Raxivace's 2018 List of Movies or (Neo-General Chat: The Second Raid)

maz89 · Post by **maz89** » Wed Jun 06, 2018 10:19 am

Raxivace wrote:I'm jealous of you guys having films that remind you of home. I grew up in Indianapolis, and the only good film about that city that I'm aware of is The Magnificent Ambersons, and its entirely about what a soulless hellhole that place is.

And you know what? Welles was right.

I should read the original Booth Tarkington novel sometime.

At least it was a fantastic movie.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Wed Jun 06, 2018 10:25 am

Eva Yojimbo wrote:I've got the email to prove it!

Just having an e-mail doesn't prove time travel is real though.

Gosh Jimbo I thought you were better than this. Do you think it really is Nigerian Princes that send you e-mails too!!!?????

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I absolutely agree about Hitchcock. Every time I even catch bits of his films on TV I'm inspired to go watch one. They're just so rich in terms of theme and technique that every rewatch seems to deepen the appreciation for the overall film. Even his “lesser" films tend to get better (I remember how impressed I was by Sabotage after I got to see it for the second time in a decent print).

Sabotage is great, though I was lucky in that that the version I had on DVD was pretty good.

I think Secret Agent and Number 17 from that period will likely get something of a re-evaluation if they ever get cleaned up nicely (Though probably not anything near masterpiece-status). Seems like they had some good things going for them, though the audio really needs some work.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:After I wrote all this I had a thought: I wonder if Criterion re-required the license for Notorious and Spellbound? They used to have both of them (and Rebecca), but I guess MGM (and whomever owns them now) cancelled the license to release them on blu-ray, but now the blu-rays are OOP and Criterion released Rebecca on blu-ray a little while back. It's entirely possible they have plans for Notorious and Spellbound as well.

I asked a guy I know online who keeps up with this stuff, and he thinks Criterion having the license for Notorious is likely. Apparently there are rumors of a blu-ray release within the next year or so.

I guess I'll just hold out to see if/when that happens. Same with Spellbound.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Thing is, most of them aren't even that interesting in terms of film history. Except for something like Numero deux with its experiments with video most of the films are closer to plain propaganda than art-films. I guess Teut va bien is somewhere in the middle.

It's not like there still isn't reason to look at propaganda though, even if it isn't in terms of formal artistry that we might defend someone like Riefenstahl or Griffith or Eisenstein with.

Look, worst case scenario is that I overthrow Gendo and seize the means of production of Pitter's Place.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I did and still do watch a lot of game shows, now mostly when I'm working out and/or when I eat. I have seen a lot of WWTBAM, but I don't know if Slumdog made me especially nostalgic for it. These days I'm into the Card Sharks reruns on early in the morning on Game Show Network (Bob Eubanks is a funny guy!).

My brother loves Card Sharks and GSN in general, and he likes to pretend to Bob Eubanks sometimes. His favorite hosts are Pat Sajack and Alex Trebek though. It's cute.

I've been watching old Survivor seasons on a whim (I guess that's kind of a gameshow too, now that I think about it), and it blew his mind that Jeff Probst was on there since he only knew him from old Rock 'n' Roll Jeopardy clips on YouTube.

BTW, funniest game show moment ever:

LOL

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Wed Jun 06, 2018 10:27 am

108. The Housemaid (1960, Dir. Ki-young Kim) - I found this one bizarre in a way that's difficult to really sell the impact act of. The prologue of the film features a family reading a newspaper article about a man committing adultery with his housemaid. The main portion of the film is a pretty good Hitchcockian thriller about a family hiring a housemaid, the husband of the family impregnating the housemaid, the family forcing the housemaid to abort the fetus, the housemaid poisoning one of the children of the family in revenge, and the housemaid and the husband ultimately killing each other. Pretty bleak stuff, and it takes like 100 minutes of this 110 or so minute film.

The epilogue returns to the family of the prologue, except there's bizarrely comedic tone to their discussion about presumably what we just watched. The father laughs at the arrogance of anyone who would hire a young woman maid in a home with an older man, because men only get hornier with age, and then in a fucking bizarre move the man turns to the camera and starts directly talking to the audience. He derides any audience member (Though presumably he means the straight males) that think they wouldn't make the same mistake that the main protagonist of the film then and just starts laughing at them/us. It's a strange, strange ending that caught me offguard in a way that I didn't expect and that hasn't happened to me with a film in a while now.

The shots of the rat poison filled glass of water really reminded me of the famous shots of the glass of milk in Suspicion. The usage of rain in the movie kind of evoked Kurosawa for me to

109. Elevator to the Gallows (1958, Dir. Louis Malle) - A cool film noir. I'm not sure whether it technically counts as part of the French New Wave or not, though even if it doesn't it certainly anticipates the content of films like Breathless (Though obviously not Godard's form. Malle is much more classical here). The whole notion of the perfect crime going wrong and an attempt at constructing an elaborate locked room mystery utterly falling apart because our murderer Maurice Ronet got stuck in an elevator all night and some rowdy kids stole his car is just great.

This leads to an interesting dynamic where characters keep making wrong observations and acting upon them- like Jeanne Morreau seeing her lover Ronet's car being driven at night, seeing a girl in the passenger seat, but merely assuming who the driver is, accidentally revealing that to the police, leading to this weird bit of literal “fake news" where Ronet reads a newspaper to find out he's been accused of a different set of murders he had nothing to do with.

Also, the score to this movie is very interesting on two fronts.

1. That it is even a film noir with a jazz score is super unusual. I know the stereotype of noir films is that their darkened streets and byztantine plots and cool anti-heroes and sexy femme fatales are accompanied by jazz, but when you go and actually watch noirs, whether we're talking the ones made in Hollywood up until now, or the Japanese noirs that people Kurosawa or the Nikkatsu studio made, or in England that people like Carol Reed were making etc., you'll find that most of them in fact did not have jazz music (I'm not exactly sure where this stereotype comes from. My best guess off of the top of my head would be the American neo-noirs of the 70's).

2. The score was entirely improvised by a young Miles Davis, about a year before he recorded his famous album Kind of Blue. I'm not knowledgeable enough about music to talk about what he's doing here, but it sounds fantastic.

Really great, fun movie overall.

110. Crazeologie (1954, Dir. Louis Malle) - Not much to say about this short, other than that's its nice that Malle graduated from such humble, bad beginnings to making something as good as Elevator to the Gallows in his debut feature. As it is though, I dunno, it plays like a bad Eric Andre bit or something.

111. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, Dir. Wes Craven, Rewatch) - I had so much fun watching all of the Friday the 13th movies last year that I thought I'd try and replicate that with the Elm Street movies this Summer. I saw this first Elm Street years ago though a kind of random DVD rental (RIP Blockbuster Video), and in revisiting it ooooph, not as good as I remembered. The acting is just kind of bad (Btw, its neat seeing the debut of Johnny Depp here, playing a straight-laced kid oddly enough), though I'll say the cheesy effects are kind of charming, especially for a movie with only a budget of $1.8 million.

Freddy Kreuger is still a great concept for a character (If not perhaps indebted to older classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari). Here's hoping that the myriad of sequels can do something neat with the character- or at the very least be some campy fun.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Wed Jun 06, 2018 10:29 am

maz89 wrote:
Raxivace wrote:I'm jealous of you guys having films that remind you of home. I grew up in Indianapolis, and the only good film about that city that I'm aware of is The Magnificent Ambersons, and its entirely about what a soulless hellhole that place is.

And you know what? Welles was right.

I should read the original Booth Tarkington novel sometime.

At least it was a fantastic movie.

Oh I love it dearly, and I'm looking forward to this rumored Criterion blu-ray coming.

I still have hope that this lost original cut is one day found...

maz89 · Post by **maz89** » Wed Jun 06, 2018 10:31 am

+1 for Elevator to the Gallows. I probably should check out more from Malle too. Interesting thoughts on the score... I saw it in, like, 2009 so it deserves a rewatch.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Wed Jun 06, 2018 12:35 pm

I haven't actually seen any other Malle myself. I keep meaning to watch My Dinner With Andre at least but never seem to get around to it.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Fri Jun 08, 2018 2:15 pm

I was watching another Godard last night before going to bed, and I had a dream where he made a James Bond movie.

Not even sure what that would be like. If it was the younger Godard maybe it would resemble Metal Gear Solid or something like that.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Sat Jun 09, 2018 1:12 am

112. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985, Dir. Jack Sholder) - A kind of weird follow-up to the original. The budget is clearly bigger, leading to more involved special effects. The dynamic of Freddy is different too- before he invaded your dreams as you sleep. He still does that, sort of, but now he's a more spectral entity, trying to possess your body. The way he mutates the male lead kind of resembles Cronenberg movies like The Fly, which was interesting.

There's also a huge undercurrent of homosexuality in the film too, from the S&M interested gym teachers who is implied to spy on his showering male students and is killed in a sexually humiliating way, to many shots of ripped young men wearing tight underwear (An interesting contrast to, say, the TNA shots in something like any most Friday the 13th films), to the lead character Jesse and his friend Grady. Oh boy, Jesse and Grady.

Jesse and Grady are like, really gay for each other. Like it's kind of over the top. They playfully depants each other during a game of baseball and are constantly teasing each other like this. At one point in the movie, Jesse is having sex with his “girlfriend" Lisa, before “mysteriously" Freddy begins to possess Jesse, and Jesse runs away in fear. Where does Jesse run off to, in the middle of the night? Grady's bedroom. How he found his house and snuck in there is beyond me, but the only way this could be more blatant was if they started fellating each other right then and there and called each other by their own name.

Elm Street 2 is straight up (Excuse the pun) an LGBT film, to the point that the Wikipedia article for the movie mentions that gay audiences have more or less claimed the movie (That article is worth reading by the way). Go back and watch it if you don't believe me. It may not have been noticed by mainstream audiences in 1985, but in 2018 it's really hard not to read it any other way (And it only makes 80's tributes like Netflix's Stranger Things look all the more conservative. Imagine being less daring than an Elm Street sequel).

It's a fun, bizarre movie that largely goes against what I expected out of a random slasher, and the reason why I like doing these otherwise kind of random deep dives into franchises like this.

113. La Chinoise (1967, Dir. Jean-Luc Godard) - A bunch of students mostly sitting around in various rooms, debating leftist political philosophy. Wasn't my favorite Godard, though visually it was a bit more striking than 2 or 3 Things at least. A lot of red on white backgrounds in this film (Perhaps because of Mao's Little Red Book?). Lot of shots of panels from comic books in here too- odd to see Godard referencing Captain America and Nick Fury and Batman.

The conversation where the professor on the train interrogates the girl was probably my favorite overall, and the one I had the easiest time following (Even moreso than the scene about Melies and Lumiere, and those are dudes I'm at least familiar with). It really seems like this scene and the ones after this were Godard moving away from the propagandistic nature I was expecting from this film- the train girl honestly doesn't have answers for what happens after the revolution, kills the wrong person she had set off after at the film's end, the kid that played Antoine Doinel in 400 Blows gets fruits and/or vegetables thrown at him as if this were a bad stage performer etc.

I'm glad I read up a bit about May '68 before watching this, because it did make La Chinoise feel slightly more contextualized to me. That it seems to predict this civil unrest right before it broke out is interesting.

114. For Your Eyes Only (1981, Dir. John Glen) - Another decent Bond, though one I again just don't have a lot to really say about. I will mention though that I think Roger Moore's age is really starting to show, and its sad to see Bernard Lee no longer in the franchise as M. Still, some solid set-pieces- the mount climb at the end was my favorite, and the underwater section is probably the best one in the franchise so far, since it was based more around exploring than a big battle scene between indistinct characters like in Thunderball.

Eva Yojimbo wrote:Do me a favor though; don't read anything on For Your Eyes Only before/after seeing, and come here and hazard a guess as to what director you think praised it (it's someone you'd never expect).

I'm gonna guess its somebody who worked in a completely different mode than the blockbuster... Hmm... Maybe Brakhage?

Eva Yojimbo · Post by **Eva Yojimbo** » Sat Jun 09, 2018 2:47 am

maz89 wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:Funny you say that about Godard. There are many directors whose films get muddled in my head when I do "marathons," but this hasn't really happened with Godard; all of his are pretty distinct in my mind, despite their similarities. Shame you didn't make it to his post-80s material; they're gorgeous films. Autumnal, haunting, oneiric, insular, frequently even more baffling and incoherent than his 60s work, but I just sink into their world like the best music. I would at least recommend trying to see Neuvelle Vague, which is my favorite of his post-80s work. It desperately needs a blu-ray release, though. Sauve qui peut, Passion, and Helas pour moi are brilliant as well.
Cool, guess I should check it out then. Maybe it'll remind me why I was obsessed with Godard at one point in my (early cinephile) life.

My only suggestion is to make sure and read a plot synopsis before you watch them. Godard doesn't do exposition, and these later films are so dense and elliptical and lack even the narrative markers of 60s Godard that without knowing something beforehand it's difficult just to parse the who's who and what's what.

maz89 wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:If Wake in Fright is a nightmare, I guess Walkabout is a sweat lodge spiritual journey!
Well put! May re-use this in the future (and without citation).

Haha, feel free. :)

maz89 wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:Haha, I'd almost forgotten about franzkabuki! Along with fontinau over on the classical music board he was like my #1 Frienemy! We had a lot of good debates, and I remember going back and forth with him about Godard (and Malick).
Haha, that sure sounds like franz. Btw, I was a spectator on the Music board, and I always liked fontinau's terse arguments. He never wrote two words if one would suffice. I also liked that, despite his knowledge on music, he seemed to be totally unpretentious, e.g. his loud unapologetic support of Ms Swift...

Btw, did you check out the third season of Twin Peaks? I'm sure Rax and I would love to hear your thoughts.

I agree about fontinau. He had this odd combination of confidence but lack of pretentiousness that I found endearing. I loved how he'd boldly assert controversial stuff like Kanye being better than Bowie. We had some good discussions on the Classical Music board, too.

I haven't seen any TV or films in... geez, over a year now. I started working out regularly, eating healthy, took up guitar again around Christmas, and have generally been obsessed with music so it feels like I have no free time these days. I'm sure I'll swing back around to film/TV eventually and Twin Peaks as right at the top of my list.

Eva Yojimbo · Post by **Eva Yojimbo** » Sat Jun 09, 2018 2:56 am

Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:
Derived Absurdity wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote: LOL at the idea that Amazon employees think!

The was the same look on my face last time I opened an Amazon package!
I've never really had those issues with Amazon. I think the worst that ever happened to me with an Amazon delivery was a box ending up at my neighbor's house by mistake.

Worst thing that ever happened to me with Amazon was I ordered a “Used - Very Good" pair of speakers for my dad from Amazon Warehouse Deals. Both speakers arrived in boxes that looked like rabid wolves had made a meal out of them and the speakers were beaten to smithereens; and because of that I had the privilege of driving many miles out to a shipping center that was capable of actually processing such a large return item. Generally though, their packaging seems completely random. I've seen a few DVDs/CDs thrown into gigantic boxes with a single piece of “packing material" thrown in to fill up a bit of space.

Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:I've got the email to prove it!
Just having an e-mail doesn't prove time travel is real though.

Gosh Jimbo I thought you were better than this. Do you think it really is Nigerian Princes that send you e-mails too!!!?????

Well, there's only a few explanations:

1. You sent me an email from the future.
2. You sent me an email from the present but lied about it being from the future.
3. Someone who knows both of us sent me an email pretending it was you from the future.

Since I didn't think you capable of such a dirty, rotten, filthy, stinkin, low-down, no-good, dirty lie; I naturally assumed time travel. :)

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I absolutely agree about Hitchcock. Every time I even catch bits of his films on TV I'm inspired to go watch one. They're just so rich in terms of theme and technique that every rewatch seems to deepen the appreciation for the overall film. Even his “lesser" films tend to get better (I remember how impressed I was by Sabotage after I got to see it for the second time in a decent print).
Sabotage is great, though I was lucky in that that the version I had on DVD was pretty good.

I think Secret Agent and Number 17 from that period will likely get something of a re-evaluation if they ever get cleaned up nicely (Though probably not anything near masterpiece-status). Seems like they had some good things going for them, though the audio really needs some work.

Sabotage may be Hitch's darkest film if you think about it. Not just the fact that the kid dies from the bus bomb, but because the wife, after losing her son, kills her husband who killed her son.

I agree about Secret Agent and Number 17. Latter seems like a really cool, atmospheric, chamber thriller almost. Former is one of the many forerunners to Hitch's great on-the-run thrillers.

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Thing is, most of them aren't even that interesting in terms of film history. Except for something like Numero deux with its experiments with video most of the films are closer to plain propaganda than art-films. I guess Teut va bien is somewhere in the middle.
It's not like there still isn't reason to look at propaganda though, even if it isn't in terms of formal artistry that we might defend someone like Riefenstahl or Griffith or Eisenstein with.

Look, worst case scenario is that I overthrow Gendo and seize the means of production of Pitter's Place.

Fair enough.

Worst case? More like awesomest case! What's a bit of insurrection amongst friends?

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I did and still do watch a lot of game shows, now mostly when I'm working out and/or when I eat. I have seen a lot of WWTBAM, but I don't know if Slumdog made me especially nostalgic for it. These days I'm into the Card Sharks reruns on early in the morning on Game Show Network (Bob Eubanks is a funny guy!).
My brother loves Card Sharks and GSN in general, and he likes to pretend to Bob Eubanks sometimes. His favorite hosts are Pat Sajack and Alex Trebek though. It's cute.

I've been watching old Survivor seasons on a whim (I guess that's kind of a gameshow too, now that I think about it), and it blew his mind that Jeff Probst was on there since he only knew him from old Rock 'n' Roll Jeopardy clips on YouTube.

GSN is my go-to when nothing else is on, but man am I tired of them running Family Feud all the time! I used to love Idiotest on there; one of the best “play along" game shows I'd ever seen, but I haven't seen it in a long time; I'm guessing they canceled it.

Raxivace wrote:108. The Housemaid (1960, Dir. Ki-young Kim)

Honestly, this was probably my second favorite in that box set behind Titas. I agree with what you said about its bizarreness, but I loved how it was this mix of melodrama, thriller, and ultimately satire. Good call on the Suspicion similarity.

Raxivace wrote:109. Elevator to the Gallows (1958, Dir. Louis Malle)

Really cool film, and another that's stuck in my mind for a long time after seeing it. It kinda straddles that line between the old-guard and the new-wave, much like the films of Melville. It has the knowing, cool, detachment of the latter films, but without the stylistic quirks and subversive vibe. Still really excellent all around.

