I was getting tired of the old thread never going to the right page, so here's a new one.
Wind River: a pretty good film which touches on the conditions Native Americans live in and the big problems they face. The problem is the main characters are both white outsiders, Jeremey Renner is the tracker/hunter they call in whenever something needs doing, and so it does give us a bit of a white saviour narrative. So with the local sheriff they investigate the death, not quite a murder, of a young woman and it turns out this is part of a pattern...
Worth a watch, but I think Frozen River was better. Also most of the people mumble, it isn't always easy to hear what they say.
Detroit : it wasn't a bad film but I didn't enjoy it. The parts where the characters are held prisoner by the cops are tense and painful, but the intro to the film gives us a fairly standard police narrative, so although the violence and torture is still shocking you still get the impression that they brought it on themselves.
Almost Holy
https://youtu.be/t-uBjW9hhxc
Taxi Tehran
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b073bp67
The Villainess
https://youtu.be/-xm2CcFlJtw
https://youtu.be/Ts3JbwFl0HQ
Chemsex
https://www.theguardian.com/film/video/2015/dec/04/chemsex-video-review
ministry of fear
https://www.criterion.com/films/28065-ministry-of-fear
pretty good entry in a genre i like. there are absurd elements which make it more interesting than it would otherwise be, and it was interesting to me to see a scene in the tubes on account of an air raid.
John Wick 2. Not as good as the first one, but I nevertheless thoroughly enjoyed it. The John Wick movies are to the early 21st century what the Die Hard movies was to the 90s. Great action films.
A Dark Song. Horror movie in which the entire story is about two people casting a spell/doing a ritual. Never seen a horror movie like that ever. Quite original and enjoyable. A bit low budget, but that didn't get in the way of the story telling. Both creepy and contemplative.
The Handmaiden. It's ok.
Dispossession - the Great Social Housing Swindle. Well made documentary about social housing and in particular the current "regeneration" of many estates. Very interesting, simultaneously depressing and hopeful. Hopeful because it clearly sets out the problems, depressing because it's just so wrong.
Band Aid - I thought this was going to be fun, a couple form a band so instead of arguing all the time they can sing their disagreements. The songs aren't quite as clear as they should be and the story does take a bit of a dark turn. On the whole it isn't bad but isn't as light-hearted as I expected. If you like Adam Pally from Happy Endings or Zoe lister-jones from life in pieces hen you'll probably like it.
Godzilla Monster Planet (anime). Really really good.
Beatriz at dinner - not very exciting. We are supposed to see Beatriz as challening these rich shitheads but as she is sponging off them with reiki it is hard to see her as the proltetarian the film tries to set her as. The film succesfully hows that while you may get paid nfor massages and given hugs you aren't actually a friend.It completely fails to explore whether Beateiz's "love" for the family is anything other than financial necessity. This is not anti-trump satire, it is a few mild moments of discomfort with no resilution.
Hunt for the Wilderpeople, really enjoyed it. Had an actress in out of Eagle vs Shark too, another great film. 5*.
The Room - I am speechless. But I have a twisted thought that it was simply a genius subversion. The more people you watch it with, the better:)
Disaster Artist - I would say that it was a rather useless movie.
Bushwick - I liked the idea and the effort the filmmakers put into it.
Good Times - Rather unconventional, but in a good way. liked the acting a lot.
Gerald's Game - I read the book, so I was sceptical but it was done very well. I liked the ending in the book a little bit more, though.
Jigsaw - Waste of time.
Better Watch Out - Good acting.
The Distinguished Citizen - Simply excellent!
Justice League - Bad.
Sense8 (season 2) - I don't know the intentions of Wachowski, but to me, this was totally for the activists. In a good way. It is not class-oriented, rather lib-dem, but I think it is not so hard to ignore this and really enjoy the series. To me this is the best political-fiction TV series ever made. Hard to imagine what could top this in the future.
Menace II Society. Bit violent, not really for the faint of heart.
I, Tonya, loved it.
The Shape of Water, it was ok.
I wanted to improve my german and saw a ton of german-language movies a while back. Found some nice movies in the process (although nothing recent), if you don't mind subtitles. The Edukators - has some anticapitalist themes; the characters go around vandalizing rich people's homes. Lola rennt - supposed to be a philosophical movie, pretty interesting and has a nice soundtrack. Das Experiment - plot's a bit twisted; there's an english verison but the german seems better. Victoria - done in english and german and filmed in one take, good movie. Goodbye Lenin.
zugzwang
I saw both of these with English subtitles not long after they came out and thought that they were both good movies.
The Death of Stalin - great comedy movie!
Sike
Yeah I enjoyed those. (And I think it helps with learning a language to immerse yourself in the movies, music and so on, from there.) I'm always more impressed with foreign films than american ones. I guess the cultural and language differences enhance them in a way. Don't know how well I'd receive them if I lived there though. I thought some of Haneke's stuff was good too, Cache and Amour, but those are in french I think.
(Surprised there's two reviews of Edukators on libcom. http://libcom.org/news/article.php/edukators-anarchist-film-review-23122005 http://libcom.org/library/edukators-dir-hans-weingartner-germany-2005-film-review-%E2%80%93-tom-jennings. It would be neat to have a regular film review/recommendation section on here. I guess these movie threads are kind of like that.)
zugzwang
I recommend The Lives of Others and Barbara, if you haven't already seen them. I have a mild obsession with Communist East Germany.
Lady Bird - destined to be a massive classic I think. Beautifully done.
cactus9
Heard of the first one but never got around to seeing it. Its cover art kind of reminds me of that movie One Hour Photo, which was okay if I recall correctly. Just reading its imdb they sound similar too, being about protagonists who become absorbed in other people's lives.
Previously this Sally Potter comedy film;
https://www.timeout.com/london/film/the-party-2017 and last this Yorkshire farm set drama
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/feb/25/dark-river-review-ruth-wilson-clio-barnard
both recommended.
What happened to Monday. I don't think that the 7 characters were really developed and it was a bit silly having Noomi Rapace talking to herself most of the time. The idea was good but maybe they needed more time than a film allowed. bit too much time on fight scenes that didn't always work, they quite often managed to be very violent but without giving you a real sense of actual fighting. And it did seem like they wanted you to see the female character/s getting hit a lot. I wouldn't recommend someone not to see it, but I think it was more of a wasted opportunity.
Killing Gunther - thought it would be shit in a fun way, but it was just shit. They didn't quite get the fun sense of this kind of film or have any push towards gravity. Watch something like The One with Jet Li or Smokin' Aces instead.
Never mind.
zugzwang
Yeah, I also tend to be more often impressed with foreign films than american films. I think the cultural and language differences may be a significant part of it but I also find that foreign films are more often more daring and seem more willing to enter into social terrain that US films are more generally unwilling to explore.
MT
I'd agree it contained some great comedy, but did anyone else feel unease watching a film for laughs about such horrific events?
Serge Forward
Yep. Presumably its the point of the film somehow but that doesn't help. The particular type of comedy and the famous American actors made it worse than it it had been done by the people affected more directly.
My ex-wife, whose dad was in Buchenwald and grandfather died at Sobibor told me she was going to watch it and asked me if it was any good. I told her she probably wouldn't like it, in spite of its comedic value. She decided to give it a miss.
I think that the film was not only a good comedy but had educating effect. The absurdity of it all makes people check the facts about the era. Not many films bring such outcome. So I think the authors did a good job although not in a direct way directly (hard to say if it was intentional or accidental).
Sike
I don't watch enough movies to know, but I guess it's different with lower-budget films, with indie filmmakers etc. I just meant for me wathching a foreign film with subtitles, some of the cultural stuff may go over my head, references and so on, and I might be more impressed with it than I should be.
Death of Stalin was okay. I don't think the actors/actresses were Russian though... It all felt a bit too Englishy in humor and everything. (Seems like some characters were doing an English-Russian accent thing, while everyone else spoke perfect English. Bit weird.) I guess the filmmakers weren't going for authenticity in that regard, among others. I still liked the cast -- not a movie buff, but it's not often I see mostly older cast members with leading roles, somewhat refreshing. Didn't realize until I looked it up that Palin was in it.
Has anyone actually seen Black Panther?And what did you think if so? I tend to watch about 1 film every two years, so haven't seen Death of Stalin, but have read a really negative review that quite made me want to see it.
R Totale
Much like yourself I rarely go to the theater to see any movies and haven't seen Black Panther so I really can't tell you my opinion of it but I did come across several reviews by the leftish reviewers that are seriously critical of it.
Some Scathing Critiques of Marvel Studio’s ‘Black Panther’
You Were Never Really Here. Bit brutal for me but the end is good.
Just seen 'Sweet Country' set in Australia's North west territory around the 1920's Better than average for covering this bit of grim history. Critically reviewed here:
https://hookedonfilmwa.wordpress.com/2018/01/28/movie-review-sweet-country/
The Lady Vanishes. Great Hitchcock, really enjoyed.
120 BPM, film about the AIDS activist group Act Up-Paris in the 90s. It's great, see it if you can.
Game Over, Man; a Netflix movie done by the Workaholics peeps. It was trying to be a Die Hard comedy. A so-so movie, but stupid enough to be entertaining.
Any movie suggestions? I half-watched a Louis Theroux doc on eating disorders. Not a particularly big fan of him. Some of his docs are entertaining/informative. His scientology doc was okay.
i just watched Cronocrímenes ("time crimes" in english).
it's a movie about someone who accidentally travels back in time and, in trying to make sure the past version of himself will travel back in time just as he did, he comes into conflict with different versions of himself, as well as everyone else in the movie.
it's not only a good depiction of alienation, but also of impersonal domination - he can not help but be drawn into a conflict where there is no real enemy but his own temporally shifted activities. he is both the recipient of domination and the one who creates this domination.
zugzwang
His Weird Weekend docs were all great. The far right and the porn episodes were real interesting.
Apocalypse Now, like Pulp Fiction popular consciousness had spoiled a couple of things for me. But interestingly the context in the film was very different from the references. Like the `love the smell of napalm in the morning` bit. Usually its quoted in a punchy jingoistic way but in the film it came across as daft and impotent.
Really enjoyed the cinematography and the Odyssey to madness and decay theme too.
zugzwang
You want movie or documentary suggestions?
