Last Movie You Watched

[DavidRoss]

Saw The Master. To quote Roger Ebert, fabulously well-acted and crafted, but when I reach for it, my hand closes on air. Spot on, I think, although it's definitely worth seeing on the basis of Phoenix's performance alone. And Jonny Greenwood's fantastic score.

Haven't seen it yet but Ebert's statement regarding its essential emptiness aptly describes his penultimate flick, There Will Be Blood. Given Anderson's track record of excellence, however, and my own perverse curiosity in how a movie industry "star" presents a roman à clef about a cynical huckster whose influence infects that very industry, I will no doubt see it once available for home consumption in late February. Thanks for the note. I'll remember to keep an ear cocked for the score. 

[TheGSMoeller]

"The Bluths will be back in May. Netflix will drop all 14 episodes at once."

Two sentences that just made my night. Read more here...

http://www.vulture.com/2013/01/arrested-development-returns-in-may.html?mid=imdb

[George]

"The Bluths will be back in May. Netflix will drop all 14 episodes at once."

Two sentences that just made my night. Read more here...

http://www.vulture.com/2013/01/arrested-development-returns-in-may.html?mid=imdb

[Gold Knight]

Via Netflix, the final disc of Smiley's People, starring Alec Guinness, Patrick Stewart, Bernard Hepton and Barry Foster. Now it's on to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

[Rinaldo]

Today is the presidential election here in Czech Rep., so it seemed appropriate to attend a press screening of Lincoln! Wish I could vote for that guy. And the movie was pretty good as well: surprisingly subdued with a fair share of memorable scenes, most of them involving Tommy Lee Jones. Day-Lewis is just as uncanny as you would imagine from seeing the poster and the rest of the cast is a joy to watch (Strathairn ftw!). I didn't care much for the family aspects of the script, especially Lincoln's son, but that's only a minor complaint.

And I can't help but think that a certain moment involving an argument that ends up with a pistol being drawn is Spielberg's poignant contribution to the gun control debate..

[Fëanor]

...
And I can't help but think that a certain moment involving an argument that ends up with a pistol being drawn is Spielberg's poignant contribution to the gun control debate..

Now if only the Congressman had had a revolver ... 

Lincoln: great movie: 4.5/5*

[Octave]

Very happy about ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT redux.  That show was so well casted, just viciously well casted.  I still hear New Age flute in my head when I see people getting deep and wise on television, epsecially politicians or religious authorities in times of crisis/opportunity.  That alone was worth watching the series for: a survival technique.

A clutch of things I've seen recently...


FIREFLY (television series, ~2002) and its film sequel, SERENITY (2005)

Not my usual thing, and lots of Nerd Culture staples irked me intensely, namely the penchant for poses, probably a side-effect of the comic-strip's rationing of a more-fulfilled life by the frame.  Or cinema's, for that matter, why not.  (Think of the dreadful, silly, potentially harmful ending of APOCALYPSE NOW, where nothing is said loudly, slowly.  The important thing is to look cool.  Don't worry too much about the natives.)  And the spirit of revenge, which haunts so much nerd-fun, because aren't all these awkwardly-staged fisticuffs and fake martial arts and magic spells really about stairwell-esprit comeuppance over grammar-school meathead bullies?  And the series' nerd humor, which rankles me occasionally.  Despite all this, the sweet spirit of the show is winning.  Also its feminism is beautifully streamlined and lightly worn, not just a matter of "tough chicks".  The social vision lurking maybe incongruously in the subtext almost makes me want to watch Joss Whedon's other major TV creation, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, which somehow I have avoided for ~15 years, perhaps for reasons stated above.  I'm still impressed with how casual yet insistent Whedon and company can be with their mild social critique and subtle, substantial gender politics.  A space western in which prostitution-as-an-excuse-for-misogyny is a running subject of discussion....that is interesting, especially when it doesn't come across the least bit didactic.  So it's not clear that this is another "arrested development" (literally) entertainment, and nothing else.  Some of the writing could be quite good, especially the final episode, "Objects in Space", which apparently was motivated by Sartre.
I dislike the form of most television, so I'm not a good critic of it at all; I'm simply indisposed to it.  There are notable exceptions, though, like THE WIRE, which was excellent.


