IdleRich

IdleRich
She continued to get supporting parts in films like Paid and Party Girl. Unfortunately by 1934 she was bankrupt and unable to find work. She started starving herself and her health quickly deteriorated. Her last role was playing a waitress in the 1936 comedy Ten Laps To Go. She moved into a tiny low rent apartment in Los Angeles. On January 21, 1937 Marie Prevost died from acute alcoholism and malnutrition. She was only thirty-eight years old. Sadly her body was not discovered for two days. Rumors started to spread that her hungry Dachshund Marxie had eaten her body. The truth is that the dog tried to wake Marie by gently biting her then spent days barking until she was found. Her close friend Joan Crawford paid for her private funeral. She was cremated and her ashes were given to her sister.

That sounds like the censored version though to be honest.
 

glasshand

dj panic attack
And the other film was totally different; Bull is a very low budget British gangster revenge thing with Neil Maskell as a relentless psychopath brutally murdering his way through the gang of low-rent scumbags who set him on fire and kidnapped his son - seemingly the only thing he cared about in the world.

I would say it was gritty but that doesn't really do it justice. It's the Grim Brittania thread with more machetes and afterwards I realised that it had left me feeling almost depressed. The sordid smallness and ugliness of everything about was extremely effective.

I suppose when you see some mafia don or Colombdian drug lord who will kill people to lead a glamorous lifestyle of mansions and private jets, well, I don't condone it or anything, but it is more understandable than some horrible Scottish boss who has quite literally sold his soul for a detached house in Romford. The idea that people can become so evil for so little gave the film a kind of powerful banality if I can say that.

In contrast to Neptune Frost, the originality of which posed constant challenges of the "what next?" and "how should it end?" type for its creators, the well-trodden nature of Bull's plot arguably meant they were able to tie it up more satisfactorily and completely.

Edit - I would describe Bull as a bit like Dead Man's Shoes - but without the joyously upbeat message that conveyed in every scene - meets, er, another film. But if I say the other film it reminded me of then it will give away the twist ending which apparently caught everyone completely off-guard although I saw it (or something similar) coming a mile off.

just watched Bull and enjoyed it. i'm a bit hungover still so i spent the whole film thinking his name was Paul. funny how Neil Maskell has to play that same guy in nearly every film he's in. am filing it next to Kill List, London to Brighton, Down Terrace, which are all really good too.
 

glasshand

dj panic attack
Another Round

Loved it, a tragicomic tribute to booze, Mads Mikkelsen the legend

The last time I felt so nostalgic about the booze fuelled glories of youth was when I read the first of Knausgaard's My Struggle series. Those scandis know something about the liberation of booze. Perhaps cos they're as repressed as Brits?

i watched this last year when i was doing dry jan and second it as a great film. only lasted 2 weeks of dry jan, don't think it was related. Danish pubs definitely reminded me of English ones the one time that i visited, but Carlsberg actually tastes decent there
 

glasshand

dj panic attack
i watched Aniara recently. a societal/ecological collapse parable. a load of people get trapped in a spaceship which is knocked off course as it leaves a destroyed planet Earth for a barely-inhabitable Mars. the passengers descend into cultish sex rituals, depression, and an ad hoc dictatorship led by the captain. obviously quite depressing in itself but stays engaging the whole way thru, balanced by a bit of a tragic romance story. maybe it's just what i've been choosing to watch recently, but it's interesting how many films seem to be about our civilisation telling the story of its own demise.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Just watched The Long Day Closes by Terence Davies, perhaps my favorite of his so far, out of the four I've seen. I really think the austere, ruminative style works well, especially with the cheerful barroom singing and laddish banter peppered in. He may be one of my favorite directors.

In this one, there was an excellent short montage: overhead of the protagonist boy swinging on a rebar rod over a basement staircase by the sidewalk, match cut transition to the beam of light from the projector over the heads of moviegoers, panning still unto another match cut transition of a crowd of churchgoers in the pews panning toward the pastor, match cut mirror transition to a teacher standing before a classroom of boys whom he dismisses, returning via a final match cut transition to the same basement stairwell by the sidewalk - overhead continuous pan the whole way through.

Beautiful filmmaking.
 
Last edited:

catalog

Well-known member
If you like Terence davies, it might be worth your while to check out bill douglas' trilogy if you haven't done so already. Too heavy and sparse for me at the time I saw them, but might be up your street.

Pretty sure at the time I saw them, they were paired with a Davies film.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
If you like Terence davies, it might be worth your while to check out bill douglas' trilogy if you haven't done so already. Too heavy and sparse for me at the time I saw them, but might be up your street.

Pretty sure at the time I saw them, they were paired with a Davies film.
Oh nice, I haven't heard of Douglas before. I'll keep an eye out for those films.
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
you should read schnitzler's traumnovelle, but you'd probably prefer the film
i don't want to touch it yet, there's still a lot from the film to process. most specifically the idea that the big budget film world is such a different place in 2022 to what it was in 1999. the level of sophistication in eyes wide shut makes everything i've seen recently look like shit by comparison. really muted and boring. i don't watch hardly any films though so i don't know what i'm on about, and to be honest every time i go to the cinema i love whatever i'm watching by default
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
as usual i noticed the difference in bodies a lot. tom cruise is hench in eyes wide shut but he's an order of magnitude less muscular than a sexy man film character today. the type of muscles he's got are different too. the women's bodies as well, of which there are a lot, looked so normal to my eye as well, for women who are supposed to be really sexy. the arses in particular are really different to modern sexy arses.
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
oh yeah actually somehow that comment reminded me, the most immediate thing that the film made me think about walking home was that it felt like an expression of some really contemporary sexual anxieties, this kind of collective thing going on between filmmaker and audience where some discomfort with the current quite liberated sexual free for fall (ie how things go down for most people from the 80s onwards, where the rules around sex in the anglo world at least changed quite a lot) was being expressed.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
We're just watching a Frances McDormand double-header cos, randomly enough, one channel showed Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day and then another is showing Blood Simple. The first is fine, a fast-talking jazz age deco-porn fest of a romantic comedy, it passes the time and it does it fairly well I guess. Not sure I will remember it tomorrow, maybe some of the interiors... now we're watching Blood Simple, the first few scenes... especially the first with the two driving a car into the rain, the camera placed in the back seat and nothing really visible except the rain on the windscreen while they talk a load of bollocks that sets the scene (Hitchcockian Liza said). In fact the first few scenes are just brilliant, the dialogue is so fast and clever - and a lot of it is too fast and oblique for Liza to grasp although I'd say she speaks fluent English now - just not Texan. I haven't seen the film for years so I hope it carries on this good but I'm already recommending it unreservedly... also it strikes me that - for better or worse - Coen brothers ended up being the most influential thing on cinema over the thirty or so years since Blood Simple came out, so many moments and lines and jokes that could be lifted from their films before you count directors like that guy who did In Bruges who simply took their whole schtick.
 
Top