RIP Bigas Luna

[padraig (u.s.)]

I hugely enjoyed Kaboom

his best film is definitely Totally Fucked Up, which is like some crowning momentous achievement in queer cinema and bildungsromans and the birth of 90s indie films (came out the same years as Clerks iirc) all in one, Doom Generation + Nowhere are too self-consciously campy tho. Mysterious Skin being his other masterpiece

 

[baboon2004]

Korine - Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy are both utter shit. Still think Kids is a very powerful film, though he wrote rather than directed.

Araki - haven't seen that one, in fact. Will get hold of a copy right away. Nowhere I loved, Doom Generation less so. And what can you say about Mysterious Skin that would do it justice? Likely one of the best and most disturbingly beautiful films ever made.

Another vote for auteurs is Amos Kollek, who no-one outside France and new York seems to know about. And Lodge Kerrigan, who is also a genius of sorts

 

[rubberdingyrapids]

james cameron is a weird auteur. christopher nolan. danny boyle.

really? theyre weird by mainstream standards, which means 'a little bit but not very much'. im not really that interested in stuff that offers a slightly odd tweak to the modern blockbuster. that kind of thing gets too much credit (see: nolan/batman). plus, weird has been abused by 'quirkiness'. and yeah, post-90s indie, there is more blurring happening.

by weird, i guess i mean something like herzog's bad lieutenant. greg araki is a good one, though his last one was basically his version of a teen college movie - like a bid for hollywood (not that i disliked it - i thought it was fab). refn's drive i think was a bit too obviously cult-movie-ish, like it was made to be like lynch, point blank and all those other old noir-ish movies, so its weird, sure, but not in a new way exactly.

holy motors has to be the weirdest recent film i can think of.
ha@all the korine hate. i liked (and hated in parts) trash humpers.
thoughts on gaspar noe? enter the void is all time for me. dont want to see it a second time in case i dont like it as much.
i still havent seen innocence, made by his wife - thats meant to be pretty unsettling.

i wouldnt call lodge korrrigan or andrea arnold strange, just indie (whatever that means now).

 

[baboon2004]

Maybe not Andrea Arnold (tbh I was more just thinking of a great female auteur, forgetting the weird bit for a second), but I'd say Lodge Kerrigan qualifies - there's a really peculiar intensity to his films. Which ones have you seen, out of interest?

Haven't seen Enter the Void or any other of Noe's films, but I thought Irreversible was (almost mesmerisingly) terrible.

 

[rubberdingyrapids]

haha. noe is still immature and jarring and all the rest of it (like korine) but its a great disorienting, jolting, 'experience' kind of movie - i found it mesmerising even when it gets a bit boring. if midnight movies were still a big thing, i think it would be an amazing one.

ive only seen claire dolan tbh. i liked it. i need to see the others.

this is the one by noe's wife/partner.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375233/

 

[baboon2004]

Claire Dolan is the one I saw last - very good, isn't it. And Katrin Cartridge is amazing in it. Clean...Shaven is a bit more obviously weird, and possibly an even better film.

I remember meeting a French actor (friend of a friend of a friend) and being flabbergasted that she (a) knew who Amos Kollek was, in detail, and (b) was going to work with Lodge Kerrigan. Just checked on imdb, and it seems that (b) didn't work out in the end, but still. Good taste. She was exceptionally nice too, polar opposite of many (less successful) 'creatives' I've met

 

[rubberdingyrapids]

'less succesful creatives' can sometimes be quite painful to deal with. they dont make it easy to sympathise.

 

[baboon2004]

definitely, mostly because many people use it as pure status symbol

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

theyre weird by mainstream standards

it also really depends what you mean by "weird auteur"

someone like boyle is more stylish than outre, ok, but like, how are terminator and aliens NOT weird auteur movies? how is terminator less body horror than videodrome? cos it grossed more? I do guess nowadays big studios take fewer risks than ever but it's not like there haven't been plenty of truly weird mainstream movies. like, Lawrence of Arabia made tens of millions and won like 7 Oscars but how is it not a complex, totally bizarre film? meanwhile tons of experimental self-consciously weird underground cinema is actually extremely unweird (and terrible). I'm not defending big studios or something, I'm just saying weird is subjective.

also as much as I love werner herzog, bad lieutenant original > remake

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I don't hate harmony korine's films tho. hate is irrational. i think his movies fucking suck for very concrete reasons. kids too. oh wow, they sneak onto the NYC subway and steal 40s! I too have done those things. they are not super impressive. also the one guy fucks virgins and gives them AIDS and they have no morals and that is some statement on today's (of the 90s) youth being nihilistic, or something. it's some shit where film critics are like "this is a true representation of what today's youth is like" but larry clark is just like any jerk making hippie exploitation movies in 1969. plus it suffers his usual creepy obsession with filming the unclothed teenage form.

darren arronfonsky is a weird auteur tho. he is the non-shitty version of harmony korine.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

the only noe film i seen is irreversible. which the rape scene went on for way too long. I'm not someone who thinks you can't show graphic rape but if you do you better have a goddamn good reason to do so and he really doesn't, not for how long and brutal it goes on. other than it was like memento, but in paris, so pretty good. vincent cassel elevated the material tho.

 

[rubberdingyrapids]

just about to leave now but i wasnt thinking about terminator w/r/t cameron, i was thinking more about avatar!

 

[IdleRich]

I think that Gaspar Noe tries hard but the films never quite work. I reckon he might make a good film in the future though. Strangely enough I think something similar about Cassel, his films always sound as though they ought to be good and he makes interesting choices but they always fail.
Who did that film Southland Tales? The guy who did Donnie Darko. That was a weird folly kind of film, I liked it. He's probably closer in spirit to Jess Franco than Cameron is.

 

[Sick Boy]

I will agree that Harmony Korine's movies are shit. I never watched Kids as... a kid... but I watched it very recently for the first time after years of putting it off and it is totally cynical exploitative garbage with very little substance. It represents, as Padraig said, a middle-class obsession with otherness which is obnoxious in and of itself, but it heightens that by being obsessed with it in the same way VICE Magazine is - which is to say in a very superficial, detached and wrong way. It celebrates, and makes cathartic, social problems in a way that is only achievable by casting them through the perspective of bohemian bourgeois existence. Pretty repellant stuff.

I haven't seen Irreversible, but I did really like Enter the Void. Despite how absolutely shit the lead male character was (no previous acting experience), I think the use of the ambiguous drug trip/post-mortem journey of the soul narrative was a great platform for an exploration of lot of really interesting psychosexual thematic stuff, as well as being undeniably creepy in a way that can really only be described as uncanny, in the specifically Freudian sense of the term.

 

[baboon2004]

Can't defend Kids in any vaguely rational way, so I won't try. Saw it a long time ago... The Vice magazine comparison is probably on point though - it's funny how certain films can pass one's critical faculties entirely, and this is probably the case for me in this...case

never got the praise for Terminator. When I watched it a while back, I was pissing myself at how bad the acting and dialogue were - quite surprisingly, as I'd been led to believe it was some kind of sci-fi touchstone. And I like a lot of Arnie films, so I was quite open to it.