Revival Circuit

Started by w/o horse, October 26, 2007, 11:11:35 PM

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

w/o horse

  Leave it to your choosing whether this topic or the more specific director or film topic suits you.  Because I now live in LA I have access to a handful of great revival theaters and a lot of times when I see one of these there doesn't feel like a place to discuss it.  So, I will here, and I hope it appeals to more people and they do too.

Three great ones in a short period.  The first was Madame de..., Max Ophüls 1953.  At the Aero as part of Kevin Thomas favorite film series.  It's a great period picture and one that doesn't betray the story by emphasizing the environment.  What it does is unfold a romance story it makes emblematic of social constrictions normal for the period, this strengthens the desires and passions of its leads because of how easy it is to emphasize with characters wanting resolution and explosive emotional content when as an audience member we're asking for the same.  We want them to let go, fix their problems, resolve their storyline, but we can't make them and they aren't doing it.  Its ability to communicate the inhibitions of the leads without forcing the leads to uncoil feels very genuine and more believable than what you see in an Amadeus from the present.

Mary, Abel Ferrara 2005 the next day again at the Aero.  I love Ferrara because Bad Lieutenant is brave and moving and because The Funeral is an intelligent and powerful crime film.  But I feel about him kind of like pete feels about Guillermo Arriaga, I think he said it in the Three Burials thread, how it seems like Arriaga doesn't know the difference between contrivance and serendipity.  Besides the two listed all of his films are pretty inconsistent.  Mary fits along with this.  It has two or three really jarring scenes, interesting character dynamics, and intelligent conversation about at least one of its major themes (the suppression and misrepresentation of female figures in the Bible).  But it also reaches into places without exploring, which might be called provocative since provocative seems sometimes to mean inconclusive and unilluminating.  All scenes involving the infilm director are included in this description - in fact his entire story line.  And Whitaker's ending.  Their purpose seems to suggest the complexity and confusion implicit in Biblical study but Ferrara so oversaturates these scenes with strong images and emotional intensity that it feels like he's other trying to say more and not accomplishing it or not sure about what he wants to say.  So the powerful of Ferrara's filmmaking overcomes his power as a storyteller.  Other times his filmmaking is weak, like in all the Whitaker television scenes.

Second Breath, Jean-Pierre Melville 1966.  Last night at the Egyptian.  Italian neorealism is for me what the French New Wave is for others, and so what continues to fascinate me the most is that semi-realistic but poetic and filmic French period just pre-andinto-New Wave, like Melville, Becker, and Bresson.  Those actually are still my favorite kind of movies, and I'm lucky that the whole world makes them now (and it literally just now occurred to me that that's obviously noir's appeal for me).  But anyway Second Breath was everything like that.  This is my favorite kind of fantasy world to enter into, where everyone seems concerned with spiritual value but are moved forward by the machinery of society.  Melville did this with criminals, here and in other films.  Second Breath has an existential value to it, you feel it in the actors, dialogue, and situations.  You feel it in the exposition and structure.  Second Breath certainly has a lot of setup.  It's a pretty long film with a middle that requires a lot of your attention.  In the end though I'm not watching a criminal complete acts introduced in the first act, I'm watching the closure to a man's journey of expressing his value as on object of this world.
Raven haired Linda and her school mate Linnea are studying after school, when their desires take over and they kiss and strip off their clothes. They take turns fingering and licking one another's trimmed pussies on the desks, then fuck each other to intense orgasms with colorful vibrators.

