Raxivace wrote:Eva Yojimbo wrote:I'm typically hit-and-miss with Kiarostami but this sounds interesting; perhaps similar to Hou's Cafe Lumiere, which he also made in Japan as a tribute to Ozu. I'll definitely make Hell or High Water a priority.
I haven't seen Cafe Lumiere but I remember reading some review on IMDb that derisively compared Anno of all people to the film which has kind of stuck in my memory.
It seems like there's always someone trying to take Anno down, though I think that's the first time I saw someone trying to do so from an arthouse POV and not some enraged Tomino fanboy that's mad Eva is more well-known than Space Runaway Ideon or something.
Wow, I can't imagine how/why someone would make a comparison between Anno and Cafe Lumiere; that's like, apples and rhinos! Of course, I can imagine why someone who loved a film like Cafe Lumiere could hate Anno. Cafe Lumiere is the epitome of those films where absolutely nothing superficially happens; it's just Hou observing very quiet, normal, slice-of-life stuff from a distance. It's subtly visually playful in that way that all Hou is, but it's often in the service of people just sitting and eating, or talking about their day, or whatever. Of course there's this very subtle commentary about the generation gap, as there always was in Ozu, but Hou makes Ozu looks like Sirk by comparison.
Raxivace wrote:It's hard to think of a real solid example that works in quite the way Scream does. Maybe Haxan?
I guess there's something like Targets too where Boris Karloff is basically playing himself, but that's not really quite "meta" in the way Scream is.
Haven't seen either of these, but Haxan has been on my list forever, long before Criterion finally got a hold of it.
Raxivace wrote:To me, I've always thought of TV as being closer to novels and feature films being closer to lyric poetry; the idea being that the compressed time in features put more pressure on directors to do more with form and style to supplement whatever lack of time they have to do longer developmental arcs for characters and plot. In a sense, I won't be terribly sad if we see story-centric ("mainstream," I guess) filmmaking decline and allowing those things to move to TV, as long as the artier forms of filmmaking survive I'll be satisfied as I think that's really where films is at its best (and that's true even in what many would consider story-centric films like noirs and westerns).
I think the best noirs and westerns had strong styles/form too, though I think part of what was good in style in those films was how they would use visuals to suggest story information (Beyond general visual pleasures of venetian blind shadows or landscape shots of Monument Valley and so on that had helped create a great tone in a lot of the best of those movies).
Here's my worst nightmare scenario for films today: Take a movie like The Searchers. That movie never outright tells you what Ethan was doing in the Civil War, or that he had an affair of some sort with Debbie's mother, but there's enough there to suggest there's a lot we don't see (And well the latter of which is explicitly mentioned in Ford's script). Nowadays I wonder if instead of suggesting things about Ethan through cinematic style, gestures in actor's performances etc., we would get The Searchers 1 about Ethan's war misadventures and political assassinations or whatever the fuck misgivings he was up to, The Searchers 2 where Ethan has steamy love affair, and then The Searchers 3 Part 1 about Ethan coming home, The Searchers 3 Part 2 about the actual search for Debbie, and then The Searchers 4: The Scar Backstory Movie that gives backstory about Scar and fails at the boxoffice for being a prequel.
Or they could be seasons of a TV series, but at a certain point I have to wonder what expanding and lengthening a story really adds, especially since I think its likely to come at the expense of "putting pressure on directors to supplement with form and style", and that we just end up with a lot of pointless filler as a result that's much less interesting as an explicitly told story.
None of this is to say I wouldn't even enjoy these hypothetical versions of The Searchers, but I fear they would just end up as less dense, worse versions of Ford's classic.
"Prestige" TV at its worst gives you Lost type disasters where there are many pointless detours over 100+ episodes, and I wake up with a cold sweat in the night at the thought of my favorite films being subjected to that hellish format.
Of course the miniseries format a la Evangelion or Berlin Alexanderplatz are a different beast, and I think preferable usually to multiseason shows.
I was including films/westerns in that list of the "potentially arty films" I hope survives, though I realize that wasn't clear from how I worded that. Basically I was saying most would consider them "story-centric" type films, but I think their style is why the best examples have survived so if story-centric films are to survive I hope they're like noirs/westerns and stylized as well. I also agree about the visuals being used to relate story information, which I would include in that whole visual language-as-poetry metaphor.
