by ·Comments Off on Brandon’s Top Ten Retrospective Screenings of 2009

This might be the final year for the retrospective-theatrical category. I hardly see anything at the High anymore and Emory has slashed their free film programs. I hope Film Love and the Plaza can take me through one more year… will suck if the only movies in theaters in 2010 are movies from 2010.

1. Do The Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee)
This is fast becoming one of my favorite movies. I was hanging out with good Emory folks, the projection was great (and loud as hell), the Fox was sold-out and reacting loudly to certain scenes (oh the laughter when Martin Lawrence was onscreen). This would’ve been number one even if Spike and cast members hadn’t also shown up for a Q&A.

2. Amarcord (1973, Federico Fellini)
The touring restoration print (I wonder how long those will keep coming) at Landmark. Most beautiful movie ever.

3. The Age of Innocence (1993, Martin Scorsese)
A “great adaptation” chosen by Salman Rushdie. I never would’ve watched this near-perfect film, and in such clarity, if Emory hadn’t played it.

4. Bizarro Sat. Morn: Halloween Edition
This was good fun and good company at the Plaza. The Ultraman episode really brought it over the top.

5. Roger Beebe program
Film Love presents an independent (avant-garde? why not.) filmmaker with a good sense of humor who runs up to eight projectors at once. The kind of thing that can’t be replicated on video. I bought the DVD anyway, just in case.

6. Ceddo (1977, Ousmane Sembene)
Watched at Emory, preceded by an announcement that the film’s distributor just went out of business, making movies like this harder to watch on film in the future, and that Emory is cutting back on film screenings. A double-whammy. If you gotta go out, though, this was an eye-grabbing way to go.

7. Toy Story 3-D double-feature
A low-key empty late-night screening with Katy at Phipps

8. Wise Blood (1979, John Huston)
Weird-as-fuck Southern pro/anti-religion drama introduced by Salman Rushdie at Emory, a few months before the DVD release when nobody was talking about this movie. Rushdie picked it as an excellent film adaptation of a novel, so I read the book and appreciated it that much more. Rushdie himself, it turns out, had misremembered the movie. He hates it.

9. The Round-Up (1965, Miklos Jancso)
Chilly Hungarian paranoia film screened at Emory

10. Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack! (2001, Susuke Kaneko)
The Plaza gave us a rare opportunity to see a giant monster movie on 35mm with a cheering crowd.

Runners-up were Jeanne Dielman and Dracula, both at Emory. I’m sorry, but a 3-hour Belgian art film and a slow old-timey horror flick are no match for the computer-generated wrath of giant monsters.

by ·Comments Off on Brandon’s Fifteen Favorite Shorts of 2009

I watched an awful lot of shorts this year, culminating in Shorts Month, during which I watched way too many. Loved the hell out of all these.

1. Agnès Varda: Du côté de la côte, L’ Opéra mouffe and Ulysse
Between her features, her shorts and her Beaches, Agnès basically won my whole year.

2. Dave Fleischer: Koko’s Earth Control, Snow White and Betty Boop’s Halloween Party
Much as I love the Looney Tunes, there must’ve been audience members in the 30’s sighing, thinking of these Fleischer cartoons and saying “they don’t make ’em like that anymore.”

3. Buster Keaton: The Playhouse, One Week, The High Sign

4. The Telltale Heart (1928 Charles Klein and 1953 Ted Parmelee)
It’s always fun to see different adaptations of the same work, but super-rare for them both to be this brilliant.

5. Osamu Tezuka: Broken Down Film and Jumping
6. L’Apparition (1986, Pascal Aubier)
7. Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005, Peter Tscherkassky)
8. Nostalgia (1971, Hollis Frampton)
9. The Man Who Planted Trees (1987, Frederic Back)
10. A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008, Nick Park)
11. The Strip Mall Trilogy (2001, Roger Beebe)
12. Chess Fever (1925, Vsevolod & Shpikovsky)
13. Motion Painting No. 1 (1947, Oskar Fischinger)
14. The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (1946, Robert Clampett)
15. PES: Western Spaghetti and Roof Sex

Runners-up: Vivian, The Perfect Human, Passionless Moments, Organism and The Mystery of the Leaping Fish

by ·Comments Off on Brandon’s Favorite Movies on Video, 2009

What a great movie year here at Casa Brandon. Generally good hit-to-miss ratio, skipping most of the crap (except of course during SHOCKtober). I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend any of the 42 titles on this here top-30 list.

