[pants]

We went to see Bunny and the Bull on Saturday, not sure if or when this will be out in the States, but it's worth taking a look at if you like The Mighty Boosh, movies by Michel Gondry, and sets made out of newspapers, plastic bottles and books (occasionally clock parts too).

The story of the movie was a little thin and could have easily been made more robust but I think the bulk of the movie's attentions were on the sets and dreamy atmosphere, which isn;t all bad, just sort of disappointing. Still, really neat movie to look at.

[girltrouble]

i think that is his wife. i remember reading that noe was married to a filmmaker... i will add it to my list. thanks as always, my dear dolor.

tonight i saw mr. fox, which was lovely and sweet-- with very subtle film references, my fave was the citizen cane tantrum scene.

i also saw the road, which was dark and bleak. i will say one thing i found annoying about the road was the restoration of the(white heterosexual) nuclear family-- even with one of my favorite actresses, molly parker-- at the end of the movie. it's a tired old trope, and in this case a bit absurd. a couple with one kid, i'll buy, but 2 kids and the family fucking dog? really? after we've been told no animals survived, and cannibalism is the norm? why did spot not end up on the dinner table? it just rang false, as it usually does. it wasn't as ham handed as the remake of war of the worlds, but i hate a whole movie being realistically dark only to recant in the last 5, 10 minutes. i would have rather that the only bit of hopefulness was the discovery of a beetle. it was subtle enough to say that the world was recovering. having the family come in, was dumb. it just seemed like it was trying too hard to be a happy happy joy joy ending to please some test audience. look, if i'm buying a ticket to a bleak post apocalyptic drama (as opposed to a disaster flick or a thriller), i know what the hell i'm buying. don't punk out on me at the end.

i also saw bad taste, which was a fun bit of splatterhorror from new zealand by peter jackson, the director of king kong and the lord of the rings trilogy.

[dolor]

Yes, I recall Bird being one of the darkest movies I'd ever seen... lamentably oscuro.
And I also like Forest W consistently

"Innocence" is dedicated to the notably non-innocent (shock-meister?) Gaspar Noe!,
which whom the director has worked, apprenticed? (Are they a couple?)
This was her first film.

[girltrouble]

i haven't dolor, but as usual, you've got me curious...

finally saw grace, anna. comparing it to inside, i find it interesting how both look at pregnancy/motherhood as, well "blood sport" a competition to survive. i'm curious to compare it to chroneberg's the brood, and i guess there is a french horror movie about a woman with a blood thirsty child from the 90's i have to dig up....

also saw calivaire, or, the ordeal, and sheitan, or satan, both owed a LOT to deliverance, (strangers go to the country, and find a town/house of incestuous/mentally infirm communities that hunt them down)... wait...that sounds like frontier(s) too. hmmm.... sorry i digress. calivere, and sheitan were chock full of biblical/christian allusions. neither was bad, per se, just a bit.... dull tension wise, and the best french horror have a great sense of tension and pacing.

next up is angst or, fear, which gaspar noe claims to he heavily influenced by, then two noe films then i think i'll be off horror for a while. it's starting to make me a bit ill.


oh, i also saw the box, which was awful in every single way. ugh. i dunno how that guy made donnie darko, cos since then his movies have been utter crap.

[anna k]

I watched Bird last week, the biopic about Charlie Parker, but found it really boring. And I wanted to like it. I like Forest Whitaker, I like the portrayal of the 1940s jazz scene, and hearing the music. But there was something so tedious and slow about the film, I just tuned out of it halfway and stopped watching. The lighting in the night scenes was terrible. I don't know if it was the quality of the film, but the lighting was too low, making scenes hard to watch. It had good performances and an interesting way of presenting scenes out of chronological order or a person's memory literally playing as a scene behind their head while they reminisce, but I couldn't stay into the film, and felt disappointed.

[dolor]

Has anyone seen "Innocence" the 2004 French movie: a dream-like surreal depiction of an all girls boarding school?
Any reactions, comments?

I enjoyed it, and am now looking forward to reading the novel that it's based upon, as soon as the new translation comes out.

[dolor]

Girltrouble, in all her wisdom says:
"you see a film for the first time only once."

This is so true!

(In other situations I've said: "You kiss for the first time only once...")

