saw a talkie at the picture show: new film thread

[fishjim]

Thanks, Greg, that's very informative!

Ditto!

[G.C.R]

I also rewatched A Matter of Life and Death recently. My god, what a strange and amazing film.It's as good as you could want its silly high concept to be: An RAF pilot is shot down and by all rights should be dead, but it was so foggy over England that the heavenly escort, a ridiculous French dandy, is 24 hours late to convey him to heaven! And in the meantime the pilot meets an American girl and they fall madly in love! So he sets out to make an appeal to the high court in heaven that he now has earthly responsibilities and should be allowed to live. It has serious arguments about love, patriotism, proof; it has speeding motorbikes; it has the most stunning depiction of heaven as a beautiful, highly efficient bureaucracy. It has David Niven in his late 30s/early 40s attempting to play 27. Its a really nice film. Powell/Pressburger movies tend to make me feel really good about films, and about people.

[peacocks]

gah I want to see that it sounds wonderful.

[jebreject]

3D is just a minorly interesting quirk in a good film, and a massively annoying distraction in a bad film to my mind. Unless that film is Piranha 3D, in which the 3D makes everything that was great and awful even more great and awful.

That new Harold and Kumar jawn justified 3D for me

[elpollodiablo]

I was really psyched to see Coriolanus today, but they unceremoniously pushed the release date back into January. Think I'll see that Cronenberg movie about Jung instead.

[mixed cats]

The five or ten minutes I saw of Ben Kingsley recalling old times looked a lot like a pop-up book. That's about allz I remember.

I think the movie is based on a heavily illustrated kids book.. My mom bought it for my cousin a few years ago. I don't really care about seeing the movie, but Bill's mom is convinced we need to buy a giant movie poster because of the name.

[Greg Nog]

Apparently, the guy who wrote the book is a friend-of-a-friend from way back, and saw me in a high school production of Midsummer Night's Dream that he said was the funniest he'd ever seen!  I was glowing when I heard this, just prior to seeing Hugo, but now I just keep grimly repeating, "I'm sure the book was better, I'm sure the book was better"

[auto-da-fey]

oh man there's a screening of Satantango here this weekend, I don't think I can go though because it starts at 2 and I work in the evening...

this happened to me earlier in the year, except it involved a reluctant trip to New Orleans. I would have much rather attended Satantango.

I did see The Turin Horse in the theater, on a wet windy day to boot, and it was quite an experience. I was worried that my ladyfriend would be alienated, but she loved it and is kind of obsessed with Bela Tarr now.

[auto-da-fey]

3D is just a minorly interesting quirk in a good film, and a massively annoying distraction in a bad film to my mind. Unless that film is Piranha 3D, in which the 3D makes everything that was great and awful even more great and awful.

That new Harold and Kumar jawn justified 3D for me

oh man, hell yes. that was one of my five favorite films of the year, and I saw more 2011 films IN 2011 than I typically do in a given year. the smoke! the penises! NPH! everything!

[fishjim]

Think I'll see that Cronenberg movie about Jung instead.

I so want to see this. It looks like a remake of Deadringers - except with Freud & Jung as the twisted twins!

[hannah]

hannah, I'm down with Méliès. It's just that I'd heard this film was quite nice and an especially good example of 3d, and since I hadn't watched any 3d films yet I wondered whether it was worth giving it a go.

I thought the 3D was pretty good in Hugo—though it was the first time I ever felt motion sickness—and I will give it this: for someone who has done a fair amount of reading about/viewing of/thinking about Méliès in an academic context, it was a treat to finally see clips from his films, with their original hand-coloration, on the big screen.

You do have to sit through two hours of every character crying at least twice to get there, though.

[fishjim]

Apparently, the guy who wrote the book is a friend-of-a-friend from way back, and saw me in a high school production of Midsummer Night's Dream that he said was the funniest he'd ever seen!

OMG. If you played Puck, I'm going to scream out of pure Nog fandom!

[Greg Nog]

No, it was Flute/Thisbe.  The friend with whom I saw Hugo (and from whom I found this out) was Bottom/Pyramus. 

Thinking about Hugo more, I think the closest writing I can compare it to is The Room, in that the characters' personalities, expressed through their dialogue, seemed to be very very clearly creations of a filmmaker dead-set on expressing a certain Important Message without any real care for whether they in any way seem like fully-formed humans.  It was almost Brechtian! 

