A few films recently watched.

[gaarg]

Finally seen Koyaanisqatsi.

 

10/10 - amazing visual/audio experience.

[YEK]

just watched PI again for the maniest of times. i didn't find it quite as depressing this time again. highly recommended and it's soundtrack is pretty good too.

[data]

Micmacs à tire-larigot

 

not as good as amélie, still though - 8/10

 

where do you rate Amelie next to Delicatessen and City of Lost children?

 

i haven't seen either of those yet, loved "a very long engagement" though.

[Ego]

Why would you think Amélie is nauseating? Because it's cheesy or something? I think Amélie is by far his best film. The visual fluency in that movie along with the atmosphere, music and cute ideas make me smile every time.

 

Anyway I just watched something on the other end of the spectrum. Rosetta by the Dardenne brothers. Which is another depressing character-study you could describe as Dogme95. But like many Dardenne films, it is incredibly strong. Some lovely allegories as well.

 

Still, I'm gonna wash away this bitter taste with Ta'm e guilass/Taste of Cherry.

[YEK]

Amelie is great. it's one to own in my opinion.

[Guest viscosity]

Finally seen Koyaanisqatsi.

 

10/10 - amazing visual/audio experience.

 

watched this yesterday, the time lapse footage is great

[Guest ruiagnelo]

Why would you think Amélie is nauseating? Because it's cheesy or something? I think Amélie is by far his best film. The visual fluency in that movie along with the atmosphere, music and cute ideas make me smile every time.

 

Anyway I just watched something on the other end of the spectrum. Rosetta by the Dardenne brothers. Which is another depressing character-study you could describe as Dogme95. But like many Dardenne films, it is incredibly strong. Some lovely allegories as well.

 

Still, I'm gonna wash away this bitter taste with Ta'm e guilass/Taste of Cherry.

 

Indeed, the soundtrack is sweet and that parisian atmosphere is incredibly well portraited.

There is a funny part where amélie is trying to guess how many couples are reaching orgasm. Pretty funny movie.

[Guest vodor]

alien 4 is jeunet's best film.

 

no but seriously, when i watched amelie i looooved it but i was young and probably in a strange mind-state, because when i reflect on it, it seems like the kind of movie that would irritate the hell out of me.

 

city of lost children is the only other jeunet i've seen.

 

my feeling about jeunet is that his films have brilliant visuals and interesting ideas but his sense of humor as a director--the physicality of the humor and way he films and directs it--don't really jive well with the rest of the pieces. there's something very flamboyant and cartoony about it. i've only seen the trailer for very long engagement, but even then that's how it seemed to be. i can only assume that it deals with serious war themes, but then there's a shot where the camera is up in the sky looking straight down as someone gets blown up by some explosive and flies all CGishly straight up to the camera, right up to the camera so we can see his face going like "eeeeyowzah mon dieu j'ai mal a la tete," and then back down. like, wtf dude.

[Atop]

Alien 4 sucks ass....

 

cept for some of the visuals

 

Micmacs rules!

[Silent Member]

Alien 4 is ....

[Guest Benedict Cumberbatch]

the expendables trailer on tv keep giving me boners

[Atop]

I like bon0rz

[Guest Benedict Cumberbatch]

pride was yesterday

[Guest Benedict Cumberbatch]

grown ups 6/10

I'll see anything with Kevin James in. and I'll see anything with Rob Schneider in. so this is like a dreamteam movie. felt very improvised and wasn't good for it. some laughs. didnt help that the cinema was mostly empty on opening night.

 

and i still haven't seen micmacs :( this week though

[baph]

Black Sheep (not the one with the fat dude):

 

/10

[baph]

Also,

Caught a screening of White Material (Dir. Claire Denis) at the LA Film Festival this weekend. I'm having a hard time putting a number to it: the film is somewhat messy, deliberately so, but was also powerful and very upsetting. I might need another viewing to sort it out, although the narrative is not especially complex.

 

[lengthy, rambling, unproofed, but mostly spoiler free discussion:]

 

Essentially the story of French coffee plantation owners in an unnamed African country as it's devolving into civil war. You have Marie, who is the protagonist, who is of this vastly overprivileged class but who seems paradoxically "innocent": she just wants to fulfill her purpose and make coffee in the face of chaos; that chaos strengthens her purpose and she mentions that she would have none of her courage if she were to return to France. That's contrasted with her husband (Christopher Lambert, which was a somewhat distracting lol for me, although his performance is fine) and her step father, who better represent the greed/corruption of the affair, and her son, who is grossly incompetent and growing rather batshit insane (and who highlights some of the messy racial dynamics of the situation: he seems to want to be African, but he's obviously not, and he's virtually rejected, rightly so, by not only the African population but by the environment itself. He dreams of being a wild dog, and as he grows more unstable he becomes this wild, disruptive, figure, at times looking and acting like a skinhead and at times presenting himself as a liberator of the African oppressed).

