The cinema thread

[Faust]

Re: Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second: The cinema thread



[quote user="xcoldricex"]+1 wkw fan. i happen to like fallen angels a lot - which isn't usually picked out as outstanding among his works.
[/quote]</p>

Yea, I did not like that at all. Maybe it wasn&#39;t a good introduction to WKW for me.</p>

Last one I saw was Remains of the Day. It was amazing. What a strong film. Anthony Hapkins is simply amazing.</p>

</p>

Is anyone else excited that they finally made Perfume into a movie? I loved the book, and I hope Hollywood doesn&#39;t mess it up too much.</p>

[mass]

Re: Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second: The cinema thread

[quote user="xcoldricex"]+1 wkw fan. i happen to like fallen angels a lot - which isn&#39;t usually picked out as outstanding among his works.
[/quote]

i feel the same way about ashes of time, but i also really like fallen angels.

[Faust]

Re: Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second: The cinema thread

I&#39;ve seen Sleeping Beauty 10 times in the last week now. I hate it.

[Faust]

Re: Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second: The cinema thread



Got Battle of Algiers sitting at home. Can&#39;t wait to see it.</p>

And, heads up for all you Netflixers. Blockbuster will let you rent a free movie for every Netflix envelope flap you bring them [B]</p>

[destroyed]

Re: Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second: The cinema thread



I love Battle of Algiers. Very timely.</p>

</p>

I just watched Tarkovsky&#39;s THE STALKER yesterday. He&#39;s quickly become my favorite director. Something beyond cinema is happening in his films. Right now, Tarkovsky&#39;s THE MIRROR is my favorite film ever.</p>

[Seventh]

Re: Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second: The cinema thread




Nice picks, Battle of Algiers and Stalker are two of my favorites. I couldn&#39;t stop thinking about the Battle of Algiers for days after I saw it--it is definately timely. And Stalker is a breathtakingly beautiful and philosophical movie (it is amazing that was filmed before the Chernobyl accident). The ending of Stalker is... words don&#39;t do it justice, but it just flips the whole movie upside down. </p>

Destroyed, have you seen Ivan&#39;s Childhood (I think it has an alternative title possibly, &quot;My Name is Ivan&quot;?) by Tarkovsky? It was one of his earliest film and has a different style, but also a favorite of mine. </p>

I recently watched the Saddest Music in the World --I thought it was OK, had some pretty wonderful images/moments, but I find Guy Maddin irritating sometimes. The next movie I am going to watch is Eraserhead (somehow I have never gotten around to seeing it), and I have high hopes for it!
</p>

[destroyed]

Re: Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second: The cinema thread



hmmm... haven&#39;t seen Ivan&#39;s Childhood. strangely www.greencine.com doesn&#39;t have it. must be out of print. will have to seek it out. thank you.</p>

</p>

i had to work really hard to get through Saddest Music in the World-----and i&#39;m not sure it was worth the effort. well, actually, it is quite nice to recall images from it, even if i didn&#39;t enjoy it so much as i watched it.</p>

</p>

i wish i could watch eraserhead for the first time again. love that film------it really changes the viewer. afterward, seek out the song of the same title by bruce mcculloch of kids in the hall. it will take the edge off...</p>

[Faust]

Re: Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second: The cinema thread

[quote user=&quot;destroyed&quot;]

hmmm... haven&#39;t seen Ivan&#39;s Childhood. strangely www.greencine.com doesn&#39;t have it. must be out of print. will have to seek it out. thank you.</p>

</p>

i had to work really hard to get through Saddest Music in the World-----and i&#39;m not sure it was worth the effort. well, actually, it is quite nice to recall images from it, even if i didn&#39;t enjoy it so much as i watched it.</p>

</p>

i wish i could watch eraserhead for the first time again. love that film------it really changes the viewer. afterward, seek out the song of the same title by bruce mcculloch of kids in the hall. it will take the edge off...</p>

[/quote]</p>

I can buy it for you - not sure if you&#39;d want to invest, as it is Tarkovsky&#39;s early work as Seventh pointed out, and is much less surrealistic. It&#39;s about WWII.</p>

