[!@#$%!]

hell yes. i know the words to la marseillese since they made us sing it in school (long story). so of course i was singing along with the prisoners ha ha ha ha. a touching detail is i thought the man who requests la marseillese is supposed to be english, right? i loved that.

most haunting though musically was the children's song they play with the flutes and sing later... "il était un petit navire..." fucking brilliant. and it works with that scene in the mountains. check the lyrics here- all kinds of disturbing and awesome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_était_un_petit_navire

that song is stuck in my head since last night.

one of the remarkable things outside the story for me is that jean gabin had such a strange face-- almost flat, no crevices, looks like carved in rock or something. plus it was a gigantic head. then i realized he had a strong resemblance to john wayne (not so evident in the poster). then teh woman's face is the same type as his.

i have seen la regle du jeu and i remember images from it (wide shots of a large estate and a ballroom and people outside etc) but strangely enough i can't recall a thing about the story! (i must have watched it drunk, ha ha, and i'll have to rewatch it soon).

[Bytor Peltor]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

I don't know. I liked the miniseries but Crawford is so perfect in the original that any attempt to remake it without her would be struggling to compete.She defined tht character, almost like an alter-ego.

A good friends wife was checking in to a Paris hotel when Joan Crawford walked up to the counter. According to her, Crawford is still living like the alter-ego.

We don't pay for HBO, but will try and watch the mini-series......my wife loves Kate Winslet.

[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by Bytor Peltor

A good friends wife was checking in to a Paris hotel when Joan Crawford walked up to the counter. According to her, she is still living like the alter-ego.

I'm assuming by 'is' you mean 'was', cos she's been dead since the 70s.

[h8kurdt]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

anyway, last night watched

 

la grande illusion - what a movie!!! (don't watch any trailers because old trailers ruin everything. ) i have no words right now to say how good it was, but it was...! the criterion disc did a great transfer.

Still not seen this movie. Really should get around to it.

[Bytor Peltor]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

I'm assuming by 'is' you mean 'was', cos she's been dead since the 70s.

Ummmmmmm - my bad......my friends wife ran into, Joan Collins

Not so good at these old movies and the stars from back when.

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Watched Fire In The Sky last.night and I thoroughly enjoyed.it.. I liked how the drama of the first half of the.movie.is the tensions between the main charaters.and the town's people who dont believe their encounter story. The central.plot it the potential murder.case theyre all facing and worse being lynched. They saved all the kick ass alien freak out shit for the end.. of course the ending kinda sucked, rather melodramatic and rushed.. its like, why is Mike more disturbed than Travis and how did Travis miraculously bounce back when it looked like he was facing being institutionalized!

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by h8kurdt

Still not seen this movie. Really should get around to it.

yes you should! it's most excellent.

anyway, recently saw:

 

"blackboard jungle" (1955) - originally i looked this up purely on anthropological grounds: i had been listening to broadcast a lot and figuring out the lyrics "your father was a teddy boy" i found about about some teddy boy riots (and other youth riots) which were caused by this film. turns out it's pretty awesome! yes a bit of 50s cheesiness is inevitable but overall great.

 

"parfait amour!" aka "a perfect love" (1996) - aka "quel dull!!" ha ha. i generally like catherine breillat's movies and her unflinching look at sex and relationships, but this one was sooo boring!!! since i was already caught in the story i had to watch it at double speed in order to finish-- still a chore. in retrospective yes, there were some interesting ideas there, but just terrible execution for my taste.

[pony]

 

<3

[gmku]

We've been on a Netflix Gilmore Girls marathon. Who has time for movies?!

[evollove]

 

STILL ALICE

Filmed theater, mostly. Some chick gets early Alzheimer's.

Julianne Moore always struck me as a solid, respectable actress, but she knocks it out of the park on this one. It's something of a career defining performance, not unlike Deniro's in Raging Bull. Amazingly, she does nothing and gets everything across. I watched it twice: the second time, I mostly just watched her eyes which is where all the action takes place.

A great film marred by two things: a out-of-place bit of Hitchcockian suspense, and the presence of Kristin Stewart, who basically shows how NOT to act. It's so "hey dig me," whereas the scenes with Moore and Alec Baldwin are great because they just do their subtle thing and you sort of forget they're acting, which seems an appropriate style for a realism film like this. Kristin Stewart's desperate attempt to prove she's a real actress might totally ruin the movie for some people, which is too bad.

[Rob Instigator]

Hobbit:Journey

and

Hobbit: Smaug

will see the new one in theater.

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Recently watched Interview With A Vampire which for some reason ive always been obsessed with.. Platoon which is one of the hands down best Vietnam flicks.. Raw Deal which I always thought was a totally underrated Arnold movie..

[!@#$%!]

i try to watch a movie a day (can't always manage) but lately these have been remarkable in one way or another:

the man without a past (2002)

 

(the actual movie does NOT look washed out like this)

what can i say. kaurismäki rules all. i don't think there's a movie by him i don't love. his usual themes and motifs and aesthetics are here. it's never gonna be "oh, thrilling action and great effects" but damn, great fucking humans and a lovely, hand-made cinematography, plus great music.

chico & rita (2010)

 

the love story was pretty bleh, but the look into mid-century cuban music was amazing (even w/ the falsification of some dates making a certain bolero "appear" 11 years before it was written). holy fuck i loved the music here. and lovely voices. also a great graphic recreation of ancient times.


bad lieutenant port of call new orleans (2009)

[no picture cuz we can only post 4]

a lot less boring than the original bad lieutenant (which i never finished because zzzz). starts pretty depressing and suddenly, holy fuck, it's HILARIOUS. i thought there was something wrong with me for laughing at this shit but no, it's what herzog intended. you think you should be horrified but instead you laugh & laugh. great job. nicolas cage is the greatest live cartoon ever.

frank (2014)

 

ginger devil office drone rockstar wannabe meets eccentric experimental band. i ended up liking the music, particularly carla azar on drums. probably a great narrative for all sygers i'd imagine. not sure how much i would have liked it without the actual music though.

a nos amours (1983)

a crazy jumbled story that jumps through years in the life of an emotionally stunted teenager/young adult. as a "plot" movie, not much to say; as a kind of petit-bourgeois neorrealism, on the other hand, fantastic stuff. great lines of dialogue throughout and great performances.