It actually wouldn't surprise me if Elevator to the Gallows itself helped to popularize the noir/jazz association. Miles Davis's soundtrack is absolutely crucial to the vibe of that film and it's not hard to see why neo-noirs were so keen on taking it up. The soundtrack was a bit of a side track project for Davis (who wasn't really “young" at the time: he was 30-something, really into his “middle period"), performed during a break from his first great quintet with a lot of professional musicians he hadn't worked with before. He reformed the quintet when he came back, recorded Milestones—which is the real predecessor to Kind of Blue—collaborated with Gil Evans on a trio of classical/orchestral/jazz-fusion albums, and then came Kind of Blue. Needless to say, Davis was an incredibly prolific artist. If there's any connection between Elevator… and KoB it's in the laid-back, relaxed tone more than anything specifically musical. Davis was still utilizing the traditional Bop method of soloing over chord changes rather than soloing based on modes on Elevator, but tonally it's different from most of his bop/hard-bop period.

Raxivace wrote:I haven't actually seen any other Malle myself. I keep meaning to watch My Dinner With Andre at least but never seem to get around to it.

Malle was one of the most versatile directors ever. Barely made the same film twice. There's the completely off-the-wall stuff like Zazie in the Metro and Black Moon, classic romances like The Lovers and Atlantic City, psychological portraits like The Fire Within; vaguely autobiographical films like Murmur of the Heart and Au revoir les enfants; a war film like Lacombe, Lucien; period pieces like Pretty Baby, zany comedies like Viva Maria! And Crackers, and the all-dialogue My Dinner With Andre. Yet, despite the stylistic/genre diversity, I think there's a really consistent level of quality and craftsmanship among them all. The only potential knock against Malle is that, in being a rather conservative filmmaker style-wise, he never quite reaches the peaks of a Godard or even Truffaut.

Raxivace wrote:113. La Chinoise (1967, Dir. Jean-Luc Godard)

Basically agree with you on La Chinoise. Narratively it isn't very interesting, but it did keep my interest visually, surprisingly so. I also thought the fact that it predicted the student riots fascinating.

Raxivace wrote:114. For Your Eyes Only (1981, Dir. John Glen)

Eva Yojimbo wrote:Do me a favor though; don't read anything on For Your Eyes Only before/after seeing, and come here and hazard a guess as to what director you think praised it (it's someone you'd never expect).
I'm gonna guess its somebody who worked in a completely different mode than the blockbuster... Hmm... Maybe Brakhage?

I think I liked FYEO a bit more than you. For a Bond it seemed surprisingly subtle and to have a bit more atmosphere to it. In an odd way, it kinda reminds me of Dr. No, and it was a good "return to normal" after Moonraker.

Well, you got the BR part right: it was actually Bresson that complimented FYEO: “It filled me with wonder because of its cinematographic writing...if I could have seen it twice in a row and again the next day, I would have done."

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Sat Jun 09, 2018 10:41 pm

Eva Yojimbo wrote:Worst thing that ever happened to me with Amazon was I ordered a “Used - Very Good" pair of speakers for my dad from Amazon Warehouse Deals. Both speakers arrived in boxes that looked like rabid wolves had made a meal out of them and the speakers were beaten to smithereens; and because of that I had the privilege of driving many miles out to a shipping center that was capable of actually processing such a large return item. Generally though, their packaging seems completely random. I've seen a few DVDs/CDs thrown into gigantic boxes with a single piece of “packing material" thrown in to fill up a bit of space.

Ah yeah, that kind of thing really sucks.

I maybe shouldn't have spoken too soon either: the case for my Mobile Suit Gundam volume 1 blu-ray was itself damaged.

"Luckily" Godard + Gorin is okay.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Well, there's only a few explanations:

1. You sent me an email from the future.

Unlikely. Even if suppose that sending a message into the past is possible, would not the very act of sending that message into the past necesitate in erasing the future that produced that message to begin with? Unless sending messages into the past creates split timelines, or we're in one of those goofy "lol time travel has always been predetermined" rulesets like in La Jetee/12 Monkeys or something.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:2. You sent me an email from the present but lied about it being from the future.

As every good fan of the mystery novel knows, motive is everything. I have no reason to claim to be from the future.

3. Someone who knows both of us sent me an email pretending it was you from the future.

Possible, though again what motive could such a person have?

Since I didn't think you capable of such a dirty, rotten, filthy, stinkin, low-down, no-good, dirty lie; I naturally assumed time travel. :)

Hmm...maybe you just imagined such a future message. Or maybe you're from a separate timeline where you received such a message but crossed over into another timeline where no such message was sent.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Sabotage may be Hitch's darkest film if you think about it. Not just the fact that the kid dies from the bus bomb, but because the wife, after losing her son, kills her husband who killed her son.

I agree about Secret Agent and Number 17. Latter seems like a really cool, atmospheric, chamber thriller almost. Former is one of the many forerunners to Hitch's great on-the-run thrillers.

Oh fuck I had forgotten about that second spoiler, but I remember that first one very well since Hitch mentioned it being a mistake in his career, though I think we both disagree with his assessment on that one.

Hopefully Criterion or someone will fix up Secret Agent and Number 17.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Worst case? More like awesomest case! What's a bit of insurrection amongst friends?

Much like Jesus I bring not peace, but a sword.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:GSN is my go-to when nothing else is on, but man am I tired of them running Family Feud all the time! I used to love Idiotest on there; one of the best “play along" game shows I'd ever seen, but I haven't seen it in a long time; I'm guessing they canceled it.

Ah I like Family Feud. Idiotest was goofy, though sometimes I wondered if some of the puzzles on there weren't a little unfair- a shame I don't have an example on hand though.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Honestly, this was probably my second favorite in that box set behind Titas. I agree with what you said about its bizarreness, but I loved how it was this mix of melodrama, thriller, and ultimately satire. Good call on the Suspicion similarity.

Yeah it mixed all three of those elements in a really interesting way. Really good use of only a few locations too.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:It actually wouldn't surprise me if Elevator to the Gallows itself helped to popularize the noir/jazz association.

It would make sense, though if that's the case I'm surprised that I didn't hear of it before when I took that deep dive into noir for that class I took a few years back.

Granted, the professor I had for that operated under the (IMO very silly) "IF ITS NOT AMERICAN IT ISN'T FILM NOIR" definition of the "genre", so I wonder if that had something to do with it. I still liked that class alot, but I had my disagreements from time to time.

Miles Davis's soundtrack

I'm going to have to dig more into him in the future, because I really enjoyed his score.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Well, you got the BR part right: it was actually Bresson that complimented FYEO: “It filled me with wonder because of its cinematographic writing...if I could have seen it twice in a row and again the next day, I would have done."

Damn, I actually thought about putting down Bresson too. I figured that it wasn't entirely unreasonable for the guy that made Pickpocket and A Man Escaped to enjoy Bond, which made me think that because it was someone I would therefore expect it must not be right (Even if he has a more minimalist style than the Bond films espouse).

EDIT: Now that I think about it, I will say I found the entire opening sequence of For Your Eyes Only to be odd.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 1:53 pm

Random thought: Has "Would anybody like [Controversial Film X] if it wasn't made by [Famous Directory Y]?" ever been a valid or interesting question to ask at any point in the history of film criticism?

Derived Absurdity · Post by **Derived Absurdity** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 3:59 pm

Raxivace wrote:Random thought: Has "Would anybody like [Controversial Film X] if it wasn't made by [Famous Directory Y]?" ever been a valid or interesting question to ask at any point in the history of film criticism?

What the hell does that question even mean?

Eva Yojimbo · Post by **Eva Yojimbo** » Mon Jun 11, 2018 2:36 am

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Well, there's only a few explanations:

1. You sent me an email from the future.
Unlikely. Even if suppose that sending a message into the past is possible, would not the very act of sending that message into the past necesitate in erasing the future that produced that message to begin with? Unless sending messages into the past creates split timelines, or we're in one of those goofy "lol time travel has always been predetermined" rulesets like in La Jetee/12 Monkeys or something.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:2. You sent me an email from the present but lied about it being from the future.
As every good fan of the mystery novel knows, motive is everything. I have no reason to claim to be from the future.

3. Someone who knows both of us sent me an email pretending it was you from the future.
Possible, though again what motive could such a person have?

Since I didn't think you capable of such a dirty, rotten, filthy, stinkin, low-down, no-good, dirty lie; I naturally assumed time travel. :)
Hmm...maybe you just imagined such a future message. Or maybe you're from a separate timeline where you received such a message but crossed over into another timeline where no such message was sent.

Nah, I'm a many-worlds guy so sending a message “into the past" would be basically no different than sending a message to a different location. All the future possibilities still exist, which would almost make sending messages into “the past" rather pointless since it wouldn't change the future since all the possibilities are realized in some world.

I agree; you had no motive to lie. :)

I guess such a person could be really into playing pointless pranks.

I certainly didn't imagine it. I could take a screen shot and post it here. In any case, you're, like, blowing my mind, man, with all these time-travel paradoxes!

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Sabotage may be Hitch's darkest film if you think about it. Not just the fact that the kid dies from the bus bomb, but because the wife, after losing her son, kills her husband who killed her son.

I agree about Secret Agent and Number 17. Latter seems like a really cool, atmospheric, chamber thriller almost. Former is one of the many forerunners to Hitch's great on-the-run thrillers.
Oh fuck I had forgotten about that second spoiler, but I remember that first one very well since Hitch mentioned it being a mistake in his career, though I think we both disagree with his assessment on that one.

Hopefully Criterion or someone will fix up Secret Agent and Number 17.

The whole scene with the two of them in the dining room is a gem and, IMO, one of the finest scenes in all of Hitch's filmography:

(1:02:12 to 1:05:36)

Two favorite moments are when, in a single take, the guy moves from a mid-shot into close-up (1:04:07)—the way his eye looks there is just so striking, as is how it switches to his POV immediately after—and the low-angle shot at 1:05:16 with his boots in the frame as she slowly walks to the background.

Ditto on Secret Agent and Number 17.

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:GSN is my go-to when nothing else is on, but man am I tired of them running Family Feud all the time! I used to love Idiotest on there; one of the best “play along" game shows I'd ever seen, but I haven't seen it in a long time; I'm guessing they canceled it.
Ah I like Family Feud. Idiotest was goofy, though sometimes I wondered if some of the puzzles on there weren't a little unfair- a shame I don't have an example on hand though.

I like Family Feud too but they seem to show it a lot! There were a few Idiotest puzzles that I thought perhaps had valid alternate answers, but the show is basically a visual equivalent of crossword cryptics, where you have to read the questions extremely literally and think of all the possible meanings in the way they're phrased. Once you know that, it becomes easier, though they still managed to throw curve balls occasionally.

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:It actually wouldn't surprise me if Elevator to the Gallows itself helped to popularize the noir/jazz association.
It would make sense, though if that's the case I'm surprised that I didn't hear of it before when I took that deep dive into noir for that class I took a few years back.

Granted, the professor I had for that operated under the (IMO very silly) "IF ITS NOT AMERICAN IT ISN'T FILM NOIR" definition of the "genre", so I wonder if that had something to do with it. I still liked that class alot, but I had my disagreements from time to time.

There may be some American noirs with jazz before Elevator, but if there are I don't know of them and they must be among the more obscure ones.

Raxivace wrote:
Miles Davis's soundtrack
I'm going to have to dig more into him in the future, because I really enjoyed his score.

You're spoiled for choices. Only thing to keep in mind is he went through several distinct periods, and you may like some and not others. To boil it down to the periods and my recommendation for each:

Cool jazz - Birth of the Cool
Bebop/Hard Bob (First Great Quintet) - Round About Midnight
Orchestral jazz (with Gil Evans) - Sketches of Spain
Modal jazz - Kind of Blue
Post-Bop/Avant-Garde (Second Great Quintet) - Miles Smiles
Jazz Fusion - In a Silent Way
Jazz Funk - On the Corner

He also had some killer live albums: Plugged Nickel and Blackhawk being the favorites among those that I've heard.

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Well, you got the BR part right: it was actually Bresson that complimented FYEO: “It filled me with wonder because of its cinematographic writing...if I could have seen it twice in a row and again the next day, I would have done."
Damn, I actually thought about putting down Bresson too. I figured that it wasn't entirely unreasonable for the guy that made Pickpocket and A Man Escaped to enjoy Bond, which made me think that because it was someone I would therefore expect it must not be right (Even if he has a more minimalist style than the Bond films espouse).

EDIT: Now that I think about it, I will say I found the entire opening sequence of For Your Eyes Only to be odd.

I suspect Bresson's love for the Bond might've had as much to do with the fact that, of all the great filmmakers, he may have been the least cinephile—he just didn't watch many movies, and I think only saw the Bond because he was going with someone else. It's possible he was just taken by what they could do visually with the technology at the time (which may not seem like much to us today… or every your average moviegoer back then).

FYEO is an odd Bond film in general, IMO.

Raxivace wrote:Random thought: Has "Would anybody like [Controversial Film X] if it wasn't made by [Famous Directory Y]?" ever been a valid or interesting question to ask at any point in the history of film criticism?

I guess it's basically just asking if our valuations of films are biased by our prior feelings about the director. I've admittedly wondered about this myself, but I don't think it's really an answerable question. You can't unknow what you know.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Sat Jun 23, 2018 4:09 pm

My apologies on the lateness to this.

Eva Yojimbo wrote:I certainly didn't imagine it. I could take a screen shot and post it here. In any case, you're, like, blowing my mind, man, with all these time-travel paradoxes!

Yeah its pretty crazy to think about. I guess we'll never solve this mystery though.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote: Two favorite moments are when, in a single take, the guy moves from a mid-shot into close-up (1:04:07)—the way his eye looks there is just so striking, as is how it switches to his POV immediately after—and the low-angle shot at 1:05:16 with his boots in the frame as she slowly walks to the background.

Oh man that is such a good sequence, watching it again.

Looks like Hitch sort of breaks the 180 degree rule too after the POV shot too for good effect.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:There may be some American noirs with jazz before Elevator, but if there are I don't know of them and they must be among the more obscure ones.

The only ones I can think of featured jazz performances as explicitly part of the plot anyways, like Detour (Which is very good, probably Edgar G. Ulmer's best film), and a kind of obscure but decent one called Nightmare about a jazz musician that has a dream that he murdered someone that he thinks might actually be a repressed memory (This one has Edward G Robinson in a supporting role too!).

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Mile Davis

Hey thanks for this list, I'll have to dig into it at some point.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I suspect Bresson's love for the Bond might've had as much to do with the fact that, of all the great filmmakers, he may have been the least cinephile—he just didn't watch many movies, and I think only saw the Bond because he was going with someone else. It's possible he was just taken by what they could do visually with the technology at the time (which may not seem like much to us today… or every your average moviegoer back then).

I don't think I knew that about Bresson, not being a cinephile I mean. It almost makes him sound like, I don't know, apathetic Kevin Smith or someone like that (Though he used a donkey in a very different way than Bresson did).

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I guess it's basically just asking if our valuations of films are biased by our prior feelings about the director. I've admittedly wondered about this myself, but I don't think it's really an answerable question. You can't unknow what you know.

When people try and decontextualize art like that, I dunno I just find it to not be that productive. Just seems like a meaningless rabbit hole to wander into.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Sat Jun 23, 2018 4:11 pm

115. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1978, Dir. John Cassavetes) - Yeah I don't really understand the love for this one. I watched the shorter cut of the movie as I heard it was the superior version, but even this felt like it meandered quite a bit at times. Ostensibly the neo-noir trappings are just tools to help the character study along, but man even from this era I can't help but feel something like Mean Streets or Taxi Driver holds up better and has a more interesting characters and performances to boot (Yes I know Scorsese was influenced by Cassavetes and that Mean Streets wouldn't exist without Cassavetes bitching about Scorsese's Boxcar Bertha but the student quickly surpassed the supposed master IMO).

I really just don't understand where the affection Cassavetes has for such a shitty strip club or its idiotic owner is coming from, though I did like Ben Gazarra in his role. Unfortunately, Gazzara's Cosmo is just not that interesting of a character. He just really likes running his strip club with a veneer of respectability (That isn't earned) and its like okay? That was clear after 20 minutes of the movie? By the end I don't feel I've come into any deeper insights on the man.

Perhaps the original 1976 cut is superior, but I got to be honest the people praising this as some forgotten masterpiece confuse me.

116. Mazinger Z: Infinity (2017, Dir. Junji Shimizu) - Not a whole lot to say about this one- it's just a straightforward robots punching each other movie. Its fun for that but not much else- pretty solid CGI mechs though.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Fri Jun 29, 2018 12:51 am

117. Fermat's Room (2007, Dir. Luis Piedrahita & Rodrigo Sopena) - A kind of light film about four mathematicians being invited to a party by the mysterious “Fermat", locked in a room, and forced to solve math riddles and enter their answers into a PDA before the four walls of the room crush them all to death. The main plot revolves around the characters trying to figure out who Fermat is and why he did this, and it isn't that surprising of a reveal tbh. Still, it's a fun movie for what it is, if you enjoy whatever weird genre stuff like this and Cube fall into.

There's a fun nod to Lost in one scene.

118. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1929, Dir. Unknown) - An interesting but brief archival interview with Doyle, who talks about the creation of Sherlock Holmes (And, rather curiously, refers to the Watson character as “Stupid".) and his own belief in the supernatural. He has a way thicker Scottish accent than I expected. I'm not the first to point that this out, but he mentions that losing so many friends in War being a motivator in his spiritual beliefs turned what I previously dismissed as a kooky aspect of the man into something very profoundly sad.

As far as I'm aware it's the only recorded interview with Doyle, which makes it worth taking a look at.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... Wjgt9PzYEM[/youtube]

119. Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough (2018, Dir. Nick Gibbons & Chris 'Casper' Kelly) - A short from the people who made Too Many Cooks. It tries to satirize video games and streaming culture, but instead it just makes the people who made this feel kind of out of touch as a lot of their attempt at imagining video games that people wouldn't to play not only exist in some form are relatively liked (If not sometimes ironically, in the case of stuff like Desert Bus), and the general look streaming feels hollow since it doesn't attack any legit problems with the streaming like people becoming popular for being racist or homophobic or whatever.

The looping nested narrative structure was neat at least, though I'm not sure it was quite thoughtfully applied.

