Movies: Last Movie You Watched and Rate it | {Insert Appropriate Seasonal Greeting Here}

[ProstheticConscience]

That time again. In the last year here, we've had fires, record heat, flooding to the degree that this city was completely cut off from the rest of Canada for a while...what else is there in store for us here on the loony left coast? Raining frogs? Boils? Locusts? While we wait for whatever the next Biblical plague is to befall us, we continue to watch movies. Because why not.

Last thread way above 1k, last page here:

Movies: - Last Movie You Watched and Rate It | Cinema at the End of the World Edition

-------------------------------------------------------------

Ichi the Killer

with seriously f***ed up Japanese people.

The mean, mean streets of Shinjuku are awash in prostitutes, drugs, pimps, psychotic Yakuza henchmen, and one very, very messed up hitman called Ichi. He may have bladed boots with which he can (and does) kick people literally in half, but he's very unhappy. He's either desperately smiling or crying his eyes out, whether witnessing sexual assault, murder or various other horrors. His latest job has been to splatter a Yakuza boss all over his apartment, but by the next day all traces of the atrocity have vanished, along with a good chunk of the gang's money. Enter Kakihara, a flamboyant, bleached blonde S&M freak/Yakuza lieutenant who's extremely pissed off that his boss just disappeared. Superiors and underlings alike are all quite rightly terrified of this guy, and believe me, you do *not* want him after you. But the whole situation is being manipulated by a shadowy outsider for shadowy outsider reasons. Blood, ultraviolence, graphic torture, paraphilia and other fun stuff happens. Yeah. Wow.

This one really sticks with you. Banned in several countries, and it's not hard to understand why. Take a Japanese sadist, strap him to a chair Clockwork Orange-style and make him watch Quentin Tarantino movies for a few weeks, and you'd come up with something like this if you let him direct a movie. You're right up in there for the torture scenes. Also has weirdly incongruous cartoonish, slapsticky moments, but graphic violence is the order of the day. Not really sure if you'd call it a good movie, but it's certainly an impactful one. Definitely not for the squeamish.

On Prime. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Barely a human resources violation to this guy.

Click to read more...

 

[Pink Mist]

Comets / კომეტები (Tamar Shavgulidze, 2019)

I haven’t seen many contemporary films from Georgia (the country not the American state), but all of them are what you could classify as “slow cinema”. They all move at a very deliberate pace, with mostly long static shots, and are highly contemplative and philosophical. It seems like there is a burgeoning slow cinema movement in Georgia, or at least that’s what Mubi would have me believe since that’s where I have been introduced to most of the films from Georgia that I have seen. Comets is a 71 minute film which follows two childhood friends who are reunited after three decades of separation when one of them returns to their small rural community. Their reunion brings up memories and complex feelings of their teenage lesbian love affair as the one who has stayed settled into a traditional heterosexual life in the Georgian village while the other is returning for the first time since moving abroad as a university student. Despite the film’s brief runtime, the film is sloooooow but never boring or unengaging. Featuring long drawn out conversation spliced with memories and flashbacks of their friendship and relationship in the old days, the film is a reflection of what things could have been and of enduring desire. There is a rich and tense atmosphere in the film with both of the characters displaying their conflicted emotions through things both said and unsaid, which is why the long shots work so well as it allows the actors to believably play out these conversations. The final 12 minutes of this film is an odd ball though as the film abruptly becomes an avant-garde sci-fi film that doesn’t really work and is a bit of a misstep. I get what Shavgulidze was getting at but that change in plot didn't work for me.

Worth checking out if you have the patience, Georgia has one of the more interesting emerging film scenes going on right now and this is a decent entry into it.

 

[Pink Mist]

Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)

Like most transition periods, the late silent film/ early sound era is one of the more interesting eras in film to me. The transition to sound is undoubtedly the most significant advancement in film history, but it is not just interesting to me because sound was introduced but because I feel that auteurs in the silent era had only just mastered the cinematic language of the silent era in the 1920s with a lot of innovative filmmaking tricks and effects when the introduction of sound and having to compensate for microphones caused them to think on their feet again on to effectively use this new element in their picture without losing the energy and creativity of the silent era. Obviously there where a lot of mixed results as many filmmakers basically just made recorded theatre plays in the early sound era that have not aged well today and are static, boring and lifeless, but some filmmakers used sound with some creative results.

