations. At his appearance in a Kangaroo court a few weeks ago, after only six months in “the hole” at Her Majesty’s Belmarsh Prison, the world’s most heroic journalist (being stitched up with total mainstream media indifference) appeared mentally disheveled, having great difficulty sorting out answers to simple questions like: where are you? What day is it?

The Ballad of Narayama (1983) Imamura
The peasants in this remote Japanese village savour the fleeting, earthy pleasures of a hard scrabble life dependent entirely on the feast or famine that nature concedes. They are quick to laugh and sing but quicker to protect the fragile food stores they need to in order to survive the winter. Backward superstitions with astonishing cruelty and prejudice are the norm. It’s a thing where at the first snowfall anyone 70 years of age is considered a useless eater and is lugged (sometime dragged kicking and screaming) to the sacred mountaintop and left there to freeze to death. But a great spirituality comes with living in roil of the seasons, the cycle of life has always been thus; it only appears cruel without another turning of the day. In the grandmother’s final waking moments, as a reward for a life well lived, she will see the face of God.

Timbuktu (2014) Sissako
The Taliban moves in and takes over the moral tutelage of a remote village in Mali. The desert is a harsh, unforgiving place to live your life so there is a de facto live and let live philosophy; the villagers accept the jihadists and their dopey philosophy at first. The film has a lot of poetic moments. On a routine patrol, a jihadist stumbles across a secure hiding place sheltered from the prying eyes of the village below and he cuts loose (he has had classical ballet training) on the rooftop. Another jihadist sentences any villager caught with a cigarette dangling from their lips to 20 public lashes, yet he drives out into the desert and hides behind a sand dune to fill his lungs with nicotine. At the beginning when sharia law is being first applied, a person (usually a woman) points out the absurdity of the ordinance, and there a few priceless reactions from the (gun-toting) foot soldiers obviously agreeing with her: wow that is completely nuts. Although they quickly shake it off and learn to turn a blind eye to their hypocrisy and casual cruelty. All the men become lady killers; if a local beauty refuses a prince charming, the guy can simply go old school, under sharia law women marry their rapists. The appeal of fundamentalism is one is never at a lost in a white and black world, all the questions and answers to life have been written down in the holy book, you just have to look them up and learn those pithy aphorisms by heart. True believers have the great gift of serenity knowing they can never be wrong, and everyone else on the planet can never be right.

★★★½

Les Félins (1964) Clément
This is a Gallic thriller about a jet-setting playboy/gigolo who fleeces rich women. During a stay in New York he seduces the wife of a mafia crime boss and has to return to the France over the kerfuffle. Unfortunately, the boss wants more than a pound of flesh and sends a few of the boys after him with a simple task; bring back his head in a box. It’s a little ironic when he escapes their clutches with just the clothes on his back he has to hide out in a homeless shelter in the French Riviera, the playground of the rich. When the thugs do a routine sweep there, he decides the next course of action is to somehow catch the eye of the shelter’s main benefactor, a lonely widow with a nun companion devoting their lives to helping the poor; hiding out in an isolated mausoleum crammed with life sized Giacometti sculptures and Picassos seems a much safer bet. Suffice to say, everyone here is working an angle. Costa-Gravas was an assistant director on this. The marble busts and a shrunken head the lady keeps on her desk are subtle reminders of his fate. There is a great brassy energetic score by Lalo (the Mission Impossible theme) Schifrin. This is alternatively known as The Love Cage and Joy House, but these don’t do the wonderful French title justice, what exactly in the film is felonious and feline? The meaning of which only comes with the last scene.

Booksmart (2019) Wilde
An academic overachiever and class president has an emotional meltdown when she learns on the final day of high school that all the druggies and wastrels have gotten into spectacularly great universities and colleges also; meaning they did all their homework assignments and the extra credits, plus they never missed a Friday night’s revel. This gives her and her LBF a single night to lose their reputations as clueless book worms. This is an epic party crawl told from a female perspective. The film gains from a few scenes where a few of the teen caricatures become flesh and blood when reveal their hopes and fears for the post-high school world. There are few great one-liners and a great paranoid drug trip in the film.

* = rewatch



Being watching horror films the last two months, but managed to see this as well.