Anyhoo, recently I just watched Blade Runner 2049 and Avengers: Infinity War. Both movies were entertaining, but before I make up my mind about them I have to watch them again. I wanted to really love Blade Runner, but on the first viewing it left me wanting. Not sure exactly what I think it's missing, but it just didn't carry the same punch as the original; I felt much less for the characters.
Infinity War was decent. I am a fan of the MCU, but recently a fatigue has set in. The last few of their movies have just been so so.
I've also watched a ton of war documentaries. Last one I watched, on Netxflix, was The Battle of Chosin in the Korean War. Pretty bleak shit and reveals just how callous both McArthur and Mao were with human lives. On top of that, a lot of war docs on ISIS, the Kurds, and Afghanistan.
Khawaga
Either I guess, just trying to revive the thread really. Theroux's scientology doc was actually "My Scientology Movie". It's sort of hard stuffing your face with food while learning about eating disorders, unless you want to feel like shit.
Noah Fence
I think I saw most of those, at least the more interesting ones. Not so sure about his personal views. He did a doc on crime in Wisconsin recently that felt like he was trying to portray police in a positive light, didn't really care for it. This is fun though:
[youtube]sSLQbafBipw[/youtube]
Well, he’s just a typical liberal, eh? What’s good about him is his technique for drawing things out of those he’s interviewing, it’s really insidious. He gives the impression of being non invasive whilst in reality he’s going straight for the jugular.
Tully. Very good.
Noah Fence
He didn't do that so well with Savile. Didn't he like become close friends with him after that one doc? I think he later admitted that was a mistake.
True shit. That whole show was just plain creepy.
Talking of creepy, the show where Christine Hamilton had the hots for him scored high on the creepometer, and not just because of her flirting - her husband, the very peculiar Neil Hamilton’s general demeanour had me pulling my sweater up over my head! Ugh.
Khawaga
I've recently watched Captain America: Civil War for the very first time, and I found it to be at times tedious. The way the filmmakers handle action sequences is probably the most disappointing aspect of the film. Their basically following the playbook used in the Bourne films, in which the action is implied, rather than shown. But they go one step further (or backwards?) in that they don't even try to give these scenes a rhythmic quality, so that the end result is that these scenes feel quite monotonous. And these scenes require quite a bit effort on the part of viewers to follow the action and understand what's going on, and that's never really a good thing.
And aside from the action, the film itself is kinda bloated. I mean, did we really need to see five minutes or so of Tony Stark recruiting Peter Parker (aka Spider-Man). That part was not essential to the overall narrative. There's quite a lot that could have been removed or stripped down to make it a more thorough Captain America story than it already is. It's intended to be a Captain America film, and it is, but it seems the filmmakers couldn't help themselves from indulging in fan service, or finding smarter ways to fulfill their obligation to the larger shared universe.
Nebraska A strange film about a dysfunctional family in the American Midwest (I think, its Montana and Hawthorne, I don't really understand American regionalism). The father believes his won a sweepstakes but needs to get to Lincoln Nebraska to claim his winnings so he has to rely on one of his sons to drive him there.
Its a bit like a road trip movie only through the bleak and declining rural towns of the area. Its a sort of very black comedy, the family appear not to like each other at all but as the film goes on its reveal they all have an inner core of caring its just thanks to trauma's and upbringings they all have very severe trouble connecting with people.
I found the film to be less laugh out loud funny and more "huh, tat's sorta funny" but there was one part involving a compressor where the comic timing was so great that I had to pause it while I finished laughing.
I saw The Virgin Spring (1960) at a museum screening in a new print. It was the last of Ingmar Bergman's Medieval period movies and in some ways the best, and the first time that Sven Nyquist was the principal cinematographer on a Bergman film.
The story is based on a 14th century folktale and it's played out against a palpably authentic recreation of Medieval daily life. When a creative presence like Bergman is behind the camera an 88 minute black and white 1:33 aspect ratio movie devoid of special effects looks better than 99% of the current Hollywood product.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Its an incredibly stupid film, I saw one reviewer call it an 80s cartoon plot done in a live action bleak and occasionally vicious way. Can't say they're wrong but I enjoyed watching it, I probably will watch it again when it gets to the telly on slow weekends.
A Ciambra. Really enjoyed it.
Kong: Skull Island. Didn't think this movie would be as good as it was; really enjoyable action adventure and sort of a monster version of the Vietnam war movies of the 80s and 90s.
Agent
I liked Civil War, but I don't think it's as great as it's been made out to be. And I'd say that some of the reason why I didn't like it as much has to do with some of the points you raise. A good counter to Civil War in that respect is actually the previous Captain America movie The Winter Soldier. Action is shown and while there are a lot of characters, the movie doesn't feel bloated and I experienced it more self-contained than a vehicle to market other movies. Part of the reason for e.g. the introduction of Spider-Man had everything to do with marketing Homecoming and that Marvel had just gotten a deal with Fox to use the character; he was never supposed to even be in the movie. Ditto with Black Panther, although his introduction was less hamfisted. So yeah, the directors are less free to tell the story these days; the Russo brothers are usually great at ensemble casts, but are getting less so the more Marvel intervenes. See for example the difference between the first and second Avengers movies by Joss Whedon. The first was great in both storytelling and handling the characters, the other was just a mess in both aspects.
Without a trace. Very very good.
Naked (english film), seemed like a lot of misogynistic gibberish as far as the characters went. If there was some deeper meaning it went over my head; probably missed tons of references and other things. I guess you could feel somewhat sorry for the Johnny character (most of the characters you could feel sorry for actually). Pretty sad film.
I just found this list so I might watch some of this stuff (could probably use updating though).
https://libcom.org/library/working-class-cinema-video-guide
The Hateful Eight, its pretty underwhelming, technically speaking its very well done the sets look authentic and the actors throw themselves into their caricatures, its just effort spent for nothing really.
All the characters are unlikeable and the violence is cartoonish in a way that kills the tension. It also has Samuel L Jacksons character sexually assaulting a naked man at gun point while laughing like a loon. And this is revealed by him gloating about it to the man's grieving father.
But both him and his son were racist confederates who murdered black union soldiers in the Civil war, so I guess its supposed to make the whole thing cathartic?
Honestly it just meant I didn't like any of them. It also ends on a very ugly note.
The only highlight for me was that the old confederate general was the old dad in Nebraska and seemed to be playing the same character only this time he's slightly more lucid and openly racist.
Edit: Like from the name I guess its intentional for them all to be hateful and I guess we're supposed to hate them, but honestly it was just a group of very unlikeable people milling about in a tavern during a snow storm and then they beat and graphically killed each other. So I just wasn't really bothered.
First Reformed. Absolutely fucking brilliant, see it.
zugzwang
I really liked Naked but I haven't seen it for about 20 years. I think the misogyny is supposed to be ironic or something. It's definitely a very sad film, probably sadder than I realised at the time.
The Florida Project. It's set in a motel where most of the people there are long-term residents, they're poor and unable to find stable housing. The main characters are a six year old girl, her 20-something mother, and the manager of the motel. It's a slow movie with only a thin plot, but it kept me very engaged, and the ending is emotionally wrenching. Recommended.
Justice League continues the DCEU's streak of very bad or mediocre films - with the sole exception of Wonder Woman - following Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, and Suicide Squad. They are obviously far from doing as good as job as the MCU. The story in this one is trivial, and some of the scenes had video game aesthetics.
Blade Runner 2049 is a good movie, but not as good as the first. The first film was a lot simpler, immersive from beginning to end, whereas this second film has more twists and turns to the plot. There are scenes that provide atmosphere and showcases the production design and cinematography, but the two films kinda diverges in their cinematic aim.
Any US posters seen "Sorry to bother you" yet, the film done by Boots Riley from The Coup?
Action flick Foreigner with Jackie Chan vs the IRA. Cried a bit.
Who is America?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vqH2gRys5QQ
Uncreative
Will have to check it out. I like some of Riley's musical work with The Coup; their Kill My Landlord (done around the time of the LA Riots) has a lot of anti-capitalist lyrics as well as a track with a Trump reference/diss, which is funny considering it was done in '93 (not that Trump wasn't deserving of a diss or whatever back then). Not sure how exactly Riley identifies politically. I try not getting so caught up with that stuff when it comes to music or films; I just like the depictions of working class struggle, anti-capitalist themes etc. Just did a quick search for his thoughts of Sanders and it looks sort of promising though:
I might see Spike Lee's new movie, Blackkklansman, which is supposed to be about an African-American police officer who infiltrates the KKK.
zugzwang
Yeah, saw that quote recently, not bad. He was in the Progressive Labour Party when he was younger, ended up attending Central Committee meetings i think, but he left. Says hes still a communist though, and was involved in Occupy Oakland and other stuff. Theres some details in this interview. Konsequent met him after a gig a while ago, hes a nice bloke.
zugzwang
Since Occupy, I've seen him in multiple interviews identify with anarcho-socialism and anarcho-syndicalism. I think it was around Occupy that he was looking into other ideas. And he even made a FB post to his "anarchist friends" on the topic of direct democracy and Libya (?), and that was discussed on this thread.
Recently watched 'The Happy Prince' a biopic of Oscar Wilde with Rupert Everett reviewed here:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jun/10/rupert-everett-oscar-wilde-film-the-happy-prince
provides much material for a discussion of homophobia and homosexual practice in relation to both the upper classes and the workers in times past.
I've seen Sorry To Bother You and it's really good. No spoilers, it's message heavy, pulls no punches about its anti-capitalist message without being preachy and is very entertaining and funny at the same time.
I saw Blade Runner 2049 not so long ago and was completely underwhelmed I remember thinking it was finally becoming more interesting it was the end of the movie and maybe I was expecting to much from the movie compared to the original(director cut) who I would rate among my favorite top 3 movies with Taxi driver and Chinatown. While it great cinematography It did not really have the same great atmosphere as the first one and did not feel as real city unlike the first, although the soup at begin was a nice callback to the original of blade runner (1982) script that was supposed to be the opening scene of that movie.
Khawaga
You must be a Godzilla fan like myself. Unfortunately, I have to disagree. I turned it off with about thirty something minutes remaining. There was way too much talking and exposition, and a story that just wasn't compelling enough. The animation did look nice though. I was actually reminded of this after watching the trailer for the new american Godzilla movie coming next year. I'm looking forward for that one.
Method of Freedom
You mean the directors' cut from the early 1990s, or the 2007 Final Cut version?