Blackmail is Alfred Hitchcock’s first talkie and he actually made two versions of this film, one silent and one in sound (I haven’t seen the silent version, but there are copies out there). Blackmail starts off like a silent film, it keeps the cinematic language of the silent era and is completely wordless for the first 5 minutes or so. I was beginning to think I had accidently watched the silent version until sound very subtly gets introduced before a cacophony of sound takes over leaving me no doubt that this is indeed a film with sound. The film is about a woman who secretly leaves her beau who is a detective to go on a date with an artist. When the artist rapes her at his apartment during the date, she murders him and tries to leave the crime scene unnoticed – of course despite her best efforts she is still seen and makes her ripe for blackmailing. The plot itself is a fairly standard thriller and it moves at a brisk pace, but its by no means Hitchcock’s best. It feels like an early experimentation of ideas and tricks Hitchcock would master in later films; a keen eye will see a lot of references to things he uses in some of his masterpieces. But as an early talkie, it is one of the better ones I’ve seen from that era.



One of the oddities of this film is that Hitchcock decided to dub over star Annie Ondra's voice because they thought the Czech born actress didn't speak convincing English. Despite her clearly sounding fine in my opinion. That video is probably also one of the first "That's what she said" jokes recorded on screen

 

[Warden of the North]

The Eternals 6/10

My majors issues with it are that it doesn't fit in the MCU. The retconning they chose to go with to try and make it fit made it even more complicated.

 

[Spring in Fialta]

That time again. In the last year here, we've had fires, record heat, flooding to the degree that this city was completely cut off from the rest of Canada for a while...what else is there in store for us here on the loony left coast? Raining frogs? Boils? Locusts? While we wait for whatever the next Biblical plague is to be set forth, we continue to watch movies. Because why not.

Last thread way above 1k, last page here:

Movies: - Last Movie You Watched and Rate It | Cinema at the End of the World Edition

-------------------------------------------------------------

Ichi the Killer

with seriously f***ed up Japanese people.

The mean, mean streets of Shinjuku are awash in prostitutes, drugs, pimps, psychotic Yakuza henchmen, and one very, very messed up hitman called Ichi. He may have bladed boots with which he can (and does) kick people literally in half, but he's very unhappy. He's either desperately smiling or crying his eyes out, whether witnessing sexual assault, murder or various other horrors. His latest job has been to splatter a Yakuza boss all over his apartment, but by the next day all traces of the atrocity have vanished, along with a good chunk of the gang's money. Enter Kakihara, a flamboyant, bleached blonde S&M freak/Yakuza lieutenant who's extremely pissed off that his boss just disappeared. Superiors and underlings alike are all quite rightly terrified of this guy, and believe me, you do *not* want him after you. But the whole situation is being manipulated by a shadowy outsider for shadowy outsider reasons. Blood, ultraviolence, graphic torture and other fun stuff happen. Yeah. Wow.

This one really sticks with you. Banned in several countries, and it's not hard to understand why. Take a Japanese sadist, strap him to a chair Clockwork Orange-style and make him watch Quentin Tarantino movies for a few weeks, and you'd come up with something like this if you let him direct a movie. You're right up in there for the torture scenes. Also has weirdly incongruous cartoonish, slapsticky moments, but graphic violence is the order of the day. Not really sure if you'd call it a good movie, but it's certainly an impactful one. Definitely not for the squeamish.

On Prime. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Barely a human resources violation to this guy.

The special effects are complete shit but I thought it was a very good film. The Japanese prostitute who speaks impeccable English while every thug around her speaks in Japanese is such a pleasant, stylish sonic touch. And great caption.

 

[Osprey]

Breathless (1960) - 4/10 (Disliked it)

A self-centered street criminal on the run pressures a girl to have sex and flee the country with him. This landmark French film didn't entertain or impress me, unfortunately. There isn't much of a plot and I didn't find the characters interesting. The lead, especially, is a jerk who thinks that he's cool and talks about being in love with this nice girl, but really just wants to sleep with her. She's more likable, but no attempt is made to explain why someone like her tolerates someone like him. She's reluctant to give up her newspaper job and her independence to run away with him, yet she's not surprised to learn that he's a thief and a murderer, lies to the police for him, continues to be around him and even steals a car with him. It doesn't make much sense. It's a "crime drama," but I didn't sense much suspense or drama until maybe the final scene. The middle act of the film was particularly boring because it's just one long, nearly half-hour conversation in a bedroom in which he asks over and over for sex and for her to run away with him. What the film is most famous for are its jump cuts (ex. girl starts to cross the street, then suddenly appears on the other side in the same shot, as though she teleported), but I just found them silly and distracting. There's a reason why they weren't and still aren't done much. I got the feeling that the film was more an experiment in rebelling against filmmaking conventions than an attempt to tell a good story. In fact, director Godard said that the film's success was a mistake, so I suppose that he really was just trying to express his rebelliousness as a filmmaker rather than try to make something that audiences would actually enjoy. I pushed through it to the end because it's on some lists of the greatest films ever made. I don't feel that historical importance makes something great, though; see Hitler. On the bright side, it was nice seeing the streets and sights of Paris in 1960.

