24 frames per second: new movie thread

[auto-da-fey]

Votes for Men with Guns and Lone Star as 1 and 1a here.

I might agree with that. The whole run from City of hope (where's the damn DVD for that???) to Limbo is pretty impeccable, IMO. I was a stupid teenager when The Secret of Roan Inish came out and refused to see a children's/family movie in the theater, and I've regretted that ever since I finally did see it a few years later.

[auto-da-fey]

also I've been watching an absolute shitload of movies and should be posting the hell out of the not-on-DVD thread, but I've fallen behind and catching up just seems like an insurmountable task. Maybe I'll just wipe the slate clean and start over tomorrow, since I'm planning a Frank Perry double feature.

[auto-da-fey]

hell, maybe I'll watch another movie tonight: Alan Rudolph's Roadie, with Meat Loaf and Alice Cooper, is up next!

[Andrew_TSKS]

if you've gotta give up on catching up in order to make yourself start documenting again from now forward, then do it. sometimes i have the same problem with the various things i try to update and i always find that holding myself responsible for catching up just makes it take that much longer for me to actually get going on it again. that's not even worth it most of the time, you know?

[auto-da-fey]

yeah I mean, it's not like I have a sense of obligation to post about this shit, I just get excited and want to share, and then it's like, "well, I just saw James Caan's one directorial effort that came out in 1980 and disappeared but deserves better, but then maybe I should post about this crazy 1965 film noir shot in downtown Los Angeles" and then nothing gets posted at all. Which is no great loss to mankind or anything, but just kind of a minor bummer and a vicious cycle of disincentives.

[Andrew_TSKS]

tell yourself you're gonna do it super quick n' dirty, maybe a sentence about each one. you'll end up posting just as much as you would have otherwise. at least, that's how it always works for me.

[elpollodiablo]

Hey whit, my slasher film class started yesterday. We screened Black Christmas. I liked it!

[Wally]

And Wally, I have a massive, massive love for Sayles, I really look up to him as a writer of dialogue especially. The scenes in the bar in Limbo, with all the minor characters talking and the way their conversations flow into each other I thought was inspired. This is partly this thing again of feeling like I should like Limbo, I just have this irritation with it. Same thing with "Sunshine State". I have to see some more of his stuff, I havent done Return of the Secaucus Seven or Lone Star yet, but it s also making me think of the ones I want to see again, like Men With Guns and Roan Innish. earlier this year i re-watched my two favourite Sayles films, "Matewan" and "Brother from another planet" and I think they are both still amazing, some of my favourite films really. Which of his do you like best?
Cineaste magazine did some really good stuff on him recently, with a great interview, and discussions about his working methods with Chris Cooper and David Strathairn. The man usually has about six script drafts on the go at a time, and of course many get discarded, but fuck.   

I'd also plump for Matewan, although I'd put Eight men out and Casa de los Babys after that. Although there's so little to choose between everything post-Brother from another planet and pre-sunshine state, (and yeah, I know Casa comes after Sunshine, but it really shouldn't have.) that you could ask me tomorrow and my choices for Sayles 2nd and 3rd greatest film would be different. Matewan however would always come first, plugs into my fetish for tales about union struggles, along with what is possibly my favourite Chris Cooper role. I'm going to search the internet for those interviews and discussions, thanks for the heads up.   

[andronicus]

Matewan however would always come first, plugs into my fetish for tales about union struggles

[G.C.R]

Matewan is a film I watch and cant find any flaws with. Its a really fucking good film. I'd also really like to get a recording of that bluegrassy number that was written by Sayles and Mason Daring for the opening credits, I really like it. I think Brother from Another Planet has many flaws, but for some reason that holds a dearer place in my heart. I love the feel of it so much, and the things that Joe Morton does with just a look slay me over and over.
I'd forgotten eight men out, thats good too... anyone seen this newest one of his about the blues club or whatever its called?

[elpollodiablo]

Screened our first Argento today, Deep Red

That film is basically dog shit

[guanajuato]

you've got to start with suspiria.

