Quarantine Filmz

[jenkins]

Clifford -- it's a family movie that doesn't feel anything like a family movie, it's a comedy that doesn't feel anything like a comedy, with a sweet message about Clifford being an example of a bad child, as in the thing is don't be like Clifford who pushes people away when they interfere with his dreams, and occurs to Clifford on account of his wanting to go to Dinosaur World so badly, and you do watch him break apart older men who themselves become awful, and Mary Steenburgen is the only light in the tunnel, which is why Clifford carries his dinosaur figurine bestfriend who is also a touch wild, plus now and then Clifford plays a recorder he carries in his magical pockets. by the end of the movie he goes through a roller coaster loop without wearing safety straps and it's like goddamn i wish i had been Martin Short and the star of that movie, everybody dreaming this with me. a true, honest-to-god champion in the manchild subgenre

Palm Springs -- traditional love-conquers-all propaganda, but, also, in the timeloop subgenre . i can be seduced by niches and science shit (quantum theory here). i like the sideplot involving the sister betraying the sister. that was "successfully developed." how successfully developed is this movie? well in the big picture life is bullshit and don't die alone, so it's a less-funny-Clifford that's strong-on-romance, and both as good and bad as movies are. the highest rank in the timeloop subgenre is Groundhog Day

Je t'aime, je t'aime -- this is my own Groundhog Day, one that inspired Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and i watched it owing it to feeling lukewarm after Palm Springs, but now i can actually be easier on Palm Springs too, because they do hit differently. Je t'aime, je t'aime pretty much kills it by employing an editing method i've seen in Muriel, or the Time of Return and Don't Look Now too. the protagonist's psychology is being organized by quick-witted editing, and this is a scifi movie in which okay but get this--get this--scientists, because they understand science more than people, they consider it a good idea to test time travel that might kill somebody on a person who isn't afraid to die, so they handselect a person who recently attempted to kill himself, to relive his past year of life, thinking he isn't afraid of death, but somehow not a goddamn scientist in the room considers that he might not want to relive this particular year, and by the end he rediscovers the reason he wanted to kill himself. this also means the movie ends problem oriented rather than general existential

later i: edited out certain outlandish typos

[wilder]

Clifford -- it's a family movie that doesn't feel anything like a family movie, it's a comedy that doesn't feel anything like a comedy, with a sweet message about Clifford being an example of a bad child, as in the thing is don't be like Clifford who pushes people away when they interfere with his dreams, and occurs to Clifford on account of his wanting to go to Dinosaur World so badly, and you do watch him break apart older men who themselves become awful, and Mary Steenburgen is the only light in the tunnel, which is why Clifford carries his dinosaur figurine bestfriend who is also a touch wild, plus now and then Clifford plays a recorder he carries in his magical pockets. by the end of the movie he goes through a roller coaster loop without wearing safety straps and it's like goddamn i wish i had been Martin Short and the star of that movie, everybody dreaming this with me. a true, honest-to-god champion in the manchild subgenre

I haven’t seen it since I was a child and am excited to revisit the blu when it hits. Though I’ve got vague memories about how dark the whole thing (especially the final Dinosaur World sequence) was, your review seems to confirm that it's mining something stranger than most movies targeted at that age group.

This shouldn't exist. It's a one-joke movie: Martin Short pretends to be the child from The Bad Seed as he tortures Charles Grodin. Short's face is in constant motion. Grodin's face is a mask of pure rage, never played as a joke, always bubbling with anger.

It's Problem Child dialed up to 11, the absurdity of the premise underlined by the fact that it's all adults behind the scenes. Here, they are just painful, destructive, and murderous. If Grodin brutally murdered Martin Short, the audience would nod in agreement.

I rewatched John Huston’s The Misfits (1961) last night. The movie is ripe with the feeling of looming personal apocalypse.

