May 2014

May 2014

The Theatre Bizarre (Various, 2011)|||||3.5
C-/C+/C-/B-/D/C-, sympathetically.
Les rendez-vous d'Anna (Akerman, 1978)|||||8
The Last Temptation of Christ (Scorsese, 1988)|||||7
Pain & Gain (Bay, 2013)|||||4.5
Confidential Report (aka Mr. Arkadin) (Welles, 1955)|||||8
Godzilla (Edwards, 2014)|||||5
The Immigrant (Gray, 2013)|||||7.5
One of those ultra-classical narratives, characterized by old-fashioned naivete, openness to ridicule, a well-constructed screenplay of encompassing dramatic ironies and passionate worldly diatribe.  I don't think Gray quite hits anything out of the park, with consistency, but still a film highly affecting and wise.
Ida (Pawlikowski, 2013)|||||6.5
A pure and essential story, somewhat undermined by Pawlikowski's weakness for narrative efficiency.  Not much under the surface, but the surface is a pleasure.
* Phantom of the Paradise (De Palma, 1974)|||||6.5
Journey to Italy (Rossellini, 1954)|||||7
La promesse (Dardennes, 1996)|||||6.5
Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switch-Board Operator (Makavejev, 1967)|||||7.5
The River (Renoir, 1951)|||||7.5
Ugetsu (Mizoguchi, 1953)|||||7
The Holy Girl (Martel, 2004)|||||7
Fellini's Roma (Fellini, 1972)|||||7.5
The Merry Widow (von Stroheim, 1925)|||||6
Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (Ulmer, 1957)|||||5.5
* Prince of Darkness (Carpenter, 1987)|||||76
First of all, so Hawks (also, unrelatedly, sweet smatterings of Argento).  Operatic and portentous.  An all-in conflation of the hysterical imperatives of religion (to reveal Evil and what may lie supernally - or subatomically - to humanity) with the hopeful wishes of the modern, scientific, sentimental age, and so, a bit reflective of the science vs. religion-concerned Exorcist II whose spiritual images are almost matched, well, at least in regularity.  Carpenter seems stricken by a desire to frame icons and computers as the monoliths buttressing our vertical existence.  Around the religiosity is the HAWKS, though, and this film seems to flaunt the largest - and, tellingly, most anonymous, as apostles often are - of Carpenter's teams of do-gooders.  It doesn't quite deliver on these facets by the end, but a quality remains throughout.
* A History of Violence (Cronenberg, 2005)|||||5.5
Blood Simple (Coen, 1984)|||||76.5
So Hitchcock, if he were an American nihilist.  Manages to capture some of Hitchcock's concerting visual poetry (a slo-mo newspaper acting like a kissing Grace Kelly), but to the movie brat's lurid ends.  Finally, a masterful concerto of death and death drives, within a spiraling drainage of meaninglessness and one woman's triumph in the face of meaninglessness, caps it off on a high point.
* Unfaithfully Yours (Sturges, 1948)|||||7.5
Clash of the Titans (Leterrier, 2010)|||||2
Under the Skin (Glazer, 2013)|||||7.5
The Girl in Room 20 (Williams, 1946)|||||6
Shivers (Cronenberg, 1975)|||||4

April 2014

April 2014

* Damien: Omen II (Taylor, 1978)|||||4
Visually capable, but a story that could have teemed with subtext, as something of cruel, messianic scripture taking place in modern times, is just increasingly utterly subtextless, adamantly disinterested in emotions in the rush to serve horrendously dumb schematics.  Even genre films could have sprawl back in the 70's storytelling heyday (a horror film taking place in a military academy?  Neat.), and this held a place in my imagination as a child, but clearly the Omen franchise is a vacuum.
Noah (Aronofsky, 2014)|||||5
The Unknown Known (Morris, 2014)|||||7
* Body Snatchers (Ferrara, 1993)|||||4.5
Tess (Polanski, 1979)|||||6.5
Oculus (Flanagan, 2014)|||||4.5
Young Soul Rebels (Julien, 1991)|||||5
* Exorcist II: The Heretic (Boorman, 1977)|||||6.5
I suppose one cannot refuse to understand the "petulant bro" reaction of douchebag audiences of 1977 or Friedkin immediately calling Boorman an anonymous movie-making moron.  In my theater screening of this last night, I could feel the viewers around me trying desperately but failing to commodify this experience of such little sense and long, drawn-out scope.  This is not a night-out movie.  It's alternately painful and painfully beautiful, a screaming, shrieking religious adventure, and experience.  Cinepassion on Exorcist II
Scenes from a Marriage (Television Version) (Bergman, 1973)|||||8
Workers, Peasants (Straub, Huillet, 2002)|||||7
Mes petites amoureuses (Eustache, 1974)|||||6.5
All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (Levine, 2006)|||||4.5
Gummo (Korine, 1997)|||||6
Welp, I can take back my haughty prognostication.  Surprised, but I found this cloying debut feature better than Spring Breakers.
Nymphomaniac Vol. 2 (Von Trier, 2014)|||||7
Miami Vice (Mann, 2006)|||||5.5
Maniac Cop (Lustig, 1988)|||||4
Conan the Barbarian (Milius, 1983)|||||6.5
Nymphomaniac Vol. 1 (Von Trier, 2014)|||||8

