The cinema thread

[sam_tem]

speaking of van damme, anyone ever see that recent movie of his simply titled "JCVD"? sounded like it might actually be really cool.

robinson crusoe on mars
only interesting as an artifact more than anything else, but it was fun regardless. i enjoyed how faithful the story was to the book and that they just transplanted the storyline onto mars.

unmade beds
probably would have loved this movie coming out of high school, but being in my late twenties now makes it really hard to appreciate things that center on the life of hipsters. it's all in good form with some nice shots and thankfully avoids a lot of the trivial banter one would expect out of something like this, but in the end i wished i was watching morvern callar instead the whole time.

[widmerpool]

speaking of van damme, anyone ever see that recent movie of his simply titled "JCVD"? sounded like it might actually be really cool.

I did. I quite enjoyed it, but it is rather insubstantial and goes on a bit longer than it should.

[MoFiya]

Saw Arizona Dream by Kusturica yesterday.
I am not the biggest fan but some scenes were hilarious

[Faust]

/\ I am also not a big fan of Kusturica, but this was absolutely fantastic. And the epic Iggy Pop tuned credits...

[HreP]

I just watched Barry Lyndon. Now I understand why people have recommended me watching this one. This one and 2001... A frightening great couple. A Clockwork Orange is so utterly overrated compared to BL.

[laughed]

Juliano Mer Khamis killed.

http://tinyurl.com/3b5796p

[Rayuela]

Stuffy note.

[TheNotoriousT]

BOOM!

[K.T.]

http://www.hkiff.org.hk/eng/film/section.html?filter=36

Trying to catch up with Abbas Kiarostami retrospective as the Hk international film festival is near its end.

You can watch the entire film, The Wind Will Carry Us, on youtube; well, in 14 parts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy5ZeQtsJ5I&feature=related

[klangspiel]

http://www.hkiff.org.hk/

wow, that's a really good festival programme. lots of fantastic new films.
tarr (the turin horse!), haroun, puiu, wiseman, herzog, kapanoglu, popogrebsky, jia, fedorchenko, ruiz, de oliveira, fliegauf, benning, guzman, wenders, svankmajer, muntean ........ not to mention retrospectives on joyce wieland and shibuya minoru.
couldn't have programmed it better.
hong kong's got it pretty darn good

revisiting albert serra's honor de cavalleria right now




"Albert Serra's understated first feature, Honor de Cavallería loosely channels the melancholic wanderlust of such contemporary, dedramatized road films as Marc Recha's Days of August and Lisandro Alonso's Los Muertos to create an organic, rigorous, and often frustrating, but indelible and penetrating chronicle of the interiority and profound alienation of picaresque adventure. A de-romanticization of knighthood, chivalry, and heroic myth - and in particular, the ambiguity and delusive rationalization of the "noble quest" that propelled the Crusades - Serra's vision of the iconic Don Quixote de La Mancha (as personified by Lluís Carbo) eschews the abstraction of a loveable dreamer, eccentric protagonist, and tragic hero and hopeless romantic of the Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra novel for the corporeality (and terrestriality) of a Samuel Beckett-inspired, moribund, existential antihero, transforming the self-destructive co-dependency of Waiting for Godot's directionless traveling companions, Vladimir and Estragon, into a chronicle of the dislocated, atemporal journey of a fragmented, helpless, and willful aging horseman unaware of the absurdity of his situation and an obliging, devoted friend, Sancho Panza (Lluís Serrat) who enables his unattainable, pathetic delusion. Filmed using natural lighting in long takes, often in medium and long shot, the film is composed of decentralized, hyperrealist, quotidian sequences reminiscent of Ermanno Olmi's The Tree of Wooden Clogs that underscore the idle passage of time and the vacuity of their noble, but elusive gesture - resting in the shade, surveying the landscape, collective laurels for a wreath, clearing paths, bathing in a lake, and engaging in reinforcing (and regurgitative) hilltop pronouncements on the righteousness of their lonely crusade. So bracing in its vulnerability and dislocation, and achingly transitory in its tactile, crepuscular imagery, Honor de Cavallería subverts the evoked (and unrequited) ideals of the eponymous hero to create a somber, aimless, and provocative meditation on longing, spiritual desolation, impotence, and collective delusion."

[K.T.]

Thanks for introducing me to albert serra.

Yes indeed the festival has a fine selection, just that I have reached an age where I neither have the time nor energy to spend hours on ends at cinemas like when I was ten or twenty years ago watching the entire Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz.....

Never heard of Shibuya Minoru before, seen Modern People the other day.

What's more interesting are the Vietnamese films. Seen The Wild Field and was impressed by how lyrical it is. The programme notes said it was intended to be a propagnada film but it turned out to be nothing of this sort.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pneGnzq7ix0

[deius]

Solas (Alone) a Spanish film by Benito Zambrano ... http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/cinema/...es/solas.shtml
A very nice well made film, combination of social realism and conventional drama, alludes to bleak issues (sexual abuse, poverty, the solitude of the elderly) but also uplifting.

And in regards to earlier films: Un Prophet is what Gomorrah should have been, the latter seems so unconvincing even though it is based on journalism.

and also - corsair sanglot you don't rate eXistenZ? I read a critical essay on the link between William Gibson's cyberpunk novels and Cronenberg's Videodrome, somehow apart from the fact that Gibson name-drops Cronenberg in one of his later novels, it was a little disappointing.

[Faust]

Could somebody save my girlfriend some grief and recommend a few pictures from the Tribeca Film Festival? Nothing violent, please.

[TheNotoriousT]

CLASSIC!

[Faust]

I am not sure the tuck works here /\