[girl]

I've had Children of Paradise at home for almost two months, which is surely a Netflix record for me. Normally, I'm pretty quick to watch and return movies, but for some reason, I just never got to watching this one. I've had it on for about half an hour, and it's completely charming so far. I'm sure glad I didn't just return it without watching it.

[TeddyTreebark]

you've got to start with suspiria.

Still shit.  A slightly higher form of feces perhaps, like dolphin, or maybe the pure and noble gorilla, but shit none the less.

EDIT:  Dario Argento's greatest gift to the world was giving me his daughter to swoon over.  So indirectly, he gave me a boner quite possibly rivaling those boners that every other horror fan ever seems to get from his utterly terrible movies.

DOUBLE EDIT:  Dario Argento sucks.

TRIPLE EDIT:  Boner.

[jebreject]

I've had Children of Paradise at home for almost two months, which is surely a Netflix record for me. Normally, I'm pretty quick to watch and return movies, but for some reason, I just never got to watching this one. I've had it on for about half an hour, and it's completely charming so far. I'm sure glad I didn't just return it without watching it.

We've had American Gangster for like two months.

[alistarr*]

jay z has been slowly working on making me want to see that movie. his record is awesome.

[alistarr*]

i mean y'know, if you like jay z.

[elpollodiablo]

The record may be awesome, but the movie is pretty sub-par.

[alistarr*]

that's the kind of talk (with the words record and movie flipped) that stopped me picking up the record for so long!

[elpollodiablo]

Well, you know. YMMV. I'm not saying it's bad, just that it's not great.

[Andrew_TSKS]

Screened our first Argento today, Deep Red

That film is basically dog shit

seriously, if you didn't see the version that switches from dubbed english to subtitled italian, it's not going to have made any sense to you. the american version cut over 20 minutes from it, which were never dubbed into english. i saw the criterion version which restored these cuts, and i remember thinking about halfway through that without the parts that were subtitled in italian, it would have been an incomprehensible mess.

[Andrew_TSKS]

Last night I watched two movies, "Teeth" and "Blast Of Silence". I had begun thinking about "Teeth" after I got it, in a way that was really freaking me out--I just didn't know if I could handle the vagina dentata imagery. So I ended up having to make myself sit down and watch it anyway, since I was tired of having it sitting there on the table and making any and all excuses not to watch it. Lo and behold, it wasn't nearly as traumatizing as I expected, specifically because every guy who got the teeth was completely unsympathetic to me at the time it happened. Hell, I would say that every guy in the movie was completely unsympathetic except for the girl's father, and he was partially unsympathetic. But yeah, I ended up liking it a lot. Very original film, and a very good one.

"Blast Of Silence", though, was just on another level entirely. I mean, holy fucking shit, this movie is like the pinnacle of bleak, misanthropic noir. At least, it seems so to me at this moment--I haven't seen a lot of noir movies that are considered classics ("Detour" is next on my queue, for the record). The second-person narrative voiceover, the squalor some of the characters lived in, the horribly depressing personal interactions... it was all perfect. I loved this movie. This is the kind of movie that I feel compelled to purchase on DVD for my own collection, and I'm not a dude who does that sort of thing very often.

[elpollodiablo]

We watched the Criterion version. Ironically enough it failed every criteria by which I judge a movie's relative quality. Everything about it was terrible except the music and certain directorial flourishes. D---, would not watch again.

And while we're on the subject why in the fuck did it switch from subtitled Italian to English overdubbing? It made an already bad movie almost unbearable.

[Andrew_TSKS]

As I said, the Italian subtitle sections were never dubbed in English. If you think this means they should have subtitled the whole movie, well, I agree with you, but for whatever reason they didn't.

Anyway, if you saw that version and didn't like it, then I guess you just didn't like it, but I wanted to warn you on the off chance you saw one of the older crappier versions.

[elpollodiablo]

I mean I know there are some real Argento aficionados around and I was pretty excited cuz I've heard Blake talk about him so much, but man. Utter fucking crap, at least to me. Just everything about it was so hammy, cheesy, awful! The plot, the dialogue, the acting, the pacing, the visuals... How could a movie about murder and betrayal and insanity be so goddamned boring?