Stalker is an amazing film. The book is awesome too, but it has a Communist flavor that Tarkovsky successfully took out.</p>

[Seventh]

Re: Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second: The cinema thread



Thanks Destroyed, now I am looking forward to eraserhead even more...[:D]</p>



Yes, the Ivan&#39;s Childhood is much more a straight narrative, about an orphan that is, in a way, adopted by Soviet soldiers in WWII. The child actor in &quot;Ivan&#39;s childhood&quot; is the main reason I love the film, an amazing acting performance. He is the opposite of most american child actors, not cute, not very personable, instead filled with such intensity and anger. And yet, still a child at times. Tarkovsky is able to of distill so much of the horror of the war into basically three characters in that movie...
</p>

Faust, what is the book on Stalker? Was it written by Tarkovsky? Still in print?</p>

A tragic thing about Stalker, is that a lot of it was filmed (twice) in real abandoned industrial/chemical plants. I think almost everyone that worked on the film has died (many very young), I have heard that it might have been because of the pollution they were working in.
</p>

[destroyed]

Re: Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second: The cinema thread



The book stalker is based on is called Picnic by the Roadway, or somesuch. I wonder if that what the Suede song &quot;picnic by the motorway&quot; is referencing. i&#39;ve never read the book....</p>

faust-----thanks for the offer. i will mull it over.
</p>

[Servo2000]

Re: Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second: The cinema thread

I was curious if anyone had heard anything about a film called Old Joy recently. I heard about it as it stars Will Oldham, one of my favorite musicians who truly is one of the few people I&#39;ve heard who is able to spill every bit of himself onto a record, and imagined that it could be something interesting.<div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder" /></div><div>From what I&#39;ve heard, the entire film takes place primarily between two people, who spend the film trying to &quot;catch up&quot; and yet never manage to, and in fact, in the end, realize how little they have in common. It sounds like, if scripted and acted well, that it could be quite a film.</div>

[Faust]

Re: Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second: The cinema thread

[quote user=&quot;Seventh&quot;]

Thanks Destroyed, now I am looking forward to eraserhead even more...[:D]</p>



Yes, the Ivan&#39;s Childhood is much more a straight narrative, about an orphan that is, in a way, adopted by Soviet soldiers in WWII. The child actor in &quot;Ivan&#39;s childhood&quot; is the main reason I love the film, an amazing acting performance. He is the opposite of most american child actors, not cute, not very personable, instead filled with such intensity and anger. And yet, still a child at times. Tarkovsky is able to of distill so much of the horror of the war into basically three characters in that movie...
</p>

Faust, what is the book on Stalker? Was it written by Tarkovsky? Still in print?</p>

A tragic thing about Stalker, is that a lot of it was filmed (twice) in real abandoned industrial/chemical plants. I think almost everyone that worked on the film has died (many very young), I have heard that it might have been because of the pollution they were working in.
</p>

[/quote]</p>

Destroyed got the title right. It&#39;s written by the most famous Russian science fiction writers, brothers Strugatsky. Here is an entry from Wikipedia. They wrote some amazing books. I wish someone did a film on It&#39;s Hard to be God. It&#39;s an incredible book - it&#39;s two main themes are impossibility of remaining Human in the face of barbarity, and on difficulties in trying to speed up a process of developing nations (just look at all the fuckups of the Europeans and Americans in Africa).
</p>

[destroyed]

Re: Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second: The cinema thread



speaking of books and cinema, has anyone read Klaus Kinski&#39;s autobiography? i&#39;ve been trying to get my hands on it but it is OOP and hard to find at that.
</p>


follow up question: any pick up the herzog &quot;SHORTS AND DOCUMENTARIES&quot; box? i am hoping that it will be under the xmas tree this year, but i have my doubts...</p>

[designersheep]

Re: Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second: The cinema thread

Satantango

A 7.5 hour (!) film by Bela Tarr, finally came out on DVD (R2 UK available in Amazon UK).
I&#39;ve been waiting for this film for so long and finally had the chance to watch it. The film has two intermissions, and the DVD is divided into 3 discs by those intermissions.

