Movies: Last Movie You Watched and Rate It | Mid-Spring Edition. Happy Beltane!

[Pink Mist]

Jules and Jim (1962) Directed by Francois Truffaut 10B

Jules and Jim is the most famous menage a trois in film history. In Paris, before the start of the World War I, Jules, who is Austrian, and Jim, who is French, are best friends, living the bohemian life on the Left Bank, concerned passionately with books, art and girls. Catherine enters their life and Jules and Jim, while remaining the closest of friends, are both smitten. Catherine is an incandescent free spirit who plays by no rules except her own. She is seductive without trying, a celebration of life unto herself. As Jules and Jim become more deeply involved with her, the challenges to their friendship mount. Catherine’s zest for living comes at a high price and her inability to compromise or reason with herself has unforeseen consequences.

Jim (Henri Serre) is actually a bit of a flat character, but Jules (Oskar Werner) and Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) are an amazing study. Though Jules has his bourgeoisie side and tends to be unassertive, he selflessly sacrifices everything for Catherine, even accepting her affair with Jim. Surprisingly he does this not out of weakness, but because of the purity of his love for Catherine. His is a stunning act of will. Catherine’s approach to life is dangerous but recklessly alluring. Catherine makes everyone feel alive, the embodiment of pleasure and the cause of anguish. But she walks a knife edge with her whims. Eventually her misjudgment and intransigence lead to a final act of defiance. Jules reaction to the tragedy is closer to relief than sorrow. He has fought the good fight and now it is over.

To quote Paulene Kael once again, Catherine is “about the impossibility of freedom” as well as “the many losses of innocence.” That's pretty much the themes in a nutshell. The film making is exhilarating as Truffaut captures the giddy romance and darker tensions of the era, shifting moods in quicksilver fashion. The French New Wave made film feel fresh and exciting again, full of endless possibilities. I think Jules and Jim is one of the best movies ever made (#3 on my all-time list).

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Love this film, among my favourites too. What's #1 and 2 on your list?

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

Exorcist II: The Heretic (Boorman, 1977) - Widely considered to be one of the worst films ever made, disowned by its stars and ridiculed by the makers of the original film, this sequel was thought as a "ripost" to the first film by an afterward regretful John Boorman. Every aspect of the film is so poor that it quickly reaches beyond the limits of ridicule to the realms of absurdity. I think the acting here is the worst thing, and considering the styrofoam sets of the African scenes and the flight effects of the locusts, that's saying a lot. Linda Blair is a terrible, truly terrible actress, but surrounded by this cast, she looks like she deserved the Oscar nomination. 1.5/10

To quote Paulene Kael once again

Funnily enough, I was just reading the IMDB trivia, and a few notorious people somehow defend this film. Among them, your beloved Pauline who thought the film was better than the original and that it was cadenced and exotic and too deliriously complicated to succeed with most audiences (that's a very weird excuse for condescension) and that there was enough visual magic in it for a dozen good movies. Oh well... she's not alone in her padded room, Scorsese is also identified as someone who thought it surpassed the original. Tarantino liked it too, probably a poor attempt to look "special".

 

[Osprey]

Funnily enough, I was just reading the IMDB trivia, and a few notorious people somehow defend this film. Among them, your beloved Pauline who thought the film was better than the original and that it was cadenced and exotic and too deliriously complicated to succeed with most audiences (that's a very weird excuse for condescension) and that there was enough visual magic in it for a dozen good movies. Oh well... she's not alone in her padded room, Scorsese is also identified as someone who thought it surpassed the original. Tarantino liked it too, probably a poor attempt to look "special".

When I was reading about Pauline Kael nearly singlehandedly turning around critical sentiment toward Bonnie & Clyde by gushing over it while everyone else was dumping on it, I wondered if she just liked being a contrarian. Now, I'm pretty sure of it.

What's the next film that you're going to review? Wait! Don't tell me. I want it to be a surprise.

 

[kihei]

Love this film, among my favourites too. What's #1 and 2 on your list?