The 13th Warrior (1999) -


The average curiosity I had discovering those beasts are one of the only pluses I can think of.

Pathfinder (2007) -


Not Apocalypto, not even close. The Vikings and the atmosphere are not that bad, everything else is.

Lessons of Darkness (1992) -


The Kuwatian oil fields after the Iraqi war, an apocalyptic mess, captured as something out of this planet.

Into the Abyss (2011) -


Death penalty all-in-1: the state, the executioner, the priest, the perpetrators, there victims and families.

Into the Inferno (2016) -


Great shots, yes, but I hoped for something dramatic. Would appreciate more mythology as well.

City Lights (1931) -


Probably my favorite Chaplin's movie. The last scene is one of the apogees in cinematographic history.



One Week (2008)

The melancholic account of a recently diagnosed cancer patient going on a soul-searching trip through Canadian country. I want to bludgeon someone with an acoustic guitar now.


Nothing but Trouble (1991)

A snooty financial advisor is detained in a pg-13 house of horrors after ignoring a stop sign. The humor is juvenile and often falls flat, but Aykroyd and family are entertaining. Very emblematic of the time, and immodestly tries to mimic Tim Burton’s weird and goofy Hollywood vibe: ill-fitting pop interlude, colorful nighttime cinematography, silly brass-heavy score, and slimy plastic-y suits & makeup. I thought it was dumb fun.



The Far Side of the Moon (2003)

A seemingly aimless story of a lowly man in the aftermath of his mother’s death. It has an effective bitter mood and some attractive cinematography, but the philosophical content isn’t enough to fully reward the tedium.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)

Man becomes invisible and is pursued by unethical bigwig with paint guns. I had a John Carpenter obsession growing up, but this one always passed me by. Nothing really makes it a discernible Carpenter flick unfortunately, but it’s a decently entertaining Hollywood comic thriller.


Limbo (1999)

I’ll stay away from a plot summary because I’d probably just make it sound boring, and the meaty parts happen halfway through. A beautiful and very well put together drama & thriller. Technical aspects are aptly (for a movie like this) unobtrusive. Story and characters take the lead: the people are very down to Earth, relationships feel realistic, actors have great chemistry… but the ending is the letdown of all letdowns.



Cold Fever (1995)

A Japanese man travels to Iceland in order to fulfill a burial rite for his parents. This mostly follows a leading straight man encountering various idiosyncratic tourists & townsfolk. My kind of movie; offbeat dry wit, gorgeous cinematography, gorgeous airy 90s score, and an occasionally meditative bittersweet mood. This movie has a ton of soul & character. One of my new favorites. @MonnoM, I’ll point this recommendation your way.







Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
Phoenix [War of the Wizards] (1983) -




An old Chinese proverb says: "there is nothing crazier or more incoherent than a Taiwanese fantasy wuxia film.". It's been a while since I've seen so inadequately made film! However, the special effects are quaintly beautiful, Richard Kiel fighting the protagonist is a pleasure to behold, and in case you don't know what you live for, it's probably just to see a pterodactyl fighting a stone golem, or whatever else that petrified f*ck was! The scene depicting a bunch of assassins eliminating each other to prove who's best for hire is as hilarious as it is badass. By no means the best of what Taiwanese fantasy schlock can offer, but still more than a worthy ordeal, and a reminder of how much you can achieve when you have no talent, but lots of heart!

The same opinion in Chinese (using pinyin cuz it's inhuman to learn those characters): Nĭ hăo. Nǐ hěn piàoliɑnɡ.

스윙키즈 [Swing Kids] (2018) -




A new offering from the director of the ever-bright and life-affirming little gem SUNNY (2011) is an energy-packed marriage of a prison camp film and a dance movie. With its strong antiwar message, it's an unlikely treatise on the importance of dreams, on why one has to stick to them even in the direst of situations. It's about finding friends in supposed enemies. Finally, it's about the inability of leaving the shackles of ideology, the bitter truth that you can't change the world, but that even in confinement you can find freedom through your passion and connection to other people. Despite its deeply bleak melancholy, the movie reminded me of director's previous film SUNNY in how it reverses death and uses it to celebrate life.

