nochexxx

harco pronting
Ha - scroll back to the top of the page (or maybe the previous one) and I was talking about L'Argent which I think may have been his next film. I thought it was great anyway. Haven't seen Pickpocket yet but our tastes seem to coincide quite often so I will definitely look out for that.
I'll also try and watch White Dawn this weekend.

great! your tip positively reinforces my instinctive feelings i have towards Bresson's other films. looking forward to chewing the fat,

hope you rate the White Dawn as much as i do. please post your thoughts!
 

stephenk

Well-known member
my first three have been ali - fear eats the soul (second fassbinder i've seen, really poignant and mournful), general idi amin dada (obviously totally insane - there's an amazing scene where he races against some guys in a swimming pool, and cheats by swimming across half of the lanes, cutting everyone else off. and when he gets to the end he bellows "I WIN!"), and the lady vanishes (early, unpolished hitchcock). all enjoyable.
 

gumdrops

Well-known member
saw ken loach's kes last night for the first time. one of the best things ive seen in ages. really moving film about animals/school.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
really moving film about animals/school.

for some reason that synopsis tickled me :)

i decided for some reason i had to watch Star Wars for the first time in aeons yesterday (Part IV). It's a weird beast, so it is. Acting beyond atrocious, and somehow less cohesive than I remember it.

Is everyone aware that the casting for SW and for Carrie was done at the same audition? Spacek could easily have been Princess Leia...

All auditions on youtube:
 

nochexxx

harco pronting
lovely anecdote from Alllison Anders about Carnival of Souls

I was on a plane about ten years ago when a businessman sat down next to me. Like most people, I dreaded having to talk to someone new. I figured he wouldn’t talk to me anyway, ’cause I have tattoos and he looked very straight-up corporate. He immediately smiled and asked me who I was, what I did for a living. I told him I made movies, but probably none he’d ever heard of. Indie movies. I figured that would shut him up so I could look out the window and mope. He smiled big—“Oh, you mean like cult movies?” I shrugged kindly—well, yeah, I guess you could say that, hopefully that. He said his sister had been in a movie when he was a youngster. A film as independent as it gets. One that had become a cult classic.

Somehow I just knew what he was going to say next. His sister was not Candace but another girl in the film, and that man and I talked about Carnival of Souls for well over an hour. And then we spent the next two hours of our flight engrossed in each other as he told me vividly of the supremely radical life he’d led prior to becoming a businessman for the environment! You just never know . . .
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
lovely anecdote from Alllison Anders about Carnival of Souls

I was on a plane about ten years ago when a businessman sat down next to me. Like most people, I dreaded having to talk to someone new. I figured he wouldn’t talk to me anyway, ’cause I have tattoos and he looked very straight-up corporate. He immediately smiled and asked me who I was, what I did for a living. I told him I made movies, but probably none he’d ever heard of. Indie movies. I figured that would shut him up so I could look out the window and mope. He smiled big—“Oh, you mean like cult movies?” I shrugged kindly—well, yeah, I guess you could say that, hopefully that. He said his sister had been in a movie when he was a youngster. A film as independent as it gets. One that had become a cult classic.

Somehow I just knew what he was going to say next. His sister was not Candace but another girl in the film, and that man and I talked about Carnival of Souls for well over an hour. And then we spent the next two hours of our flight engrossed in each other as he told me vividly of the supremely radical life he’d led prior to becoming a businessman for the environment! You just never know . . .

Interestign anecdote, but why do people draw such close associations between how people are and how they look? Annoying, and allows many people to get away with 'appearing' 'radical' when they are at heart as conservative as a, um, Thatcher.
 

slim jenkins

El Hombre Invisible
another film crossed off the list. Le Samourai was riveting, although i didn't get the ending at all.

Scores high on style but I don't think it's the masterpiece many claim it to be.

Rewatched 'Goodfellas' the other day and whilst it's undeniably good, after a while I tired of the constant jukebox soundtrack...way overdone...as is most of the acting...and I could see more clearly why it's become a Lads Top Ten film. This time I found Scorsese in gangster chic groupie mode rather annoying.
 

nochexxx

harco pronting
Scores high on style but I don't think it's the masterpiece many claim it to be.

i wouldn't have it in my top 10, as too many parts were quite wooly. i loved the whole metro chase, and the driving scenes in general. the bird not eating his food was an excellent idea but the ending itself didn't wash with me if i'm honest.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Saw Le Samourai when i was 20 or so, when I still kinda believed in french new wave hype, and still thought it was quite tedious. just a vehicle for alain delon to look... very french. Very few new wave films are the masterpieces people make them out to be. emperor's new clothes, and all that. don't know enough about it, but it's quite conceivable that britain produced better films overall in the 60s. That's a very vague guess though, based ona handful of films.

