dwellerINTHEdark
Curator of the mausoleum
no country for old wainds
Active Member
- Nov 23, 2002
- 26,677
- 9,652
- 113
That was like if Troma merged with Korine's autism or some shit. What the fuck is wrong with you lmao.
no country for old wainds
Active Member
- Nov 23, 2002
- 26,677
- 9,652
- 113
Is it a Damon Packard signature move to have fabricated cameos of real people? I feel like you've mentioned something weird like that with Fatal Pulse.
Oblivious Maximus
I am the worm
Damon Packard follows me on Instagram and I can’t figure out why.
no country for old wainds
Active Member
- Nov 23, 2002
- 26,677
- 9,652
- 113
no country for old wainds
Active Member
- Nov 23, 2002
- 26,677
- 9,652
- 113
10) Friends of Friends (Dir. Dominik Graf)
Take a picture of him for me. None exist.
i went into this completely blind aside from knowing it was graf (whose invincibles has me seeking out as much of his work as possible), so i had no idea it was a modernised henry james adaptation, which makes so much sense. it's a kind of ghost story that never fully tips its hand, but graf's grainy images and cryptic dialogue always have such an eerie dreaminess that i can imagine all his stuff flirts with that genre in some way. schweighöfer's unnerving starey smile really adds to the effect as well, maybe the closest thing i've seen to danielsen lie's amazing performance in oslo august 31st.
9) Oasis (Dir. Lee Chang-Dong)
I'm here because you interest me.
a borderline sociopath is released from jail and lopes around the city like mifune on crack, goes to pester the family of his manslaughter victim and starts up an affair with the almost completely helpless daughter, who suffers from debilitating cerebral palsy (she might also be underage?). their courtship is initiated by a brutal rape presented to us to us in graphic detail, but lee is challenging us to find empathy for what might conventionally be regarded as the dregs of society and he highlights all the ways their bond has been shaped by societal/familial neglect and abuse. it's a provocative film--probably among the most subversive love stories ever put to celluloid--but it's great because it stays true to its characters and leaves the judgments to us. whether it's a defiant outcast romance or a repugnant horror is very much in the eye of the beholder.
8) My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (Dir. Johnnie To)
It's nothing... she's just possessed.
a dry run for romancing in thin air complete with the great sammi cheng, this is johnnie to at his wackiest, blending slapstick comedy, supernatural horror and romantic drama into a typically ridiculous, delightful and heartwrenching look at grief and facing death. his usual precise yet fluid camera movements always seem to synthesise heart and head, but this is one of his better looking films in general with a particularly eyepopping colour scheme. it's also admittedly an uneven mess and romancing in thin air is really this one honed to perfection, but i'm such a slut for that film i still loved this. there are just so many pleasures in all his movies, i think he's one of the few filmmakers who brings the best qualities of golden age cinema into the modern day without being slavishly retro.
7) Happy Here and Now (Dir. Michael Almereyda)
There might be termites in it. People too.
my favourite feminine sci-fi of the year over the aforementioned teknolust and assayas' superficially similar but more cynical and trashy demonlover, this is another of almereyda's quietly fraught dialogues about identity and connectivity. i love this director for making personal films that are pregnant with ideas and emotions while being seemingly completely uninterested in commercial appeal, and this strange little story of a woman searching for her lost sister in a lovingly documented pre-katrina new orleans is no different. it's probably too loose and idea-driven for some, but it may also be the most prescient film of the year, the one that seems most aware of how the internet will come to dominate our lives and shape our selves.
6) The Man Without A Past (Dir. Aki Kaurismäki)
If you see me face down in the gutter, turn me onto my back.
went long on this on RYM:
not unlike hong sang-soo, kaurismäki can become a kind of second home. he's that rare brand of all-encompassing auteur whose every film is instantly recognisable as his creation, and a variation on the same tics, themes, tropes and obsessions. you know what you're in for: a stylised yet lived-in working class milieu, static, micro-managed frames somewhere between ozu and wes anderson (a vocal kaurismäki fan), droll understatement laced with deadpan humour as in jarmusch (another vocal kaurismäki fan), poverty/delinquency on the margins, alcohol and cigarettes, live/diegetic music, underdog immigrants and the bureaucratic bullshit which always shadows them. STROSZEK is always brought to mind, only filtered through kaurismäki's generous humanism. the immigrant in question isn't a foreigner in this case but a man with amnesia, a stranger in his own land who remembers very little beyond his penchant for rock 'n roll. the way this man-with-no-name drifts into a rundown village and enlivens its inhabitants is something you'd typically find in a western; there's also a dame with a hard exterior and soft centre, a sheriff with a killer dog named hannibal, a villainous gang, and of course there are all these pitiless institutions for our hero to haplessly navigate.
THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST is one of kaurismäki's more straightforward films, and probably the sweetest and funniest that i've seen. i like that our nameless stud chats up a woman by saying there's something in her eye, and it works. the legal argument is hilarious, and the appropriation of rock music is glorious; it made the coastal shantytown feel even more like something out of DISCO ELYSIUM. does it stray a little too far into sentimentality? maybe. there is a lack of true danger here relative to other kaurismäkis, the level of absurdity is such that you never really feel that things won't work out just fine. then again, it's possible all of this is just the utopian dream of a man slowly dying from a head wound, and there's still plenty of disappointment and anger under the surface if you're paying attention. i love the scene where he meets his former wife for the first time. tentatively, he asks whether he had a drinking problem--no... but he liked to gamble, with his beloved record collection as collateral. the film's fairytale quality means that scenes like this pack a punch, because you know such lives play out very differently in reality; it's akin to IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE in this way. there's a particularly dark note involving the fate of a bank robber which lingers on as a very real alternative for our protagonist, and it's also worth considering how the community would fare without his presence--the implication is that immigrants can often have a positive, even transformative effect.
at one point, a side character responds to the offer of payment for a favour by requesting "if you see me face down in the gutter, turn me onto my back". it reminded me of when a man had a heart attack and died at my mum's post office, and the people in the queue stepped over him and carried on with their day. in the finale, this marginalised community takes matters into its own hands, rising as one with no help from up high. as ever with kaurismäki, it's not just finland's government and its institutions that are held accountable for the fate of its most vulnerable inhabitants, but the people too. if our nation fails us, the least we can do is look out for each other.
5) Punch Drunk Love (Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
I don't know if there is anything wrong because I don't know how other people are.
i don't love this quite as much as i used to, as with each viewing i find it a little more self-consciously offbeat and random in a way that distances me, but it remains such an original, magnificently autistic vision. the aggressively colour coordinated environment constantly being destabilised by the percussive, jittery score and camera motion, sandler wheeling through it like a shook up bottle desperately trying to keep its lid on. i'm not sure i can call it sandler's greatest performance anymore in light of uncut gems, but it's the most ingenious use of his unique manchild persona, and the film unexpectedly morphs into an exhilarating crowdpleader as his love makes him "stronger than anything you could imagine".
4) The Twilight Samurai (Dir. Yoji Yamada)
Don't be so impatient, you can kill me at anytime. I'd like to talk to you. Have a seat. It's a nice day.
it seems a strange comparison to offer for a samurai movie, but this a far more soulful, subtle and elegiac 2002 melodrama than todd haynes' heavy-handed far from heaven. the pressures of poverty, disease and cultural conservatism are as dangerous an enemy as anything beyond the borders, and if you manage to survive them you'll be sent off to die in the war in any case. the film isn't devoid of action, but when it comes it's matter-of-fact and inglorious, an exhausting and nervewracking threat to the routine of raising your children, a job that is itself so tough it barely leaves time to bathe. as grimy and weathered as "twilight" himself, the samurai genre is here to count its losses, sigh its last weary sigh and put itself to rest.
3) Bubba Ho-Tep (Dir. Don Coscarelli)
Always the questions. Never the answers. Always the hopes... never the fulfillments.
Now the stage is bare and I'm standing there
With emptiness all around
And if you won't come back to me
Then they can bring the curtain down
We're lost in a cloud
With too much rain
We're trapped in a world
That's troubled with pain
But as long as a man
Has the strength to dream
He can redeem his soul and fly
behind the egyptian mumbo-jumbo, which is probably the film's weakness in that i'm not sure it serves a specific purpose beyond being the mythology that's most inextricably associated with death, this is a great little cult film about coming to terms with mortality, overflowing with character and pathos. i love that we never see his wife, we never see his daughter, even his identity remains an open question to the end. his last stand of dignity and self-reclamation begins with the dismissal of his condescending, well-meaning carer, a complicated moment filled with cruelty and defiance, and we never see her again either. all of this could be happening in his own mind, it doesn't much matter. it makes me feel a little better about one day being in this same position, alone in a home with only my regrets and the growth on my pecker for company. for such a modest film, its arc feels even more epic than the one in lord of the rings.
