Just got back from watching Django and I'm very positively surprised. I've never actually seen any Tarantino movie up unitl now, that I actually, genuinely, liked. So that's a first.
Cronenberg is the man. I think he's more interesting than Lynch as a director since he's been able to do big-budget stuff that is good (in my opinion) without sacrificing much of his vision -- though I've heard bad things about the Freud/Jung movie. Lynch is still a goody, though. I just saw a 35mm version of Fellini's 8 1/2. It was so wonderful. Almost every part of it seems perfect to me and damn does it have some superb transitions. I could also talk about Nino Rota's music all day.
Finally saw Looper, which I liked very, very much. Every time travel movie should have two characters sitting at a table telling each other "Don't think too hard about time travel."
You even liked the Otherwise I liked it a lot, especially the rural/urban juxtaposition in regards to proximity. Not particularly special, I just really enjoyed it.
Tonight, I finally made the time for Jean-Luc Godard's maddening, brilliant Weekend. The bluray's been sitting on my shelf for a week, taunting me. Weekend is a movie that unmakes itself as you watch it. Godard had decided mainstream narrative cinema was over, because movies could not react to history quickly enough to matter. So he concocted Weekend, a movie "found on a scrap heap" that sprays bile at every aspect of French culture circa 1967 before proclaiming via end-title card the "END OF CINEMA". As such, it's one of the great pieces of artistic self-immolation, and a perfect coda to Godard's amazing run of movies from 1960 to 1967. There's very little plot here. A bourgeois couple plans a weekend travel to see the woman's parents in order to murder them for inheritance money. Along the way, they hit a traffic jam that forces them off the main road and eventually on foot as civilization begins to crumble around them. The French countryside is littered with cars, often still on fire, and bodies. They run into Giuseppe Balsamo - aka Cagliostro, an 18th century occultist magician - who destroys the physical laws of the universe. They run into Tom Thumb and Emily Bronte, who enrages the couple by speaking poetically, and they burn her alive. Eventually they murder the woman's parents and are taken hostage by cannibal revolutionaries who disembowel the man and mix him in with the rest of the food. It ends with the woman, fully indoctrinated, consuming the last meaty bits of her former husband. So it's a road movie. It's also a political movie (there's a long static scene where an Arab and an African man stare into the camera as they eat while each voices-over the struggle of the other), a treatise on art (a scene at a farmhouse where a man has dragged a piano to play Mozart for the owners and workers as the camera slowly circles around the farm), a surrealist nightmare, a "documentary of the future" presaging the student riots of May 1968 that hadn't happened yet, a condemnation of consumer culture, and a parody of Ingmar Bergman's Persona. The main characters are utterly and purposefully without depth - the only time the woman has any emotion at all is when she realizes her Hermes handbag has melted in a car fire - and exist merely as stand-ins for the entirety of the French middle class. Title cards constantly interrupt the movie, first to introduce characters (Cagliostro is introduced with a card that reads "The Exterminating Angel") or establish time, then later as a car speedometer, until finally the cards are reduced to single words and letters that may or may not have any meaning at all. Distancing techniques like incongruous music swells that cover dialog, sounds dropping in and out, or car horns blaring blanket the movie. The movie uses violence first as darkly comedic and overtly, theatrically fake, but ends with the on-screen slaughtering of animals. This is a movie that is trying everything in it's considerable power to get you to hate it. And for many people, it worked. I remember seeing it in a film class where at remarkably common intervals, groups of people would just get up and leave the screening. (First wave was during the traffic jam, which is a nine-minute long (composite) tracking shot with no dialogue or music and the constant blaring of car horns. Second wave was when they lit Emily Bronte on fire. Third wave was the rabbit. Fourth wave was when the revolutionaries slit a pig's throat and bleed it out.) To me, though, it's so angry and perverse I can't help but... well, love is a strong word. But I think it's one of the craziest, wildest achievement in movie history. It's the most punk rock movie ever made.