 

[ItsFineImFine]

Princess Cyd (2017) - 6.5/10

Mediocre indie film with a lacklustre lead. Rebecca Spence can act though, she should be bigger. Slice of life films are only good when there's good mumblecore dialogue in there, this has a lot of weird awkward conversations with some redeeming scenes and stillness which make it worth a watch.

 

[Puck]

Breathless (1960) - 4/10 (Disliked it)

Saw it many years ago in college, it's a French New Wave classic. Too bad you did not like it but I am impressed you took the time to see it. Belmondo passed away a few months ago.

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

Breathless (1960) - 4/10 (Disliked it)

A self-centered street criminal on the run pressures a girl to have sex and flee the country with him. This landmark French film didn't entertain or impress me, unfortunately. There isn't much of a plot and I didn't find the characters interesting. The lead, especially, is a jerk who thinks that he's cool and talks about being in love with this nice girl, but really just wants to sleep with her. She's more likable, but no attempt is made to explain why someone like her tolerates someone like him. She's reluctant to give up her newspaper job and her independence to run away with him, yet she's not surprised to learn that he's a thief and a murderer, lies to the police for him, continues to be around him and even steals a car with him. It doesn't make much sense. It's a "crime drama," but I didn't sense much suspense or drama until maybe the final scene. The middle act of the film was particularly boring because it's just one long, nearly half-hour conversation in a bedroom in which he asks over and over for sex and for her to run away with him. What the film is most famous for are its jump cuts (ex. girl starts to cross the street, then suddenly appears on the other side in the same shot, as though she teleported), but I just found them silly and distracting. There's a reason why they weren't and still aren't done much. I got the feeling that the film was more an experiment in rebelling against filmmaking conventions than an attempt to tell a good story. In fact, director Godard said that the film's success was a mistake, so I suppose that he really was just trying to express his rebelliousness as a filmmaker rather than try to make something that audiences would actually enjoy. I pushed through it to the end because it's on some lists of the greatest films ever made. I don't feel that historical importance makes something great, though; see Hitler. On the bright side, it was nice seeing the streets and sights of Paris in 1960.

Saw it many years ago in college, it's a French New Wave classic. Too bad you did not like it but I am impressed you took the time to see it. Belmondo passed away a few months ago.

I'm not much of a fan of À bout de souffle either, and I think it's one of Godard's least interesting films - which says more about his other films than this one, I guess. Making a film à la sauce américaine, with some deadpan and typically French humor, was probably a good idea, but the result just ain't that compelling (to me anyway). On the other hand, the film is a technical masterpiece, the freedom manifesto that filmmaking was needing. The jump cuts were made the 'big thing' in this, and were instrumentalized as a way to shortened the film, but they're only part of the formal rethinking of fiction film (borrowing from neorealism, but also - and more importantly - from cinéma direct and what would be known as cinéma vérité - Godard would even end up in Québec a few years later for an ambitious TV project that would never succeed but that would still revolutionized the TV medium, opening way to the first community TV). I agree with Osprey that historical importance does not make something great, but in this case, even if the film ain't much fun, you have to admit that it's a great and unique film, which had a great and unique impact on things to come. Citizen Kane is freakin' boring, but put back in context, it's a masterpiece (narratively and technically). I think the same can be said here (difference is, Godard will continue to outdo himself - had he made something like Bande à part in 1960, it would have been even more impressive - and Welles will never do anything close to CK again). As Osprey's scale is based on enjoyment, a 4 is probably right on. On importance alone, the film is a 10. I tend to rate films according to their joyous impact on my little brain, how much I'd have to say about them or how much they got my méninges to flex, in a pleasurable way, and so À bout de souffle is a tough one to rate and I'd probably have it around 7.

 

[Pink Mist]

Breathless (1960) - 4/10 (Disliked it)

She's more likable, but no attempt is made to explain why someone like her tolerates someone like him. She's reluctant to give up her newspaper job and her independence to run away with him.

I can never think about Breathless without thinking about Jean Seberg yelling "New York Herald Tribune, New York Herald Tribune!". For some reason it's ingrained in my mind

 

[Pink Mist]

Taming the Garden / მოთვინიერება (Salomé Jashi, 2021)

This is one of the more surreal and stranger than fiction documentaries I’ve seen in a while.

