Last Movie You Watched and Rate It | Part#: Some High Number +5

[MetalheadPenguinsFan]

The only thing I'm chasing at my age is the recliner and the remote control. .

Awesomely put...yet again.

 

[kihei]

Malina (1991) Directed by Werner Schroeter 7C

A nameless poet (Isabelle Huppert) frustrated in her art and also in turmoil because she cannot choose between the two men in her life slips ever deeply into madness. Malina is reminiscent of the descent into psychotic breakdown that the Catherine Deneuve character undergoes in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, but Polanski gives her descent an order that Malina completely disavows. What we have instead is closer to a highly fragmented stream-of-consciousness approach in which a continuous flow of emotional turmoil is internalized by Huppert’s poet. The surreal imagery is often quite striking as the poet’s world seems to slowly burn down around her, literally. People who are skeptical about art movies will run from the theatre kicking and screaming. I, myself, was ready to pull the plug after thirty minutes, but I kept watching.

The movie grew on me for two reasons. One, the stream-of-consciousness approach works better than I have seen before in movies, far better than, say, the cinematic adaption of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which never acquires anything like the flow evident in the novel. Secondly, Huppert jumps into this role feet first and is amazing to watch. I can’t think of another actress who has chosen so many risky projects and so many edgy characters to perform. Here she is intense, unflinching, and erotic all at once. All on her own she makes Malina a must to see.

Sidenote: MUBI is just great at digging up obscure works, seriously neglected works, experimental works, and short films that are almost impossible to find anywhere else. Worth checking out the site if this kind of thing appeals to you.

subtitles

MUBI

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

Malina (1991) Directed by Werner Schroeter 7C

A nameless poet (Isabelle Huppert) frustrated in her art and also in turmoil because she cannot choose between the two men in her life slips ever deeply into madness. Malina is reminiscent of the descent into psychotic breakdown that the Catherine Deneuve character undergoes in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, but Polanski gives her descent an order that Malina completely disavows. What we have instead is closer to a highly fragmented stream-of-consciousness approach in which a continuous flow of emotional turmoil is internalized by Huppert’s poet. The surreal imagery is often quite striking as the poet’s world seems to slowly burn down around her, literally. People who are skeptical about art movies will run from the theatre kicking and screaming. I, myself, was ready to pull the plug after thirty minutes, but I kept watching.

The movie grew on me for two reasons. One, the stream-of-consciousness approach works better than I have seen before in movies, far better than, say, the cinematic adaption of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which never acquires anything like the flow evident in the novel. Secondly, Huppert jumps into this role feet first and is amazing to watch. I can’t think of another actress who has chosen so many risky projects and so many edgy characters to perform. Here she is intense, unflinching, and erotic all at once. All on her own she makes Malina a must to see.

Sidenote: MUBI is just great at digging up obscure works, seriously neglected works, experimental works, and short films that are almost impossible to find anywhere else. Worth checking out the site if this kind of thing appeals to you.

subtitles

MUBI

Again a film I haven't seen in ages. I've seen 4 films by Schroeter and have them all at 8 or 9/10. Very interesting director.

Suspiria (1977) - 5/10 (Didn't like or dislike it)

An American ballet student (Jessica Harper) arrives at a dance school in Germany that harbors dark, bloody secrets. This supernatural horror is very stylish, often suspenseful and occasionally gory, but felt like an Italian ripoff of Rosemary's Baby. At first, I liked that it was similar to that classic, but I lost some interest as I realized how unoriginal and predictable that made it. The story is also not nearly as well developed and many things are just not explained at all. To disguise that, the film relies on a strong sense of style that is very colorful and surreal. Many of the scenes are bathed in artificial color (especially pink) and the film features a dreamlike soundtrack by the band Goblin. I actually liked the music, surprisingly, but the color was too artificial for me and reminded me of how scenes in some silent films were tinted to evoke a mood. I also liked the main actress, but her character isn't given much depth and felt too similar to Mia Farrow's in Rosemary's Baby (demure and dangerously naive and curious). Basically, I feel that the film lacks originality and substance and tries to make up for it in style. It worked to a point for me, but not entirely.

I fail to see how anybody could consider Suspiria a ripoff of Rosemary's Baby... why? Because of the "cult"? And what is it with substance???

The film doesn't lack originality, it might lack focus though. Argento cranked the giallo aesthetics to 11 and mixed it with the occult and true horror elements. The result is - to me anyway - superb, and pretty efficient.