[girltrouble]

um, hung out with crushgirl, not crushgirl, yes crushgirl tonight. we saw: men who stare at goats, good hair, the fourth kind. [le sigh] how can i not crush out on a girl who doesn't bat an eye at seeing 3, 4 movies in a row?

men who stare was funny, but in expectedly political. it was kind of wishing we had taken a different path with our military, a more peaceful, hippyish one. it was lovely.

good hair was....well, good, but not great, but extremely interesting. i'd wait till video, much as i want to support black films. lots of good stuff in it, particularly the money, history and chemistry involved in black hair styling. the interviews with everyone from raven simone, to al sharpton and ice t are funny and illuminating.

the fourth kind was pretty crappy, but i didn't like paranormal activity, so i'm biased. but the woman who played the "real life" doctor played by mila jovovitch has the craziest face since shelly duvall in the shining. but the person who makes the movie a real turkey is the director, who wrote himself a role in the movie. the "real life" doctor is confessing horrible, terrible things to him, and he reacts as if she is explaining why she prefers her toilet paper roll overhand as opposed to underhand. he is utterly non-plussed by anything she says to the point that it's unintentionally hilarious.

*******

yeah, 7, there are two kirosawas. it's a mistake lots of people make. they have heard of the first one-- akira, (stray dogs, ran, 7 samurai, etc.) but not the second, kiyoshi (pulse, cure, etc.). while i've seen quite a bit of the latter, i've never seen ANY of the former. i know, i know, it's shameful for a movie lover like me not to have seen them, but like a couple of hitchcock films, laurence of arabia, and a few others i am holding off till i can see them on the big screen. after all, you see a film for the first time only once.

dolor:
i could not get past half of crime. but the preview made it look interesting. i loved the 5 obstructions too. but i didn't notice the misogyny in zentropa, but it came across clear as a bell in breaking the waves. i like emily watson, but ugh.

i know what you mean about bright future, and charisma, although it didn't bug me so much in BF. i think you'd like cure. it's more straight forward, and like pulse, it is open ended. watch until the last frame, tho. (the original pulse ending is so much better than the american version. imho. i read an interview with kiyoshi where he talked about the remake. seems they just remade it. took the name, most of the plot, the visual style, and never talked, consulted or paid him.

[rogue]

This afternoon I went and saw The Men Who Stare At Goats and it was really good. The friend who I went with and I thought it was hilarious but we were the only ones laughing in the theatre. We have an odd sense of humour but I do think it was quite funny. It was short - only about an hour-and-a-half - but I think that was perfect about it. Ewan McGregor is amazing.

[anna k]

I saw An Education last night, despite having written it off as a coming-of-age film. It was so good and so funny and sweet, even if you could see the ending coming. There was this light brevity to it that captured a girlish spirit, how everything in the story was from the girl's point of view (at times I wanted to see scenes without her, like between her boyfriend and his friend, to get a different side of the story), the cute 60's song that opened the film, the total fantasy boho life that the girl wanted (and that I wanted too when I was a teen, albeit in a different era), and being fascinated by both her schoolteacher (they tried to marm up Olivia Williams, it looked a little unconvincing) and her boyfriend's female friend, this glamourpuss who you never really got inside of.

It recreated early 60's London in a very realistic way, like capturing a blue and gray color to the streets, the warmth of her working-class home, and interesting in how her father seemed to alternate between wanting her to have an Oxford education then wanting to marry her off to the rich artsy boyfriend for upward mobility.

All in all, the film just had this sense of class to it that I appreciated, and I'm happy that it's been so successful.

[koffeewitch]

Ignore this post: Sometimes when I click on a forum in the Lounge I get sent to a post on page 2 or something and I don't notice I am responding to something sent ten posts ago. Sorry. GIrltrouble already clarified this issue about the two Kurosawas.

Confused: The Kurosawa who made Stray Dog and the Kurosawa who made Pulse are two dif. people, right?? Maybe I'm wrong; I'm wrong often enough.

Seven and others: I am crazy for old Japanese films of the 1940-70s (hell, I really love the modern ones, too). I don't think of facial expressions being different as much as ACTING styles. I tell myself that there is more than one way to tell a story/make a film and I try to throw my pre-conceived American notions out the window. This is NOT to say that I did not have to go through an adjustment period with some films and some actors. I guess I feel my comfort with old Japanese film is something I worked a little bit to achieve (and I'm so glad I took the time and made the mental leap). I love Stray Dog, BTW...I hope you give it another chance when you are not so stoned.