1. Children of Paradise, Michel Carne
2. Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray
3. Jules and Jim, Francois Truffaut
4. The Double Life of Veronique, Krzysztof Kieslowski
5. Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Resnais
6. The Mirror, Andrei Tarkovsky
7. Blow Up, Michelangelo Antonioni
8. 8 ½, Federico Fellini
9. I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Tsai Ming-liang
10. After Life, Hirokazu Kore-eda

 

[kihei]

Funnily enough, I was just reading the IMDB trivia, and a few notorious people somehow defend this film. Among them, your beloved Pauline who thought the film was better than the original and that it was cadenced and exotic and too deliriously complicated to succeed with most audiences (that's a very weird excuse for condescension) and that there was enough visual magic in it for a dozen good movies. Oh well... she's not alone in her padded room, Scorsese is also identified as someone who thought it surpassed the original. Tarantino liked it too, probably a poor attempt to look "special".

My beloved Paulene was out to lunch on that one, I suspect. Actually I haven't seen any of the sequels, not even the Richard Burton one, because I was not a fan of The Exorcist which didn't work for me at all. I didn't hate it, but I laughed too often in the wrong places to like it.

When I was reading about Pauline Kael nearly singlehandedly turning around critical sentiment toward Bonnie & Clyde by gushing over it while everyone else was dumping on it, I wondered if she just liked being a contrarian. Now, I'm pretty sure of it.

Yes and no. She definitely had that contrarian aspect. After all in her early fun days, she used to attack other critics as catty lead-ins to her own thoughts. I always liked that, actually--gave her a rebellious aura. But like any label "contrarian" is a self-limiting description if one takes it literally. She was much more than that. She wrote great chatty, impassioned reviews. I would rank her along with Dwight Macdonald and the pioneering James Agee as the most astute and most readable film critics that we had in the period roughly between 1940 and 1990.

These are only brief excerpts from some of her reviews but they will give you an idea of why she was such an addictive read when she wrote film criticism for The New Yorker.

15 of Pauline Kael’s Most Passionate Takes | IndieWire

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

1. Children of Paradise, Michel Carne
2. Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray
3. Jules and Jim, Francois Truffaut
4. The Double Life of Veronique, Krzysztof Kieslowski
5. Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Resnais
6. The Mirror, Andrei Tarkovsky
7. Blow Up, Michelangelo Antonioni
8. 8 ½, Federico Fellini
9. I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Tsai Ming-liang
10. After Life, Hirokazu Kore-eda

I haven't seen #2, pretty sure I haven't seen #10. I'm neutral for the Carne film, and don't really like Truffaut (though J&J is his best film). Otherwise, pretty solid list IMO.

My beloved Paulene was out to lunch on that one, I suspect. Actually I haven't seen any of the sequels, not even the Richard Burton one, because I was not a fan of The Exorcist which didn't work for me at all. I didn't hate it, but I laughed too often in the wrong places to like it.

That's the one with Richard Burton! Rumors has it that he was drunk half of the time on set and that he read his lines from cue cards because he didn't care to read Boorman's numerous script changes. He hated the film, like everybody else involved. The 3rd film is more than decent. I have very little memory of the two fourth films, but I'll get back to them soon.

I don't know what made you have this reaction towards The Exorcist, but laughing is a very natural reaction to abjection (next time you see a gory film in theater, wait for it). And well maybe it simply was silly to you. Coincidentally, William Peter Blatty takes great pleasure in telling how he had a good laugh when seeing the sequel.

 

[nameless1]

Jules and Jim is also a 10/10 in my books, and in my personal top 10 too. I really should check out kihei's list. I know all of the films, but I have not gotten a chance to watch them yet.

 

[nameless1]

Rewatched:

9/10

I actually wanted to watch the entire series recently, but I could only get through the first three before I decided I had enough and had to call it quits. The series is pretty bad overall, even for 80s action flick standard, but it completely falls into parody status by Rambo III. 4, meanwhile, is Stallone's attempt to rediscover his lost stardom, but in the end, it, like 5, is just mindless violence with so much gore that nobody would want to sit though twice. Ironically, the video game Mortal Kombat XI actually understood the character far better than the movies, so much so that I care more about him in the game than when I watched him on screen.