 

i sort of feel like the character of... wasser name... sandrine bonnaire... is recycled decades later in "blue is the warmest color" but to a very different end... sort of, 2 paths of an unrefined sensualist (maybe it was the spaghetti that made me think of it, ha ha). the director maurice pialat, who also played the dad, was great as the dad, dispensing philosophy among the unworthy.

also caught stuff like:

guardians of teh galaxy. - ssssokay... redeemed by some humor. but overall nothing special.

looking for eric - rises from tv-episode quality by featuring a series of hallucinations featuring eric cantona. makes me regret not having known about cantona in his day. but other than than, a bit of "meh" film with nice people in it. i think it began promisingly and ended a bit too pedestrian and that was my problem with it.

[!@#$%!]

ps- okay here's the picture from he greatest cartoon on film because dammit he deserves to be shown

 

 

[evollove]

That lizard scene is classic.

Edge of Tomorrow- fucking idiotic and I'll probably never watch it again, but I wasn't bored one second.


Looking for mid-80s to early 90s indie classics, preferably American. (Let's pretend I've already seen Clerks and Slackers.) Suggestions?

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by evollove

Looking for mid-80s to early 90s indie classics, preferably American. (Let's pretend I've already seen Clerks and Slackers.) Suggestions?

trying to think what qualifies as indie -- basically, the money (can get picked up by large distributors though) which allows creative control. free from big studios. the mid-90s brought us the explosion of sundance & the "big indies". these days, hard to tell what's what.

sodherberg: sex lies & videotape (i didn't like it that much but it has its place in history)
tarantino: reservoir dogs / pulp fiction
rodriguez: el mariachi (the original one, not the one wih banderas)
tsukamoto: tetsuo, the iron man
sayles: brother from another planet + other stuff i haven't seen
jarmusch: stranger than paradise / down by law / mystery train / night on earth / dead man
whitman: metropolitan / barcelona / last days of disco (this goes a but past mid-90s but they go together)
kaurismäki: ariel / leningrad cowboys go america / the match factory girl / la vie de boheme / drifting clouds
waters: crybaby/ serial mom
cohens: blood simple / miller's crossing / raising arizona/ barton fink
van sant: drugstore cowboys / my own private idaho / to die for / (was good will hunting "indie"? i hate that movie but it was "big")
cronenberg: the fly / dead ringers / m. butter fly / crash
haynes: superstar / safe
burton: scissorhands / ed wood
linklater (you didn't mention this): dazed & confused
smith (you didn't mention either): mallrats, chasing amy
anderson: bottle rocket
lee: school daze / do the right thing
almodovar: too many films to mention
merchant-ivory: same thing

(i gotta go but i'll keep adding later)

serious question: when is a "foreign" movie an "indie"? e.g. fassbinder, jarman, greenaway? always? [oh i just noticed the "mostly american" note-- still...] also: i'm including releases from 1983 up to 1997 (except when noted) (so no fassbinder)


ferrara: bad lieutenant (i didn't like it but it's a "classic") + some other stuff
hartley: the unvelievable truth / trust / simple men / amateur / flirt / henry fool
russell: spanking the monkey / flirting with disaster

[evollove]

Damn it. Aside from some of the kaurismäki, I've seen every single one of those fucking movies.

There has to be some cool Sundance-y thing I haven't seen yet.

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

serious question: when is a "foreign" movie an "indie"? e.g. fassbinder, jarman, greenaway? always?

Greenaway's probably indie, Four Weddings and a Funeral not. I'm not sure how the powers that be figure this stuff out.

[Rob Instigator]

I hate when someone wants me to watch an "indie movie". My definition of "indie movie" is a movie with too much talking, not enough money for interesting plot points, boring sets borrowed from a relative, and dealing with the very specific and tedious concerns of whatever was up the filmmakers ass that day he wrote the "screenplay."

[LifeDistortion]

Shallow Grave 1994 Danny Boyle
Swimming with Sharks 1994
Repo Man 1984

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by evollove

Damn it. Aside from some of the kaurismäki, I've seen every single one of those fucking movies.

There has to be some cool Sundance-y thing I haven't seen yet.




Greenaway's probably indie, Four Weddings and a Funeral not. I'm not sure how the powers that be figure this stuff out.

indie just means made outside the big movie studios. today, that includes a bunch of big movie studio subsidiaries (it all started when disney bought miramax in the mid 90s). even shit like "the passion of the christ" is an "indie" movie. i haven't seen that, btw, but might some day just cuz monica bellucci.

reason i asked about foreign film is because in europe there are well-established production facilities (the bbc, cinecittá, etc) but many also get serious support from their culture ministries, etc. so, are all of them "indie" or are none of them "indie"? maybe this definition does not apply outside the usa.

e.g., shallow grave, which is thematically and estehetically very much a 90s "indie" movie, was funded by publicly-owned channel four (it wasn't a lot of money in that budget, but still...)

and then-- hong kong? china? bollywood? the iranians? how do the economics of filmmaking work there? i have no idea.

as for your quest for unearthed gems-- i'll try to throw more names later. have you seen "paris is burning"? great documentary.