In Georgia, a billionaire tycoon, and briefly the Prime Minister of Georgia, Bidzina Ivanishvili, has a personal project in buying trees from across the rural Georgian country side. And I don’t mean buying the seeds for the trees, or some sampling, or the timber from the trees. I mean he buys entire giant 15 story tall trees, roots and all, and transports it across Georgia and then replants these massive trees into his private arboretum. It is absolutely absurd to see these giant trees being rooted out and then transported by truck and sea, both in terms of the ecological absurdity of it and in a visual sense. It is breathtaking to see the huge trees being transported on a container ship surrounded by the vast sea, like a miniature island from the distance, and breathtaking to see the arrogance of offering $40,000 to a someone in poverty in rural Georgia to take a tree by the roots that was planted generations ago in the family and leave a gaping hole in their property where the tree once stood. It really is a tale of the capitalist claim over nature and how money truly can buy anything at the expense of others. The visuals in Taming the Garden are beautiful; visually one of the better cinematography I’ve seen in a documentary in a long time, and there is also a keen eye for detail in the soundscape that immerses the viewer into the process of moving these trees. The film is patient and slow, very much a procedural documentary without any talking heads - almost anthropological - as we just watch the workers figure out how to dig up and move the trees as well as the reactions of those who have sold their trees (some mourn the loss of the tree that’s was planted by their great-grandparents, other’s celebrate the money they got from a tree that they wanted to get rid of anyway). But the film ends with a clear statement in the contrast between the craters left by these lost trees in the rural countryside and the opulence of the arboretum of the wealthy billionaire who is unseen in the film but whose presence is felt like a vampire hanging just out of sight.

 

[Chili]

Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)

There are some great interviews around that Hitch gave, part of one here with Franҫois Truffault (talking about Blackmail) if you haven't heard it:

Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut (Aug/1962) - Part 3 - The Alfred Hitchcock Wiki

I watched one interview from the Dick Cavett show 1972 recently, covering a lot of topics. Interesting his favorite of his own films was Shadow of a Doubt.

 

[Osprey]

Taming the Garden / მოთვინიერება (Salomé Jashi, 2021)

This is one of the more surreal and stranger than fiction documentaries I’ve seen in a while.

In Georgia, a billionaire tycoon, and briefly the Prime Minister of Georgia, Bidzina Ivanishvili, has a personal project in buying trees from across the rural Georgian country side. And I don’t mean buying the seeds for the trees, or some sampling, or the timber from the trees. I mean he buys entire giant 15 story tall trees, roots and all, and transports it across Georgia and then replants these massive trees into his private arboretum. It is absolutely absurd to see these giant trees being rooted out and then transported by truck and sea, both in terms of the ecological absurdity of it and in a visual sense. It is breathtaking to see the huge trees being transported on a container ship surrounded by the vast sea, like a miniature island from the distance, and breathtaking to see the arrogance of offering $40,000 to a someone in poverty in rural Georgia to take a tree by the roots that was planted generations ago in the family and leave a gaping hole in their property where the tree once stood. It really is a tale of the capitalist claim over nature and how money truly can buy anything at the expense of others. The visuals in Taming the Garden are beautiful; visually one of the better cinematography I’ve seen in a documentary in a long time, and there is also a keen eye for detail in the soundscape that immerses the viewer into the process of moving these trees. The film is patient and slow, very much a procedural documentary without any talking heads - almost anthropological - as we just watch the workers figure out how to dig up and move the trees as well as the reactions of those who have sold their trees (some mourn the loss of the tree that’s was planted by their great-grandparents, other’s celebrate the money they got from a tree that they wanted to get rid of anyway). But the film ends with a clear statement in the contrast between the craters left by these lost trees in the rural countryside and the opulence of the arboretum of the wealthy billionaire who is unseen in the film but whose presence is felt like a vampire hanging just out of sight.

That reminds me of the movie Silent Running. Life on Earth is dying and we want to save certain species of trees and plant them on another world, so do we collect a shoebox full of seeds and stow it in the corner of a small spacecraft? No, we uproot full-grown trees and ecosystems, plant them in these huge greenhouses the size of hockey arenas, strap nuclear rockets to them and send those into space, instead. I wonder if the documentary's billionaire is a fan of the movie.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

I've also been dabbling in some Hitchcock lately (thanks Criterion) but my interest has been on his later films. It wasn't by deliberate plan, but I wound up watching a pair of Cold War spy thrillers, Torn Curtain (which I posted about already) and Topaz and a pair sadomasochistic-tinged thrillers in Marnie and Frenzy.