Regardless, I do like First Blood the most in the entire series, but that is partially because it was filmed in Hope, British Columbia, about a two hours drive from where I live. In fact, the bridge that featured prominently in the movie stood until 2011, when it was dismantled. Personally, I actually find the behind-the-scene details to be more interesting than the actual movie. In the original book, Rambo was supposed to die in the end, and the filmmakers did want to follow the source material, but it tested terribly with the audience. As a result, the ending that we see now was filmed, and that decision inadvertently gave Stallone two movie franchises. Also, according to Stallone himself, the original cut was over 3 hours long, and apparently it was so bad, that he wanted to buy the movie and destroy it, as he thought it would kill his career. While Stallone can be factitious in his interviews, I think it is probably true, because there is no way anyone can sit through a movie like that for three hours, and the much shorter hour and a half version is at least bearable.

I have it at a 6/10. It is not great, and I wish the originally ending was kept, so we would not have been subjected to 3 to 5 in the franchise, but it has a very good story concept that had a lot of potential, and the acting, especially from Crenna and Dennehy, is actually pretty good.

 

[kihei]

I haven't seen #2, pretty sure I haven't seen #10. I'm neutral for the Carne film, and don't really like Truffaut (though J&J is his best film). Otherwise, pretty solid list IMO.

Satyajit Ray movies are way removed from your usual turf, though, then again, that was true for me the first time I saw Pather Panchali. Still, you really should see the entire Apu Trilogy, of which Pather Panchali is the first film. The movie is a very personal story about a boy growing up in a remote village in India (the later two films trace his development as he grows older), but the trilogy can also be seen as a representation of India's emergence from the rural and traditional to the urban and modern, warts and all. I would also recommend his Charula, which is in my top 15 films, and could recommend several others. He is by far my favourite director, one of the great humanist artists of the 20th Century.

That's the one with Richard Burton! Rumors has it that he was drunk half of the time on set and that he read his lines from cue cards because he didn't care to read Boorman's numerous script changes. He hated the film, like everybody else involved. The 3rd film is more than decent. I have very little memory of the two fourth films, but I'll get back to them soon.

I don't know what made you have this reaction towards The Exorcist, but laughing is a very natural reaction to abjection (next time you see a gory film in theater, wait for it). And well maybe it simply was silly to you. Coincidentally, William Peter Blatty takes great pleasure in telling how he had a good laugh when seeing the sequel.

Trust me, abjection wasn't even close to being the cause; rejection, maybe. My reaction had more to do with the dialogue like Linda Blair telling the priest what his mother was currently doing in hell. The pea soup didn't help either. I had read the book and was expecting more, a lot more. And the casting of Miller I thought was a disaster. His looks of intensity that seemed indistinguishable from constipation also made me laugh. However. when I did see it for "the movie of the week" page a few months ago, I did notice one of those little split second subliminal demons flashed on the fridge as someone walked by.

 

[Shareefruck]

Satyajit Ray movies are way removed from your usual turf, though, then again, that was true for me the first time I saw Pather Panchali. Still, you really should see the entire Apu Trilogy, of which Pather Panchali is the first film. The movie is a very personal story about a boy growing up in a remote village in India (the later two films trace his development as he grows older), but the trilogy can also be seen as a representation of India's emergence from the rural and traditional to the urban and modern, warts and all. I would also recommend his Charula, which is in my top 15 films, and could recommend several others. He is by far my favourite director, one of the great humanist artists of the 20th Century.

Which ones would you recommend after Charulata and the Apu Trilogy?

 

[ItsFineImFine]

Ze French Connection (1971) - 8/10

Definitely one of those movies that make you say 'damn this is well-made' as you watch it. The patience of the chase scenes on foot along with the NY cinematography are really perfect. Film suffers from a lull in the middle and I didn't like Gene Hackman's over-acting of a cop on roid rage with little depth but as far as police procedural go, this is pure coppin'.