The final cut, so used when a movie comes out later in a new cut its usually called a directors cut so I thought it was called that have not traced down other cuts of the movie although saw a clip online from the original ending with unused material from the shining (which might be my favorite Kubrick movie) with the voice over from Ford which I felt did not have any character but usually like voice over in old film-noir movies.
Fleuve Noir : Thriller with Vincent Cassel aas the damaged, alcoholic cop searching for a missing boy while his own son is mixed up in drugs. Romain Duris is the creepy neighbourwho has an interest in the missing boy. It is a pretty clichéd film there were moments where I was literally cringing. There were a few bits where conventions was subverted a little. In general, it was quite a good film and the two leads were excellent, but the film didn't really say too much and the main character Visconti was rather dull, albeit played very well by Cassel.
Fleur
yeah just to echo this, this film is amazing. Everyone should go see it.
I'm quite excited it's his first movie as well, as it should mean there are lots more in future!
Don't want to give away anything about the plot, because I think it's more enjoyable if you don't really know what it's about. But it's fucking spot on
Does anyone know if it's had a proper UK release yet? I've heard really good things about it, but it doesn't seem to be showing anywhere. Anyone know what's up with that?
Platoon, surprised how little of this film was spoiled for me by pop culture. Probably my favourite Oliver Stone movie, it was very strong in its emotions, especially that village scene. Refreshing to see a Vietnam war film that actually does take an anti war stance rather than shrug its shoulders and leave it up to the audience to pick a theme out of it.
R Totale
apparently not. Despite it being very successful in the US (a critical success and it's taken at least $15 million at the box office despite a budget of just $3 million), apparently film distributors see it as a "black movie", and think that international audiences don't watch "black movies". Which is completely ridiculous for a number of reasons. Especially post-Black Panther and Get Out
Steven.
Yeah, its pretty bizarre that distributors do that...
I emailed a cinema (little local one) about it a day or two ago, and they said they were talking to a bunch of distributors about getting it because they've had a fair bit of interest, so fingers crossed.
Wow, that sucks, and is indeed pretty weird when compared to some of the obscure films that do get shown in cinemas over here.
Looking at IMDB page it looks like sorry to bother you is only being shown in usa and canda https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5688932/releaseinfo
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bg2k06
About British Pakistani and Ugandan men
The Castle of Cagliostro, very enjoyable cat burglary film with really sharp animation for 70s anime. Also had some political intrigue and a plot that was surprising without being convoluted.
A Fistful of Dollars. The image quality isn't very good and I wasn't particurarily interested in the characters. Though I might be saying that just because I saw Yojimbo (which has the same plot) before I saw this one.
Yojimbo has, in my opinion, a better lead actor, better side characters, a better image quality, a better soundtrack, a better direction, a better cinematography and it's funnier.
Horus, Prince of the Sun, a Japanese animated film from 1968, another early Miyazaki film. Its like a folk tale of a fishing village uniting against an evil wizard. The creative team were largely left wing radicals so they incorporated Socialist values into the film.
The villagers come together, live collectively and work to support each other, the only characters whom are self interested are shown in negative lights. An incompetent headsmen whose selfishness puts the village in jeopardy, and his scheming deputy.
I think young children would really love it.
Dead Man's Shoes. Loosley based on the experiences of Shane Meadows and Paddy Considine who directed and co-wrote the film. A quite bleak and emotional low budget 'revenge' film that is not quite what it seems at first. Some interesting insight of hierarchy, some funny moments though but it's no comedy, great acting, well directed.
explainthingstome
A Fistful Full was a disappointment for me and I think you are right about the image quality.
Flowers of Youth (International Version) a Chinese-Japanese animated co production about three short stories of life in modern China with flashbacks to the 90s in Shanghai and Hunan province. Its pretty to look at and full of emotion of the "look after your friends, family and treasure your memories" style.
I had two thoughts while watching it, first modern China seems to be no different from any other capitalist country with urban development, anxiety over getting good grades for a well paid job etc. And that I don't really see why this was animated, they could have made it in live action very easily. I guess it worked out cheaper?
I think rambarstuous got auto-banned for spamming (?), if someone wants to do something about that...
zugzwang
That user spammed multiple threads demanding their account be deleted.
I saw Netflix added Full Metal Jacket and figured why not complete the Nam trilogy? I didn't really care for it, I know its regarded as heresy to not like a Kubrick film but its easily the least of his films that I've seen.
It doesn't feel like a complete film its like two film that share a character. I really liked the first film in boot camp, it was very tightly shot and it did a very good job of showing how dehumanising military discipline is and why its not really a good idea to brutalise young man while at the same time giving them training and equipment to kill others.
But you could cut the film to start at the Saigon scene and not lost anything because there really is no connection. Its criticism is very weak too, the best it gets is the debriefing scene for the Stars and Stripes newspaper. But honestly even that's quite lazy, its just characters outright stating how hollow and disconnected the war is from its stated aims.
I also really didn't like Joker, he's not trying to maintain his humanity he's just a smug ironically detached jerk.
To be honest I think its interesting that the only parts of the film that became pop culture canon were R Lee Ermey. The only parts from the Vietnam section of the film I've ever heard before was racist pricks doing impressions of the Vietnamese sex workers.
Pretty Village, Pretty Flame.
My friend lent it to me. Pretty good.
Steven.
Yep, it's heckin great. The trailer really does not do it justice, and makes it seem quite apolitical.
If it's not showing in your country, you should be able to stream it soon after it's released on DVD on October 23rd.
I, Dolours was very interesting. It's about Dolours Price, the Irish hunger striker and Provisional IRA member, who filmed 'tell-all' interviews with the stipulation that they only be released once she passed. I thought it was very well put together; the film is constructed out of a mix of direct interview, recreations and newsreel footage, and unlike most historical recreations these are very well-acted and make the film much more than just any old documentary.
It's quite clearly constructed to be sympathetic to her and her dissident republican position. The film itself implies that she only sat for these interviews because she felt so betrayed by Sinn Féin but if you keep all this in mind with a critical attitude then you will get a lot out of it.
The film got a bit of newspaper attention because she names Gerry Adams as an IRA commander and directly implicates him in the murder of Jean McConville. However the documentary itself contains no sensationalism at all, and it is much more a character study of a very interesting woman than it is anything else.
Go see it if you can!
Get Out, some superb acting, there were parts where just a strained look made me feel very vulnerable. And yet comedic moments were really funny and I didn't really feel any mood whiplash when the film moved from awkward fish out of water comedy to brutal mental horror.
Also a pretty clever and cutting look at race in American society.
Ex Machina. I was slightly surprised to find it boring and annoying. The main character feels very empty and I laughed several times in places I don't think I was supposed to. I didn't like the cinematography. It has some interesting ideas but overall it's not a good film. I can't decide whether or not this film was better than another film the director made, Annihilation.
Nerdland : very dull with the kind of artwork I don't like. Supposed to be a satire but didn't really have much bite and virtually nothing was funny, it seemed very unfinished. It had Patton Oswalt but that didn't make it good. And it completely wasted Garfunkel and Oates as bimbos.
Annihilation - Made me think of Contact and Evolution (apparently that was supposed to be a thriller in which case Annihilation could be its alter ego.) It was good film, it didn't try to sell you on a story, the characters didn't understand what was happening, there's a reason why the line "I don't know" got repeated so often in parts. A good film and worth a watch.
Nanette - Hannah Gadsby. Not even sure what to say. It took a while to get going, but was absolutely worth it. I don't think it is really comedy, she describes it as theatre near the end, but it was definitely worth watching. Genuinely moving and powerful.
Hot take: Annihilation is a great movie to watch on acid, but other than that it's just an inferior imitation of Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979).
jef costello
Same
I went to see BlacKkKlansman with some friends, I think we caught the last showing. Its pretty difficult to talk about, I guess its a really dark comedy the kind that has pure comedy bits and pure dark drama, which is joined together by a few scenes that mix the two.
I didn't laugh very much, but that was because I was usually still chewing over the really ugly racist violence in a scene or two before. My friends laughed a lot more. Its kinda flawed a bunch of the supporting characters seem to just do what the plot needs to move on regardless of consistency, especially the police chief. Its also weird how police racism is shown to be the fault of one bad copper and just general cluelessness from the rest of the force.
I think it would have been better if they ditched the police entirely really, the politics is very confused, though thankfully its examinations of racism and the politics of the south and Klan and groups like it is a lot more focussed and coherent. One of my mates went and looked up the real events and that may explain why the police parts were so mushy, I think on reflection it was the best they could do while still keeping it "based on a true story". Probably should of gone full fictional.
Oh and it doesn't shy away from the horrific racial violence in the states, there's one part where they discuss an historical racist murder in graphic detail and show photo's of the event that were taken at the time (and then later sold as postcards).
The ending was very effecting, really powerful stuff.
I think its worth watching and picking the bits out of the mess.
Sorry To Bother You opens in the UK December 7th. Highly recommended.
Lucky Black Cat
My recollection of this is that for a while I found it horribly irritating - the performer really lacking charisma and the audience laughing their asses of at stuff that wasn’t even funny, and all this seemed to come at me through a beige filter of liberalism. I only carried on watching it because my daughter recommended so strongly.
Anyways, I trudged on and somehow, I’m not really sure at which point, I found myself drawn in. By the end of it I was hanging on her lips, it really took my breath away. As Jeff said, I really was deeply moved by it, amazing.
Wow, I know literally nothing about Nanette, but these are some pretty powerful testimonials, makes me want to see it for myself.
An uplifting tale about an immigrant loser called 베놈. *bicep emoji*
https://pann-choa.blogspot.com/2018/08/theqoo-korea-vs-japan-movie-poster-for.html?m=1
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/aug/20/boots-riley-spike-lee-blackkklansman
Reddebrek
Thanks for the review! I wasn't sure about this movie but now I'll probably see it.
Fleur
Hµas just popped up online, I'll watch it at the weekend if I can.
The last ones I've watched are:
Tampopo - Japanese 'food western' from 1985 about a woman, Tampopo, who wants to become a better Ramen chef and is helped by a gallant truckdriver. Dumb sexist premise but actually a very fun film.
David Lynch - The Art Life - Beautiful documentary about David Lynch as a visual artist, also his youth memories, but mostly you see him working, i.e. paint/draw/sculpt with mud or any other of material.
Fleur
On one hand it's really annoying that the delay's so long, but on the other I suppose that's right at the start of the works Xmas do season, so maybe seeing it immediately before might be good for inspiring a few people to take a swing at their managing directors while pissed.