120. The Lost World (1925, Dir. Harry O. Hoyt) - So y'all know that Arthur Conan Doyle made Sherlock Holmes. Some of you may not know of the other character he made- an assholish scientist named Professor Challenger, who wanted to go on an escapade to an island where dinosaurs still roam. I'm not super familiar with his adventures (I read only one of his stories when I was a child) but I remember them being fun.

This silent film adaptation is pretty good. The plot follows Challenger recruiting people for his expedition to an island with dinosaurs, going to the island, encountering dinosaurs and what I think are meant to be prehistoric humans, and attempting to take a brontosaurus to the city. During an transportation accident the brontosaurus breaks free and runs through the city until he eventually escapes into the water.

The plot description doesn't really do the special effects justice- the stop motion dinosaurs may not be high tech today,
but they sure are charming to watch. These effects were pioneered by Willis O'Brien, who eventually went to work on King Kong and its sequel Son of Kong (I wonder how much of the actual plot of Kong is owed to The Lost World too, considering the broad similarities between them). During this time there was a rather bizarre and tragic incident where O'Brien's first wife murdered their two children before attempting suicide herself.

O'Brien's career took a decline after this (His most notable work after Son of Kong probably being Citizen Kane which he did some effects for, and the original Mighty Joe Young), though his legacy continued both through both his protégé Ray Harryhausen and all of the giant monster movies that Kong inspired, such from Godzilla to Jurassic Park and so on.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Sat Jul 07, 2018 8:20 pm

121. Fahrenheit 451 (2018, Dir. Rahmin Bahrani) - I honestly think this gets a bit of a bad rap. Michaels B. Jordan and Shannon are both good in this, the Blade Runner 2049-esque tech-noir aesthetic works (Though this doesn't have the budget that Villenenevue's film did), and while it's not the subtlest film in the world (I don't think that's inherently a bad thing) I like the way the modernized take on the story worked, with references to social media and the turning of news into entertainment.

122. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970, Dir. Elio Petri) - I'm not really sure how to describe this one. Ostenisbly its about a high ranking police official murdering his lover and having to investigate his own crime, while also shutting down left-wing strikes and such on the side (Making it an interesting parallel both to the Fahrenheit 451 adaptation I just mentioned in terms of being about abuses of power, and also La Chinoise's talk about Maoism). The tone here is awfully hard to describe though, somewhere between black comedy and satire. I think it works, but it's a strange little film that I don't see people talk about too often.

Weird Ennio Morricone score too, with a lot BOING BOING BOING noises

It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film too, and that's kind of neat.

123. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1973, Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbiner) - Fassbinder's update on Douglas Sirk's classic melodrama All That Heaven Allows, set in 70's Germany. Here an older white woman falls in love with a younger immigrant Moroccan man (The Ali of the title), with race instead of class differences being emphasized here for the most part. The relationship goes about as well as you'd expect, especially once one realizes the woman and the generations her friends come from and their husbands and fathers and older children would have been a part the Nazi party. The couple does ultimately stay together despite peer pressure, though Ali's future seems uncertain due to health concerns.

While still a melodrama it plays for realism more than Sirk's film does, though it doesn't sacrifice strong visual direction to do that (A mistake many going for realism make these days). I think that makes it worthy follow up to the Sirk, and it also made me realize that Todd Haynes was borrowing from a fair bit here as well when making his own Far From Heaven. Its also sad that a lot of the anti-immigrant comments that you hear from characters in this film also still seem to be common sentiments among today.

I wonder if The Shape of Water will start being included among this lineage too, since it also seems to be a riff on this kind of storyline, and Del Toro talked about being influenced by Sirk too.

124. Mifune: The Last Samurai (2015, Dir. Steven Okazaki) - A documentary about the classic Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, most famous for the samurai films he made with director Akira Kurosawa (Though he did plenty of other kinds of things). Its pretty lean at about 80 minutes in length, and while the documentary is a fun watch I'm not entirely sure who the audience is for since it feels like most of the stories in here are things that people interested enough in Mifune to watch a documentary on the guy were likely to have heard already anyways (Kind of reminds of Werner Herzog's documentary about Klaus Kinski in that aspect).

Still, seeing some of these archival photographs from Mifune's World War II days and other such early stuff was neat. I just wish the whole thing was more in-depth.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Tue Jul 10, 2018 10:01 pm

125. Blow-Up (1966, Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni) - While there's a clear debt to Hitchcock's Rear Window here, I like that this still very much does not seem like a cheap copy. In this film, a fashion photographer accidentally photographs what a appears to be a murder in progress, but because he's an Antonioni protagonist, a fidgety guy drifting through ennui, can't actually muster up the motivation to answer the call to heroism and solve whatever the fuck mystery is going on (Very Evangelion-esque in its own way), instead just lounging about, seeking banal pleasures, shopping at antique stores, and playing with mimes in a very memorable sequence at the film's end (One which, unsurprisingly, Pauline Kael hated and compared to Last Year at Marienbad for some reason). By time he actually cares enough to do something, its too late to actually make a difference- documenting with photography alone did not make a difference.

It's very much an anti-thriller of a movie, though Antonioni gives you enough information to at least theorize about the more-or-less irrelevant murder plot.

126. Blow Out (1981, Dir. Brian De Palma) - This on the other hand does have the classic De Palma problem of feeling like a copy- maybe not a cheap one, because De Palma still does have technical skill that makes him not quite a hack, but he's produced a copy none the less which makes his lack of ambition all the more frustrating. John Travolta, a sound man in Hollywood, has also accidentally recorded a murder but in typical De Palma, he ends up involved in a typical, shallow thriller plot lifting from stuff like Blow-Up but also The Conversation, From Russia With Love of all things, Hitchcock once again in general etc.

I at least liked this more than crap like Dressed to Kill or Femme Fatale in De Palma at least feels like he's trying to synthesize his influences into something unique the way directors better than him are able to, but I don't think it quite works since it still ultimately feels like a thematically hollower, less interesting version of those same influences.

Even the big conclusion where the love interest, in a genuinely awful performance by Nancy Allen, is killed is so weakly motivated by the terrible setup to the film's final act that it ultimately has none of the power of stuff like Vertigo, or something like Chinatown, or even On Her Majesty's Secret Service since the comparison to the Bond franchise is invited by the film itself.

127. The Ritual (2017, Dir. David Bruckner) - Another “Netflix original". A group of five friends is reduced to four when accidentally walking in on a convenience story robbery. The four remaining friends decide to go on a hiking trip to honor their fallen friend's memory…however they get lost in the woods and something seems to be hunting them.

It's a pretty simple premise but one executed competently. The cinematography actually looks decent at times, and the movie even does some visually neat things, such as one character constantly hallucinating the aforementioned convenience store from the film's prologue as a part of the massive forest, which is an admirable attempt at surrealism. This isn't the greatest film ever made or anything but certainly a more admirable effort than other Netlflix horror/thrillers like The Cloverfield Paradox or Circle (Not the Tom Hanks movie).

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Thu Jul 12, 2018 6:46 pm

128. The Greatest Show on Earth (1952, Dir. Cecil B. DeMille) - The Best Picture Oscar Winner of 1952, and the also the first DeMille film I've seen in its entirety. It's…not especially good. DeMille is trying to present the (Recent defunct) Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey's Circus as cinematic spectacle, and its just kind of dull. The Circus itself as an entertainment venue kind of seems like a leftover from the 19th century (Much like cinema itself! Dohohohohoho), and DeMille just can't quite generate whatever excitement he might have felt about it through filmic means, despite having the actors trained to actually perform many of these stunts.

Even some of the non-Circus spectacle bits, to quote a Christian film review podcast of all things, feel like half-measures. The big train crash is done with obvious miniature work, feeling way less amazing to watch Buster Keaton's own crashing of a real train in The General.
There's some character melodrama in here that's…decent, and sort of works but not enough to carry the two-and-a-half-hour runtime. Charlton Heston is okay as the lead, but not charming enough to carry this. The love triangle between him, Betty Hutton's Holly, and Cornel Wilde as “The Great Sebastian" helps spice things up a little bit, though I almost think the triangle aspect should have been cut out entirely and just been a love story between the latter two characters. The most exciting actual Circus bit in the movie involves Sebastian receiving a serious, crippling injury during a performance and the exploration on how it affects his and Holly's relationship is pretty decent, though not decent enough to save everything that surrounds it in the story. And then there's Jimmy Stewart in this film.

What the fuck is Jimmy Stewart's character in this movie? He plays the lovable and charming “Buttons the Clown", a mysterious clown who never removes his makeup. You might think the reason is something cute. Oh you might think that, and you'd be wrong. Hints are dropped until its eventually revealed that “Buttons" is actually a disgraced doctor who euthanized his dying wife, is wanted by the police for “murder", and is merely hiding out with this Circus troupe. The fuckin' climax of the film revolves around Buttons having to reveal his identity in front of the police to save Heston's life, who then, despite now respecting Buttons, have to arrest him anyways. Its implied that whatever his ultimate legal fate may be, it'll result in something preventing him from ever returning. And like immediately after this, the movie tries to pivot from this darkness back into “Wooo the circus! Fun! Cotton candy!". What the hell.

It's very discordant, and I don't think the movie really works. If, for some reason you want a better light-hearted circus comedy I recommend Charlie Chaplin's aptly named The Circus (1928), and if you want a better circus drama I recommend Todd Browning's Freaks (1932).

As far as other Best Picture nominees this year, I liked High Noon and The Quiet Man more. Didn't see Ivanhoe or this version of Moulin Rouge though.

129. From Here to Eternity (1953, Dir. Fred Zinnemann) - The Best Picture Oscar Winner of 1953. The classic image from this film is of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr making out on the beach, so I expected this to be some kind of romance film.

There are romance subplots here, though I wouldn't really call it a romance film. The film is set on a military base in Hawaii, and most of the focus is on Montgomery Clift refusing to join a boxing team among his company, despite his talent in the right, as the last time he fought he blinded a man and put him in a coma for a week. The company harasses him for weeks on end, and Clift just refuses to give in.

There's a lot of stuff I'm leaving out here, but it's a pretty good film overall- top notch classical Hollywood. One thing I found kind of interesting is that the exact setting of the film didn't seem quite established throughout the film, until in the climax Japanese fighters attack and the film makes it clear that we're seeing Pearl Harbor now play out. I'm not exactly sure if audiences in 1953 would have been aware that this is what everything was going to culminate in, but I found it surprising (And it leads to the film's final irony, as the boxing matches that Clift was so adamant in refusing end being canceled and he ends up killed by his fellow comrades in the confusion of the Pearl Harbor attacks).

Shane is the only other BP Nominee from this year that I've seen, and while I liked that film well enough I think I prefer From Here to Eternity overall.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Sat Jul 14, 2018 10:15 pm

130. Weekend (1967, Dir. Jean-Luc Godard) - I've often wondered what Bonnie & Clyde might have looked like if Godard had gotten to direct it, and this film is probably the closest answer to that question we'll ever get. The plot begins with some mumblings about an insurance scam but its totally irrelevant. The film is mostly about a couple trolling the countryside, chaos erupting in their wake. Chaos.

It's really hard to describe the film with any other kind of word. Mayhem. In a sense 60's cinema was all about increasing trends of violence (From Hitchcock's Psycho and The Birds, to Kurosawa's Yojimbo and Sanjuro, to Powell's Peeping Tom, to the James Bond films of Eon Productions, to Leone's Dollars Trilogy and the rise of the Spaghetti Western etc.). It almost feels like Godard is trying to create the culmination of this trend, his film decadently climaxing in an act of cannibalism (Perhaps this is the real “End of cinema" that Godard fears to come). I think this ending, perhaps Godard's Marxist vision of capitalist society finally crumbling away, in a way it also kind of predicts Night of the Living Dead which came out the next year- Romero's film might as well be a sequel in some ways, they'd certainly make an interest double feature in the ways they're similar and the radical ways in which they contrast.

I don't really feel like I'm doing this “rotten movie" justice. Its a hard to really form a coherent though about- the general sense of violence is what stood out to me most this time, though even then I didn't really find a way to bring up something like the traffic jam sequence that in a long take after several minutes reveals an accident. Its definitely a film I need to revisit at some point- that's probably true of most Godards but this is one that I feel more motivated than others to want to look at again.

The Dziga Vertov Group period will begin soon…

EDIT: Another 1968 film that might make an interesting contrast in a double feature with Weekend is 2001, especially if you think of Weekend's fallen society and humanity as what Bowman must transcend.

131. Murder is My Beat (1955, Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer) - A decent but unremarkable B-movie noir from the “King of the B's" himself. A police detective goes to arrest a woman for the murder of her boyfriend, though the detective begins to believe the woman's claim of innocence.

Its got a lot of the standard stylings of detective noirs but isn't a particularly remarkable example of it. The mystery is decent, but Idk, there's not a lot going on here compared to Ulmer's better noir outing in Detour (1945). Its less than 80 minutes long so it moves briskly enough, it just isn't one of the best examples of the “genre" I've seen.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Thu Jul 19, 2018 6:37 pm

132. Top Gun (1986, Dir. Tony Scott) - I honestly had no idea a new movie was in the works before I decided to watch this. Pretty fortuitous timing on my part.

Its pretty shlocky in some aspects (And is definitely 80's as hell) but it's fun for what it is. I was actually surprised by how neat some of those opening shots looked.

It was a huge influence on a ton of mecha anime I've seen too. Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, Macross Plus, and of course Hideaki Anno's GunBuster. I think all of those do this basic story better (Gundam 0083 could be argued, since it has some shaky writing in its last few episodes) but they all do it pretty differently which makes for something interesting comparisons.

133. Love & Pop (1998, Dir. Hideaki Anno) - Anno's live action followup to The End of Evangelion is certainly...something. I think this is the first thing he did that has absolutely no sci-fi elements whatsoever, instead focusing the lives of girls who engage in “compensated dating" with weirdo dudes. I found an old Eva Geeks Forum post from like a decade ago where the user Xard compares the whole thing Vivre sa Vie (Godard's movie about the life of a prostituteand I find that to be pretty apt.

Lots of crazy handheld tracking shots in this movie too- I had noticed some of them in Shin Godzilla, but Anno really goes crazy with them here, making an interesting contrast from how his style is applied in animation despite also using a lot of his classic shots of power lines and such. Pretty sure there's a POV shot from a vagina at one too, which is a bit baffling more than anything.

I was surprised by some of the reference points in this movie too, like to the Chicago Bulls and, of all movies, the short film Captain EO, created for Disney world by the Francis Ford Coppola/George Lucas/Michael Jackson triumvirate.

134. Marty (1955, Dir. Delbert Mann) - The 1955 Best Picture Winner. This one was a pleasant surprise, as it was just a low key romantic drama about Marty, a man in his mid-30's being dissatisfied with his life. He meets Clara a young teacher who is nearly 30 but unmarried herself, and the whole thing is about how this kind of pushes Marty to try and turn his life around, instead of just hanging out with his asshole friends doing nothing.

The whole idea of toxic friendships (Not to mention the Italian-American emphasis in the movie) really reminds me of early Scorsese too, particularly Who's That Knocking At My Door? and Mean Streets (Though the latter especially still has gangster genre elements that makes it different from something like Marty). I don't for sure if this film was an influence of Scorsese, though I wouldn't be surprised.
I was also really surprised with the ending here, considering it was a Hollywood film of the 50's. We don't actually know for sure whether Marty ultimately ends up with Clara, if they get married or not etc., but he makes the effort to reject his toxic friends and actually try to make a connection with her again which is perhaps the more important point.

The only other nominee I've seen from this year was John Ford's Mister Roberts which I liked though found flawed.

135. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987, Dir. Chuck Russell) - I gotta say I was a little disappointed in this one in some aspects. The whole idea of the dream powers using them to fight Freddy is cool. Even the damn theme song is about that…which makes it kind of weird when they're totally unrelated to how Freddy is defeated in the movie. The whole thing with Freddy's mom being a ghostly nun only talking to the main adult doctor of the movie to tell him how to actually defeat Freddy is a bit weird too.

Gotta say I'm a bit sick of these horror movies from this era only seeming to have kids in wheelchairs just to kill them off for shock effect. Texas Chainsaw Massacre and one of the Friday the 13th's (I think Part III? I forget which one specifically) both did that too and it's a bit gross after a certain point.

Interesting cast in this one too, with Lawrence “Larry" Fishburne being a major supporting character and Patricia Arquette as one of the leads. Zsa Zsa Gabor and Dick Cavett of all people have really good cameos too.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Fri Jul 20, 2018 5:09 am

Huh, rumor going around right now seems to be that the last Rebuild of Evangelion movie won't come out until 2020.

It's a bit of a wait but oh well. Plenty of stuff to do and see in the meantime.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Sat Jul 21, 2018 1:13 pm

136. Around the World in 80 Days (1956, Dir. Michael Anderson & John Farrow) - The 1956 Best Picture Winner. I think at first glance its even harder than usual to try and understand just what on Earth the Academy was thinking when they awarded this of all movies. The best explanation I've heard is because the movie is basically a travelogue: yes there are technically characters and a plot (I.e. man makes a wager he can travel around the globe within 80 days) but the main characters are not particularly defined. The secondary character Passepartout (Played as a kind of homage or pastiche to both Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton by famous Mexican actor Cantinflas whom I honestly just don't know about though apparently he was pretty big in his era) puts in the best showing here, as he gets to a lot of comedic relief and even some action scenes.

The actual emphasis here is on the locations themselves that our characters are traveling around- this was filmed on location in multiple countries- England, Spain, India, China, Japan, the United States etc., and these countries are all presented in Technicolor and 70mm film. To a 1956 audience (One I assume would not intentionally seek out the wealth of foreign language films being made around the world at the time) it must have been mind blowing to see so many countries in such detail all within three hours. In a sense it reminds me a lot of early film theory, imagining utopian ways of using the new medium of film to educate the audience of the world in a way not quite possible before…

In 2018 this movie doesn't really have that sense of wonder anymore. Its pretty at times, some funny though it doesn't quite have that same globetrotting appeal any more (Assuming me and the podcast I heard a version of this argument from initially are even correct). Some sequences go on a bit long (Passepartout becomes a matador in one section and it feels like it goes on forever), and the whole thing basically does not work dramatically at all.

The other really notable thing here are the cameos. There are a bunch. Edward R. Murrow introduces the film (Even playing clips from A Trip to the Moon), and some others included Frank Sinatra, Peter Lorre, George Raft, and Marlene Dietrich. Also Buster Keaton.

