Last Movie You Watched

[Cato]

One fun fact (maybe not a fact?) circulating about the Herrmann/De Palma collaboration was that Herrmann complained that "nothing happens" for the first ~40 minutes of SISTERS.  When De Palma pointed out that PSYCHO works like this, he was told, "People will wait for Hitchcock!  You're not Hitchcock!"  No idea if this is apocryphal....
I am really looking forward to De Palma's newest, PASSION; I've tried to avoid reading anything about it, though somehow still I got the drift that it was a 'trashy' one.  Huzzah!  Even when i am not crazy about the whole of any one of them, there are at least a couple-few shots or sequences that knock me out.

No, the story is in fact from De Palma himself in an interview he gave (I think) to the Village Voice about Sisters and working with Herrmann, who apparently was in an ill temper most of the time!

[Karl Henning]

A hoot!

[George]

J G-L never ceases to show just how talented he is. His biggest mistake here is not really having a clue about how difficult it is to shake an addiction. Other than that, this movie was great. It was hilarious, featured Scarlett looking damn hot, Tony Danza as the creepy Dad and I actually found it refreshing for Julianne Moore to finally be starting to show some age. I like the way the story was told, the repetition of it. Having known hundreds of guys like Jon (and yes, being just a little bit like him myself), it felt to me like an honest film. An excellent first effort from J G-L.

[TheGSMoeller]

http://www.youtube.com/v/2n_r_5RXobM http://www.youtube.com/v/mXD8l8JFk6E

[Brahmsian]

Academy Award-® winning director Martin Scorsese once again teams up with Leonardo DiCaprio in this spine-chilling thriller. When U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) arrives at an asylum for the criminally insane on Shutter Island what starts as a routine investigation quickly takes a sinister turn. As the investigation unfolds and Teddy uncovers more shocking and terrifying truths about the island he learns there are some places that never let you go.

[asin]B00AEBBA68[/asin]

A great movie.  Wonderful music, too.

[Octave]

LEVIATHAN (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel, 2012)

A documentary about a fishing vessel from two filmmakers working out of the 'Sensory Ethnography Lab' (!) at Harvard.

Among cinephiles my generally negative opinion of the film seems to be minority.
Here's a long, gung-ho review of the film from Phil Coldiron:
http://cinema-scope.com/features/blood-and-thunder-enter-the-leviathan/

A more direct article on the filmmakers and the film from NYT's Dennis Lim:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/movies/harvard-filmmakers-messy-world.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

A video Q&A with the filmmakers from the NYFF:
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2012/blog/nyff-qa-with-verena-paravel-and-lucien-castaing-taylor-leviathan

Or here are a concise few paragraphs from David Bordwell:

At the other extreme lies the bustle of Leviathan, a poetic, quasi-abstract documentary by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel. The filmmakers capture a New Bedford fishing trip through GoPro digital mini-cameras worn by fishermen, tossed into a netful of fish, or dragged through the water. Long takes abound here too, but it's hard to say how many. As in The Man with a Movie Camera, the very boundary between one shot and another is put into question. So is the boundary between us and the space onscreen, as we're weirdly wrapped in the extreme wide-angle yielded by this lens.

This is what you get when no human eye is looking through the camera. Often, in fact, nobody could look through the lens. No head, let alone human body, could occupy the space of some of these shots. Chains roll out past us from churning greenish darkness, while fish drift and slither on all sides. We're right next to a gull trying to use its beak to lift itself to another area of the hold. Here the fish-eye lens lives up to its name. The camera bobs in a tank as fish are tossed in and spin aimlessly past. Coasting along the edge of the craft, we dip abruptly in and out of the heaving water, our plunge accentuated by brutal sound cuts. We chase starfish and ride waves, spinning up to watch gulls blotting out the sky. Accelerations of speed (again, Man with a Movie Camera comes to mind) render the action hallucinatory, especially since the shutter can capture foam with strobe-like precision.

One result is a disembodied, dehumanized vision of sea and sky: The camera as flotsam. But we also get bumpy, skittish visions of human labor definitely tied to bodies that harvest the ocean. Work activities are filmed from cameras lashed to the fishermen's heads or lying on the deck among scallops to be shucked. Most documentary close-ups of artisans' tasks are taken from far back and with long lenses; here the very wide-angle GoPro lenses not only show tasks from the inside, but their distortions exaggerate each gesture, sometimes heroically, sometimes grotesquely. Either way, human activity has been defamiliarized no less than undersea life.

We start the movie immersed in a welter of details and stay enmeshed for nearly an hour. Only then do we get an "establishing shot" showing the boat deck and mapping the overall process of filling and emptying the nets. And fairly soon after that, as if to parody the usual documentary about fisher folk, we get a four-minute shot of the captain dozing off while watching a TV show (apparently The Deadliest Catch). Leviathan ends with a sequence that brackets the chiaroscuro of the opening, but we no longer see a clam's-eye-view of being snagged. Instead, we get barely illuminated darkness with whiffs of crimson teasingly darting to the edge of the frame, as if to signal the end, before swerving back to the center, then heading offscreen. Again, Ruiz has the line: Special shadows that give off light.