Saw sorry to bother you last night thought it was alright perhaps I was over-hyped but thought there would be more emphasis on union and the strike in the movie. Was lucky enough that an art house cinema was showing it and and someone who lives in northern europe I did not it would be screened where I live but it was rather funny movie and the audience laughed a lot during the movie but more in the first half
CLASH (the a is a graffiti style Anarchy A), a film about the Egyptian revolution filmed almost exclusively within the back of a police truck. The as the film goes on more and more protesters from different backgrounds and political groups are dumped in the back as the police and army move to drive the Muslim Brotherhood from the streets and in the process often attack pro army demonstrators.
The political divide is between the Muslim Brotherhood and the pro army side, with two AP journalists caught in the middle, but the social backgrounds and personal ideas of the dozen or so prisoners is very mixed.
Although the film concerns police repression on a mass scale the police and army are still human, some are abusive and insulting, some just doing what they're told and apathetically standing around until stones start flying, some are pretty sympathetic to the prisoners but the officers use of extreme discipline keeps them in line.
Also while there some riot police action and one scene in the middle that breaks the only showing the truck and what can be seen from the windows where police brutally beat a captured fighter, most the violence is a result of imprisonment itself. The prisoners are crammed in prison vans without water or toilets and left in the heat.
It was also interesting to see how the MB functions, it'll be very familiar to anyone with experience of the various vanguard parties, complete with segregation of full members and supporters.
It handles the confusion of street fighting very well too.
The MB took direct inspiration from Leninist parties; indeed they more or less copied their structure, hierarchy and party discipline.
Although not a movie I really liked the newest season of daredevil
SPIRIDONOVA - ARMED LOVE by Class War
I really enjoyed this. It's like nothing I have ever seen before. Although I am probably just not aware of other films like this. If there are others please let me know.
It took me a few seconds to get past any expectations of acting to appreciate this storytelling. In fact, the lack of any attempt at slick production, two fingers at professionalism, and the need to be inventive, to work with what you got, to nick what you need, was a big part of what made it compelling.
https://youtu.be/cv6Kn1ixAv0
I am surprised there is no reference to this film here (not that was found by search anyway). Do you think it is rubbish?
I've not seen it myself yet, but people may be interested to see Nae Pasaran when it comes out in November: https://naepasaran.com/upcoming-screenings/
"1974. In protest against Pinochet’s brutal military coup in Chile, Rolls-Royce factory workers in Scotland refuse to repair and return Chilean jet engines used on the day of the coup and leave them to rust in the yard, prey to the Scottish weather. After four years, the engines mysteriously disappear and the boycotters are told their action had been in vain.
40 years after their defiant stand, the workers, along with the Chileans involved, discover the incredible impact of one of the longest single act of international solidarity."
pi
Hey thanks for sharing I probably wouldn't have heard of this film, its pretty well done.
pi
I watched it, too. I'd never heard of Maria Spiridonova. She seems like she was really awesome. Her speech where she talks about the importance of love in revolution made my heart glow. And there were a few LOL's, like, "Don't worry, people, it's just a grenade in the balcony!"
It's super low budget and it shows, and the acting is what you'd expect from a bunch of people who clearly aren't actors, but I didn't mind. It was an entertaining way to learn about an admirable historical figure and comrade.
Edit: I googled quotes from the speech I like and can't find it. I hope they didn't make it up. But perhaps it's just not online.
Yeah I haven't been able to find much by or about Spiridonova online, the closest was a chapter in a book by Emma Goldman.
http://libcom.org/library/my-disillusionment-in-russia-emma-goldman-16
Since the rest of the rest of the speeches are real and the events are very accurate and there's generally not much online about the Left SRs at all I'm guessing they based the script off a rare book a member had.
This scan does cover some of the events of the film http://libcom.org/files/cmr_1252-6576_1997_num_38_1_2483.pdf
Reddebrek
There also is this article by Alexander Rabinowitch:
https://sci.libgen.pw/item/detail/id/59e6b4d93a04465a6afedc3b
meinberg
Thank you!
I also finally managed to see Peterloo, something my local cinema made almost impossible due to its restricted showings.
Anyway, it was honestly very good, I don't feel comfortable saying I enjoyed it, because the main emotions it made me feel were anger and sadness. It didn't pull its punches and it resisted making Hunt into a sort of messiah and showed his many personal flaws.
The hypocrisy and casual brutality of Regency England was clearly demonstrated, but didn't feel propagandistic or distorted. It also held my attention throughout.
Saw Sweet Country, an Australian Western that directly focuses on Australia's race relations and history of colonialism. Its incredibly authentically shot but its very grim and depressing. The plot also involves one of the most disturbing rape scenes I've seen. Its shot totally in the dark but the scenes pacing and sound is really unsettling.
It also uses an aboriginal language called Arrernte extensively. I recommend it but its pretty heavy in its pessimistic tones.
Beast. A++
Queen - v arrogant.
Aggretsuko
https://youtu.be/1n3xXuEyr40
Been watching Nosferatu on and off. Anyone got any good older movies (non-Hitchcock because i've seen most of his stuff)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC6jFoYm3xs
Thought Sorry to Bother You was a bit too on the nose/cheesy. Some of the dialogue was painful to sit through (the sign twirling scene with "Squeeze" in particular). Some parts were funny and others weren't. It was all a bit too over the top for me. Still it was surprising to see all the attention/air time Riley and this got (maybe because of the cast.).
zugzwang
Have you seen any of the following?
Magnolia(pretty long and harrowing, but truly magnificent)
Harold and Maude
Barfly
The Midnight Cowboy
I could easily think of more but if there are any of these you haven’t seen it’s pointless me straining my brain and bombarding you with options.
All the suggested films have great dialogue and fantastic acting but the acting in Magnolia is virtuoso stuff and the many storylines are compelling as fuck. I really think it’s one of the best films ever made.
If you like old movies, you might want to check out John Huston. He did good noir, The Maltese Falcon, Asphalt Jungle, The Treasure of Sierra Madre is fantastic, The Misfits is beautiful heartbreaking.
Half a dozen classic ‘old’ movies:
The Kid (USA, 1921), Charlie Chaplin’s comic genius.
The Philadelphia Story (USA, 1940), all-star line-up with witty screenplay.
I’ll Be Seeing You (USA, 1944), moving story, showing Ginger Rogers could act (no dancing or singing).
Wild Strawberries (Sweden, 1957), Ingmar Bergman’s best movie I think - not too dark, and for him optimistic.
The Red & The White (Hungary/USSR, 1967), Miklos Jancso’s take on the chaos of the Russian civil war.
The Last Picture Show (USA, 1971), try and see Bogdanovich’s director’s cut.
Also High Noon, a Christmas classic. (You have to be British of a certain age to get that.)
Will look into all these, thanks all (don't think I've seen any of them). Oh and someone uploaded Sorry to Bother you on YT, will probably be up for a short while before being taken down, if anyone wants to see it...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-7kI36Yync
I second the Misfits.
M by Fritz Lang
Murder by Contract - Irving LErner
It depends what you mean by old.
Martin - George Romero
Le Samourai - Jean-Pierre Melville
L'appartement - Gilles Mimouni.
Diabolique - Clouzot?
Noah Fence
The Harold and Maude movie was pretty funny. I could've done without all the Cat Stevens though. I liked the beach "protest" and questionnaire scenes.
jef costello
Maybe no more silent movies, kind of like the development of audio in films (still haven't finished Nosferatu)... I don't really mind though.
https://www.nkmillennials.com
I watched the Nun
Anyone seen the The Young Karl Marx? Remember seeing this post about it.
"The Battle of Algiers"
I have seen young marx and remember thinking it was okay
https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/how-asia-got-crazy-rich/
Thoroughbreds - fun, short psychological thriller.
Black Panther - this one is the MCU's best reviewed film. It's definitely worth seeing if your interested in comic book movies.
Roma - I don't love it, but it's definitely interesting. Lots of longish tracking shots. That is to be expected, since it is directed by Alfonso Cuaron. Best reviewed film of 2018 according to metacritic.
The Senator, apparently its called Chappaquidick in the US. I was expecting a fluff piece given how much mainstream America seems to love the Kennedys, but I was in for a shock.
I was amazed at how loathsome and scummy they depict him, his family and network of friends. I genuinely started hating the guy, Jason Clarke is an amazing actor, I spent the movie just wanting more and more to hit the narcissistic toady.
Reddebrek
You mean your not one of those folks who thinks each and every one of Kubrick's films is a masterpiece? Seriously, those folks could be annoying at times when discussion of his filmography comes up. If you look through reddit, you could find some of his fans who argue how anti-imperialist Full Metal Jacket is. But that doesn't really boost how important this film is or should be. It's a good film, but it's not great. In certain parts, it is kinda boring.
Another film of his that is just good, but not great is The Shining. The film fails as a horror film. It just isn't scary. The film's self conscious camerawork brings too much attention to the film's style. But despite it not providing any scares, it is always interesting to watch and performances are enjoyable, and funny at times.
The last film of his that I have seen is The Killing. Once again, considered by many to be a great film, or at least classic in its genre. I just find myself disagreeing. The way the plot unfolded, plus the narration, undermined the suspense. I might have it give it a second watch.
My assessment of A Clockwork Orange is similar to what I wrote above for The Shining, except I didn't find it to be always interesting from beginning to end. While I found some sequences in the film to be visually mesmerizing, the camerawork here has the same fault, if not more so, as in The Shining. Overall, this one had me checking the time and didn't leave much of an impression.
The only films of his that live up to the hype of his reputation are Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. All three are consistently entertaining. I think Paths of Glory shows him at his most restraint. Dr. Strangelove was really funny in my opinion. And 2001 is probably his defining work.
Oh, I almost forgot Spartacus; such a dull and mediocre film, I can't believe it was made by Kubrick. I turned this one off a half hour, maybe an hour in, and never bothered to finish it. Yet it's on many film enthusiasts list of best films of all time.
And that pretty much sums up all of what I've from him thus far. There are six films remaining in his filmography that I have to watch. Kubrick definitely deserves to be discussed if your a film buff. According to the website They Shoot Pictures, Don't They, he's the third most acclaimed filmmaker of all time. I'm not sure he deserves that status though.