2) Solaris (Dir. Steven Soderbergh)
I was haunted by the idea that I remembered her wrong.
it's a strange thing to say about a largely forgotten remake of a classic, but on what was my fourth or fifth viewing i realised what a formative film this has been for me. since i've just mentioned him i'll say that it's a better almereyda sci-fi than all the actual almereyda sci-fis, chopping the fat from its sources to leave only an incredibly focused, desperately romantic and existentially terrified meditation on this question of how there can be identity, connection or meaning when the memories it's all built on are so slippery and self-serving. it boils down to the metaphysical, a lost lonely man reaching out for god and finding only fragments of his own consciousness.
1) The Son (Dir. Jean-Pierre Dardennes, Luc Dardenne)
the son is the closest thing to a perfect film that i know. it's so economical in its editing and exposition, so relentless in its motion and physicality (of which gourmet's all-time top ten performance is an extension), that the urgency and intensity never slacken for a second. with the verité style they helped to pioneer you'd think they wouldn't care about shot composition, but it's never been clearer that it's actually an obsession for them, the difference being they simply don't cut between many of the shots. they begin when they must, they cut when they must, and, as is their signature, they end the film at the precise split second it needs to end, unresolved but tentatively gesturing toward the possibility of closure and grace.
moreso even than any bresson i've seen, it's the film that best collapses the distinction between the physical and spiritual, there in that warehouse as they stare at each other from either end of that plank of wood, the carpenter and his judas. physical distances are manifestations of emotional distances, everyday spaces are crucibles for wrestling ideas, the imagery arises out of the mundane, themes made tactile in a way that seems to divorce them from intentionality completely. i've deliberately not included a quote because the finale is completely wordless, without music even, just pure and elemental and it leaves me in tears every damn time. who needs words when you've got cinema?
---------------
Take a picture of him for me. None exist.
i went into this completely blind aside from knowing it was graf (whose invincibles has me seeking out as much of his work as possible), so i had no idea it was a modernised henry james adaptation, which makes so much sense. it's a kind of ghost story that never fully tips its hand, but graf's grainy images and cryptic dialogue always have such an eerie dreaminess that i can imagine all his stuff flirts with that genre in some way. schweighöfer's unnerving starey smile really adds to the effect as well, maybe the closest thing i've seen to danielsen lie's amazing performance in oslo august 31st.
9) Oasis (Dir. Lee Chang-Dong)
I'm here because you interest me.
a borderline sociopath is released from jail and lopes around the city like mifune on crack, goes to pester the family of his manslaughter victim and starts up an affair with the almost completely helpless daughter, who suffers from debilitating cerebral palsy (she might also be underage?). their courtship is initiated by a brutal rape presented to us to us in graphic detail, but lee is challenging us to find empathy for what might conventionally be regarded as the dregs of society and he highlights all the ways their bond has been shaped by societal/familial neglect and abuse. it's a provocative film--probably among the most subversive love stories ever put to celluloid--but it's great because it stays true to its characters and leaves the judgments to us. whether it's a defiant outcast romance or a repugnant horror is very much in the eye of the beholder.
8) My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (Dir. Johnnie To)
It's nothing... she's just possessed.
a dry run for romancing in thin air complete with the great sammi cheng, this is johnnie to at his wackiest, blending slapstick comedy, supernatural horror and romantic drama into a typically ridiculous, delightful and heartwrenching look at grief and facing death. his usual precise yet fluid camera movements always seem to synthesise heart and head, but this is one of his better looking films in general with a particularly eyepopping colour scheme. it's also admittedly an uneven mess and romancing in thin air is really this one honed to perfection, but i'm such a slut for that film i still loved this. there are just so many pleasures in all his movies, i think he's one of the few filmmakers who brings the best qualities of golden age cinema into the modern day without being slavishly retro.
7) Happy Here and Now (Dir. Michael Almereyda)
There might be termites in it. People too.
my favourite feminine sci-fi of the year over the aforementioned teknolust and assayas' superficially similar but more cynical and trashy demonlover, this is another of almereyda's quietly fraught dialogues about identity and connectivity. i love this director for making personal films that are pregnant with ideas and emotions while being seemingly completely uninterested in commercial appeal, and this strange little story of a woman searching for her lost sister in a lovingly documented pre-katrina new orleans is no different. it's probably too loose and idea-driven for some, but it may also be the most prescient film of the year, the one that seems most aware of how the internet will come to dominate our lives and shape our selves.