Keaton is interesting here. For one, he talks in this film! He's also playing a train conductor in the America section, and the whole movie basically turns into a western. Some bits from his movies are even recreated, including the burning scene from The Paleface and the climatic railroad destruction from The General. Even before he actually showed up in the film Keaton was kind of haunting over the movie since Passepartout had already recreated some of his gags from The Balloonatic and One Week earlier in the film (Though the One Week one I didn't actually notice myself).

Shame that despite these fun celebrity spotting game and the varied locations that the movie doesn't really work.
The only other 1956 BP nominee I think I'm familiar with is The King and I which I don't have particularly strong feelings about, though it at least gets mentioned in both the original Twin Peaks AND Twin Peaks: The Return so uh bonus points for that I guess?

Lastly, it's odd to think that Michael Anderson is the guy who made this would go on to direct Logan's Run of all things.

137. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, Dir. David Lean) - The 1957 Best Picture Winner. Yeah I don't know what it is about Lean but between this and Lawrence of Arabia, Lean just does not work for either me or the ghost of Andrew Sarris at all. Well maybe I shouldn't say "at all" because this is still a perfectly decent movie, but just not one I would put at the height of cinema like Lean's fans seem to want. Yes good performances, yes occasionally pretty shots, occasionally interesting ideas that for whatever reason just don't come together for a great filmic experience for me.

With Arabia I remember part of my problem being how fucking theatrical and uncinematic the whole thing was, and while I have similar feelings here (Kwai seems even more thematically surface level than Lawrence was btw) there's at least a solid suspense sequence at the end of Kwai with the destruction of the bridge (Which also seems oddly reminiscent of The General, making this and Around the World in 80 Days a weird pairing. Come to think of it Disney remade The General as The Great Locomotive Chase in this same time period… 20's nostalgia must have been in the air).

Also, I wonder if the image of the wire being pulled up through the sand and river at the film's end was what influenced the power cable buried on the beach in Lost.

I guess Lost has been on my mind again since Gendo did his rewatch.

Looking at other 1957 nominees, 12 Angry Men and Witness for the Prosecution were both nominated and I personally preferred both of those films.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Sun Jul 22, 2018 2:17 am

Hey since I've been posting a lot about Godard lately, I'd be remiss to mention that Mubi is currently streaming two of his rarer films: "The Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company" (1986) and "Oh, Woe is Me" (1993). They'll be available for 22 days and 30 days respectively from the time of this post.

You can get a free one week trial from Mubi, so that's what I'll be doing to watch these. It would be cool if anyone else watches and discusses these with me since it sounds like not a lot of people have seen them. Neither seems to be very long either.

Post by **Gendo** » Sun Jul 22, 2018 5:50 pm

Just replying to say that even though there's little activity; I do read most of these posts. Just bought that version of 80 Days a couple months ago. I'm hoping to get back into watching more movies again soon.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Sun Jul 22, 2018 7:21 pm

Gendo wrote:Just replying to say that even though there's little activity; I do read most of these posts. Just bought that version of 80 Days a couple months ago. I'm hoping to get back into watching more movies again soon.

I appreciate it.

Did you get the three hour version of 80 Days? That's the cut that actually played in theaters- there's a two and a half hour cut floating around too but that that was the cut made for TV broadcast in the 70's I think.

Eva Yojimbo · Post by **Eva Yojimbo** » Mon Jul 23, 2018 4:11 pm

You HAVE been busy! Here's my attempt to catch up:

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote: Two favorite moments are when, in a single take, the guy moves from a mid-shot into close-up (1:04:07)—the way his eye looks there is just so striking, as is how it switches to his POV immediately after—and the low-angle shot at 1:05:16 with his boots in the frame as she slowly walks to the background.
Oh man that is such a good sequence, watching it again.

Looks like Hitch sort of breaks the 180 degree rule too after the POV shot too for good effect.

It's seriously one of my favorite sequences in his entire cinema. The fact that it's happening to a husband and wife after the husband accidentally killed their son makes it all the more potent, IMO.

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:There may be some American noirs with jazz before Elevator, but if there are I don't know of them and they must be among the more obscure ones.
The only ones I can think of featured jazz performances as explicitly part of the plot anyways, like Detour (Which is very good, probably Edgar G. Ulmer's best film), and a kind of obscure but decent one called Nightmare about a jazz musician that has a dream that he murdered someone that he thinks might actually be a repressed memory (This one has Edward G Robinson in a supporting role too!).

Haven't seen either. Makes me think of how many noirs I haven't seen, which is a bunch. I never really went through a full-blown noir phase, but just kinda watched them sporadically over the years.

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I guess it's basically just asking if our valuations of films are biased by our prior feelings about the director. I've admittedly wondered about this myself, but I don't think it's really an answerable question. You can't unknow what you know.
When people try and decontextualize art like that, I dunno I just find it to not be that productive. Just seems like a meaningless rabbit hole to wander into.

I think it can potentially be productive to discuss our various biases, and knowledge/our ability to contextualize is one thing that inevitably biases how we react to art. I don't think it's innately positive or negative, it just is what it is. One reason I've (lately) been hooked on the Lost in Vegas YouTube channel is because it's fun to see two guys with a completely different musical background (mostly hip-hop) react to rock and metal music without knowing much (or anything) about the bands/genres/history. It's just interesting to hear outside perspectives sometimes.

Raxivace wrote:115. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1978, Dir. John Cassavetes)

I kinda agree with you on this one, though I think I may have liked it a bit better than you. I just don't think Cassavetes and genre films mixed. His best stuff is those intimate, personal, character study dramas where his characters are uninhibited by any preoccupations or constraints of plot and can just act and react in the moment. Faces and A Woman Under the Influence are top tier Cassavetes; Chinese Bookie is pretty middling by his standards.

Raxivace wrote:121. Fahrenheit 451 (2018, Dir. Rahmin Bahrani)

I'm kinda interested in this given the book is so highly praised (I haven't read it) and Truffaut's film sucked so much.

Raxivace wrote:123. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1973, Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbiner)

I need to rewatch this as I saw it before I was into Sirk and it was also my first Fassbinder. I didn't care much for it then, but I've come to appreciate the genre and Fassbinder a bit more since then (though as of now I probably prefer his The Merchant of Four Seasons). Guy was inanely prolific given his short life. All That Heaven Allows, Ali, and Far from Heaven would make for an interesting threesome in a film studies class.

Raxivace wrote:124. Mifune: The Last Samurai (2015, Dir. Steven Okazaki) -

I may check this out given how much I love Mifune. Even if it's old stories it's probably been long enough since I've heard them they'd still seem fresh.

Raxivace wrote:125. Blow-Up (1966, Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)

The only thing I don't love about this film is that, compared to Antonioni's other work, it's rather aesthetically drab. L'Avventura, L'Eclisse, Red Desert, The Passenger... really, most of his filmography, are just visually stunning films. The ironic thing is that Blow-Up may be his most visually sophisticated film given how much of the story he's telling (and how much of the themes he's relating) on a purely visual level. But is there even a single memorable shot in the film?

Anyway, my basic take on it is that it's about the subjectivity of truth and value. Common wisdom is that photography captures reality as it is, but the shots he takes ends up requiring interpretation, and by the time that he blows them up several times, they become closer to the abstract art that his friend makes; and abstract art represents nothing, and requires the viewer to use their imagination to make it meaningful. Most of the scenes are playing off this basic idea: one moment everyone is involved in lovemaking, the next moment they're apathetic (there's a similar scene in L'Eclisse); one moment everyone is fighting over the broken guitar as if it's the most valuable thing in the world, but by the time they're outside the club it's worthless. The mimes are a pretty blatant symbol for this whole phenomena because a mime's job is make us imagine real things where in reality there is nothing. So it's kinda the classic Antonioni theme of the anxiety/ennui of finding purpose/meaning/answers in the "desolation of reality" (to use Yeats's phrase) that gives us none.

Raxivace wrote:Blow Out (1981, Dir. Brian De Palma) -

I barely remember this one, but I didn't care for it back then and De Palma has never really impressed me. Everything he does feels like cheap copies to me, despite the apparent technical skill. I just don't think he has anything original or interesting to say and his films mostly just serve as fun technical exercises. The cinematic equivalent of a Sergei Rachmaninoff maybe.

Raxivace wrote:128. The Greatest Show on Earth (1952, Dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

"Not especially good" is being too kind. It sucks, plain and simple. One of the legit candidates for worst Best Picture Winner ever. I may have liked it a bit more than Spotlight... I dunno. Anyway, I think you nail everythign that's wrong with it. Even back in 1952 I find it hard to imagine what the appeal of this was... the spectacle, maybe, but surely there were better spectacles than this long before then? Hell, the silent films of Lang and Griffith's Intolerance look far better now. Ditto on Chaplin's The Circus and Browning's Freaks being infinitely better. High Noon and The Quiet Man shit all over TGSOE

Raxivace wrote:129. From Here to Eternity (1953, Dir. Fred Zinnemann)

Your plot synopsis reminded me I had seen this and I remember quite liking it, but that's about all I remember. I've also seen Shane and I probably prefer it, but Shane was one of my favorites growing up. One of the many westerns my dad introduced me to.

Raxivace wrote:130. Weekend (1967, Dir. Jean-Luc Godard) -

Yes! The one word "Chaos" or "Mayhem" sums this film up perfectly. It's clearly Godard depicting the end of civilization and even narrative film as we know it. Watching Weekend it really became clear to me why Godard took the path he did after, because he clearly felt there was nowhere left to go with an outward-looking narrative cinema. I say "outward-looking" because it occurred to me just how extroverted Godard's 60s films were, and how, when he returned to narrative in the 80s, how introverted most of those films are, despite revolving around many of the same themes.

I always thought Pierrot le fou was Godard's Bonnie & Clyde, but Weekend does have that vibe as well. Very interesting thought about Romero's NotLD being a kind of spiritual sequel. Also rather serendipitous given that I've been watching YouTube play-throughs of Resident Evil lately!

I also don't have many other interesting/coherent thoughts about Weekend. Of all Godard's 60s films, it may be the one that flummoxed me the most, and that's saying something! First time through I felt like I was just along for the ride and just enjoyed the experience. It currently stands close with Pierrot as my second favorite (behind Contempt).

Raxivace wrote:132. Top Gun (1986, Dir. Tony Scott) -

One of my favorite films as a kid. Loved the OST to death, and basically inspired my brief childhood obsession with fighter jets. I even remember playing the (awful, TBH) NES game. I still have nightmares about those midair refueling failures. No idea how it would hold up if I watched it now.

Raxivace wrote:133. Love & Pop (1998, Dir. Hideaki Anno)

It's a good film, but feels very loose and experimental, very Godard-esque, actually. Anno seemed to be fascinated by finding as many different camera setups and angles as possible. Shiki-Jitsu feels like a much more "complete" film in comparison. L&P throws around a lot of ideas, many of which I think are better explored in Kare Kano.

Raxivace wrote:134. Marty (1955, Dir. Delbert Mann) -

This is one BPW I don't believe I've seen, but your review makes me think I should. Speaking of Scorsese influences, have you ever seen Robert Rossen's Body & Soul? A clear influence on Raging Bull and a really good film to boot.

Raxivace wrote:Huh, rumor going around right now seems to be that the last Rebuild of Evangelion movie won't come out until 2020.

It's a bit of a wait but oh well. Plenty of stuff to do and see in the meantime.

I'm not in a hurry, but I wonder what the wait is for?

Raxivace wrote:136. Around the World in 80 Days (1956, Dir. Michael Anderson & John Farrow) -

Pretty sure I also haven't seen this one, and by your review it doesn't seem like I missed much.

Raxivace wrote:137. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, Dir. David Lean)

I'm not sure if I'd put at the pinnacle of cinema, but I certainly loved it. I saw and reviewed it not terribly long ago. Here's what I wrote:

Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean) - 9/10

The first of Lean's five career--ending (and arguably defining) epics is perhaps more a transitional film, not yet
possessing the vast visual and narrative canvasses of those to follow while expanding the vision of his earlier,
small-scaled, character--driven dramas. The film strikes a wonderful balance between the personal and
impersonal, visionary scale and intimate detail.

The heart of the film are the characters and performances, and the parallels and contrasts between them in
the screenplay. Holden's Shears is the brash, pragmatic American, played with an easy cool that belies the
danger of his situation. Alec Guinness gives one of his best performances (and that's saying something) as the
stiff--upper--lipped Lieutenant Nicholson, who evolves from the defiant force against the dementedly driven
Colonel Saito over having his officers doing manual labor on the bridge, to the proud engineer who oversees
the construction of the bridge, to a rather wistful soldier reflecting on the emptiness of his life and service.
Hayakawa's Saito is, bizarrely, one of the film's most sympathetic characters as we realize he's driven out of
fear for his own life.

Perhaps what's most remarkable about the film is how easily it transitions between film genres. It starts as an
almost archetypal POW film with Nicholson pitted against Saito, order against chaos, pride against
pragmatism. After Holden's Shears narrowly escapes, the film intercuts between the building of the bridge and
Holden's company's plans to destroy it. The finale of the film, which stretches for roughly the final 45 minutes,
is some of the best suspense filmmaking I've ever seen, to the point I imagine Hitchcock would've proud.
Even as the film splits the screenplay continues to find meaningful connections between the sections, between
the characters that insist on doing things according to the law with order and dignity, and those who think such
notions are ludicrous in war, where the only paradigm is to survive with one's humanity intact.

If there's one flaw it's in the cinematography. Though Technicolor was great for musicals and lush melodrama,
its colorful richness wasn't well-suited to the gritty world of war, and the entire film has something of a sickly,
jaundiced look. One could also complain of excessive length, and at 160-minutes I'm not sure if that complaint
is without merit, but I do think the film accumulates enough detail and is careful enough building its
characters, narrative, and suspect to argue that does (if barely) warrant it.

If not perfect, Kwai is still a deserving classic, and one that, despite its length, will repay rewatches and
analysis.

It's almost mind-boggling to me you think Arabia is uncinematic of all things. I haven't seen it in over a decade and the visual aesthetics have still stuck with me. It's definitely theatrical in parts as well, but uncinematic it ain't! I enjoyed both 12AM and WftP, but I'll take Kwai over both.

Raxivace wrote:Hey since I've been posting a lot about Godard lately, I'd be remiss to mention that Mubi is currently streaming two of his rarer films: "The Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company" (1986) and "Oh, Woe is Me" (1993). They'll be available for 22 days and 30 days respectively from the time of this post.

You can get a free one week trial from Mubi, so that's what I'll be doing to watch these. It would be cool if anyone else watches and discusses these with me since it sounds like not a lot of people have seen them. Neither seems to be very long either.

I haven't even heard of the former, but Helas pour moi (Oh, Woe is Me) is excellent. Typical of post-80s Godard in how beautiful, poetic, oneiric, dense, and melancholic it is. I know I wrote a review of it, though I'm sure I've forgotten most of the details by now, I'd be glad to discuss it as much as possible.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Mon Jul 23, 2018 6:26 pm

Eva Yojimbo wrote:You HAVE been busy! Here's my attempt to catch up:

Not much else to do here these days but catch up on movies, and I have plenty of those to watch...

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:The fact that it's happening to a husband and wife after the husband accidentally killed their son makes it all the more potent, IMO.

Yeah its so damn good.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Haven't seen either. Makes me think of how many noirs I haven't seen, which is a bunch. I never really went through a full-blown noir phase, but just kinda watched them sporadically over the years.

You know I'm kind of surprised to hear this, considering how many noirs (Particularly 40's noirs) are trying to emphasize tone and mood and such over their convoluted plots (And arguably that's just part of said tone and mood too) and that's something I know you tend to value.

Detour is one I highly recommend btw. It's really grown on me over time. I remember DeRider really liked it a lot too.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I kinda agree with you on this one, though I think I may have liked it a bit better than you. I just don't think Cassavetes and genre films mixed. His best stuff is those intimate, personal, character study dramas where his characters are uninhibited by any preoccupations or constraints of plot and can just act and react in the moment. Faces and A Woman Under the Influence are top tier Cassavetes; Chinese Bookie is pretty middling by his standards.

I actually have Faces on DVD and will get to it eventually here. I know Woman Under the Influence is really respected to- I think I still have it downloaded.

If genre constraints are the problem then that gives me hope for these other films of Cassevetes...

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I'm kinda interested in this given the book is so highly praised (I haven't read it) and Truffaut's film sucked so much.

Ah I've been been curious about the Truffaut one, shame to hear bad things. I haven't read the book either because reading is for nerds, but I know a lot of fans of the book hated the HBO movie FWIW.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I need to rewatch this as I saw it before I was into Sirk and it was also my first Fassbinder. I didn't care much for it then, but I've come to appreciate the genre and Fassbinder a bit more since then (though as of now I probably prefer his The Merchant of Four Seasons). Guy was inanely prolific given his short life. All That Heaven Allows, Ali, and Far from Heaven would make for an interesting threesome in a film studies class.

Yeah we did ATHA and FFH when I was in school and those two were a fun pair.

I really have to get to more Fassbiner at some point...

That reminds me, do you think breadth or depth is more important in film watching? It's something I've been thinking about lately- like yeah these deep dives into directors with huge filmographies like Hitchcock or Godard are fun, but sometimes I wonder if its really worth the opportunity cost of sampling other directors/film movements.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:The only thing I don't love about this film is that, compared to Antonioni's other work, it's rather aesthetically drab. L'Avventura, L'Eclisse, Red Desert, The Passenger... really, most of his filmography, are just visually stunning films. The ironic thing is that Blow-Up may be his most visually sophisticated film given how much of the story he's telling (and how much of the themes he's relating) on a purely visual level. But is there even a single memorable shot in the film?

Interesting criticism that I might agree with. Even when I think of striking parts of the film like the game with the mimes at the end that's arguably more about the content of the scene than any particular shot being memorable.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Anyway, my basic take on it is that it's about the subjectivity of truth and value. Common wisdom is that photography captures reality as it is, but the shots he takes ends up requiring interpretation, and by the time that he blows them up several times, they become closer to the abstract art that his friend makes; and abstract art represents nothing, and requires the viewer to use their imagination to make it meaningful. Most of the scenes are playing off this basic idea: one moment everyone is involved in lovemaking, the next moment they're apathetic (there's a similar scene in L'Eclisse); one moment everyone is fighting over the broken guitar as if it's the most valuable thing in the world, but by the time they're outside the club it's worthless. The mimes are a pretty blatant symbol for this whole phenomena because a mime's job is make us imagine real things where in reality there is nothing. So it's kinda the classic Antonioni theme of the anxiety/ennui of finding purpose/meaning/answers in the "desolation of reality" (to use Yeats's phrase) that gives us none.

