1. Bad Blood (Leos Carax)
Electrifying movie, seen in all its 35mm glory at Emory
2. A Summer’s Tale (Eric Rohmer)
Perfect digital projection at The Ross
3. Son of the Sheik and Man With the Movie Camera
Live music by Alloy Orchestra, seen at The Ross and Film Streams
4. John Hubley Anniversary Shorts
Terrific-looking restorations at Film Streams
5. Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau)
An old favorite at the Landmark
Some of these flew by – I’d want to see them all again before ranking, but here are some favorites:
from the Oscar shorts program: The Missing Scarf, Get a Horse, A la francaise
from Atlanta Film Festival: Rabbit and Deer, Monkey Rag
Jan Svankmajer’s Jabberwocky
Venice 70: Future Reloaded (some of it, anyway)
The Tender Game from the Hubleys
At least some of the Cattet & Forzani shorts
Guy Maddin’s Bing & Bela and Sighs & Bosoms
I’ve already identified 100+ must-see 2014 movies and am adding ’em to my master movie list, so not gonna repeat all those here. But here are a few I’ve been reading about on other lists (some people publish year-end lists before the year’s even over, would you believe it?) that I am especially anxious to watch.
Obvious Must-Sees:
Life of Riley
Winter Sleep
Maps to the Stars
Edge of Tomorrow
Timbuktu
Mr. Turner
Inherent Vice
Critically-Acclaimed Films that I suppose I oughtta see although they don’t look that interesting:
Listen Up Philip
Nightcrawler
Whiplash
Calvary
Selma
Two Days, One Night
Festival and Limited Release Films I haven’t had a chance to see yet:
Adieu to Language 3D
Duke of Burgundy
Jauja
The Trip to Italy
20,000 Days on Earth
Leviathan
Lil Quinquin
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
White God
Horse Money
The Look of Silence
Clouds of Sils Maria
Movies Nobody Loved but I am determined that I will love them:
Burying the Ex
Willow Creek
They Came Together
The Congress
Sin City 2
The Zero Theorem
Additions from The Dissolve:
John Wick
Last Days in Vietnam
Wild
Lucy
The Overnighters
Song of the Sea
The Guest
The Rover
Additions from individual critics lists in Sight & Sound:
Taprobana – Jason Anderson
Heli – Michael Atkinson
Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy – Anton Bitel
LFO The Movie – Anton Bitel
Obvious Child – Catherine Bray
The Kindergarten Teacher – Michel Ciment
Frank – Mark Cousins
Dos Disparos / Two Shots Fired – Maria Delgado
La Sapienza – Suzy Gillett
Love Is All – Sophie Mayer
Ow / Maru – Tony Rayns
Nuoc / 2030 – Tony Rayns
Hwayi, A Monster Boy – Tony Rayns
Hipopotamy – Chris Robinson
Wonder – Chris Robinson
We Can’t Live Without Cosmos – Chris Robinson
Unity – Chris Robinson
The Pride of Strathmoor – Chris Robinson
The Tribe – Jonathan Romney
Locke – Jonathan Rosenbaum
The Owners – Jonathan Rosenbaum
Lettres du Voyant – Sukhdev Sandhu
Closer to God – Jasper Sharp
Tu dors Nicole – Thirza Wakefield
Psychic Driving – Neil Young
Sun Stop / Sonne Halt – Neil Young
A pretty dire Tashlin movie. Sure you’ve got the color widescreen (ruined by the low-res letterboxed-SD presentation on our wide-HD monitor) and the humorous attacks on television, but the overall concept isn’t as shocking as it used to be, there aren’t enough actual jokes to keep things light and amusing, pacing is too slow and the lead actors didn’t have the skill or charisma to elevate it.
Who Were They, Anyway: Tom Ewell was actually the lead in The Girl Can’t Help It, but that movie had Jayne Mansfield and the music performances to distract from him. Sheree North (a Marilyn Monroe double, as I suspected and her IMDB trivia supports) was in Madigan and Charley Varrick, later mother-figure of the Maniac Cop. Special/sexy appearance by Rita Moreno of West Side Story, Tom’s agent/buddy is Les Tremayne (most often credited as a narrator, also in The Monolith Monsters and I Love Melvin) and the soldier who’s blantantly trying to steal Sheree is Rick Jason (in The Wayward Bus with Mansfield).
Based on lies and misunderstandings and gifts of the magi, as are most comedies. Sheree signs up for the air force after hearing her husband is being recalled to duty, but he’s dismissed for medical reasons and ends up following her to the base and living in the army-wife suites (see also: Cary Grant in the much better I Was a Male War Bride) to protect her from Rick. “Just get her pregnant,” said Katy repeatedly, advice the movie finally takes at the end, but too late, as Tom has spent the previous hour acting like a psychopath. At least the movie seemed edgy for the first few minutes, and at least it’s about a happily married couple who are still happily married at the end, a rare thing.