The Misfits is a haunted film. It features a trio of utterly doomed sex symbols. It was Clark Gable’s last film, he would die only two weeks after filming had completed, some say as a direct cause of stunts performed in the film. The Misfits is also Marilyn Monroe’s last completed film and hers is the most eerily prophetic performance. The Misfits also documents Montgomery Clift’s last gasp of life. After The Misfits, Clift would relentlessly pursue a self-destructive path that ultimately led to his suicide. The Misfits accidentally recorded finality.

The fact that the trio in The Misfits were all singularly representative of sex and celebrity at different stages of Hollywood’s history is an astounding thing when contemplating the cultural implications of casting them together in a film like this. That it was each one’s last gasp of cinematic life gives the film an inconsolably elegiac quality. The film is basically about a group of misfit cowboys and a beautiful divorcé that set out to wrangle wild mustangs in order to sell them to be grounded up into dog food. Since the screenplay was written by none other than Arthur Miller, the metaphor inherent in the synopsis should be painfully self-evident. Miller wrote it with his then-wife Monroe in mind. This also adds to the creepiness of the character dilemma. You get the feeling that no one's really playing a character but dreamlike versions of themselves.

[WorldForgot]

Clifford - a true, honest-to-god champion in the manchild subgenre

lol! Too true.

That and Tammy and the T Rex should play Mission Tiki Drive In theatre while Drive Inz are in the air, so to speak. I've long wanted to watch The Misfits and je t'aime, je taime (and Marienbad!). Used to have a John Huston biography with a great full page print of this poster:

Spoiler: ShowHide

Watched Tommy today. A rightful trip, cuz Ken Russell's team of collaborators rulez.

[jenkins]

one perspective is that a viewer is not a person waiting to be entertained, but a pianist sitting in front of a sheet of music. and the idea is that the greater the skill of the viewer, the greater the gift of the creator. art only gives what you put into it: summary. and that perspective refers to interpreting stuff that has a lot of stuff to interpret. did you interpret everything you could have? are you a good interpreter? this thought model is actually based on pianists and ballerinas, who are doomed if they weren't trained as children. but i think this analogy is a logical fallacy: i don't think that it's first a matter of what the thing has to offer. i think that it's first a matter of what you can offer the thing. if you're going to love, love all way, in general, that's my opinion

and from a human perspective, if your perspective comes from love, it's always right. so anyway Show Boat is the Children of Paradise of the early-20th-century American south, from the director of Waterloo Bridge. there's both realdeal blackface and Paul Robeson and Hattie McDaniel. there's both realdeal blackface and towering figures in black hollywood during the golden age, such as Mammy from Gone With the Wind. but so you're looking at a homosexual director from the golden age, and while social processing one strays from the question: based on their living reality, does everybody feel honest, does everybody feel strong? is it a decentralized narrative or a centralized narrative with sidecharacters--one person's narrative or everybody's? and the narrative is mostly the white people chosen as the lead protagonists, in terms of actual narrative, but it's everybody in terms of who matters, emotionally speaking, and with crucial songs considered

and here is everything mixed together

everybody mixed together is a crucial aspect of the movie, not "progressive" but "basic human shit" from two New Yorkians, really, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, borrowed from Edna Ferber

[wilder]

one perspective is that a viewer is not a person waiting to be entertained, but a pianist sitting in front of a sheet of music. and the idea is that the greater the skill of the viewer, the greater the gift of the creator. art only gives what you put into it: summary. and that perspective refers to interpreting stuff that has a lot of stuff to interpret. did you interpret everything you could have? are you a good interpreter? this thought model is actually based on pianists and ballerinas, who are doomed if they weren't trained as children. but i think this analogy is a logical fallacy: i don't think that it's first a matter of what the thing has to offer. i think that it's first a matter of what you can offer the thing. if you're going to love, love all way, in general, that's my opinion

[jenkins]

lol

it’s just that i believe one’s own imaginative faculties are involved in interpretations. for example if you sit in front of sheet music for mary had a little lamb, well, make mary sound as she never has before