If it steals from anything, it's from The Bird With the Crystal Plumage: the whole structure of the character knowing he knows something without being able to clearly remember it, having him go back many time to this original moment, which brings on a - very original (!) - layer of reflexivity to the film (in Suspiria a lot less interesting and elaborate than in The Bird). IMO it's his third best film. The best one being Profondo Rosso (Deep Red), where he also uses this gimmick. The huge difference is he cheats in both The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (with framing) and Suspiria (with sound) and the spectator doesn't have the information the character tries to remember. In Profondo Rosso, you've seen the killer, just like the character did, and you don't remember it - the investigation becomes a masterclass in reflexivity (for a film that keeps you invested in its diegesis despite the many distantiative breaks, I think it's really one of the most interesting).

The Suspiria remake is completely different and I thought I'd hate it, but it's also very good.

 

[Jevo]

Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) Directed by Tomas Guiterrez Alea 8B

If you asked a serious film buff to name five films from Caribbean countries, I’d bet a lot of money that he or she couldn’t do it. While film has exploded just about everywhere on the planet, the Caribbean remains a desert in an otherwise fertile garden. However, there are a handful of worthy films, and Memories of Underdevelopment is among the best of them. Covering the period from the victory of the Cuban revolution in 1959 to the dawning of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Memories of Underdevelopment is the story of Sergio Mendoza, an intellectual who decides to stay in Cuba after the revolution despite his complete dissatisfaction with and even rancor toward the regime. Much of the movie consists of Sergio’s monologues as he observes the world around him, his internal musings becoming a central part of his character development. Director Tomas Guiterrez Alea seems to take his approach from the French New Wave, specifically Jean Luc Godard’s political and experimental works (I don’t know this for a fact, but it sure looks that way). He combines dramatic scenes with archival footage, documentary images and scenes where actors take part in real situations as a means of showing both the depth of Sergio’s malaise but, also, interestingly, the character flaws of Sergio himself. In fact, Sergio becomes something of a portrait of the clueless intellectual—a man who thinks complex thoughts about existence but whose personal behaviour is hardly above reproach. Memories of Underdevelopment is an innovative look at post-revolutionary Cuban history as well as at the limitations of certain intellectuals who recognize their alienation but who choose to do little but complain about it.

subtitles

Criterion Channel

Does Soy Cuba count even if it was directed by a russian?

Seems I've watched Memories of Underdevelopment a couple of years back, but I have no recollection of it, so it probably didn't leave a huge impact, but the visuals seems familiar from what stills can be found with a google search. Maybe I should rewatch it some time.

 

[ORRFForever]

Awesomely put...yet again.

Thanks, meng.

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

Amityville 1992: It's About Time (Randel, 1992) - This 6th Amityville film is based on the same book as the 4th entry (the one with the lamp, but now the evil is in an old clock). A man comes home to his kids way too old to need a babysitter with an old clock he stole from "a house he tore down". The house in question appears only in a stock shot flash overlayed to his actual atrociously ugly house, and that's it. Anyway, the evil comes from the clock and preceded the mess it caused in Amityville (still, the guy is obsessed with the Amityville house and designs miniature models of it, go figure). No time to try to make sense of this thing, even though it tries real hard to be relevant (the pun in the title came to fruition as I hoped and the film really is "about time", with a circular structure and everything). It's all very dumb, absolutely inefficient as a horror film, and it has not a thing to do with the first Amityville films. Randel is responsible for the only valid Hellraiser sequel, but here he f***s up pretty bad. Problem is, it's still kind of fun! I don't know if it's really bad enough to deserve a "so bad it's good" ranking, but that's where I'll put it for now. 1/10

 

[Osprey]

I fail to see how anybody could consider Suspiria a ripoff of Rosemary's Baby... why? Because of the "cult"?

I was vague about the similarities because I didn't want to spoil the film for anyone.

Spoiler

• Girl moves into a building with character and history.
• She becomes friends with another resident who is her age.
• Friend dies suddenly and gruesomely after becoming suspicious of the establishment.
• She has a spell or charm placed on her.
• She is slipped a drug in her food by an elder witch.
• While she's out cold in bed, cultists enter her bedroom through a secret door.
• She eventually becomes suspicious of and discards the items given to her.
• She consults an expert on witchcraft for direction and learns about a past resident of the building who was into the occult.
• She snoops around the building, eventually discovering a secret door that leads her to where the cultists perform their rituals.

Of course, there are differences, too, but the similarities seem like more than coincidences, especially when you consider that Rosemary's Baby was, at the time, one of the most critically acclaimed, commercially successful and genre-defining horror films, especially of the "art horror" subgenre that Suspiria is in. I don't blame a filmmaker for being inspired to make a similar film, and Argento made a pretty good one, but I found it too similar.

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

I was vague about the similarities because I didn't want to spoil the film for anyone.