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Great sequel to The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. I liked this one better – less psychoanalysis and more social/political discussion. Again we’ve got clips from films and new stories and music performances, with Zizek talking for the entire runtime, having been placed inside the sets from some of the films (“feel-ums”). Would be worth watching this a few times, a la the Adam Curtis movies, in order to grasp it all, but it’s simply less enjoyable than an Adam Curtis movie. Maybe if they got Craig Baldwin to edit the visuals and Mark Cousins to re-record the voiceover… but I digress.
Some Things:
Good idea to open with They Live. Besides the obvious bit with the clear text commands beneath billboards and magazines (“consume”) he discusses why the fight scene has to be so long and difficult.
Zizek speaks from inside They Live, The Sound of Music, a Coke commercial, A Clockwork Orange (I think), Jaws, Triumph of the Will (heh), The Fall of Berlin, one real location (an airplane graveyard), Taxi Driver, Full Metal Jacket, Brief Encounter, Seconds (good one) and Titanic (including a great post-credits stinger where he plays Dead Leo DiCaprio)
“The basic insight of psychoanalysis is to distinguish between enjoyment and simple pleasures. They are not the same. Enjoyment is precisely enjoyment in disturbed pleasure, even enjoyment in pain, and this excessive factor disturbs the apparently simple relationship between duty and pleasures.”
He uses Kinder Eggs (“a quite astonishing commodity”) as a metaphor about layers of enjoyment. I think by his logic that Edgar Wright movies are Kinder Eggs.
He defends Rammstein, showing concert footage that has been likened to nazi imagery. Actually, nazis come up a lot in this movie, and there’s a long section about Beethoven’s 9th, Ode to Joy (also feat. A Clockwork Orange).
Seconds:
How to properly mock communism: in Loves of a Blonde and The Fireman’s Ball, Milos Forman “mocks precisely the ordinary people in their daily conformism, stupidity, egotism, lust, and so on. It may appear that this is something very arrogant, but no, I think that this is the way to undermine the entire structure of the Stalinist universe, to demonstrate not that leaders are not leaders – they’re always ready to say ‘oh but we are just ordinary people like you’ – no, that there is no mythic people which serves as the ultimate legitimization.”
“How come it is easier for us to imagine the end of all life on earth, an asteroid hitting the planet, than a modest change in our economic order? Perhaps the time has come to set our priorities straight and to become realists by way of demanding what appears as impossible in the economic domain.” Seems that Zizek is advocating for revolution.
Endless, rambling bio-pic about a theater producer who always planned bigger shows than he could afford, with enthusiasm that proved contagious to financial backers. Semi-falsely billed as a William Powell/Myrna Loy movie, since she plays his second wife, appearing in the last half hour of the three-hour movie. Good scenes (especially the lavish musical numbers) and acting, but the story is bloated with details from Ziegfeld’s life that just aren’t necessary to the plot or character, starting with an opening scene with his father and a little girl (who returns hours/years later to dance in one of his shows, but so what).
Powell was between The Thin Man and its first sequel. He runs a circus act with strongman Sandow (Nat Pendleton of two Thin Man movies), then marries his star Anna Held (Luise Rainer, winning back-to-back oscars with this and The Good Earth) after moving to Broadway shows. Anna carries her whole show, but Ziegfeld wants to do something bigger (he gives the impression of having a short attention span), so he starts the Follies, a musical comedy variety show that changes every year. Some ups, some downs, he seems washed up then opens four Broadway hits at the same time, then falls broke/sick/dead when the market crashes.
Myrna Loy’s character is Billie Burke, the good witch of The Wizard of Oz, and Frank Morgan (Ziegfeld’s main friend/rival) played The Wizard himself. Surprisingly, Will Rogers was dead and that was a Will Rogers impersonator in his scene.
Written by one of Ziegfeld’s main show writers. Won best picture and actress (Luise Rainer). Frank Capra, The Story of Louis Pasteur and Dodsworth took the rest. Got a semi-sequel in Ziegfeld Girl, also by Robert “Ziegfeld” Leonard with Busby Berkeley (it’s shorter, with Judy Garland = probably a better movie), and the music and comedy revue Ziegfeld Follies, featuring Powell as the dead Ziegfeld.
Gorgeous movie with an unusual look, like storybook illustrations in motion. Aging, childless couple get a baby, fine cloth and a ton of gold from bamboo plants. The girl grows rapidly, loves playing outdoors, likes a local boy called Sutemaru, but her dad decides all this gold should be spent to give his Princess a finer life so he has a palace built in the city, where she learns to sit very still and play music and not do much of anything except be courted by deceitful rich men. Then it turns out she’s from the moon, which is weird, but M. Schilling says it’s “based on the oldest-known Japanese folk tale, which dates to the 10th century,” also filmed in the 1980’s by Kon Ichikawa as Princess from the Moon. We watched the English version – only notably great voice was James Caan as the Princess’s foster dad.
