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Post by Vercetti on Mar 19, 2007 3:11:18 GMT
Isn't the final scene just perfect?
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Boz
Published writer
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Post by Boz on Mar 19, 2007 3:39:15 GMT
I still don't get the Manhattan thing. I felt like Annie Hall was way better. Probably Crimes and Misdemeanors too.
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Post by Michael on Mar 19, 2007 3:41:41 GMT
I need to re-watch Manhattan. I think I might appreciate it more now than when I first saw it.
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Omar
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Post by Omar on Mar 20, 2007 21:46:36 GMT
Tasogare Seibei The Twilight Samurai(2002/Yôji Yamada) [Second Viewing] A single father samurai struggles to keep things going in a changing time.Yamada's attention to detail and well done pacing can not save the film from a cliched narrative that takes away from the film's credibility and gives it a cheesy old fashioned feeling. The romance subplot also hurts the film, but it's the climatic duel, inspired greatly by "Apocalypse Now", that makes the film stand out, in a way. Kakushi ken oni no tsume The Hidden Blade(2004/Yôji Yamada) [First Viewing] A samurai is forced to kill an old colleague who has gone insane.Technically better than Yamada's previous effort, and once again, the attention to detail and pacing rule supreme. The elaborate design and recreation of the times is so well done here, that it makes you forget the silly romantic subplot, even though Yamada was obviously trying to pay homage to the classic westerns of American cinema. If the final scene were removed, my rating would probably be higher.
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Omar
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Post by Omar on Mar 21, 2007 21:21:51 GMT
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?(1962/Robert Aldrich) [First Viewing] An aging and crippled movie star finds her life in danger at the hands of her has-been bat shit crazy sister.Slightly overlong, but suspenseful and creepy as hell. Bette Davis' performance as the deranged child star turned alcoholic monster is truly terrifying, and Aldrich's pacing is gripping most of the way through. The opening segments are also very well done, and very unconventional for their time.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Mar 23, 2007 22:10:04 GMT
A Hard Day's Night Richard Lester 1964 UK 1st time; big screen A day in the life of the Beatles: escaping screaming fans, meeting deadlines and recording a TV appearance - for which they show up just in time. It plays very much like a Marx brothers film - four characters, none of whom has the lead, and all of whom are used simply as decorative attractions for the carefree narrative, playing pranks, telling jokes and dropping one-liners at the expense of any kind of story. Its intention was to seemingly to humanise the Fab Four, to put them in a context wherein everyone else around them is crazy and stressed out and carried away with all the media attention and whatnot, so that they're all caught up in the shennanigans without really paying attention to it. The musical numbers are good, too, and presented in such a come-and-go, surreal fashion it's hard not to laugh along.
Goldfinger Guy Hamilton 1964 UK Nth time; big screen Bond saves Fort Knox's millions from an international gold smuggler. Probably the most solid of all the Bonds; the third in the franchise, on the back of two previous hits, made in the UK but with handsome funding from America and full confidence in Connery. It isn't as bloated as the follow-up, Thunderball (1965), and is a lot more tamed, more subtle than From Russia With Love (1963), in its sexual innuendos and crude fist-fights. The rhythm is consistent, the narrative never shoddy, and the set-pieces expensive and impressive. At the end of it all, it's the one with the best car, best gags, most memorable situations and best theme song.
^^ From 6th March
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Mar 23, 2007 22:19:41 GMT
Das kabinett des Dr. Caligari The Cabinet of Dr Caligari Robert Wiene 1919 Germany 2nd time; big screen A madman tells the tale of the director of his lunatic asylum who used a somnabulist to murder his victims. Endlessly studied, artistically significant, incredibly influential film, not so much part of a movement (German Expressionism) as a cinematic imitation of it. On the one hand, the camera doesn't quite enter the hermetic world it captures, but on the other, the meticulous, distorted set design and crammed mise-en-scène evoke a fully credible world of immorality and perversion and underlying darkness. It's visually excessive throughout: streets zig-zag into endless oblivion; the walls on either side of alleyways lean toward one another with claustrophobic menace; streams of light and shadow are painted onto objects; houses are built as if a bomb had gone off long ago, and, instead of blowing up, the whole town just tilted on its axis. There's a satisfying twist to things to, bringing a bleak axe down on the already deranged nihilism.