I wouldn&#39;t go into too much details, but it was an astonishing one of a kind experience. The plot could be shown in a regular length film, but Tarr makes use of extreme long takes and endlessly stretched scenes of mundane (there are number of scenes of people walking for 10 minutes, and then there is the repeatitive drunk dance sequence which lasts over 30 min and so on), and totally distorts the viewers&#39; senses of time and space. That said, the film is never boring; each seemingly endless sequence gave me inexplicable catharsis of being thrown into a middle of &#39;Infinity&#39; itself and those scenes have totally hypnotic qualities. It&#39;s not just that though. The film does have a plot, with interwining stories and overlapping times. A dream for a narratology junky like me.

It is hard to give rational analysis of why this film works other than the technical excellence. But I have one theory. Going back to the walking example, in this film we see actors walking down the road for literally 10 minutes to go from one place to another. Since we have the whole event instead of small snippets of an event, film watching becomes &#39;knowing&#39; from &#39;thinking&#39;. We know that A walked from a place to another, we know that something something happened, and so on. The film no longer is an act, but becomes something more real, hence the viewers are extremely drawn in.

Also, the actings are flawless, and every frame is beautiful to look at. Hypnotic atmospheric music is amazing. Even the cows, pigs, dogs, and horses act amazing. There really are scenes that just makes you say &#39;there is no way this scene had been scripted&#39;. Can&#39;t say enough about this film.

DVD Beaver review
imdb link
Amazon UK link


[quote user=&quot;Fuuma&quot;]

Hi Jun, welcome!. Great to have yet another film lover onboard!

I second the suggestion of Kiarostami, Ozu, Bresson and pretty much everyone else you mentionned. However, in a sense, those are pretty safe choices among the film loving set. They&#39;re great as recommendations and because these directors are genuinely good and involving (you might have noted that the majority of directors you mentionned are also on the list I made even though I only named 100 films) but I believe you understand a lot about a cinephile by hearing about the lesser-known/generally disliked or at least not highly considered movies they love. Or even about the masters/classics they dislike (I should post about why, while I rank most of Bresson&#39;s movies I&#39;ve seen from good to incredible, I&#39;m not too found of Au hazard Balthazar and it&#39;s christ-like donkey). You might have seen, for exemple, that I genuinely enjoyed the Belmondo vehicule &quot;Le magnifique&quot; (and countless others Belmondo movies for that matter) or British crime movie &quot;Get carter&quot;. Those are personal choices that I&#39;m not sure many cinephile share or recognize as favorites. So I&#39;m wondering what are your own cinematic &quot;quirks&quot;.
[/quote]

Hey, sorry about slow reply. I somehow never got back to this thread after my own posting :)

I&#39;d say most of my film preferences are SAFE among the film loving set. I tend to like (or at least respect) directors who are consistent with his/her own vision and style, and unique enough to look at a work and feel their signatures all over. As much as I love &#39;Au hasard Balthazar&#39;, most of the time I wouldn&#39;t be in the mood to watch such film. So I go by periods where I feel like watching a Kiarostami, and then a week goes by and feel like watching a Melvielle etc.

Well, maybe because I highly regard uniqueness so much that, I just can&#39;t seem to enjoy the masters who had the widest influence on mainstream cinema. I would say Hitchcock, Griffith, Welles, Ford, and Kurosawa are examples of this. They did make great films and I did enjoy them, but they&#39;ve been copied by so many other directors that I don&#39;t feel the magic I get with watching a Tarkovsky or a Bergman etc. I mean, Tarkovsky, Bergman, Godard, and Bresson were all influential in their own ways, but they all had their own language of cinema which couldn&#39;t easily be translated into wide audiences; therefore the influence goes like Bergman to Tarkovsky to Tarr etc rather than Hitchcock to Melvielle and the rest of the whodunnit crew.

Well, I am increasingly having aversion to most of the Hollywood stuff, and I just can&#39;t seem to enjoy films made to entertain. I get entertained by films that does not want to entertain :P

I&#39;ll give more thoughts and give you a better answer if I come up with one. I think my taste is rather too safe among those Tarkovsky/Ozu/Kiarostami/Godard loving film fans.

