December 2013

December 2013

Rome, Open City (Rossellini, 1945)|||||7
Think I prefer the crazy 2nd half.
La vallée close (Rousseau, 1995)|||||6
Stromboli (Rossellini, 1950)|||||7
Frozen (Buck & Lee, 2013)|||||4.5
Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (McKay, 2013)|||||3
An Autumn Afternoon (Ozu, 1962)|||||8
Apocalypse Now Redux (Coppola, 1979)|||||7
The reincorporated long scenes are very good (the plantation scene maybe something monumental)... the smaller restructuring and smaller reinstatements/alterations irk, making the original version somewhat preferable.  Then watch the long scenes separately.
* Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979)|||||7
Slugs (Simón, 1988)|||||2
Resident Evil: Extinction (Mulcahy, 2007)|||||3
Paranormal Activity 4 (Joost and Schulman, 2012)|||||3
Damn.  Promising start, more cleverness and crispness from Joost and Schulman, but zero payoffs in the scare department plummet this in the latter half, and the denouement is a devolution into bullshit demon-face-chasing-you crap.  That is some DTV, Grave Encounters shit.  Not that the uber-commercial PA franchise is anything much loftier, but it's a super uninspired way to take the PA tale absolutely nowhere.
River of No Return (Preminger, 1954)|||||5.5
Twixt (Coppola, 2011)|||||6
My Soul to Take (Craven, 2010)|||||4.5
Wes Craven's weirdo, quirky horror/magical-realism stylings.  Craven's usual brand of wonky humanism is fully present, a strangely affirming retort to Scream's nihilism - portraying a messy and in-fighting, but deeply courageous, teenage world of born heroes - in this, his YA rendition of Scream.
Computer Chess (Bujalski, 2013)|||||7
Celine and Julie Go Boating (Rivette, 1974)|||||7
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Lawrence, 2013)|||||3.5

November 2013

November 2013

The Color Wheel (Perry, 2011)|||||7
Gold Diggers of 1935 (Berkeley, 1935)|||||7
Maniac (Khalfoun, 2012)|||||4.5
12 Years a Slave (McQueen, 2013)|||||6.5

October 2013

October 2013

* Eaten Alive (Hooper, 1977) (theater)|||||7.5
Hellbenders (Petty, 2012)||||4.5
Vanishing Point (Sarafian, 1971)|||||4.5
Gone in 60 Seconds (Halicki, 1974)|||||6
Carrie (Peirce, 2013)|||||5
The Apple (Makhmalbaf, 1998)||||8
A Touch of Sin (Jia, 2013)|||||6.5
24 City (Jia, 2008)|||||6.5
Gravity (Caurón, 2013)|||||5.5
This is 40 (Apatow, 2012)|||||5
Dead-End Drive In (Trenchard-Smith, 1986)|||||6
Room 237 (Ascher, 2013)|||||5
Something of a feature-length indulgence.  A geek show of cinephilic interpretations, a reveling in cinematic wonders that is content to gaze resolutely inward.  An over-validated A/V club project, but one that will provoke kindly regard from anyone who believes in the symbolic power of films (such as me) - particularly Lamberto Bava's Demons.  Its construction consisting entirely of helpful graphics, clips from other movies, and a stream of The Shining manipulations, the film is purely ends via nerdy means, which are half truths, half ineffectively neutral interpretive fondling.