^^ From 7th March.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Mar 23, 2007 22:31:20 GMT
A Prairie Home Companion Robert Altman 2006 USA 1st time; big screen The last broadcast of a live radio show, as seen onstage and backstage, through the eyes of the participants and a mysterious woman. Reductive, perhaps, but an initial point of reference: Altman's Nashville (1975), another multi-character musical had a lazy ending which brought everything together, whereas this is very succinct and satisfying, at once implicit and ambiguous; but whereas Nashville's three-hour duration gave an epic weight and allowed Altman to give a wealth and depth to each of his characters' personalities, because it is only two hours, A Prairie Home Companion is at times a little imbalanced. Another half-hour or so would have ironed its narrative out into a much more consistent rhythm and flow - and the writing and acting are both excellent enough to have made it quite watchable at a longer length. It's a brilliant film, though, full of laughs, full of wit, full of energy and colour and confidence, unfolding finally as a film driven by nostalgic characters caught up in a world slowly drowning in melancholy. Altman's camera is less casual, less roaming than his other films, but is riveting all the same - various pans and simultaneous zooms, difficult to describe but lovely to watch, bring us in and out of this conversation and that conversation.
^^ From 11th March.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Mar 23, 2007 23:24:28 GMT
I've been writing this capsule for a good forty-five minutes, drafting and re-drafting, which is probably telling in itself. For now, I'm happy with it, but it's all open to change. Since he's the only other person who's seen it here, I'd be interested in hearing what Wet Dog has to say, in relation to the film directly, or in relation to what I have to say on it myself...
Inland Empire David Lynch 2006 USA / Poland / France 1st time; big screen An actress in Hollywood may or may not have an affair with a co-star, and her persona splinters into several parallel dimensions. Lynch's most self-indulgent film is three hours long, and could quite have easily been double that without seeming it - there's absolutely no conventional narrative arc, no way of foreseeing where things are going or anticipating what's to come, so that it's impossible to measure how long it's been going on and how long it might continue to go on. It's incredibly innovative, a step forward in Lynch's personal ambitions: instinctive, imaginative, entrenched in its own world - its own worlds-within-worlds - so that any approach to it which might seek some kind of connection from the hermetic fiction to the environment in which it is consumed (i.e. anything outside of the film) seems to be missing the point. Indeed, rather than requiring active deconstruction (as almost all narratives do), it's a textural experience, a fabrication which is meaning, not an encoded narrative which has meaning. The move to low-budget DV has freed him up in two senses: visual expression and narrative flexibility. Lynch is a master of 'uncomfortable space': some of the shot compositions are frighteningly intimate; very few scenes have establishing shots, so that conversations, even presented in the most basic, shot-reverse shot fashion, have a disturbing edge; and each intra-scene cut seems to be ever-so-slightly delayed. It's erotic at times, funny at others, agreeably bizarre, and often terrifying: unique, original, and easily reduced to pathetic superlatives or wordy descriptions. A quote from Calvino's Invisible Cities might be telling: "I realized I had to free myself from the images which in the past had announced to me the things I sought: only then would I succeed in understanding the language [...]".
^^ From 13th March.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Mar 24, 2007 0:31:26 GMT
Posle smerti After Death Yevgenin Bauer 1915 Russia 1st time; big screen A modest man, humbled by the affections of a beautiful woman, is devastated when she kills herself over him. Short and sweet… well, short and tragic. Rather poignant, with jump-cuts used to have the dead woman's ghost appear and reappear. The same effect as what Méliès used to trick his characters for fun, but here it has a deadening impact, deliberately so.
Chelovek s kino-apparatom The Man With a Movie Camera Dziga Vertov 1929 USSR 1st time; big screen The day in the life of a camera as it captures movement en masse, and various mechanisms of machinery at work. Various techniques combine for a pulsating experience, with an emphasis on repeated visual motifs, abstract compositions and a cumulative rhythm, to evoke emotion through shot-to-shot relations and single shot durations. It goes best with a percussive soundtrack, even in less frantic episodes such as that in which athletes are filmed in slow-motion, forwards and backwards. But original intentions aside, the whole thing is now undercut by the ironic opening intertitle: wishing to create a purely cinematic experience independent of other art forms, Vertov still felt the need to warn us in words beforehand.
