Multiple Cinegasms

[Wally]

I watched Old Joy the other day and it was a perfect thing. Just sweet and subtle enough to make my heart warm. It also made me quite sure that Will Oldham is a better actor than he is anything else. If people like films about small gestures, quiet friendship and compromising yourself to find a place in the world. Well this is a film you should watch.

[nonotyet]

NNY, be sure to report back on Once.  I've heard it's cute, but not from anyone I trust.

Yeah, I didn't see it. I have heard and read in the Onion that it it really good but I had neither the money nor the stamina to sit through something really cute and fuzzy and full of bunnies of love last night. So I watched I The Heart Of The Game for the second time instead. It is SUCH A GREAT MOVIE. Also I know more about basketball now than I did when I saw it in the theater so like, I knew what the coach meant when he said things like "when you guys fast break there's nothing they can do." Also there are so many extras on the DVD! I was happy.

[auto-da-fey]

I watched Old Joy the other day and it was a perfect thing. Just sweet and subtle enough to make my heart warm. It also made me quite sure that Will Oldham is a better actor than he is anything else. If people like films about small gestures, quiet friendship and compromising yourself to find a place in the world. Well this is a film you should watch.

I'm glad you liked this. I wish everyone would watch it.

Also, I'm strangely compelled to seek out this Heart of the Game movie--I have no idea why that screencap is captivating me, but it is. Maybe it's rewarming my 10th-grade JV benchwarmer aspirations.

[nonotyet]

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
It is PURE JOY, The Heart of the Game is. And basketball. And Ludacris narrates. So if you like those things.
And I don't want to spoil anything for you, but it follows a couple of girls on the team in particular and delves quite a bit deeper into their lives than just "and she was real good at dunking," and there are some pretty shocking/awful/adverse elements. Also this is total deja vu right now because I got into it briefly with Knuckles when I saw this in the theater last year and he was all "girls can't dunk" and I was all "fuck your shit." But in a loving way. I think.

nb: I don't think any of them actually dunk.

[dumbfish]

With McQueen, does it matter that he did the stunts himself?  Perhaps McQueen the dude was badass but McQueen the actor was not?  Inverse of John Wayne, maybe?

His role in The Great Escape wasn't much (ride motorcycle, toss baseball, repeat), but it's how I like to think of him.

[JamesSchneider]

I'm out visiting the mom in New Mexico with my sisters, and they all surprised me yesterday with early birthday presents because I won't be here in a month when it actually is my birthday. Anyway, the best of the best were the Criterion collection DVDs of Straw Dogs, Fishing with John, and Ikiru. Holy shit they're all great. Also, and I guess unrelated, they gave me the 14 disk David Sedaris box set. Fuck Yes.

[girl]

Nice birthday haul!

I'm trying to watch The Element of Crime, but I keep realizing that I'm not paying attention to it and I've had to re-start it twice.  Also, The Getaway is at the top of my Netflix queue, so I'll have it next week.  I'll keep you posted with any revisions in my Steve McQueen assessment.   :wink:

[JamesSchneider]

Has anyone else seen Fishing With John? I'd only seen the Tom Waits segment but holy shit. Willem Dafoe and John Lurie icefishing in Maine.

John: I'm so cold
Willem: Well if you're that col -
John: I don't want to hear this.
Willem: I'm just saying, we could zip our sleeping bags together.
John: I really don't want to hear this.
Willem: I'm sorry, I just get a little sweet at bedtime.

Oh man.

[Andrew_TSKS]

i saw a movie with willem dafoe in it today--"affliction". pretty fucking intense, and not at all what i expected, though realizing that paul schrader wrote and directed it put it in a bit more context once i saw how the whole thing played out. anyway, nick nolte is a cop in a tiny town. a killing happens, he's the only one who thinks it was a murder instead of an accident (and you wire fans, the guy who he thinks committed the murder is prezbelewski!), so he starts digging into things. powerful people in the community warn him off, which just makes him think he's onto something, but the problem is that he's got a lot of other crap going on in his life, and it's overloading his brain. james coburn is outstanding as his alcoholic, abusive father, and nolte does a good job on his own of showing how the alcoholic abusive behavior is coming to the fore in the son. that said, i thought this would be a movie of redemption--that nolte would solve the murder and grow as a person, start to heal or whatever. that would be the typical hollywood approach to something like this. but... i won't tell you any more, but FUCK NO that is not what happens. dafoe plays nolte's brother, who narrates from the position of an outside observer, but also has plenty of insight into the mind of both nolte and coburn, due to his also being part of their family. fucking intense movie, but very dark and grim, so don't go into it looking for uplift.