September 2013

September 2013

Mother's Day (Kaufman, 1980)|||||6
Essential Review: cinemachine
Contagion (Soderbergh, 2011)|||||6
La région centrale (Snow, 1971)|||||6
Honour of the Knights (Serra, 2007)|||||6.5
Pontypool (McDonald, 2008)|||||5.5
Shrooms (Breathnach, 2007)|||||3.5
Giallo (Argento, 2009)|||||4
The Devil Within Her (Sasdy, 1975)|||||3.5
The Reeds (Cohen, 2010)|||||3.5
Our Hitler: A Film from Germany (Syberberg, 1977)|||||8.5
Rabbit Fire (short) (Jones, 1951)|||||+++
Charulata (Ray, 1964)|||||8
* The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Hooper, 1986) (theater)|||||7
Insidious: Chapter 2 (Wan, 2013)|||||3
Henry Fool (Hartley, 1997)|||||8
Surviving Desire (Hartley, 1991)|||||7
In the City of Sylvia (Guerin, 2007)|||||6.5
Tout va bien (Godard, 1972)|||||7.5
Sweet Movie (Mekavejev, 1974)|||||7.5
The World's End (Wright, 2013)|||||6.5
The Possession (Bornedal, 2012)|||||3.5

August 2013

August 2013

L'argent (Bresson, 1983)|||||8
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (Witt, 2004)|||||3.5
New York, New York (Scorsese, 1977)|||||6
Scorsese in hit-and-miss pastiche-mode, a la Shutter Island.  But a driving investigation of gender roles, particularly in relationship to the 50s musicals it homages and the reiterated A Star is Born tale of a marriage dissoluble by independent success.  Needless to say, this 70s update shines in its modern reappraisal: a modern acceptance of the idea of separation, and the realness of our characters' divergent sensibilities and love regardless.  Also, clearly a juxtaposing stab at Casavettes, which Scorsese might be on record for stating as an intention.
Out of Sight (Soderbergh, 1998)|||||6.5
Senso (Visconti, 1954)|||||7.5
Take Shelter (Nichols, 2011)|||||4.5
King of New York (Ferrara, 1990)|||||7
Ratcatcher (Ramsey, 2001)|||||6.5
* Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pasolini, 1975)|||||6.5
Pickpocket (Bresson, 1959)|||||8
The Decline of the American Empire (Arcand, 1986)|||||8
L'enfance neu (Pialat, 1968)|||||7.5
Casualties of War (De Palma, 1989)|||||7.5
Wreck-It Ralph (Moore, 2012)|||||4.5
The Revenge of Frankenstein (Fisher, 1958)|||||5.5
Marketa Lazarová (Vláčil, 1967)|||||6.5
Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (Burr, 1990)|||||3.5
Sweet Smell of Success (Mackendrick, 1957)|||||6.5
Pandora's Box (Pabst, 1929)|||||8
La Pointe Courte (Varda, 1957)|||||8
Pacific Rim (Del Toro, 2013)|||||5
It'd be easy to condemn this picture for having no sense of atmosphere or build-up whatsoever, but things pick up slowly but surely until the film reaches awesome-levels.  It's actually the film's Hawksian portrait of workmen-heroes and sense of values (the film is really somewhat Only Angels Have Wings) that sustains our interest in the increasingly convoluted, inane story. Also, effective communications on trauma and coping.
Damsels in Distress (Stillman, 2011)|||||6.5
Adorable and teetering on inapplicable to real life, but nevertheless a high degree of intelligence.  
Dark Skies (Stewart, 2013)|||||4
A good yarn, it's deserving of that much acclaim in a time of weak American studio horror films.
Uncle Sam (Lustig, 1996) (V)|||||4.5
Manufraktur (Tscherkassky, 1985) (short)|||||+
Outer Space (Tscherkassky, 1999) (short)|||||++
* Lincoln (Spielberg, 2012)|||||6.5
"Liberality all around."  And lots of ruminating.  A good Lincoln film.
Young Mr. Lincoln (Ford, 1930)|||||6.5
Body Double (De Palma, 1984)|||||5.5
Amiable "meta" thriller - loved by De Palma acolytes - all about not holding a high nose over kink and perversion, placing XXX actors as the heroes and real shakers of the Hollywood world, but also casting a wide net of gratitude to all actors, who, through the indignities endured, come out above us all. But I must miss out on this love train - it's pure story, I constantly kept wishing the film would just pause on the plot and meditate a little more, and its central male validation story is the definition of short-term narrative reward.
Goodbye Charlie (Minnelli, 1964)|||||6
Van Gogh (Pialat, 1991)|||||7
Explorers (Dante, 1985)|||||6