Oh man I can't believe I forgot to mention the guitar. 100% agree with this take.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I barely remember this one, but I didn't care for it back then and De Palma has never really impressed me. Everything he does feels like cheap copies to me, despite the apparent technical skill. I just don't think he has anything original or interesting to say and his films mostly just serve as fun technical exercises. The cinematic equivalent of a Sergei Rachmaninoff maybe.

I don't know who this Russian man you've mentioned is, but I absolutely agree with the rest of this. That's consistently an issue I keep having with De Palma and I really, really do not understand where these people that cite him as one of the best are coming from.

Like ffs I've seen more than one person try and cite Femme Fatale as one of the best films of 2000-2009. Femme fuckin' Fatale. Mulholland Dr. came out the year before and did the exact same thing a thousand times better.

The one ripoff of De Palma's I don't think I mind really is how he copied THAT sequence from Battleship Potemkin in The Untouchables. I saw Untouchables first so it made seeing the baby actually die in Potemkin way more shocking.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:"Not especially good" is being too kind.

I guess. Greatest Show on Earth is by no means an impressive film, but its also one that just doesn't offend me at all, and its hard for me personally to get mad at something that I doesn't actually offend me in some fashion (even if its mediocrity at best). There can be different reasons for this- like Funny Games offends me because how wrongheaded I think the entire project was, and someone like De Palma offends me in how he seems like he's wasting his raw talent on creating "cheap copies".

When push comes to shove I'd probably have to admit I think something like Funny Games (Just to use a random example) or Blow Out or whatever is a better film than Greatest Show on Earth is, but Idk I just didn't have that same kind of reaction to it.

GSOE at least has the bizarre shit with Jimmy Stewart in the movie that's kind of interesting.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:It sucks, plain and simple. One of the legit candidates for worst Best Picture Winner ever. I may have liked it a bit more than Spotlight... I dunno. Anyway, I think you nail everythign that's wrong with it. Even back in 1952 I find it hard to imagine what the appeal of this was... the spectacle, maybe, but surely there were better spectacles than this long before then? Hell, the silent films of Lang and Griffith's Intolerance look far better now. Ditto on Chaplin's The Circus and Browning's Freaks being infinitely better. High Noon and The Quiet Man shit all over TGSOE

Yeah its probably toward the bottom for me too. I dunno if I liked it more than Spotlight- I think I did because I feel like Spotlight's obvious issues matter more since its about a subject infinitely more important than the circus...

Man we sure talk about fuckin' Spotlight a lot for two guys that didn't like it lol.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Yes! The one word "Chaos" or "Mayhem" sums this film up perfectly. It's clearly Godard depicting the end of civilization and even narrative film as we know it. Watching Weekend it really became clear to me why Godard took the path he did after, because he clearly felt there was nowhere left to go with an outward-looking narrative cinema. I say "outward-looking" because it occurred to me just how extroverted Godard's 60s films were, and how, when he returned to narrative in the 80s, how introverted most of those films are, despite revolving around many of the same themes.

The "introverted" comment here interests me since I've now watched Rise and Fall of a Small Film company and yeah it does feel different to me despite returning to some of the ground that Contempt covered. I'll try and elaborate when I post on the movie.

I always thought Pierrot le fou was Godard's Bonnie & Clyde, but Weekend does have that vibe as well.

I need to rewatch Pierrot le Fou. I wasn't super into it when I saw it a few years ago but I think I'd get way more out of it now with more Godard experience under my belt now.

Very interesting thought about Romero's NotLD being a kind of spiritual sequel. Also rather serendipitous given that I've been watching YouTube play-throughs of Resident Evil lately!

Oh man I love me some Resident Evil. The remake of RE1 is one of the best games ever IMO, and I'm very excited for the upcoming remake of RE2 to the point that I made a topic about it that only maz read. Even the PSX version of RE2 still holds up pretty well today IMO.

If you want any opinions on RE games from me just ask. I've played nearly all of them except Gaiden and the two Outbreak games.

I also don't have many other interesting/coherent thoughts about Weekend. Of all Godard's 60s films, it may be the one that flummoxed me the most, and that's saying something! First time through I felt like I was just along for the ride and just enjoyed the experience. It currently stands close with Pierrot as my second favorite (behind Contempt).

Yeah that's kind of how I was.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:One of my favorite films as a kid. Loved the OST to death, and basically inspired my brief childhood obsession with fighter jets. I even remember playing the (awful, TBH) NES game. I still have nightmares about those midair refueling failures. No idea how it would hold up if I watched it now.

I had a second-hand NES as a kid and I think I even owned that Top Gun game. I didn't work very well though and I'm not sure I ever really played much of Top Gun.

I remember the Angry Video Game Nerd reviewed it though.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:It's a good film, but feels very loose and experimental, very Godard-esque, actually. Anno seemed to be fascinated by finding as many different camera setups and angles as possible. Shiki-Jitsu feels like a much more "complete" film in comparison. L&P throws around a lot of ideas, many of which I think are better explored in Kare Kano.

I actually started Kare Kano the other day, though I'm only a few episodes in. It seems very cute and I'm enjoying it a lot, though I find the comparison to L&P interesting since despite coming out the same year and having plenty of Anno-isms they feel very different to me. I'll be checking out Shiki Jitsu afterwards.

Raxivace wrote:This is one BPW I don't believe I've seen, but your review makes me think I should. Speaking of Scorsese influences, have you ever seen Robert Rossen's Body & Soul? A clear influence on Raging Bull and a really good film to boot.

Yeah let me know what you think if you ever see it. TBH I wonder if I'm not being "too kind" to that one too since its smaller and more intimate than like Greatest Show on Earth is, though second guessing myself is something of a bad habit I have. I did like it though.

Never did see Body & Soul, I'll make a note to get to it eventually.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I'm not in a hurry, but I wonder what the wait is for?

Well we know that Anno reportedly got depressed again after 3.0 was finished, then Shin Godzilla happened which "reinvigorated" him. Even with all in mind though I'm not sure what's been going on with this last Rebuild. I'm not really bothered though since I'll probably be spending at least several more years after the movie comes out coming to terms with whatever it is and the Rebuild project as a whole.

kuribo made a joke to me the other day that since Funimation will probably take forever to get it on blu-ray, you probably won't see it until like 2025 lol.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Pretty sure I also haven't seen this one, and by your review it doesn't seem like I missed much.

Yeah its one I probably only would have watched to finish the BP conquest. I liked seeing old Buster though.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:It's almost mind-boggling to me you think Arabia is uncinematic of all things. I haven't seen it in over a decade and the visual aesthetics have still stuck with me. It's definitely theatrical in parts as well, but uncinematic it ain't! I enjoyed both 12AM and WftP, but I'll take Kwai over both.

Kwai and Larry are something we'll just have to agree to disagree on. Its possible that a rewatch of Larry will change my mind, but man its hard to convince myself to revist a 4 hour film I didn't like very much the first time.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I haven't even heard of the former, but Helas pour moi (Oh, Woe is Me) is excellent. Typical of post-80s Godard in how beautiful, poetic, oneiric, dense, and melancholic it is. I know I wrote a review of it, though I'm sure I've forgotten most of the details by now, I'd be glad to discuss it as much as possible.

Cool, I'll be watching Woe here soon.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Mon Jul 23, 2018 6:34 pm

BTW one last thing I want to add is that for years I've heard people say that the high school romcom sequence in EoTV was meant ironically or something. I never really agreed with that and I especially don't agree with it now since one of the first things Anno did after Evangelion was...a high scool romcom in the form of Kare Kano (This also means there's a pretty straight throughline from GunBuster to Nadia to NGE to Kare Kano. Nadia also features a ship named "Exelion" like in GunBuster and Nadia also ends with sci-fi concepts like "Adam" that NGE of course reuses).

Maybe Kare Kano goes to fucked up places later on though Idk. I'm still pretty early into it.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Mon Jul 23, 2018 7:30 pm

138. Insiang (1976, Dir. Lino Brocka) - The first film from the Philippines to ever be screened at Cannes, and also the first film in the second World Cinema Project boxset. It's a rape-revenge drama (Kind of?) set in the slums (The setting itself a form of social criticism, as the dictatorship running the country at the time was very much trying to hide these parts of life in the country).

The story revolves around Insiang, her mother Tonya, and Tonya's younger boyfriend Dado. Tonya is kind of a terrible mother and is generally shitty to Insiang. Dado is also kind of an asshole, terrorizing Insiang's boyfriend. Dado rapes Insiang (Tonya initially sides with Insiang though buys Dado's fake explanation about getting seduced by Insiang and then sides with him), and Insiang tries to run away with her boyfriend who leaves her. Where the movie gets weird is when Insiang goes back home and…seems to seduce Dado gets her to attack the boyfriend. She then…kind of manipulates the mother into killing Dado, who goes to prison for murder of course. I think it's a little ambiguous what Insiang actually intended (It kind of seems to me like Insiang hated her mother more than her actual rapist), and I'm not really sure what I make of the film overall.

139. The Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company (1986, Dir. Jean-Luc Godard) - In some ways this is Godard returning to ground he covered in Contempt in that it's a film about, as the title suggests, filmmaking. Apparently Godard had been hired to do a TV movie adaptation of some crime novel and instead did a TV movie about a TV movie crew failing to make a TV movie- seems (p)reminiscent of Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation.

Maybe it's the video format getting my nostalgia working, but this film seems…warmer, more intimate than most Godard movies do. While there are clearly some of Godard's stylistic touches (Some perhaps random freeze framing and audio desyncing (That I think wasn't a fault of streaming the film anyways through Mubi), he's also working pretty strongly within a narrative filmmaking mode, even if what his narrative contains is characters often talking about film history, recent events, as well as narrative concerns about funding, casting etc.

Also this film has Jean-Pierre Léaud playing the character of Gaspard Bazin (No doubt a nod to Andre Bazin), and the just barely repressed mania he brings to the role is an absolute delight to watch and might be straight up my favorite performance from him so far.

It's still a Godard ass movie and may not be completely accessible, and while I again I feel I'm not doing justice to the movie its one worth taking a look at for people interested in his work.

140. A Quiet Place (2018, Dir. John Krasinski) - I'm not familiar with The Office, so I don't really know Krasinski from that. Apparently, he was a writer on Gus Van Sant's Promised Land of all things, which while not a great film or a great script would not have given me high hopes for this film. Also, this film was produced by Michael Bay who even as a producer doesn't have the greatest of track records (Friday the 13th remake, anyone?).

A Quiet Place is pretty good. Strange, very strong monsters with extremely sensitive hearing have taken over at least part of a town (We're never exactly sure if this is a global phenomenon or not). We don't know where they came from or why. It doesn't matter. They're hear, and if you make too much noise they find you and kill. It's a simple but great premise and allows Krasinski to easily generate tension from things as simple as a child dropping their toy or stepping on a rusty nail and trying not to scream in pain.

We spend most of the movie following a family of four (There were five of them, but well…monsters), and their attempt at living their day to day lives without making much noise. They communicate primarily with sign language. Quickly the audience sees the wife is pregnant, and I defy any audience member not to have their mind running wild from the implications that this brings in this setting, and the movie does go on to explore it.

The movie is pretty good about letting audience either figuring things out (Like I don't think they ever explicitly explain that the red lights around the farmhouse are meant to be a warning, but its easy enough to get from context of things are playing out.) or understand the stakes of any given action. Sometimes it can feel like you're getting too ahead of the movie though: the biggest example being such an obvious video game-y way to defeat the monsters that I can't help but wonder why our characters are only just figuring it out at the end of the movie after well over a year has passed in the world of the story.

Formally, the film's big strengths come from how heightened and important it makes diegetic sounds- too loud of a sound yells out death, after all. I wish visually the movie was this strong though, it doesn't ever quite seem to be as good as it is aurally.

It's a good movie with a great concept at the end of the day. Apparently A Quiet Place 2 is in production- I'm excited to see how it shakes out.

141 Bill Maher: Live From Oklahoma (2018, Dir. Beth McCarthy-Miller) - Meh.

Eva Yojimbo · Post by **Eva Yojimbo** » Tue Jul 24, 2018 1:56 pm

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Haven't seen either. Makes me think of how many noirs I haven't seen, which is a bunch. I never really went through a full-blown noir phase, but just kinda watched them sporadically over the years.
You know I'm kind of surprised to hear this, considering how many noirs (Particularly 40's noirs) are trying to emphasize tone and mood and such over their convoluted plots (And arguably that's just part of said tone and mood too) and that's something I know you tend to value.

Detour is one I highly recommend btw. It's really grown on me over time. I remember DeRider really liked it a lot too.

Will definitely make it a point to check Detour out. I definitely dig the tone/mood of noirs, but the thing is that it's a very singular tone that can be monotonous if you watch too many in a row. Same reason I space out Ozu films (or even Bergman to a lesser extent). ).

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I kinda agree with you on this one, though I think I may have liked it a bit better than you. I just don't think Cassavetes and genre films mixed. His best stuff is those intimate, personal, character study dramas where his characters are uninhibited by any preoccupations or constraints of plot and can just act and react in the moment. Faces and A Woman Under the Influence are top tier Cassavetes; Chinese Bookie is pretty middling by his standards.
I actually have Faces on DVD and will get to it eventually here. I know Woman Under the Influence is really respected to- I think I still have it downloaded.

If genre constraints are the problem then that gives me hope for these other films of Cassevetes...

Woman Under the Influence is stunning just for the acting. Gena Rowlands gives one of my top 5 favorite female performances ever, and it's truly devastating in some parts. As intense as film gets. Opening Night is another interesting one with Rowlands; kinda a Black Swan/Perfect Blue predecessor. It's more genre oriented than Faces or Woman..., but I think it works a bit better there than in Bookie. One of those films I'd say is more interesting than a complete success, though.

Raxivace wrote:I really have to get to more Fassbiner at some point...

That reminds me, do you think breadth or depth is more important in film watching? It's something I've been thinking about lately- like yeah these deep dives into directors with huge filmographies like Hitchcock or Godard are fun, but sometimes I wonder if its really worth the opportunity cost of sampling other directors/film movements.

Not only was Fassbinder prolific but he seemed to be extremely versatile in terms of content and style. I don't think I've seen two of his that are all that alike. TBH, I didn't care much for any of his earlier noir-inspired films; they had a definite Melvillean "cool" vibe to them, which I'm not a big fan of to begin with, but Melville did it better.

maz asked me something similar in our music thread. I'm a fan of the "know something about everything and everything about something" approach, which in art means be as broad as possible, and be choosy about your deep dives. Breadth is necessary to give you the experience needed to appreciate a variety of works, and often times whether or not you like something just comes down to how familiar you are with it, and breadth helps make all kinds of things more familiar. Alternatively, some artists absolutely warrant exploring almost everything they did: Hitchcock, Godard, Kurosawa, Bergman, etc., but I think with many it's fine to mostly just see the major works and then maybe check out some of the others on the off chance you'll find a diamond in the rough. There is something special in finding those unsung films that you think stand up with the established classics. I know I really would've missed out had I never gotten around to exploring post-80s Godard, eg.

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:The only thing I don't love about this film is that, compared to Antonioni's other work, it's rather aesthetically drab. L'Avventura, L'Eclisse, Red Desert, The Passenger... really, most of his filmography, are just visually stunning films. The ironic thing is that Blow-Up may be his most visually sophisticated film given how much of the story he's telling (and how much of the themes he's relating) on a purely visual level. But is there even a single memorable shot in the film?
Interesting criticism that I might agree with. Even when I think of striking parts of the film like the game with the mimes at the end that's arguably more about the content of the scene than any particular shot being memorable.

Indeed, and it's one reason I prefer Red Desert to it, because even though Red Desert may not be as intellectually provocative (though it's far from shallow), it's vastly aesthetically superior. Same with L'Avventura and L'Eclisse. Passenger is close. I really need to give it a rewatch, but it's definitely haunted me since I first saw it. It desperately needs a blu-ray release though.

Hmmm, just checked: Ask and I shall receive: http://www.powerhousefilms.co.uk/produc ... ssenger-le

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I barely remember this one, but I didn't care for it back then and De Palma has never really impressed me. Everything he does feels like cheap copies to me, despite the apparent technical skill. I just don't think he has anything original or interesting to say and his films mostly just serve as fun technical exercises. The cinematic equivalent of a Sergei Rachmaninoff maybe.
I don't know who this Russian man you've mentioned is, but I absolutely agree with the rest of this. That's consistently an issue I keep having with De Palma and I really, really do not understand where these people that cite him as one of the best are coming from.

Like ffs I've seen more than one person try and cite Femme Fatale as one of the best films of 2000-2009. Femme fuckin' Fatale. Mulholland Dr. came out the year before and did the exact same thing a thousand times better.

The one ripoff of De Palma's I don't think I mind really is how he copied THAT sequence from Battleship Potemkin in The Untouchables. I saw Untouchables first so it made seeing the baby actually die in Potemkin way more shocking.

Even if you don't recognize the name, you've almost certainly heard this from him:

It's been in a crapload of movies/TV/anime, and the verse of Eric Carmen's All By Myself is based on it.

Anyway, I think part of De Palma's appeal lies in his campiness. He really played up the perversity of his subject matter even more than Hitch did without bothering with all of the thematic substance behind it, so in a sense I'm guessing many find him a bit more "fun" than many of the works/directors he's imitating. Untouchables is a really solid film, but also rather atypical for De Palma. I also think the original Mission: Impossible is quite good and shows off his technical skills without all of the campy imitation cheese.

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:"Not especially good" is being too kind.
I guess. Greatest Show on Earth is by no means an impressive film, but its also one that just doesn't offend me at all, and its hard for me personally to get mad at something that I doesn't actually offend me in some fashion (even if its mediocrity at best). There can be different reasons for this- like Funny Games offends me because how wrongheaded I think the entire project was, and someone like De Palma offends me in how he seems like he's wasting his raw talent on creating "cheap copies".

When push comes to shove I'd probably have to admit I think something like Funny Games (Just to use a random example) or Blow Out or whatever is a better film than Greatest Show on Earth is, but Idk I just didn't have that same kind of reaction to it.

GSOE at least has the bizarre shit with Jimmy Stewart in the movie that's kind of interesting.

I get what you're saying. Maybe it goes back to what I said about the difference between interesting failures and films that are just blandly bad. Stuff like GSOE is just blandly bad, while stuff like Funny Games or Blow Out are at least interesting despite their failures. At least with the latter I can see why some people would like/love them, but with stuff like GSOE I just don't get the appeal even for its time.

