they've shown this on both screens: your next movie thread

[hannah]

From what I could tell (e.g., when the laughter started), people were getting a chuckle from Eli's preaching. His style and content, you know, are certainly funny from an outsider's point of view, but I didn't think it was being played for a laugh -- I was watching it as terrible, as in "Ivan the," but the laughter undermined my viewing experience. Anyway, don't mean to make a big deal out of this. Cheers!

[auto-da-fey]

Many of the reasons I hate seeing movies in theaters involve people yanking me out of my semi-total-immersion with their obnoxious noise, so I sympathize. Of particular irritation to me is when idiots at old grindhouse and horror movies laugh just because shit is old. I mean, some of this stuff really is cheesy and campy, but much of it isn't, but half the crowd always seems to think Italian horror films are funny just because they're dubbed.

[auto-da-fey]

i watched godard's contempt. godard is now three for five in my book, with breathless, band of ousiders and alphaville winning hard, and masculin feminin and contempt being dumb and useless. pretty but a total waste of time

also saw black sunday (or the mask of satan) and i guess i don't really feel comfortable reviewing it based on the dubbed version, because a lot of the dubbing was distracting and bad, but i was disappointed

I think I like it more than you do, but I agree that Contempt is wildly overrated. I've never understood why, it doesn't seem particularly fresh to me.

And yeah, Bava's films were handled so poorly in the U.S., it's a shame.

[auto-da-fey]

While I'm at it, two more recently-seen films:

Who Can Kill a Child? is a 1978 Spanish horror movie that begins with a somewhat questionable eight-minute montage of graphic documentary footage showing children dying around the world, in the Holocaust, Pakistan, Vietnam, Nigeria, etc. It's strong stuff that will probably outrage or unsettle many, but it's actually put to use in a thoughtful film about children getting their revenge, killing all the adults on a secluded resort island. Only problem is, director Narciso Ibáñez Serrador seems a little intimidated by the weight of his thematic aspirations, to the point that subtlety gives way to a bit of dullness (though he does let some shock-value fly in the final minutes). It's a provocative, admirable film in many ways, but I guess it could have used more oomph.

Then Gaby wanted to see MASH, so we did. I really admire this film--such a pivotal reframing of the horrors of war, capturing the tone of Catch-22 far more effectively than the film of that book did the same year. Gaby was upset by the sexism of the characters, and while I agree that this is very problematic, it's also useful as a window into the shortcomings of the entire male-dominated countercultural framework, so I think it serves a contemporary purpose in reminding us of exactly what feminists were protesting and what progress--albeit so very incomplete--has indeed been made, since Gould and Sutherland's behavior would never be acceptable today (all of which being said, I do think Altman allows for multiple readings--I had forgotten just how traumatized Hot Lips is by her exposed shower; while the film frames it as a joke, Sally Kellerman shows real pain and anger, not letting it slide past unchallenged). Now I'm on the verge of launching into an Altman retrospective.

[YojimboMonkey]

Of particular irritation to me is when idiots at old grindhouse and horror movies laugh just because shit is old.

God forbid anyone enjoy themselves at a movie.  Or maybe you could make up pamphlets describing appropriate types of enjoyment and hand them out before the film starts.  Then you could go to the nearest sports bar and hang a "No high-fiving" sign up.

[auto-da-fey]

I know, I know, that was pretty cranky-sounding. I think Hannah made her point more tactfully and sensitively. On the one hand, yes, people should enjoy themselves at movies, and I wouldn't want to be the arbiter of how they go about that; hell, I'm sometimes guilty of romanticizing-from-a-distance the old silent era when the audience perceived filmgoing as a participatory event. On the other hand, I don't think I'm wrong being annoyed by people who think anything with low or obsolete production values is automatically funny. I'm not into controlling other people's behavior, so the proper response for me is probably to watch movies alone at home, which is how I prefer it anyway; that way everyone can have their good time. Only problem is, I can't resist going to see stuff on the big screen. As problems go, this is pretty bearable.

[coldforge]

But I mean, how should they experience it? If you go to see something that was shlocky and terrible-looking and cheaply and sloppily made even 35 years back, you gotta assume that most folks are not going to approach it in the spirit of earnest scholarship that you pull off. I mean, you know—this is not pearls before swine, exactly.