then i saw another dark, grim movie--"touch of evil". saw the recent re-cut dvd that attempts to restore the things orson welles wanted from the movie. apparently it was taken out of his hands and re-edited after he'd come up with a rough cut and was trying to do what was evidently too much innovation for a b picture, as far as his studio bosses were concerned. after the butchery of this movie, welles quit the hollywood business, at least as a director, and never made another movie. i can understand why he did, but that doesn't change the fact that, even with a bunch of obviously cheesy inserted scenes, "touch of evil" is an incredible movie. welles, janet leigh, and charlton heston all give great acting performances, welles in particular as a fat drunken middle-aged crooked cop with a bad leg who prefers to plant evidence rather than doing the necessary legwork to solve crimes legally. the whole thing takes place on the mexican/american border, and welles's character is set up in opposition to heston's honest cop--but heston is mexican, while welles is american, so they never both have jurisdiction at the same time. meanwhile, gangsters are menacing heston's new wife (leigh), who is tough and brassy but doesn't necessarily have the ability to stand up to a bunch of hot-rodding leather jacketed hoods. there's a plot, and it's mostly satisfactory, but i was much more into the incredibly dark noir atmosphere of the movie, and a lot of the isolated scenes as little mini-movies in themselves. welles may have had the movie taken from him, but a lot of really incredible long tracking shots were left in, and i'm not the kind of guy who even typically notices those sorts of things. but i couldn't miss them in this movie--the opening shot especially is breathtaking. any fans of 50s noir can't go wrong in checking this one out.

[girl]

You failed to mention Marlene Dietrich, ("Your future is all used up") but you're spot on about Touch of Evil.  I obsessively love Orson Welles, but the plot of this movie is definitely secondary to the atmosphere. 

[Andrew_TSKS]

oh man, and zsa zsa gabor too! she's in the movie for like 30 seconds, but i immediately said to brandon, "hey, is that zsa zsa?" he was like "yeah, i think so. weird."

i didn't pick up on the fact that marlene was marlene until the credits, but yeah, she was pretty great. lots of great people in that movie.

[auto-da-fey]

Affliction and Touch of Evil are both great, but I unearthed a real treasure today: Deadbeat at Dawn. I'd never heard of it, but some of the truly hardcore trash fans over at DVDManiacs compared it to Combat Shock, one of my favorite 1980s grindhouse flicks, and so I promptly investigated. The thing seriously blew my mind--it's an amazing piece of work, shot in Dayton, Ohio on 16mm in 1988 and featuring a bunch of nonprofessionals.

I rarely ask myself why I like what I like, but watching this, one thing became clear: I absolutely love the use of urban space in grade-z, no-budget films. Deadbeat captures the feel of 80s rust-belt urban decay with a vividness that I seriously can't imagine any Hollywood director even approaching--there's something about guerilla street-filmmaking that conveys a sense of place with such immediacy, all I can compare it to are the films of David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls, George Washington), even though this occupies another cinematic universe entirely.

The plot is sort of dreck--dude named Goose and his gang the Ravens fight rival gang the Spiders, etc.--but it really functions as a travelogue through the mean streets of Dayton. And they are fucking mean--shit looks like the Bronx circa 1984. I had no idea. Also, the filmmaker, Jim Van Bebber, is really creative and surprisingly talented for an out-of-nowhere hack, and his fight scenes are tightly choreographed and gory as fuck. Basically, this is probably one of my top ten or twenty sleaze classics of the 1980s, and I would pop it back on and watch it again right now if I had the time.

[dumbfish]

Oh man, Fishing with John changed my damn life.  It's a $1 rental at Visart here in CH, and probably cheap wherever the rest of you are, too.  The theme music is positively hypnotic.  Best episodes are ones in which the guest meets or exceeds John's own nuttiness.  Jarmusch, DeFoe, and Tom Waits eps particularly recommended.  Perfect high-guy TV viewing.

[Wally]

Affliction is indeed a grand old film, based on a book by Russell Banks, another film based on a book by the same man is the Sweet Hereafter which another grand film for similar reasons. Often suprises me that two film makers as different in tone and style as Egoyan and Schrader could adapt the same writer and come up with films that go so nicely together.

