Facebook conversation made me think of Alejandro Jodorowsky, whom I haven't thought about in years.
I had no idea he tried to make Dune
With Orson Welles? And H.R. Giger? And Salvador Dali?
[Cries]
[Keeps crying]
French New Wave film director Alain Resnais dies aged 91
And I don't think I ever posted about Harold Ramis.
[Cries some more]
Didn't watch a movie in a while and when I did, it was Escape from L.A.
Vive le Snake Plissken!
Didn't watch a movie in a while and when I did, it was Escape from L.A.
Vive le Snake Plissken!
I tried to forget about that one, damn you!
No link since I'm limited tl using my phone, but Le Hussard Sur le Toit (The Horseman on the Roof) about a young Italian officer on the run from Austrian spies joining up with a French woman (played by Juliette Binoche) as they make their way through Provence while an epidemic, that would have made "Love in the time of the cholera" a fitting title if it hadn't already been taken, is well worth a watch.
Left out of the trailer, alas, is the female labor militant who is introduced enforcing the 15-minute tea break ("We fought for it!") and is continuously ratting Sir Alec out to the union ("Scab labour? Wait 'til the Works Committee hears about this!").
Vive le Galt!
I got bored and gave up.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
[Yawns] but likes the monster armies.
Not as good as I remembered it, alas.
Watched a good chunk of Bridesmaids on the teevee with my mommy and Hee hee!'d quite often.
Also saw, like, two-thirds of The Mackintosh Man. Was also pretty good, can't wait to watch the end.
Not as good as I remembered it, alas.
That was about the stupidest movie.
Rapture Palooza was kinda funny.
Sweet. Leprechaun is on Netflix streaming.
That was about the stupidest movie.
Not as good as I remembered it, alas.
Synergistic weirdiosity in play, I go on FB and find the Eldritch Mr. Shiny posting about a new Ralph Steadman documentary.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Case for Reasonable Doubt? which features one of my old comrades;
and The Shootist which doesn't.
Watched the Sang il-Lee's Unforgiven last night at the Seattle international film festival.
An amazing remake of a Clint Eastwoods classic 1992 film. The Cowboys are replaced by Samurai with Ken Watanabe playing the lead.
If you love the original you will enjoy this remake.
-MD
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Cinema and the Class Struggle
Well, not really the class struggle at all, but...
This is one of the sickest, blackest comedies I've ever seen. It being Britishiznoid, or rather, Pakistani-Britishiznoid, there's a lot that flew over my head...but OMG!!! this movie is bad ass.
Chris Morris (the bloke responsible for this) is very funny.
Check out any of his Jam or Blue Jam stuff.
Or, the most messed up stuff: Brass Eye. Sadly, the panic he was satirising hasn't gone away.
Yes, that shiznit is fuh-nee. I watched it twice over one weekend with two different sets of friends and we're all still repeating lines from it occasionally. Oddly enough, I haven't shown it to my lone Arab friend....yet.
I will certainly watch this here Brass Eye thing, but it reminds me, Geraint, a whiles back, when Peter O'Toole passed, you linked some play, which youtube took down, like, the next day. Do you happen to remember what it was?
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The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared: A glorious combination of Snatch, Forrest Gump, Kitchen Stories, and Children of the Revolution. Watch it now! (Aviso: trailer is only in Swedish, but you can get the idea.)
It had me at "Comrade Stalin wants you to tell him everything you know about the nuclear bomb."
Man, I wish I still lived in a city with access to culture...
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared: A glorious combination of Snatch, Forrest Gump, Kitchen Stories, and Children of the Revolution. Watch it now! (Aviso: trailer is only in Swedish, but you can get the idea.)
It's lead actor, Robert Gustafsson, was once voted funniest man in the world (by a wholly Swedish audience, so...) That may be over-egging things a tad, but he's definitely in my top 20.
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The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared: A glorious combination of Snatch, Forrest Gump, Kitchen Stories, and Children of the Revolution. Watch it now! (Aviso: trailer is only in Swedish, but you can get the idea.)It's lead actor, Robert Gustafsson, was once voted funniest man in the world (by a wholly Swedish audience, so...) That may be over-egging things a tad, but he's definitely in my top 20.
The book that is based on was a big seller in the UK.
My hetero life partner has a weakness for post-apocalyptic films. "It's like The Road meets The Road Warrior!"
It was alright. I'm glad I saw it as a matinee.
Pretty good loveletter to two films I'd never heard of:
I watched a bunch of movies over the past five days which were kind of a mini-vacation.
Guardians of the Galaxy, I enjoyed.
Ender's Game, I didn't. In fact, I fell asleep twice and then had to rewatch the last half hour the next day. Made me wanna go back into some of the locked Ender's Game threads and start a fistfight.
I also was subjected to the entirety of The Matrix Trilogy. [Yawns]
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Obligatory Musical Interludes:
This one is for you Comrade.
I was reading in the Lauren Bacall obits that she and Bogie once led a march in D.C. to protest the persecution of the Hollywood Ten.
Vive le Galt!
*uses a lot of nasty words due to missing Gallipoli yesterday evening.
Bela noite para voar. (A good night to fly.)