In fact, if I hadn't known who directed the film, and someone had just told me "It's a famous director of grown-up films... and he made a kids' movie!" I probably would have guessed it was Verhoeven, doin' his playful-antagonism-toward-audience-desires thing.

Anyway, the whole thing made me wish Scorcese had simply eschewed the kids' plot entirely and made a straight-up biopic about Melies, since the flashback scenes were pretty strong, and the Melies footage was really the most fun part of the entire film to watch.

[auto-da-fey]

I generally like both A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis at the New York Times, but their top-ten lists for the year have a lot of what at least look like WTFs.

curious about these titles though, if anyone cares to comment:

Incendies
Le Quattro Volte
Warrior (they both included it; looks like a generic sportsflick to me, am I missing something?)
My Joy
Of Gods and Men
Poetry (I was nonplussed by the preview)
Seeking the Monkey King
Voluptuous Sleep
Aurora
Abracadabra

also I did see the Herzog death-penalty documentary and found it very subpar for him; not bad, but sorta TV-documentary-like.

and I have an aversion to the Miranda July movie that I just can't overcome no matter how many friends rep for it. and I say that having liked her first film. I'd totally watch Moneyball though.

[hannah]

I think I swore off reading top ten lists at some point (better for my blood pressure, etc.). Anyhow, I haven't seen of those titles, so I'm of no help. I do know I really wanted to see Aurora but it only played here for one day. And I had fun at Moneyball and am with you on the Herzog.

Edit: I have seen Seeking the Monkey King, and it is excellent. But Ken Jacobs can do no wrong in/to my eyes.

[auto-da-fey]

oh man, I met this guy at a party last weekend who saw Star-Spangled to Death at the Anthology Film Archives, and I was mad jealous (never having seen it). I hadn't even known of the new film's existence, so far as I can tell.

[auto-da-fey]

also I am somehow reminded that I never posted here about the film my lady and I made screening in a real theater as part of the Philadelphia Film Festival. that was bizarre, hilarious, and pretty awesome. but alas, I was overburdened this semester and never posted about it, and now it seems like too much effort.

but definitely up there among my cinematic highlights of 2011, even if our film itself was basically a piece of crap. 

[clare]

I'm planning on taking the boys to Puss in Boots this afternoon. Wish me luck. Not 3D though, I don't think E's up for that yet. It's his first movie at a cinema.

[G.C.R]

So is it almost time for us guyses to do our top ten of 2011 lists too? (Though happy to forgo if it will angry up Hannah's blood too much.) I have had a lovely year of watching films, though not a heap of new stuff.

[edison]

My top ten list will be awesome (and, unless something really mindblowing comes up, topped by Essential Killing). I don't think I want to do it before the end of the year, though, because there are about 4 or 5 movies I haven't had the time to check out that I'll probably watch after Christmas.

Reading your comments, I feel bad that I'm going to miss The Turin Horse, which is only playing until Tuesday and therefore not doable for me.

[edison]

Of Gods and Men

I have carefully avoided this - I'd say that there is 90% of chances that it's boring and ponderous and entirely uninteresting cinematographically (?) speaking. At least that's what all the critical discourse (good and bad alike) I've read on it suggests.

[Ignatius]

I can tell you that Incendies was garbage. It was like a joke about over-reliance on tropes from greek tragedy. Problem is, it's greek tragedy so the punchline is pretty well telegraphed and a bad-joke groan after 2+ hours doesn't cut the mustard. And it's just SOOOO god damn heavy. I can't recall if any of the individual performances were any good which probably means no they weren't.

Aurora had a cool poster, but I had to work the evening we showed it

[clare]

Watching Wake in Fright which I've never seen before (that I remember) It's quite something. Bloke is actually more wigged out by it than I am, which is a surprise. "yer mad, ya bastard".

[Ah_Pook]

i watched the new fright night. it was pretty awful, but at least david tenant was amusing.

[auto-da-fey]

went all the way to NYC to see Peter Watkins' La Commune (Paris, 1871) at the Anthology Film Archives yesterday. holy shit. upon reflection, I'm not sure I've ever seen a six-hour film in a theater before, but the physical endurance test perfectly supported the film's affect (the final hour, as the Versailles military force crushes the revolutionaries, is unrelenting and excruciating--and devastating), and it was just a staggering experience all around, a radical film that chafes against the very bourgeois constraints of the cinema's formal boundaries. I don't even like the idea of "masterpiece" as a concept, but if there are such things, this is one. my god.