Films you've seen recently and would unreservedly recommend:

[mistersloane]

I watched Bigger Than Life last night, another Nicholas Ray film, featuring a comic tour de force from James Mason. One of the funniest and most subversive (I was going to add 'for its time', but tbh its points still hold, except the audience now is more aware of the critique he is making, in a post-modernly knowing way) films I've seen in an age.

Brief synopsis: James Mason is a school teacher working two jobs to keep his wife and son upwardly mobile in 1950s suburban America, who suddenly contracts a rare life-threatening illness, which can only be averted by taking new wonder-drug cortizone - unfortunately, it proves to be quite addictive, with tragic (and fucking hilarious) consequences...

Oh wow I saw that one, I didn't realise it was Nicholas Ray. That film is ferocious.

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

The Mist (2007)
This is a strange one. Starts out like any other creature B-movie, with a mental ground zero in a supermarket, internecine conflict, rednecks, CGI monster attacks. But with some weird features - an insufferable end-of-days god botherer-led group dynamic, an Aliens-inspired cocooning/spawning sequence in the pharmacy, enormous betentacled Cthulian monsters stalking the landscape that surely inspired Cloverfield and a total bummer of an ending.

Based on the Stephen King novella. It's good, but not as good as The Dead Zone.

I'm going to watch The Medusa Touch again now.

 

[rubberdingyrapids]

a short film about love and a short film about killing. weird watching them now as they scream out 80s arthouse and i cant help thinking he overdoes it with the score at times - not quite spielbergian but the music could have been used less. still, i thought they were as good as i remember. not sure what kryslowski's standing is these days - i think he might have become underrated. im sure theres plenty of examples to prove me wrong and its my own biases showing but sometimes i think arthouse pretty much peaked in the 80s/90s.

also, daft punk's electroma film. reminded me of sofia coppola. thought it would leave me cold but i found it a bit like the man who feel to earth.

 

[baboon2004]

a short film about love and a short film about killing. weird watching them now as they scream out 80s arthouse and i cant help thinking he overdoes it with the score at times - not quite spielbergian but the music could have been used less. still, i thought they were as good as i remember. not sure what kryslowski's standing is these days - i think he might have become underrated. im sure theres plenty of examples to prove me wrong and its my own biases showing but sometimes i think arthouse pretty much peaked in the 80s/90s.

that's really interesting. I loved these when I was 18/19, but watching short film about love again recently, i couldn't stand it, and I was surprised at my reaction, because my tastes haven't changed all that much in film. I found it quite pretentious in a way that a few friends had accused it of being first time round, relying too heavily on 'meaningful looks' etc - I found myself seeing it much more from their point of view.

I think the same applies to Lars von Trier - having becoming more familiar with Haneke (for example) since seeing the classic von Trier films in the 90s, von trier looks leaden, obvious and untalented by comparison.

It's something specific to European arthouse films maybe, cos the American/British films I loved when I was a teenager, I tend to still love.

@HMGovt - Dead Zone is amazing. Christopher Walken's finest hour, for my money.

@mistersloane isn't it just? James Mason may be one of the finest comic actors there's ever been, too.

 

[IdleRich]

I watched Kyslowski's 10 Commandments films a year or two ago and thought they were great, on the other hand The Double Life of Veronique seemed to me to suffer from exactly that kind of heavy-handedness you mention. On the whole I like him but maybe his smaller films are his best.

 

[rubberdingyrapids]

that's really interesting. I loved these when I was 18/19, but watching short film about love again recently, i couldn't stand it, and I was surprised at my reaction, because my tastes haven't changed all that much in film. I found it quite pretentious in a way that a few friends had accused it of being first time round, relying too heavily on 'meaningful looks' etc - I found myself seeing it much more from their point of view.

I think the same applies to Lars von Trier - having becoming more familiar with Haneke (for example) since seeing the classic von Trier films in the 90s, von trier looks leaden, obvious and untalented by comparison.

It's something specific to European arthouse films maybe, cos the American/British films I loved when I was a teenager, I tend to still love.

hmm i thought they were full of real fragility and emotion and empathy. i know that sounds totally pretentious but they just have a lot of feeling (being ill and slightly self-pitying while watching them prob helped too). i never found they were over labouring it. the main flaw imo was that they were borderline sentimental and could seem a little too in love with their own beauty/'everyday life' humility at times. a lot of that was down to the music, but it was in a similar way to how a film like umberto d is undoubtedly moving but sits right on the edge of dipping into sentimentality. i suppose what stopped that happening was that they are beautiful but also pessimistic or accepting of lifes tragedies.

i keep wanting to watch old hal hartley or jarmusch as i loved those films when i was a teenager, but i dont want to, in case age makes me think theyre crap. i saw jarmusch's last one and thought it was terrible. just an empty, cliched rehash of what made films like stranger than paradise so good.

not sure about von trier vs haneke. LVT def likes to provoke with glee, sometimes just for the hell of it, haneke likes to provoke more righteously. i havent got rid of all my juvenille tendencies yet so im cool with both. wasnt a huge fan of the white ribbon though. amour i liked but it seemed a bit episodic, like a scene by scene checklist of what goes wrong when you get old. kind of like a domestic horror movie about ageing.