Saw a sneak preview of the latest Statham flick last night, Parker. I can say with no reservations it is completely mediocre and almost amateurish in its direction, editing, and plot but it was free so I'm not gonna bitch about it too much. You will not regret not seeing it though.
Nice to see my ability to guess that movie's quality from the commercials has been confirmed. Edit looked like the most basic and uncreative by the numbers movie I had ever seen.
I'm the sort of loser that only sees reruns on public access television, so I've been watching the Indiana Jones marathon for days. It's like the broadcasters went on vacation and they just set the first movie trilogy i deny the fourth movie they could find on a loop. But I still love the movies. My favorite series that Spielberg has done.
Yeah, normal broadcast TV is great for when you don't know what you want to watch and then you coast past some lame channels and go, whoa, is that Conan the Barbarian? And end up watching it.
Just watched Iron Man 2. Like, apparently, everyone else, I didn't think it was as good as the first one. But more to the point it was unnecessary. I didn't really learn anything new about Tony Stark, nor did the story offer any setup to The Avengers.
Get out! Lucky bastard... Anyway, I went with the fam to see Life of Pi this evening. No, I had never read the book, so I had no preconceptions, but I didn't find the screenplay all that engaging. And the acting was merely adequate. But the visuals, man, they were sumptuous! It was like an Indian-inflected mashup of Castaway and The Fountain. And, it must be said, possibly the best implementation of 3D I've yet seen. With few exceptions, it served only to add depth to the image and draw the viewer into the scene, rather than launching a frontal assault on the senses.
Last night: The sadly overlooked Matinee, a very cute Joe Dante movie about a William Castle-esque figure who swings into a town in the Florida Keys to premiere his latest atomic-age monster movie during the Cuban Missle Crisis. So, yeah, maybe a little high-concept for your average moviegoer in 1993. More so than even Gremlins 2: The New Batch, it's almost impossible to figure out who Joe Dante thought Matinee was for except him and a tiny handful of movie-obsessed nerds like myself. So, of course, nobody saw it. Which is a shame, because while it's basically a coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of imminent nuclear annihilation, it's also very funny and treats both it's characters and subject matter with warmth. Rose-colored warmth, sure, but warmth all the same. It's also in my fave movie-nerd genre: Movies about movies. John Goodman plays the William Castle role, capturing Castle at the absolute height of his popularity when (for a while) he was a contemporary and rival to Hitchcock. (For those who don't know, Castle was a schlock movie producer who's movies all came with gimmicks to get people in the theatre - everything from tinted glasses that would "remove" certain characters from the movie if you were too scared, or having the patrons sign a (fake) disclosure that the wouldn't sue the filmmakers if they died from fright, or wiring some of the chairs in the theatre with electric buzzers to shock people during specific points of the movie. He wasn't so much a filmmaker as he was a carnival barker, and his movies were very much in the dumb-but-fun vein.) Goodman revels in the character and delivers a great performance. There's really not much too it except to say that I loved it when I saw it originally back in 1993 (I think), and I loved it just as much last night.
I have seen Matinee no less than a dozen dozen times. Probably more. At one point I managed a video store and it is one of the movies I would play on the "big" screen. The wife and I decided to have an animated double feature last night. Paranorman and The Lorax. I enjoyed both of them, though probably Paranorman a little more because of it's stop motion and it's art style. I also thought it handled the subject of bullying very well. The Lorax was, of course, a bit heavy handed with its environmental message, but still worth watching in my opinion.
This weekend's movies: Punisher: War Zone - bonkers. I would have ended up skipping it, but I happened across discussions elsewhere that led me to the How Did This Get Made? podcast episode on it. I dug it. Frank Castle Vs. Parkour is a particular highlight. The Monitors - late 60's attempt at light sci-fi satire, and trapped-in-amber product of the time. Looper - It was good, but as with all time-travel movies, it's best not to think too deeply into the actual details.