1. Sunset Blvd. (1950, Billy Wilder)
2. Powell/Pressburger: I Know Where I’m Going! / A Matter of Life and Death
3. My Winnipeg (2007, Guy Maddin)
4. Agnès Varda: Le Bonheur / 101 Nights of Simon Cinema
5. Orlando (1992, Sally Potter)
6. Pontypool (2008, Bruce McDonald)
7. John Ford: Judge Priest / The Sun Shines Bright
8. Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1992, Craig Baldwin)
9. Black Cat, White Cat (1998, Emir Kusturica)
10. Rio Bravo (1959, Howard Hawks)
11. The Young One (1960, Luis Bunuel)
12. The Power of Nightmares (2004, Adam Curtis)
13. Frank Borzage: Seventh Heaven / Lazybones
14. The Naked City (1948, Jules Dassin)
15. The Color of Pomegranates (1970, Sergei Parajanov)
16. Werner Herzog: Fitzcarraldo / Burden of Dreams
17. Johnny To: Mad Detective / Exiled
18. Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003, Joe Dante)
19. Jacques Demy: Donkey Skin / Lola
20. Black Dynamite (2009, Scott Sanders)
21. Time (2006, Kim Ki-duk)
22. Frank Tashlin: Hollywood or Bust / Susan Slept Here / Son of Paleface
23. Mon Oncle d’Amerique (1980, Alain Resnais)
24. Woman in the Dunes (1964, Hiroshi Teshigahara)
25. Raoul Ruiz: Comedy of Innocence / Zig-Zag
26. Joan the Maid (1994, Jacques Rivette)
27. Takashi Miike: Big Bang Love / Bird People in China
28. Nashville (1975, Robert Altman)
29. Claire Denis: Trouble Every Day / Friday Night
30. The Good, the Bad and the Weird (2008, Ji-woon Kim)

Some good runners-up: Magnificent Obsession, Dance of the Seven Veils, Suspiria and three by Oshima.

This year’s Edward Burns Memorial Award, given to the movie I saw this year which I have already mostly forgotten, goes to Finye (The Wind), which Katy says she remembers just fine.

The Alien Resurrection Award, given to a movie I liked which nobody else did, is proudly presented to Takeshi Kitano for Achilles and the Tortoise, indeed for his entire career-self-destruction trilogy. Back when I saw Kitano’s Fireworks in the late 90’s I’d been hearing about what a great artist he was and I started to agree, but then acclaim mysteriously intensified after his mediocre Zatoichi remake, then it died off completely when he made this daring, exciting trilogy.

by ·Comments Off on Brandon’s Favorite New Movies in Theaters, 2009

1. The Beaches of Agnès (Agnès Varda)
2. Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson)
3. A Serious Man (Coen bros.)
4. Up (Pete Docter)
5. Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas)
6. In the Loop (Armando Iannucci)
7. The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch)
8. Che (Steven Soderbergh)
9. Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
10. Coraline (Henry Selick)

Each of the runners-up was great at something, but maybe not at everything:
Africa Paradise, Moon, District 9, Inglorious Basterds, Goodbye Solo and Antichrist

The Dark Knight Award, given to a movie which everyone else must have been tripping while they watched and raved because I can’t see what’s so great about it, is hereby presented to the Star Trek remake.

And the annual WTF Awards, given to movies I’d heard I was supposed like but I can’t see why, is presented to Jia Zhang-Ke for the double-whammy of Dong and Still Life.

by ·Comments Off on Movie Lists 2009-10

Umberto Eco: “Why am I so interested in the subject? I can’t really say. I like lists for the same reason other people like football or pedophilia. People have their preferences.”

SPIEGEL: “Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can’t be realistically completed?”

Eco: “We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.”
–

This site/domain predates the movie blog. It was originally set up to hold my movie lists. Lists of movies I’ve seen and have yet to see. Movies I liked and need to see again. Saw in theaters or on video? Have on DVD? Available on DVD. Watched on Turner Classic. Read about in a magazine. How many movies seen, by year? By director? How many directors? How many movies? How many lists?

I do love the movies more than the lists, but it wasn’t seeming that way. I’d watch House of Mirth very late one night, not remember it the next day but check it off the list. Watch In a Lonely Place whilst looking for music on the internet, only glancing at the TV when it sounds like the scene has changed. With the movie blog around, I have to think about everything I’ve seen after watching it. Encourages thought and analysis. Exceptions still occur, as does terrible writing and half-assed entries, but overall it is working.