^^ From 14th March.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Mar 24, 2007 0:46:38 GMT
Kasaba The Small Town Nuri Bilge Ceylan 1998 Turkey 1st time; DVD Across four seasons in a small rural village, two children experience life at school and at home. Ceylan's first feature is a quiet and personal film, very abstract and quite affecting, concentrating on otherwise unseen moments and relationships outside of dialogue, the beauty of Nature, the nature of memory and fragments of chance. It reveals a confident artist, and his background in photography prior to film comes as no surprise, since he relies heavily on visual composition for emotional effect and resonance: while the crickets chirp relentlessly in the background, ageing characters reminisce around a fire at night about a past which is either distant (to the talkers) or altogether alien (to the listeners). The early scenes, in a children's classroom, have a rare, natural intimacy to them, similar to Loach (and Kes in particular); but this director's aesthetic is far more lasting.
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan Larry Charles 2006 USA / UK 2nd time; pirate DVD A TV reporter from Kazakhstan travels to New York with his agent, and thence to California, in search of cultural enlightenment and Pamela Anderson. It is perhaps too lazy to defend Sacha Baron Cohen's shameless anti-Semitism here by guarding him with the fact that he is devoutly Jewish himself. Similarly, it might also be naïve to assume his intention is to expose the ignorance in general, or racism in particular, of those unwitting individuals he confronts in the course of the film - or indeed, that of those who laugh at the film. As a mockumentary, it works a whole lot better than Ali G inda House, and, regardless of the (deliberately) difficult questions arising from possible racism, its best moments are its visual gags - Borat 'settling into' his new hotel room, an elevator; causing disastrous, expensive havoc in an antiques store; and a lengthy naked wrestle with his obese agent in the hotel at which they're staying, with Borat's penis covered with an exaggeratedly long censor.
^^ From 17th March.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Mar 24, 2007 13:08:36 GMT
Manhattan Woody Allen 1979 USA Nth time; big screen The chronicles of a TV writer's complicated sex life in the city he loves. Conversational piece, wherein characters pretentiously refer to other artists as a way of dealing with inner neuroses. The whole thing, acted with a naturalistic naivety, is shot in stunning black and white; if the actors are not framed in the extreme left or right of screen, they are obscured in vivid darkness, with the light catching only the edges of their face and body. Allen's a fantastic writer, but his visual wit is not to be missed: such as in the montages with his son and the weekend away with a girlfriend and friends, and the conversation between an infuriated Allen and best friend, with Allen standing next to a silent skeleton, a sort of mirror composition.
^^ From 18th March.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Mar 24, 2007 13:41:11 GMT
Nazarín Luis Buñuel 1959 Mexico 1st time; DVD A neverdowrong priest, in the name of God, is hounded and scandalised for sheltering a commoner. A surprisingly weighty film, very solid, shot in a combined style of expressionistic, shadowy interiors and impressionistic, minimalist exteriors. Downbeat in a funny sort of way, it shows the director to have tight discipline in editing, shot composition and control of actors - cardboard on surface level, but with a subtle emotional power which comes through as the narrative unfolds in its watchable if predictable manner.
Fa yeung nin wa In the Mood for Love Wong Kar-wai 2000 Hong Kong Nth time; DVD In 1960s Hong Kong, two lonely neighbours realise their respective partners are having an affair with one another, and slowly begin to fall for each other themselves… A filmmaker's film, fragmented and dreamlike, which develops in a succession of fractured little snippets of scenes. Abandonment of storyboard and script brings a flexibity to narrative, with a naivety and vulnerability in its two leading characters, played poignantly by Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. Peppered throughout, holding the snippets together in a cohesive whole, are elongated scenes played out in slow-motion to various pieces of music, a waltz by Shigeru Umbeyashi, and Spanish recordings of Nat King Cole numbers. Deeply nostalgic, the whole thing, wonderful to look at and listen to, seems to be in mourning of times long gone.