I found that film to be so underwhelming, likely due to how much it was hyped-up. I was expecting to be scared witless (I was in my early teens when I first watched it), but just found it tedious. Watched it again much later and found it even more tedious, though I could at least appreciate the cinematography and acting.
the first half of full metal jacket is much better than the last, really surprised by the shinning comments it's my favorite Kubrick film with fantastic acting by Shelley Duvall, If I remember correctly Spartacus was studio film where Kubrick replaced another director after production has started so I would not count it as Kubrick film but has a good ending which you might want to checkout, fear and desire his first movie is not good and I found Barry lyndon to be boring I have seen every kubrick movie once if that maters
Agent Of The International
how do you feel about the top 2 (Hitchcock (1) WELLES(2)) ? I feel WELLES adaption of the kafa's the trial is underrated
I would go much further, this film is truly awful. I don’t think a film based on a book has to slavishly adhere to it's source, in fact I can see that it can be very difficult to do so, but the changes should be for a purpose, or at least not explode the whole premise of the original.
Firstly, the film is based on the American publication of the book which is a big fat fuck up in itself. That publication(which by now I hope has been rectified?) is missing the whole third, and concluding section of the book! I mean, in what universe is that a good idea? So on that alone the film is set to fail. However, the problems don’t end there, far from it - key scenes are altered in such a way as to remove the teeth from the entire story. The sex scene with the two young women which Kubrick has made into something out of Benny fucking Hill is supposed to be the brutal rape of two 10 or 11 year old girls, and for some reason that presumably only the skewed logic of Kubrick can explain, the accidental death of a senile old woman in her own home is transformed into the bludgeoning to death of a gratuitously ‘sexy’ looking forty something with a giant fucking penis in an art gallery! I mean, what the actual fuck???
Then there’s the casting - a vital part of the story is that these are supposed to be 14-15 year old boys, and that Alex is a small, slight, and vivacious, young looking one at that, he is mostly referred to as ‘little Alex’ in the book, instead we get a clumsy, plug ugly fucking oaf of a 28 year old playing his part! Jesus, my palm seems to have developed a magnetic attraction to my face just thinking about it!
As for the language, in the book it comes across as fluid, credible and very amusing. Once again the film makes a real dog’s dinner of it and it just sounds daft.
Really, any changes, however far from the original, could be justified if the end result was something of any appeal or value, but apart from some of the visual aspects, comparing the book with this film is like comparing a Michelin star dinner with a pot noodle!
Edit: In case I don’t make my self clear, a giant penis is used to bludgeon the ‘sexy’ forty something to death, I didn’t mean that a forty something with a giant penis was bludgeoned to death with some unspecified blunt instrument. If it was the case that she had a giant penis, she would indeed, have been ‘sexy’.
And while I’m mining the ‘things that are supposed to be great are actually a steaming great pile of horse manure’ vein, I’ll mention a film that has been recommended to me by several people - Captain Fantastic. In short, there was not a believable moment in the entire film - shallow characters portrayed by wooden actors in a wholly predictable and corny(not in a good way) plot. Two hours of my rapidly diminishing life that I’ll never get back.
Method of Freedom
I saw the Trial adaptation after seeing Perkins in the Psycho series (which got worse with every additional movie imo), was pretty good stuff if I recall. I read most of Kafka's short stories and novels in my teens; think maybe his "Hunger Artist" was my favorite short story (probably have to be sufficiently introverted and "angsty" to appreciate his stuff). I wasn't aware at the time but Kafka also had libsoc leanings as it turns out. There's also a German-language film based off The Castle but I never saw that.
Noah Fence
It wasn't that bad, I don't think. I'd probably put it in the same category as Sorry to Bother You; both have some awful and unconvincing dialogue. If I remember I think they went a little overboard with the Chomsky references (and then Noam Chomsky Day...).
I'd like to see Rahul Jain's Machines doc/film at some point, if I can find it.
Noah Fence wrote
Lol, I haven’t seen the film for years so I thought I’d check this scene - I got my facts a little wrong but the criticism still stands, the changes to this scene(and many others) totally abandon the original narrative, to the great detriment of the story.
Method of Freedom
I'm fine with the top two. There's not really much to complain about there. I've seen quite a bit of Hitchcock; I found Rear Window, Psycho, Vertigo, and North by Northwest to be his most enjoyable flicks. Those are obviously considered among his best. I haven't seen much of Welles unfortunately. I did see Citizen Kane quite a long time ago. And like yourself, I enjoyed The Trial, although I don't think it was an exceptional piece of film making. I think the story was strong enough to keep me engaged throughout.
Here's the link to They Shoot Pictures, Don't They's Top 250 most acclaimed directors of all time for others who are probably too lazy to find it themselves.
Method of Freedom
Yeah I'm almost finished with it, it's okay. I guess one could nitpick at stuff; the one scene where Marx was arguing for "fair wages" doesn't seem right. They got the chess boards set up correctly however, which a lot of movies struggle with. I don't really see why the chess cliches were needed to establish them as "classy intellectuals" though (bit silly that some people associate chess knowledge with knowledge of non-chess-related things).
zugzwang
I think the movie would be much better if it would take a later period, either in the German revolution of 48 or in the international
Not sure if this is a real game or not by Marx
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1278768
Good post by Noah Fence on A Clockwork Orange.
Have you seen Kubrick's first film The Day of the Fight?
rat
Nope, not seen that, should I?
Probably, as it's only 12 minutes long, it's on YouTube.
Who is America? series - I liked it a lot. I wonder what people in the US think about it.
[quote=Agent of the International]Reddebrek
Spartacus was started by Anthony Mann who was fired by Kirk Douglas. Douglas hired Kubrick to replace Mann, and some of Mann's footage remains in the movie. Mann was certainly more adept at Hollywood historical spectacle than Kubrick (see El Cid and Fall of the Roman Empire.) So in this instance Kubrick was a director for hire for the only time in his career.
The Other Side of the Wind. Shot by Welles between 1970 and 1976 the picture was held hostage by assorted legal claims that were only resolved two years ago. Stylistically as great as anything by Welles the movie is a take down of machismo and the New Hollywood of its era.
Sunshine - a good sci-fi flick from director Danny Boyle. This was an HBO pan and scan version of the film. I hate pan and scan!
The Time Machine - it was showing on TCM. I had to watch it in two sittings. The first time, I found it boring and so I eventually turned it off midway. The second time, I thought it picked up a bit in the second half. I wouldn't recommend it though.
High Noon - in the hope of getting a promotion I am watching cowboy films...
Retiring sheriff is threatened by the return of a killer he had caught years ago, now the town is peaceful they don't haevb any deputies to support him and everyone refuses to help him form a posse.
John Wayne hated it, called it unAmerican, which is stupid as fuck. Basically the sheriff tries to gather a posse to face down th guy but can't so takes on four men alone. The sheriff lives up to the lone hero narrative that Wayne thought they were mocking (draft dodger who made tough guy military films claims asking for help is cowardly), the subversion is actually in the fact that the sheriff is abandoned by the community.
Speaking of community I've been on libcom 13 years. As there's no libcommunity I'll just mention it here.
The screenwriter was a former CP member and had to testify in front of HUAC during the filming of High Noon. He never worked in Hollywood again, he moved to the UK, as did some other blacklisted artists. I don't think it's particularly subversive but it's still a damned good movie. It was made in about a month, on a shoestring budget to fulfill a contract to produce a certain number of films. The photography is amazing, the story is in real time. There were a lot of westerns on TV when I was a kid, I don't think I particularly want to revisit any of them, except for High Noon, which has always been a favourite of mine.
Talking of westerns, I've been watching the Westworld TV series and for the first time in my life I have wanted to go to Utah. The locations are just gorgeous.
Congrats on your longevity, Jef.I think I've been around these parts for about 6, although I have sworn to walk away in anger on many an occasion :)
If Beale Street Could Talk. Pretty good. The end is good.
Thanks Fleur, I have wondered about leaving more than once myself.
The Man with the Iron Heart: pretty good film about the men who killed Heydrich. Better than the source novel because all of the metanarrative stuff has been removed (he spends a whole chapter complaining about not being able to read a pamphlet in Slovakian then turns out he bumped into an old lady very soon after finding it and she translated it for him. He then doesn't reference the contents. Very self-indulgent) Not sure if the film is worth watching if you know the story, I was just depressed, watching the Nazis massacre a bunch of people and seeing brave people die. Maybe if I had been in a better mood I might have found it more inspiring than depressing. I haven't seen the competing film Operation Anthropoid, that one had a bit more star power.
Rio Bravo - good film, worth a watch. John Wayne doesn't ask for help and kills the bad guys. He has an amazing stealth move, which is slightly hunching his shoulders.
Father of the Year - David Spade as a bad father whose high-flying son gets stuck with him. Not too bad, I found the two young leads quite personable. If you want something a few simple and uncomplicated laughs then why not.
El Dorado - loose remake of Rio Bravo with, I think a slightly better story, Wayne's (poorly acted) spasms make things interesting, as does Caan's inability to shoot. It does however have added extra racism (Caan's chinese impression, endless talk of injuns), some very unconvincing stunt work and John Wayne re-uses the stealth move and adds a clever tactic running in a group, toiwards bad guys who are in cover, and not getting shot... I do like the ending with the main bad guy, though. It's why I watched the film.
Wall Writers - quite an interesting documentary about taggers in the US, mostly in New York.
Wayne - Not a film, it is awful. 'Guitars and violence yeah!!!' If that isn't all that you want then the odd and pointless story will bore you, the attempts to try to bring depth to a character that has none seem ham-handed and pointless and the complete lack of consequences for violence might be a little ridiculous. And the Boston/massachusetts accent always seems a bit ridiculous.
Jef have you seen the movie "Operation Daybreak" which is also about killing Heydrich?: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075019/.
I liked it a lot when I was younger; I remember it being kind of an action movie. I've been meaning to rewatch it sometime to see if it holds up.
Prairie Giant - The Tommy Douglas Story
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie_Giant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Douglas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9SNHt6lRCE
Jordan Peele's Us - good film but kinda disappointing.
Edited to remove spoilerish comment.
Thanks for spoling it, I guess...
Edit: deleted the spoiler
Khawaga
It was probably a bit bad to include that bit about the [spoiler], so I removed it from my post. You should probably edit it out from your post as well. Although, it doesn't give away all of the mystery, so not totally spoiled.
They’ve re-released A Clockwork Orange. It’s still an abomination. Avoid it at all costs.
Noah Fence
What?
I liked the film. It is different to the book, but it's still good I think.