Still gonna give the edge to the chase scene in Bullit compared to the train chase scene here.

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

Satyajit Ray movies are way removed from your usual turf, though, then again, that was true for me the first time I saw Pather Panchali. Still, you really should see the entire Apu Trilogy, of which Pather Panchali is the first film. The movie is a very personal story about a boy growing up in a remote village in India (the later two films trace his development as he grows older), but the trilogy can also be seen as a representation of India's emergence from the rural and traditional to the urban and modern, warts and all. I would also recommend his Charula, which is in my top 15 films, and could recommend several others. He is by far my favourite director, one of the great humanist artists of the 20th Century.

My turf used to be quite large (not always by choice, but anyway), love Kiarostami, love Ceylan. I don't know why I never got to see one of Ray's films. I'll try to rectify that if I can put my hands on one.

Trust me, abjection wasn't even close to being the cause; rejection, maybe. My reaction had more to do with the dialogue like Linda Blair telling the priest what his mother was currently doing in hell. The pea soup didn't help either. I had read the book and was expecting more, a lot more. And the casting of Miller I thought was a disaster. His looks of intensity that seemed indistinguishable from constipation also made me laugh. However. when I did see it for "the movie of the week" page a few months ago, I did notice one of those little split second subliminal demons flashed on the fridge as someone walked by.

Fair enough. I love the film and think it is brilliant and complex, but wouldn't fight a round for it. The demon you've noticed wasn't in the original version, it's one of the add-ons for the later cut. The ones I was referring too were true film edits spliced in the reels. There's the pigs and bees in the soundtrack too, and the genuine fear reactions of people that were pranked. It's an exhaustive exercise.

Ze French Connection (1971) - 8/10

Definitely one of those movies that make you say 'damn this is well-made' as you watch it. The patience of the chase scenes on foot along with the NY cinematography are really perfect. Film suffers from a lull in the middle and I didn't like Gene Hackman's over-acting of a cop on roid rage with little depth but as far as police procedural go, this is pure coppin'.

Still gonna give the edge to the chase scene in Bullit compared to the train chase scene here.

Coincidentally, that's the film that got Friedkin the Exorcist gig.

 

[kihei]

Which ones would you recommend after Charulata and the Apu Trilogy?

Devi (The Goddess), Nayak (The Hero), The Music Room, The Big City, pretty much in that order. After that, The Home and the World, The Stranger, The Adversary, and Days and Nights in the Forest.

 

[kihei]

My turf used to be quite large (not always by choice, but anyway), love Kiarostami, love Ceylan. I don't know why I never got to see one of Ray's films. I'll try to rectify that if I can put my hands on one.
.

Criterion Channel is having a major retrospective of Ray's work. Includes everything I have mentioned to you and to Shareefruck except for Days and Nights in the Forest. Great site, actually.

Later: Thinking it over, if you are starting out, Charulata may be your best bet. Traditional but exquisite.

 

[SepticFish]

Criterion Channel is having a major retrospective of Ray's work. Includes everything I have mentioned to you and to Shareefruck except for Days and Nights in the Forest. Great site, actually.

HBOMax also added a number of his films this month.

 

[nameless1]

I have not seen a lot of Ray, but I liked The Music Room a lot. I want to get into Ray more too now, but I have a huge backlog that I want to get through.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

I actually wanted to watch the entire series recently, but I could only get through the first three before I decided I had enough and had to call it quits. The series is pretty bad overall, even for 80s action flick standard, but it completely falls into parody status by Rambo III. 4, meanwhile, is Stallone's attempt to rediscover his lost stardom, but in the end, it, like 5, is just mindless violence with so much gore that nobody would want to sit though twice. Ironically, the video game Mortal Kombat XI actually understood the character far better than the movies, so much so that I care more about him in the game than when I watched him on screen.