[auto-da-fey]

But that's what I'm saying--a Dario Argento movie is not schlocky, terrible-looking, cheap, or sloppy, but crowds still laugh, and I think what they're laughing at is the foreignness of it--they know they shouldn't laugh at the foreignness of, say, a Bergman or Eisenstein film, but because this doesn't have that veneer of canonicity, many people equate it straight-up with The Sinful Dwarf or Blood Feast, which are all of those things. I'm not saying they don't have the right to do so, but I am saying they are not even engaging with the films at a basic level of attentive, thoughtful viewing--you don't need to get all film-theory-driven to recognize that not every aesthetic that isn't the same as the latest Will Smith movie or imagined "arthouse" stuff is thus hilarious.

Again, I'm not denying the rights of people to experience film however the hell they want, I'm just defending the right of other viewers to be annoyed by them. If I were talking about There Will Be Blood, few would challenge this notion.

[elpollodiablo]

Whit, people in theaters laugh at modern horror films. Horror films are silly.

[Andrew_TSKS]

i wouldn't say that's even usually true, though it might seem so to someone who watched a lot of 80s freddy/jason style horror movies.

[elpollodiablo]

Whaddya mean?

[Andrew_TSKS]

i mean all those 80s "nightmare on elm street" horror movies are really pretty silly, but stuff like "deep red" is not silly at all. i wouldn't say "night of the living dead" is either. nor "texas chainsaw massacre", nor pretty much any david cronenberg movie. "last house on the left" has silly parts (the fact that "last house" is also a wes craven movie might have something to do with this), but they ruin the movie, and a cut of the movie with the silly parts completely removed would probably be one of the most horrifying things i'd ever seen.

by the way, i won't deny that a lot of those 50s era b-movie horror films from aip or whoever are pretty silly too.

[elpollodiablo]

Ah. I'm not really qualified to speak on the subject, anyway. I detest horror movies.

[auto-da-fey]

i mean all those 80s "nightmare on elm street" horror movies are really pretty silly, but stuff like "deep red" is not silly at all. i wouldn't say "night of the living dead" is either. nor "texas chainsaw massacre", nor pretty much any david cronenberg movie. "last house on the left" has silly parts (the fact that "last house" is also a wes craven movie might have something to do with this), but they ruin the movie, and a cut of the movie with the silly parts completely removed would probably be one of the most horrifying things i'd ever seen.

Yeah, I agree with this. Most post-Scream American horror films actively solicit laughter with their "ironic" dispositions, which is a pretty weak approach (I hate those silly parts in LHOtL). I suppose audiences do often laugh even at serious horror films like the ones mentioned there, but even then the laughter comes after a shock--they're laughing at their own responses. All of which is substantively distinct from laughing at a film that doesn't invite the laughter, but I guess the point has been belabored enough by now.

[Good Intentions]

On Christmas Day I prompted us to watch Peter Jackson's Braindead. I laughed, my mother squirmed at the it, and my brother stared at it in confusion. I think we got a good range of appropriate responses.

[Little Sixes Little Nines]

Oooh! My mum's in the credits for that and Meet the Feebles! Claim to fame

[G.C.R]

Whit that "Who can kill a child?" sounds really interesting to me. And I feel you on the inappropriate audience responses... though the one I immediately think of was kind of the opposite... there are a lot of funny and silly moments in "mysterious skin" and campbell and I were laughing at them, and the waves of disapproval from the rest of the audience! like, "THIS IS A FILM ABOUT PEDOPHILIA HOW DARE YOU LAUGH" Its not like we were laughing at inappropriate moments, geez.
Though going to kids movies is about the height of fun in audience reactions. The little kid when Anne and I went to Finding Nemo who screamed at the scary things and shrieked with laughter at the funny things just made it more enjoyable.

[guanajuato]

so this afternoon someone pulled up the rock that i had on my field and uprooted me and showed me that dario argento had in fact finished mother of tears, the third movie in the three mothers trilogy after susperia and inferno.
i totally forgot that he was making another movie.

anyway, it sounds crucial.
from salon

 After I left the depressed and/or laconic Texans, I flew straight to Rome, figuratively speaking, for Dario Argento's "The Mother of Tears." I don't have a taste for contemporary horror pictures -- I avoid the "Saws," the "Hostels," almost completely. I did see "House of Wax" (which I'm sure is relatively mild as these things go) and was dismayed at the protracted, sadistic quality of the violence.

