Katy found us a new Christmas movie. Aloysius McKeever (Victor Moore, star of Make Way for Tomorrow) is a squatter who lives in mega-rich Michael O’Connor’s summer house during the winter (and his winter house in the summer). He starts inviting other unfortunates to stay with him during a post-war housing shortage, leading to a More The Merrier situation where roommates Jim (Iowan Don DeFore, who somehow played a German later in a Douglas Sirk movie) and Trudy (Gale Storm of some Joseph Kane westerns) fall in love. Jim is blandly unmemorable, so fortunately there’s more going on – Trudy is the homeowner’s daughter pretending to be down on her luck, and she invites both divorced parents (Lubitsch actor Charles Ruggles and Ann Harding of Double Harness) to play along – I forget why they go along with it, but Ruggles eventually reveals himself to Jim, donating land to his housing-crisis alleviation project, after all the family togetherness somewhat unscrooges him. They never clue in McKeever, who heads merrily to another mansion in the new year.
Author: Brandon
Brandon's the guy who runs this site.
Leave No Trace (2018, Debra Granik)
Ben Foster (Chris Pine’s trigger-happy brother in Hell or High Water) is too freaked out to join society, lives the survivalist life in the woods outside Portland, earning cash by hawking his PTSD meds. Problem is he’s got a daughter (Thomasin McKenzie) who’s good at finding wild mushrooms and hiding from the authorities, but would kinda like to eat normal food and meet other people sometimes. They are caught pretty soon, provided a home, escape back to the woods, are allowed to stay at a new home, escape back to the woods, etc., until McKenzie makes the decision to join civilization, even though her dad is psychologically unable to stay. One remarkable thing about the movie is that everyone they meet is generous and kind, the opposite of Winter’s Bone.
The Other Side of the Wind (2018, Orson Welles)
Love to spend years following rumors of the recreation of the lost masterpiece by an all-time great filmmaker, only for the thing to finally appear direct-to-video, then watch it in fragments over a week of late nights because I keep falling asleep. I watched the previously released scenes of this in the early days of the movie blog, never thinking there’d be a feature, and here we are, not quite knowing what to put in quote marks (the “complete” feature “by” Welles). Rosenbaum approves, so who am I to argue?
Stills, narration, and the line “that was long before cellphone cameras” mar the opening minutes, then hammy P-Bog becomes a main character, and the movie’s in trouble. It recovers easily – a party film with a magnetic John Huston as the Wellesian center, artists and hangers-on all around, cutting all over the place, and then the scenes of Huston’s never-to-be-completed film (this is an extremely self-aware movie – even Hammy P-Bog appears to be playing “hammy” “p-bog”), a miniature, fragmented work inside the work, which is both a beautiful art film and a pretentious parody of a beautiful art film, problematically starring an always-nude Oja Kodar, who in fact cowrote this film, making it knowingly, self-parodically problematic, I guess. Playfully homoerotic dialogue, apparently documentary sections, and all the colored lights making this more Suspiria-like than the Suspiria remake. The whole project and its implications fill your brain up all the way. Besides P-Bog there are a few overdone performances – I’m thinking of the film critic (Susan Strasberg) and Zimmy The Southern Gentleman (Cameron Mitchell) – but on first viewing it seemed 15% tiresome, 85% wonderful.
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They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (2018, Morgan Neville)
I remember this being fun… let’s see, my notes say “uses every bit of Welles footage they could find to place in dialogue with interviewees” and “ends with Why Can’t I Touch It, wow.” I should watch the making-of and the new Mark Cousins doc then rewatch the feature, but I also got things going on besides Orson.
The Favourite (2018, Yorgos Lanthimos)
Yorgos has been refining his bold visual style from Alps to Lobster to Sacred Deer, but it’s hard to notice while you’re busy making sense of his oddball characters and dialogue. So now something amazing has happened, and he’s applied those bold visuals (now featuring more fisheye lens than I’ve ever seen in a movie theater) to someone else’s script, a period comedy about women in high court behaving badly. The result wipes the floor with last year’s The Death of Stalin. And YL’s actors have always been splendid, but it’s been hard to tell since they fall into an uncanny valley of almost-not-quite human behavior, so now that they’re playing recognizable humans with killer comic insult dialogue, they’re all getting award nominations.