Lately the unfortunate combination of The Road (post-apocalyptic survival story) and Collapse (paranoid doc about how the world’s headed down The Road sooner than later) along with Vic Chesnutt’s death on Christmas, all got me thinking about death, that discouraging, humiliating limit. Like Umberto Eco, I like lists because I don’t want to die. So as The Year We Make Contact approaches and I ponder how many George Clooney movies, Hellraiser sequels, classics, romantic comedies, awful remakes and foreign dramas I have left to watch, I have kicked out more lists than ever:

Favorite New Movies in Theaters, 2009
Favorite Movies on Video, 2009
Fifteen Favorite Shorts of 2009
Top Ten Retrospective Screenings of 2009
Fave Movies of the Decade
Movie Lists 2006 Redux
Movies to Watch in 2010

I was gonna jazz these up with some fresh screenshots but all this writing is cutting into valuable moviewatching time…

by ·Comments Off on The Hurt Locker (2008, Kathryn Bigelow)

First feature of Bigelow’s I’ve seen (and only the third she’s made) since Strange Days in the mid-90’s. As good/intense as they say. Plot is just a series of dangerous situations strung together, with minimal character/story crap getting in the way – and I say that as a compliment. Doughy-faced star Jeremy Renner (seen him before in two not-so-good movies), replacing a blown-up Guy Pearce, defuses bombs with his team Anthony Mackie (charismatic star of Spike Lee’s forgotten She Hate Me) and Brian Geraghty (hundredth-billed in Art School Confidential). David Morse shows up to talk (where’s he been since The Green Mile?) and Raifffienes plays a desert bounty hunter (pffft, “security contractor”) who catches a bullet to the neck during an ambush.

Geraghty, Mackie, Pearce:
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Movie builds tension further by counting down the days (30-some) till the company is relieved – keeping in mind that movies historically love to kill army guys when their tour is almost up, or kill cops a few days away from retirement (see also: Exiled). Jeremy goes a little mad chasing after a boy who sells bootleg DVDs, thought dead so a revenge plan is set in motion, it goes wrong, then the boy shows up alive and well. Brian gets kidnapped and shot, but the three guys live. Renner can’t deal with home/family life (shades of The War Tapes), re-enlists in the final scene, with a chilling “365 days left in tour” title card.

J. Renner assesses the situation, find it unsatisfactory:
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It’s unsurprising that cinematographer Barry Ackroyd works with Paul Greengrass, but curious that he also shot The Wind That Shakes The Barley.

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Since we didn’t see this when it played theaters this summer, I skipped all the articles about it. Found one still lingering on Bright Lights, arguing that it “combines two cinematic subgenres that no one ever thought to put together before – the bomb disposal film, and another subgenre that has scarcely been recognized as such, the Steve McQueen military film.” Apparently I must see The Small Back Room, a Powell/Pressburger British/Nazi Hurt Locker.

by ·Comments Off on It Happened In Hollywood (1937, Harry Lachman)

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From Sam Fuller’s autobiography:

[Writer/producer Myles Connolly] and I started throwing around ideas for his picture. It was supposed to be about a character based on Tom Mix, the cowboy star of silent films who’d made scores of Westerns. Then came the talkies, and Mix didn’t make the transition successfully. Myles and I came up with a story about a silent cowboy star who doesn’t want to play a gangster role in a talkie because he wants to be loyal to his fans. He doesn’t want to disappoint the kids who are crazy about his Westerns. We called it Once a Hero, but after the movie went into production, they gave it the more commercial title of It Happened in Hollywood.

Harry Lachman, who’d been a successful painter in Paris, directed the picture. Lachman is forgotten today, but he made over thirty movies before he stopped directing in the early forties. Fay Wray played the female lead. This was after King Kong distinguished her from all the pretty blondes of the day as the one who could scream the best. the Tom Mix character, Tim Bart, was played by Richard Dix. It Happened in Hollywood was my first real credit on a picture.

Fay Wray, the one who could scream the best:
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The name wasn’t changed soon enough – the Once a Hero title card made it onto the film. Celeb cowboy actor Bart is introduced screening his latest movie to sick kids, a real white-hat good-guy honest friendly lunkhead. He and his leading lady Gloria are called back to Hollywood for sound tests – she makes it but Bart, dressed in a silly period suit and made to speak out-of-character flowery dialogue, gets cut. Gloria later gets him a bit part as a gangster but he walks when the script is changed to make him a cop killer.