Jean de Florette Claude Berri 1985 France 2nd time; TV Two friends in rural France plot to bring bad fortune to the hunchback who has inherited the land they wish to plant carnations on. A more appropriate title would be "Jean de Florette: A Series of Unfortunate Events", for this unfolds as one bad thing after another for Depardieu, who carries the film with conviction, countered by a young and promising Auteuil. Adequately shot and well-acted, but far too repetitive and long, with nothing really all that attractive, to keep you watching, or to bring you back; you can't help but feel it is simply an extended exposition for the tragedy of the sequel.
The Set-Up Robert Wise 1949 USA 1st time; TV An ageing boxer fights his last bout despite angst from his girlfriend, and the fact he's supposed to lose in a staged knockout. One of those rapid, brief B-movie productions made on an assembly line of forgotten masterpieces, by Wise, who here shows himself to be a very efficient, economic filmmaker - in the implicit, exciting exposition of narrative, in the tense, atmospheric bulk of the boxing fight itself, in the succinct, satisfying climax. Studio-bound, of course, but with an air of sweaty, dingy seediness hanging over it; you can't help but imagine that the sweat, blood and tears are in some way inherited from the rapid, low-budget production itself.
^^ From 19th March.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Mar 24, 2007 14:40:47 GMT
Rope Alfred Hitchcock 1948 USA 3rd time; DVD Two friends murder their companion for a social experiment, and throw a party for the victim's friends and family, the drinks for which are served on the trunk in which he lies. Notable thriller, overlooked now and very underrated, critically dismissed at the time and by no means a commercial success, for which Hitchcock devised an entire, self-sufficient set and turned it, for production, into a technical slog, a coreographed film shot in continuous, ten-minute takes, cutting for the most part at invisible intervals. Things to note: it is probably Hitch's most philosophical film, with Nietschzean ideas discussed throughout; its humour is deranged, dark and hilarious in a perverse kind of way, contradicting both the initial crime and the homosexual overtones; the acting is superb, matching quite convincingly the meticulous writing; the sound design is top-notch. If it sounds like the one film in which Hitchcock went all stagebound (a three-walled set, an obvious proscenium arch), think again: much of the tension comes from camera placement, whether on Stewart's investigator when Dall slips up about the killing, or the close-up on the table-cum-casket when the maid comes to shift the dinner decorations from it and into the other room.
Rear Window Alfred Hitchcock 1954 USA 4th time; DVD A photographer recovers in his apartment from a broken leg, and suspects a neighbour of murder. Fantastic: a gripping, fascinating, multi-layered film, as meticulous as Rope but with a deeper emotional heart at its centre - the protagonist avoiding marital advances because of the woman's glamorous beauty, and the means by which she wins his affection, by becoming part of his voyeuristic suppositions. The production values are nothing less than impressive, Kelly's costume design and makeup is utterly seductive, and Hitchcock's storytelling is at its most creative - visual, implicit shots of Stewart's neighbours reveal far more than any dialogue could. Not just a technical triumph, but its thematic exploration, bringing up all kinds of disturbing undertones, have proved very influential (Lynch loves it) and timeless in their self-reflexive significance.
The Man Who Knew Too Much Alfred Hitchcock 1955 USA 1st time; TV A remake of Hitchcock's 1934 British version: an American couple and their son are caught up in an assassination attempt to kill a high-ranking senator. More bloated and grandiose than the original, with a surprisingly better first half than the second - the early scenes, in which Stewart and Day acquaint another couple in a restaurant, is very effective at conjuring up a comforting warmth in the midst of foreign alienation. It lacks the visual excitement of his best work, and sags a little before the end, but the Royal Albert Hall scene is brilliant, and even if the post-climax coda is too long, the "Que Sera Sera" whistling packs a powerful resonance.
Vozvrashcheniye The Return Andrei Zvyagintsev 2003 Russia 3rd time; DVD After a twelve year absence, a father returns to see his sons, and takes them on a mysterious fishing trip. Challenging in its persistent, overwhelming ambiguity, it's as if Zvyagintsev was determined to make a film which adheres to Bordwell's analysis of what constitutes "art cinema" (as outmoded as it might be). Character motivation moves toward nothing in particular, the narrative arc has no foreseeable pattern, there is no solution when it ends, and there is little explanation as to who this mysterious stranger really is or why he is suddenly back. It's a success, too: the location is exploited fully, the north Russian landscapes look gorgeous, and it conjures an atmosphere of mystery and danger with seeming ease, one which lingers for days after.