About the Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek as he jets around his country, meeting with provincial governors, inspecting the construction of Brasília, wishing his adopted daughter a happy birthday, and putting in a visit with his secret lover in Belo Horizonte (in a nice change to what's usually the case on film, he's the one that's not married). And in parallel we see Marshal Botafogo (played by a Telly Savelas look-a-like) and several other members of the military plot to bring him down after the US ambassador has let it be known that he can't accept Brazil nationalising its oil industry.
During an inset of his lover preparinf for their tête-a-tête we get to hear a very nice version of Are You Lonesome Tonight in Brazilian Portuguese.
*uses a lot of nasty words due to missing Gallipoli yesterday evening.
That and All quiet on the Western Front... make me feel sad.
I've watched quite a few movies that I haven't posted about mostly because they were not very good blockbusters.
I did, however, also watch The Black Swan which, among other things, caused me much confusion about the proprieties of courtship on the Spanish Main and also reminded me a bit of my recent readings on bride kidnapping.
(Maureen O'Hara is hawt, btw.)
I was going to drive down to Boston today to catch a showing of Godard's Le mepris (Youtube says it's "Probably the greatest French movie trailer ever") but unless watching the trailer inspires me further, I think I'll just order it on Netflix.
Which reminds me of another flick in French that I've got on my shelf waiting for a re-watch:
Vive le Galt!
I forgot that this film includes a pleasing tribute to me.
featuring Wilson Pickett, Ike and Tina Turner, Roberta Flack, The Staple Singers, Santana, Les McCann and Eddie Harris and a Cast of Thousands!
I watched Contempt again last night. Holy f*#!ing shiznit, and that's not because of Brigitte Bardot's bare bum in the opening scene. [Ooohw-fa-fa!]
You know, I think the Boston Phoenix ran articles on it every time it played at the Brattle or the Harvard Film Archives and I still waited 37 years before I saw it.
If you like pretentious French flicks, this one's for you!
Cinema and the Class Struggle
Speaking of the Brattle I was on their webpage and came across...
Back when I was a wee goblin militant, my comrades, some of whom had been to Britain in '84, would always tell me about how the gay organizations had donated hot pink minivans to the National Union of Mineworkers for flying pickets. This story was always used to illustrate the Marxist trope that "consciousness can change in periods of class struggle" and, indeed, the next year, the NUM sent a sizable contingent to start off the Gay Pride march (or whatever it's called in Blighty). Anyway, point being, my old comrades are the only ones who ever told me this story, and I have happily told it to a variety of trade unionists, lefties and gay rights activists over the past 20 years, but now someone has gone and made a movie about it.
Looks like your typical Bill Nighy-involved Labour propaganda film (Brassed Off, Billy Elliott, The Full Monty), and I don't see any hot pink minivans, but I'll probably watch it.
The 2014 Canberra International Film Festival will be starting up late October. Currently going through the program and working out what I want to see. Not as much on that I'm really keen for this time, but there looks to still be some good stuff. (I'm also trying to convince myself that I don't need to see 20 films again... I was wrecked after that last time. Multiple days with 2 or 3 films aren't much fun. I can do it at home, but I can take a break there and shift around.)
When Animals Dream in particular looks kind of interesting. Plus there's a Stellan Skaarsgard revenge flick (can't remember the name now), which has me intrigued. Looks like it'd be a good complement to the revenge film from last year's program, Blue Ruin, which I highly recommend by the way.
Once I've worked out my itinerary I'll post it.
Hee hee!
Well, if you thought I had a taste for pretentious movies before...
Am in the process of recruiting a local Iranian-American state school student to the cause of international proletarian socialist revolution. My comrade, as he always does, threw out a mention of D&D as a litmus test. The new kid didn't respond to that, but said that he was really nerdy abount film. Even called himself a cinephile. "Oh yeah?" I asked, "Impress me with some cinephile nerdery." He started talking about a 12-hour film he had recently seen by a Dutch Marxist invited to Mao's China made back in the day. "Alright," I reply, "I'm impressed."
I friend him on Facebook, and here are the three films he's posted on most recently:
Maoist propaganda film:
Breaking with Old Ideas
North Korean espionage epic:
Unsung Heroes
And, apparently, a Lithuanian short about Athens?
Baltie zvani (1961)
All I know is I better finish Marketa Lazarova soon.
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Saw Pride and enjoyed the heck out of it. Premise: during the 1984–1985 coal miner strike in Wales , LGBT activists in London realized they were being harassed less by the police—then made the jump in logic that someone else must be the new target, and decided to help the targeted community with both donations and resistance techniques. Spoiler: solidarity and being an ally can be hard work, but are super valuable.
(Also, historical films set in the mid-1980s = me feeling old.)
Vive le Galt!
Some great letters with reactions from viewers, including one frm someone belonging to both the Welsh and the Gay have been a feature of the Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo BBC4 film shos/podcast in the past few weeks.
Didn't make it very far on the latter. Read the book two years ago, looked for it on Netflix (snobby anti-Netflix cineaste article, btw) found it on hold, put it on my queue, two years later it pops up, I jump it to #1, start watching it, and even the prospect of watching Jennifer Connelly (speaking with a bad Spanish accent) and Antonio Banderas doing it while fighting the Pinochet regime couldn't keep me interested. Not that it was terrible; it was just a pale reflection of the book. (Snobby litterateurs are pretty down on Isabel Allende, but I like her.)