| Movie | Rating | Review | Date | Your Rating | Match | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Babel - R | January 4, 2010 | N/A | ||||
| Meotjin haru (My Dear Enemy) - Unrated | January 4, 2010 | N/A | ||||
| Quixote - Unrated | January 3, 2010 | N/A | ||||
| Castro Street - Unrated | January 3, 2010 | N/A | ||||
| Quick Billy - Unrated | January 3, 2010 | N/A | ||||
| Berlin Alexanderplatz - Unrated | December 27, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Gaichu (Harmful Insect) - Unrated | December 18, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Er shi si cheng ji (24 City) - Unrated | A fascinating and baffling hybrid of fiction and documentary. Jia interviews 9 former workers of the now dissembled aircraft parts factory which is being replaced in the current market economy by a housing and commercial center in the city of Chengdu. The catch is that 4 of these people are actors who tell their stories based on real people's experiences. The thing is that the actor interviews were not hard to discern even for two of the actors that I didn't recognize immediately. The actors are just not able to duplicate the naturalness and richness of the real people, no matter how good the performances were. This is exactly what Jia intended to exploit in order to show the difference between the forgotten personal history with the nationalistic history and its self-sacrificing ideology. | December 12, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Fantasma - Unrated | December 12, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Like You Know It All - Unrated | Mostly more the same bifurcated stuff from Hong, saturated with booze and bad behavior. The dense rhyming structure is like that of Virgin except told in the form of episodic events in late Hong. The Bunuelian touches from Night and Day is incorporated more seamlessly here for confusion and comedic effect. I had some problems with the first half, some of which were too absurd, and lacks the poignancy of the 2nd half. | December 12, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Like You Know it All (Jal aljido mothamyeonseo) - Unrated | December 12, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Walden: Diaries, Notes and Sketches by Jonas Mekas - Unrated | Assembled from 4 years of footage Mekas shot, the film documents episodes from Meka's life including attending weddings, filmmaking excursions , meeting with other filmmakers such as Brakhage, Dreyer, Warhol, etc. In the poetic tradition Mekas discovers his own artistic voice through this process of recording and retrospection of his quotidian life. The handheld footage is very jittery with tons of rapid cutting as well as double exposures which looks amazing in the part called Notes on a Circus, originally intended as a tribute to Kenneth Anger. | December 11, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Lithuania and the Collapse of the USSR - G | December 11, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Tong nien wang shi (A Time to Live and a Time to Die) - PG | December 11, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| J'ai pas sommeil (I Can't Sleep) (I'm Not Sleepy) - Unrated | December 10, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Zardoz - R | THE GUN IS GOOD! THE PENIS IS EVIL! THE PENIS SHOOTS SEEDS AND MAKES NEW LIFE TO POISON THE EARTH WITH A PLAGUE OF MEN, AS ONCE IT WAS. BUT THE GUN SHOOTS DEATH AND PURIFIES THE EARTH OF THE FILTH OF THE BRUTALS! | December 8, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Linda Linda Linda - Unrated | Irresistibly charming. Bae Du-na is perfectly cast in Yamashita's deadpan style. Anyone who doesn't like this is an asshole. | November 23, 2009 | N/A | |||
| David Holzman's Diary - Unrated | This has some good ideas, but is too amateurish and simplistic in execution. It poses Godard's quote that cinema is truth at 24 frames/sec (which really doesn't mean anything depending how one defines 'truth'). As far as a mocku-diary trying to be the real thing, the contrived nature of its fictional parts stick out sorely compared to the improvised scenes, especially one where a transsexual hooker tries to pick up the cameraman. From the current perspective all it does it affirm that there is no unique formal quality to non-fiction, and that direct cinema is no more honest than what came before. | November 19, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Visage (Face) - Unrated | I probably need to see this again after getting more acquainted with the Salome story. I can say that this is Tsai's most self-reflexive film, like he's channeling Rivette. It's like the flip side of the coin to What Time..., plus plenty of musical numbers(though they have a more concrete context here), and that only describes part of it. The mis en scene is crazy good, definitely his most accomplished thus far. The problem I had was that it felt too disconnected, with too many major characters, and the Amalric and Baye cameos were pretty pointless. | November 16, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (Gokushiteki erosu: Renka 1974) - Unrated | People who like personal documentaries will dig this. This is about the director chasing after his ex-wife and making her the subject of his work after their divorce. It isn't really direct cinema since the sound is out of sync, calling the verisimilitude of dialogue into question, which might benefit the film because what happens in front the camera is so personal and traumatic. It would be better if Hara puts more of himself into the film instead of only rarely appearing and intruding into it. It contains perhaps the most harrowing birth scene since Window