^^ From 20th March.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Mar 24, 2007 15:10:10 GMT
Die Große Stille Into Great Silence Philip Gröning 2005 France / Switzerland / Germany 1st time; big screen Documentary on the silent Carthusian Monks in the Grande Chartreuse, France. Like the monks themselves, Gröning goes about his business in a very humble, almost silent fashion, with no music, no voice-over, almost no interviews. It's an interesting premise because the subject matter is so unique, but it's a complete waste of an opportunity; to be frank, it is one of the most annoying, dumbfounding and frustrating documentaries made. In fact, it lacks the required insight to be classed as a documentary, and certainly isn't expressive enough to be a feature in its own right - it captures various activities without any insight as to why they go about what they do, why it is that these men have chosen a life of complete seclusion; it only serves to mystify these monks further, instead of de-mystifying them, so that anybody coming into the documentary not knowing who they are or what they do leaves the theatre having endured three hours of point-and-shoot filming of various religious rituals which aren't given any context at all. It defeats its own purpose: Gröning apparently waited close to two decades to get permission to film there, and the final product falls way short of revealing anything interesting about a potentially fascinating subject. The time-lapse shots, of the entire vicinity in the snowy mountains, are effective in their tranquility, but are completely undercut by inconsistent transitions (the film has no rhythm at all) and lazily assembled intertitles, quotations from the Bible. These quotations have some sort of obscure connection to the footage surrounding them, a bit like the Victorian quotations preceding each chapter in Fowles' novel The French Lieutenant's Woman; but while Fowles did immense research in assembling an eclectic, convincing range of quotes from all kinds of different sources, Gröning uses two or three and peppers them throughout his documentary as if to hammer the same point home time and time again, to the effect that, by the end of the film, you know what each intertitle says in French and German before the English subtitles come up translate it for us.
^^ From 21st March.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Mar 24, 2007 17:14:34 GMT
3-4x juugatsu Boiling Point Takeshi Kitano 1990 Japan 2nd time; DVD A gentle gas station attendant punches a bullying gangster, and decides to buy a gun to stand up for himself. Kitano's unique style, of mixing deadpan, dry humour with even more deadpan, dry violence, is at its funniest here, using lowly characters who don't speak very much - and when they do they just bullshit - and an unusual narrative technique, of explaining things purely by means of visuals and editing, to great effect. Kitano himself plays a minor but memorable role as a casually bi-sexual, mysoginistic and vicious gangster. Very witty, very nonchalant, very fun.
^^ From 22nd March.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Mar 25, 2007 12:32:25 GMT
Kino, I missed the new bfi print of that last year because it was only showing on a Sunday morning, and I had a heavy night out on the Saturday. Still, I've got it high in a rental queue.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Mar 25, 2007 18:05:15 GMT
La science des rêves The Science of Sleep Michel Gondry 2006 France / Italy 1st time; big screen An insecure, Mexican artist moves to France and falls in love with his neighbour in his dreams. This and Eternal Sunshine share a common emotional impact in the way they unfold: in a very casual manner, strikingly original in form and hilariously written and performed, so that any real emotional weight is accumulated as the narrative progresses in its deceptively nonchalant manner, and, come the climax of both films, an attachment has formed between viewer and film which seemingly wasn't on the cards at all. It's utterly refreshing stuff, energetic and perceptive, and determined to subvert expectations, from things such as overall narrative pattern to smaller details such as conventions of fictional character. At first, the ending might seem abrupt and unsatisfying in confirming that the narrative has been overwhelmed by its own fantasies ("when is it going to go back to reality?"), similar to, say, Videodrome, but it's written so as to be open to a hell of a lot of interpretation - what seemingly takes place during one night of dreams might actually be a collection of memories of real events, filtered into one dream-like narrative... that's the science of sleep, after all. Visually meticulous, emotionally complex, sharply written and excellently performed.
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Mar 25, 2007 18:12:39 GMT
The Science of Sleep is Gondry's third feature, yo.
I need to rewatch Human Nature.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Mar 25, 2007 18:16:56 GMT
Sorry, pedant.
Have you anything to chip in on any of the films I've Proview'd? I did ask your thoughts on Inland Empire...
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