July 2013

July 2013

Oz: The Great and Powerful (Raimi, 2013)|||||5
Underrated and not the po-faced drudgery that is Disney's Alice in Wonderland!  A rough, posery Kansas section must be sat through... then the Land of Oz's roller coastery introduction is lifeless CGI spectacle... But, once the plot has begun, this is fine, handcrafted entertainment (yes, Raimi successfully fends off CGI-fest rigor mortis). Franco has none of the gravitas, but he's funny and can make his eyes really big, so he services well Raimi's amusing, full-on cartoony [2nd-tier-Dante] approach to things. Also, I didn't think she had it in her, but Mila Kunis is great and classically beautiful in the most dramatic role. 
Trafic (Tati, 1970)|||||7
Innerspace (Dante, 1987)|||||5.5
"'Eat me, drink me'?  What is that... From The Exorcist???  No, Alice in Wonderland!"  LOL.
Bonfire of the Vanities (De Palma, 1990)|||||4.5
The Conjuring (Wan, 2013)|||||3.5
* Gremlins (Dante, 1984)|||||6
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Schrader, 1985)|||||6
The ABCs of Death (Various, 2012)|||||3.5~4
Admirable intentions, refreshing in a way, but so much crap and noxious elements.  Best segments: Vigalondo's A, Sarmiento's D, Yamaguchi's J, the Amer duo's O.  Honorable Mention to the WTF ones, including H, T, W.
For Ever Mozart (Godard, 1996)|||||7.5
Orpheus (Cocteau, 1950)|||||7
The Curse of Frankenstein (Fisher, 1957)|||||6
Upstream Color (Carruth, 2013)|||||4.5
Beneath (Fessenden, 2013)|||||5
Ridiculous and hilarious, I'd say in a good way but many will say in a bad way.  A dreary ending dampers it.  Fessenden takes B-material and gives it his still-existing moves.
Laurence Anyways (Dolan, 2012)|||||6.5
Epic melodrama.  Perhaps the nearest I've seen to a revival of Sirkian levels of complex emotion and unutterable scope.
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (Resnais, 2012)|||||6
Five Million Years to Earth (Baker, 1967)|||||5.5