 

[IdleRich]

Not sure I'd recommnd it to everyone but I thoroughly enjoyed Cloud Atlas yesterday. Glad I watched it in Genesis Stepney Green's new Studio 5 (basically a normal screen but it has sofas and more room) cos it's really long but it needs to be. They've had a decent stab at adapting a book that seemed impossible to adapt, rerusing to cut any of it out or put in any of the kind of overly didactic explanations that clunk into the middle of the action in supposedly brainy sci-fi such as Inception.
I can imagine that a lot of people might leave totally nonplussed or say (as my friend did) that it was a bit pointless but basically I liked the way that they went all over the world, into space, to the past and to the future in the aid of a few little vignettes that addd up to make themes rather than stories.
The film dispenses with the "palindromic" structure of the book in favour of quick cuts between the various stories and probably keeps the excitement higher as a result. I can certainly see why they did that though it's harder to justify their decision to use the same actors in every scenario leading to bizarrre casting such as Hugh Grant as a tattooed post-apocalyptic warrior and Halle Berry as a (white) German Jew.
They threw in everything but the kitchen sink and at times it can't help being silly but for me it was always fun with a little bit of something extra and that's impressive for such a monstrosity of a film.

 

[empty mirror]

Have you seen Army of Shadows?

late reply, but yes. i couldn't really connect with it though. just a bit BIG of a movie for me. i prefer le cercle rouge or le samourai. i can digest character studies and little crime films better. maybe i'll give it another go round.

 

[zhao]

I watched Kyslowski's 10 Commandments films a year or two ago and thought they were great, on the other hand The Double Life of Veronique seemed to me to suffer from exactly that kind of heavy-handedness you mention. On the whole I like him but maybe his smaller films are his best.

10 commandments are AMAZING. everything else i've ever seen, including Double Life and especially Red, White, and Bullshit, is unbearable pretentious drivel.

i think he had a spark but went overboard and became too self conscious with its success very quickly. also may be that oppressive (faux) communist regimes really are good for film making.

 

[viktorvaughn]

Not sure I'd recommnd it to everyone but I thoroughly enjoyed Cloud Atlas yesterday. Glad I watched it in Genesis Stepney Green's new Studio 5 (basically a normal screen but it has sofas and more room) cos it's really long but it needs to be. They've had a decent stab at adapting a book that seemed impossible to adapt, rerusing to cut any of it out or put in any of the kind of overly didactic explanations that clunk into the middle of the action in supposedly brainy sci-fi such as Inception.
I can imagine that a lot of people might leave totally nonplussed or say (as my friend did) that it was a bit pointless but basically I liked the way that they went all over the world, into space, to the past and to the future in the aid of a few little vignettes that addd up to make themes rather than stories.
The film dispenses with the "palindromic" structure of the book in favour of quick cuts between the various stories and probably keeps the excitement higher as a result. I can certainly see why they did that though it's harder to justify their decision to use the same actors in every scenario leading to bizarrre casting such as Hugh Grant as a tattooed post-apocalyptic warrior and Halle Berry as a (white) German Jew.
They threw in everything but the kitchen sink and at times it can't help being silly but for me it was always fun with a little bit of something extra and that's impressive for such a monstrosity of a film.

Yeah i liked it's madly ambitious scope too. Some terribly saccharine bits in it (the very last scene comes to mind, and the cod-philosophical 'everythings connected maaaan kind of message) but quite fun, and props for not cutting it down at all.

 

[rubberdingyrapids]

veronique i think was him trying to be more international/french and break out beyond poland but i think he lost a lot of what made the films before so interesting/distinct. it has good creepy atmosphere but the whole theme about how people can intersect and connect without knowing each other seemed too heavy handed and at the same time, slight.

blind chance is also good, and camera buff is brilliant imo. seemingly little but it packs a lot into it, about relationships and art and what an artist/filmmaker has to consider and the conflicts between the two and then inside them. and he does it all without ever being heavy handed. its not a comedy, like ive read some say, but it has a lightness of touch about it that makes KK someone i really warm to.

one thing i found a bit distracting about short film about killing was the filters he used on various scenes. there was no need for it. i read recently it was meant to look phlegmatic, but to me it looked golden, giving what is a kind of realist looking film a sort of sun-baked glow for various scenes. bit weird. had the same thought while watching wings of desire - its such a gorgeous looking film, but was there any need to switch between colour and B&W? ditto rumble fish with the red fish in the black and white fish tank. then again, rumble fish is just an odd film in general, the way it looks seems totally wrong for the characters and the story (never mind that a lot of the acting is ridiculous).