Two unifying characteristics jumped out to me:
1) They're all pretty talk heavy, particularly for exposition and especially Marnie and Frenzy which have entire scenes that are basically the reviled doctor at the end of Psycho moment. Hitch is enough of a troll that some of this might be meant as a playful jest, but it didn't do much for me in any context.

2) Even when the movie as a whole may not work, he always has a scene or two or three that just grabs you by your shirt and says, "Watch this, dammit!" Marnie was my least favorite of this quartet, but there's an undeniably masterful safe robbery sequence in the middle of the movie.

I thought Torn Curtain needed to either be lighter or heavier, but didn't work as its existing calibration.

On paper, Topaz is the exact sort of movie I love, but I thought the story was plodding and characters are pretty flat. Hitchcock was born to depict spy craft though.

Frenzy was my favorite of the lot. It finally lets Hitchcock turn subtext into text in regards to sex and violence. The meanest and nastiest film of his I've seen. It's a mystery built not around who did it, but who didn't. As with the others, it drags at times with some long, plodding conversation scenes, but there's a running comic relief bit with a wife's cooking that consistently made me laugh. Natural double feature with Psycho.

I feel like I will need to give Marnie a go again somewhere down the line. There's a lot of legit interesting writing about that movie and the openly f***ed-up relationship at its heart. But I was mostly bored and thought poor Tippi Hedren was outright bad in her moments of trauma. On my first pass I thought it was more corny than anything. Its defenders may drag me back to it one day. But it'll be a while.

 

[Pink Mist]

That reminds me of the movie Silent Running. Life on Earth is dying and we want to save certain species of trees and plant them on another world, so do we collect a shoebox full of seeds and stow it in the corner of a small spacecraft? No, we uproot full-grown trees and ecosystems, plant them in these huge greenhouses the size of hockey arenas, strap nuclear rockets to them and send those into space, instead. I wonder if the documentary's billionaire is a fan of the movie.

Good question, there definitely are a lot of parallels in the thinking and it definitely seems like an idea lifted from science fiction.

To the billionaire's credit he did open his private arboretum to the public for free and it is an impressive looking garden but it's impossible to look past the environmental impact of creating it. And it wasn't just trees from Georgia he brought to the park, he shipped trees from every continent in the world this way.

 

[Spring in Fialta]

I love Breathless. I think it's very fun and funny.

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

Back by popular demand, gialli #36 & 37 were similar on a lot of levels, and both very unique - in all the wrong ways.

Delirio Caldo (Delirium, Polselli, 1972) – Pronto! Pronto!!!! This one really owns its title (Hot Delirium). Absurdity has been brilliantly exploited by quite a few directors, but in calculated ways that weren't, in themselves, absurd. Now this film poses a different challenge. The story is pretty simple, and somewhat close to the common giallo: an impotent (of course) man with a fetish for strangulation eliminates a series of (mostly naked) women. The killer (played by former Mr. Universe Mickey Hargitay in a straight role where he never once shows off his muscles - he ends up shirtless in one scene, but he's framed from the shoulders up) is revealed right away, so the “mystery”revolves around the identity of a second killer, who strikes strategically whenever the guilty psychologist might be suspected (the killer works with the police to try and identify himself, a job he seems to be taking seriously – he even sets a trap up to catch himself, and falls for it (!) resigned to surrender himself, but he's saved by that damn second killer). The killer also has the most comprehensive wife ever, who's well aware of his acts, and offers her neck to his murdering hands, understanding his fetish (at some point he tortures her with some roller – if anybody ever sees this film, please explain). The wife has the most absurd erotico-surreal dreams of torture and lesbianism, and they make it pretty obvious all along that she's the second killer, but is she? Enters the niece/lover, and an amazing gaslighting scene where the two women hear voices in the house and roll on the floor screaming in terror only to realize it's coming from a tape recorder two feet away from them (we'll never know who was responsible or why that tape was played either). The killer has squeaky shoes, one suspects swears and insults everybody in a terrible English (and comedy bits has him trying to kill a fly while calling the police), even the maid's cleavage is funny, and the soundtrack is mostly made of howling/moaning and bells. This is a gem, and the actors really give it their all. People from Québec might remember Le coeur a ses raisons, a TV pastiche show that mostly worked on ludicrous overacting – at times this ain't far from the same, done seriously. I don't think you should ever watch this, it's a terrible, terrible film, but I had a lot of fun with it and certainly will go back to it. My rating scale puts this type of films all together as SO Bad It's Good films, just know this one is particularly good. 1/10

Le coeur a ses raisons (for reference):