Eraserhead. I'm pretty sure I didn't actually enjoy it. It has to be one of the most important films I've ever seen, though. I don't think I've ever seen anything that lays down quite so clearly that film-making is a pure artform in the same way as any other. It's the visual and the performing arts as one full soul, brought together for our pleasure. I did a quick search to see if anyone else has mentioned it, and madkevin brought it up as an example of a work without internal consistency, which I completely agree with. It's got a logical structure in as much as you can say what happens, but there's no way you can tell me why or what it actually is. That's the key thing about Eraserhead. It presents in a cinematic fashion a complete panoply of ideas without being overly concerned by what's actually going on. It's interested in what you, the viewer, bring to the film, and Lynch has borne that out in an apparent silence over what he was really doing here. Take The Man in the Planet. Is he David Lynch, setting his creation into motion and then unable to stop it as it starts to terrify even him? Is he a Creator? Is he a manipulator, a marionette creator? Is he Henry's conscience? The simplicity of what seems to happen and the perfectly normal and acceptable nature of everything slides in and out of this febrile world where the body is something horrendous to be shut down, that my teeth were on edge the entire film due to the incredible sound-scape. There's something almost Old Testament about parts of the film. It almost feels like bits of it bristle with a distant rage; the way the father's voice rises to scream blood and thunder and the world's hackles raise up with him before he is shut down as quickly by life itself. Henry himself is such a character, completely in thrall to his emotionless state. I'm still not sure who he is, but what happens to him has some messages. About fatherhood; the childish nature of Henry and Mary speaks of the terror of growing old, or mediocrity, or something. I'm struggling to say what I really think about the film because like so much great art, it's mysterious and opaque in my hands. It's a hard work, I think, and an interesting one. I would be more than happy if anyone more knowledgeable wants to talk about it or point me in the direction of some discussions I might otherwise miss. There's a tacit admission in there that I have to do some serious reading about Eraserhead. I'm finding it a bit strange and wonderful that a film I don't think I want to watch again makes me want to read the bones it has cast. Big difference, from what I've seen, is that Lynch is an artist using film as his medium. Cronenberg seems to be a film-maker making art.
Yeah, I agree. You do that, you're there all day making diagrams with straws. Although I did watch Pusher for the first time recently and trying to puzzle that one out and reading all manner of explanations afterward was both maddening and enjoyable, so maybe the sheer level of confusion there makes it an exception.
Noooooo kidding. I don't think I've ever enjoyed not enjoying a movie more than Eraserhead. As to what it all means.... Who knows? Eraserhead is David Lynch at his most primal, with not even the lip service to conventional cinema he gives in even his more out-there works that followed. It's pure, unfiltered id, presented in a way that's utterly unique to David Lynch. The only real analog here is Luis Bunuel, who made the surrealist landmark films Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or with Salvador Dali and then followed his own twisted, brilliant muse throughout a very tumultuous career. But Bunuel even at his craziest had a political dimension that Lynch's Eraserhead completely lacks. Eraserhead takes the tools from the dadists and surrealists and turns them entirely inward. Eraserhead is so personal that it's difficult to know what it's even about in it's broadest strokes. Fear of fatherhood? A visual poem about the dangers of industrialization on the human psyche? A landscape of Freudian sexual repression? Who knows? Eraserhead is a Rorschach test of a movie - the harder you try to divine any sort of sense out of it, the more it simply reflects back your own fears/desires. Roger Ebert, in one of the rare instances where I completely agree with him, described Lynch's Lost Highway as a movie made with a "painter's intelligence", and I think that's the key to Lynch and Eraserhead: Lynch puts together images and sound* in a way that makes artistic sense but not a logical sense. I never feel in Eraserhead that it's just entirely random images, but I also never feel that Lynch would be able to put into words why Eraserhead even exists. (Wisely, in my opinion, he's never really talked about any sort of meaning behind Eraserhead at all. Take that as you will.) It moves like a nightmare. I don't know if I like it, either. I've never known if I like it. I find Lynch to be mostly a maddening film-maker, because when he clicks for me (like he did in Mulholland Dr. or Blue Velvet), I think he's a genius. But he doesn't click all the time, and when he doesn't I hate him. Eraserhead does both. * And how about that sound design in Eraserhead? I think more than even the insane visuals, the sound of Eraserhead is what stays with me. There's something so menacing and horrible about it, like a horror movie set to an early Test Dept. album or something. The sound is maybe the most oppressive thing about it.
