Monthly Top Five

Bumping to the new page.

Do it. 

Write overly long reviews for every Christopher Nolan movie.

Boys state - I mean it's infantile political junkies from texas who haven't yet turned 18 (minus a few). It's insufferable hopeful and completely predictable all in one. And it's certainly worth watching. Immediately looked to find two participants on instagram (couldn't find em) and very much am excited for the continuing melting pot that is texas to awaken in the future for the good guys. It's gonna happen. 8/10

Hunger games 1 - I liked this story a lot. I'm not sure why it took me this long to get through these... But alas. I can see the attraction, but who the fuck gave this to seabiscuits gary ross to helm? There was no one else? And who hired lenny kravitz? Wtf? The style ross uses is awful but his set designs are awesome and the capital was very intriguing to me. Woulda loved it if we got a few more wide shots not so many in close face shots. 7/10.

Hunger games 2 - much prefer this directors style overall, but why they fired the set designers and costume designers from the first one will never make sense to me. At least this director understood what to do with lenny kravitz tho... Give him 4 lines and kill him off screen. 7/10

Hunger games 3 (do you see a pattern?) - why did it take this long for me to watch these again? Jesus my younger edgier self must have been insufferable. But this is all just teasing that revolution we waiting for.... So this is kinda just a weird filler movie... I haven't yet completed part 2 of hunger games 3 so I'll reserve judgment on the series as a whole until then. Give this about a 6/10 - diminishing returns are to be expected, and good night philip seymour you sweet prince (and amos from the expanse shows up in this! - bonus egg).


Class action park - round out the month with another doc... It was entertaining. Not much else going on here except telling a story. Woulda been a more interesting one hour special. Stretching it beyond that was a bit too much to ask. But first hour is pretty fun. 6/10

The screenplay by blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo—credited to Millard Kaufman because of the blacklist—and by MacKinlay Kantor was based upon a short story by Kantor published in 1940 in The Saturday Evening Post. In 1998, Gun Crazy was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."



One has Woody Allen and the other doesn't. Add bonus point for Scarlet Johansson in her prime. Match Point > Crimes and Misdemeanors.



It's a great movie.



You're an American man with American tastes.



Sucking up to the boss, I see.

You just don't want your annual Fifty Shades of Grey viewing on the record.

It’s always on record.

Glad you liked Destiny, Doomsday. My girlfriend got me Kino's Fritz Lang's Silent Movies Blu-Ray set and Destiny was the first in it I thought was genuinely really good and not just for Lang completionists. Currently on Die Nibelungen, which is a two-part 4 and a half hour epic. Excited to watch but no idea when I'll find the time.

5. Death in Venice (1971)
"I blind bought this during a Criterion sale because of the Visconti name but wasn’t sure exactly what to expect from it. As it turns out the film in question is beautiful, challenging, and a little disturbing in its implications. The film was made late in Visconti’s career and was an adaptation of a fairly famous novel by Thomas Mann, a novel that likely does not lend itself easily to film adaptation. The plot focuses a German composer (the film is actually in English, primarily) who travels to Venice after a series of personal and professional setbacks and while there he becomes infatuated and obsessed by the sight of this “beautiful” boy of about sixteen and begins engaging in a sort of internal self-reflection as he comes to realize there’s a cholera epidemic around the city. The Venitian setting combined with the theme of internal struggle and, uh, death while in that city almost certainly reminded me of Don’t Look Now, which came out two years after this and was ostensibly based on a Daphne du Maurier story but almost certainly also drew from the Mann novel. That film certainly did a good job of making Venice seem haunting rather than touristy but I think this one shoots it in an even more haunting and interesting fashion but it does so at a very deliberate pace with a heavy emphasis on atmosphere over any kind of conventional story progression and a lot of people would probably hate this about it.