Moviegoers and critics seem to be thinking, talking and writing more about movie violence these days: A.O. Scott addressed the subject in a recent Sunday New York Times piece, reflecting on the lasting influence of Arthur Penn's 1967 "Bonnie and Clyde." I don't see "Bonnie and Clyde" as a clear source of our current problem, and I hesitate to beat any drum about the prevalence of movie violence because I think the term itself is way too broad: When we talk about movie violence, do we mean the artful but brutal chase scenes and fight sequences in Paul Greengrass' "The Bourne Ultimatum"? Or the creepy killer in "House of Wax" who gives us a good three or four minutes (at least that's how long it seemed) to look forward to his lopping off a young woman's fingers with tinsnips?

It's the sadism of the latter that bothers me, and while I don't automatically read it as evidence of our "sick society," I can see it's not making our movies any better, either. And that's why I loved "The Mother of Tears." I haven't seen any recent Argento -- I've been warned that his newer movies don't have the nutball stylishness of earlier pictures like "The Bird With the Crystal Plumage" or "Four Flies on Gray Velvet" or, my favorite, "Suspiria."

But "The Mother of Tears" is so unapologetically loopy and lush and ridiculous that I found it irresistible. Now look, I'm not going to tell you that there isn't some sick stuff in this thing: When a trio of crazed demons began strangling a woman with her own entrails -- and this is within the first 10 minutes -- I began to think that a peaceful afternoon spent searching for that Clooney earlobe didn't sound like such a bad thing. But I sure as hell wasn't leaving that theater. In "The Mother of Tears" Argento revisits lots of favorite motifs, to use a noun that's perhaps more delicate than is warranted: There are the usual instances of knives being plunged into women's chests (I think I read somewhere that that's a kind of phallic symbolism. Y'think?), as well as an occurrence of what a friend and colleague calls "the old pike up the vag," a chestnut Argento has used so many times it's almost endearing.

I don't particularly like watching that stuff; I confess to being a proponent of the watch-through-the-fingers thing. But Argento's sick violence is of the old-school kind. It's swift and uncluttered; he gives you five seconds to anticipate it, another five to get it over with, and then he's on to the next thing. That next thing might involve an ingenious eyeball-stabbing device (and this is where I highly recommend the tried-and-true watch-through-the-fingers technique), but again -- 10 or 15 seconds, and it's over.

And then you're left to simply enjoy the squirrelly riches that Argento tucks so lovingly around the blood and gore, which is very obviously and exuberantly fake, anyway. In "The Mother of Tears" two Rome museum curators -- one of them, the heroine of this tale, is played by the wonderfully brash and sensuous actress Asia Argento, Dario's daughter -- receive a curious stone urn and can't resist opening it. Inside are three fat stone statues with ugly faces, a primitive jeweled dagger and a scrap of cloth that we learn is a ceremonial dress from pagan times. The thing looks like -- no, wait, I'm telling you, it is -- a cut-off sweatshirt decorated with mysterious runes written in glitter glue. It also happens to be a minidress: When the powerful witch Mater Lachrymarum slips it on, it barely covers her bum -- and what a bum it is!

But I'm getting ahead of myself. In "The Mother of Tears," the opening of that urn restores the powers of the beautiful and deadly Third Mother, one of three witches responsible for spreading pain, tears and darkness throughout the land. Now that Mama Lach is back in action, witches from around the world are headed to Rome for her big house party-slash-orgy -- dressed in black miniskirts and Patrick Nagel-style eye makeup, they descend upon the city like Beelzebub's "Girls Gone Wild." Violence erupts in the streets: Crazed, possessed maidens run around topless; priests who know a little bit too much about the occult face gruesome ends. "The Mother of Tears" is wild and untamed, a celebratory feat of gonzo artistry. Argento clearly didn't have a lot of money to spend on the picture, but it still has a sort of cheapie-luxe look: The women's clothes, for example, aren't expensive, but they nonetheless give you a pretty clear sense of what a Satan doll's idea of glamour would be.

"The Mother of Tears" is as sick as hell. But at least it's got class.