Spoiler

• Girl moves into a new building.
• Girl makes a friend with someone her age.
• Friend dies when she starts to suspect something fishy about the establishment.
• Girl has a spell or charm placed on her.
• Girl gets drugged by the establishment's elder stateswoman so that she won't wake up when they go into her bedroom at night through a secret door.
• Girl eventually becomes suspicious of and discards the items given to her.
• Girl consults an expert on witchcraft for direction and learns about a past resident of the building who was into the occult.
• Girl snoops around the building, eventually discovering a secret door that leads her to where the cultists perform their rituals.

Of course, there are differences, too, but the similarities seem like more than coincidences, especially when you consider that Rosemary's Baby was, at the time, one of the most critically acclaimed, commercially successful and genre-defining horror films, especially of the "art horror" subgenre that Suspiria is clearly also in. I don't blame a filmmaker for wanting to make a horror like it, and Argento made a pretty good one, but I found it too similar for my enjoyment and to bestow too much praise upon.

Damn... you make a pretty good case! It's so different in tone and pace, the similarities went right over my head.

 

[Osprey]

Damn... you make a pretty good case! It's so different in tone and pace, the similarities went right over my head.

It helped that I re-watched Rosemary's Baby only a few months ago. It's still really fresh in my mind .

 

[Osprey]

Sputnik (2020) - 6/10 (Liked it)

At a remote military facility, a young doctor treats a cosmonaut who returned to Earth with a parasite inside of him. This Russian sci-fi isn't really what I was expecting, which was an effects-driven horror film set largely in space. Instead, it's a minimal, slow moving, character-driven sci-fi set almost entirely on Earth that gets you thinking and is moody more than thrilling. In other words, it's more Arrival than Alien and is almost entirely about understanding the extraterrestrial creature, not fighting or running from it. It's very slow, as I mentioned, but I didn't find it boring because the premise is interesting and got me thinking. Still, it maybe could've been edited down a little in length (it's nearly 2 hours) and the plot is slightly predictable. Also, while it was interesting and kept my interest, it was never quite absorbing. Overall, I liked it, though. Because it's slow and in Russian, it's not going to be for everyone, but fans of smarter sci-fi may want to check it out.

 

[kihei]

Rebels of the Neon God (1992) Directed by Tsai Ming-liang 8B

Rebels of the Neon God is Tsai Ming-Liang’s first feature length movie and although it differs significantly from Tsai’s later highly idiosyncratic work, it is a very impressive debut. The movie employs a slice-of-life, realistic approach that examines the lives of three young men and a girl stuck in an aimless rut. None of them are “bad kids’ even the two thieves among them, but their lives in Taipei seem to have nothing going for them except bright lights, nowhere jobs (if that) and video arcades. As a result, they flail around, possessing none of the skills that they need to alter their fate, just getting through the day in an endless cycle of ineffectuality and emptiness. Rebels of the Neon God has an energy that makes the movie as easy to watch as Rebel without a Cause, an odd comparison at first glance but in many ways this film’s kindred spirit. Although not much is different at the end of the movie than it was at the beginning, at least the audience has a better understanding of the wasted potential of these lives. Somehow society has just lost track of providing a promising future for its young, a fact that these characters are well aware of. Tsai manages to present all this in his first movie with snap and style.

subtitles

Criterion Channel

 

[ORRFForever]

Sputnik (2020) - 6/10 (Liked it)

At a remote military facility, a young doctor treats a cosmonaut who returned to Earth with a parasite inside of him. This Russian sci-fi isn't really what I was expecting, which was an effects-driven horror film set largely in space. Instead, it's a minimal, slow moving, character-driven sci-fi set almost entirely on Earth that gets you thinking and is moody more than thrilling. In other words, it's more Arrival than Alien and is almost entirely about understanding the extraterrestrial creature, not fighting or running from it. It's very slow, as I mentioned, but I didn't find it boring because the premise is interesting and got me thinking. Still, it maybe could've been edited down a little in length (it's nearly 2 hours) and the plot is slightly predictable. Also, while it was interesting and kept my interest, it was never quite absorbing. Overall, I liked it, though. Because it's slow and in Russian, it's not going to be for everyone, but fans of smarter sci-fi may want to check it out.

Well said.

 

[ORRFForever]

Amityville 1992: It's About Time (Randel, 1992) - This 6th Amityville film is based on the same book as the 4th entry (the one with the lamp, but now the evil is in an old clock). A man comes home to his kids way too old to need a babysitter with an old clock he stole from "a house he tore down". The house in question appears only in a stock shot flash overlayed to his actual atrociously ugly house, and that's it. Anyway, the evil comes from the clock and preceded the mess it caused in Amityville (still, the guy is obsessed with the Amityville house and designs miniature models of it, go figure). No time to try to make sense of this thing, even though it tries real hard to be relevant (the pun in the title came to fruition as I hoped and the film really is "about time", with a circular structure and everything). It's all very dumb, absolutely inefficient as a horror film, and it has not a thing to do with the first Amityville films. Randel is responsible for the only valid Hellraiser sequel, but here he f***s up pretty bad. Problem is, it's still kind of fun! I don't know if it's really bad enough to deserve a "so bad it's good" ranking, but that's where I'll put it for now. 1/10

You`d know better than I would, P.O., but we seem to get long stretches of poor horror films. Then, every so often, we'll get a bunch of quality horror films. My guess (and feel free to tell me I'm wrong)...