[Fuuma]

Re: Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second: The cinema thread

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><span style="font-size: 10pt; color: black">Detour/Ulmer/USA/19</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt">One of the biggest bang for the buck ever made, with a budget under 30k (if I remember correctly). Great, tightly paced noir with a memorable variation of the classic femme fatale who replaced her habitual sultriness with a harsh and fretful personality that is a pleasure to behold, from the viewer seat that is&hellip;</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt; color: black"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt; color: black"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt; color: black">Marie-Antoinette/Coppola/USA/2006
</span><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt">I saw this one yesterday; here are a few random thoughts:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 18pt; text-indent: -18pt; tab-stops: list 18.0pt"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Symbol"><span>&middot;<span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span dir="ltr"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt">More about themes than any sort of well constructed storyline, definitely a mood piece where the connection is/isn&rsquo;t made on an emotional level</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 18pt; text-indent: -18pt; tab-stops: list 18.0pt"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Symbol"><span>&middot;<span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span dir="ltr"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt">This is really Coppola&rsquo;s personal viewpoint; the movie is thankfully not about history. Americans tend to approach French history from a weird angle anyway + the past should be treated with the same range as the present, otherwise all you can get out of it are &ldquo;historical films&rdquo; which greatly limit creativity.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 18pt; text-indent: -18pt; tab-stops: list 18.0pt"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Symbol"><span>&middot;<span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span dir="ltr"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt">I liked the inclusion of modern songs on the soundtrack, combined with some of the very creative cinematography they turned parts of the film in very effective videoclips</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 18pt; text-indent: -18pt; tab-stops: list 18.0pt"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Symbol"><span>&middot;<span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span dir="ltr"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt">Successfully relayed the feeling of infantilism you get from a social class which, having stopped having any usefulness long ago, pass the time by endlessly complicating<span> </span>human interactions to an extreme level, making their make-believe world almost impenetrable to outsiders.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 18pt; text-indent: -18pt; tab-stops: list 18.0pt"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Symbol"><span>&middot;<span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span dir="ltr"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt">I saw the French dub version, a rarity for the film purist that I am. I must say American accents would have killed it for me so this was probably a benediction</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 18pt; text-indent: -18pt; tab-stops: list 18.0pt"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Symbol"><span>&middot;<span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span dir="ltr"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt">Lots of close-up, camera movements; a restless and youthful realization that fits the piece very well</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 18pt; text-indent: -18pt; tab-stops: list 18.0pt"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Symbol"><span>&middot;<span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span dir="ltr"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt">The fluff dosage was very high but palatable, contrary to let&rsquo;s say Baz Lhurmann baroque monstrosity (Moulin Rouge)</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 18pt; text-indent: -18pt; tab-stops: list 18.0pt"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Symbol"><span>&middot;<span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span dir="ltr"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt">While it wasn&rsquo;t boring (maybe a tad too long though, could have benefited from a more disciplined editing), it has about as much significance as &ldquo;Girls just wanna have fun&rdquo;, but, while you never think about it, you do bob your head to that song when it plays, do you?</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 18pt; text-indent: -18pt; tab-stops: list 18.0pt"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Symbol"><span>&middot;<span style="font: 7pt 'Times New Roman'"> </span></span></span><span dir="ltr"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt">If you want to see an infinitely better film about the French court of that time (well slightly earlier) just rent Ridicule by Leconte</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt; color: black"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt; color: black"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt; color: black">Love/Juice/Shindo/Japan/2000</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 10pt">Two girls are roommates, sleep in the same bed, work at the same place and go out to drug fuelled techno clubs together. One is a whimsical incarnation of feminity while her boyish friend is a more straightforward character whose unreciprocated feelings for girl A are slowly tearing apart. The movie is basically about their symbiotic relationship and the various feeling and tensions that lie underneath the carefree exterior. I like the grainier, naturalistic look of the film, miles away from the typical Japanese overproduced movies. I guess you could classify this as a gay and lesbian film, however this label tends to separate these from other love/relationship movies, a situation akin to how the ethnic character meet his love interest (of the same race, of course) as an afterthought in season 2 of a typical soap/drama.</span></p>