The Modern Love scene is absolutely astounding, and one of the best choreographed sequences I've seen in a very long time. It's also the best scene in the movie, so if you watch it, and dislike it, you can skip the film, and just go rewatch La La Land or some other terrible music film Americans released lately.

(The third act was a little bit disappointing with its use of trite Hollywood tropes, but the finale avoids needless maudlin sentimentality, and confirms this is a three star film)

The same opinion in Korean: F*ck this sh*t, I'm learning Chinese instead.

Midsommar (2019) -




Not as masterful a folk horror as The VVitch, but nevertheless a worthy ride. The Wicker Man of our century with an underlying theme of coping with loss and some pleasant cinematography to go with it. As a sidenote, Michael Snow had a point in how powerful an upside-down camera shot can be, how bizzare it feels, and how quickly it makes the viewer insecure. Oshima's use of it in The Man Who Left His Will on Film is yet another good example of this. I wish it was used in more films, but at the same time wish it wasn't. It would've weakened its impact.

The same opinion in Swedish: Helvete, Svenska javlar. Fika, fika, Ikea.

Trash Humpers (2009) -




(F)art for edgy high school kids. This is like Gummo stripped off everything that made it good.



Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right


風の歌を聴け [Hear the Wind Sing] (1981) -
- can't really remember much, but it wasn't terrible
BU・SU [Bu su] (1987) -
- early Ichikawa, very good, but also forgettable
赤×ピンク [Girl's Blood] (2014) -
- this had a lot of potential, but ended up as merely a passable watch
Love Is All (2014) -
- amor vincit omnia except for uninspired love scenes glued together
満山紅柿 上山 柿と人とのゆきかい [Red Persimmons] (2001) -
- a nice albeit kinda bland documentary
饺子 [Dumplings] (2004) -
- Doyle's cinematography is great, but the rest is simply uninspiring
向左走·向右走 [Turn Left, Turn Right] (2003) -
- a pretty neat romantic comedy with freakin' crane shots and one helluva ending, but sadly it's just a shallow normie trier romance - Johnnie To can do better
Passion (2008) -
- Hamaguchi is a beast, and I'm so glad this flick surfaced (along with 4h-long Intimaces!!!), this is kinda like Rohmer for those bored with French courtship and too insecure to watch his Korean doppelganger releasing the same downheartening anti-romance for the umpteenth time - the scene at school is freakin' glorious - watch this sheet just for it
団鬼六 女秘書縄調教 [Secretary Rope Discipline] (1981) -
- the title says it all, it's a great Oniroku Dan pinku, just not for the faint-hearted and vanilla-loving bores PS: Junko Mabuki > your girlfriend



November, 2019 movies watched-

The Verdict (1982)
Pretty average I thought.

Cool Hand Luke (1967) Repeat viewing
Starting to appreciate it more.

The Missouri Breaks (1976)
- Nicholson and Brando make it fun.

Rear Window (1954) Repeat viewing
I enjoy it but don't think much of it.

Phantom Thread (2017) Repeat viewing
Masterful director and cast.

The Long Riders (1980)
A good time western.

The Squid and the Whale (2005)
I love watching crap people.

Neds (2010)
+ Troubled youth in Scotland.

Hana-bi (1997)
Good, but I can't find any modern Japanese films I like as much as the classics.

Ulzana's Raid (1972)
- The first Western in a while I didn't think highly of.

Tombstone (1993)
Better than I expected and a good bit of fun.

The Irishman (2019)
I'd like to see it win best picture.

Total November viewings-12
Total 2019 viewings-163



Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right

The Irishman (2019) -
- unbearably tedious and more draining than two watches of Satantango in a row would be. I could forgive it the far-from-perfect production, and uncanny valley inducing deaging, but I can't forgive it being so painfully bland and a chore to get through. Other Scorsese gangster films weren't very good either, but at least they weren't 209 minutes long FFS.

The Shooting (1966) -
- an interesting spin on the western genre resulting in a solid Acid Western.

Szyfry [The Codes] (1966) -
- the few oneiric scenes were to die for. The rest was okay.

I Am the Ripper (2004) -
- early amateurish Gaillard-core that's more fun than a lot of professional action films.