Thought ‘A Clockwork Orange’ as a movie, was ok. I didn’t really understand why everyone made a big fuss about it at the time. Kubrick was overrated IMO, and only ‘Paths of Glory’ was really a knockout - a gripping and well-rounded film. The ending was very moving with the girl singing to the soldiers, whereas Kubrick’s other stuff was too mannered (or manicured).
Jeff, I quote myself here from earlier in the thread. Bear in mind I’m a bit of an obsessive - I’ve read the well over thirty to times, at least once a year since I first read it aged around 14/15.
Obsessive or not though, I think my critique is well justified(apart from my fuck up as corrected in the second quote).
Re the bludgeoning scene...
I noticed it was playing at a local theater that specializes in classic films. I had no idea it was given a re-release. It doesn't seem like the kind of film that would attract a lot of admissions. I too thought it was just an OK film.
Agent of the International
It’s always had a cult following in the UK since the enormous stir it created on its original release. I believe Kubrick himself withdrew the film from public availability. Doing so was undoubtedly the best thing he ever did for cinema.
As for it being an ok film, if I put the indignant bombast to one side for a moment, I dare say in isolation you’re right. Certainly the photography and the set design etc is stunning at times.
The thing is though that it doesn’t exist in isolation. The book is a masterpiece - inventive, compelling, linguistically extraordinary and absolutely hilarious and this is the problem. In particular, Burgess’s trick of getting you onside with someone who’s behaviour should make you hate him gives you the experience of viewing things from, and then eventually rejecting an individualist standpoint is completely lost in the film. The Alex in the book is extremely endearing, funny as fuck and as sharp as a tack. In the film he’s just a big fucking oaf. What a waste of an opportunity.
Auld-bod
Couldn't agree more about 'Paths of Glory' - really a great movie.
Just about everyone I know raves on about how great '2001: A Space Odyssey' is but whenever I try to see it I always seem to doze off about halfway through.
Enjoyable 'off-beat' Icelandic film with on-screen music backing and a surprising Ukrainian civil war connection at the tail end;
https://www.mysterytribune.com/icelandic-movie-woman-at-war-wins-nordic-council-film-prize/
I'm debating whether or not I want to continue watching Twin Peaks. The score by Angelo Badalamenti is pretty nice.
I watched twin peaks (tv series) few years ago and remember liking it
Method of Freedom
I'm really only watching it because I remember Alan Wake being influenced by it (can definitely see that). I'm not so keen on the police and fbi protagonists, and I probably shouldn't have read Lynch's wiki where he called himself a libertarian at one point in his life. Other than that it's not bad, and I like the dreamy music and overall style.
Are you watching the old or new series? I love both, but strongly preferred the new one over the old one. Don't worry too much about Lynch calling himself a libertarian, you wouldn't really guess that much from the show itself. I don't think he is anyway, most of his political activity is strange shilling for Transcendental Meditation, he used to support the Natural Law Party which is the party arm of the TM movement. Pretty weird stuff, they advocate for things like mandatory TM classes in inner city schools to decrease gang warfare.
It's a mostly apolitical show but for what it's worth the entire 'Dougie' storyline of the new series is a pretty direct (and funny) attack on the emptiness of upper-middle class American life.
I never miss an opportunity to post the link to their party political broadcast...
https://youtu.be/438UKM1Av1g
I actually saw it when it was aired and was suitably impressed, as I’m sure you guys will be!
I’ve always felt disappointment at the lack of advocacy for bubbling bliss amongst communists. It’s probably the main reason that we never get anywhere.
That guy doing the yogic flying was getting some serious air, he must have great core strength
sherbu-kteer
So I've seen the new Twin Peaks, and while I liked it, I have to admit I don't understand the story. It's a pretty complicated 18 hours.
Also, David Lynch voted for Bernie Sanders, so he's moved away from his early libertarian views.
sherbu-kteer
The original one, bit late to the party.
Agent
I was relieved to see that also (which I guess is an improvement?). I was getting some Atlas Shrugged-Dagny Taggart vibes at first with Lynch calling himself a libertarian and the Packard Sawmill characters, but there's probably no connection there. I'm still working my way through the first season.
Agent of the International
But it's also more explicit than the old series. You never really knew if the weird stuff was real or not in the old one. The new one tells the whole thing. Which means talking giant kettles in space amongst other things. It all goes together as well, very few loose ends.
I felt he had affection for his characters in the old series but in the new one it feels exploitative. Like he's taking the piss out of these people. Some scenes are even more Pinter, Brecht, Roy Anderson like than before which is sort of nice.
Cooked
All I remember is that the old one was very easy to follow, and I was excited to see how the story would be continued. And then I just become lost watching the new one. There wasn't much that was familiar imo.
There's also the "missing link" of Fire Walk With Me, which I've still not seen, but I think a few bits of the new series might make a bit more sense if you've seen them. I don't think much of the new series was as good as most of series 1, but I also don't think any of it was as bad as the worst bits of the second series.
Also the original series would have been much better if every boring James Hurley scene was replaced with Michael Cera's Wally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AeANz2ndM8
R Totale
I watched Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me before watching the new series. It doesn't really help. It's also a very bad movie; probably the worst thing David Lynch has made. Looking at it's ratings on review aggregate websites, it's one of those films that is disliked by critics, but well received by fans of the show. I have to agree with the critics on this one. It's a pretty inert experience. The strangeness doesn't do anything.
Almost finished with the last season of Twin Peaks. It quit being interesting for me after they found out who killed Laura Palmer. I'm not all that eager to see whether the Horne guy 'turns his business around', and I don't really care what happens with the rest of the spoiled, bourgeois (racist I might add - what was with the confederate thing for two or three episodes?) Horne family. Oh and the chess thing now is just stupid. If you're going to have a chess story line at least do more research than who Capablanca was and how to set the board up correctly. None of the pieces have even left the back rank, they clearly have some opening position on the board, and the Earle guy is talking about stalemate?
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse - best superhero/comic book film ever made. I put it above The Incredibles, Black Panther, Spider-Man 2 and The Dark Knight. This is such a creative film.
Annihilation - good, but not great. This is an attempt on making a bold sci fi but I don't think this will stick very long.
Happy as Lazzaro - this is a really good foreign film. Realistic first half, surreal second half.
Mission: Impossible - Fallout - this is notable for just how action packed it is. The series gets better and better. Although this is a bit too long.
BlacKkKlansman - Spike Lee's strongest effort since Do The Right Thing.
Agent of the International
Heard this was good but had forgotten about it. I will add it to my watching list.
I just saw a movie on the Manson family that I liked a lot more than Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” This movie is about the Manson women and largely created by women. It’s directed by Mary Harron (American Psycho, I Shot Andy Warhol), with a screenplay by Guinevere Turner (American Psycho, The Notorious Betty Page). It’s based on two books, The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten by Karlene Faith, and The Family: The Story of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion by Ed Sanders. You may recognize Ed Sanders as a poet and member of the 60s beat rock group The Fugs.
This film focuses on the women and Charlie Manson (Doctor Who’s Matt Smith) manipulates them into seeing him as an Angel, a guru, a savior to follow and obey unquestioningly because he is breaking down their egos to create a utopia where all are one. The film covers the timeline of Manson’s attempts to break into the music business, and he pimps out the women ("shares" them) to industry insiders and others toward this end. The turning point (as told here, in real life there was other violence and a murder that preceded the Tate-Labianca muders) comes when he fails to get a record deal and begins to enact his apocalyptic race war end times vision of “Helter Skelter” based on the Bible and the music of the Beatles. Manson was an absolute racist who saw himself ruling over black people after the race war, and preserving the white race. By the time he is telling his followers to kill, we can sort of understand how they were mentally and sometimes physically beaten into submission to the point they just wanted to please Manson and make his visions come true. He had conditioned them to think this was part of being a revolutionary.
Aside from that story line, the other half of the film is a college professor who ends up teaching the main three Manson women in prison. She slowly makes them question their conditioning, and they study feminist literature together. We flash back and forth between these sessions and Spahn Ranch, which offers a picture of Charlie as a charismatic con man and virulent misogynist. The issues of the 60s are touched on a bit more than the Tarantino film, enough for us to see that even as obviously corrupt the cult became, many people attracted to it believed they were fleeing the oppression and violence of an insane culture of war, violence, and lies. That’s what makes it so sad. Contrast this to Tarantino’s film which offers us Reagan (the actor) era cowboys who will slaughter evil hippies for our catharsis. It just doesn’t compare.
Maybe this Charlie Says film looks even better to me after just seeing Tarantino’s nothing of a movie, but I wanted to offer this recommendation as an alternative film. The story has been told many times, and this one is also incomplete, but the focus here is what made it worth watching.
Recently watched Dockers (1999) a film about the Liverpool Dockers strike, the one where Chumbawamba dumped a bucket of water on John Prescott over.
Happily the rights holders uploaded the film for free on youtube
https://youtu.be/DgYkLWsEPZk
If you're familiar with social history type dramas you'll know what to expect, its full of the usual working class actors.
I thought I saw a Solfed banner in one scene but I think it was one of those things were films didn't bother getting permission so did a generic version.
Its very well made, I'm surprised I didn't know anything about it until stumbling on the channel. In addition to being a film about working on the docks and the effects of striking it doesn't pull its punches on showing how the strike was sabotaged by the Union leadership and how the Labour party left them to rot.
looking up the film on Wikipedia revealed l this interesting fact
Although the credited screenwriters for the drama were Liverpool screenwriter Jimmy McGovern and Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh the drama was largely written by sacked dock workers and previous union members under the supervision of the two screenwriters. This unusual writing method was considered an experiment in 'democratic television' and was documented in a separate channel 4 documentary, Writing the Wrongs.
At last, two films I can recommend, both taken from novels, which are superficially simple yet are better than the usual confectionary dished up for our entertainment.
‘The Bookshop’ - in the 1950s a widow wants to open a shop in a sleepy English seaside town, which irritates the ‘establishment’. Classic British understatement and suffocating conservatism.
‘Leave No Trace’, I’d heard this was good – it is better than that – no explanations are offered, the story is told through terrific acting and cinematography.
I really enjoyed Leave No Trace, I saw it in the cinema.
Joker sucks. It's like if someone sucked all the subtlety and nuance out of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy and mashed it into a ridiculous liberal, anti-socialist framework. Its viewpoint is roughly something a reformist liberal would say a hundred years ago: the working class is a scary mass of irrationally violent people, so we should placate them with reforms lest they fall prey to a charismatic leader and start carrying around signs saying "kill the rich" (they literally carry these signs in the film). The depiction of violence is just stupid, nothing interesting or intelligent about it at all.