6) The Man Without A Past (Dir. Aki Kaurismäki)
If you see me face down in the gutter, turn me onto my back.
went long on this on RYM:
not unlike hong sang-soo, kaurismäki can become a kind of second home. he's that rare brand of all-encompassing auteur whose every film is instantly recognisable as his creation, and a variation on the same tics, themes, tropes and obsessions. you know what you're in for: a stylised yet lived-in working class milieu, static, micro-managed frames somewhere between ozu and wes anderson (a vocal kaurismäki fan), droll understatement laced with deadpan humour as in jarmusch (another vocal kaurismäki fan), poverty/delinquency on the margins, alcohol and cigarettes, live/diegetic music, underdog immigrants and the bureaucratic bullshit which always shadows them. STROSZEK is always brought to mind, only filtered through kaurismäki's generous humanism. the immigrant in question isn't a foreigner in this case but a man with amnesia, a stranger in his own land who remembers very little beyond his penchant for rock 'n roll. the way this man-with-no-name drifts into a rundown village and enlivens its inhabitants is something you'd typically find in a western; there's also a dame with a hard exterior and soft centre, a sheriff with a killer dog named hannibal, a villainous gang, and of course there are all these pitiless institutions for our hero to haplessly navigate.
THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST is one of kaurismäki's more straightforward films, and probably the sweetest and funniest that i've seen. i like that our nameless stud chats up a woman by saying there's something in her eye, and it works. the legal argument is hilarious, and the appropriation of rock music is glorious; it made the coastal shantytown feel even more like something out of DISCO ELYSIUM. does it stray a little too far into sentimentality? maybe. there is a lack of true danger here relative to other kaurismäkis, the level of absurdity is such that you never really feel that things won't work out just fine. then again, it's possible all of this is just the utopian dream of a man slowly dying from a head wound, and there's still plenty of disappointment and anger under the surface if you're paying attention. i love the scene where he meets his former wife for the first time. tentatively, he asks whether he had a drinking problem--no... but he liked to gamble, with his beloved record collection as collateral. the film's fairytale quality means that scenes like this pack a punch, because you know such lives play out very differently in reality; it's akin to IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE in this way. there's a particularly dark note involving the fate of a bank robber which lingers on as a very real alternative for our protagonist, and it's also worth considering how the community would fare without his presence--the implication is that immigrants can often have a positive, even transformative effect.
at one point, a side character responds to the offer of payment for a favour by requesting "if you see me face down in the gutter, turn me onto my back". it reminded me of when a man had a heart attack and died at my mum's post office, and the people in the queue stepped over him and carried on with their day. in the finale, this marginalised community takes matters into its own hands, rising as one with no help from up high. as ever with kaurismäki, it's not just finland's government and its institutions that are held accountable for the fate of its most vulnerable inhabitants, but the people too. if our nation fails us, the least we can do is look out for each other.
5) Punch Drunk Love (Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
I don't know if there is anything wrong because I don't know how other people are.
i don't love this quite as much as i used to, as with each viewing i find it a little more self-consciously offbeat and random in a way that distances me, but it remains such an original, magnificently autistic vision. the aggressively colour coordinated environment constantly being destabilised by the percussive, jittery score and camera motion, sandler wheeling through it like a shook up bottle desperately trying to keep its lid on. i'm not sure i can call it sandler's greatest performance anymore in light of uncut gems, but it's the most ingenious use of his unique manchild persona, and the film unexpectedly morphs into an exhilarating crowdpleader as his love makes him "stronger than anything you could imagine".
4) The Twilight Samurai (Dir. Yoji Yamada)
Don't be so impatient, you can kill me at anytime. I'd like to talk to you. Have a seat. It's a nice day.
it seems a strange comparison to offer for a samurai movie, but this a far more soulful, subtle and elegiac 2002 melodrama than todd haynes' heavy-handed far from heaven. the pressures of poverty, disease and cultural conservatism are as dangerous an enemy as anything beyond the borders, and if you manage to survive them you'll be sent off to die in the war in any case. the film isn't devoid of action, but when it comes it's matter-of-fact and inglorious, an exhausting and nervewracking threat to the routine of raising your children, a job that is itself so tough it barely leaves time to bathe. as grimy and weathered as "twilight" himself, the samurai genre is here to count its losses, sigh its last weary sigh and put itself to rest.