Goodfellas is extremely well-paced, and very watchable because of this, but it's cartoonish, I've always felt. Which is fine, but people who use it as evidence of Scorsese's genius are wowed by its reputation rather than the film itself, I feel. Most gangster films are a bit rubbish anyways. Discuss.
 

gumdrops

Well-known member
im no new wave expert but yeah ive found a fair number of of french new wave films to be more in that easy to admire/hard to love category. never quite gotten whats so great about goddard, other than stubborn difficulty and slightly tiresome self consciousness. i think theyre just so revered cos they went against hollywood convention, and broke a lot of filmmaking rules. but i did like chabrols les bonne femmes (even if it did peter out a little unsatisfyingly - great witty/spiky dialogue in the first half though), truffauts day for night (though not sure if this is just french rather than nouvelle vague as its a bit later on after that whole movement ended i think, its excellent either way). jules and jim i wanted to like more than i did.
 

paolo

Mechanical phantoms
Winter's Bone is pretty good. One of the better thrillers of recent years (I think it's a crime thriller anyway. Could be called a drama or something I suppose)
 

michael

Bring out the vacuum
Ha - scroll back to the top of the page (or maybe the previous one) and I was talking about L'Argent which I think may have been his next film. I thought it was great anyway. Haven't seen Pickpocket yet but our tastes seem to coincide quite often so I will definitely look out for that.

I went to a few films in a bit of a Bresson retrospective they had here (when there were more indie theatres :() and thought Pickpocket was great. One thing that did my head in aged 19 or so was the complete lack of attention to realism when it came to the actual picking of pockets. That's my memory of it anyway - first time I sort of got "expressionism" on screen. Up until then I'm sure my idea of a serious movie is that it had to be realism.

The other one I strongly remember from the retrospective was Lancelot du Lac, because some guy had brought his two young boys to it, obviously hoping it'd be a rollicking King Arthur action flick. Opening scene: two stumbling knights fall about in exhausted combat, near-blindly lurching at each other for a bit before one stabs the other in the groin and lets him slowly die. I felt very sorry for everyone involved. :(
 

nochexxx

harco pronting
I went to a few films in a bit of a Bresson retrospective they had here (when there were more indie theatres :() and thought Pickpocket was great. One thing that did my head in aged 19 or so was the complete lack of attention to realism when it came to the actual picking of pockets. That's my memory of it anyway - first time I sort of got "expressionism" on screen. Up until then I'm sure my idea of a serious movie is that it had to be realism.

nicely said. to my mind i equated the pickpocket scenes to mime artistry, very expressionist.

have you watched A Man Escaped? i thought this was just tremendous.
 

nochexxx

harco pronting
Up until then I'm sure my idea of a serious movie is that it had to be realism.

(

i must confess i crave realism in film, mainly because i feel so many films try but fail in this area.

another thing i've been wondering about Bresson's directorial style is his situational use of non-actors or actors playing non-actors. for some reason i love this kind of self concious acting. one of the reasons Two Lane Blacktop is my all time fav film.
 

michael

Bring out the vacuum
have you watched A Man Escaped? i thought this was just tremendous.

No, I should really get back into seeing ... some movies, actually.

Big impediment re: genuine realism, I reckon, is just music. God I'm a fucking snob about soundtracks! I really like no-music recent stuff like Gomorrah and Le Class in that regard, although I'd also hate for movies to be limited to just that faux doco look.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
The Road was totally ruined for me by the music. You're looking at a desolate wasteland, the aftermath of a horrendous and unspecified event that has all but wiped out mankind and turned the world into a sterile and hostile place where the only way to eke a living is by scavenging tin cans from victims' houses. You're seeing this through the eyes of a starving and desperate man who knows that he and his child are destined to die an ugly and lonely death. You don't need Nick Cave tapping out a melancholy tune on the piano to tell you things aren't good. And more than that, the music drags you out of the experience which at times almost succeeds in being immersive and reminds you that you're just watching a film.
 
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