Regardless, I do like First Blood the most in the entire series, but that is partially because it was filmed in Hope, British Columbia, about a two hours drive from where I live. In fact, the bridge that featured prominently in the movie stood until 2011, when it was dismantled. Personally, I actually find the behind-the-scene details to be more interesting than the actual movie. In the original book, Rambo was supposed to die in the end, and the filmmakers did want to follow the source material, but it tested terribly with the audience. As a result, the ending that we see now was filmed, and that decision inadvertently gave Stallone two movie franchises. Also, according to Stallone himself, the original cut was over 3 hours long, and apparently it was so bad, that he wanted to buy the movie and destroy it, as he thought it would kill his career. While Stallone can be factitious in his interviews, I think it is probably true, because there is no way anyone can sit through a movie like that for three hours, and the much shorter hour and a half version is at least bearable.

I have it at a 6/10. It is not great, and I wish the originally ending was kept, so we would not have been subjected to 3 to 5 in the franchise, but it has a very good story concept that had a lot of potential, and the acting, especially from Crenna and Dennehy, is actually pretty good.

Rewatched the first one in the past six months as well. I genuinely liked it. Some flaws for sure -- definitely feels like stuff is cut out and the whole forest sequence really makes no geographic/time/spatial sense. It's a fascinating watch because of what the series would become. The first movie feels like it's on another planet (in a good way) from the subsequent sequels. I noted this when I rewatched it, but the setup and the opening confrontation between Stallone and Dennehy is WILD to watch today. Almost disorienting in how it portrays police. You wouldn't be able to do it today without igniting a massive media blowback.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Criterion Channel is having a major retrospective of Ray's work. Includes everything I have mentioned to you and to Shareefruck except for Days and Nights in the Forest. Great site, actually.

Later: Thinking it over, if you are starting out, Charulata may be your best bet. Traditional but exquisite.

I have several sitting on my to-watch list. Hoping to tackle them soon.

 

[nameless1]

Rewatched the first one in the past six months as well. I genuinely liked it. Some flaws for sure -- definitely feels like stuff is cut out and the whole forest sequence really makes no geographic/time/spatial sense. It's a fascinating watch because of what the series would become. The first movie feels like it's on another planet (in a good way) from the subsequent sequels. I noted this when I rewatched it, but the setup and the opening confrontation between Stallone and Dennehy is WILD to watch today. Almost disorienting in how it portrays police. You wouldn't be able to do it today without igniting a massive media blowback.

The idea of the corrupt sheriff is not new in American cinematic history, especially in Westerns, and in the 70s, many filmmakers do take on the idea of a corrupt police force, most famously with Lumet's Serpico. I honestly do not find it that out-of-place, so I do not see that much of a blowback, even today.

What is interesting is the Jekyll and Hyde portrayal of the sheriff. The town seems to love the sheriff, but then he drives Rambo out of town because he wants no trouble. He slowly turns more into a typical villain, but I still do not find him to be a particularly bad man, which is why, in old-fashioned Hollywood tradition, he survives in the end, though badly battered. The truly problematic character is one of his subordinates, who actually shoots to kill, but he meets a grisly end, as the unwritten rules dictate. That is why I actually do not see that much of a problem today. In the end, the hero survives, and justice prevails, in a roundabout kind of way.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

The idea of the corrupt sheriff is not new in American cinematic history, especially in Westerns, and in the 70s, many filmmakers do take on the idea of a corrupt police force, most famously with Lumet's Serpico. I honestly do not find it that out-of-place, so I do not see that much of a blowback, even today.

What is interesting is the Jekyll and Hyde portrayal of the sheriff. The town seems to love the sheriff, but then he drives Rambo out of town because he wants no trouble. He slowly turns more into a typical villain, but I still do not find him to be a particularly bad man, which is why, in old-fashioned Hollywood tradition, he survives in the end, though badly battered. The truly problematic character is one of his subordinates, who actually shoots to kill, but he meets a grisly end, as the unwritten rules dictate.

Bad law enforcement definitely has been played before and since. I should've been more specific ... burying the lede, as some may say.