DARK HORSE (Todd Solondz, 2011)

Perhaps my least favorite among Solondz's movies, but still not bad.  If I eventually came to the conclusion that he were simply mean, I'd be pretty disappointed that I ever bothered watching all his films, some more than once.  It does seem like there's quite a bit more going on, though.  I'm concerned about his evident contempt for the working poor in the service industry, people with jobs less interesting than his.  Also, contrary to his protestations in interviews, here (in this film), he seems to work awfully hard to make the "protagonist" as loathsome as possible.  He labors at it.  His protestation sometimes seem like bad faith: what do you mean you are shocked at laughter from the audience, Todd?  Really?  It's hard to see this as anything other than flattery of a certain constituency with a certain education and even a certain standard of living in common among them.  Still not worthless as a critique of a kind of failure and a kind of success in American life (if not other kinds of life).  But in the end, is it merely mean?  I still cannot make up my mind if all his moves amount to anything more than a sequence of cheap shots.


ATTENBERG (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2010)
Quirky as hell but also annoyingly mannered, a little bit disgustingly so, like a small child who learns that they are cute and repeats themselves tactically ad nauseum, which is the origin of all "reality television", as it's called.  I was irritated at my own relentless comparison of the style of this film's deadpan, zero-affect comedy to a film from the year before, DOGTOOTH---also from a young Greek director---which I liked much more.  Turns out the director of that film plays a small part in ATTENBERG.  I don't think I'm wrong about this.  The child charm-->cunning metaphor begins to make more sense.  ATTENBERG seems to be organized as a series of fake wildlife (or ethnographical?) films involving rudderless and downbeaten laconic characters perhaps in the Jarmusch mold, or better yet, in the NAPOLEON DYNAMITE mold.  There's the kind of insistence on episode that we find in movies that might have been described as "postmodern" by academics ~15-30 years ago, but unfortunately my impression was that all this was third- or fourth-order, affected, mannered, adopted.  Apparently a number of hip critics have enjoyed this more than I did, so YMMV.
Turns out the director got an MFA from the University of Texas in Austin.


L'APOLLONIDE - SOUVENIRS DE LA MAISON CLOSE [aka HOUSE OF TOLERANCE aka HOUSE OF PLEASURES] (Bertrand Bonello, 2011)
Ah but I tilted the other way with this film, which might in fact very possibly be a boring, pretentious, annoying, mildly exploitative piece of art-house junk; but which I actually found very exciting for some reason.  I don't think the reason was the proliferation of (almost exclusively female) nudity, which was interesting in the sense that it became (sometimes literally) clinical after not at all long.  (The film takes place in, and is in a sense exclusive about, a Paris brothel fin de siècle [19c-20c].)  There's rather little if any "explicit" sex, none of it presented in a titillating fashion, and only a small bit of (overt, graphic) violence, which is disturbing but painstakingly contained, almost in the fashion of ancient Greek tragic theater.  I liked that the film did not overuse its little tricks (intricate spiraling time-space scheme in the opening minutes, repeated in longer waves later in the film), and even though two shocks at the beginning (right before the credits) and the end (set to a wonderful moment from LA BOHÈME) left me mildly irritated more than fascinated, the film worked a kind of moody magic on me.  Hesitantly recommended.  Honestly not sure if I'm even right about the film as a whole.
Also worth mentioning a few uses of jarringly anachronistic music, including a couple great soul jams at the beginning and end, plus the Moody Blues!  Absolutely no idea why the filmmaker did this, but I decided to like it.  Very odd, almost as cagey as J-L Godard suddenly sucking all the music out of the frame, a trick he did repeatedly.

[George]

Something seems to have gone wrong with Solondz. Dark horse was just plain bad and Life During Wartime wasn't much better. Palindromes was poor too. Sad because Happiness is one of the best films I have ever seen. Storytelling was very good, but represented the beginning of his decline.

