Last Movie You Watched

[TheGSMoeller]

I don't understand the whole "binge watching" claim. If Netflix wanted to force you to binge watch they would have made AD an 8 hour single episode.
Anyway, I applaud Netflix for attempting original programming, it took HBO many years before they had an original hit.

Had to include this...I typed this on my iPhone, and at one point my fat fingers spelled out Nerdflix.  which is fine, I have nerded out over Netflix before.

[Karl Henning]

I like Nerdflix.

[TheGSMoeller]

I like Nerdflix.

We might be on to something, Karl. Let's buy that domain before it's too late!


Edit: yep, already taken.

[Brian]

Hey Parsifal, you might want to try this fan-edited version of AD where a dedicated fan who clearly has nothing else to do in life recut the entire Season 4 to be in chronological order. "I did as much as I could to make these feel like real episodes."

Creator Mitch Hurwitz said he's all in favor of fans "remixing" the season, and even thought about having fans edit the finished product, but you will still have to download these things probably (?) illegally. I'll give the 21-minute premiere a shot when I get home from work.

[listener]

Fritz Lang's SPIONE - restored 2hr.24 min. version, probably by Criterion but I've got a much less expensive Bo Ying rip-off.
Visually very stylish, but don't ask about the coincidences in the 'plot'.
JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI -  directed by David Gelb (son of Peter Gelb, Met. Opera).  Use of Philip Glass music underlines the repetitiveness  of the subject's search for perfection in his profession.   

[snyprrr]

Get Christy Love (1974)

On now on the ONE Channel,... she may not be Cleopatra Jones, or Pam Grier, but she's still vintage Black Girl Tough Guy. Ah, the '70s!

[Octave]

Two films with exhilarating riots as climaxes:
1. EIJANAIKA (Shohei Imamura, 1981)
2. QUADROPHENIA (Franc Roddam, 1979 - prod. by The Who)

I wasn't prepared to be so impressed with QUADROPHENIA.  Its apparent direct address to or maybe commentary on the punk subculture of the late Seventies was immediately noticeable; the fact that it was oblivious to specifics actually made its use of youth culture seem more transcendent, less dependent on viscissitudes of "tribal" fashions or the particulars of milieu.  I also couldn't get over how affecting a bunch of downtrodden, three-day-week hormonal rampage could be.  I am sure it was the energy and not anything like nostalgia.  The 360-degree pans were remarkably full and sensual and seemed like a direct antecedent to, say, the corresponding mono-to-stereo private world pan in BOOGIE NIGHTS.  It wasn't just the rush and terror of the riot towards the end---the dance party sequences are just some of the most palpably narcotic I've seen on film, without anything in the way of special F/X trickery or expensive crane blarney.  The treatment of massed bodies was just impressive, odiferous....not heroic and sometimes gross and scary, but distinctive. 

Plus you get to see Sting attacking cops.

I also kept thinking how raw and angry and helpless and barely-class-conscious and desperate and wild QUADROPHENIA felt compared to the way, say, TRAINSPOTTING felt in its cultural moment, at least for me.  (And I think that latter film would still be enjoyable for me.  Its ancestor is just a wilder, more shocking kind of film.  It might just have been the time.)  After sensing the vaguest connection between the two ragged ~youth movies, I read that Danny Boyle et al had hired Brian Tufano, cinematographer on QUADROPHENIA, to lens both SHALLOW GRAVE and TRAINSPOTTING.  Unfortunately, the movie fell off a bit after the riot subsided; even with some spendy aerial photography at the very end, it felt like an afterthought, like a rather traditional Romantic-nihilist coda.  Not a bad sequence, as something sensational, as a Rock Star Showstopper.....but not as great as everything that came before it.  And rock n' roll was dead by then anyway.

[Karl Henning]

You know, I hadn't been particularly drawn to Quadrophenia (the movie) before, but your review here does tickle my curiosity. (Why I specified the movie is unclear, as I used to own the album on vinyl but was not taken with it to at all the degree of a few others in my acquaintance.)

