Films Recently Watched

The Shout (1978) - this was really out there, but it was so good!

  On 3/17/2024 at 1:08 PM, iococoi said:

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I'm not on twitter so don't have access to the memesphere but this is culture today. Spot on. 

Went on a binge this last week. 

Watched:

Drive my Car

Stopmotion

Out of Darkness

Beau is Afraid

Oppenheimer

Past Lives

Monster

Zone of Interest

Anatomy of a Fall

Watched last evening Kenneth Branagh's film of Shakespeare's classic comedy Much Ado about Nothing, one of my favorite Shakespeare's play. Shakespeare's title for this play is very funny. 'Nothing' is a multi-level pun, and would be pronounced just like 'noting' in middle English. Noting, or taking notice of something, really checking it out, is punned on throughout the play as the males try to woo and win the women. 'Nothing' was also sexual slang in Shakespeare's time, meaning vagina (men would refer to their dick as their 'thing', and a woman's pussy would then, if you asked men who had consumed some ale of the time, be 'no thing'). In short, the title 'Much Ado about Nothing' could accurately be translated as 'Much Fuss about Vagina'

Anyway, I enjoyed the film. It has some corny and hammy moments. Keanu Reeves is the villain of the play. Michael Keaton also appears as the intellectually challenged constable (and is very good). The highlight of the film, though, for me was Branagh as Benedick and Emma Thompson as Beatrice. Brilliant acting, funny as hell, very moving too. Basically a wealthy family in Messina hosts a company of military men led by Don Pedro (Denzel Washington) as they return from a battle and rest at this family's estate for a month. Beatrice's uncle owns the estate. Her and Benedick know each other from before the play. Beatrice's uncle notes that there is a 'merry war betwixt' Beatrice & Benedick, that whenever they meet there is a contest of wits. The way that Branagh and Thompson bring this verbal battle of the sexes to life is imo worth the price of admission for this film, although I think having some experience with reading Shakespeare is probably necessary for enjoying the film.

There are also a ton of cute women throughout the film, and some of the scenes with the soldiers together has good comradery, just the boys playing pranks on one another & having fun times trying to get laid or fall in love. Like most of Shakespeare's great comic characters, revelry and good cheer are their highest virtues. Because Benedick considers himself a lifelong bachelor who would never be enslaved or cucked by a woman (this is how he views marriage at the play's outset), his friends have to trick him into becoming aware that he in fact loves Beatrice. When he realizes it initially, it leads to some damned funny scenes. Even though the studio must have insisted on adding some completely dumb and hammy shit for a mass audience, a lot of the film making, especially the composition or staging of key scenes, was either passable or downright good, as in Beatrice's speech where she wishes she was a man so that she could destroy through physical violence a man who has dishonored her kinswoman.

  On 3/20/2024 at 5:23 AM, aderei said:

Went on a binge this last week. 

Watched:

Drive my Car

Stopmotion

Out of Darkness

Beau is Afraid

Oppenheimer

Past Lives

Monster

Zone of Interest

Anatomy of a Fall

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I like your rating system 

Watched Napoleon. It was free on Apple+. When I saw the trailer I was quite impressed, but then I'm almost 50, so by now kinda wised up and sceptical to the mind trick that is a brilliant trailer. Like perhaps Alien Romulus. Anyway it's hard to rate it really. The battle scenes looked incredible with good direction from Mr Scott (very Gladiator) but every other detail seemed shallow and empty. I didn't really learn that much. Just a lot of prancing about with no depth of story and some posturing, whimpering and mumbling by Mr Phoenix. I understand it's kind of impossible to do his story justice in a 150 minute film, and I think therein lies the massive problem. To be honest I got the impression that we were just in fast forward mode to get to Waterloo. That I think would have made a better film, and perhaps the film the Ridley Scott wanted to make, but I guess an Englishman just making a film about Napoleon and his defeat would have seemed odd. Just my opinion, I'm not a film boffin. probably give it a 6/10

that Marilyn Monroe biopic with Ana de Armas is one of the most revolting films I've ever seen.

  On 3/22/2024 at 8:16 PM, usagi said:

that Marilyn Monroe biopic with Ana de Armas is one of the most revolting films I've ever seen.

Was it the fetus?? Hahaha

it was the whole-ass thing. I don't mean revolting in a visceral sense necessarily, I mean aesthetically and like... spiritually, or something. it was fucking gross to even look at.