One of the best scenes, where Kaguya is sitting still behind walls as others decide her fate, then she panics and flees, and the animation style panics with her.
Incoherence (1994, Bong Joon-ho)
Bong’s half-hour student short has been on my laptop for ages, and since I’d just watched Coherence, I couldn’t resist pairing these. I’m guessing it’s closer in tone to his unseen Barking Dogs Never Bite than his more sinister features of the 2000’s. Three comic chapters, each featuring a man in a position of power doing something immoral (professor reading porn in his office, business exec stealing milk from stranger’s front step, lawyer getting drunk and belligerent) with an epilogue of the three appearing on a panel show to discuss morality and self-control. The drunk prosecutor would go on to play a detective in Memories of Murder.
Light Is Calling (2004, Bill Morrison)
Like a Decasia outtakes short. Scenes from The Bells (1926, James Young), destroyed and decayed, set to serious violin music. The director of Begotten probably cries himself to sleep watching this.
Three Video Haikus (1994, Chris Marker)
Firstly, some manipulated digital video of a river under a bridge.
Catherine Belkhodja from Level Five smokes a cigarette, each exhale punctuated with superimposition of an owl in flight. I think the smoking is the same footage from Marker’s Silent Movie. These first two were set to piano music.
The third has opening and closing titles, static shot of railroad tracks, and electronic sfx, and I think was supposed to be humorous?
Tomatoes Another Day (1930, James Sibley Watson)
I didn’t know indie goof-off sound shorts existed in 1930. Where’d they get the equipment? Oddball talkie featuring a wife, her husband and her lover playing out a predestined scene while flatly speaking their every thought (“You are my husband”). The second half is full of punny wordplay like the title line, which the Portuguese subtitles on Youtube faithfully translate as “outro dia de tomates”.
This is Watson of Watson & Webber, following up their Fall of the House of Usher. A. Grossman, who brought the movie to my attention with a Bright Lights article, calls it a “satire of the redundancy of talkie cinema, in which image and sound are inflexibly congruent” … “a revelation that the silent trance, when granted sound, becomes embarrassingly demystified.”
On Departure (2012, Eoin Duffy)
The Missing Scarf finally showed up online, so after failing to impress Katy with that, I watched Duffy’s other popular success. Depressed alien goes on a business trip… then, as tends to happen at the end of his movies, the world ends. Actually I read an interview with Duffy, and this is about something else entirely, but I’m gonna gonna stick with my interpretation.
Sausage (2013, Robert Grieves)
Local craft food sellers work together to defeat mustache-twirling corporate foodlike-product manufacturer. Populace is easily distracted by whatever shiny new thing tries to catch their attentions. Movie shows the public swayed by price and spectacle (true) and turning up their noses at gross combinations of things like hotdog-in-a-donut (sadly not true).
Three Little Bops (1957, Friz Freleng)
I’d planned to follow up Shocktober with Animation November but cancelled… still watched a few Looney Tunes, though. Wolf vs. Three Pigs story retold in the jazz age. At the end, the wolf dies, goes to hell, returns as a ghost sitting in with the pigs on trumpet. Could they not get a vocalist who could sing on the beat… or is that jazz? Great line: “The Dew Drop Inn did drop down.”
Duck Soup to Nuts (1944, Friz Freleng)
Porky goes duck hunting. Daffy does his thing, gets away.
Ali Baba Bunny (1957, Chuck Jones)
Bugs and Daffy are buddies on vacation together until Bugs digs ’em into an Arabian treasure cavern and DD gets greedy. Showdown with the Sultan’s enforcer follows. DD gets shrunk by a genie. Stereotypes abound, but this is all better than it sounds.
Transylvania 6-5000 (1963, Chuck Jones)
The one with the two-headed bird-witch. Bugs stays at a vampire’s castle, learns some useful magic words. Remade in the 80’s with Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis,
Vampire vs. umpire:
Porky in Wackyland (1938, Robert Clampett)
Katy’s first time in Wackyland – she seemed annoyed at just how wacky this was, decried the “darkest africa” bit, asked if that’s what dodos really looked like, and claims scientists are trying to clone new ones.
Boop-Oop-a-Doop (1932, Dave Fleischer)
Less nuts than my favorite Boops can be. A couple terrific visual gags, some good cartoon weirdness (sinister circus ringmaster has a mighty morphing mustache, empty seats applaud on their own) and one song (“don’t take my boop-oop-a-doop away”) but Betty’s act only amounts to whipping lions, and her standard damsel-in-distress scene (saved by Koko the Clown) is uninspiring.
Arcana (2011, Henry Hills)
A half hour of zen based on a “treatment” by John Zorn (a numbered list of things) and featuring his music. I always love Hills’s editing (less extreme here than I’ve seen before), so this is enjoyable and relaxing, with seemingly no rhyme or reason to the order of events. I fell asleep to this a couple times in Georgia but only now watched it all the way through. Katy also praised the movie when I used it once as a kitchen screensaver.