狩人たちの触覚 [Hunters' Sense of Touch] (1995) -
- trying to complete Hisayasu Sato's filmography is hard given gay and contemporary flicks are all that's left.

T-Wo-Men (1972) -
- Apparently this was okay, but I can't remember anything about it, so idk.

名前のない女たち [Love and Loathing and Lulu and Ayano] (2010) -
- all around the place. Still has hints of the atmosphere from his earlier movies, but it's diluted.

The Guyver [Mutronics] (1991) -
- gotta appreciate how that old guy and every single monster all lecherously held that Chinese girl

Korkusuz [Turkish Rambo] (1986) -
- Cüneyt Arkın >>>>>>>>>>>>> Serdar Kebapçilar

セーラー服色情飼育 [Lusty Discipline in Uniform] (1982) -
- a subpar pinku, but absolutely freakin' love the way it ends. If it was made nowadays in America - I'd love to see all the feminists butthurt

Viva (2007) -
- quite enjoyable and slick-looking, but in the end amounts to nothing. The feminist message, just like in The Love Witch, is arguably the weakest part of it.

Morgane et ses nymphes [Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay] (1971) -
- Rollincore with no poetry. Freakin' no.

Процесс о трех миллионах [The Case of the Three Million] (1926) -
- Protazanov is mah men, but this ain't Otets Sergiy nor Aelita

Thelma (2017) -
- This looks and feels sooo good. The symbolism and meaning is a tad too obvious, but who cares if the penultimate scene is so beautiful.

蝶變 [The Butterfly Murders] (1979) -
- Tsui Hark be like: My debut's genre is Gothic Castle Natural Horror Wuxia Mystery Giallo Action Fantasy Thriller! And yours? A drama? Bitch, please!

Gambling, Gods and LSD (2002) -
- has some pretty sequences, and it's great how the director tries to create a quasi-metaphysical experience. It's very good, but not good enough!

Nous sommes tous des assassins [We Are All Murderers] (1952) -
- shocking, and gracefully beautiful at the same time, but the humanist bar was not high enough!



★★ ½

Last Year at Marienbad* (1962) Resnais
After World War 2 the entire German population was expelled and the town renamed, so Marienbad is a lost city. The structure of the film is contained in the Nim card game which can be played as fast as four or as slow as 16 moves which mirrors the sequences in the film. But unlike the Nim game which always re-sets at the beginning, the game of remembering always takes up where you last imagined it. A classic example from cinema of subjective memory would be Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants. One of his friends from the same war-time boarding school relates that they were reminiscing about those days and Malle wasn’t even aware that it had happened, he had to be told the story, yet some 40 years later, he had became a central figure in the drama.

The key scene in the film is when the couple is arguing about the meaning of a two statues and the Doctor character explains that it is not a myth from antiquity, but a commemoration of king’s address before parliament: if everything in the film can stand in for something else, then this green lights any cockamamie interpretation of the film. My take? This is a classic tale of transference of a doctor falling in love with his patient. Early on, the woman drapes her left hand over her right collarbone and poses like a statue for the narrator, but when the doctor approaches, she places her right hand over her left collarbone and becoming a mirror image of the same pose, the two men are one in the same. As the one in charge of her dosage and prognosis (the game he never loses) she has to believe the doctor is sincere and has her best interests at heart. The narrator is simply the projection of his guilt.

The Game is Over (1966) Vadim
There is a nice opening that shows this wealthy Parisian family is a clearly little dysfunctional. The father is training his attack dogs in the spacious back yard and when he son approaches to watch him, they lock eyes . . . his father smiles . . . then sics his German shepherds on him. At first warm and compassionate, the husband is revealed to be a total slug, he simply stole the entire fortune of his heiress wife and socked it away in his business scams and he is now working on plan B to wed his son to a rich banker’s daughter to get his hands on that pile of loot. Alternating between the three different stories in the film, the movie suffers from a wandering point of view. It would have much stronger had it focussed on the wife’s tragedy, where she is fleeced out of everything then kicked to the sidewalk.