[Octave]

I didn't think DARK HORSE was exceptional, even just among Solondz's other films; but "just plain bad"?  I disagree.  "Mediocre" doesn't even really apply, because from the "anthropological" faux-musical-theater opening (the wedding party dancefloor) to the wobbly unspooling of reality in (at least) the last ~quarter of the film (really probably passim, though), what is the film trying to be like?  What else is it like?  The disgusting cotton-candy plasticene DV look of the film was even more extreme than LIFE DURING WARTIME, and even more appropriate to the setting and subject matter.

Now how effective a satirist or critic Solondz is, that's another question.  I still wonder if he's flattering his constituency and then back-pedaling when asked, even by sympathetic interlocutors, if he isn't just being mean.  I don't think there's any doubt that HAPPINESS is a much greater film than any of these last few, though; that's the first one that anyone should see who hasn't seen any Solondz.

It's odd to me that the American critic J. Hoberman, who can be insightful when he isn't writing for the VILLAGE VOICE (their recent firing of him was a favor to his writing), seemed so venomously contemptuous of Solondz's films until perhaps the last couple, with a DARK HORSE review of his in iirc TABLET managing to almost present a favorable image of the filmmaker's whole body of work.  It's not clear why these late films would have been the ones to change his mind; I don't remembering him especially admitting that his mind had been changed, but unfortunately his customary self-shielding glibness is what keeps me from seeking out more of his writing.

[SonicMan46]

I'm currently going through my documentary DVD collection and am now watching this 2 DVD set:

Africans in America: America's Journey Through Slavery (1998) - despite it's age, still an excellent production narrated wonderfully by Angela Bassett - this will be a 'keeper' for me, and amazingly is listed on Amazon for $100 (should I sell?) -

[Brahmsian]

I did not watch it, nor would I normally watch the Golden Globe Awards, but was quite happy that two of my favourite actors won in their respective categories:

Daniel Day-Lewis and Christopher Waltz

[Brahmsian]

Something seems to have gone wrong with Solondz. Dark horse was just plain bad and Life During Wartime wasn't much better. Palindromes was poor too. Sad because Happiness is one of the best films I have ever seen. Storytelling was very good, but represented the beginning of his decline.

Agreed, that is a fantastic, albeit very disturbing film.  It is Solondz best work by far, and it has been a downhill slide since.

[Cato]

We saw Cloud Atlas for a dollar.  It should receive Best Oscar for Make-up!  At times it seemed to have only 6 actors performing dozens of roles!  It deals with various stories of reincarnations across time, from the 1800's to c. 2300 A.D.  The "Brothsters" Wachowski of The Matrix fame and German Tom Tykwer of Run, Lola, Run directed the movie.  The most interesting and compelling story is a rewrite of Blade Runner with a "fabricant" (i.e. cloned human being a la Brave New World) seeking humanity and freedom and becoming a religious prophet. 

There is a story about a bisexual composer in the 1930's which showed nobody involved understood music or composing beyond strum charts, and which should have been excised completely. (A composition supposedly unlike anything ever heard before shows a C major chord     )     Another story has the terrible cliche' of a nuclear power company killing off whistleblowers who know about design flaws.  Even though their plots are exposed, somehow a nuclear power plant disaster sends the earth into global warming apocalypse in the future.  And humans colonize another planet - with two moons! - from which Earth is visible?!   Mars after terra-forming maybe?  Never explained!

Anyway, it was worth a dollar!  I checked the IMDB and the movie seems to be a financial bomb.  $80 million in the hole.

[snyprrr]

We saw Cloud Atlas for a dollar.  It should receive Best Oscar for Make-up!  At times it seemed to have only 6 actors performing dozens of roles!  It deals with various stories of reincarnations across time, from the 1800's to c. 2300 A.D.  The "Brothsters" Wachowski of The Matrix fame and German Tom Tykwer of Run, Lola, Run directed the movie.  The most interesting and compelling story is a rewrite of Blade Runner with a "fabricant" (i.e. cloned human being a la Brave New World) seeking humanity and freedom and becoming a religious prophet. 