Spoiler

Le Foto di Gioia (Delirium, Bava, 1987) – There's no relation between the two movies, except that they're both poor gialli with a penchant for erotica. Delirium (1972) ends on a montage of nude photos of some of its characters, unrelated to the movie (of course). Delirium (1987) opens the same way, but here the photos are the introduction to our main characters, photographers and models (and a rear window neighbor wheelchair voyeur), making the film feel like soft core porn from the get-go. And then the crippled voyeur calls. Now I don't know if it's the translation (I have a dubbed version and at no point after that in the film does this type of crude dialogues appear), but this goes south fast. If you want a trashy film that's really comfortable being trash, I guess that's a pretty solid option. The subjective camera from the killer's pov tries to go weird (blue to red saturation, surreal hallucinations of the victims' faces as giant eyeballs or insects), but it's too late and you can only receive the film as kitsch and coarse. Themes are up my alley (with lots of reflexivity, most of it from the use of images, film sets, photo equipment, but a few more playful elements, like Serena Grandi telling George Eastman “You'll be a villain 'til the day you die” – he played the villain in her very first film, Joe D'Amato's infamous Anthropophagus), but nothing's used interestingly. There should be a register of all impotent giallo killers – it kind of kills the intrigue (not that it matters much, the film banks on heavy breasted ladies more than on narrative achievement). It's a SoBIG movie too, if you're in the mood for trash – just not as good or funny or interesting as the previous one. Lamberto Bava has been the assistant of some of the best Italian horror directors (including his father, but also Dario Argento and Ruggero Deodato for Cannibal Holocaust), but he only really did one interesting film himself, Demons (and its sequel, which is not too far from being a remake). 1/10

 

[Spring in Fialta]

Breathless (1960) - 4/10 (Disliked it)

A self-centered street criminal on the run pressures a girl to have sex and flee the country with him. This landmark French film didn't entertain or impress me, unfortunately. There isn't much of a plot and I didn't find the characters interesting. The lead, especially, is a jerk who thinks that he's cool and talks about being in love with this nice girl, but really just wants to sleep with her. She's more likable, but no attempt is made to explain why someone like her tolerates someone like him. She's reluctant to give up her newspaper job and her independence to run away with him, yet she's not surprised to learn that he's a thief and a murderer, lies to the police for him, continues to be around him and even steals a car with him. It doesn't make much sense. It's a "crime drama," but I didn't sense much suspense or drama until maybe the final scene. The middle act of the film was particularly boring because it's just one long, nearly half-hour conversation in a bedroom in which he asks over and over for sex and for her to run away with him. What the film is most famous for are its jump cuts (ex. girl starts to cross the street, then suddenly appears on the other side in the same shot, as though she teleported), but I just found them silly and distracting. There's a reason why they weren't and still aren't done much. I got the feeling that the film was more an experiment in rebelling against filmmaking conventions than an attempt to tell a good story. In fact, director Godard said that the film's success was a mistake, so I suppose that he really was just trying to express his rebelliousness as a filmmaker rather than try to make something that audiences would actually enjoy. I pushed through it to the end because it's on some lists of the greatest films ever made. I don't feel that historical importance makes something great, though; see Hitler. On the bright side, it was nice seeing the streets and sights of Paris in 1960.

I love the film and still can't deny that this is a very intelligent and worthy review. Not a scholar, and I love the jumpcuts, but I'm ashamed to admit that I've never understood exactly why the film is seen as so revolutionary. @Pranzo Oltranzista touched on it a little bit, but it still seems surface level. Again, adore the film strictly for what it is as a piece, but would one of the regulars be able to explain what makes it so influential? In attitude/technical prowess/narrative, it definitely has a voice of its own but what makes is so revolutionary? I never got it. It always struck me as a fairly conventional film with quirks but not much beyond that. Never affected my admiration for it though. Like, to me, Resnais's first two features (Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad) strike me as far more radical in form but they don't get discussed in the same way.

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

I love the film and still can't deny that this is a very intelligent and worthy review. Not a scholar, and I love the jumpcuts, but I'm ashamed to admit that I've never understood exactly why the film is seen as so revolutionary. @Pranzo Oltranzista touched on it a little bit, but it still seems surface level. Again, adore the film strictly for what it is as a piece, but would one of the regulars be able to explain what makes it so influential? In attitude/technical prowess/narrative, it definitely has a voice of its own but what makes is so revolutionary? I never got it. It always struck me as a fairly conventional film with quirks but not much beyond that. Never affected my admiration for it though. Like, to me, Resnais's first two features (Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad) strike me as far more radical in form but they don't get discussed in the same way.