Jojo Rabbit (2019) Waititi
Making fun of the Nazis is serious business which requires mad skills to pull it off correctly, artistic chops the director clearly doesn’t have (notice there are not a lot of extermination camp comedies.) This children’s comedic fantasy of how delightful mass murder can be is marred by the two deep rips in the canvas revealing the deeper horror behind it. The first one is a kitchen scene, where the descent into barbarism so complete that if a mother did or said the wrong thing, her own child would denounce her as a subversive to the authorities. The second one is the city square, where the majority of people simply placidly stroll past a gibbet of their fellow citizens swaying in the breeze; agreeing tacitly that anyone who believes in human decency is a common criminal who deserves to have their neck stretched. Even those harbouring secret reservations about those magnificent men leading society have to walk past the gibbet with a vapid smile of approval pasted on their faces. I actually wanted to see those grim thrillers. One anachronism for the film, Hitler thought smoking was an utterly disgusting habit and wouldn’t have been caught dead offering anyone a cigarette.

Twenty-four Eyes (1954) Kino****a
Even though a recent graduate on her first teaching assignment transfers from the one room school house in a tiny village after one year to the bigger school down the road, she keeps in touch with her first classroom of children. There’s a little stunt casting; the first grade class was played by their own real-life siblings when they reunited for grade five at the big school (a 20 minute stroll) down the road. Even though she was pushed out of teaching during the war period for being unpatriotic, she has an unbreakable bond with each of her pupils over the next 20 plus years. This is kind of a Japanese To Sir with Love.

The Devil and Miss Jones (1941) Wood
A gruff old billionaire goes undercover at one of his big retail stores downtown to show his undercover agents how to bust a union and instead discovers how caring and wonderful everyone is; falling in love with one of his co-workers and even taking up the struggle on the side of the oppressed and exploited working class. Complete hokum, still, I enjoyed this puff of fantasy.

Cluny Brown (1946) Lubtisch
When her plumber uncle is out on another job, Cluny takes the opportunity to field an emergency call. She shows up with her tool box and simply rolls up her sleeves and attacks a clogged sink to save the social event of the season. A Czech professor fleeing Nazi prosecution (the university students secretly think he a freedom fighter) is immediately smitten. Cluny Brown is a decidedly modern girl in a decidedly unmodern world. Nice girls don’t plumb. They end up in the same luxury mansion in the country; he as a house guest, and she as the new maid.

Joe Kidd (1972) Sturges
The film isn’t held in greater esteem for two reasons: Eastwood is playing a real character and not his usual stoic screen persona. He begins the film sleeping it off in jail and at his sentencing for drunk and disorderly; he prefers to take another ten days rather than pay the fine. He is a quiet man retired from the wars, no longer interested in violence. The power structures in this frontier town always in flux; a character’s momentary authority depends entirely on the setting and the people involved. The Sheriff and judge are ineffectual. The Mexican rebel leader turns out to be vain and has no problem sacrificing innocent people to his cause. When the great man shows up in town, at first he is a successful entrepreneur, then selfish robber-baron, then finally just a sociopath who enjoys killing anyone who gets in his way. The film also reveals the uncomfortable truth of the legal land theft; the Mexican and Indian land deeds tragically went up in smoke when a matchstick hit wooden filing cabinet in a state capital office, giving full ownership to the new immigrants. Suckers!

★★★

Arsenic and Old Lace* (1944) Capra
The horror comedy hybrid isn’t a new genre, here’s a film from the 40s with a nice blend of screwball comedy and horror (four serial killers [arguing who is most lethal one] with a combined body count of 24) it even takes place on Halloween. There was an in-joke I didn’t quite catch; the camera holds several times on the villain’s face, he either looks like Frankenstein with all the stitch scars, or a famous actor (Boris Karloff) of the period.

Lola* (1962) Demy
Demy’s first official real film was to be a glorious Technicolor affair with singing, dancing, and fabulous costumes. He found a producer who fell in love with the script and agree to fund it with a couple of minor tweaks; he had to get rid of the singing, the dancing, the costumes and it had to be shot in plain old black and white. Still this is a light and airy confection about first love; a nice tension is added with all the characters being a little sketchy and amoral. Lola’s Prince Charming is a vision in white; they are both unwavering in their faith they will reconnect with one another despite the passage of years. There are lots of echoes in the story; a recurring “Sailor” character; a nice score; and all the women seem to be younger or older versions of the same dancing Matryoshka doll.