[Octave]

Re: QUADROPHRENIA

Caveat emptor...I myself was surprised by how well the film had dated, all things considered, and I mean that in a couple ways.  I should say too that I didn't like the Who music in the film much at all, surprising to me because I've liked such a big chunk of their music before.  One big exception: a puckish Mod kid puts on "My Generation" at a party and it sounded like a punk anthem.  I've heard that hit a hundred times and it came off like an amphetamine rush, perhaps for the first time for me.  Not at all "classic rock".  But most other examples weren't as successful, like the "Bellboy" song, which is a little silly already, and was spun/shot here like a primitive music video: "Okay, we're singing about it, and we'll show it to you too!"  FYI there is a nice new Criterion edition, including Blu; though I watched it streaming.

And big ups to a very, very young-looking Ray Winstone, who shows up with his swagger-leer-glaze already intact, only to disappear within a minute.  I now need to see SCUM!

[Sergeant Rock]

e for a mini-run on Netflix stock.

For me the issue with Arrested Development is not that it is bad.  They have tried to make a new kind of television show that appeals to binge watchers who are willing to sit through 15 episodes back to back and obsess over the intricacies of the interlinked plots.

I don't understand the whole "binge watching" claim.

I don't understand it either. I'm watching the show one episode every one or two days. I'm not having a problem following the "interlinked plots" at this pace. If I watched weekly, like a regular sitcom, I don't believe I'd have trouble either. No need to force feed yourself, Parsifal. Watch it at your own pace.

Sarge

[Karl Henning]

. . . Watch it at your own pace.

Plain, good sense.

[TheGSMoeller]

Star Trek: Into Darkness - Highly enjoyable. I like the pacing of the film, it's not an ebb and flow of action scenes and down time-talky scenes, it's fairly consistent throughout maintaining its intensity. The plot is interesting enough with a nice twist of 'the enemy of your enemy is your friend'. I'm not a fan of the Star Trek TV series, not to say I'm not appreciative of it, but I did grow up with the original-crew movies from the 70s-90s, and will have the worm-in-the-ear scene from Khan forever embedded in my mind. I know some Trekkies might be turned off by this reboot for various reasons, but I like to separate them as their own entity, and view them as summer-popcorn fluff that contains a higher intelligence than most summer fluff. I think Cumberbatch is one of the great actors working today, BBC's Sherlock is outstanding partly due to his portrayal of the famous sleuth. At times he made his villainy a bit unbelievable, perhaps he just too brilliant of an actor, but I would prefer this method over someone that would take it overboard into insanity, which I don't think Kh John Harrison was at this point.

I'm still uncertain about J.J. Abrams taking over Star Wars. I find him to be too much of an obvious choice.

And for the love of all the children in the world, Mr. Abrams, please lessen the amount of lens flare used in your films.

Arrested Development: Season 4 - Finished the 4th season. What an ending, talk about a punch in the face...or, cliffhanger. As I would suspect most would agree, not as solid as the original first 3 seasons, but still crazy funny, and kudos for not missing a beat after taking a seven year break. The same zaniness and creativity of the writing and acting still exists. Now let's get that 5th season going sooner than later.

[Karl Henning]

And for the love of all the children in the world, Mr. Abrams, please lessen the amount of lens flare used in your films.

There was a joke on that theme in the Honest Trailer . . . .

[TheGSMoeller]

There was a joke on that theme in the Honest Trailer . . . .

I feel as if I've seen that one, Karl. And those are a funny bunch of trailers for sure, they get me chuckling.

I mean, it's very obtrusive, even a simple and slow dramatic pan-in to a characters face is distorted with the flare.

[snyprrr]

I feel as if I've seen that one, Karl. And those are a funny bunch of trailers for sure, they get me chuckling.

I mean, it's very obtrusive, even a simple and slow dramatic pan-in to a characters face is distorted with the flare.