Primer couldn't hold my attention at the time, so I ended up picking up my tablet and spent attention on it instead. Which definitely didn't help my understanding of the movie.
That's something that really struck me, but in an oblique way. The film is packed full of things, of images and ideas without telling what each one really is. I imagine that's the reason the film gave me such a start. I didn't expect something so curious and artistic to provoke me like this, especially as the film is presented in such a terrifying way. I completely agree. Lost Highway made very little sense when taken as is stands, but the film gives you the strangest feelings about whatever is happening. I guess that's where Lynch gets his 'creepy' reputation. He's channeling images directly from somewhere else, it feels like, and the way everything fits together is so completely bizarre and beautiful. I saw that he hadn't spoken about the film, and you might have a point about Lynch understanding his own film. It's far, far less of a linear story than any film with cut-up storylines or 'clever' plotting. It feels a bit like an organic mess of nerves and fibres that Lynch picks over highlighting a deformed memory or an emotion as he requires. It's almost indescribable (possibly just to an inexperienced person like myself). 'Moves like a nightmare' is such a perfect description of the film. Something about it doesn't quite feel right although the entire piece seems correct. I only regret that I have but one like to give for your post. This bit in particular. The background is what put me on edge, too. The soundtrack is something else. It's like a industrial being of concrete, alive and breathing and reacting to the characters. I still don't know if I like it either. The overwhelming memory I have of Blue Velvet is a kind of bewitched revulsion. I don't know if that means I like Lynch or that I recognise that he's working in different ways to everyone else.
I'm glad I watched Awake before Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I'm not sure I would ever have been able to forget that. I'm also glad I watched Suits before that movie, though Louis may now always be Snape to me. And they're not even the same guy. They're just, y'know, interchangeable physically is all. Nelson and Corbett and Murphy can get off their fat asses and do the last two movies in the series, though. I hate this horrible incomplete feeling.
I watched My Week With Marilyn, and it was a delightful little movie. Eddie Redmayne is great, as is Michelle Williams, and pretty much everyone else.
I watched Sinister because I am a sucker for anything in the horror genre and it got a few good reviews. Ethan Hawke gives a solid performance, but the rest of the film was bogged down by lots of easily recognizable influences (O HAI THE RING) and some lazy scares (things jumping out, etc). Disclaimer: I feel like I've seen a dozen Western horror movies about supernatural evil and children in the last few years to where it bores me to tears, so YMMV. I also watched Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale which is a Finnish horror/black comedy movie about evil Santa Claus and is exactly as wacky as it sounds. Dug it.
You mean something like Design For Living? That was the most recent one. Throughout the years I've seen most of his better-known movies: The Shop Around The Corner, Ninotchka, To Be Or Not To Be, Heaven Can Wait, the awesomely pre-Code Trouble In Paradise.
I just watched Death Proof for the first time as a contiguous movie on blu ray on a 52" screen vs an interrupted film on Iraqi bootleg on a 3.5" lcd screen. It benefited greatly from the upgrade. Some dips in quality in terms of actors being chosen for their appearance rather than skill and chemistry (especially with the women talking in cars) aside, I really enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to. I think in the end it's a much more interesting movie than Planet Terror, although I like them both a great deal and I appreciate Rodriguez' stricter adherence to the aesthetic vs. Tarantino's near-pathological obsession with authentic car stunts over all else. It's probably the only recent movie anchored around a car chase that I've enjoyed because of the chase, as opposed to despite it. The making of stuff on the disc is really good, and the sound work/score was excellent as usual. Also, with respect to the earlier question of why The Big Year got made: my assumption is that the director assumed that Christopher Guest movies can be recreated by following a formula rather than having a genuine sense of how to mix comedy with empathy for your subjects, and that stapling on has-beens is the same as making a lot out of under-used actors. Even then, there were some promising bits to the first half of the film, but the entire second half is entirely unforgiveable.