March 2014

March 2014

Amityville 3-D (Fleischer, 1983)|||||4.5
Histoire(s) du cinema (Godard, 1998)|||||8.5
Muppets Most Wanted (Bobin, 2014)|||||5.5
Blue Sunshine (Lieberman, 1978)|||||4.5
Weirdest movie ever.  Enjoyed our uber-neurotic freak-hero.  Post-viewing must read.
Kanal (Wajda, 1957)|||||6.5
Wrong (Dupieux, 2012)|||||5
Dracula 3D (Argento, 2012)|||||3.5
Bad, yes.  But in being bad, in being a case of an old filmmaker not keeping up with the means with which to make a good film, which do adapt and update with the times and technologies, then this is still an Argento flick and perceptibly so.  If anything, Argento's Dracula is as stodgy as Tod Browning's original, and that's almost a compliment.  It's so without the excess of modern horror.
Identification of a Woman (Antonioni, 1983)|||||6.5
Last Life in the Universe (Ratanaruang, 2003)|||||6.5
Z (Gavras, 1969)|||||6.5
V/H/S/2 (Various, 2013)|||||5

February 2014

February 2014

The Great Beauty (Sorrentino, 2013)|||||4.5
Pompeii (Anderson, 2014)|||||4.5
Yankee Doodle Dandy (Curtiz, 1942)|||||5.5
Her (Jonze, 2013)|||||7
* To Catch a Thief (Hitchcock, 1955)|||||7
Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (Hong, 2000)|||||7
A two hour journey of coercion.  Shockingly, no one is damned in the end (they are liberated through Hong's blunt bathos, redeemed romantically), but the journey is a damnable one anyway.
Drug War (To, 2013)|||||6.5
Drinking Buddies (Swanberg, 2013)|||||6
Swanberg gets it.  Perfect resolution, and the greatest fear sitting through this film of such sensible measures is that it would not stick a landing.
What Maisie Knew (McGehee & Siegel, 2012)|||||5
An exercise in unceasing emotional identification with an 8 year old girl.  Particular enough about the minutiae of divorce and custody proceedings, and in capturing the nuances of symptomatic behavior from those adults embroiled in it, to warrant some social interest, and also adeptly conjured is the aforementioned experiential world and interior mind of a young, troubled child, but, with bold generic-ness, a wholly ripe maudlin-ism - both cinematically and narratively - wins out.
White Heat (Walsh, 1949)|||||6.5
The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer, 2013)|||||8
The Lego Movie (Miller, Lord, 2014)|||||5.5
The Grudge 3 (Wilkins, 2009)|||||3.5
They Died With Their Boots On (Walsh, 1941)|||||7.5
Stranger by the Lake (Guiraudie, 2013)|||||6.5
A deft film, if a bit inert. A text on sociability, it plunges us into a world (by the lake) that simply cannot be held to the same social or moral expectations viewers normally hold and would normally place upon watching another hetero-noir like another version of The Postman Always Rings Twice. What the film does is offer a vital look at the desperate fragments of functional sociability in a society that is forced to exist outside of reality - rather than some judgmental comment on cruising culture, or "hedonism," the film proves its worth in denying such an easy reading, instead claiming to expose the sad, double-edged existential realm these men must inhabit.  I think of this film and the saying: "No man is an island"... except for those hazarding, by some necessity, a life at the margins. 
Buffalo '66 (Gallo, 1998)|||||6.5
At Berkeley (Wiseman, 2013)|||||7

January 2014

January 2014

Our Sunhi (Hong, 2013)|||||6.5
Sun Don't Shine (Seimetz, 2012)|||||5
When We Lived in Miami (Seimetz, 2013) (short)|||||
All That She Surveys (Mairs, 2012)|||||+
* Tales from the Crypt (Francis, 1972)|||||4.5
* Asylum (Baker, 1972)|||||5
Post Tenebras Lux (Reygadas, 2013)|||||5.5
Once Upon a Time in America (Leone, 1983)|||||6
Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2013)|||||6.5
From Beyond the Grave (Connor, 1973)|||||6
American Hustle (Russell, 2013)|||||5.5
Blue Valentine (Cianfrance, 2010)|||||5.5
US 47 (Bening, 2013)|||||6.5
signs (Benning, 2013) (short)|||||+
Flesh+Blood (Verhoeven, 1985)|||||7.5
* The Searchers (Ford, 1956)|||||6.5
The Wolf of Wall Street (Scorsese, 2013)|||||5.5
Passion (De Palma, 2012)|||||6.5
Mama (Muschietti, 2013)|||||3.5
The Lone Ranger (Verbinski, 2013)|||||5
* The Wolf Man (Waggner, 1941)|||||5.5
Le plaisir (Ophuls, 1952)|||||7.5
La cérémonie (Chabrol, 1995)|||||7.5
The Floorwalker (short) (Chaplin, 1916)|||||+
The Rink (short) (Chaplin, 1916)|||||++
* The Invisible Man (Whale, 1933)|||||7.5
Only God Forgives (Refn, 2013)|||||5

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