Hadn't seen Roman Holiday since I was a kid and loved it so much

Skinamarink (2022)

  On 11/22/2022 at 8:41 PM, Silent Member said:

Super duper grungy footage of some kids wandering aimlessly around one of those cheaply built US middle class homes, with no way of escaping and everything seems off. Unexpectedly disturbing. Not a single shit happens. I guess I liked it, but also I never want to see that again. 

what he said.

looking forward ...

Perfect Days 10/10 

Yeah, loved that.

^ suparu keenaru 

Over the weekend I watched the William Wyler film from 1946 The Best Years of Our Lives. It focuses on three US serviceman returning to their small town American lives after fighting in WWII for three years. One of them had his hands blown off and has hooks in their stead. The guy playing this character was an actual war veteran who lost both hands and was not a professional actor but gave an incredible performance and won the Oscar for that year best actor. One of the other characters was a bank executive, and he has to go back to work and get pressured by his superiors to deny GIs bank loans (which they were promised by the GI Bill) because they are poor and have no collateral. The last character returns home and all the skills he honed during the war as a bombardier are not transferable to any civilian career. He goes back to his job at the local pharmacy making ice cream sundaes and sandwiches for people. The pharmacy was a mom-and-pop place when he left but was bought out during the war and became one of those empty consumerism department stores.

At about three hours long, the film is unrelenting at chronicling the challenges faced by soldiers returning to society after being at war for three years. Surprisingly, given the date that it was released and the fact that Hollywood execs were most certainly looking for patriotic stories that glorified the war, the film seems to suggest that in some ways these soldiers were not fighting for anything meaningful back at home (although no question that imperial Germany & Japan needed to be stopped). My favorite thing about the movie was the cinematography. Legendary DP Gregg Toland (who shot Citizen Kane) was in the mix, and his use of lighting and special lenses to develop 'deep focus' cinematography is on full display. Basically, there is a greater depth of field in the images, where characters in the foreground and background of a composition are completely in focus, and the action in the foreground is often secondary, has less dramatic weight than what is happening in the background. This scene, where the character with hooks shows off his newfound piano skills, while in the top-left corner one of the other characters makes an important phone call that will impact his life severely, is a good example (although this technique is used throughout the film in sometimes more subtle and very effective ways):

The French film critic Andre Bazin, who was influential to a lot of the big French new wave guys, applauded this technique and used it to develop his theory of realism in film, where the images are ambiguous in a way that comes closer to how the human eye perceives a visual field or image. The camerawork and editing are not force-feeding the audience on what to pay attention to, as was the custom for most films of the time. The audience is instead invited to participate in the drama and develop their own meaning. Bazin's article about Citizen Kane fleshes this idea out very nicely, although I cannot seem to find a link to it online. The only thing about the film that imo has aged poorly is some of the music, which is a little melodramatic and interferes with the realism and unrelenting darkness of this story. The performances were all top tier, and I definitely recommend based on the cinematography style. Can't lie, though, it is not only very long, but almost every scene (and some more than others) is very difficult to watch.

  On 3/23/2024 at 5:25 PM, iococoi said:

Skinamarink

watched this yesterday

100 minutes of still images

a few legos and an empty house

"experimental"

lol

Perfect Days 

Night Swim 

What's interesting about Perfect Days is that it is captivating throughout. Unlike so many action packed movies. It just sucks you in. A real classic. 

  On 3/23/2024 at 5:25 PM, iococoi said:

Skinamarink (2022)

what he said.

looking forward ...

 

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This will be on Shudder on April 19

Brian De Palma's Hi, Mom! (1970)

Hilarious film, right from the start. Comic dialogue is amazing, also interesting to see De Niro early in his career (De Palma discovered him and worked with him much later in The Untouchables).

I am not a big John Luc Godard fan, although I have seen a handful of his films and liked some of the stylistic touches and innovations (and there is no question from me how influential his work is). De Palma really liked his work at this point in his career. I like that De Palma is able to do the Godard thing, reminding people that they are watching a film, while still managing to be very humorous and entertaining.

The Be Black Baby sequence in the second half of the film has to be one of the best satires I've seen on film. The satire throughout the whole film is great and much more bold or crude than his later work. I do not mean crude in a negative way, far from it, just that De Palma imo became much more subtle and indirect as he matured (in the ways he satirizes different elements of American art, culture, and society).

Watched L'Armée des Ombres (1969) for the 5th time it's one of the best WW2 films out there.

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Staff Picks: Our Favorite Films Directed by Women

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls529807759/

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