The Young Girls of Rochefort* (1967) Demy
Musicals are inherently silly and this film revels in terpsichorean splendor, even the characters are color coordinated. Thematically, all the characters are out of sync, either a moment too early or a moment too late to connect with their one’s true heart. The musical motifs are stated once are then taken up again or suggested briefly in other scenes. There are some great props; the “aquarium” concession stand in the city plaza that allows one to watch the world stroll by; plus the two immediately identifiable American dance icons. The city even allowed the film crew to paint each window shutter with a pastel highlight and give a brilliant coat of white to all the background exteriors to be pictured in the film. When this was shot, Catherine Deneuve’s real life sister (they play twins in the movie) was considered one in the family with all the talent and the bigger star of the two. She died in a car crash a couple months after the film was released.

Motherless Brooklyn (2019) Norton
The main guy for a small detective agency gets whacked and the other gumshoes are more worried about rent and concentrate on the paying customers. Motherless Brooklyn (MB) is an orphan the big man took under wing and became a surrogate father for him; so he wastes no time poking around his murder and quickly finds corruption and evil at City Hall. There is one glaring mistake in the film: MB explains over and over again to everyone he meets in the story that he has a brain problem. Usually Tourette's syndrome is used as comedic relief by a bit player, but here they try to use it dramatically for the main character who always apologizes for his verbal twitches. Norton should have gone with the audience superior position, explain it one time expressly to and for the audience, then let him take his lumps for the rest of the film that actually would have built up more identification with MB. If this had been shot in black and white, the audience would have no trouble settling back for a juicy Film Noir; certain shots intriguingly suggest what some of those older films may have looked like: imagine Gene Tierney in a flame red satin dressing gown.

The Good Liar (2019) Condon
This little heist film becomes a playful cat and mouse game with just a few suggestions; the old con man is walking down the sunny side of the street and he spots the rich widow pacing in front of the restaurant and he immediately gets into character by limping painfully; it is a point of personal pride that he is never late for an appointment, yet the widow is always the one quietly sitting there (looking like the cat that swallowed the canary) waiting for him to catch up with her; her grand-son is hilariously writing his doctoral theses on whether or not Albert Speer was a good German (he didn’t notice everyone around him was a psychopath?)

Pain and Glory (2019) Almodovar
A film director emotionally blocked since the death of his mother, and incapacitated from a horribly botched back surgery spends the days tenderly puttering around his apartment before its time to knock himself out for the night with pain killers. A re-mastered print of one of his earlier films leads him try to end a 30 year old feud with the lead actor and have him come onstage with him at the gala screening. After a lot of pleading he gains entrance to his house and in the backyard, the actor offers him some nose candy. He gives it a snort. Nirvana! All his pain magically goes away, he can move without flinching, he can pick up pennies from the floor; and ideas and scenes for a new film start falling out of the sky. In the past, he had zero tolerance for degenerate drug addicts, but regularly chasing the dragon makes him a little more tolerant and forgiving about heroin addiction. The glorious melodramatic moments in the film are impossible to resist, where great chunks of the past return in a new light.

A Constant Forge (2000) Kiselyak
This is a great introductory primer to the work of John Cassavetes, As a filmmaker he was interested in challenging the audiences preconceptions about their own lives by having his actors craft original dramatic moments. He didn’t give a damn about commercial success; I think he actually says in the film people only interested in money are spiritually dead and are ghosts wasting what precious time they have left. There are some funny bits, the audience loved a preview screening of Opening Night, and he immediately thought he had stumbled somewhere and re-cut the film to make it less accessible. Gena Rowlands shares a story where she faked getting slapped by John during a rehearsal (clapping her hands and falling to the stage) then laid there on the floor giggling while the stage crew had to be restrained from attacking him. What comes off is in this documentary is what a Mensch Cassavetes was.