Funny you mention Resnais' films, Godard once said something like "Apart from Alain Resnais, I am the greatest technician of French cinema... and I don't see what Resnais has on me." (from memory, so probably not the exact quote).

À bout de souffle has nothing of a fairly conventional film (fiction film anyway), not in the process nor in the technics - and it's all about freedom from norms (which was embodied in the jump cuts as a symbol of the whole process). It's a lot closer, at both levels, to a reportage (the fact that it is filmed by Coutard, a war reporter, is of significant importance to the result), filmed with natural light and no makeup crew, sometimes unknowing "actors" - nobody would know what they would shoot in the day because Godard threw away the script. Seberg said that working in opposite fashion to Hollywood made her natural. The film is done in parrallel to cinéma vérité, but goes even further with its equipment - cameflex without tripods, without light, wheelchair or tricycle as dolly, and use of film exposition capacity to its very limit or inventing their own film stock with photographic rolls (not surprisingly, Coutard would end up working with Jean Rouch the next year). You often read stuff like "Paris had never been filmed that way" - that is true on every level, techs included. Filming without sound also opened ways to another layer of reflexivity and you probably have the first true postmodern film right there.

Here's an article that touches on this but in very underwhelming ways (IMO): The Making of Innovation

Really, this comment by Raoul Coutard is all you need to really know about À bout de souffle:

That first time, on A Bout de souffle, he said to me: “No more confectionery: we’re going to shoot in real light. You’ve been a photographer. Which stock do you prefer?” I told him I liked to work with Ilford H.P.S. Godard then had me take photographs on this stock. He compared them with others, and we made a number of tests. Finally he said: “That’s exactly what I want.”
We got on to the Ilford works in England, and they told us that they were very sorry, but their H.P.S. wasn’t made for motion picture cameras, only for still photographs: we would have to give up. But Godard doesn’t give up. For still camera spools Ilford made the stock in reels of 17½ metres. The perforations weren’t the same as for cinema cameras. Godard decided to stick together as many 17½ metre reels as he would need to make up a reel of motion picture film, and to use the camera whose sprocket holes corresponded most closely with those of the Leica – luckily, the Cameflex. The professionals were horrified.
But that wasn’t the end of it. One photo-developer got particularly good results with H.P.S. stock, and that was Phenidone. With Godard and the chemist Dubois of the G.T.C. Laboratories, we ran several series of tests. We ended up by doubling the speed of the emulsion, which gave us a very good result. Godard asked the laboratory to use a Phenidone bath in developing the film. But the laboratory wouldn’t play. The machines of the G.T.C. and L.T.C. laboratories handle 3,000 metres of film stock an hour, with everything going through the same developing process, and with the equipment geared to standard Kodak practice. A laboratory could not effectively take one machine out of the circuit to process film stock for M. Jean-Luc Godard, who at the very most would probably want no more than some 1,000 metres a day.
On A Bout de souffle, however, we had a stroke of luck. Tucked away in a corner, the G.T.C. laboratories had a little supplementary machine, more or less out of service, which they used for running tests. They allowed us to borrow this little machine so that we could develop our stuck-together lengths of llford film in a solution of our own making, and at whatever rate we chose. There’s one thing that ought to be understood: the fantastic success of A Bout de souffle, and the turning point that this film marked in cinema history, was clearly due mainly to Godard’s imagination, and especially (what to my mind is the film’s major quality) to its sense of living in the moment. But it also had to do with the fact that Godard stuck together these 17½ metre lengths of llford stock in the teeth of everyone’s advice, and miraculously obtained the use of this machine at the G.T.C. laboratories. (Light of day: Raoul Coutard on shooting film for Jean-Luc Godard | Sight & Sound)

 

[MetalheadPenguinsFan]

Rewatched Last Night:

8/10

 

[ItsFineImFine]

Cross of Iron (1977) - 7/10

Bloody war film. Antiwar but it almost glorifies the violence in terms of the number of explosions and quick cuts and blood packs exploding. The antiwar aspect is more in terms of anti aristocracy than anything. James Coburn shows why he's one of the better rough leading men from the era.

 

[sr edler]

Rear Window (1954) by Alfred Hitchcock – 9.5/10

I love this film but I don't buy for a second that it's much of a suspense film or much of a thriller, it doesn't connect at all on that level with me, which is honestly to its benefit. And I think it would probably fall a bit flatter if it tried harder on that side of things.

I've briefly briefed the internet and apparently there are some theories out there regarding this film, about contemporary societal paranoia and surveillance (which could make some sense) and even about Jefferies secretly wanting to kill his own girlfriend (which seems quite silly and far-fetched, IMO).