[jenkins]

News from Home and Je tu il elle and Les rendez-vous d’Anna -- they're like the cinematic, autobiographic version of Chronicle of a Summer, when they are like that, which they can be, though also they can posses a purely cinematic perspective, as in just long, patient shots. an example of a remarkable long shot is when Anna finally meets her mother in Les rendez-vous d’Anna. it's at a train station and the sound is cut from their first encounter, such that we can't hear their first words, not until we're inside a restaurant, which scene also begins wordless. then when Anna slumbers with her mother we hear a story from Anna, and every other time we listen to the story of another. for example a truly poignant scene within Je tu il elle is when the truck driver tells the story of his adult life, after Akerman, the lead actress, gives him a handjob. and the final man in Les rendez-vous d’Anna does a fullon existential thing that sounds like a true complication related to the human condition. News from Home was made after Je tu il elle, and after Jeanne Dielman, after Akerman had left NYC, but it was shot in NYC, and Akerman reads letters her mother wrote her after she first arrived in NYC. it's both true to say there's a rawness to these movies and that there's formal rigor. Jeanne Dielman has a formal audacity that's made it famous but within each of these other three movies there is a sense of concept too, and they thematically, artistically interlink like the Koker trilogy. i adore Akerman's relationship with her mother, and while watching these movies i was rereading from My Mother Laughs. it's not about scripts it's about life, which is a favorite kind of thing of mine

[jenkins]

Tampopo -- the layers captivate me. to provide a western-culture analogy: it's Kurt Russell in Big Trouble in Little China (the link: Kurt Russel was a truck driver who fell upon adventure), crossed with Zemeckis-levels of pure-imagination, and with a lead who is something like Ripley and Sarah Connor. that's to describe the main narrative elements, concerning the construction of an impressive ramen shop. but, again with the layers, the development of a winning ramen store, and the story of each person who helps build the idea of a ramen shop, plus the yakuza in a food-sex relationship, and this is the opening of the movie

the layers

so the director began when he was fifty and he either did or did not commit suicide by falling from a building

One theory is that Itami's suicide was forced by members of the Goto-gumi yakuza faction. A former member of the Goto-gumi faction told journalist Jake Adelstein in 2008, “We set it up to stage his murder as a suicide. We dragged him up to the rooftop and put a gun in his face. We gave him a choice: jump and you might live or stay and we’ll blow your face off. He jumped. He didn’t live.”

plus it's Tati to which everybody compares writer/director Juzo Itami

Every so often, Itami was compared to his then recently deceased French counterpart, Jacques Tati, who utilised similar styles of critiquing their society's cultural transition while crafting films with trenchant distinctions in humour and sadness. They also had almost similar, brief numbers of films that they directed and wrote before their death and they also used similar elements in the majority of their films.

i'm currently quoting his imdb biography

Known to choose the subjects of his films through everyday observations, he often followed up significant events in his life with films depicting idiosyncrasies that he felt were unique to the evolving Japanese culture. He was the definition of an iconoclast who took the great Molière's words to heart, "castigat ridendo mores" (criticise customs through humour).

[wilberfan]

I loved Tampopo back in the day (saw it first-run).  It's been decades since I've seen it, worth a re-watch I think.  Had no idea the director met a dark fate.

[jenkins]

Shirley -- are Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg equally impressive? certainly their level of ability is complimentary at least. Moss is listed as a producer here too, and Martin Scorsese is listed as an executive producer. Josephine Decker of course gets things that you can't learn and you're just born with. it's not a finely tuned biopic it's a finely tuned movie, and i adore the dutch psychological angle. it's a thriller and the villain is vague existentialism. most of these scenes truly crackle and the degree to which the camera helps orient the narrative perspective is impressive. some snobbery shittalking which is among the harshest shittalking known to human kind, second only to the brutal observations of children. i actually didn't like watching this movie but i wasn't in the proper mindset. if i were in the proper mindset this movie would be there for me