 

Against this, you have a number of African figures: the "Boxer," who is a local resistance hero taken in by Marie without much regard for the official backlash, a number of corrupt African government officials/soldiers, and some pretty ambiguous children of the resistance who kind of make their way into the coffee compound but who are also apparently fighting back against the influx of "white material" (the ostentatious elements of White wealth which is being "reclaimed" or just destroyed as it were).

 

The narrative is framed in a way that you're never given much backstory, so your insight into character motivations comes piecemeal, although it's apparent early on that Marie is fairly pure of intention but also hugely fucking irrational.

 

The last 2/3 of the film get into some properly violent and unsettling Apocalypse Now territory (and indeed, the movie feels like a quieter, more abstracted rumination on the French Colonial mindset per that lengthy segment of the Redux). You get a bit more insight into the Colonialized mindset than Apocalypse Now was going to offer, but it's still disjointed and unclear--instead the presentation is one of inevitable forces coming to bear on the plantation, and figures like the Boxer seem intentionally reduced to a symbolic role. And there's an uneasy tension that develops as you're sucked into Marie's perspective in that way-- she's an outsider, she doesn't belong, but you empathize with her sense of purpose even if it's laughable and dangerous and even if she certainly doesn't "deserve" to be in her position above all this abject poverty. And you're consciously playing all of that against the racial and colonial politics that the movie throws at you in a very dreamy, abstracted manner, but it never takes any clear stance except to hint at the corruption coming in from all corners, not the least of which, of course, is your rich white folk, whose presence and practice of bribery, it's suggested, has legitimized the corruption of the local government and even the marauding neo-tribal highwaymen.

 

Visually, the film reflects that uncertainty, too; you get quite-a-few-more-than-average extreme close ups of faces, to the point that what you're seeing is just a part of the whole, often obscured or blanched out by shadow/lighting. All the film's uncertainty comes to a head in the final chaotic moments, in which the partially-glimpsed insanities of just about everyone's motivations become violently explicit.

 

[joew]

i liked Black Sheep, wasn't so great but entertaining at least

 

what i've watched recently:

 

Stroszek - really outstanding. i watched this alone. messages are conveyed very affectively. i'm not really a film guy but i probably appreciate this more than i do a lot of the stuff i've seen

 

Paranormal Activity - 7/10; not bad relative to a lot of the stuff that has been coming out. some of the things that were tried were kind of blatant at times. it's ultimately a cookie cutter "haunting" movie but it's done well. entertaining, at best. maybe the fact that i was both listening to it with Rifftrax as well as with friends took something away from it.

 

Plan 9 from Outer Space - not the MST3K riff, but still not nearly as bad as all the hype makes it seem, though still bad. relative to what came out in that time period though, it's just OK. Manos would have been really awful in comparison if we hadn't watched it with MST3K.

 

Session 9 - 9/10; really good. this and Jacob's Ladder have a similar tone that I like. also the tape effects were used well

[baph]

I can't even sit through the MST3K'd Manos.

[Guest Billov]

Stroszek.... really need to watch it. I've seen most of Herzogs movies, but I've heard great things about stroszek.

[Redruth]

the girl with the dragon tattoo

michael jackson's this is it

bright star

onegin

[Guest Blanket Fort Collapse]

the girl with the dragon tattoo

 

was it good? was thinkin bout watchin it, pretty mixed reviews

[Guest vodor]

i was joking when i said that alien 4 was jeunet's best, just incase you guys didn't read it that way.

 

gone baby gone: 3/5

 

i needed to get me some more casey affleck and mmmmm-MMM! he didn't disappoint. the moral problem presented felt almost as contrived and the plot did, but i still appreciated what it brought to the table.

[Atop]

I thought you were serious about it and was shocked at your crazy opinions!

[Silent Member]

same

[Guest Adjective]

Doesn't really count as film, but i have been watching The Twilight Zone and i am quite addicted to it already. Each story is a wonder of the human imagination and it has a science fiction feeling that i haven't seen for a while in shows brought by the same period.

Yep, absolutely classic.

 

Watched 20/156 episodes so far. Still a lot remaining

If you haven't already seen, you might like Night Gallery too, and maybe The Outer Limits