Queen Olivia Colman’s best friend Rachel Weisz handles all the complex policy issues while the queen hides away in her rabbit room, and this is fine until Rachel’s cousin Emma Stone shows up and starts insinuating herself. These are all based on real people according to the wiki, though it doesn’t mention whether the real Queen had 17 pet rabbits representing all her miscarried children. Nicholas “Beast/Nux” Hoult plays a parliament member who tries to get Emma to spy for him, and maybe if I see him in a few more movies I’ll start to recognize him, but probably not. Premiered at Venice with Roma, Buster Scruggs, Suspiria and Vox Lux, and sold out Phipps on a Sunday matinee, which I thought was impressive until I realized Phipps got those gigantic lounge seats and now only 24 people can fit in their tiny theaters.
Madeline’s Madeline (2018, Josephine Decker)
The second movie I’ve seen this year with a sea turtle girl at the beach. The wikipedia version of this movie is a frustrated teen off her meds who finds a community in a weirdo theater troupe, but conflicts arise between the girl (Helena Howard) and her mom (Miranda July), spilling into her acting and vice versa, and this is encouraged past the point of comfort by theater director Molly Parker.
The experience of watching it is something different, with editing and camera focus and framing just all over the place. Butter on the Latch was similarly disorienting, but more energy here from characters and story drives the thing into a jittery madness which is extremely fun to watch.
Roma (2018, Alfonso Cuarón)
Fourteen Things That Haunt Me, from most intense to least:
1. the birth scene…
2. the beach scene…
3. Trying to park the giant family car in the narrow driveway
4. Taxidermied dog heads on wall of the country house
5. Group martial arts demo with guru who stands on one leg
6. Solo nude martial arts demo
7. Dad taking the bookcases, leaving the books
8. All the dog shit in the driveway
9. Department store confrontation between Cleo and FermÃn during a riot
10. Fermin going to the bathroom and never returning
11. Father going on a “business trip” and never returning
12. Mom calmly explaining to the kids that father has left
13. Drunken new year’s forest fire
14. The pried-in references to previous Cuarón movies
From Up on Poppy Hill (2011, Goro Miyazaki)
It’s a pretty good animated period drama, but if you watched if before the others, you’d say what’s the big idea with this Ghibli thing, their movies aren’t so hot. At least “pretty good” puts it above what I’ve heard about Tales From Earthsea from the number one Goro hater in my office. But it’s missing something, the smoothness and refinement of motion. When people turn their heads it doesn’t look so much like a person turning their head as it does progressive images of a head turned at different angles – the flow is wrong. Or I dunno, maybe my blu-ray was bad, but this came out after Ponyo, and some of the stuff in Ponyo is leagues beyond. The old timey piano music on the soundtrack was different, anyway.
It’s the ol’ story of kids saving their clubhouse from demolition by fatcats – in this case it’s a creaky old multi-story house on a high school campus where all the boys run their after-school organizations, and the school board is demolishing it to build a nicer one, so the girls pitch in to clean the place up and show off its value. Shun runs the school paper, Umi runs a boarding house, and they think they might be in love, but then see photos of each other’s dead fathers and it’s the same guy so they’re worried they might be siblings, then this gets resolved and it turns out their fathers were just friends so they are free to do whatever.
Cam (2018, Daniel Goldhaber)
A decent doppelganger thriller with an anticlimactic ending, our lead Alice challenging her alter-ego Lola to a live simon-says, and Alice gets more likes by smashing her nose against a table, so Lola hands over her account password and presumably dematerializes. Kind of a neat creepy concept in the meantime though, combining the phenomenon of “cam girls” (girls with live online video shows, often nude, competing for tips) and the problem of not knowing who online is a fake/clone/bot/ghost. Great music, too.
Star Madeline Brewer is from the Black Mirror episode with military vs. “roaches.” Her lead customer/stalker Tinker (“I can usually tell when a girl’s gonna be copied”) is Patch Darragh, a doctor in The Visit. Her brother Jordan is Devin Druid, Jesse Eisenberg’s younger brother in Louder Than Bombs, and her mom is Melora Walters of Magnolia who I guess I don’t recognize anymore. Watched on streaming, and it was too pixelated, but since it’s a movie about streaming video, I’m going to allow it.