Climax -- although the premise is, in some ways, silly, it's also so fully comprehensible that it's been Noé's most appreciated movie, which Noé adorably doesn't like. this is the exact imdb trivia bit:

One of Gaspar Noé's best reviewed movies, a fact that, by his own admission, made him somewhat suspicious, as he believes art in general and his movies in particular should be divisive and make the audience uncomfortable.

what he wants to present the audience is challenging emotions. this movie is so marvelously crafted it's distracting perhaps. when the kid is locked in the electrical closet is when the craft really starts popping. because then in the hallway you can hear the child scream. the woman with her hair on fire, just a sidenote. then that "single unbroken 42 minute long take," what a doozy. though that take transitions into an upside down shot. you know, i think the take ends in the blackness of the floor, then you return to the room's red lights and there's a lot of upside down stuff. i think it ends with me feeling unnerved but if it ended another way--amid the chaos instead of the aftermath--i could have left feeling hysterical, just in terms of discussing the lasting effect of the movie compared to the common intentions of Noé. but yeah i mean the bulk of this movie is simply wonderfully composed and alive and inspiring from a fundamental perspective, which is Noé's style

[putneyswipe]

Paris belongs to us - heads up to anyone curious but there are several Rivettes on the criterion channel rn. I feel like a dunce for putting him off this long, I really connected with this one. It has that expansive paranoid city narrative that I just love.

[jenkins]

The Watermelon Woman -- definitely the first thing i wondered was why am i just learning about this now. and now that i've watched it there's no good reason. it might in fact be that i'd seen it before but ignored it for some reason, except idk, because i do think i would remember the title, and the title became new to me rather recently (past few months). it's all my favorite stuff: Cheryl Dunye wrote a movie based on her own life and starred in it, character named Cheryl, directed it, and she's particularly focused on early 20th century cinema. the only difference is she's a black lesbian and she does speak about this, her early 20th century cinema topic of interest is early black actors. she dates a white woman and thus interracial relationships are discussed. speaking into the camera, Cheryl mentions that at this point in time she doesn't know what movie she wants to make but she knows there aren't enough movies about lesbian black women. so she's in the 90s but ahead of her time and in our time, not at the end but still going. and Cheryl is a laser sharp person so you believe in the people you see and their dialogue, it all feels so related to reality

Ghost World -- sometimes i say that america sucks at conveying depression but boy this movie nails it. i had forgotten what this movie was like, i realized while rewtatching this movie. i most recently heard such type topics from Seth: a vibrant sense of nostalgia rescues you from living in a hopeless present. its imdb trivia says that Steve Buscemi felt depressed playing his character, and this was after he wrote/directed Trees Lounge. in a way it's overall romanticizing the loser type by evoking sympathy, but also, yes, love the losers too. and the whole main topic is the complexities of Enid

[WorldForgot]

Agnes Varda's Along the Coast -- If you want to get out of the house and visit Cannes for a 'lil, you'll find gorgeous film stock at pristine restoration and plenty of charm.

Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left - My kinda quar film -- especially considering the songwriting/singing is performed by Hess, while simultaneously portraying pure scum. An odd film, tonally. You can see the personality all throughout. Freakin weird hippie-death-knell and I dug it. In this, Craven's first film, revenge starts with a Nightmare sequence.

[jenkins]

Pee Mak -- i am dying of laughter if i'm ahead of you about this. is it that you're looking forward to Christopher Nolan? just kidding about your lameass. what i like about Pee Mak is nobody is better than anybody else. you know in western shit you usually get the comic foil and the serious person. why can't the serious person be the comic foil? because of ego, of course. 50% of this movie is the adult male protagonists screaming from being terrified and i've never felt more alive

[jenkins]

^ lol what goes through my head sometimes. what an angle of vision there. how rowdy my thoughts are. i like how i mention both death and life, which is thematically appropriate for the movie, and the final statement has brought this song to my mind