What jumps out about First Blood is that it's law enforcement openly and aggressively harassing a veteran. I know the harassment and disrespect of Vietnam veterans was real and this is a product of that, but that's the aspect that has dramatically changed in the past 40 years. Without getting too political, the military and police and those who broadly support them are more on the same side today than in opposition which made that opening in particular really jump out to me. I'm not sure you could do the same thing today without stirring up some sort controversy. (Though this is in part because a lot of folks are just generally primed to be pissed off at movies more now than then ...)

 

[Spring in Fialta]

'Oh yeah? I was hunted once. I just came back from 'Nam. I was hitching through Oregon and some cop started harassing me. Next thing you know I had a whole army of cop chasing me through the woods. I had to take them all out. It was a bloodbath!'
'That's Rambo, dude.'
'What?'
'You just described the plot of Rambo.'
'Yeah, it's the first one. It's not the first time you've described your life in the way of John Rambo's life.'

 

[nameless1]

Bad law enforcement definitely has been played before and since. I should've been more specific ... burying the lede, as some may say.

What jumps out about First Blood is that it's law enforcement openly and aggressively harassing a veteran. I know the harassment and disrespect of Vietnam veterans was real and this is a product of that, but that's the aspect that has dramatically changed in the past 40 years. Without getting too political, the military and police and those who broadly support them are more on the same side today than in opposition which made that opening in particular really jump out to me. I'm not sure you could do the same thing today without stirring up some sort controversy. (Though this is in part because a lot of folks are just generally primed to be pissed off at movies more now than then ...)

I see your point now. To be fair, it has the defense that it is based off a book, but people only read twitter headlines now. The outrage would probably last a couple of days, especially at that animal-inspired network, before a retraction is printed when it is pointed out that the book is based off of real-life instances, and then people get distracted by another buzz-worthy instance of "cultural war".

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

I see your point now. To be fair, it has the defense that it is based off a book, but people only read twitter headlines now. The outrage would probably last a couple of days, especially at that animal-inspired network, before a retraction is printed when it is pointed out that the book is based off of real-life instances, and then people get distracted by another buzz-worthy instance of "cultural war".

But Dennehy is great in it! I rewatched Silverado not too long after First Blood where Dennehy plays ... **checks notes** ... a crooked sheriff.

By sheer coincidence in the past week I started watching a show on The Smithsonian Channel (it's what helps me go to sleep) and Dennehy is the narrator. And on top of that I just watched a documentary about Dalton Trumbo and Dennehy is one of several actors tapped to read some of Trumbo's writing.

I can't seem to escape the man lately.

Gotta track down FX.

 

[Shareefruck]

Devi (The Goddess), Nayak (The Hero), The Music Room, The Big City, pretty much in that order. After that, The Home and the World, The Stranger, The Adversary, and Days and Nights in the Forest.

Thanks

 

[kihei]

Autumn (2008) Directed by Ozcan Alper 7B

Now in his thirties, Yusuf returns home to his village in northeast Turkey near the Georgian border to lick his wounds. He has spent the last ten years in prison because of a student political protest that he took part in during his university days. He is like an animal who has returned to the nest to heal. He doesn’t say much. His mother, a peasant whose life differs little from what it might have been like in the 19th century, wishes he would talk more. So does his sole remaining friend, stranded in this outback with no future. So does his hooker girlfriend who thinks, astutely, that he is like a character out of a Russian novel.

But Yusuf retains the unnerving power of those who never speak about anything important. We get very brief suggestions, rather than direct evidence, of the hell he must have gone through. He’s obviously a good guy, though—he loves his mother and teaches his young nephew maths so that the kid has a slim-to-none chance to become a doctor. All this takes place in a countryside which borders on the Black Sea that is in its own woodsy way as lush and beautiful as Hawaii’s. The rainy weather and picturesque landscape are as central to the movie as Yusuf and his few acquaintances—a reminder of the disparity between nature’s abundance and the paltry existence of humans in its midst. For these characters, there just may be no way out now; that time may have passed. Autumn is just a gorgeous piece of low-key film making.

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