2018 Movies To Watch and Other Lists
2018 Movies I Missed:
I made a “complete” list of movies that played somewhere I could reach (Nebraska, Atlanta, blu-ray, streaming) in 2018 that I wanna watch on letterboxd. I’m not going to forget the ones on everybody else’s year-end lists, or the latest by major directors, but here are some others I don’t want to miss:
Taming the Horse
Dirty Computer
The Work
Bodied
Jeannette
The Wolf House
3/4
Those Who Are Fine
Happy as Lazzaro
The Tale
Cocote
Insect
Under the Silver Lake
The Woman Who Left
Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
Djon Africa
The Lion Sleeps Tonight
Le fort des fous
Good Luck
Milla
Lu Over the Wall
The Nothing Factory
An Elephant Sitting Still
Classical Period
Knife+Heart
The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling
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SHOCKtober 2018 Post Mortem:
I previously made a couple of must-see horror lists from 2009 and 2010 here and I collected a few more lists in 2015 here. It’s getting so I’ve seen almost all the titles on the latest “100 best horror films ever made” lists, but here are some I’m still missing, from all around the internet…
Slant list 2018:
Blood and Black Lace (1964)
Deathdream (1972)
The Hitcher (1986)
Opera (1987)
Indiewire 2018:
The Ghost Ship (1943)
The Lodger (1944)
Hangover Square (1945)
Village of the Damned (1960)
Viy (1967)
Messiah of Evil (1973)
Tales from the Hood (1995)
Indiewire Underappreciated Horrors 2018:
The Entity (1982)
Wild Zero (2000)
The Unseeable (2006)
P2 (2007)
Jennifer’s Body (2009)
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010)
The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015)
We Are The Flesh (2016)
Bear With Us (2016)
Don’t Breathe (2016)
The Eyes of My Mother (2016)
Roger Ebert Underrated Horrors:
The House That Screamed (1969)
The Company of Wolves (1984)
Razorback (1984)
Parents (1989)
Time Out’s 2012 and 2016 lists:
Threads (1984)
The Vanishing (1988)
Lake Mungo (2008)
Edgar Wright’s list:
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)
Theater of Blood (1973)
Death Line (1973)
Frailty (2001)
Older Slant list that went to 200:
Witchfinder General (1968)
Wake in Fright (1971)
Blood Spattered Bride (1972)
Shock Waves (1977)
The Entity (1982)
The Church (1989)
Selections from my own list:
Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970)
Beauty and the Beast (1978)
Boxing Helena (1993)
The Happening (2008)
The Baron (2011)
Over Your Dead Body (2014)
Unfriended (2014)
The Devil’s Candy (2015)
The Shallows (2016)
Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys (2004)
Puppet Master parts 9-11 (Axis trilogy, 2010-2017)
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BBC Foreign-Language Film Poll 2018:
Hooray, another one of these. Original list is here.
A selection of movies from the Top 100 I need to (re)watch
Landscape in the Mist (Theo Angelopoulos, 1988)
In the Heat of the Sun (Jiang Wen, 1994)
Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou, 1991)
Scenes from a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1973)
Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)
Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1962)
To Live (Zhang Yimou, 1994)
Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987)
Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988)
Farewell My Concubine (Chen Kaige, 1993)
Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
And some enticing selections from the individual lists:
Macario (Roberto Gavaldón, 1960)
Sentimental Education (Júlio Bressane, 2013)
MacunaÃma (Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1969)
A Chinese Odyssey: Part Two: Cinderella (Jeffrey Lau, 1995)
Things of the Aimless Wanderer (Kivu Ruhorahoza, 2015)
Lebanon (Samuel Maoz, 2009)
My Son, the Hero (Ismael RodrÃguez, 1961)
Year of the Devil (Petr Zelenka, 2002)
Last Night (Kamal El Sheikh, 1964)
Chronicle of a Boy Alone (Leonardo Favio, 1965)
Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957)
New Dragon Gate Inn (Raymond Lee and Ching Siu-tung, 1992)