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Yes! The one word "Chaos" or "Mayhem" sums this film up perfectly. It's clearly Godard depicting the end of civilization and even narrative film as we know it. Watching Weekend it really became clear to me why Godard took the path he did after, because he clearly felt there was nowhere left to go with an outward-looking narrative cinema. I say "outward-looking" because it occurred to me just how extroverted Godard's 60s films were, and how, when he returned to narrative in the 80s, how introverted most of those films are, despite revolving around many of the same themes.
The "introverted" comment here interests me since I've now watched Rise and Fall of a Small Film company and yeah it does feel different to me despite returning to some of the ground that Contempt covered. I'll try and elaborate when I post on the movie.

I think I said back when I was reviewing several post-80s Godard that he progressed from an avant-garde modern novelist, to a non-fiction propagandist, to a highly personalized poet. Those late works just feel so insular and dreamlike. What's really interesting about them is that it's almost like he took the essay film genre and found a way to make it into a kind of internalized, poetic exploration. I mean, the idea of an essay is that you begin with a thesis or theme or idea you want to express, but late Godard seems more contemplative than preachy, which is a pretty radical change from his late-60s/70s work where he seemed to be preaching the gospel of Marx and... whatever else he was into. By the 80s he seems to have become sobered, somber, and rather disillusioned... and also perversely funny at times.

Raxivace wrote:
I always thought Pierrot le fou was Godard's Bonnie & Clyde, but Weekend does have that vibe as well.
I need to rewatch Pierrot le Fou. I wasn't super into it when I saw it a few years ago but I think I'd get way more out of it now with more Godard experience under my belt now.

Definitely. It's a really fun film and one of Godard's most visually vibrant and striking.

Raxivace wrote:
Very interesting thought about Romero's NotLD being a kind of spiritual sequel. Also rather serendipitous given that I've been watching YouTube play-throughs of Resident Evil lately!
Oh man I love me some Resident Evil. The remake of RE1 is one of the best games ever IMO, and I'm very excited for the upcoming remake of RE2 to the point that I made a topic about it that only maz read. Even the PSX version of RE2 still holds up pretty well today IMO.

If you want any opinions on RE games from me just ask. I've played nearly all of them except Gaiden and the two Outbreak games.

I was a big RE fan back in the day too. Played 1-3 and Veronica. I'm trying to remember how I got on this kick. I think I was marathoning Conan O'Brien's Clueless Gamer vids on YouTube and stumbled across a trailor for a RE2 remake. Intrigued, I checked it out and discovered they remade the first game (and a "0" Prequel I'd never played). I watched a complete walkthrough on YouTube and, man, it was just visually amazing. More cinematic than 98% of the horror films I've ever seen. I could just bathe in that atmosphere. It was so good I watched it twice with both Jill and Chris walkthroughs. Watched the 0 walkthrough too and it was also visually excellent, but not quite as good as 1. Then I watched 2 and 3 just for the nostalgia factor and I just started on Veronica. I'm watching these while listening to music, btw, so I am missing out on the sound/music.

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:One of my favorite films as a kid. Loved the OST to death, and basically inspired my brief childhood obsession with fighter jets. I even remember playing the (awful, TBH) NES game. I still have nightmares about those midair refueling failures. No idea how it would hold up if I watched it now.
I had a second-hand NES as a kid and I think I even owned that Top Gun game. I didn't work very well though and I'm not sure I ever really played much of Top Gun.

I remember the Angry Video Game Nerd reviewed it though.

Haha, yep, he pretty much nailed it.

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:It's a good film, but feels very loose and experimental, very Godard-esque, actually. Anno seemed to be fascinated by finding as many different camera setups and angles as possible. Shiki-Jitsu feels like a much more "complete" film in comparison. L&P throws around a lot of ideas, many of which I think are better explored in Kare Kano.
I actually started Kare Kano the other day, though I'm only a few episodes in. It seems very cute and I'm enjoying it a lot, though I find the comparison to L&P interesting since despite coming out the same year and having plenty of Anno-isms they feel very different to me. I'll be checking out Shiki Jitsu afterwards.

They are very different stylistically and in the content, but there's significant thematic overlap. Shiki-Jitsu is the shit. Very solid 9/10 for me.

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I'm not in a hurry, but I wonder what the wait is for?
kuribo made a joke to me the other day that since Funimation will probably take forever to get it on blu-ray, you probably won't see it until like 2025 lol.

Yikes, that's a long wait even for me!

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:It's almost mind-boggling to me you think Arabia is uncinematic of all things. I haven't seen it in over a decade and the visual aesthetics have still stuck with me. It's definitely theatrical in parts as well, but uncinematic it ain't! I enjoyed both 12AM and WftP, but I'll take Kwai over both.
Kwai and Larry are something we'll just have to agree to disagree on. Its possible that a rewatch of Larry will change my mind, but man its hard to convince myself to revist a 4 hour film I didn't like very much the first time.

There are a few films where I think a big screen--preferably a theater--is mandatory to really get the whole experience: 2001:ASO is one, LOA is another. I'd love to see either in 70mm.

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I haven't even heard of the former, but Helas pour moi (Oh, Woe is Me) is excellent. Typical of post-80s Godard in how beautiful, poetic, oneiric, dense, and melancholic it is. I know I wrote a review of it, though I'm sure I've forgotten most of the details by now, I'd be glad to discuss it as much as possible.
Cool, I'll be watching Woe here soon.

So I don't have to hunt later, here's the review I wrote:

Hélas pour moi (Jean-Luc Godard) - 8.5/10

Like Hail Mary before it, Helas pour moi explores the lost contact between the divine and man, and man's
longing for that connection. Here, Godard's context is the myth of Alcmene and Amphitryon, in which the
former was impregnated by Zeus in the form of the latter, her husband.

As in Godard's other literary inspirations, this context is so opaquely submerged you'd likely never notice it
without reading a plot synopsis beforehand. Rather, the context—if not the entire narrative—is like a thin layer
of ice upon which Godard's ephemeral images and meditative language skate on as elegantly as dancers.
When plot emerges, it does so slowly, briefly, and obliquely; here revolving around Simon Donnadieu (Gerard
Depardieu), his wife, Rachel, and a reporter, Abraham Klimt, investigating the supposedly divine event.

Godard started his career like an anarchic novelist, developed into a polemical essayist, but has seemingly
ended as a lyrical poet. These late films, of which Helas is thoroughly representative, are less about
highlighting meaning and more about casting shadows over the attempts at illumination itself, evoking the
profound sense of yearning for that lost meaning, and making these films as allusive and elusive as the best
poetry is. There are moments in Helas that are ineffably beautiful, so much so that it makes most all other
cinema seem pedestrian by comparison.

This is especially evident in a rapturous series that begins around the 1--hour mark. It starts by paring the film
to a confrontation between Rachel and Simon, or the “god" as Simon, as Rachel questions why she was
chosen. The scene illustrates perhaps the film's central theme, the attempt at seeing the invisible. The theme
is echoed in Godard's formal strategies, including rendering out--of--focus images into which characters and
objects emerge, or framing scenes in darkness that are slowly, partially lit. The confrontation is followed by a
montage that includes facts of how Jan Oort discovered that most of the universe is made up of dark
matter, and a reading of Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night by a man casting a long
shadow through a doorway. It closes with among the most poetic literary moments in Godard's cinema, if not
all cinema, and though it seems a crime to separate Godard's literary poetry from his visual poetry, I'll close
this review by quoting it in full:

“History is not made except in its telling. But in revealing it, we lay bare our dreams. How dare we reveal our
dreams to the light? Each of us carries within us invisible dreams. Music carries us all to this ray of light…
emerging through the curtains while the orchestra tunes its violins. And so our hands slip and separate. Our
bodies touch hesitantly. Each avoids waking the other from his or her dream to push them back into darkness."

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Tue Jul 24, 2018 6:33 pm

Eva Yojimbo wrote:maz asked me something similar in our music thread. I'm a fan of the "know something about everything and everything about something" approach, which in art means be as broad as possible, and be choosy about your deep dives. Breadth is necessary to give you the experience needed to appreciate a variety of works, and often times whether or not you like something just comes down to how familiar you are with it, and breadth helps make all kinds of things more familiar. Alternatively, some artists absolutely warrant exploring almost everything they did: Hitchcock, Godard, Kurosawa, Bergman, etc., but I think with many it's fine to mostly just see the major works and then maybe check out some of the others on the off chance you'll find a diamond in the rough. There is something special in finding those unsung films that you think stand up with the established classics. I know I really would've missed out had I never gotten around to exploring post-80s Godard, eg.

Hmm, I think you're right here and I find this reassuring. There's more and more stuff I find I want to watch like every day it feels like, so sometimes it can be discouraging when you're stuck in like Jamaica Inn land or something.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Even if you don't recognize the name, you've almost certainly heard this from him:

Gotta be honest, it doesn't immediately trigger my memory.

From that entire list on Wikipedia, Grand Hotel and Muv-Luv Alternative of all things are the only wroks I've even seen/played (And I'd be genuinely shocked if you've even heard of the latter).

Anyway, I think part of De Palma's appeal lies in his campiness. He really played up the perversity of his subject matter even more than Hitch did without bothering with all of the thematic substance behind it, so in a sense I'm guessing many find him a bit more "fun" than many of the works/directors he's imitating. Untouchables is a really solid film, but also rather atypical for De Palma. I also think the original Mission: Impossible is quite good and shows off his technical skills without all of the campy imitation cheese.

You know I never did actually see Mission Impossible 1. I've seen 3 and didn't like it much (Starting my whole kind of apathy toward Abrams) but I'm curious about 1 and 2 as well for John Woo.

If people just find De Palma fun, okay, sure, that's at least a perspective I can understand. It's not like I don't enjoy superficial action or heavy sexualization like his movies employ in other forms. I've seen people go farther and say he has serious thematic depth though which is just lol to me. Like I remember I saw one article that I (Perhaps unfairly) dismissed at hand that in its Abstract defended De Palma's lifting from Hitchcock by saying he's not ripping him off, but in fact theorizing about Hitchcock in his films to a greater degree than nearly all film critics/theorists/etc., which is

, a

beyond all conception of

to me. Of course I didn't read past that Abstract because my eyes were burned at the very sight of such a passage, but maybe it had a convincing argument...

And maybe I can sprout wings and fly if I try hard enough too. You never know.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I get what you're saying. Maybe it goes back to what I said about the difference between interesting failures and films that are just blandly bad. Stuff like GSOE is just blandly bad, while stuff like Funny Games or Blow Out are at least interesting despite their failures. At least with the latter I can see why some people would like/love them, but with stuff like GSOE I just don't get the appeal even for its time.

People just liked the circus THAT MUCH back then I guess.

I will say it is pretty weird that Heston went from doing this to like Touch of Evil just a few years later.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I think I said back when I was reviewing several post-80s Godard that he progressed from an avant-garde modern novelist, to a non-fiction propagandist, to a highly personalized poet. Those late works just feel so insular and dreamlike. What's really interesting about them is that it's almost like he took the essay film genre and found a way to make it into a kind of internalized, poetic exploration. I mean, the idea of an essay is that you begin with a thesis or theme or idea you want to express, but late Godard seems more contemplative than preachy, which is a pretty radical change from his late-60s/70s work where he seemed to be preaching the gospel of Marx and... whatever else he was into. By the 80s he seems to have become sobered, somber, and rather disillusioned... and also perversely funny at times.

I definitely get the somber and disillusionment part, especially from Historie(s), though that one actually is very essayistic...

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I was a big RE fan back in the day too. Played 1-3 and Veronica. I'm trying to remember how I got on this kick. I think I was marathoning Conan O'Brien's Clueless Gamer vids on YouTube and stumbled across a trailor for a RE2 remake. Intrigued, I checked it out and discovered they remade the first game (and a "0" Prequel I'd never played). I watched a complete walkthrough on YouTube and, man, it was just visually amazing. More cinematic than 98% of the horror films I've ever seen. I could just bathe in that atmosphere. It was so good I watched it twice with both Jill and Chris walkthroughs. Watched the 0 walkthrough too and it was also visually excellent, but not quite as good as 1. Then I watched 2 and 3 just for the nostalgia factor and I just started on Veronica. I'm watching these while listening to music, btw, so I am missing out on the sound/music.

REmake and RE0 were GameCube exclusives until just a few years ago when they got PC/PS3/PS4/360/Xbox 1 ports, so if you didn't have a GameCube back then that's probably why you missed out on them.

I loved REmake to death. I played it like 7 or 8 times, clearing all of the different modes, clearing the game only using the knife, without saving another time, and for the last playthrough I speedran it just barely under 3 hours to unlock the rocket launcher. That was on the PS3, and I'm tempted to get a gaming laptop so I can run through the PC version using the nude mods for Jill because uh science?

RE0...I didn't like very much. The opening train section is excellent, and it probably has the strongest basic premise in any RE game (Rookie cop is forced to work with convicted mass murderer). Unfortunately the game after that is super bland in content, and is a chore to actually play since the having two characters never amounts to much and both Rebecca and Billy have such limited inventories compared to traditional RE protagonists. Several items take up two slots too unlike other games which is mad annoying- like two slots for a shotgun and then a third for ammunition and lol that's half a character right there. No item boxes just makes running around more than usual to get that damn hookshot a chore too. Rebecca is way less hot than Jill too. Also leech opera man.

Love RE2. I think it plays pretty well still, is still atmospheric, and really the quick turn is the only thing I think the game really needed. Very excited to see how the remake goes.

I didn't like RE3 very much. It introduced the quick turn which is a huge mechanic improvement to classic RE, and I like Jilly's skimpy outfit in that game because I'm immature I guess. However the dodge system is straight up nonsense that doesn't make sense, and I think the Nemesis encounters get really, really, really repetitive, and I kind of got sick of the loose structure Raccoon City compared to the mansion in RE1 or the Police Department in RE2. The basic plot is just RE1's again too but with worse characters- like does anyone even remember the Russian villain guy's name? The branching story paths were a neat idea I guess. I wouldn't be surprised if RE3 gets remade if the RE2 remake is successful- tbh I think it could use the remake more than RE2.

I like Code Veronica. The only real complaint I have about it is Steve is a bit more obnoxious than he needs to be and Chris' section on the Island makes the whole game feel too long for while also not feeling very strongly motivated since you know Claire isn't there by time Chris arrives. I think it would work better if Claire and Chris' stories were split into two campaigns like RE1 or RE2 instead of one giant game.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:They are very different stylistically and in the content, but there's significant thematic overlap. Shiki-Jitsu is the shit. Very solid 9/10 for me.

Cool, can't wait to get to it.

Imma try and watch Oh, Woe is Me tonight or tomorrow.

EDIT: Rebuild 3.0 + 1.0 teaser.

Interestingly, Toei gets a credit in front of the movie.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Tue Jul 24, 2018 6:52 pm

142. Madadayo (1993, Dir. Akira Kurosawa) - Kurosawa's final film, and the last of his features that I had left to see. I started my journey through Kurosawa's 30 films years ago, though I intentionally put off this last one for a great while just because I was sad to finally bring it to an end.

Ebert in his review of the movie compares what Kurosawa is trying to do here to Ozu, and I think its pretty apt. The story follows an aging professor and his relationship to his students as he gets older and…that's basically it, over 2 hours and 15 minutes. Unfortunately, I just don't find that Kurosawa is as good at this kind of “nothing happens" narrative as Ozu was (A complaint I seem to recall having with…No Regrets For Our Youth, I think, way back when in the old IMDb days). Not that this needs big plot developments like the noir or samurai films that Kurosawa made in the past (The most dramatic thing here is a cat going missing) but I feel like even Ozu films had more narrative momentum than this.

Still, I can see what the aging director would find in the aging and revered professor in the film. His house was even destroyed in American firebombings during World War II, much like what happened to Kurosawa himself (On his wedding day, no less). Its interesting from that kind of autuerist perspective, but not much else tbh.

Before she passed away, I used to call my dog “Maddie-dayo" as a nod to this film even though I hadn't seen it yet. I miss her…

143. Jaws (1975, Dir. Steven Spielberg. Rewatch.) - It's been several years since I last saw Jaws but its Shark Week and according to international law every world citizen must consume shark-based media or face imprisonment.

Jaws is still real fuckin' good in a way that I think is easy to forget until you watch it again and see Spielberg's technical virtuosity being applied impeccably- just pick literally any scene and something fantastic is happening, I'm not even going to bother describing any in detail. Not that Spielberg needs to me to defend or elaborate on one of his most popular movies anyways but damn man everything about it just works so well.

The one knock I have against it is that it is a bit lacking in thematic depth (Though there are more references to economics and class than I remember being there before) but when everything else works so well, when characters feel so well characterized for this kind of film, who cares. Jaws is good.

EDIT: One thing I want to add here is that previously I considered Jaws to be Spielberg kind of doing his take on Hitchcock's The Birds in that its a "nature attacks man" story (Though Jaws doesn't have any of the sexual underpinnings that The Birds does, at least that I can see. If there's any kind of weirdo psychoanalytic reading of the movie to be made its probably that the shark is a dark manifestation of Brody himself and his frustration with the town, much like how the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are a kind of nightmarish version of Grant's fear of children and becoming a father in my reading of that film. Some of that might just be dressing up what in reality is a basic character arc and narrative structure, but its fun to play dress-up sometimes.), but watching it again I see way more of Ford and Hawks in this movie. The focus on the community, male bonding etc. It's not hard to imagine Quint being played by John Wayne if the film was cast in another era.

Even that last 45 minutes or whatever of this movie just the pleasure of watching three professionals from three different walks of throwing their heads together and at each other in order to solve a problem (Granted that problem is "How the fuck do we kill this shark?"), and that feels very Hawksian to me.

144. The Shark is Still Working (2007, Dir. Erik Hollander) - A documentary about the making of but mostly the legacy of Jaws. Its mostly kind of light, though I did learn some things about Jaws that I never knew before- like how much improvisation was used in the film, like the great scene with Brody and his son at the dinner table. Lot of the characters in the movie were locals from the area where it was filmed, which is interesting since a lot of them have never looked like traditional Hollywood character actors to me.

I didn't realize what a marketing behemoth Jaws was either immediately after the movie came out. I normally associate movies spawning toys and such more with George Lucas and Star Wars, but no turns out Jaws had a lot of that too. Like I knew the film sold a bajillion tickets but wow.

I can't exactly say its ultimately a great documentary but as far as fawning ones go its fun.