Water Baby Moving. | November 14, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Le Joli Mai - Unrated | Holy shaiza, this is top tier Marker. Following in the steps of Rouch/Morin's Chronicle of a Summer and even surpasses that in its expansiveness and its effortless integration of personal, social, and political to present a snapshot of the state of uncertainty in the minds of the Parisian population at the end of the Algerian war, and its critique of the isolation of bourgeois, their racism and materialism (all in good Markeresque humor). The first half of the film consist of Marker and the cameraman interviewing people from various strata of the population on what they consider happiness (and a whole slew of other topics) to be while adding their own opinions to the conversation. The second half places the interviews within the broader frame of contemporary politics and social concerns with newsreel footage. The associative editing prefigures that of Sans Soleil. Also, Marker, who provides plenty of screen-time to his favorite animal, meets his match when he interviews a costume designer who dresses her cat like a barbie doll. | November 14, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Reminiscences of a journey to Lithuania - Unrated |
Jonas Mekas was the pioneer of the diary film, and this is a three part diary of his memories of being an exile in America and his realization of his adaptation to his new home, a trip 20 something years later to visit his previous home in Lithuania, and a journey to Vienna to visit his friend Peter Kubelka. The first part is fairly conventional 'home video' compared to very herky jerky 2nd part that features a ton of extremely rapid cutting, which was quite beautiful and spontaneous. The extremely unstable 2nd part had a strange effect on me, as the gushing stream of images exhausted my senses to such a state that I floated through the rest of the film in a semi-conscious state, not fully aware what I saw was part of the film or a figment of my imagination.
rough draft for As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty: It's difficult for me to write intelligently about a work of this magnitude and power, so here are some incoherent, random thoughts: Like Walden, this film comprises mostly of footage from social gatherings, travels, picnics, daily rituals and activities arranged not in chronological order but by chance as Mekas as he says in the beginning. He describes this film as about nothing, and calls it "a masterpiece of nothing". In a way this claim is justified in that the achronological silent footage taken by his Bolex does not present more than a limited impression of the filmmaker. Yet later in the film Mekas tells the viewer to read the film carefully, claiming that 'he is in every frame'. Thus he is quite deceptive in how he chooses to present himself. More than anything the occasionally poetic voiceovers subtlety hints at an unpleasant past and wounds that he still bears, which is even suggested by the "occasionally ... brief glimpses of beauty" in the title(he equates happiness to beauty). These moments of anguish are overcome by the moments of "ecstasy" of living in NY with his friends and family. Likewise the essence of Mekas' images is stated by the title of another film "Autobiography of a Man Who Carried His Memories in His Eyes". He maintains that he films not reality but his memories, thus merely his point of view of events in his life. This subjectivity is further underscored by an intertitle that mocks the idyllic and perfect picture of domestic life portrayed by the film, perhaps because Mekas cannot capture moments of domestic strife or simply that the significance of these images can only grasped by him, although he later says that the images do not contain any hidden meaning. The many incarnations of his persona: as a family man, filmmaker, poet, film critic, champion of the avant garde, and the self-effacing, boyan-playing fool that are on display in his work gives me a fascinating portrait of the man (not to mention my brief real life encounter), similarly the film's images, sped up, pixilated, superimposed, in conjunction to the intertitles and voiceovers likewise presents many versions of Mekas during the different stages of filmmaking through the conception of the images to their retroactive organization decades later. |
November 14, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Sátántangó (Satan's Tango) - Unrated | Somewhat uneven. The tango-like structure and extremely long dead time are pretty awesome in showing the futile inertia of the community. However whenever some douche in the film opens their mouth it becomes laughable. It's very effective in carving out large chunks of time, which is really above all what the film is about. I'm not sure what the scene near the end featuring the writers discussing the characters was for. I thought I had seen enough rain in this film to last a season, but I left the theater only see it was pouring outside (plus an ominous sound of bell towing). | October 28, 2009 | N/A | |||
| The Round-Up (Szegenylegenyek) - Unrated | Yeah, the long takes are nice, even though Jancso may have influenced Tarr the takes here are not as long and dynamic. Jancso really makes some great wide-screen compositions especially that of the vast empty landscapes. I don't know anything about the Hungarian history depicted so much of the background is lost to me and so I didn't care much for the absurd cat and mouse game in the story. | October 23, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Phenomena (Creepers) - R | October 18, 2009 | N/A |
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