I found LEVIATHAN really frustrating, unproductively ugly and dull.
I see Bruno Latour was thanked at the end, plus the species of birds, fish, etc were credited right alongside the human fishing crew; so the ~antihumanist angle extended even to methodology (the 'released' array of GoPro cams, used to 'distribute the authorship' as one of the filmmakers apparently said).  That's quite interesting in theory; I just wish the experience of watching the damn thing had been more rewarding.  I wonder if the fish and birds who watch this film will feel differently?  Is it not an extension of humanist arrogance to presume that the perspective "of" another species can ever be given?
On the other hand, the idea of a documentary that tries to communiciate an experience through its form even if that form ends up moving into non-narrative, ferociously abstract territory---this might actually not be so uncommon---is quite appealing to me.  Nonetheless I was disappointed.

I must say that most of the shots involving birds (gulls?) were really exciting to me, not least because they looked fake...like low-grade CGI.  I have reason to believe that this is not the case, but the jittering, 'mobile' GoPro anti-cinematography makes the experiences really tremulous, freakish.  Phil Coldiron (above) makes a passing comparison to Hitchcock's and that is not unfair at all.  The 'automated' or 'surrendered' cameras are so much a part of this vertigo, I wonder if even being on the boat would not have captured that experience quite the same way (I've had a little such experience), and might have been quite a bit less intense....so this might be a notably contemporary example of cinema as an amplifier for the real, beyond the usual stock of close-ups and post-production FX.  That is exciting.  Still mostly a tedious experience for me.

[Todd]

The Iceman.  Michael Shannon plays a mob hitman, and pretty well at that.  Chris Evans plays a decidedly un-Captain America like character, and Ray Liotta plays, you guessed it, a mobster.  Old hand character actor Robert Davi delivers the goods as a mob heavyweight, too.  I read some critiques of the film that said there isn't much depth to the main character, but that makes me wonder, how much depth is there to psychopaths anyway?  Not a great film, but one I enjoyed quite a bit. 

[Bogey]

Oblivion (2013)



A story that continues to be tapped, but this round kept me entertained while I rode the bike....and that was the objective.  Cool ship, but very little in the way of twists that go anywhere or imagination.  Better titles:

Planet Without the Apes
Not Much Beyond Thunderdome
or
Logan's Crawl

[Octave]

1. TELL THEM ANYTHING YOU WANT: A PORTRAIT OF MAURICE SENDAK (Lance Bangs & Spike Jonze, 2009)
2. WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE (Spike Jonze, 2009)  adapted from Sendak by Jonze and Dave Eggers

I was surprised how much I enjoyed the 40-minute doc, which I streamed from Hulu.  (It was not included on the stripped down rental disc of WTWTA.)  Maurice Sendak was a cranky old buzzard!  With a foul mouth to boot.  Maybe in spite of this, I found him quite funny and lovable this way.  ("Ah, people make such a fuss....'He drew a dick on a little boy!'  Gewalt!")  Non sequitur: I didn't know he was gay; he doesn't dwell on it, but he also doesn't dodge talking about a painful youth.  I realized I've read barely anything of his, and nothing for many years; and hearing him grumble for a while made me want to read more by him.  It might be nice to encounter those books without memories of them intervening.

I enjoyed the WILD THINGS adaptation much less; I think I'd sensed that it was something I needed to skip when it came out, but it certainly wasn't all that bad.  (I am guessing that once I saw Dave Eggers' name, I backed away.  The handful of things I've read by Eggers have irritated me to no end.  It's too bad, because somehow he seems like one of the good guys, and I like the McSweeney's concept....it's just the scene that bugs me.  Maybe just resentment on my part?  Probably not resentment of great writing.)  In fact, WILD THINGS might have the distinction of being one of the most melancholy ~kids' films I've seen.  Except that the kids it's for were in their 30s/40s when it came out; plus, the field of melancholy-spiked actual kids' films is pretty crowded, come to think of it, crowded and time-honored; plus this is obvious, self-pitying, indie-rock melancholy, mumblecore apologia for a halfhearted dropping-out: "We tried to build something," says James Gandolfini, who probably wonders what his motivation is, but wouldn't be wondering that if it were Sendak writing and directing the film.  "A world where only things you wanted to happen would happen." 
Plus more demerits for Karen O's rankling, whiny, distracting music, not even helped out of a rut by the capable Carter Burwell.  Its main distinction might be its membership in a gaggle of variably successful 'arrested development' movies (DARK HORSE, GREENBERG, MOMMA'S MAN, etc etc etc), a little zeitgeist burp.

Catherine Keener stops by in both movies, and I must say as much as I have always liked her, I love watching her age.  She (and her interesting, nuanced performance) and an also rough-around-edges, timeworn Philip Seymour Hoffman (and Walken) were what I clung to during the tediousness of A LATE QUARTET.  She has almost nothing to do in WILD THINGS; it's too bad, because I feel like she has really pungent depths of emotion that she can communicate especially when she is not forced to play ice queens nonstop.

