Revival Circuit

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

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w/o horse

Quote from: samsong on May 16, 2008, 07:36:36 PM
i was going to go to that.  they bring it back at least once a year.  one of the best movie-going experiences of my life, seeing a 70 mm print of playtime.
also wanted to go see the "super rare!" 70 mm print of apocalypse now tonight but the laker game is on, and i don't feel like driving.

Playtime's going to be at the Aero Sunday, May 25.  You don't even have to wait a year.  Last year when it came through I think I had just moved to LA, and didn't last year they also show other movies, maybe it was even a Tati retrospective I don't know, because didn't Trafic play?

Quote from: 72teeth on May 17, 2008, 03:48:34 AM
I saw Pulp Fiction on tuesday... man i forgot how great that movie is.

I saw Reservoir Dogs last night (at the New Bev).  My new favorite scene is Mr. White prepping Mr. Orange for the heist, the "hit his nose with the butt of your gun" and look at the bitch who is giving you shit like she's next and "see if she don't shut the fuck up" scene.  "I'm hungry, let's get a taco."
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.

72teeth

Quote from: w/o horse on May 17, 2008, 01:53:53 PM
Quote from: 72teeth on May 17, 2008, 03:48:34 AM
I saw Pulp Fiction on tuesday... man i forgot how great that movie is.

I saw Reservoir Dogs last night (at the New Bev).  My new favorite scene is Mr. White prepping Mr. Orange for the heist, the "hit his nose with the butt of your gun" and look at the bitch who is giving you shit like she's next and "see if she don't shut the fuck up" scene.  "I'm hungry, let's get a taco."

cool, ill take note, theyre playing dogs next wednesday down here and Lebowski this wednesday....
Doctor, Always Do the Right Thing.

Yowza Yowza Yowza

w/o horse

Escape from New York and Escape from LA double feature was everything I wanted it to be.  John Carpenter honestly said that he wouldn't mind spending the rest of his days on his couch playing videogames (he had just beaten Ninja Gaiden II) and watching basketball.  His final words:  "I have a meeting with my drug dealer now."  He was a total bad ass and yet open and approachable.  He also said that after Christine he started feeling like his name was taking over the credits and that's why he stopped taking credit for some of the things he continued doing for his films but stopped taking credit for.
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

  An Umberto Lenzi triple feature at the Egyptian, Assault with a Deadly Weapon, Almost Human, and The Cynic, The Rat and the Fist went well beyond my expectations.  Especially Assault and The Cynic.  Similar sensibilities to American exploitation films of the 70s.  A Sergio Corbucci double feature, The Mercenary and Navajo Joe was great for the former and kind of dragged during the latter.  In all films what impressed me was the rich character detail and inventive, unrestricted filmmaking.  It's not often now that I see films that fully engage me and here was a handful of films that did.

  I've been blowing off the Godard retrospective for the Italian Grindhouse, but Wednesday I'm going to be at the Aero for Two or Three Things I Know About Her and Band of Outsiders.  Tonight or tomorrow night I'll be at the New Bev for Wet Hot American Summer.
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

A charmingly inneffective film was Midnight Madness, the film that played before Wet Hot last night.  A perfect pair it turned out.  Madness is this absurdly simplistic scavenger hunt film, literally, and literally as in it's a film about a scavenger hunt and its narrative is a scavenger hunt of conventional filmic drama and comedy.  An accidental parody or an awesome and hilarious parody, it's really difficult to tell, and you could sense that all of us in the audience (like ten of us) were unsure if it was awful or brilliant for the first half hour.  Then everyone gave in the film started getting big laughs.  I recommend as a party film.

It also has this humorous trivia bit at IMDb:

QuoteThe movie inspired Joe Belfiore, a high school junior in Clearwater, Florida, to create a similar game. He took the game with him to Stanford University, then ultimately to Microsoft. The Game, as it came to be called, in turn, inspired the movie The Game (1997).
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

Compulsiveness led me to see Spartacus (Aero Theater).  It's my final Kubrick, the last of his works unseen to me.  I'd been avoiding it because of a dislike for sword and sandal epics, because of stories about Kubrick's troubles over control, and because it always seems to be placed outside of the rest of his films in conversation and criticism.  I didn't expect to like it as much as I did.  It was the script and score that I liked the most, even though the second half the film felt padded and too concerned about accountability.  The characters were all distinct people, it made me realize how many contemporary period films will simply have the "fighter personality" the "leader personality", etc, without concern for the details and life of its characters.  If historical accuracy is notably sacrificed in achieving this, and maybe a show like Deadwood shows you don't have to make that sacrifice, it's a valuable trade to have emotionally enriched characters.  Insanely quotable too.  The new documentary about Dalton Trumbo had reviewers everywhere commenting on the sorely missed verbal wit of Trumbo, on the elegance of his prose and speech, and those qualities were a big part of the success of Spartacus.