w/o horse

Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett 1977 and My Brother's Wedding, Charles Burnett 1983.  Last night at the Billy Wilder Theater (but the all-night horror marathon at the Aero slipped my mind until this morning so that's kind of a bummer).  These two films are a part of some movement that people kept referring to as the LA Rebellion.  There might have been a manifesto even.  That's the stuff for trivialists though, and what I saw was a great example of regional filmmaking.  In both films there's a real bleakness and gloominess hovering in the South Central, a despair that Burnett gives images too, and characters whose stories are never forcing themselves out of their location into ethereal Hollywood elements.  I don't think you could watch either film and not identify with the characters, then carry the characters around with you.  My Brother's Wedding had a stronger narrative and you could see Burnett become more a storyteller.  Killer of Sheep is raw, it stands its misery and celebrations alone, outside of plot, and the children and adults who inhabit the film burn their way into your thoughts.  Killer of Sheep reminded me of Kenneth Anger or Harmony Korine in style because each scene was meant to have its own voice.  A scene will be just a man and woman dancing to a song in front of a window.  Or a boy starting a fight with some girls on the street and the girls taking apart his bike.  These two things aren't connected other than temporal and spatial distance but Burnett connects them emotionally, and the total devastation and heartbreak of the film is brilliantly achieved.
Raven haired Linda and her school mate Linnea are studying after school, when their desires take over and they kiss and strip off their clothes. They take turns fingering and licking one another's trimmed pussies on the desks, then fuck each other to intense orgasms with colorful vibrators.

w/o horse

Blade Runner: The Final Cut, Ridley Scott 1982 and 2007.  Saturday night at The Landmark.  Made it out for this weeks late and it was still a cheering audience.  The revelation for me was just how good Harrison Ford is in this.  And how perfectly the atmosphere in Scott's future setting emulates the dreary, amoral film noir vibe.  Critics that dismiss the film as falderal must be focusing on the sci-fi robot theme too much because I don't see how this isn't obviously as tonal of a film as anything noir I've ever seen, and that this doesn't get credit while Minority Report does is biased or hypocritical or both.

However, now that I've done Blade Runner in the theater I couldn't do Blade Runner anywhere else.  It fills the fucking screen.
Raven haired Linda and her school mate Linnea are studying after school, when their desires take over and they kiss and strip off their clothes. They take turns fingering and licking one another's trimmed pussies on the desks, then fuck each other to intense orgasms with colorful vibrators.

JG

Quote from: w/o horse on October 28, 2007, 10:53:49 AM
Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett 1977 and My Brother's Wedding, Charles Burnett 1983.  Last night at the Billy Wilder Theater (but the all-night horror marathon at the Aero slipped my mind until this morning so that's kind of a bummer).  These two films are a part of some movement that people kept referring to as the LA Rebellion.  There might have been a manifesto even.  That's the stuff for trivialists though, and what I saw was a great example of regional filmmaking.  In both films there's a real bleakness and gloominess hovering in the South Central, a despair that Burnett gives images too, and characters whose stories are never forcing themselves out of their location into ethereal Hollywood elements.  I don't think you could watch either film and not identify with the characters, then carry the characters around with you.  My Brother's Wedding had a stronger narrative and you could see Burnett become more a storyteller.  Killer of Sheep is raw, it stands its misery and celebrations alone, outside of plot, and the children and adults who inhabit the film burn their way into your thoughts.  Killer of Sheep reminded me of Kenneth Anger or Harmony Korine in style because each scene was meant to have its own voice.  A scene will be just a man and woman dancing to a song in front of a window.  Or a boy starting a fight with some girls on the street and the girls taking apart his bike.  These two things aren't connected other than temporal and spatial distance but Burnett connects them emotionally, and the total devastation and heartbreak of the film is brilliantly achieved.

i missed this thread, but i'll revive it (.. bump it a few spots) to say that i've seen both killer of sheep and my brother's wedding in theaters this year and i think both are the best things ever. 

you're right about killer of sheep - its apart of a family of herzogian films that exist to give these incredible moments and/or images a context.   my brother's wedding has a stronger sense of narrative and even though its probably the less popular of the two choices, i love love love it.  seriously, see my brother's wedding. pete is always talking about soul.  this has soul.  its also the most heartbreaking thing ever. 

killer of sheep and my brother's wedding are the only two burnett movies i've seen.   