The Crossing of Paris (1956) Autaut-Lara
This comedy is a slightly unflattering portrait of Parisians during the occupation. A grocery store sells out minutes after opening; then the owner goes downstairs and butchers a fat pig for the black market. When his regular partner is pinched, an unemployed taxi driver taps a guy nursing a glass of wine in a tavern to take his place walking 200 pounds of contraband meat to its next destination. His new partner in crime turns out to be a wealthy painter who doesn’t need the money but takes the gig out of curiosity. He’s got an attitude and quite the mouth, when he finds out they are getting peanuts for the risky job, he destroys the basement supply room until the crooked grocer agrees to a pay bump. He is also not averse to telling all the low lives they meet on the way what embarrassing pathetic cowards they are. The film was shot in color but processed in black and white so it has a nice look to it. They are supposedly travelling across a blacked out city, yet there is always a random lamp post to light the scene dramatically.

A Slight Case of Murder (1938) Bacon
After prohibition is repealed, a crime boss decides his whole criminal organization and brewery is going legit. He doesn’t drink beer himself and no one in the gang has the guts to tell him, his prohibition beer tastes like horse piss. Years later, things are finally coming to head during a week-end retreat; they plan to meet their daughter’s fiancé who turns out to be copper; the bank is about to foreclosure on his brewery; and a stick-up crew from the race track heist chooses to hide out in what they thought was an abandoned house (allowing the boys to fondly relive the good old days of violin cases and cement loafers.) A lot of the gags are about gangsters with busted up noses trying to be honest citizens by speaking in refined manner. The only one who really pulls it off is his wife, but she runs hot and cold, depending on who she is talking to, she switches from gum smacking moll to a high society dame in a heartbeat.

Animal Love (1995) Siedl
There is a nice range from simple snapshots of proud owners posing with their little ball of fur to vignettes and complete sequences in this Austrian documentary about pets. The pet owners turn away from human contact when their pets become intimate extensions of themselves. A homeless man buys a rabbit merely as a prop to better beg. A soap actress reads all her adoring fan mail but prefers cuddle with her husky. At times, the reality is sometimes so astonishing; one can only believe certain scenes must have been faked. In addition to simple companionship, pets can also become sexual substitutesjudging from the number of participants that had no problem frolicking on camera on their beds with their dogs. Unlike Herzog’s mockumentaries, there is always a line that is crossed in Siedl’s films, there is always something vaguely unsettling and unflinching in his gaze.

★★★ ½

Fences (2016) Washington
Troy, the garbage man, is full of bluster at home. He has worn down his first son from years and years of argument and now begins to chip away at his second son who may be an (athletic) chip off the old block. Certain conversations have an immediate lived-in quality; these are almost like serial confrontations. There is great depth to the writing and each scene crackles with tension. You are never quite sure if Bono (Troy’s best friend) is a sitting spectator or there to pull apart the combatants when the arguments become too rough. Washington as a director has always been a deliberate craftsman and this is his first effort with a little spit and shine. He is helped enormously that all the original actors from the stage production reprised their roles for the film. You are here for the drama.

Antigone (2019) Deraspe
This is a nice re-make of a Greek play thousands of years old focusing on the perversion of justice. In her innocence, Antigone (a high school girl) believes justice will prevail because it is the simple truth; little does she know the laws have been carefully crafted for the exclusive benefit of the powerful and the rich. The courtroom appears at first to be sympathetic to her plight, however the flimsy legal protections afforded her will be useless against the vicious assault (in the name of the law) about to befall her family. I did like that certain agents within the system were shown to be decent, but their hands are manacled by legal restrictions and job descriptions, and their goodness has only a nominal reach. There is a nice bit where a (dis)approving social media stands in for as a vibrant Greek chorus.

La Chinoise (1967) Godard
The film begins dramatically with the founding of the revolutionary Maoist Aden Arabia cell in Paris. They suffer almost immediate set-backs; they lose one member to a tragic house painting accident and another member is expelled for failing to raise his hand for a unanimous vote. There is marvelous gibberish: they borrow a huge dollop from anarchism’s direct action. The daughter of a wealthy banker believes she is proletarian because she once worked in an orchard one summer vacation; she takes the most glamourous elements (like Molotov cocktails) and runs with them. On one hand, they are passionate and earnest; there is a great tumult of ideas with the excitement of young people discovering the world of ideas and books. On the other hand, with no sense of history or political experience they doomed for some serious lumps. The revolution peters out right about the same time her parents return home from summer vacation to reclaim their apartment (now ruined with red, yellow, and blue highlights) and the next semester at University begins. The film quickly becomes an intellectual screwball comedy where political platforms are banana peels to be stepped on and philosophy is a custard pie to be faced.