June 2013

June 2013

* School of Rock (Linklater, 2004)|||||6.5
Before Midnight (Linklater, 2013)|||||7
Adamant in making crystal clear what we've always sort of known throughout these movies: Jesse and Celine are not particularly "special" people.  In fact, they're utterly banal.  Jesse is a man capable of deep, enlightened thoughts, but he's also rather a lightweight; Celine is much less compelling a thinker, but she's a passionate and razor-sharp pragmatist - also persuaded by raw emotion to a fault, as we're made to see so clearly here. Before Midnight is a plunge into the fuck-ups of normal imperfect people, and as such it's wonderful.  As a capper to my time with these characters, though, it left me a bit ornery and unsatisfied: rather than bringing us down to the ground as it does, I wanted Linklater to damn it all and take the artistic liberty with real life by letting the trilogy follow its previous trajectory of upward and upward fantasy, to end with a conclusion on an even higher plane than the last one (and I loved the ending of Before Sunset).  Instead, the last scene - SPOILER - wraps things up with the two commiserating on a round of make-up sex.  The profound, beautiful, and basic, nature of love, indeed.  Good for Celine and Jesse, though, and good for Linklater.
To the Wonder (Malick, 2013)|||||8
Hell of the Living Dead (Mattei, 1980)|||||3.5
Before Sunset (Linklater, 2004)|||||7
The perfect ending.  Didn't see it coming, and it was the best brick in the face I've ever felt.
Before Sunrise (Linklater, 1995)|||||6.5
* Stagecoach (Ford, 1939)|||||7
Three Crowns of the Sailor (Ruiz, 1983)|||||6.5
Slacker (Linklater, 1990)|||||8
Life of Pi (Lee, 2012)|||||6
Killing Them Softly (Dominik, 2012)|||||5.5
In Vanda's Room (Costa, 2000)|||||7
Bernie (Linklater, 2012)|||||5.5
Man of Steel (Snyder, 2013)|||||5
* Lifeforce (Hooper, 1985)|||||7.5
Deja Vu (Scott, 2006)|||||4
Resident Evil (Anderson, 2002)|||||3.5
Frances Ha (Baumbach, 2012)|||||7
* Halloween II (Zombie, 2009) (Director's Cut)|||||5.5
The Director's Cut is indeed evidential of a drastically different vision, heavily cut down and simplified for the Theatrical Version.  If you saw this theatrically, then you actually haven't seen Zombie's film.  You can't doubt the 14 drippy extra minutes.  No, the gore-level stays mostly the same - 14 extra emotionally drippy minutes.  The deleted bits are almost entirely dramatic, and suddenly the arc involving Laurie and Annie's strained relationship appears before your very eyes.  The film emerges into itself as an explicit white trash drama, and highly deconstructive of its thick surface slathering of seamy and tabloid-ready embroiled violence (in all incarnations: physical, but especially psychological, emotional).  The film's greatest virtue becomes how constantly and earnestly it will repeat and underline and emphasize the issue of its emotional undercurrents.  Zombie betrays himself as, and I'm beginning to suspect most great horror authors are this, deep inside, a big, highly sensitive softie (which is further proven in his follow-up to this, the softly treading "Lords of Salem," where the human scenes once again surpass in effect the leaden horror scenes).
Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (Sato, 1968)|||||5.5
Warm Bodies (Levine, 2013)|||||5
Colossal Youth (Costa, 2005)|||||7.5
Texas Chainsaw 3D (Luessenhop, 2013)|||||3.5
Just stupid and positive-natured enough to like.
Elevator to the Gallows (Malle, 1958)|||||7
Beware of a Holy Whore (Fassbinder, 1971)|||||6.5

May 2013

May 2013

After Earth (Shyamalan, 2013)|||||3.5
Chinese Roulette (Fassbinder, 1976)|||||7.5
Grave Encounters 2 (Poliquin, 2012)|||||3.5
Battle in Heaven (Reygadas, 2005)|||||6
Puppet Master II (V) (Allen, 1991)|||||3
A Woman Under the Influence (Cassavetes, 1974)|||||8
Dr. Seuss' The Lorax (Renaud, Balda, 2012)|||||4
Casa De Mi Padre (Piedmont, 2012)|||||4
Charley Varrick (Siegel, 1973)|||||6.5
The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012)|||||2
The Ceremony (Oshima, 1971)|||||7.5
High and Low (Kurosawa, 1963)|||||7.5
Twelve Angry Men (Lumet, 1957)|||||6.5
Where the Heart Is (Boorman, 1990)|||||8
Top of the Lake (TV Series, 2013)|||||++
The Women (English, 2008)|||||3.5
Coffy (Hill, 1973)|||||6.5
The Last Communist (Muhammad, 2006)|||||6.5
A Star is Born (Cukor, 1954)|||||6