Films like Taxi Driver succeed because they provoke people to critically reflect on what they've seen. Joker just intends to shock you and presumes the daze it leaves people in is equivalent to a state of proper reflection. It's like it's trying to make you think but it doesn't realise it's a superhero film, which is to thinking what alcohol is to sobriety. No doubt this bullshit make the studio a lot of money, the faux-controversy in the press about it has done its job perfectly.
Also, Robert de Niro upstages Joaquin Phoenix.
sherbu-kteer
Having heard how great Joker is I was highly suspicious, I think I shall take your review as confirmation that my suspicion is justified. Won’t be watching it now.
So many times these supposedly marvellous films are cringingly bad, none more than my pet hate, A Clockwork Orange. But I’ve set the record straight about that particular abomination on this thread before so I’ll shut up about it now.
As for Taxi Driver, obviously Bob is great in it but King of Comedy is in another league because as well as an absolutely masterful performance from Bob, the storyline is fantastic and the understated performance from Jerry Lewis alongside the unhinged character brilliantly portrayed by the scarily brilliant Sandra Bernhardt elevate it another level. One of my favourite films of all time.
All of the marketing and hype surrounding the Joker up to its release billed it as some kind of return to The Dark Knight style dramatic thriller. This obviously resonates with many DC movie fans who always talk up these films as offering grittier realism as opposed to the supposed cartoon nature of Marvel films. Others see it's potential to tackle serious social issues, thus raising it's importance. Then the film actually releases to mixed reviews, with many of them describing it as a one dimensional portrayal of the title character. As far as critics are concerned, the film is far from great. But there has been a strong segment of movie goers who are heaping praise upon it on social media, including some of my own friends. They are generally left wing, from Bernie Sanders supporting social democrats to marxist leninists, who actually believe this film is a condemnation of capitalism. Sherbu-kteer's review is interesting because it's a counterpoint to the many folks I've come across declaring this film pro working class.
Condemnation of capitalism?:)
It is rather a reflection of some aspects at best, used instrumentally to create a human story of emergence of a villain. Some perceived it as left-wing and I can see why, but to me it was rather neofascist or at least plainly authoritarian. It reminded me the Bane character because the role of "masses" was portrayed in the similar way with the key idea that people are stupid.
Still, I find the technical aspects of the movie and acting quite interesting. But the ending drags it all down.
spoilers for the joker incoming
I think someone on social media correctly pointed out that in the movie it was the media who thought the first violence by the joker was some sort of class hatred but for the joker it was because they attacked him on the subway that he attacked them and he never attacks his boss nor does he think in terms of classes but mainly sees his violence as result of personal issues
I did see some leftists like Micah Uetricht from Jacobin supporting it, as well as a few of the leftmost American liberals like Michael Moore. I didn't understand their responses until I listened to the Chapo Trap House episode on it and I think I started to pick up on where they're coming from. A lot of them are cynically reacting to the idea that's been in the media (and on twitter) a bit, that this film glorifies white male violence, that it will trigger incels to become violent, that sort of thing.
Chapo Trap House people at least see this particular response as part of an ideological trend in American liberalism to smear all class rage from white working class men in America as dangerous. Because Joker depicts this rage, links it to the social system, and also shows the consequences of what happens if it is 'untreated', it triggers the libs and so can be applauded on that basis. And I kind of sympathise with that view because American films are generally awful at social criticism, and mainstream American liberals are obviously annoying. By the standards of American popular culture, this probably is a revolutionary film, but the point to make there is that American popular culture is totally fucked, not that this film has any real social value.
But, that's probably being overly charitable with some of the leftists anyway, I'm not sure how many of them are committed to socialism beyond state reformism. This is how Uetricht's positive review of the film in the Guardian ends:
Socialism or barbarism, or in other words, social democratic reformism or barbarism. If Sanders isn't elected, then who knows how many proletarians will become serial killers? Uetricht actually almost touches on the issue I have with the film here:
True, the film doesn't say that the poor need to be reined in with cracking of skulls. It says the poor need to be reined in with social safety nets, social workers and improved government funding. It's like hawks vs. doves. The idea that the poor are this chaotic, existential threat to social order that needs to be reined in is not disputed.
Wild Rose. Film about a woman who gets out of prison in Glasgow who wants to be a country singer. It's a good enough enjoyable watch but it also has a deeper theme of how our paths in life get set and a good class consciousness.
Riot (2018)
An Australian film about homosexuality in 70s Sydney, and the holding of the first Gay pride mardi gras street celebrations.
I guess the film its closest to would be Pride, in that both are about lesbians and gays and do involve them working with the Union movement (though that's more of a subplot in Riot). But I'd say Riot is a bit more depressing and upsetting at times. Its outlook on politics is bit more bleaker, the police are violent and vicious and when they aren't cracking heads on the streets they're taking advantage of the legal code effectively given them "grounds for reasonable suspicion" 24 hours a day to invade gay and lesbian spaces and harass people they've singled out as trouble makers.
The attempts to work with the Australian Labor Party fail, and the representatives of the Communist party aren't exactly helpful. The main character Lance has a father who was in the Communist party and he's quite abusive and dismissive of his son and his sexuality, but he does also criticise their groups attempts to build bridges with moderate politicians. "the labor party are too cowardly to be revolutionary and too catholic to be liberal, you won't get anywhere with them".
Overall I'd say I like it a bit more than Pride, Pride was hyper focused and had a feel good ending that felt a little forced.
Riot shows a lot more of the gay and lesbian communities in Sydney, their issues and problems and diversity, and also the left at the time and just how powerful the church and the police were. It also ends bittersweetly in the aftermath of a cop riot, they got their pride celebrations and have used to break the climate of fear, but they still lost a lot in fighting.
Also apparently this was TV film made largely by a regional Australian television company. I was very surprised to learn that it looks very cinematic and some of its scenes are massive in scale and number of actors on screen.
Sorry We Missed You - pretty good, definitely makes its point. Definitely preaching to the converted though.
A Second Chance. Documentary about the scheme where the Timpsons group train and employ ex offenders. It told the story of 5 (?) people who were employed. It is a great film, subtly explores a lot of the issues around criminal justice as well. It's reasonably hard hitting but I'd highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the area. The director is Rex Bloomstein who apparently made a film about Strangeways too.
Wandering Earth based on the novella by Cixin Liu by the same name. Watched it because I absolutely loved Liu's The Three Body Problem trilogy (in my mind some of the best hard sci-fi out there). It was ok and entertaining, but too Hollywood rather than hard existential sci-fi that I expected.
We also watched 'Sorry We Missed You' the recent Ken Loach film - depressingly real!
Good review here though; http:/www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2019-11-18/sorry-we-missed-you-wage-slavery-in-the-spotlight
JOKER is an insightful, almost painfully honest look into the issues society faces with addressing mental illness in an adequate fashion. Also a believable, canon-worthy take on the potential origins of The Joker as a character.
While many have claimed that such a film may ignite waves of violence and the like, I do believe that this should also serve as an eye-opener, an epiphany for how severely we fail those who do have such conditions.
Judy and Punch. Really enjoyed this. Very complex film. Visually amazing.
Recently saw the Irishman when it was released in cinemas. Excellent film, the acting is genuinely incredible and a good reminder of what De Niro is capable of when he's not doing shithouse comedies for spare change. There's a lot of working class content in the film but it's solely examined from the angle of corrupt union officials like Jimmy Hoffa and his goons, so people on here might be a bit disappointed with it.
Also recently saw Hands Over the City by Francesco Rosi, another excellent film. Set in Naples and filmed on location, it's essentially about a conflict between a corrupt property developer Nottola, played by Rod Steiger, and a local Communist Party politician De Vita, played by a guy named Carlo Fermariello, who was actually a local Communist Party politician in real life. A building collapses in a slum and Nottola's son is likely responsible. The Communists manage to force a resolution through parliament establishing an inquiry into the collapse. The rest of the film is about how the conflict between the property developers and communists and the citizenry play out.
It portrays the dynamics of local electoral politics very well. Rosi obviously favours De Vita, but true to neorealist form, he does not allow the entire film to be bent towards this conclusion. Unlike most films which are constructed in such a manner so as to make the hero the centrepiece and ultimate point of the film, the heroism of De Vita emerges naturally out of the depicted events, and the critical distance allows you to question exactly how much of a hero De Vita is in the end -- his flaws are certainly apparent.
The cinematography is excellent too. Pairs well with Rosi's previous film Salvatore Giuliano.
The latest Joker movie. It was truly a masterpiece. Joaquin Phoenix is criminally underrated as an actor.
This useful article justifies a cross reference to the film thread:
https://libcom.org/blog/american-dream-meets-chinese-dream-nightmare-fuyao-avenue-31012020
Edit: Also mentioned and linked by Craftwork on the 'TV's you like thread.
Parasite. It's ok.
Little Joe, really enjoyed it, great Sunday night film.
Anyone else here seen Richard Jewell? Definitely an interesting film. Has a lot of flaws, but doesn't really try to hide them either, eg you can very clearly see the limits of Eastwood's "libertarianism", right wing anti-"mainstream media" populism, etc.
I'm still making up my mind on the issue of the way they suggest a reporter had sex with an FBI agent to get a leak. She's since passed away but the people at her newspaper are defending her strongly, saying the accusation is totally false. The screenwriter has responded defending the depiction, suggesting it's a kind of diversion away from the otherwise very accurate criticisms of the paper for essentially ruining the dude's life for a bit.
It's nice to watch a film that doesn't make heroes out of cops or mainstream journalists for once; one of the main ideas in the film is that the government and media are not opposing forces like some journalists want to make out, but that they're in a symbiotic relationship together with "the little guy" as their victim. One of the ways this symbiosis is depicted is through the ditzy evil female journalist exchanging sex for info from the evil FBI man. Naturally as a socialist I'm sympathetic to the overall gist of the film but I also think the accusations of sexism are understandable
Free State of Jones, about a group of runaway slaves and confederate deserters who formed a community in a swamp before organising a force to drive off the confederacy. Its based on a true story, and has the most blatant class war messaging I've seen from a mainstream film.
Also criticises the Union for its lack of interest in ensuring abolition or supporting the Southern population that did oppose the confederacy and the plantations. It also covered the period of reconstruction and how the wealthy former rebels were able to walk back into power as if nothing happened.