Eva Yojimbo · Post by **Eva Yojimbo** » Fri Jul 27, 2018 2:03 pm

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Even if you don't recognize the name, you've almost certainly heard this from him:

Gotta be honest, it doesn't immediately trigger my memory. From that entire list on Wikipedia, Grand Hotel and Muv-Luv Alternative of all things are the only wroks I've even seen/played (And I'd be genuinely shocked if you've even heard of the latter).

I'm surprised it doesn't sound familiar. Last film I heard it a lot in was the Eastwood one. There's also a really funny and memorable scene in The Seven Year Itch that uses the first movement (instead of the second one I posted above):

Raxivace wrote:
Anyway, I think part of De Palma's appeal lies in his campiness. He really played up the perversity of his subject matter even more than Hitch did without bothering with all of the thematic substance behind it, so in a sense I'm guessing many find him a bit more "fun" than many of the works/directors he's imitating. Untouchables is a really solid film, but also rather atypical for De Palma. I also think the original Mission: Impossible is quite good and shows off his technical skills without all of the campy imitation cheese.
You know I never did actually see Mission Impossible 1. I've seen 3 and didn't like it much (Starting my whole kind of apathy toward Abrams) but I'm curious about 1 and 2 as well for John Woo.

If people just find De Palma fun, okay, sure, that's at least a perspective I can understand. It's not like I don't enjoy superficial action or heavy sexualization like his movies employ in other forms. I've seen people go farther and say he has serious thematic depth though which is just lol to me. Like I remember I saw one article that I (Perhaps unfairly) dismissed at hand that in its Abstract defended De Palma's lifting from Hitchcock by saying he's not ripping him off, but in fact theorizing about Hitchcock in his films to a greater degree than nearly all film critics/theorists/etc., which is , a beyond all conception of to me. Of course I didn't read past that Abstract because my eyes were burned at the very sight of such a passage, but maybe it had a convincing argument...

And maybe I can sprout wings and fly if I try hard enough too. You never know.

I'm a pretty unabashed fan of the M:I films and I think they're all varying degrees of excellent. I just don't think modern action/adventure filmmaking gets any better, and I like that the series has kinda become a vehicle for those mid-tier "craftsman" directors to work within a genre. I think the thing that makes the series is that every single film has at least one or two memorable, imaginative, action set-pieces. That said, and TBH, all of them except the first have kinda run together in my head a bit, so I can't immediately recall what 3 was about compared to 2 or GP or RN. The first is much slower-paced than all the ones that came after; it's the one most like the original series (which I watched some back in the day) but with a few action segments thrown in.

I often think that thematic depth depends as much on how much we like films rather than anything that's objectively in the films. So often I've found when analyzing a film and trying to put into words what I think it "means," it usually comes down to some pretty common, universal stuff that exists in tons of media, and the only difference between them is that THIS work made me care because of its particular take on the subject matter, and THAT work made me not care because of its take. So I'm sure that people could analyze De Palma and find "thematic depth," but I think we agree that his style or take on the subject matter just doesn't really provoke/inspire us to care.

BTW, this isn't to say that some art isn't more clearly focused on its themes than others, but I'm not sure that a film focusing on themes automatically makes it deeper. I think we'd both agree that neither Hitchcock nor Kurosawa cared about themes; they cared about entertaining an audience and mastering their craft to do that in highly creative ways. The fact that they did what they did so well is probably what makes their themes matter more than the vast majority of arthouse directors out there who are very consciously and overtly theme-heavy.

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I think I said back when I was reviewing several post-80s Godard that he progressed from an avant-garde modern novelist, to a non-fiction propagandist, to a highly personalized poet. Those late works just feel so insular and dreamlike. What's really interesting about them is that it's almost like he took the essay film genre and found a way to make it into a kind of internalized, poetic exploration. I mean, the idea of an essay is that you begin with a thesis or theme or idea you want to express, but late Godard seems more contemplative than preachy, which is a pretty radical change from his late-60s/70s work where he seemed to be preaching the gospel of Marx and... whatever else he was into. By the 80s he seems to have become sobered, somber, and rather disillusioned... and also perversely funny at times.
I definitely get the somber and disillusionment part, especially from Historie(s), though that one actually is very essayistic...

I haven't seen Historie(s) but I can imagine it being different, in part because it is an actual documentary (kinda-of-sorts) and in part because film is the one subject Godard probably knows best and can speak the most authoritatively on. It's possible somber/disillusionment came about with many of his other pet themes. As for post-80s Godard being silly, Prenom: Carmen is pretty funny and Keep Your Right Up! is practically a slapstick comedy... at least as close as Godard would ever get to one (too bad the latter sucks ass; former's pretty good though).

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I was a big RE fan back in the day too. Played 1-3 and Veronica. I'm trying to remember how I got on this kick. I think I was marathoning Conan O'Brien's Clueless Gamer vids on YouTube and stumbled across a trailor for a RE2 remake. Intrigued, I checked it out and discovered they remade the first game (and a "0" Prequel I'd never played). I watched a complete walkthrough on YouTube and, man, it was just visually amazing. More cinematic than 98% of the horror films I've ever seen. I could just bathe in that atmosphere. It was so good I watched it twice with both Jill and Chris walkthroughs. Watched the 0 walkthrough too and it was also visually excellent, but not quite as good as 1. Then I watched 2 and 3 just for the nostalgia factor and I just started on Veronica. I'm watching these while listening to music, btw, so I am missing out on the sound/music.
REmake and RE0 were GameCube exclusives until just a few years ago when they got PC/PS3/PS4/360/Xbox 1 ports, so if you didn't have a GameCube back then that's probably why you missed out on them.

I loved REmake to death. I played it like 7 or 8 times, clearing all of the different modes, clearing the game only using the knife, without saving another time, and for the last playthrough I speedran it just barely under 3 hours to unlock the rocket launcher. That was on the PS3, and I'm tempted to get a gaming laptop so I can run through the PC version using the nude mods for Jill because uh science?

RE0...I didn't like very much. The opening train section is excellent, and it probably has the strongest basic premise in any RE game (Rookie cop is forced to work with convicted mass murderer). Unfortunately the game after that is super bland in content, and is a chore to actually play since the having two characters never amounts to much and both Rebecca and Billy have such limited inventories compared to traditional RE protagonists. Several items take up two slots too unlike other games which is mad annoying- like two slots for a shotgun and then a third for ammunition and lol that's half a character right there. No item boxes just makes running around more than usual to get that damn hookshot a chore too. Rebecca is way less hot than Jill too. Also leech opera man.

Love RE2. I think it plays pretty well still, is still atmospheric, and really the quick turn is the only thing I think the game really needed. Very excited to see how the remake goes.

I didn't like RE3 very much. It introduced the quick turn which is a huge mechanic improvement to classic RE, and I like Jilly's skimpy outfit in that game because I'm immature I guess. However the dodge system is straight up nonsense that doesn't make sense, and I think the Nemesis encounters get really, really, really repetitive, and I kind of got sick of the loose structure Raccoon City compared to the mansion in RE1 or the Police Department in RE2. The basic plot is just RE1's again too but with worse characters- like does anyone even remember the Russian villain guy's name? The branching story paths were a neat idea I guess. I wouldn't be surprised if RE3 gets remade if the RE2 remake is successful- tbh I think it could use the remake more than RE2.

I like Code Veronica. The only real complaint I have about it is Steve is a bit more obnoxious than he needs to be and Chris' section on the Island makes the whole game feel too long for while also not feeling very strongly motivated since you know Claire isn't there by time Chris arrives. I think it would work better if Claire and Chris' stories were split into two campaigns like RE1 or RE2 instead of one giant game.

Yeah, I never had a GameCube. Last system I had was PS2 and I didn't play a whole lot on that. I do wish I had gotten to play REmake because its visuals/atmosphere certainly blew me away just watching it, so I can only imagine playing it. LOL @ nude Jill mods. I had to Google it for, uh, yeah, science. I'm more of a Claire guy, myself.

Of those I played, the original was still my favorite. It's hard to beat the atmosphere and design of that mansion, and I actually loved the puzzles. I also really liked RE2 once I got over how ridiculous it was that any police station would be designed like that! I didn't remember a whole lot about 3 and CV until I watched the walkthroughs and a lot of it came back to me. I do agree CV was better, but I do remember being a bit freaked every time Nemesis showed up back in the day.

Raxivace wrote:
Eva_Yojimbo wrote:They are very different stylistically and in the content, but there's significant thematic overlap. Shiki-Jitsu is the shit. Very solid 9/10 for me.
Cool, can't wait to get to it.

Imma try and watch Oh, Woe is Me tonight or tomorrow.

EDIT: Rebuild 3.0 + 1.0 teaser.

Interestingly, Toei gets a credit in front of the movie.

Very interesting to hear your takes on both Shiki-Jitsu and Helas. That's a pretty short teaser! I don't get much from it, but I never did get much from teasers/trailers.

Raxivace wrote:142. Madadayo (1993, Dir. Akira Kurosawa)

I haven't seen this one myself. Much like you I've saved the last few Kurosawa films because I hate for my "journey" to end. I've done the same with several directors: I also only have a few films to see from Ozu, Mizoguchi, Bergman, and a few others.

Raxivace wrote:143. Jaws (1975, Dir. Steven Spielberg. Rewatch.)

I don't disagree with you about Spielberg's virtuosity, but I think I liked it slightly less than you. I guess I just never really got the whole shark terror thing, in part because sharks mostly seem like dumb dogs in water to me... like, they're almost never aggressive towards humans and there's probably a thousand animals you should be more scared of than sharks. Of course, film and the suspension of disbelief and all that... it's certainly excellent for what it is, but not quite top-tier Spielberg for me. Part of me actually prefers Duel.

Post by **Gendo** » Fri Jul 27, 2018 2:32 pm

Raxivace wrote:
Gendo wrote:Just replying to say that even though there's little activity; I do read most of these posts. Just bought that version of 80 Days a couple months ago. I'm hoping to get back into watching more movies again soon.
I appreciate it.

Did you get the three hour version of 80 Days? That's the cut that actually played in theaters- there's a two and a half hour cut floating around too but that that was the cut made for TV broadcast in the 70's I think.

Yeah, 182 minutes.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Mon Jul 30, 2018 3:42 pm

Sorry I'm a bit late on this once again. Things got busy here for a bit for family reasons that annoy me mightily.

Eva Yojimbo wrote:I'm surprised it doesn't sound familiar. Last film I heard it a lot in was the Eastwood one. There's also a really funny and memorable scene in The Seven Year Itch that uses the first movement (instead of the second one I posted above):

That's ridiculous, I used to play piano and nothing like that ever happened to me.

... Maybe I should have stayed with the piano...

That's actually one of the major Billy Wilder films I haven't seen...I do plan on finishing his filmography some day, since he doesn't have that many films compared to someone like Hitchcock and I like most of the ones I watched already (Also an old podcast I used to listen to did an episode on every single one of his movies, which makes the deep dive more fun when you can sort of simulate having someone going through the movies with you).

Maybe after I'm done with Anno I'll go back to Wilder.

Eva Yojimbo wrote:I'm a pretty unabashed fan of the M:I films and I think they're all varying degrees of excellent. I just don't think modern action/adventure filmmaking gets any better, and I like that the series has kinda become a vehicle for those mid-tier "craftsman" directors to work within a genre. I think the thing that makes the series is that every single film has at least one or two memorable, imaginative, action set-pieces. That said, and TBH, all of them except the first have kinda run together in my head a bit, so I can't immediately recall what 3 was about compared to 2 or GP or RN. The first is much slower-paced than all the ones that came after; it's the one most like the original series (which I watched some back in the day) but with a few action segments thrown in.

What I remember about 3 is Phillip Seymour Hoffman and thinking that the "Rabbit's Foot" was maybe the least motivated macguffin I had ever seen in a movie.

Now that being said, if you asked me to explain why I had a problem with the Rabbit's Foot and not, say, the 39 Steps I'm not sure I could successfully do so (At least, not without arguing that the Rabbit's Foot arguing was the first time that Abrams began toying with his idea of "mystery box" storytelling that's arguably been one of his greatest weaknesses as a storyteller). Part of this is also because I haven't seen the movie since it was in theaters.

Looking at the Wikipedia page for MI3, apparently David Fincher was going to direct this originally. Now that would have been interesting.

I often think that thematic depth depends as much on how much we like films rather than anything that's objectively in the films. So often I've found when analyzing a film and trying to put into words what I think it "means," it usually comes down to some pretty common, universal stuff that exists in tons of media, and the only difference between them is that THIS work made me care because of its particular take on the subject matter, and THAT work made me not care because of its take. So I'm sure that people could analyze De Palma and find "thematic depth," but I think we agree that his style or take on the subject matter just doesn't really provoke/inspire us to care.

Yeah generally I agree with this.

That argument about De Palma I mentioned is a more specific one based in intertextuality though- I wouldn't have raised a fuss if it just said that De Palma is interested in general themes of voyeurism or whatever. I might challenge his exploration (Or dramatization or cinematic representation or whatever terms we want to use describe the films) of those themes compared to Hitchcock's but that's different grounds for discussion.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:BTW, this isn't to say that some art isn't more clearly focused on its themes than others, but I'm not sure that a film focusing on themes automatically makes it deeper.

Yeah I'd agree not automatically. Best Picture Winner Crash is very concerned about its themes for examples and uh its Crash lol.

I think we'd both agree that neither Hitchcock nor Kurosawa cared about themes; they cared about entertaining an audience and mastering their craft to do that in highly creative ways. The fact that they did what they did so well is probably what makes their themes matter more than the vast majority of arthouse directors out there who are very consciously and overtly theme-heavy.

Well if you mean they didn't care about themes to mean that they didn't care about themes above all else (Like entertaining an audience) then yeah I'd agree.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I haven't seen Historie(s) but I can imagine it being different, in part because it is an actual documentary (kinda-of-sorts) and in part because film is the one subject Godard probably knows best and can speak the most authoritatively on. It's possible somber/disillusionment came about with many of his other pet themes. As for post-80s Godard being silly, Prenom: Carmen is pretty funny and Keep Your Right Up! is practically a slapstick comedy... at least as close as Godard would ever get to one (too bad the latter sucks ass; former's pretty good though).

Well I'll get back to those eventually to see. Unless Image Book drops on streaming here soon the next Godards for me will be the Dziga Vertov Group stuff.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Yeah, I never had a GameCube. Last system I had was PS2 and I didn't play a whole lot on that. I do wish I had gotten to play REmake because its visuals/atmosphere certainly blew me away just watching it, so I can only imagine playing it. LOL @ nude Jill mods. I had to Google it for, uh, yeah, science. I'm more of a Claire guy, myself.

Claire is great too. I particularly like her in Resident Evil: Revelations 2 where her character is "I'm 30 now and still dealing with this zombie bullshit? I just want to go home and a take a nap dammit!".

Luckily, nude mods for her exist in that game too (I'll leave you on your own to find videos to scientifically confirm its existence- we probably should keep some sense of decorum here).

Of those I played, the original was still my favorite. It's hard to beat the atmosphere and design of that mansion, and I actually loved the puzzles. I also really liked RE2 once I got over how ridiculous it was that any police station would be designed like that! I didn't remember a whole lot about 3 and CV until I watched the walkthroughs and a lot of it came back to me. I do agree CV was better, but I do remember being a bit freaked every time Nemesis showed up back in the day.

Yeah the mansion is amazing.

The design of the police station is curious. In the beta for RE2 it resembled a real police station more closely, but that version of the game was scrapped nearly entirely (Though various builds of it now float around the internet and the hands of collectors), and we got the art museum-turned-police station of the final version of the game. I forget what entirely motivated this change in design, but I like that RE2 itself treats it as a part of its backstory lol. Even the collector's edition of the RE2 remake references it.

On a related note, I love that the files of the game treat the absurd puzzles as an entirely diegetic thing.

Secretary's Diary A wrote:April 6th
I accidentally moved one of the stone statues on the second floor when I leaned against it. When the chief found out about it, he was furious. I swear the guy nearly bit my head off, screaming at me never to touch the statue again. If it's so important, then maybe he shouldn't have put it out in the open like that...

April 7th
I heard that all the art pieces from the chief's collection are rare items, literally worth hundreds of thousand of dollars. I don't know which is the bigger mystery: where he finds those tacky things, or where he's getting the money to pay for them.

May 10th
I wasn't surprised to see the chief come in today with yet another large picture frame in his hands. This time it was a really disturbing painting depicting a nude person being hanged. I was appalled by the expression on the chief's face as he leered at that painting.
Why anyone would consider something like that to be a work of art is beyond my comprehension...

Just the idea of these poor secretaries trying not to accidently set off these puzzles or going

at his paintings is hilarious to me.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:Very interesting to hear your takes on both Shiki-Jitsu and Helas. That's a pretty short teaser! I don't get much from it, but I never did get much from teasers/trailers.

Well I'm afraid my take on Helas is going to be disappointingly boring.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I haven't seen this one myself. Much like you I've saved the last few Kurosawa films because I hate for my "journey" to end. I've done the same with several directors: I also only have a few films to see from Ozu, Mizoguchi, Bergman, and a few others.

Speaking of Bergman, are you getting that bigass boxset Criterion is putting out of his films? I'm really tempted, though if I do it will take me forever to work through it.

Eva_Yojimbo wrote:I don't disagree with you about Spielberg's virtuosity, but I think I liked it slightly less than you. I guess I just never really got the whole shark terror thing, in part because sharks mostly seem like dumb dogs in water to me... like, they're almost never aggressive towards humans and there's probably a thousand animals you should be more scared of than sharks. Of course, film and the suspension of disbelief and all that... it's certainly excellent for what it is, but not quite top-tier Spielberg for me. Part of me actually prefers Duel.

I mean Duel is great, but this is also clearly the words of a man who has never had to fight a rabid dog or the terror of nearly drowning.

Here's the thing- sharks are both of those threats combined, like Voltron. A berserk animal with mastery over an environment that humans can never truly conquer... Holy shit, I'm scared just thinking about it.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Mon Jul 30, 2018 3:57 pm

145. Oh, Woe is Me (1992, Dir. Jean-Luc Godard) -

Damn Woe is a beautiful movie.

Its distorted a bit from being a screengrab from a stream but wow that is just a random shot from the movie that looks gorgeous. The green of that grass and leaves, the blue of that water…we've seen these things a thousand times before, but damn when he wants to Godard can you wish all grass and leaves were this green, that all water was such a crystal blue, that all mountains were off just the right amount into the distance.