April 2013

April 2013

'Rameau's Nephew' by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (Snow, 1974)|||||7
The Lords of Salem (Zombie, 2012)|||||5
Print Generation (Murphy, 1974)|||||++
Britton, South Dakota (short) (Renwick, 2004)|||||+
Back in the Saddle Again (short) (Stark, 1997)|||||+
Fire of Waters (short) (Brakhage, 1965)|||||+
The Women (Cukor, 1939)|||||6
* "Masters of Horror: Sick Girl" (TV) (McKee, 2006)|||||++ / 6.5
Adam's Rib (Cukor, 1949)|||||7
* Daughters of the Dust (Dash, 1991)|||||5.5
Evil Dead (Alvarez, 2013)|||||4
If you don't think about comparing it to the original Evil Dead, this is a pretty neat, stylish horror film. Talk about messing with a tried-and-true (or not tried-and-true, depending on how you feel about it...) formula, though: it takes The Evil Dead and gives it a story, characters, character arcs, thematic underpinnings, emotional peaks and narrative waves (all of these aforementioned things not very good, to the surprise of no one), and forgoes conventional slasher film thrills for more "high concept" devices to lead to the gore and grue.  Very middlebrow for a sick and nasty throwback horror film.
Martha Marcy May Marlene (Durkin, 2011)|||||5.5
Detour (Ulmer, 1945)|||||7
Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969)|||||6
Pat and Mike (Cukor, 1952)|||||6
* The Dark (Cardos, 1979)|||||7
There is something magical about this movie.
Dusty and Sweets McGee (Mutrux, 1971)|||||5.5
Easy Rider (Benning, 2012)|||||7
La Roue (Gance, 1923)|||||7
There's actually a lot to dislike about this legendary epic silent melodrama, clearly indicative of a peak artistic point in cinema (when uninhibited visual expressionism with the pure cinematic image was the cultural order of the day).  It's a sprawling soap opera, thus morally scattered - it's often sensationalistic, thus exploitative of the hurtling psychologies and manias and dramas that rush at you with the typical silent cinema artwork's sound and fury.  But silent cinema has that grasp of the grand and mythic and the beautiful moment that it mines out of the story, which, when appearing, fully justify the at-times very tiresome cinematic-melodramatic thunder: long minutes can be spent on the joyous dance of a character.  A whole set piece can be centered on a laughing man.  It - meaning "pure cinema" - is quite moving.  The final hour of the film, which wraps up three previous hours of train crashes, destructive feelings, and aching hearts, winds down to a destitute man in his destitute house with his destitute daughter, simply living together, both actively trying to relinquish and discount their previous lives of intense strife with unadorned but content, happy but sad peace.  The four hour film, thus, ends on a high point.

March 2013

March 2013

The Open Universe (Das Offene Universum) (Wyborny, 1990)|||||5.5
Spring Breakers (Korine, 2013)|||||5.5
Much more so than Django Unchained, certainly, this is an art bomb exploded on general audiences. This is an artwork and work of vision, and I'd say more so than Gummo and Trash Humpers, since it is hellbent on mining themes from the inside out of an ostensible (to a classical extent) narrative, rather than placing bets on a milieu and anti-narrative patchworking. There's a structural story here, with allegorical dimensions, and I admire it most for that.  Korine, of course, then implodes his classical narrative to an alienating extent in his wild aesthetic of home video cameras and soulful/grotesque/unflinching documentary-ism, which is what makes it audacious and explosive.
Selena Gomez's dimwit Faith is the butt of the film (Gomez is surprisingly quite good despite her Disney Channel show being possibly the worst thing I have ever seen), coldly and uncompromisingly ejected out of the film by the halfway point; and Korine, per usual, extols the voice of the unspoken for (for better or worse): here, inchoate spring break girls who genuinely want to assert themselves in the world and experience what others like them value - power and self-importance found in the nihilist American dream - but then, in doing so, also transcend it. It's an undeniably effective and distinguished work - but despite it being preetty bad a lot of the time.
The Red and the White (Jansco, 1967)|||||7
Enlightened (TV Show) (Seasons 1 & 2, 2012-13)|||||++
Anatomy of a Relationship (Moullet, 1976)|||||7
Origins of a Meal (Moullet, 1979)|||||7.5
The Marriage of Maria Braun (Fassbinder, 1979)|||||8.5
Like Someone in Love (Kiarostami, 2012)|||||7
L'intrus (Denis, 2004)|||||6.5
Pit Stop (aka The Winner) (Hill, 1967)|||||5.5