The actions a bit lacklustre, but the acting all round is pretty solid.
Sounds like a good film Reddebrek, might give it a watch. I can't think of any other films about reconstruction off the top of my head that are actually decent -- I don't think you can't really depict that era honestly without having "class war messaging" in it anyway
Reddebrek
Film sounds good. There was an article about runaway slave communities recently that was interesting, they repeatedly mention the fact that the head archaeologist is a marxist, which is interesting.
Freakishly, a sort of class-war film from Hollywood. Watchable.
From the David North Trots --
1) Interview with the author of the book 'Free State of Jones', on which its based, Part 1 and then part 2:
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/07/12/byn1-j12.html?view=article_mobile
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/07/13/byn2-j13.html?view=article_mobile
2) Article, 'The South's Inner Civil War' :
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/07/26/civi-j26.html?view=article_mobile
Interview with author of 'The South's Inner Civil War' :
http://intsse.com/wswspdf/en/articles/2016/08/16/inte-a16.pdf
Dark Waters. I would really recommend it. A true story of how a corporate lawyer took on the Du Pont chemical company. It's very well made and detailed and does not dumb down the issues. I did shed a tear. It taught me a lot about some issues (so-called forever chemicals) that I did not know. I would recommend this film. Made by Todd Haynes who also made the film Carol.
http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-forgotten-neoliberal-man-of-parasite.html
Uncut Gems. Pretty good. 4****.
Castle in the Sky. First class Studio Ghibli film on Netflix.
La Odisea de los giles/The Heroic Losers (2019)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLGouIpUrXg
Nightcrawler. Netflix. Pretty good.
The Last Jedi; well about 3/4 of it. It really is not very good at all. But the Chinese Pirate copy does have little biographies of each character in English and Chinese when they appear, those are quite amusing.
Wild Tales- an Argentinean anthological movie on the theme of revenge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUnXv6R2HI8
Cinderella - South Korean horror about plastic surgery
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcvU83PZ_r8
featured in this dissertation:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.873.8225&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Perfect Candidate - Saudi movie
https://greatmodernthings.com/item/the-perfect-candidate
I rewatched Clerks and Patterson, both great films. Now I'm watching The King of Staten Island on demand, it's pretty good so far.
Misbehaviour. True story of the women who protested at the 1970 Miss World contest. It had the best intentions but is really pretty dire.
Hobbits
The Vast of Night - low budget sci-fi film set in late 1950s New Mexico. Very compelling despite being mostly talking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vast_of_Night
5 Bloods.
I watched "Peeping Tom", a film I have heard discussed a lot and was very controversial in it's day. I was quite disapointed. Maybe I am seeing it too much from today's perspective but it seemed strangely shallow. It got hammered for the content at the time but it looked quite a corny piece of work with brutal killings added. It is more interesting in what it reveals about the social assumptions of the time it was made than as an examination of misogynist violence or fetishism. Anyway that is one off the list.
Khawaga
Is it good? It looked good even thjough for some reaosn I don't really like Spike Lee (I think I have only ever watched one of his films, which I thought was ok)
Spike Lee has always been hit or miss for me. While there are some interesting parts, it's mostly a miss.
Rewatches of The Truman Show and Blade Runner 2049.
Whiplash. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d_jQycdQGo
I chose it because it has a high rating on IMDB and I was intrigued by the description & trailer.
I really enjoyed it, great acting and it twists at your emotions. However, I worry about what message people will draw from this movie.
Episode one of the Good Lord Bird, the miniseries about John Brown -- Ethan Hawke's acting is very good, no question there, but it's a bit lacklustre overall. I knew from one of the opening quotes that it was going to be a weird watch:
The aesthetics are Tarantino-ish, which would otherwise fit a show about the activities of a man dedicated to ending slavery through guerrilla warfare, but they don't seem appropriate here. They make Brown seem more insane than I think he actually was, perhaps to play up the dynamic about "white hero vs. white saviour".
Trial of the Chicago Seven - very disappointing, hammed-up and diverges from the actual events very significantly
sherbu-kteer
Good to know, thanks for the heads up. I only have a vague familiarity with what happened so I'll know now to take it with a grain of salt when I watch. What were some of the biggest discrepancies?
The biggest issue I had was Sorkin making the lead prosecutor a sympathetic liberal with a conscience when in reality he wasn't like that at all. You'll know what I mean when you watch
Only halfway through cos short attention span, but I've been watching The Day Shall Come, the new-ish Chris Morris film that I totally managed to miss coming out last year, about FBI entrapment. Kind of makes sense as a conceptual follow-up to Four Lions. Is very good, a bit jarring to see him who plays Nandor from What We Do In The Shadows as a paedophile/FBI informant though.
sherbu-kteer
Ugh, gross.
Not watched it yet but on the 30th of October a yearly film festival is going online instead with several horror movies. The theme is scary films in the public domain (and Incubus)
https://youtu.be/p-y3sUeWeg8
It'll be on twitch, you can watch without an account but you'll need one to take part in chat functions.
https://www.twitch.tv/itcamefromthedomain
"The Mole: Undercover in North Korea". Really interesting, kind of crazy. Casts a nefarious light on those weird "Friends of North Korea" groups around the place, though it's still unclear how much of the film's juicy secrets were businessmen and pro-Korea fanboys talking out of their arse.
sherbu-kteer
Yeah, overall it plays fast and loose with the real order of events, but a lot of it can be explained by the needs to make a film interesting to watch and coherent for an audience that will probably have little understanding of the events. But the prosecution is Sorkin at his most Sorkin liberalesque. The only reason to make the prosecutor seem so conscientious was to play into the narrative that the real villains were the Nixon administration and not the legal system as a whole.
There's a tv movie version from 1987 that sticks a lot closer to the actual events of the trial and had the direct participation of the defendants
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTzYgiL2HiM
Its very much a one set tv play kinda film but pretty engaging still.
Another change that on reflection annoys me is the part where one of the defendants reads out the names of American combat fatalities. In real life they included the names of Vietnamese killed too. Because it was an anti-war statement, Sorkin at times seems to forget that despite writing seven different characters constantly talking about the war being bad and paints the new left as patriots wanting to reclaim proper American values.
Still I've watched it twice, once with family, so it does fly by and my parents were a lot more sympathetic to Bobby Seale -the tv movie can't really do the gagging scene as well, but does show the weeks of intimidation and bullying and isolation Seale received during the course of the trial a lot better, and includes some additional scenes of Seale spending several court sessions not only gagged but handcuffed and leg shackled and stuffed with gauze which makes it overall more horrific- so hopefully this will be one of those films whose popularity inspires more people to look at the story a bit deeper.
There were 4 short and distinctive films from Steve McQueen titled 'Small Axe' about the experience of the West Indian 'community' in London UK in the 70's and 80s, dramas but based on historical records (including the party music scene) and shown on BBC 1 in a period devoid of much useful to watch on the UK TV. Well worth viewing. There is a short review here which concentrates however on just one key episode:
https://worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2020s/2021/no-1397-january-2021/proper-gander-14/
One of the other episodes reminded me also of some of Akala's experiences as a child growing up in north London as mentioned in his book 'Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire' reviewed elsewhere on libcom by the 'Angry Workers' group.
So in contrast to the above, it's a 'piss-take' really and at best based on humanism rather than a class perspective but this short film called 'Tribes' takes a dig at the more absurd aspects of 'identity politics' and is pretty funny I thought though I suppose some will still object. Has anyone else seen it?
Saint Frances. A 34 year old server who feels lost in life gets a nanny job looking after the daughter of a lesbian couple who also have a new baby and the mother has post-natal depression. 4.5*. Really great. Netflix.
Tenet. Christopher Nolan Inception plus. Controversially I thought it was pretty good. I think there are probably loads of plot holes if you concentrate, but I'd didn't. Would recommend.
Rose Island, a Netflix co-production with Italian film makers. Its a comedy dramatisation of Girogio Rosa and his eccentric friends and how they built their own island off the coast of Italy and declared it an independent nation La Esperanta Respubliko de la Insulo de la Rozoj belonging to the whole world. The Italian government that was busy trying to take back control of the universities didn't take kindly to this and fought to destroy it.
I didn't find it hilarious, but I laughed a few times, and I liked the performances, taps into the protest and counter culture of 1968 and its a surprising story. The dubbing was dreadful so I recommend watching subtitled if you're Italian is poor.
"Taken for a Ride" about the role of General Motors in the decline of streetcars and mass transit in the US. I'm not nostalgic about streetcar companies, but the scheming of the auto and related industries is useful info I think (as long as it's evidence-based), especially when transportation emissions are the largest greenhouse emissions in the US. There's a whole bunch of other shady stuff involving the auto, oil and other industries (besides of course these industries' exploitation of 'developing countries', their downplaying of climate change and stuff like that), the history of leaded gasoline for example, etc.
Spikymike
One small detail in those episodes - several times the older West Indians are shown listening to (and once, singing) country songs. Alongside ska & reggae, the saccharine Nashville crooner Jim Reeves and other country artists were massively popular in both the Caribbean and Africa in the 50s & 60s and the older generation would usually have at least one country record in the house.
https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2015/05/reggae-country-feature
https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-03-23/why-american-country-legend-jim-reeves-endures-nigeria
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/aug/10/st-lucia-loves-country-and-western-music-caribbean-make-mine-country
Jim Reeves was (and is) inexplicably popular everywhere! I once did a music volunteering thing in a refugee detention centre and people from Sri Lanka kept requesting I do "I Love You Because".
This useful CWO text which reviews the documentary film ''We the workers'' directed by Wenhai Huang that provides an inside look at the modern experience of Chines workers between 2009-2015 seems best place under this thread;
https://libcom.org/blog/we-workers-china-behind-scenes-12032021
Songs My Brothers Taught Me.
Farewell Amor.
Nomadland.
All very good, I enjoyed them a lot.
Ray and Liz, really good.
Saw 'Nomadland'. Very good but reflects my age and experience in recent times.
The television series Der Pass seems pretty good. Basically like the German/Austrian Dexter (ok not really) with some folkloric elements thrown in. Also has some nice music in it, "De Kinettn wo i schlof" (really only understand the "I have not shaved or showered in ten days" bit... but still up my alley)
‘The Power of the Dog’.
A Jane Campion film, that gives you a lot to think about. Well worth a watch.