Two other epics I experienced recently were Once Upon a Time In America (Aero) and Inglorious Bastards (New Bev).  Once Upon hosted sensational sequences, absolutely incredible sequences that were highly engaging if not properly motivated.  I don't think the narrative is as fluid as it should be.  This I'm sure has much to do with the cut footage.  What works is fascinating and memorable.

Inglorious Bastards I don't have much to say about.  It was a serious error confusing my expectations for QT's film with this film, which doesn't have much to offer.  What my friend and I both were thinking and discussed afterward was that the most impressive part of the film is the scope of the production compared to the small accomplishments of the script.  It's appropriate the same thing could be said about Tropic Thunder.
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

The Exiles, at the Billy Wilder.  I read the Ebert review just now because I don't know how to talk about this film, and in his review Ebert mainly describes the film, which if you want the film described here is Ebert:

QuoteHomer Nish is one of several American Indians who are followed for most of a day and all of a night in Kent MacKenzie"s "The Exiles," a sad and beautiful film about a group of hard-timers in Los Angeles, circa 1960. MacKenzie was a USC film student at the time; he died in 1980. His film, photographed in stunning 35mm b&w by Erik Daarstad, Robert Kaufman and John Morrill, would have been a key work of the New American Cinema, the Cassavetes generation, if it had ever been seen. It played three film festivals, never got picked up for distribution, has survived only in a low-quality 16-mm print. Now the UCLA Film and Television Archive has restored it, apparently working from the original materials, and it looks like it was made yesterday. Milestone has picked it up, will exhibit it in "selected theaters," and then release it on DVD. It is like cracking open a time capsule.

"The Exiles" in the title are Indians who have left reservations to live in Los Angeles. They were already exiles, of course, when they lost their ancestral lands and were confined to the reservations. Those we meet are alcoholics, marginally employed, locked in a cycle of drinking and carousing and fighting all night. In footage shot over many months, MacKenzie used his "cast" to recreate a typical day. It begins in the kitchen of Homer's wife, Yvonne Williams, the most sympathetic character. She fries pork chops and serves them on white bread to her husband and his buddy Tommy Reynolds, and then the two join friends in a convertible, drop her off at an "all-nite" movie, and hit the town.

I think it's surviving because it's both nostalgic and resentful, beautiful and bitter, uplifting and depressing.  It's not a tragic film but it is - sometimes people get stuck.  And in this film these Indians are stuck in LA.  There's no direction to their lives, there's nothing hopeful presented through the narrative, but the details of their lives as explored by the film contain the entire, complete and complex range of human emotions.  It's full lives they live, with disparate levels of passion and intensity, and the film reminded me that the above all, while society shifts and shapes into some impersonal glob, we'll all still live our lives of personal pain and triumph.

Believe me I'd tell you why the film is so great if I could.  It's definitely not found in its filmmaking prowess alone - like Burnett's Killer of Sheep (he was appropriately a producer/presenter for this restoration) - I mean you can't describe a shot from Killer of Sheep or The Exiles and recreate the true experience you had of seeing the moment.  The Exiles is one of those films you feel.

It's very good.

Tomorrow 7:30 PM Last Man on Earth & Omega Man  & 12 Monkeys at the Aero.  Then I'm driving across town for:



at the New Bev.

P.S.  Some AMAZING shit going down at the Silent Movie Theater in October.
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

I did some fancy number crunching to get across town by midnight from the triple feature that started at 7:30.  As in I had no shot at making it for The Gate.