[dolor]

I've only seen Zentropa and half of "Element of Crime." (I actually bought both of these... as VHS bargain.) And also The Five Obstructions-- which is fun.

Even with the first two, my admiration was checked by the package of misanthropy > misogyny > sexual loathing. LvT has an especially bad case of this masculine affliction.

Time to see Zentropa again: I just went over to Netflix where I found that it has now been re-assigned its original title, Europa, and has been given the Criterion treatment.

With Pulse, the reason to see it again is to figure how whether /how those amazing scenes fit into the film as a whole. In general, I'm fond of open-ended and seemingly arbitrary endings (such as The Holy Girl, Memento) and I want to revisit that one, where you have them sailing off on their ship to...?

On the other hand, the aggressive symbolism (or crypto-symbolism?) of Bright Future and Charisma just didn't work for me. Haven't seen the Cure.

November-December is a down time for me, so I should probably be focusing on up movies, and /or going back to Mexico...

[nickclick]

i saw Amelia tonite.... ehhhh...... Hilary's my girl but it was kind of flat.

[girltrouble]

yes, well i am a sucker for formalists so zentropa was just what i needed. i'm not bored at all with the theme, and i think that that pathology might be a good template for looking at antichrist. the sexuality is weird in it, in that she, the woman in the story, is beating her head bloody against a toilet with the seat up. defoe's reaction? time for sex! it's a bit more complex than that, but everything seems to be a reason for humping in the film. there is bdsm thrown in, but the woman is blamed for everything. at worst, defoe is a cold, but concerned husband, while gainsbourg is abusive, sadistic, masochistic, hateful towards her child, the list goes on and on. i have to admit i read a interview with 5 people about their take on antichrist, one of whom was a feminist, she said, it wasn't misogynistic unless the woman was viewed as "every woman" which, first off seems a rather ridiculous hurdle. after all, if you have 3 women but all of them are written in a hateful way, does that not make it misogynistic? how does a cast of two or more change that? what's more, the film only has two people in it: he and she. so automatically they are archetypal. obviously this is somewhat allegorical, so they are both universalized. it's just faulty logic.

and i agree, dolor, i really should move pulse to #1 of all kirosawa's films (although i admire cure and seance a lot). it seemed the most visceral. it was so moody, and contained so many kinds of fear:loneliness, technology, death, loss, disease.... he took all he had learned and really showcased it in that film (kirosawa is considered the grandfather of asian horror, since either he or his students had a hand in all of those pale wet asian girl films like the ring, the grudge, etc. the style was mostly fermented in his horror miniseries for tv. i've seen the grudge, and it was mindblowing: low tech horror using old school camera effects instead of cgi, and it was very, very unsettling. easily better than anything that followed. ).

[dolor]

I have to say that in all those recent Asian movies that I crashed through, the most extraordinary moments came in Kurosawa's Pulse,
scenes when they're sensing phantom presences,
how K creates and builds these scenes,
and esp when they go into that one empty (?) room...
Also, there was real power in his focus upon the effects of a collective loneliness, the paradox of a *shared loneliness*...

I'd like to see it again.

I think we agree much on von T.
I hope I'm not boring you with this theme (?) but I take it that again we're dealing with the pathology of masculinity: someone who dislikes women, dislikes his own sexuality (because it binds him to women), dislikes female sexuality (ditto)...

"So, Lars, let's talk about your Mother...."

I also really admired Zentropa, esp. from a technical standpoint. Grooved to the very selective use of color-- like the rumblefish in "Rumblefish."
He first wanted to call it Europa, but then the Polish movie came out "Europa, Europa" (also good) so he skipped to the more sci-fi-ish "Zentropa."

7Secs,
Your reference to Slavic Melancholy was ... very illuminating! Something to think about. I'm not Slavic, but I was raised on slavic melancholy. Then I saw it in Russia & Poland, & heard it in Dvorak & Martinu etc. And I think that pertains to why Tarkovsky effects /affects me (us?) so.

[girltrouble]

it's not a stupid question, but not one i can answer. although i should point out, i was talking about the films of kiyoshi kirosawa, NOT akira kirosawa-- who did stray dogs. kiyoshi is still alive, and making films, unlike akira, who is dead.

[sevenseconds]

That's a stupid question. Sorry.
And it's not a movie question, it's a UN question - can we all be friends if we can't read the emotions off each other's face correctly. I think that's what made me so uncomfortable, cuz my almost limitless capacity for empathy suddenly grinds into rubble. So please ignore it.