[auto-da-fey]

Anyone who still needs a reason to drop their jaw in horror at the actions of the Catholic Church would be well served by Deliver Us From Evil. It's not the greatest entry in the burgeoning molestation-documentary genre, or even the pedophile-priest subgenre (I'd take Kirby Dick's Twist of Faith), but its interview footage with rapist/molestor priest Oliver O'Grady is truly some of the most chilling material ever committed to film. He recalls his transgressions with such pleasure that he barely bothers to feign repentance; after serving a mere 7 years in a California prison despite untold numbers of victims, he's living free in Ireland now and even waiting for his priestly pension (!) to kick in. The film also carefully chronicles the sheer Machiavellian evil of Los Angeles' own Cardinal Roger Mahoney, who in addition to spending millions of dollars on a massive L.A. cathedral that took precedence over the needs of his parishioners, has repeatedly shielded pedophile priests and stonewalled investigations. It's a tightly constructed film that meticulously avoids climbing on the soapbox, letting the Church hang itself, but its major contribution to cinema is definitely the extensive O'Grady footage--I can't think of a comparable depiction of a human monster, off the top of my head.

[girl]

Yeah, I saw that and I agree with your assessment completely.  You get the impression that the priest genuinely believes he's done nothing wrong.  It's mindblowing. 

[joseph scott]

NNY, be sure to report back on Once.  I've heard it's cute, but not from anyone I trust.

Yeah, I didn't see it. I have heard and read in the Onion that it it really good but I had neither the money nor the stamina to sit through something really cute and fuzzy and full of bunnies of love last night.

I saw Once and it is my favorite movie of the year so far, hands down. (Granted, it doesn't have a lot to compete with yet...) It's really not "cute and fuzzy" at all. It's romantic in parts, the music can be a little sappy, but it's never overwrought and every emotion feels completely natural.

The only way I think you can hate this movie is if you simply hate the Frames, or music like what the Frames do.

I went on and on and on about how great this movie is here - scroll down a few days, you'll see it.

[das kranke Tier]

Saw The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai last night.

Fucking.Weird.

[Lindsay With An A]

I just watched Harold and Maude. It was the first non-French movie I've watched in I can't remember how long so it was a relaxing experience not having to read subtitles for a change. I liked the movie. I guess Wes Anderson did too.

[SPACERACE]

ok, so i just recieved a DVD in the mail by a young-ish pastor named Joel Osteen, called "Be A Good Example." i haven't watched it yet. i'm afraid to do so.

[DanielBurns11]

ok, so i just recieved a DVD in the mail by a young-ish pastor named Joel Osteen, called "Be A Good Example." i haven't watched it yet. i'm afraid to do so.

I've seen that guy on TV, he's fucking hysterical. Watch it now!

[SPACERACE]

apparently the largest ministry in the nation.

[Ah_Pook]

Affliction and Touch of Evil are both great, but I unearthed a real treasure today: Deadbeat at Dawn. I'd never heard of it, but some of the truly hardcore trash fans over at DVDManiacs compared it to Combat Shock, one of my favorite 1980s grindhouse flicks, and so I promptly investigated. The thing seriously blew my mind--it's an amazing piece of work, shot in Dayton, Ohio on 16mm in 1988 and featuring a bunch of nonprofessionals.

I rarely ask myself why I like what I like, but watching this, one thing became clear: I absolutely love the use of urban space in grade-z, no-budget films. Deadbeat captures the feel of 80s rust-belt urban decay with a vividness that I seriously can't imagine any Hollywood director even approaching--there's something about guerilla street-filmmaking that conveys a sense of place with such immediacy, all I can compare it to are the films of David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls, George Washington), even though this occupies another cinematic universe entirely.

The plot is sort of dreck--dude named Goose and his gang the Ravens fight rival gang the Spiders, etc.--but it really functions as a travelogue through the mean streets of Dayton. And they are fucking mean--shit looks like the Bronx circa 1984. I had no idea. Also, the filmmaker, Jim Van Bebber, is really creative and surprisingly talented for an out-of-nowhere hack, and his fight scenes are tightly choreographed and gory as fuck. Basically, this is probably one of my top ten or twenty sleaze classics of the 1980s, and I would pop it back on and watch it again right now if I had the time.

oh cool, i downloaded this the other day but havent watched it yet

[trailofmusic]

His church is the same building as what used to be the Summit, when the Houston Rockets didn't suck a fucking cock.  He's actually not that bad sometimes, even though I'm not a whatever, and so on, the end.

[girl]

I finally had a chance to watch Ball of Fire with Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper.  She's great in this.  It's easy to forget what a good comic actress she was, since she seems to be better remembered for her dramas.  The plot is silly--there's a group of scholars writing a comprehensive encyclopedia.  Gary Cooper is the English expert, but he's having trouble with the section on slang, so he invites Barbara Stanwyck, who is a night club singer, to teach him modern slang.  But it's really charming in the way 40s comedies are.