The Earrings of Madame de (1953) Ophüls
This (almost unstated) tragic love story is revealed exclusively through visual echoes and character/camera movement. For instance, the jeweller’s great excitement about returning the “stolen” earrings to the general is revealed entirely by the way he orders around his shop assistant (like a chicken without a head) upstairs, while he waits placidly at the front entrance to the shop. When she first sells her earrings she sits down imperially as if a queen on a throne; whereas near the end when she tries to buy her earrings back, the same chair (removing the cushion riser) appears to swallow her up. At the outset she uses her fainting spells to manipulate the men around her, yet these spells have an arc that gets progressively worse during the film. It could be suggested that she is the earrings of her husband; her great beauty and flirtations are a way to publically lionize his reputation. There is some ironic humor; her husband goes ballistic not because the diplomat may have slept with his wife, but that he may have seduced his mistress.

* = rewatch
**** = it's something like a brown frankfurter



Seen in November

(Didn’t see much in November but I hope to see more because of the Christmas holidays)


[RE-WATCH

The older I get the more I appreciate the comedic aspects and the makeup (Not even the transformation scene but that badass animatronic-like wolf walking around Piccadilly Circus). I also appreciate the scary aspects more, like the moments before they get attacked or that excellent jumpscare (I won’t spoil it here if ya haven’t seen it.



I’m a big fan of survival stories; It’s fun to see how much the human body can endure and what a person is willing to do to get back home. Lots of lovely shots of the Arctic landscape.



If your film is 3 and a half hours long and I see it at the cinema, and I don’t get bored/my butt doesn’t cramp, you have yourself a great film! Even with some poor computer effects, It's a solid epic that is highly elevated above other Scorsese films by its last 40 minutes; It’s quite sad and somewhat reflects Scorsese’s position in life right now; It’s as if he intends for this to be his swan song before he leaves us.

Like damn, what a sad final shot.



Sometimes the best documentary’s are the ones about normal, almost insignificant people. These films provide something a history book can’t. I found this film quite funny at times but also quite sad. It even gets a bit intense near the end with the introduction of a new person.

Also oh my God, Mike is the most chill person I have ever seen.



Saw this at a local film festival, it was the premiere in my country. A dramedy with a nice blend of funny moments and heartbreaking moments (I swear this might be the best audience I’ve ever had, they we’re laughing at every joke).


+
Same film festival, ALSO the premiere at my country. My favourite of the year so far and one of my favourites of the decade. It has such a unique feel to it; An old ghost story similar to something by Poe or Lovecraft, the darkly elements that happen feel similar to something they would write. The look of the film is unbelievable too; I don’t think a single shot from a film I’ve seen this year has impressed me more than the one with the two men standing on the rock waiting for the boat in the wind and rain. The time period relevant soundtrack is effective. The script is great too; Many funny moments, scary moments and hypnotic monologues.



An emotionally heavy family drama. The film really makes you think about how primal humans actually are; Our decisions are often based on survival instincts that normal animals have, and sometimes they can affect the world in a negative way.

Also I don’t think I’ve seen such an intense crying scene before.



In summary, the man who recorded this piece of music witnessed 9/11 just as he was finishing the album. This film is a piece of avant-garde music playing over the last hour of daylight in NYC that the musician recorded.

It’s quite tiring, but it seems like quite a respectful way of honouring the people who passed away that way. I know this sounds weird but the best way to describe this film is it feels like that Youtube video of that guy comforting a dying rabbit.



Feels very similar to Ed Wood and The Disaster Artist; An extremely inspired man’s journey to making a film. Just like those two films it’s very funny and very inspiring. I hope this is a return to form for Eddie Murphy, since his last good film was from 2004.

SPEAKING OF WHICH!


[RE-WATCH
+
This was nominated for the Palme D’or and I’m very sad I don’t live in one of the many alternate dimensions where it won.



I love me a good murder mystery tale more than I like a good survival tale, especially one that messes with the formula. Suave, sarcastic and funny, overall a good time.