February 2013

February 2013

Trash (Morrissey, 1970)|||||5
Let Each One Go Where He May (Russell, 2009)|||||7.5
Bike Boy (Warhol, 1967)|||||4.5
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (Lynch, 1992)|||||7
Tomatos Another Day (Watson, 1930) (short)|||||+
Heartbeats (Dolan, 2011)|||||5
The Strange Little Cat (Zürcher, 2013)|||||8.5
Hellzapoppin' (Potter, 1941)|||||7.5
Over Here (Jost, 2007)|||||6.5
God's Step Children (Micheaux, 1938)|||||6.5
Mandingo (Fleischer, 1975)|||||7.5
A film of rot and unsalvageable humanity and unresolvable stakes, so deep in its chaos that - for very clear godforsaken reasons - the big victim here is white women... in a slavery picture.
Secret Ceremony (Losey, 1968)|||||8.5
The Blood of Jesus (Williams, 1941)|||||7.5
Cosmopolis (Cronenberg, 2012)|||||7
Darling (Schlesinger, 1965)|||||6.5
Fahrenheit 451 (Truffaut, 1966)|||||5.5
The Space Children (Arnold, 1958)|||||6.5

January 2013

January 2013

Yelling to the Sky (Mahoney, 2011)|||||4.5
The Masseurs and a Woman (Shimizu, 1938)|||||6.5
Mr. Thank You (Shimizu, 1936)|||||6.5
The Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1978)|||||6.5
Bewitched (Gu) (Kuei, 1981)|||||4
Tabu (Gomes, 2012)|||||7.5
Interesting and ponderous. An experimental epic, infusing blood to history, contrasting it with our contemporary malaise of disconnection from the conditions and events around us.
Two Seconds (LeRoy, 1932)|||||6.5
Safe in Hell (Wellman, 1931)|||||8.5
The Manitou (Girdler, 1978)|||||3
Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow, 2012)|||||7.5
"Her compulsively watchable film brings a global exchange of unthinkable pain down to earth while still retaining the essence of its ineffability. Zero Dark Thirty is ultimately about unknowable cost...  Joseph Jon Lanthier" - Slant's Top 25 of 2012 List
The film's an apology all right. Not for torture, but for recklessness and institutionalized power that is just how the political, operative world works, and seems to have self-realized itself - been compacted into a purest density, a brilliant, malignant diamond - in modern times, as in this decade of drones, air operations, air surveillance, remote detainee camps, and remoteness in general, all to contestable "results." This film has worth as a document - if not in accuracy, in capturing the reality of reality's drab moral chaos. Bigelow's product is perhaps the closest the US has gotten to Assayas.
Dragnet Girl (Ozu, 1933)||||8
Rendez-vous (Techine, 1985)|||||7.5
Five Deadly Venoms (Chang, 1978)|||||6
Demonlover (Assayas, 2002)||||7.5
The Odd Life of Timothy Green (Hedges, 2012)|||||4
Les Miserables (Hooper, 2012)|||||5.5
This will be absolutely excruciating to some, while others - I'd call them those who aren't averse to, or even can appreciate, unashamed sentimentalism - will be moved by the film's earnest aesthetic search for extreme emotion and embrace of melodrama. I am in the latter group, while admitting this film is a nightmare of hollow slavishness to beloved but questionably valuable source material.
But color me surprised by how much I sort of love Hooper's "innovative" stylistic approach to the movie musical. His messy framing, brazen "gritty" mise en scene, handheld camera, proliferate close-ups and insert shots, and rambunctious montage editing of all these things make it seem at times like a musical made by a renegade rock n' roll filmmaker of the 60's/70's, while the "verité" filming doesn't bleed out the theatricality but actually supports the idea of our watching - and being addressed - their emotional appeals on high. This film has a sense of burlesque and theatricality that makes it feel a real honoring of theater traditions, which I'll admit makes Hooper a much more daring and honorary reviver of the ideal of the movie musical than Tim Burton.  Unfortunately this project was largely ridiculous from the word "Go."