Or about light and darkness.

I personally think (and/or feel) it's mostly a quite simple melancholic film portraying people yearning for their true selves, desires and lives temporarily out of reach. Jimmy Stewart's character yearns for his old life and true self as an adventurous thrill seeking photographer. That's why he still has to create (or unmask) adventure and drama even though he's incapacitated in a wheel chair in his own living room. He can't handle being idle. It's itching on his leg, but it's probably itching even more on his psyche, or on his soul.

And most of the female characters in the film yearns for love. Miss Torso for her military boyfriend, Lisa Fremont for whiny old Jefferies, and Miss Lonelyhearts for any good man that will treat her with respect. Now one might say that this particular premise or set up is perhaps a bit sexist or something, or old fashioned, but it still is what it is, in my eyes. It's what the film presents.

Through the early stages of the film Jefferies is shown feeling slightly uncomfortable with his relationship to Lisa Fremont because she's, 1) too young and hot for him, but mostly 2) too boring and unadventurous for him. That is, of course, until she breaks into Thorwald's apartment and shows off to Jefferies that she too can be thrill seeking and adventurous. That's the point when Jefferies gets completely sold on her, when she shows him she's just not a boring window piece. Because he's clearly not ready to give up his true self as a good old thrill junkie, not even when a young bombshell woman of good status is presenting her love and marital aspirations right in front of his nose at the beginning of the movie.

Well, that's my short analysis of this film, for whatever it's worth.

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

[For the record, 3/10 to me are mostly movies that don't do anything more than they're expected to do, painting by numbers if you will]

Spider-Man (Raimi, 2002) - It has Raimi's then pretty unique signature going for it, mixing genre a little (going from very comicky to some darker elements, and some soft porn material - MJ is quite trashy and doesn't really fit in a kiddy flick). The fact that it came early and announced a great deal of things to come, even if it's not as stylish as Burton's take on superheroes, makes me feel I have to be a little generous with this one (I had it at 3/10, long ago). 4/10

Spider-Man 2 (Raimi, 2004) - You have to appreciate a sequel without a stupidly long title. It's more polished than the first one, and thus probably a more coherent and slightly better film overall. There's still a few moments where you feel Raimi is having fun (the waking of Doc Ock in surgery is straight out of a horror movie, with cute Evil Dead allusions). Writing is getting a little too obvious and facile. 3.5/10

Spider-Man 3 (Raimi, 2007) - The fall from grace of that trilogy, and for good reasons. Writing continued going downhill, to some ridiculous extent (I know the whole emo/bad boy stuff is the ultimate low, but to me the movie has already reached a point of no return when the police captain sees his daughter hanging by a phone cord 62 stories high and goes calmly “That's Gwen? What's she doing up there?”). And again, too many narrative facilités, just that same scene: the police captain gets there just to get told his own daughter is the person hanging there in danger by her boyfriend he never met, a photographer who happens to also just be there, yuck - it's like New York was a 800 people countryside village). Parker is an idiot from the get go, and MJ is quite the bitch too - and Raimi's touch is pretty much blanded out here (apart from the disjointed Bruce Campbell scene). Too bad the effects on the Sandman are pretty bad, I like that creature concept (but I hate that they couldn't find anything else than rewriting the uncle's murder as pathos). 2.5/10

The Amazing Spider-Man (Webb, 2012) - An ok superhero flick, but an extremely bland movie – pretty much a perfect fit in my scale for an “it is what it is” 3/10.

Couldn't find the sequel on my streaming services. Not a bad thing cause I remember hating it.

 

[ItsFineImFine]

I actually rewatched Spiderman 3 and it's really enjoyable albeit unnecessarily campy. I think the bad reviews stem from how good the first two were and people being let down by the third. I remember in high school some of my friends went to see it opening night and they came back disappointed, they did have really high expectations going in. I watched it on DVD release and thought it was fine.

 

[PK Cronin]

Just watched Scream (5) in theaters.

Entertaining movie if you like the franchise, but nothing incredible. A little more gore-filled than most of the previous entries if that's your thing. As with most franchises that go this long, it struggles at times juggling the new and the old characters screen time so there's definitely a lack of development in some cases. They try hard to connect the current film to the original which is both fun and cumbersome at times. At one point they throw out a bunch of connections all at once and it's a little overwhelming trying to place each person's connection in my mind. Looks like this should be the last movie for the original trio, but you never know. Before watching this I'd rank them 1, 4, 2, 3 and I'd say this one is on par with 2.