[lastclearchance]

Those who have seen There Will Be Blood: did the audience laugh when Plainview gets baptized and/or during the final minutes of the film?

yes and yes. i laughed along somewhat with the first but felt uncomfortable with the second, though there is a humor to it if you don't empathize with dano's character and don't at all see what's coming.

[edison]

Many of the reasons I hate seeing movies in theaters involve people yanking me out of my semi-total-immersion with their obnoxious noise, so I sympathize. Of particular irritation to me is when idiots at old grindhouse and horror movies laugh just because shit is old. I mean, some of this stuff really is cheesy and campy, but much of it isn't, but half the crowd always seems to think Italian horror films are funny just because they're dubbed.

Oh, damn, I feel you on this. I haven't suffered from this in a long time, though - in my experience mostly teenagers react like that.
I'm all for letting people enjoy stuff in whichever way they want, but seeing an old movie and laughing at anything out of the ordinary because hahaha, this is old, well, that's lame, period. (I'm all for quietness in the goddamn movie theater in general, too - hear that, obnoxious guy commenting out loud every two minutes to his friend during -California Dreamin'?)

Anyway, I've seen so many movies lately that I'm not going to comment about them at length, except to note that Sean Penn's Into The Wild (which the lady won tickets for, so, thank God, I didn't pay for it) was a near-total disaster and a waste of a potentially interesting story. A few good acting performances were the only redeeming aspect - otherwise, I'm not sure Sean Penn even has the slightest clue about directing. I haven't seen any of his other movies, so perhaps I could be proven wrong.

Also saw in theaters:
- Flaming Road, a slightly underwhelming Michael Curtiz/Joan Crawford flick
- O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias (The Year My Parents Went On Vacation), Cao Hamburger's surprisingly touching and well-executed (if very academic in many respects)account of childhood during the dictature in Sao Paulo
- La Chatte à Deux Têtes by Jacques Nolot - a day in a rundown Parisian straight porn movie theater frequented only by gay men and transgenders - excellent and very much recommended to everyone and Whit in particular
- XXY - pretty good
- The Band's Visit tame Israelian movie, despite showing promise in the first twenty minutes, and despite the involvement of Roni Elkabetz
- Un baiser s'il vous plaît
- California Dreamin' - movie of the (young) year so far by a young and unfortunately deceased Romanian director

+ on DVD Joaquim Pedro de Andrade's Macunaima and José Padilha's infamous Tropa De Elite (Elite Squad), which were both very convincing in their own ways. Oh, and Angels With Dirty Faces last night - didn't love that as much as I figured I would.

[hannah]

Though going to kids movies is about the height of fun in audience reactions. The little kid when Anne and I went to Finding Nemo who screamed at the scary things and shrieked with laughter at the funny things just made it more enjoyable.

Man, yeah, I saw City Lights on Christmas and this one kid in the theater laughed the funniest and loudest and best laugh the whole way through.

Also, edison, I agree with you re: Flamingo Road (and not sure of the dropped "o" was accidental, though it is appropriate) -- a movie I always forget that I've seen.

[hannah]

Doc Films is great this quarter, man: http://docfilms.uchicago.edu/calendar.shtml

[auto-da-fey]

- La Chatte à Deux Têtes by Jacques Nolot - a day in a rundown Parisian straight porn movie theater frequented only by gay men and transgenders - excellent and very much recommended to everyone and Whit in particular

This sounded familiar, and when I went to add it to my Netflix queue, I realized that's because it was already there, under its U.S. title of Porn Theatre. But it was at number 239, and now it's at 5, so I'll see it soon.

[auto-da-fey]

Doc Films is great this quarter, man: http://docfilms.uchicago.edu/calendar.shtml

Holy shit, the uncut Thundercrack! Crazy bisexual avant-garde porn from the 70s! I would love to see that. The Fuller movies are cool too--I was just getting excited about having my mother tape Park Row off TCM for me this month.

We get some cool Fuller at the Egyptian this month--Run of the Arrow and Merrill's Marauders--but the thing I'm probably most excited about is Otto Preminger's Hurry Sundown, a "rich Southern Gothic panorama, swarming with racists and crackpots."

[hannah]

I have to miss Park Row because I will be in Florida that weekend, but I will try to do right by you w/r/t the others.