Last Man on Earth is still a kind of boring movie that's more important than good, The Omega Man is pretty ridiculous and I contemplated napping the whole way through, and 12 Monkeys is better than I remembered.  Most sci-fi/time traveling/movies in general should kill for a script as cohesive and involving.
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

OK so...here you are, and you live in LA, or nearby, and you like movies and whatnot, and you have time available April 8:  tell me how the hell you are going to miss this:

april 8, 9

    * Two by John Cassavetes!

    * Minnie and Moskowitz (1971)
          o 7:30

    * Love Streams (1984)

New Beverly Cinema.
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.

john

Fuck yeah.

I like it when The New Beverly redeems itself liked this for it's lesser, shittier, choices.

Godard's Made In The U.S.A. is playing in San Francisco at the Castro - and, presumably, in other cities as well. I'm seeing it tomorrow. I am properly excited.
Maybe every day is Saturday morning.

SiliasRuby

I'm in W/O Horse. I just saw a double feature of ishtar and joe vs. the volcano last night. So much fucking fun...I have to write up a article on 'ishtar', defending it.
The Beatles know Jesus Christ has returned to Earth and is in Los Angeles.

When you are getting fucked by the big corporations remember to use a condom.

There was a FISH in the perkalater!!!

My Collection

JG

minnie and moscowitz is the only cassavettes movie i've seen a film print of, and i've seen it twice. its pretty amazing. but love streams. i've never seen it, and if i'm not mistaken, its pretty hard to find. go see it!

john

Last Saturday I went to a screening of Nobuhiko Obayashi's House at the Castro Theater. It was, appropriately, terrific. Momentarily terrifying, absurd, and beautiful. Like David Lymch describing the plot of a Hayao Miyazaki film - an absolutely wonderful discovery.

I'd had some growing reservations about the crowd I imagined would show up to this. Primarily due to conversations by people who seem to want to see this for all the wrong reasons, (It's fucked up! it's stupid!") and because Pete hit the nail on the head in the Alice in Wonderland thread:

Quote from: pete on April 04, 2010, 11:43:17 AM
castro is a sad case of a theater brought to its knees by a shitty film crowd.  San Fran has like a dozen indie theaters, but they have not found a way to build a relevant, exciting crowd, nevermind exciting programming.  everything is a scene in this city, and moviegoing becomes especially shallow when it has to compete with great comedy, good bands, AND great weather.  I'm sick of revival theaters playing second run indies or The Big Lebowski.  Seriously.  The curators seem to have no connection no balls and most of all, no cash.

The main perpetrator being Jesse Hawthorne, who curates the "Midnites for Maniacs" series at the Castro. Monthly double and triple features complimented by the occasional rare or interesting print... but mostly an irony-free embracing of shit like Hackers and Jennifer's Body. Screenings he usually introduces with a gratingly sincere declaration of how "important" these films are and how you shouldn't enjoy them for any reason other than that they are actually good films.

1.) It's terrible to have to urge anyone to enjoy a film without irony. Clearly, you are doing something wrong in your programming.

2.) It's terrible to tell people to enjoy shit like Hackers irony-free. There's no reason to enjoy that film otherwise and, even drenched in irony, it's charms are debatable.


Hawthorne, uselessly, introduced House and (surprisingly) his pleas for sincerity might have actually been useful here. Instead we got a packed crowd with an unfortunate portion of the audience laughing at the film consistently. Not out of surprise or bewilderment, but at the same repeating images and even at some actually beautiful images. Like they were above the film. There are plenty of things on view in the film that can illicit a worthy laugh, but this laughter was different. It was condescending at a film that was too technically and emotionally accomplished to deserve condescension.

It wasn't too large a portion of the crowd to ruin the experience. It was just a mild irritation but an unfortunate one, nonetheless.

Shitty film crowds might not dominate revival theaters, but there are a lot of great revival theaters in California and a lot of terrible scenesters showing up to them. Don't let these fuckers win.

Also, go see House if you have the chance, y'all. It's fucking wonderful.
Maybe every day is Saturday morning.

pete

john, as awful person as I might turn out to be, you and I need to go on a movie date.
I actually turned down the chance to see House because I was urged to by a sincere girl who has a lot of wrong film friends.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

john

Yeah, man. I think it's high time we mutually enjoy each others company... I'm pretty sure we're both  monsters that inhabit the very same jar. Our equal awfulness should finally be shared.

If not in a darkened theater, then in a room with a lot of guitars and instruments that make noises.
Maybe every day is Saturday morning.