There is a story about a bisexual composer in the 1930's which showed nobody involved understood music or composing beyond strum charts, and which should have been excised completely. (A composition supposedly unlike anything ever heard before shows a C major chord     )     Another story has the terrible cliche' of a nuclear power company killing off whistleblowers who know about design flaws.  Even though their plots are exposed, somehow a nuclear power plant disaster sends the earth into global warming apocalypse in the future.  And humans colonize another planet - with two moons! - from which Earth is visible?!   Mars after terra-forming maybe?  Never explained!

Anyway, it was worth a dollar!  I checked the IMDB and the movie seems to be a financial bomb.  $80 million in the hole.

brothsters... LOLZ!!!

Movie sounds like a steaming heap of the brothsters' 'sincere beliefs',... oy,... did you HEAR Jodie Foster's me-me-me speech?? OY, these people REALLY believe they are saving the world.


Did you hear that Stallone & Friends are all saying the gov should go door to door to confiscate guns? His new movie? 'Bullet to the Head".

All film biz people are as crazy as Ed Wood,... they just have more money (so they're 'eccentric')

[Cato]

brothsters... LOLZ!!!

Movie sounds like a steaming heap of the brothsters' 'sincere beliefs',... oy,... did you HEAR Jodie Foster's me-me-me speech?? OY, these people REALLY believe they are saving the world....

All film biz people are as crazy as Ed Wood,... they just have more money (so they're 'eccentric')

I skimmed through the Harvard grad's "speech" this morning:

e.g.

...But now I'm told, apparently, that every celebrity is expected to honor the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance and a prime-time reality show. You know, you guys might be surprised, but I am not Honey Boo Boo Child. No, I'm sorry, that's just not me. It never was and it never will be. Please don't cry because my reality show would be so boring. I would have to make out with Marion Cotillard or I'd have to spank Daniel Craig's bottom just to stay on the air. It's not bad work if you can get it, though."

"But seriously, if you had been a public figure from the time that you were a toddler, if you'd had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, then maybe you too might value privacy above all else. Privacy...."

My emphasis.

And so even though she claims public confession "never was and it never will be" her, she continues to go on and on about herself.

See:

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/entertainment/2013/01/full-transcript-jodie-fosters-golden-globes-speech/

[Octave]

[excised]

[Octave]

And I don't know, the Jodi Foster speech was indeed pretty nutty, but I thought it was kind of courageous, maybe.  Would have been braver ~15 years ago!
But it's good to point out craven, venal Hollywood as the greatest threat facing the USA today.  *sigh*

I was really excited to learn of Lana Wachowski's gender transition, especially because she'd been so media-shy (I understand) before.  A guy I sort knew once, a philosophy PhD drop-out, ended up playing drunken street basketball with Keanu Reeves, somehow, and apparently he was really into stuff like Georges Bataille, and it was the Wachowskis who got him into all that: funny!  I regret that I hate their movies, though I haven't seen CLOUD ATLAS; thanks for the note on it, Cato.

[Octave]

I am running into old posts of others' that I wish I'd read before posting some recent posts of my own.  FWIW, let's say some of my posts are "spontaneous" expressions, and I wish I'd been able to sew them better into the discussion; it's pure happenstance that I make reference to some things that, it seems, have been discussed before.  Mostly.  I need to comb back through the forum to catch up on conversation.  It's hard to keep up, let alone catch up.   

[CaughtintheGaze]

Some very interesting family pieces, highly personal.
[asin]B004XEEMBC[/asin]

[snyprrr]

I skimmed through the Harvard grad's "speech" this morning:

e.g.

My emphasis.

And so even though she claims public confession "never was and it never will be" her, she continues to go on and on about herself.

See:

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/entertainment/2013/01/full-transcript-jodie-fosters-golden-globes-speech/

One of the most disturbing things was when she talked about all those 'fathers',... producers, blah blah,... THINK ABOUT IT,... Foster could verrry well be the victim of some horrendous John Phillips/Klaus Kinski/Hollywood Producer stuff. and now it's just part of her past,...

without going too deep... to me she comes off as a destroyed being,... all the 'happy' stuff is what she's been given to replace the humanity she lost looong ago. (Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane maybe???)

Her and Mel... that's funny... did he finally convince her that her jewish 'fathers' are the devil's own?