Yeah, I get what you're saying about that fear, but I think as long as features are being made, directors/writers will be confronted with the question of how to include more content and say things beyond what the time constraints would normally allow. If you're hoping to create any kind of depth with film there has to be that level of suggestion, even if it's how Hitch used to do with his doubling of events/characters to suggest a lot of stuff (or even how much of Jeff's past is related in that opening shot of Rear Window). I'd forgotten how much even directors like The Coens do this; I don't know why it took me so long to realize that in No Country the scene where Chigurh asks the kids for their shirt is paralleled by Llewelyn doing the same thing much earlier. But there's also tons of films that do none of this, that are just trying to tell "what you see is what you get" stories, and THAT, I think, is better suited to a longer format like TV where where you have more runtime and don't have to rely on suggestion, where "text" can say as much as "text+subtext" merely because of time.
Of course, the proliferation of filler is the downside to having more time. More space doesn't mean that more meaningful content is added. This has generally been the reason I haven't watched as much TV, because in the end you often spend 10x more time than you would with films but don't get anywhere close to 10x the substance. Of course, TV works because most people just care about the moment-to-moment drama and as along as TV's delivering that and people are entertained/distracted, the rest doesn't matter. Perhaps one reason stuff like NGE and Dekalog is so remarkable is because of how dense they are given their long runtime. To have that combination of length and density of content/substance is extremely rare.
Raxivace wrote:Yeah, I wouldn't doubt that Nadia is stronger on the character side (it's Anno, afterall, and I don't think character has ever been Miyazaki's strength), but that's not really why I loved Laputa.
I'd say biggest strength of Laputa is in the animation and art style, which is consistently the high point in Miyazaki's work.
Yes, but I also think it's the world-building he does with that animation/art style. It's not the expansive world-building that we get in, say, most RPGs, but I love how he seems to create these bizarre little pocket universes out of very little, even the mundane at times.
Raxivace wrote:Conversely, this scared the living bejeesus out of me as a child. Took me a long time to get around to watching it again. I still think it's amazingly effective even after horror films got far more explicit and gruesome. You also really need to get around to seeing Killer Joe from Friedkin!
Have you seen Sorceror? That's another one from Friedkin I hear is good.
I have not. Looking it up it seems quite similar to The Wages of Fear, which I thought was a near-masterpiece.
Raxivace wrote:Gran Torino is the best example of how laughably bad his actors can be.
I might have to rewatch this because Gran Torino is one where I don't actually remember the acting being bad. I haven't seen that since I was in high school though and that was over a hundred years ago at this point.
Man, I cringe every time I hear that film on TV. My mom loves it so it's on quite a bit and I often hear it when I come over. *shudders*
Raxivace wrote:BTW Jimbo, do you have any thoughts on "block-booking" of all things coming back to life recently here in the States?
I had not heard about this coming back, and TBH the only thing I know about it what I vaguely remember reading in some history of film textbook (Bordwell's?). What do you think?
Raxivace wrote:189. Underworld (1927, Dir. Josef von Sternberg & Arthur Rosson)
Not my favorite of his silents, but I still thought it good and, like you, better than most of his Dietrich collabs.
Raxivace wrote:190. Scarlet Street (1945, Dir. Fritz Lang) -
Solid noir-period Lang. Wish I remembered more but many of those films have ran together a bit in my head.
Raxivace wrote:192. King Lear (1987, Dir. Jean-Luc Godard)
I liked this when I saw it, but I don't remember as much now compared to almost all the other 80s Godard's I saw. Here's what I wrote on IMDb:
King Lear - Jean-Luc Godard - 7/10
Jean-Luc Godard, Burgess Meredith, Molly Ringwald, Woody Allen, Norman Mailer, and William Shakespeare
are names that should never appear in the same sentence, much less the same film. Yet here they are, and by
a not insignificant stroke of genius, it works.