Reinhold

Killer of sheep is incredible... i caught it at the Jacob Burns last school year. The Film society and some other offices on campus are screening it (on dvd following its recent release) here at school with a discussion that should be pretty good to follow (led by my favorite professor)... i believe that it's thursday night if any NYC xixaxers feel like coming up to Purchase.
Quote from: Pas Rap on April 23, 2010, 07:29:06 AM
Obviously what you are doing right now is called (in my upcoming book of psychology at least) validation. I think it's a normal thing to do. People will reply, say anything, and then you're gonna do what you were subconsciently thinking of doing all along.

pete

will see both movies soon then, after you put it like that.  They're doing the chaplin films over here again, I think I'll go see City Lights again.  I love it too much.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

w/o horse

Diva, Jean-Jacques Beineix 1981.  At the Nuart on Monday.  Despite there being several kind of vacant thought drifting scenes this is a solid movie that is well summarized in its tagline "A Comedy. A Thriller. A Romance."  You can sometimes feel the pastiche wheels turning but the film has a serious affairs tone, a contemplative ethereal wandering camera, and straight-faced actors (the Taiwanese pirates probably excluded).  Think the lowest form of great, if you follow.

Tonight is a Head and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls double bill at the New Beverly with Edgar Wright introducing Head.  If it doesn't sell out before I get there.
Raven haired Linda and her school mate Linnea are studying after school, when their desires take over and they kiss and strip off their clothes. They take turns fingering and licking one another's trimmed pussies on the desks, then fuck each other to intense orgasms with colorful vibrators.

w/o horse

Man have I been having a great time.  Friday night I did indeed get to see Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Russ Meyer 1970 and Head, Bob Rafelson 1968 at the New Beverly with Edgar Wright, Mickey Dolenz, and Eli Roth (who was there seeing the films but not in a staying the background sort of way).  I'd never seen either; what a crowd to see the films with for the first time.  It turns out that Head by the way, if you've approached the dillusion that I had prior, is not at all the Monkees kind of movie that the Monkees show was.  It's an anarchic humor.  Dolenz said big influences on the film were Nicholson's marijuana joints and the Marx brothers.  The film is like a more rapid and more acidic (literal and pun) Meaning of Life.  Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was a holler fest.  A very quick moving film with lots of outrageous stuff going on.  Someone after said it was like two years of soap opera in under two hours and that's not a bad place to start when describing the film.

I had so much fun that I made sure to go early last night, the final night of the Edgar Wright film festival, to get good seats for Raising Arizona, Coen brothers 1987 and Evil Dead II, Sam Raimi 1987.  I'd seen these two but the energy from the audience definitely made this a great experience.  Wright called them two of his favorites films and said Raising Arizona is probably his favorite film of all time.  The camera operator for Arizona was Shaun's DP.  Then he surprised us, his "Christmas gift" for us, with a screening of Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, Ngai Kai Lam 1991.  Goddamn.  It was without hyperbole 88 minutes of the audience laughing and gasping and yelling at the screen.  A lot of us hadn't seen the film so it was funny sometimes that the first person to laugh would be Wright before the humor came.  I see that it's on DVD and if you haven't seen it already and you're the kind of person who watches movies for entertainment and possibly with a group of friends and some booze this is one you owe to yourself.  Wright's suggestion:  drink every time someone says Ricky or there's gore (from IMDb:  This was the first Hong Kong movie ever to receive a "Category III" rating for violence rather than sex).  Mike White and Eli Roth were there but stayed in the background.  Gregory Nicotero was the special guest before Evil Dead II.
Raven haired Linda and her school mate Linnea are studying after school, when their desires take over and they kiss and strip off their clothes. They take turns fingering and licking one another's trimmed pussies on the desks, then fuck each other to intense orgasms with colorful vibrators.