Additionally, that central plot is a little… problematic. This is in many ways a movie explicitly about the (gay) male gaze and given the age of the dude being gazed upon the protagonist could be viewed as a straight-up pederast. Now, whatever arousal this character is feeling is never acted upon and it could also probably be argued (as it has been for the original novel) that his infatuation with this youth is based less in sexual urge and more in a sort of philosophical appreciation for the platonic ideal of beauty but… I don’t know that I buy that. It should also be argued that there are almost certainly arthouse movies that are about people who are every bit as lecherous about sixteen year old girls as this is about a sixteen year old boy without anyone batting an eye (looking at you American Beauty), but the mere existence of a double standard does not itself make this movie any less uncomfortable. Between that and its generally challenging style, this is going to be a hard sell for a lot of people and it would not recommend it as anyone’s first Visconti movie or for someone who isn’t already pretty deep into arthouse cinema, but I was intrigued by it and there’s definitely some masterful filmmaking to be found in it if you have the patience and open mindedness… not sure I’m quite there yet."
 
4. Guys and Dolls (1955)
"Guys and Dollls is product of a very unashamed era of film musicals, one that wasn’t afraid to hide its stage origins very much at all and which also didn’t view much of a disconnect between using “tough guy” characters in the midst of a song and dance show. The film’s influence on pop culture was rather apparent to me right away; the film’s dialogue (where everyone speaks without contractions) has been pretty endlessly copied as a gangster caricature. I’d long avoided the film because it starred Marlon Brano, and the idea of that guy singing show tunes was not very appealing to me. His singing was reportedly the creation of a whole lot of work and tinkering in the recording studio, but he wasn’t distractingly bad or anything even if he is kind of blown out of the water by the rest of the cast including Frank Sinatra in his prime. All told I found the movie pretty entertaining; it works better as a comedy than the average “musical comedy,” maybe not in the sense that it had me laughing a whole lot but it was certainly amusing. Also some of the songs are pretty good. Luck Be a Lady Tonight became a standard for a reason (the Las Vegas economy basically runs on it) and the version here (sung by Brando) is hardly the best version you do need to acknowledge the source.

3. Wolf Children (2012)
Did a thing for my blog about the work of Mamoru Hosoda.  Probably could have put Summer Wars on the list as well but though sticking with the one was fine.  You can read the full review at the blog if you want.

2. The Last Wave (1977)
"This was Peter Weir’s follow-up to The Picnic at Hanging Rock which wasn’t as popular as that movie when it first came out but has since attained an almost equal level of acclaim. The film concerns an Australian lawyer tasked with defending a group of aboriginal men accused of murder who begins to have these strange apocalyptic visions he believes are tied to strange weather that’s been occurring in the area. I’m not exactly sure that this is an entirely progressive depiction of aboriginals, who are sort of depicted as unknowable mysteries rather than humans and their mysticism is kind of appropriated by the movie, but I don’t think it’s trying to be actively disrespectful. The film was almost certainly an influence on that movie Take Shelter but this is less interested in playing the “is this real or is this guy crazy” element and more clearly signals that these visions are real but is less clear on what they really mean. It’s not really a movie for people who want clear answers to every question that gets raised but it’s also not a movie that exudes weirdness and surrealism at all times. Definitely a movie worth seeing and worth contemplating.

1. State of Siege (1972)
"State of Siege was the third in a real string of successes from Costa-Gavras coming immediately after the success of both Z and The Confession. In many ways this is probably the most daring of his films yet as he isn’t going after Greek juntas or Czechoslovakian communists but was instead confronting American cold war interference in Latin America. The film is set in an unnamed country (which is almost certainly meant to be Uruguay) and is a lightly fictionalized version of the real life Dan Mitrione kidnapping in which a paramilitary group opposed to the country’s right-wing dictator kidnaped a USAID worker and held him hostage to barter an exchange for political prisoners but when that didn’t work out they ended up killing him. Much of the film involves the interrogation the paramilitary group did on this guy in which it becomes increasingly clear that this guy is less of a true aid worker and more of an agent provocateur sent to prop up the dictatorship and make them more effectively impressive. The film is not, however, unambiguously on the side of the kidnappers and is pretty clear headed about the fact that this operation was in many ways counterproductive. Of the three big Costa-Gavras films of this era this is probably the weakest but not by much. One of the peculiar things about all three movies is that despite taking place elsewhere all three are in the French language, which is something that you can kind of go along with an understand (it’s not like there aren’t thousands of movies that do the same with English) but it’s a little more distracting here given that is basically makes the Americans almost indistinguishable from the Latin Americans. That’s not a huge thing though.

Nope.