A few film makers take horror in a new direction and it becomes original, scary and inventive.

Then people start copying that new style and it becomes tired and old - and that last for years as we wait for something new and inventive, again.

Does that sound right?

TBH, I can't remember the last time a movie REALLY scared me - maybe I Trapped The Devil.

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

You`d know better than I would, P.O., but we seem to get long stretches of poor horror films. Then, every so often, we'll get a bunch of quality horror films. My guess (and feel free to tell me I'm wrong)...

A few film makers take horror in a new direction and it becomes original, scary and inventive.

Then people start copying that new style and it becomes tired and old - and that last for years as we wait for something new and inventive, again.

Does that sound right?

TBH, I can't remember the last time a movie REALLY scared me - maybe I Trapped The Devil.

Answered in the horror discussion thread!

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

Amityville: A New Generation (Murlowski, 1993) - So we had the Amityville evil hiding in a lamp (4th), coming from a clock (6th), and now I guess also coming from a mirror, not clear. What is clear is we have three films either adapted (6th) or inspired (4th and 7th) by the same book: co-producer of the three film's John G. Jones' own masterpiece. This one is the worst of the lot. I guess I was served, praising Ruiz's in-camera and practical effect and the rarity of this way of doing things, well we have here one crafty director (seriously, the shot I posted above is very cool - but don't get excited, absolutely nothing else is cool about this film, that's it, this one shot). Again, the Amityville house is on the movie poster but only appears in a stock shot flash (in the mirror this time), and the film fails at producing any type of lineage - in tone, pace or themes - with the first three entries of the series. And it's no fun. 1.5/10 (I keep my 1/10 for the "so bad it's good" films, so 1.5 is really the worst rating I can give a film)

 

[ORRFForever]

Answered in the horror discussion thread!

Any particular post?

 

[ItsFineImFine]

On Ze Rocks (2020) - 6/10

I think the Bill Murray + Rashida Jones scenes were fairly good but the rest was quite bland. And the chemistry between Rashida Jones & the husband was just strange. I think it just ended up being such an ordinary story, it's like the story from a bad romcom but they made it a bit classier and more watchable at the expense of it being fun.

Also I need to order some shawarma.

 

[kihei]

On Ze Rocks (2020) - 6/10

I think the Bill Murray + Rashida Jones scenes were fairly good but the rest was quite bland. And the chemistry between Rashida Jones & the husband was just strange. I think it just ended up being such an ordinary story, it's like the story from a bad romcom but they made it a bit classier and more watchable at the expense of it being fun.

Also I need to order some shawarma.

What a great idea. Double the order, please.

 

[Langdon Alger]

On Ze Rocks (2020) - 6/10

I think the Bill Murray + Rashida Jones scenes were fairly good but the rest was quite bland. And the chemistry between Rashida Jones & the husband was just strange. I think it just ended up being such an ordinary story, it's like the story from a bad romcom but they made it a bit classier and more watchable at the expense of it being fun.

Also I need to order some shawarma.

Just ate a Shawarma. Pretty tasty.

 

[ORRFForever]

Just ate a Shawarma. Pretty tasty.

I had Cantonese Chow Mein after Church. I COATED it with Sriracha sauce. Pretty darn good.

I just wish there was some hockey to watch.

 

[Chili]

Gun Crazy-1950

Love on the run. Fans of movies like Bonnie & Clyde & High Sierra would enjoy this film. Well made with some impressive footage filmed from the back of moving vehicles.

 

[Chili]

I just wish there was some hockey to watch.

Hear you. Could get interesting to see what the NHL does, especially if the Olympics are believed to be a go next summer. Don't see how they can play a full season.

 

[Langdon Alger]

I had Cantonese Chow Mein after Church. I COATED it with Sriracha sauce. Pretty darn good.

I just wish there was some hockey to watch.

Netflix for me tonight.

 

[ORRFForever]

Netflix for me tonight.

Is signing up for Netflix for 30 FREE days difficult?

Is it hard to stop it before the charges kick in?

 

[ORRFForever]

Hear you. Could get interesting to see what the NHL does, especially if the Olympics are believed to be a go next summer. Don't see how they can play a full season.

I'm hoping they don't start until late January so all the U-20 players can play at the World Juniors.