pete

yeah ricky oh is pretty awesome.  it's so awesome that I remember a buddy telling me about it in fourth grade.  I had no idea what he was talking about, he was this kid with missing parents and cousins in gangs, the teachers basically gave up on him so he was free to roam around and read comics all day.  one day he came to school and I just remember he was going on and on, babbling incoherently about a guy who was really powerful, and a warden who was even more powerful.  I had no idea what he was talking about but somehow that speech had always stuck with me, and became one of my few remaining memories of that kid.  I read about ricky oh in high school, but didn't see it until I was 19.  I saw it with my roommates and it was as fun and cool as everyone said it was going to be.  then I saw it twice I think at two different midnight screenings in boston.  made some friends there and then.  when ricky oh's girlfriend committed suicide the theater gave it a standing ovation.  it was a great experience, but I think the weirdest midnight screening of that type of movie still has to be Journey Into Bliss, and the best midnight screening has to be Drunken WuTang, which I consider to be the quintessential cult film (however small its following might be).  But Ricky Oh became a much sweeter memory one day last year when I finally linked my fourth grade best friend's crazed speech with the movie.  It's hard to convey or set it up, but essentially for 14 years, all I remember was the sound of his voice from that monday morning at grade school.  And then one day it just clicks that he's talking about Ricky Oh, then it becomes very clear why he's sounded so excited.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

Gamblour.

w/o horse, are you the Landmark person? I noticed they are screening next week The Red Balloon and White Mane.
WWPTAD?

w/o horse

Quote from: Gamblour. on December 18, 2007, 12:20:27 PM
w/o horse, are you the Landmark person? I noticed they are screening next week The Red Balloon and White Mane.

Are they/did they?  It was at the Neon for a week but I have no idea what this movie is.  I hope it's not one of those 'I can't belive you missed it!' movies because I try to never miss those.

Tonight is John Woo's The Killer at New Beverly.
Raven haired Linda and her school mate Linnea are studying after school, when their desires take over and they kiss and strip off their clothes. They take turns fingering and licking one another's trimmed pussies on the desks, then fuck each other to intense orgasms with colorful vibrators.

pete

I saw that at a revival screening once in Boston.  my friends had already warned me, beware of them irony-loving crowds, they will laugh the film to death.  my buddy and I went, and sure enough, everyone started laughing as soon as the music kicked in.  One laughter was particularly annoying.  I shouted "That shit ain't funny, motherfucker!" and it stopped for a minute.  but then it just got so ridiculously macho that my buddy and I started laughing too.  it was a funny movie.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

w/o horse

That's pretty much how it went for me as well.  But overall I really liked the film, especially the scene when Chow Yun-Fat is betrayed by his friend in the apartment.
Raven haired Linda and her school mate Linnea are studying after school, when their desires take over and they kiss and strip off their clothes. They take turns fingering and licking one another's trimmed pussies on the desks, then fuck each other to intense orgasms with colorful vibrators.

w/o horse

LA is outrageously awesome with upcoming screenings.

The Magnificent Ambersons tonight at the New Bev.

At the Hammer in February:  Pre-code films from Universal and Paramount (including City Streets by Rouben Mamoulian and Impatient Maiden by James Whale).  Roger Deakins and Curtis Handson presenting Army of Shadows on the 27th.

At the Nuart:  Last Year at Marienbad, playing for a week.  A BOY AND HIS DOG MIDNIGHT SCREENING WITH DIRECTOR L.Q. JONES IN PERSON FEB 8 (my caps).

At the Aero:  Spirited Away, Darling, Shampoo, The Parallax View, Videodrome, The Bitter Tea of General Yen.  February 16th fucking Tobe Hooper is doing live commentary for Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

At the Egyptian:  The Iron Horse, Diary of the Dead.  They're ending February with DGG's full line up leading into Snow Angels.

I'm going to have to make a goddamn calendar.
Raven haired Linda and her school mate Linnea are studying after school, when their desires take over and they kiss and strip off their clothes. They take turns fingering and licking one another's trimmed pussies on the desks, then fuck each other to intense orgasms with colorful vibrators.

w/o horse

#14
L.Q. Jones is the nicest person I've ever come across who is in the industry.
Raven haired Linda and her school mate Linnea are studying after school, when their desires take over and they kiss and strip off their clothes. They take turns fingering and licking one another's trimmed pussies on the desks, then fuck each other to intense orgasms with colorful vibrators.