Films you've seen recently and would unreservedly recommend:

[zhao]

The reason why I'd slam this film

rolling eyes toward the sky.

unlike the well deserved critiques of Match-Point, I don't buy any one of these reasons.

[vernoncrane]

I'm with Infy on this one, City of God was a hyperkinetic, souless tour through Favella misery for the Cosmo elite... Lock stock and Two Smoking Barrels with Bossanova... and the Constant Gardener was equally awful..instead of building up character it went for the usual convoluted narrative shenanagins in a variety of filmstocks in order to engage with our cine-literate po-mo sensibilities (the kids wont stand for any of that atobtoc nonsense, y'know) and ended up a confused mess with no emotional centre that did justice to neither the central love story or the political dimension...plus... wasn't Rachael Thingy's initial rant at the press conference one of the most hamfisted (the hamfistedest?) Establishment-of-character moments in recent cinema?

[h-crimm]

she holds a black baby after, you later find out, losing her own child.

ha!
it was already so clear that she wasnt having an affair. that bit was just stupid.
i dont think it even occured to me that it could be his child, thier relationship was so carefully left open that they had to be setting up a twist. then it dragged on and onnnnnnnn

he's gay! So it's ok

for me that was a particular peak of swagness in the general morass.
how dyou know he's gay? he's hanging out with a guy in a photo! well... i'm convinced.
and his gayness is never anything more than the most obvious convenient way of asexualising him
substitute: "oh dont worry he was a born again christian!" or "he was castrated as a child!", and it becomes utterly ridiculous but gayness is still an uncrystalised meme. for most people, i guess, i mean to most people it maybe doesnt mean anything.
except a shite excuse for resolution.

the portrait of british people reminded me of renoirs 'grande illusion' europeans == boring boys own
and the locals were represented as so totally inactive, inarticulate, uninvolved and incidental to the real love story... i almost forgot who we're collectively murdering



i like the way this and city of god are kind of immune to film criticism for some leftist people since they tackle issues that more mainstream cinema should be tackling... i mean i dont /like\ it but, i think its sort of funny

still i'm sure it was better this way than if the treatment had fallen into the hands of some american superstars

[h-crimm]

back on recommendations::::::::::::::::::::::::



henry hills --------------- kino da.
nice short mashup of mayakovsky. nothing too difficult. no thought. just sonically pleasureable. i'd recommend his documentary(?) film Money, but its a bit long for something that i primarily want to leave to wash over me.

fassbinder --------------- plague gods.
saw this a little while ago... its from the early silly gangster-film period, before the sirk conversion. so i dont expect owen to have any time for it.
but if you secretly want to watch a high brow version of a brit gangster flick but dont want to rent city of god for fear of looking like a hippy, watch this instead.
be prepared for the joys of monotonous-drawl-speaking sloth-gangsters.

cassavettes ------------- husbands
every scene an interminable drunken nothing. did they ever even come to london at all? it seems doubtful.
jenny runacre in drawn out uncomfortably conscentual rape scene.
cassavettes is a fucking man-hating genius! what was kathleen hanna on about?

[simon silverdollar]

cassavettes ------------- husbands
every scene an interminable drunken nothing. did they ever even come to london at all? it seems doubtful.
jenny runacre in drawn out uncomfortably conscentual rape scene.
cassavettes is a fucking man-hating genius! what was kathleen hanna on about?

watching that was like getting punched in the face, over and over. good tho!

[don_quixote]

1) morvern callar? theyre showing that at a cinema round ere next week. how is it?
2) i really want to go to the cinema today, actually, but havent got a clue what to see. i have a choice between multiplex (take yr pick, they all show the same stuff) and this list: Chicken Little (U), Good Night, And Good Luck. (PG), Hidden (Cache) (15), Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (15), Lady Vengeance (18), Me and You and Everyone We Know (15), Proof (12A), The Libertine (18)

i havent been to the cinema for SO LONG and i usually love it (even shite feels good when it's really large, i can only really think of three films which i have come out hating), so i think i need a break...?

[borderpolice]

Lady Vengeance (18)

Lady Vengance is awesome, like everything else i have seen by Chan-wook Park. However, this kind of filmmaking is not to everyone's taste. also, despite a similar theme, the film tastes quite different from the utterly magnificent Oldboy!

[don_quixote]

i went to see lady vengeance and liked it a lot. i was worried it didnt know where to finish, but the ending turned out to be great!

[tox]

1) morvern callar? theyre showing that at a cinema round ere next week. how is it?

I adore Morvern Callar. There's a good thread about the director and the rest of her work in a thread here.

As far as recommendations go, today I would put forward Rize . Its a documentary by David LaChapelle about a dance style called Krumping (kidz wearing make-up dancing crazily to hip-hop in LA). A very interesting film which is definately worth a look. Given that the actual dancing is so interesting to watch on its own, I expect a DVD with extended footage could make a good rental. The stories followed in the film were actually quite thin and not heavily expanded upon, which was a bit of a shame, however the footage of the dancing was so outstanding at times that it made up for this shortfall. It was also a bit annoying that all the music was over-dubbed, so you couldn't tell exactly how the dance fitted to the music. Still made a good watch though.
(there's also a dissensus thread on krumping here. )

[big satan]

man, i thought old boy was a total waste of time.

[Chamberweed]

I also recommend Morvern Callar, worth watching more than once.

[borderpolice]

i went to see lady vengeance and liked it a lot. i was worried it didnt know where to finish, but the ending turned out to be great!

agreed. Chan-wook Park's other films in the revenge trilogy show examples of both: Oldboy has one of the most amazing ends in film history, while "sympathy for mr vengance"'s -- stil a great film -- end doesn't quite live up to the rest of its plot.

incidentally, do you think the last 3 scenes (Geum-ja Lee meets -- in this beautiful room with wooden tiles -- the child she helped kidnap as a child metamorphosing into a young man, blowing smoke; her daughter jenny waking up in bed with the fosterparents noting smoke; finally jenny as a barefoot, white-clad angle in the smoke) is about vengance (through jenny's dead) by fate on Geum-ja for the kidnapping?

[droid]

Looking forward to Lady of Vengance alright..

On a totally different buzz - saw this in an art gallery in Barcelona 3 years ago and was blown away... - funny that I had to travel across Europe to find out about it when the man himself was born just a few miles from my gaf...

Samuel Beckett’s only venture into the medium of cinema, Film was written in 1963 and filmed in New York in the summer of 1964, directed by Alan Schneider and featuring Buster Keaton. For the shooting Mr. Beckett made his only trip to America. The film, which has no dialogue, takes its basis Berkeley’s theory Esse est percepti, that is “to be is to be perceived”: even after all outside perception -- be it animal, human or divine -- has been suppressed, self perception remains. Film was edited by Sydney Meyers and the cinematography was by Boris Kaufman, both of whom were preeminent in their fields. Film was produced by Barney Rosset and Evergreen Theater.

Links and Blurb

Video clip

[infinite thought]

Beckett's 'Film' is fantastic alright...apparently, while they were making it, Beckett and Schneider realised the chair in the room had two 'eye' holes in the top part of the design and so incorporated them into the series of perceiving eyes that haunt Buster Keaton. Marvellous. Best use of animals in a short film ever too.

[borderpolice]

Given that the actual dancing is so interesting to watch on its own, however the footage of the dancing was so outstanding

agred. RiZe is pretty to look at.

there;s a shortage of dancing (in a generalised sense) in movies. i dont understand why. the combination of bodily movement to rhythms and film should be an explosive stylistic combination, and music videos and ballet have already paved the way for this, but it's rarely used by filmmakers. shame!