[Octave]

ROOM 237 (Rodney Ascher, 2012)
It is wingnuttery.  That would be fine and actually all the more entertaining, if it were not also, here, lazy.  I wonder if 'casual obsession' is an uninteresting contradiction, and makes for uninteresting sets of questions?

Actually I love speculative criticism that just departs from putative or probably or probably fantasized/projected/rigged authorial tyranny entirely.  But there are still responsibilities to these kinds of criticism, and some of them do much more honor to digression than do others.  Normally I would be all for exegetical gymnastics as a work of art unto themselves, but the talking mouths (all voiceovers, no heads) can get pretty sloppy and downright irritating; one guys shrugs off an attribution to Eliot that belongs to Joyce (and it's a biggie), another guy acknowledges the child's crying we hear mewling from the background and interrupts himself to ask, "Can you hear my kid?  Hold on, let me take care of that...." and the commentary is interrupted while he attends to his kid.  Nobody sounds prepared, including the filmmakers, who are apparently not even miking these people properly (the levels on the voiceovers are abysmal, almost like they were....phoned in).  Clips from non-SHINING films are used with abandon, often apparently randomly.  (What are multiple clips from AMADEUS doing here?)

This is probably the worst of it, though; and I must say a number of the observations are pretty cool.  I'd not realized the crazy amount of continuity "errors" that, admittedly, really do scream out 'hidden message' when it's Kubrick that is helming the proceedings.  For example, the wild but muted use of impossible space inside the hotel.  It's almost as though we're being goosed nonstop. 
But when we move from genocide to Kubrick's role in faked moon-landing footage....I at least wish the presenters had prepared scripts for themselves.  It does make me want to read more of these theories, but I'm stunned that advocates of somewhat edgy and clearly marginal positions---and not just in relation to Kubrick----wouldn't see fit to prepare themselves to make the most compressed case possible for their arguments.  It makes me think they are not serious, even about some creative sophistry.  But genocide and many varieties of 'conspiracy' are real; why would these people broach the subject and mumble their way to oblivion?  Why are we supposed to care if they don't?  I keep reading account of this movie being about 'obsessive' fans of THE SHINING, but I think of 'obsessive' (and, etymologically, 'cult') as involving, necessarily, a heightened, hypertrophied sense of care; there is some remarkable attentiveness at work here, but apparently very little care stitching these moments or nodes together.  It's like these fanatics are interested in the largest premises possible, and the smallest details detectable....and absolutely nothing in-between.  It's enough to make one wish they'd followed Aristotle's injunction to end up with metaphysics, even if it's the latter that's about 'first things'.  What a useful template for education (the getting or the giving)!

I probably would not have watched this if it had not been for the damned streaming option. 

[SonicMan46]

The Conjuring (2013) w/ Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, et al - streamed tonight from Amazon - yet another more recent paranormal film w/ exorcist themes at the end - now I own on DVD, and enjoy the Exorcist & Poltergeist and have seen plenty of other similar films - this one for those interested in the genre is not bad at all - held my interest to the end - based on a presumed 'true story' (info HERE) - 4*/5 on Amazon & 86% on Rotten Tomatoes from the critics - guess that I'd have to agree; if you like these types of ghost movies, then worth a watch.  Dave

[George]

Great movie! First time seeing it tonight. Didn't know until the end it was a true story!

[snyprrr]

How bout a new rule you can't post movies everyone's seen a billion times? kay?

Here, I'll start:

Putney Swope... it's a bad drug movie, meaning it'll make you feel like you took bad drugs. ok, now you... how bout as a rule for 2014?

[AndyD.]

Donnie Brasco, I really like that movie!

Me:

Still going crazy over SNL alumni Tina Fey and Amy Poehler's work; currently enjoying the silly but fun Parks and Recreation.

[George]

Donnie Brasco, I really like that movie!

Me:

Still going crazy over SNL alumni Tina Fey and Amy Poehler's work; currently enjoying the silly but fun Parks and Recreation.

I love Parks and Recreation!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/spenceralthouse/18-of-the-best-ron-swanson-quotes-a078

[Karl Henning]

Last night, a perennial favorite by us: Much Ado About Nothing

[TheGSMoeller]

Last night, a perennial favorite by us: Much Ado About Nothing

I do like that one myself, Karl. Michael Keaton is a hoot!

[Karl Henning]

Though it be not written down . . . .

[AndyD.]

Re Parks and Rec, I recently saw the one where Ron Swanson got shot hunting....I'm laughing just thinking about it!

Or how about the strip club, where Ron was completely disinterested and about to leave...until he saw they had an all you can eat breakfast (dying!)

[The new erato]

Last night, a perennial favorite by us: Much Ado About Nothing

That is one if the few movies I've watched twice and still long to see again.