The Adventure of Three Reporters aka Miss Mend (Boris Barnet and Fyodor Otsep, 1926)
Incendies (Denis Villeneuve, 2010)
Big Green Valley (Merab Kokochashvili, 1967)
Falling Leaves (Otar Iosseliani, 1966)
Salt for Svanetia (Mikheil Kalatozishvili, 1930)
Mr. Long (Sabu, 2017)
Angel’s Egg (Mamoru Oshii, 1985)
Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable (Shun’ya Itô, 1973)
Green Snake (Tsui Hark, 1993)
Ariel (Aki Kaurismäki, 1998)
The Iron Rose (Jean Rollin, 1973)
Girl with Hyacinths (Hasse Ekman, 1950)
The Bitter Stems (Fernando Ayala, 1956)
The Last Family (Jan P Matuszynski, 2016)
Fehérlófia / Son of the White Mare (Marcell Jankovics, 1981)
Red Wood Pigeon (Nanni Moretti, 1989)
The Disenchantment (Jaime Chávarri, 1976)
Little White Dove (Raúl Ruiz, 1973)
Udzinarta mze (Temur Babluani, 1992)
Cargo 200 (Alexei Balabanov, 2007)
Salto (Tadeusz Konwicki, 1965)
Reconstruction (Lucian Pintilié, 1970)
East Palace West Palace (Zhang Yuan, 1996)
The Heroic Trio (Johnnie To, 1993)
The Illumination (Krzysztof Zanussi, 1973)
Fruit of Paradise (VÄ›ra Chytilová, 1969)
Teza (Haile Gerima, 2008)
A Hole of My Own Making (Tomu Uchida, 1955)
The Graceful Brute (Yûzô Kawashima, 1962)
Still Life (Sohrab Shahid Saless, Houshang Baharlou and Morteza Momayyez, 1974)
Entranced Earth (Glauber Rocha, 1967)
The Outlaw and His Wife (Victor Sjöström, 1918)
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Elio Petri, 1970)
Sinbad (Zoltán Huszárik, 1971)
The Things of Life (Claude Sautet, 1970)
A Hometown in Heart (Yoon Yong-kyu, 1949)
The Eternal Breasts (Kinuyo Tanaka, 1955)
Long Arm of the Law (Johnny Mak, 1984)
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50 Under 50 Redux
Six years ago I got excited about Cinema Scope’s 50 Under 50 list and made vague plans to watch a film or two by each of the listed directors. I lost steam on this a while back, but still ended up watching about 40 movies because of one magazine issue, so it seems worth revisiting.
Twelve of the most obvious directors, and the films of theirs I had seen, were listed on the original page (and I forget why I was angry with Film Comment back then, but I resubscribed to it and Filmmaker last year) – here are the others, with links to movies I watched, unlinked are the ones I’ve meant to watch.
Pretty well-covered:
Paul Thomas Anderson
Johan Grimonprez
Yorgos Lanthimos
Matteo Garrone
Ben Wheatley
Ben Rivers
Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Maren Ade
Bertrand Bonello
Albert Serra
Lucretia Martel
Paul WS Anderson
Lisandro Alonso
In progress:
Azazel Jacobs: The GoodTimesKid / Momma’s Man / Terri / The Lovers
Miguel Gomes: Tabu / Our Beloved Month of August / Arabian Nights
Carlos Reygadas: Battle In Heaven / Silent Light / Post Tenebras Lux
Andrew Bujalski: Computer Chess / Results / Support the Girls
Ben Russell: A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness / Let Each One Go Where He May
Denis Cote: Bestiaire / Vic + Flo Saw a Bear / Joy of Man’s Desiring / Boris Without Beatrice
Joao Pedro Rodrigues: Last Time I Saw Macao / The Ornithologist / To Die Like a Man
David Gatten: Hardwood Process / Secret History of the Dividing Line
Wang Bing: Coal Money / Dead Souls / West of the Tracks / Three Sisters / Ta’ang
Xavier Beauvois: Of Gods and Men / Le petit lieutenant
Zhao Liang: a couple of shorts / Crime & Punishment / Petition / Behemoth
Corneliu Porumboiu: 12:08 East of Bucharest / When Evening Falls on Bucharest / The Treasure / Infinite Football
Raya Martin: Independencia / Buenas noches, España / The Great Cinema Party
Nicolas Pereda: Greatest Hits / Summer of Goliath / Perpetuum Mobile
Cristi Puiu: The Death of Mr. Lazarescu / Sieranevada
Hirokazu Kore-eda: Still Walking / After The Storm / Shoplifters
Still unseen:
Jennifer Reeves: The Time We Killed / a lot more shorts
Liu Jiayin: Oxhide / Oxhide 2
Matt Porterfield: Putty Hill / Hamilton
Pema Tseden: The Search
Romuald Karmakar: Deathmaker / Nightsongs
Serge Bozon: La France / Madame Hyde
Sergei Dvortsevoy: Tulpan
Sharon Lockhart: Pine Flat
Ulrich Kohler: Sleeping Sickness / In My Room