[sevenseconds]

gt, just a fly-by question since i had the same exact issue with kurosawa v/s tarkovsky a week ago....
I think it's this *ethno mimical* barrier for me.
I have a feeling older Japanese movies just ring the wrong mirror neurons when I'm trying to feel the characters - the facial expressions and extra gutturals tend to translate to my limbic brain as "unjustified rage". So my gut reaction ranges from a childish what is he so mad about, can't he pull himself together? To where I had to make my buddies stop (Kurosawa's)Stray Dog after ten minutes because I was getting a nano panic attack*** (true, I was stoned after a long break, but still - weird.) (and we've done night after night of Tarkovsky together where no one gets hurt;) So Trakovsky soothes me.
I'm slavic, i understand deep self-loathing quite well, but it is tender. It expresses as melancholy; even when you kill in Tarkovsky you do it like you're killing yourself. In mercy. In old japanese movies (brutally stereotyping, SO sorry), it's the other way around.
So my question, gt, how do you get over that barrier where your empathy switchboard indicates one emotion but you know the characters are experiencing something else? I guess that can become an aesthetic experience in itself? Takes acquiring?

(Now that's a beginner sushi dilemma if there ever was one. Thanks.)


----
*** from the cognitive dissonance (while under the influence) of watching a fellow human being experience emotions so diagonally across the color wheel from where i'd be?

[girltrouble]

perhaps (re:kiyoshi kirosawa) it's the movie you pick, i will be the first to admit, he is hit or miss. i loathed doppelganger, i thought it was awful, and i didn't really think that much of charisma, much as i would like to have loved it. in order of how much i love his films, these are my favorite are: cure, seance, pulse, bright future, retribution. the first 3 are horror, or semi, and retribution is a hot mess, but it does some interesting things technically, so i do love it. but he's not that far away from von trier in his potential pretentiousness.


medusa, i knew it could be good or it could be awful. i was hoping it would be good. i love horror, smart directors, and arthouse/horror fusion to me is very intriguing. so i would have seen it no matter what anyone said, because i was curious.

as for von trier, dolor, i am curious as to what you think of him. i used to think he was the shit, i loved zentropa (i'm a sucker for rear projection (see retribution)), and the kingdom, but i thought breaking the waves was crap, and never bothered to see anything else of his till now.

there are parts of anti-christ that are unsettling, it's use of visuals and sound are excellent, but after a while he seems to be confused, horror isn't just being vulgar, it's the foreboding, dread, and feeling that things are out of control in the world at large, he trades that twisted world for a more personal one, and the film goes off the rails. plus, honestly, i wanted the people in the movie to shut up. the film was so much better when it was quiet and he let the images speak for themselves. yes, i know it's a movie about a therapist using therapy to try to cure his wife, but the doowop (read bullshit or psychobabble) get's thick quick. von trier seems unable to not try to prove he's smart, which is why i prefer trouble everyday. it's quiet lyricism worked better for me. horror is best if the audience is doing the theorizing, not those on screen. in the credits he lists researchers for 5 different topics, which is good, but it's as if he thought he needed to cram every sentence he read into the film's symbolism, and ultimately it's that, that drowns it. but along the way we get another irrational female who mis-interpets her sexuality in a way that leads her to the crazies, much as in breaking the waves. von trier seems to think women are crazy and it's their lack of understanding of sex that does it. some people said that the film wasn't misogynistic, but was about misogyny, i tend to think it is pretty sexist. no, he, the man doesn't come out looking very good, but if you watch a neil le butte film, his guys don't come out looking very charming either, but the women are feeble, weak minded sex objects, instead, von trier sees his women as weak, crazy sex objects. but maybe that's me. like i said, i haven't seen any of his films since BTW.

[dolor]

Girltrouble,

Could you please say more about von trier's pretension, ridiculousness, crappiness, etc.

I saw Charisma, some time ago. During a bit of contemporary Asian period.
But it seems that I get more out of the earlier generation, Ozu etc.

I'm about to watch a movie from the intervening period, "Crazed Fruit," about wild (?) Japanese teens in the 50's. Rebels w/o causes.

I need to have a better understanding as to why I find Tarkovsky spellbinding, and Kurosawa not. Since they are both slow and poetical /symbolic,
and come from another part of the world....
yet...?