 

[viktorvaughn]

Not a film as such but I've just finished watching the 15 part Mark Cousins Story of film documentary and thought it an admirable stab at a massive topic.

My fave thing was that it didn't try to be totally objective, it was his love letter to cinema, as well as being didactic/rigorous in its film history. So he picked some of his favourite films or made reference to shots, directors etc that he liked, rather than sitting wholly on the fence etc.

He singled out Performance as 'the one film in the story of film everyone should watch' or something like that, and said Come and See is the best war film ever made, and Tokyo Story is the best film ever. (I've never seen the first two of these..)

 

[rubberdingyrapids]

i love mark cousins. he REALLY needs to stop telling you the ending of films (i still havent seen the passenger or third man but i now know how they end cos of that series), but yeah, i love his passion. he could do with a bit more depth at times, or closer analysis before moving on to the next thing, but he makes me want to see all the films he talks about, which is surely what good writing/criticism is meant to be about, and made me see certain films/film in general in a different way. the main thing i like about him is how hes so willing to explore areas of film outside the west, and put it side by side with everything else. i dont know many other big-ish uk critics as open minded (without it being a token gesture) as him apart from maybe, derek malcolm (though im sure theyre out there).

 

[viktorvaughn]

i love mark cousins. he REALLY needs to stop telling you the ending of films (i still havent seen the passenger or third man but i now know how they end cos of that series), but yeah, i love his passion. he could do with a bit more depth at times, or closer analysis before moving on to the next thing, but he makes me want to see all the films he talks about, which is surely what good writing/criticism is meant to be about, and made me see certain films/film in general in a different way. the main thing i like about him is how hes so willing to explore areas of film outside the west, and put it side by side with everything else. i dont know many other big-ish uk critics as open minded (without it being a token gesture) as him apart from maybe, derek malcolm (though im sure theyre out there).

Exactly. I got straight online and immediately started torrenting Murnau, DW Griffiths, Harold Lloyd etc films.

If I could make one change it would have been to scrap the talking heads completely and just have him doing the voice over on top of footage from films. It makes it purer, and emphasises the power of film somehow by using just film itself as the language for exploring cinema. The talking heads didn't really add anything, and i felt he bigged up all the directors/actors who appeared slightly more than if they hadn't been in the film (perhaps understandably).

 

[rubberdingyrapids]

yeah, often he had more interesting things to say than the actors or directors, though i think he needed the talking heads though to give the series some celeb/name weight. but things like the interview with robert towne for eg was really poorly recorded sound wise - im not sure why he left it in. i did like his little linking footage though, of his travels around the world where the films were made (was funny to see the multiplex in new jersey - i think - that is now there). made it a bit of a travelogue as much as a history.

im not sure why so many people hated his voiceover - it made it feel more intimate for me. totally different from the usual documentary presenter style where theyre blasting you with their narrative.

the one downside of wanting to see everything he mentions is that i am still so behind in catching up lol.

 

[IdleRich]

"blind chance is also good, and camera buff is brilliant imo. seemingly little but it packs a lot into it, about relationships and art and what an artist/filmmaker has to consider and the conflicts between the two and then inside them. and he does it all without ever being heavy handed. its not a comedy, like ive read some say, but it has a lightness of touch about it that makes KK someone i really warm to."

Oh yeah, forgot about that Camera Buff one, that is really good. Something sweet about it without being saccharine, slow without being boring and so on and so forth. What I always like with K is how the story often moves in ways that you don't expect. When you've seen a few of his you always start a new one wondering which of the characters you see in the first few scenes are going to be important and who the film is gonna end up following.

 

[rubberdingyrapids]

sticking with story of film, i saw a moment of innocence last night. and it was as good as cousins said it was. its about a director restaging an event from his teenage years when he was imprisoned, and getting the policeman who he tried to stab to act in his film and reconstruct the event (though i read after that the policeman couldnt act so its a proper actor). so its a film about a film but way more than that (it has a pretty interesting backstory). i prefer it to 8 1/2.

 

[stephenk]

i thought don's party was pretty good. teetered on the edge of hysterical comedy and heavy midlife/married drama. also appreciate the fuzzed out dark suburban australia, 70s decor setting.

 

[viktorvaughn]

sticking with story of film, i saw a moment of innocence last night. and it was as good as cousins said it was. its about a director restaging an event from his teenage years when he was imprisoned, and getting the policeman who he tried to stab to act in his film and reconstruct the event (though i read after that the policeman couldnt act so its a proper actor). so its a film about a film but way more than that (it has a pretty interesting backstory). i prefer it to 8 1/2.

Yeah that did sounds like a good one, will have to look it out. I've just downloaded Sholay, the 3 hour bollywood epic which looks pretty great.

 

[nochexxx]

The Baby - felt like 70s tv drama on acid

i believe at some point the director did a few episodes of Columbo