Also, for all that Godard supposedly hated Kurosawa…

Isn't this shot straight out of Rashomon? Considering where the movie goes in regards to ambiguity of an experience its not like referencing Rashomon would be unwarranted…it's just weird for Godard, a guy who pretty publicly voiced not liking Kurosawa's movies to be visually quoting him.

Anyways I had trouble understanding a lot of this movie (Beyond vague notions of the plot being that of a pseudo-detective story, as much as plot matters here), until the last 20-30 minutes when the stuff with God comes to the forefront. I forgot to mention this before with my post on The Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company, but the Mubi stream seems to have just not translated some lines (Particularly scenes with overlapping dialogue). I think its more of an issue with Woe since it seems more directly philosophical than Film Company did (Not that it was necessarily lacking any in that department).

I almost don't care, with how nice so much of the movie looks. It does make me want to buy a DVD or blu-ray though (Or at least find a version online that has better subs).

The choice of the voicebox to represent God is curious, as it recalls both the menace that terrorized Alphaville (Also a kind of detective story I suppose) as well as the voice clip from the lowly pinball machine as heard in the YouTube clip above.
I'm still struggling to bit with how Godard is contextualizing the clip too. I doubt its meant as a direct commentary- that the characters should “quit talking" with all of their philosophizing or whatever, though perhaps they really should “start chalking", i.e. acting with the knowledge that God is on Earth?

146. Mysterious Object at Noon (2000, Dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul) - A experimental mix of documentary and fiction, as Weerasethakul and his crew go around, interviewing locals, and asking them to contribute to a story about a wheelchair-bound boy and his teacher. Some of these stories are dramatized, some are performed by the locals through a kind of interpretative dance, some are loosely alluded to with documentary footage that sort of resembles the story, some are just told.

I appreciate the attempt to do something weird and different, but I can't say I thought much about the end result to be particularly compelling. I don't really feel like there's ultimately much insight to be gained here about, say, the nature of storytelling or community or how or why people create stories or whatever else. The idea behind the creation of the film itself seems to just be more interesting than the final product.

Also the ending segment that's just a bunch of kids fucking around with a dog is weird and kind of sours me on a movie that I wasn't too enthralled by to begin with.

147. Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin VI - Rise of the Red Comet (2018, Dir. Takashi Imanishi & Yoshikazu Yasuhiko) - Last of the prequel OVA's to the original Gundam anime. This one was a pretty straight adaptation (For the most part), and I was pretty positive on the project as a whole. Not a whole lot else to say about it that would be relevant to people here.

148. Octopussy (1983, Dir. John Glen) - Another Bond that's mostly pretty decent. I thought Moore was really showing his age in For Your Eyes Only and its only more noticeable now. It's crazy to think he still has another entire film after this one.

Also, even by Bond standards though "Octopussy" is a pretty unsubtle name.

Faustus5 · Post by **Faustus5** » Mon Jul 30, 2018 5:24 pm

Raxivace wrote:148. Octopussy (1983, Dir. John Glen) - Another Bond that's mostly pretty decent. I thought Moore was really showing his age in For Your Eyes Only and its only more noticeable now. It's crazy to think he still has another entire film after this one.

Also, even by Bond standards though "Octopussy" is a pretty unsubtle name.

That movie has a special place in my heart despite being kind of awful. I was playtesting the James Bond role playing game in the year before this movie's release and one of the first adventure modules to be released with the game was Octopussy. So as a lead playtester, I got a copy of the script long before the movie came out and a copy of the adventure module first draft to play with my friends. When we finally went to see the movie, my players were constantly gasping and laughing when they would see Bond make some of the same choices they did when they had played it months earlier.

Definitely enhanced the experience of watching the movie.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Mon Jul 30, 2018 5:41 pm

Oh hey Faustus, it's been a while. That sounds fun and pretty surreal.

You know that does kind of bring up what I was talking about with A Quiet Place too, seeing these action movies through the lens of games or the playing of games. I wonder if there's more to that idea, especially as video game adaptations of movies are becoming more of a mainstream thing in recent years with stuff like Rampage.

Kuribo4 · Post by **Kuribo4** » Thu Aug 02, 2018 11:21 am

(Looking at the first post here)
160~ films in one year. Damn. That's about one every other day or so.

Last film I watched: Netflix' Extinction. One of those cases where I had no interest in the film but watched it due to the surroundings.
Had a twist that sounds good on paper, but I'm not sure if it was done that well. It's a film that wanted to rely a lot on emotion, and I don't think the writing or acting where on a level for that.
It's a critic look at racism, so I can say at least they were going for a message (when the first half seems purely like a B movie).
Honestly I don't have too much to say lol.

In this case I'm more interested in the story behind the film. It's another case where a big studio dropped releasing a film in theaters because I suppose they expected it to flop, and then Netflix buys it. Don't think that's wrong honestly. At least the work these people did gets seen, and I guess somebody will like it.
It's a little funny though how they put their logo on the cover, "A Netflix Film", when they probably weren't that involved at all.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Thu Aug 02, 2018 11:51 am

I was thinking of watching that Extinction movie actually. Maybe I'll get around to it later today.

Neflix is super misleading with how they advertise series too. I know there's been several anime series that they've advertised as "Netflix Original Series" (Violet Evergarden, Kakegurui: Compulsive Gambler, Hisone & Masotan etc. All three of these were shows I liked btw. EDIT: Actually they haven't started streaming Hisone & Masotan yet here in the U.S. at least but I can guarantee you that's how they'll sell it.) when from what I can tell all that they've done is license them for streaming on their platform, and weren't actually involved in the production of at all.

So if you're just going by Netflix's own platform you can't even they tell that they didn't fund something like Violet Evergarden from shows that they actually did fund like Devilman: Crybaby, or Castlevania, or Fuller House, or Stranger Things, or Making a Murderer or whatever else either. They're all just put under the banner of "Netflix Original Series", which bothers me.

Don't even get me started on their shitty release schedules for these shows they've merely licensed.

Kuribo4 wrote:(Looking at the first post here)
160~ films in one year. Damn. That's about one every other day or so.

It would be higher if I wasn't being a stickler and counted TV shows too lol.

Kuribo4 · Post by **Kuribo4** » Thu Aug 02, 2018 12:35 pm

Luckily, nude mods for her exist in that game too

Wtf is this thread.

I was thinking of watching that Extinction movie actually. Maybe I'll get around to it later today

.
In case it wasn't clear, I do not recommend it lol.
I actually think reading a synopsis would be more fun.
But go ahead if you want obviously. I'll have somebody to share the experience with lol

It would be higher if I wasn't being a stickler and counted TV shows too lol.

You're living the dream.
Although I don't think that would fit into how I currently live my life lol. Also I have so many other hobbies. All of them really nerdy, but hey.
But the main reason I can't do this is money and time I guess. And the actual main reason is my laziness. I have to be sure I'll like something/or it is generally really well regarded to muster up the motivation. On the other hand, I'll eat up anything I like like I'm obsessed. It's how my mind works.

As for Netflix, I heard Trigger's Little Witch Academia had a pretty bad release schedule. A bunch of episodes and another bunch much later (instead of weekly releases), after there were spoilers on the internet due to the Japanese release. When I guess they could have streamed concurrently. Didn't affect me since I was late to the party anyways and watched it in a few days.

I hope IF Netflix is the one to get Promare it'll be a worldwide thing. Crunchyroll does it (without dubs, but can't they add those later?).

I heard that Hisone anime is good, so cool that Netflix will have it!

Some other stuff:
I'm still on my Utena rewatch, I'm planning on probably reading the manga Captain Harlock (since I can't watch Anno's top 10 anime, I can at least read something by the guy who directed his favourite one (Yamato), and it has been sitting on my shelf for some time, and I was gonna read it anyways cause I love this stuff, now is I good time since I'm freshly bummed out on not being able to watch stuff like Yamato or Ideon), and I have recently realized I don't like going to the cinema anymore generally, so the one film I plan to watch this year in a cinema(because I have two free tickets I gotta use) is Incredibles 2 with my brother. Comes out september over here. Weird that Pixar doesn't have a worldwide release right?
Also hopefully I'll read Romeo and Juliet too. I'm a lil busy lately.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Thu Aug 02, 2018 1:35 pm

Kuribo4 wrote:Wtf is this thread.

Science is an important topic.

On the other hand, I'll eat up anything I like like I'm obsessed. It's how my mind works.

I think that's generally how people are.

As for Netflix, I heard Trigger's Little Witch Academia had a pretty bad release schedule. A bunch of episodes and another bunch much later (instead of weekly releases),

Netflix has apparently said that their customers prefer binge watching instead of watching week to week, so that's why all of their anime releases are done in batches like that, usually weeks after the show has finished in Japan.

I have no idea how they've determined this (I'm not sure they've released any kind of numbers even), but it sounds like nonsense to me, especially in the case of these anime where people absolutely love discussing it episode by episode.

Like I would have been fine with watching any of those three shows I listed on Netflix itself, but their dumb model just made me go to pirating instead.

I hope IF Netflix is the one to get Promare it'll be a worldwide thing. Crunchyroll does it (without dubs, but can't they add those later?).

Yeah Crunchy has gone back and added dubs for some shows but I don't think its very many of them.

Like I don't think the dubbed episodes of Dragon Ball Super are on there, though I haven't checked recently.

heard that Hisone anime is good, so cool that Netflix will have it!

Yeah at least it will get an audience. Also apparently Shinji Higuchi (Co-director of Shin Godzilla) directed it, which I don't think I realized until a few days ago.

Some other stuff:
I'm still on my Utena rewatch, I'm planning on probably reading the manga Captain Harlock (since I can't watch Anno's top 10 anime, I can at least read something by the guy who directed his favourite one (Yamato), and it has been sitting on my shelf for some time, and I was gonna read it anyways cause I love this stuff, now is I good time since I'm freshly bummed out on not being able to watch stuff like Yamato or Ideon), and I have recently realized I don't like going to the cinema anymore generally, so the one film I plan to watch this year in a cinema(because I have two free tickets I gotta use) is Incredibles 2 with my brother. Comes out september over here. Weird that Pixar doesn't have a worldwide release right?[
Also hopefully I'll read Romeo and Juliet too. I'm a lil busy lately.

Other than Romeo & Juliet, I can't believe that freaking Ideon is the only thing in this whole paragraph I've seen.

With the success of the recent remake of Yamato (And its sequel that's currently still coming out) I'm sure there will some kind of new Harlock project at some point though.

Utena is another one at some point I want to get to.

Incredibles...I dunno, I'll probably see it at some point but Brad Bird irks me these days.

Post by **Gendo** » Thu Aug 02, 2018 3:21 pm

I don't remember if I mentioned this before, but I saw the first few episodes of Utena a long time ago (over 15 years ago, back when I was really into anime); and I liked it enough that I bought all of the box sets; which includes all episodes and the movie. Haven't gotten to any of it yet, though.

Post by **Gendo** » Thu Aug 02, 2018 3:24 pm

This song will always be amazingly epic:

Kuribo4 · Post by **Kuribo4** » Thu Aug 02, 2018 4:48 pm

I think that's generally how people are

That makes me feel a little better about it lol

Netflix has apparently said that their customers prefer binge watching instead of watching week to week

I really don't understand this thought process.
Weekly releases don't hinder a later bingewatch, but the bingewatch model hinders weekly releases.

I guess the thing is they think some people will forget if they can't bingewatch.
But that is pretty anticonsumer. They should give the choice.

at least it will get an audience. Also apparently Shinji Higuchi (Co-director of Shin Godzilla) directed it, which I don't think I realized until a few days ago.

LOL, totally confused this show with another one.
It's great we are getting this one as well though.

Code: Select all

I'm sure there will some kind of new Harlock project at some point though

There was a film some years ago, but I prefered going for the OG first.

Btw, found out about this yesterday:
Harlock was actually created 5 years before Captain Harlock for a manga set in 19th century America called Gun Frontier. He just reused that character, same face and all. And the protagonist of that manga is a membef of the Arcadia tripulation in Cap. Harlock.
Don't know if this plays into paralel universe stuff or something later, I'm guessing it was just kind of a joke maybe, and Matsunoto wanting to reuse a design he liked.

Also, the Discovery (Daft Punk) music videos have made Matsumoto's designs feel somehow familiar to me, even not having consumed anything by him (other than those music videos he supervised). I like his designs.

Incredibles...I dunno, I'll probably see it at some point but Brad Bird irks me these days.

Isn't that equal to saying you didn't like Tomorrowland? :P
I wasn't too much of a fan of it either, at least I have never felt the urge to rewatch it. But I have a good feeling about Inc 2.

Kuribo4 · Post by **Kuribo4** » Thu Aug 02, 2018 5:25 pm

This song will always be amazingly epic

It's even better after having seen the film. ;)
You'll think of a certain scene when hearing it.

Utena I think is a slightly flawed masterpiece. It is a little too long IMO, and some episodes aren't on the level of the rest. But most are, the total result is amazing, and the final 6 episodes are some of the best I've ever seen in animation. Amazing movie as well (not the ending to the show, but an alternate retelling that plays with what you expect having watched the show).

The same director also did Yurikuma Arashi, which I also liked. As opposed to Utena, which despite the shojo antics has a serious and high art air to it, Yurikuma is really cutesy, which might throw some people off, but it's good.

The guy is also really handsome, apparently has cosplayed as a Sailor Moon character before, and is, according to himself, the real life inspiration for Kaworu.
It doesn't even matter if that is the case (it might be since he had deep conversation with Anno in a bathhouse or something lol), the fact that he thinks he is already makes him awesome in my eyes.
Faboulous dude.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Thu Aug 02, 2018 5:29 pm

Kuribo4 wrote:I really don't understand this thought process.
Weekly releases don't hinder a later bingewatch, but the bingewatch model hinders weekly releases.

I guess the thing is they think some people will forget if they can't bingewatch.
But that is pretty anticonsumer. They should give the choice.

Yeah it really irks me. Personally speaking, I'm more likely to forget things through bingewatching, though focusing in on an episode a week can lead to missing the forest for the trees I guess. It should be my choice to make though.

I wonder if we won't see a major backlash against Netflix eventually, beyond Cannes' kind of weird issues with them.

Harlock was actually created 5 years before Captain Harlock for a manga set in 19th century America called Gun Frontier. He just reused that character, same face and all. And the protagonist of that manga is a membef of the Arcadia tripulation in Cap. Harlock.
Don't know if this plays into paralel universe stuff or something later, I'm guessing it was just kind of a joke maybe, and Matsunoto wanting to reuse a design he liked.

Also, the Discovery (Daft Punk) music videos have made Matsumoto's designs feel somehow familiar to me, even not having consumed anything by him (other than those music videos he supervised). I like his designs

Huh, I wasn't aware of any of that. I gotta dig into OG Yamato and Harlock and such eventually.

Isn't that equal to saying you didn't like Tomorrowland? :P
I wasn't too much of a fan of it either, at least I have never felt the urge to rewatch it. But I have a good feeling about Inc 2.

Well Tomorrowland, yeah, and it also makes me think badly back on Incredibles 1 in terms of Bird's not-so-subtle Ayn Rand-y "if only the unwashed masses weren't holding me and how exceptional I am back" horseshit. I might be remembering parts of Incredibles 1 wrong, but I think that aspect is even more pronounced in Tomorrowland.

Let's be honest, Incredibles 1 should have ended not with the super hero family defeating Syndrome, but the proletariat coming together under Communism, perhaps riding together on the Battleship Potemkin itself, and saving the day through a communal effort.

There are other issues in Tomorrowland too, like Bird and Damon Lindeloff just not seeming to understand why apocalyptic fiction exists- that Mad Max: Fury Road came out at like the same time too made that especially funny.

Raxivace · Post by **Raxivace** » Fri Aug 03, 2018 10:44 am

Some of this I told kuribo in PM already but I'll repeat it here.

149. Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle (2018, Dir. Kobun Shizuno & Hiroyuki Seshita) - The second part of Netflix's Anime Godzilla trilogy. I think I liked this more than the first film but it's a weird one. The first part left off with our main characters completely failing to kill Godzilla, and this second part has them discovering the remains of Mechagodzilla.

In the first film's prologue, Mechagodzilla was destroyed in Godzilla's rampage but his remains have spent the last 20,000 years mutating through nanotechnology bullshit into…a city. Called Mechagodzilla City. Huh.

Mechagodzilla City absolutely has the power to defeat Godzilla, but in doing so will assimilate the entire rest of the Earth with its nanotechnology bullshit. That's the moral dilemma that our main character Haruo faces throughout the film- whether to sacrifice only his humanity but the humanity of everyone to defeat Godzilla.

I think City on the Edge of Battle ultimately works better than Planet of the Monsters did, and I like its kind of weird interpretation of Mechagodzilla. The actual design of Mechagodzilla City though seems like it should resemble, y'know, maybe Mechagodzilla a bit? In the actual film it just kind of looks like a city or generic military base or whatever and uh that's not the greatest visual design in the world.

The movie also has a problem where during a battle scene we'll be told something happened in battle (Like Godzilla's dorsal fin being blown off) but never actually see it, which is mad annoying for something trying to deliver on spectacle.

I'm more optimistic on this trilogy than I was before but the whole project still doesn't come near Shin Gdozilla IMHO.

150. A Film Like Any Other (1968, Dir. Jean-Luc Godard) - I can't believe I bought this shit on blu-ray.

This film is essentially college students sitting in a field, talking about Marxist revolution, intercut with archival footage about the May '68 events. Constant dialogue, without characters being particularly defined, for one hour and 47 minutes.

I just didn't find the Brechtian distancing that Godard was going for in this particular film to be particularly effective. Like it honestly astounds me that he ever expected working class people to be engaged with this (Not that working class people can't enjoy art films but man even snobbish art film fans find this one tough to get through from other reactions I read online to it).

The title of the film is funny given the actual content of it, I'll give it that much.

EDIT: I suppose what's also kind of interesting about A Film Like Any Other is that its not like the content is especially different than something like La Chinoise...on paper at least. They're both films about students talking about revolution and contemporary politics and so on. La Chinoise has something of a pretext of characters though, of a plot. Film Like Any Other only perhaps has these on a technicality, but really goes out its way to de-emphasize those aspects to a ridiculous degree. Its that and the formal aspects that obscure the characters that make the films feel so different, but perhaps even moreso than one film being made pre-May 1968 and one being made post-May 1968 (Though I'm guessing Godard would say that it was May 1968 itself that necessitates, perhaps, a change in formal strategy. I don't think that's really correct but what the hell do I know).