But... But... I LOVE the flare!! He's so obsessed with the '70s,... check out 'Super 8' where he 'recreates' 1979. I thought then that the lens flare was the perfect hommage to the '70s. I mean, by now it IS one of his trademarks. I did notice it a lot in the first 'Star Trek' too. I think it works best when giving a '70s feel.

I'm a little more critical over the adding on of CGI 'old film stock' hairs and dust on the image that has been all the rage for the last 10 years (how about the fake frosty breath in 'The Social Network'?). Ugh, Film Making is so... so... I can't find the word... give me a flick from 1973 ANYTIME (Hell Up in Harlem on NOW!!). Lens flare from the '70s?,... now THERE ya go!!

[Karl Henning]

... give me a flick from 1973 ANYTIME

Okay, buddy, you asked for it!

[asin]B00001W9G0[/asin]

[Karl Henning]

Okay, maybe that one was just too scary.

Ease in with this:

[asin]0767827929[/asin]

[Octave]

Over the past week or so, three by Nicholas Ray, two for the first time:
1. FLYING LEATHERNECKS (1951) w/John Wayne and Robert Ryan
2. JOHNNY GUITAR (1954) w/Mercedes McCambridge, Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden
3. THE TRUE STORY OF JESSE JAMES (1957)

The first and third were mostly lousy and I wouldn't see them again, unless I read something about them that made me totally distrust my first impression. (It's happened!)  Regarding LEATHERNECKS: I like both John Wayne (publicly an arch-conservative in so many ways) and Robert Ryan (as liberal-left in his publicly-aired views and private life as Wayne was conservative, and condemned to play a series of brutal jerks: "I've struggled throughout my life against the kinds of men I play on screen..."); and the (merely professional, fictional?) tension between them could be delicious to watch....a pity the thing was so terribly written.  I thought I saw traces of a 'personal' film peeking out from time to time, but it was just too awful a slog.  Interesting to see a Native American soldier portrayed in a (naive) sympathetic light 55 years before FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS.

JOHNNY GUITAR: my second time through it and it was better in some respects, a little worse in others, and generally stranger: a good thing.  I found it funnier but sometimes also more ridiculous, which can be distracting, since I tend to dislike watching bad or badly made movies just to have something to laugh at: there is enough in the world to laugh at, already.  But it was also more moving this time---a slightly bizarre, spasmodic live-action nominally-'western' cartoon melodrama that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to adult life. 
I am happy it's newly available on disc from Olive Films, certainly looking better than the illegal copy I watched some years ago.  Here is the one extra from that DVD, an old-looking video intro by Martin Scorsese:
http://www.youtube.com/v/PAw7y76awqk
He doesn't go deep but he's unpretentious and very much to the point, and I appreciate the fact that he quickly spells out what he means by the adjective "operatic", which is what I think I am reaching for often when I fumble with terms like "camp" and "kitsch" (by way of appreciating rich and provocative trash art, while not wanting to condescend to its way of working).  Of course, JOHNNY GUITAR isn't quite trash, even though it is strange and lurid (i.e. colorful and unabashed) and occasionally seems like it could use a re-write here and there.
Let me give a big up to the awesome Mercedes McCambridge, greater here than even Joan Crawford (also awesome, and put to stony, oneiric good use here).  I only just now learned that McCambridge is perhaps most "famous" as the voice of the demonically possessed little girl in THE EXORCIST.  *Sigh*  She deserved better!  Here, in JOHNNY GUITAR, she makes impressive use of a one-note role with minimal exposure, her insane hunger a locust swarm of revenge and repression.



All images JOHNNY GUITAR (1954)

[CaughtintheGaze]

Pure, unadulterated fun:

[asin]B000K7VHGO[/asin]
[asin]B000JSI7BC[/asin]

[lisa needs braces]

I use to watch Broken Arrow all the time as a kid. 

Does it seem that they simply don't make adult action thrillers anymore? eg Con Air, The Rock, The Negotiator...