More so than in any of his other 80s films, Godard's King Lear eschews narrative, returning to his 70s
obsessions with images and language. However, it works here primarily because Godard's ability to
deconstruct, to burrow into details, is given the framework via its literary namesake. So when Godard sets
about deconstructing all of the shades of nuanced meaning of “nothing" or “no thing," it makes sense both
intellectually and emotionally. Much like Wallace Stevens wrote NOTES Towards a Supreme Fiction (rather than
a Supreme Fiction), Godard structures the film as a “Study" and “Approach" to King Lear, rather than a filmic
adaptation.
Rather than stop-start music, King Lear finds Godard experimenting with overlapping dialogue and sounds, like
a fragmented fugue, or perhaps more like shattered variations on the theme of King Lear. Along with the
motivic cry of seagulls—sometimes piercingly aggressive, sometimes distantly haunting—and lapping waves
(at the end accompanied by an excerpt from Virginia Woolf's novel, The Waves—one of the film's most
beautiful scenes), Godard creates a truly layered and 3-dimensional soundscape that's arguably as important
as his imagery.
Fewer Godard films have provoked more polarized reactions. Most critics upon its release considered it trash,
truly Godard imploding and scraping the bottom of the barrel, and perhaps his ridiculous appearance as
“Professor Pluggy," his hair a dreadlocked mess of cables, supported that; yet Richard Brody named it the
greatest film of all time, and Jonathan Rosenbaum has also called it one of Godard's masterpieces. Allow me
to tread a middle-ground: King Lear is middling Godard, neither among his worst or best. Godard's best all
have something in common: a kaleidoscopic effect created by their unique combinations of visual beauty,
intellectual density, and tonal complexity. Lear gets the intellectual density, but lags in the visual and tonal
departments, though they do possess both sporadically (the ending is tonally rich; the scene in the editing
room is visually beautiful). It is, however, one of Godard's most distinct films of the 80s that finds him, yet
again, refusing to tread water and fall into easy patterns and modes.
Raxivace wrote:Big thanks to Jimbo for hooking me up a with a copy of this. I flatout could not find a copy of this online myself- even standard piracy does not assure the myth of availability in the digital age.
No problem. :)
Raxivace wrote:198. Die Nibelungen: Kriemheld's Revenge (1924, Dir. Fritz Lang)
I could agree it wasn't quite as strong as the first but I still the both together constituted a masterpiece and probably Lang's best silents outside Metropolis. I remember finding the "olympics" section kinda boring, but the fact that I even remember it probably says how memorable these films were! I do remember liking the whole conflagration bit at the end. I remember wondering at the time if it could've been an influence on Gone With the Wind or Kurosawa.
Raxivace wrote:200. My Neighbor Totoro (1988, Dir. Hayao Miyazaki) - Why is Totoro even in this movie? Like he's barely in it as it is, and his design is really unsettling. With that creepy, big toothed smile of his and those large claws half the time I wondered if he was going to kill one of those kids. Same with the cat bus thing. It's a bus made out of hair, that's disgusting and a probably a health code violation.
Anyways despite usual technical brilliance from Ghibli, this fell pretty flat for me. It just seems a little too saccharine for my tastes.
Strange you'd call this saccharine of all things. I came away thinking it probably one of the least-saccharine children films I'd ever seen. Again, I'd say the wonder/magic of that film is just the subtle world-building. That whole scene of Totoro and the girl at the bus station... just them standing there, nothing else happening, was so good to me. What Miyazaki does in those moments of quiet and stillness is something I've only seen a handful of filmmakers be able to do, including Ghibli-cohort Takahata (but notably directors like Ozu and Hou). Ebert pretty much nailed it in his Great Movies review of it:
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/grea ... otoro-1993
Raxivace wrote:The Kingdom II (1997) -
I wonder how much I'd agree with you if I rewatched The Kingdom today. Back when I saw it I just remember thinking how original it was and enjoying every weird, scary, goofy, funny, minute of it. Whether or not it ever managed to add up to something more (or even less) than the sum of its parts I couldn't say. It probably lacked the depth of Lynch's visionary approach to similar subjects, but that's a pretty lofty standard as it is.
Raxivace wrote:The Witcher (2019) -
This was encouraging to read! Whenever I (eventually!) get back to film/TV this is certainly high on the list!