“The day of Westerns is over. We have to make the pictures indoors from now on.” Recalls The Naked City, which we watched the same week, finally making the pictures outdoors again.

Bart in gangster getup with his director:
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Out of work and unpopular when a young fan comes to visit, Bart throws a party and invites all the stars’ doubles and stand-ins to delight the kid – the highlight of the picture. Some stand-ins do the voices better than others – Chaplin’s and Harold Lloyd’s have no problem since they don’t speak.

This is not W.C. Fields:
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The improbabilities pile up… a realtor, after Bart to repossess his mansion while the party is being held, is kidnapped. Bart and Gloria tearfully confess to each other that they’re broke. The boy falls ill and the doctor says he can’t be moved. Tim hits his low point, about to reenact the bank robbery for real, ends up foiling a more serious bank robbery and shooting the criminals. Now a hero in the papers, he’s hired back by the studio, Westerns make a comeback and Tim opens a ranch for sick kids. That’s a better ending than Tom Mix got, touring with a circus after leaving the movies, marrying for the fifth time then dying when his car plunged into a ravine.

Did anybody realize that Blake Edwards made a movie in which Tom Mix (Bruce Willis) teams up with Wyatt Earp to solve a murder at the Academy Awards? It came out three months before Die Hard.

A boy in trouble:
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Decent movie. I liked Richard Dix (who’d really been a silent film star, and not exclusively in Westerns) but Fay Wray made more of an impression. It all confused Katy, who knows Sam Fuller is some kind of badass and didn’t follow his connection with this movie. I didn’t either, honestly – assuming Power of the Press and Scandal Sheet will show off more of his style (I already know that Shockproof does).

by ·Comments Off on Dread (2009, Anthony DiBlasi)

Stephen (dreamboat Jackson Rathbone from M. Night’s Last Airbender and the Twilight series) is a black haired film student who meets Quaid (edgy dude who studies fear). Stephen’s editor is a vegetarian girl, and I remember what happens to her from the short story. Abby is a girl with a dark goth birthmark all over her face and body – I liked her best.

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The ol’ “kid upstairs watches his family get killed by a maniac below” bit. Didn’t I see the same scene in Giallo last week? Everyone in this movie has tattoos and listens to teen hard-rock. It’s like the vision of underground youth culture put forth by 8mm or Blair Witch 2. Whoops, there’s my favorite M83 song over a clubbing/sex/film editing montage so I guess I’m guilty too. They hang up their fear-study flyers (on red paper, of course) among gratuitous ads for the new Dresden Dolls album.

A stupid, awful, violent little movie. Makes sense that the vegetarian-trapped-in-room-with-rotting-meat scene from the short story would make it to the movie intact. There’s nothing horror movies enjoy more these days than a psychological (yet gruesome) torture chamber. This also shared a hint of the ending of Martyrs, the torturer gaining enlightenment by staring into the dying eyes of his victim, but that movie somehow seemed both far more violent and less gratuitous. Stephen ends up killing everyone, gets away, ho-hum.

The writer/director has his hands on most Barker-related movies of the recent past and near future, including Midnight Meat Train, Book of Blood, something called The Plague and the upcoming Hellraiser remake.

by ·Comments Off on Sugar (2008, Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden)

I probably shouldn’t say I watched this at all, since I was focusing more on cutting out CD tracklists than on the screen, but I looked up often enough for this to remind me of Chop Shop. Seemed like one of the modern indie movies that are trying to outdo each other with their raw realism, with traces of The Wrestler follow-cam. I’m not so into the gritty Dardenne school, but this didn’t overdo it. Sugar dreams baseball, makes furniture, gets into the U.S. major-league farm teams, is the next big thing, then thinks he’s losing his edge so runs off to NYC to work on furniture, play small-time ball in his spare time.

Regular collaborators Fleck and Boden are both credited as director, but Fleck took sole director credit on breakthrough Half Nelson so Boden doesn’t get as much mention in the reviews. I don’t know who either one of ’em is, so it’s all the same to me.

Cinema Scope liked it, said they “pared down the dialogue, kept the plot off to the side, and invested everything in looks, gestures, space, and atmosphere.”