3) Bubba Ho-Tep (Dir. Don Coscarelli)
Always the questions. Never the answers. Always the hopes... never the fulfillments.
Now the stage is bare and I'm standing there
With emptiness all around
And if you won't come back to me
Then they can bring the curtain down
We're lost in a cloud
With too much rain
We're trapped in a world
That's troubled with pain
But as long as a man
Has the strength to dream
He can redeem his soul and fly
behind the egyptian mumbo-jumbo, which is probably the film's weakness in that i'm not sure it serves a specific purpose beyond being the mythology that's most inextricably associated with death, this is a great little cult film about coming to terms with mortality, overflowing with character and pathos. i love that we never see his wife, we never see his daughter, even his identity remains an open question to the end. his last stand of dignity and self-reclamation begins with the dismissal of his condescending, well-meaning carer, a complicated moment filled with cruelty and defiance, and we never see her again either. all of this could be happening in his own mind, it doesn't much matter. it makes me feel a little better about one day being in this same position, alone in a home with only my regrets and the growth on my pecker for company. for such a modest film, its arc feels even more epic than the one in lord of the rings.
2) Solaris (Dir. Steven Soderbergh)
I was haunted by the idea that I remembered her wrong.
it's a strange thing to say about a largely forgotten remake of a classic, but on what was my fourth or fifth viewing i realised what a formative film this has been for me. since i've just mentioned him i'll say that it's a better almereyda sci-fi than all the actual almereyda sci-fis, chopping the fat from its sources to leave only an incredibly focused, desperately romantic and existentially terrified meditation on this question of how there can be identity, connection or meaning when the memories it's all built on are so slippery and self-serving. it boils down to the metaphysical, a lost lonely man reaching out for god and finding only fragments of his own consciousness.
1) The Son (Dir. Jean-Pierre Dardennes, Luc Dardenne)
the son is the closest thing to a perfect film that i know. it's so economical in its editing and exposition, so relentless in its motion and physicality (of which gourmet's all-time top ten performance is an extension), that the urgency and intensity never slacken for a second. with the verité style they helped to pioneer you'd think they wouldn't care about shot composition, but it's never been clearer that it's actually an obsession for them, the difference being they simply don't cut between many of the shots. they begin when they must, they cut when they must, and, as is their signature, they end the film at the precise split second it needs to end, unresolved but tentatively gesturing toward the possibility of closure and grace.
moreso even than any bresson i've seen, it's the film that best collapses the distinction between the physical and spiritual, there in that warehouse as they stare at each other from either end of that plank of wood, the carpenter and his judas. physical distances are manifestations of emotional distances, everyday spaces are crucibles for wrestling ideas, the imagery arises out of the mundane, themes made tactile in a way that seems to divorce them from intentionality completely. i've deliberately not included a quote because the finale is completely wordless, without music even, just pure and elemental and it leaves me in tears every damn time. who needs words when you've got cinema?
---------------
1. the son
2. solaris
3. bubba ho-tep
4. the twilight samurai
5. punch drunk love
6. the man without a past
7. happy here and now
8. my left eye sees ghosts
9. oasis
10. friends of friends
2. solaris
3. bubba ho-tep
4. the twilight samurai
5. punch drunk love
6. the man without a past
7. happy here and now
8. my left eye sees ghosts
9. oasis
10. friends of friends
"I just wanna go up there and slap Geddy Lee but y'know I'm afraid if I did his voice would get higher and it could probably shatter my eardrums."
challenge_everything
Active Member
@no country for old wainds I still need to see The Son but I've always found the Dardennes to be incredibly consistent. Have you seen Young Ahmed yet?
Original Solaris is one of my favourite movies ever and while I think the Soderbergh remake is really good and I can't really fault it, I couldn't justify putting it that high in my list because I don't recall it adding too much. I've only seen it once though.
Original Solaris is one of my favourite movies ever and while I think the Soderbergh remake is really good and I can't really fault it, I couldn't justify putting it that high in my list because I don't recall it adding too much. I've only seen it once though.
9th) The Twilight Samurai directed by Yôji Yamada
Voted for by:
@CiG (1st place)
@challenge_everything (2nd place)
@no country for old wainds (4th place)
TOTAL POINTS: 26
Voted for by:
@CiG (1st place)
@challenge_everything (2nd place)
@no country for old wainds (4th place)
TOTAL POINTS: 26
.:TIED FOR 7th: 28 POINTS:.
Gangs of New York directed by Martin Scorsese
Voted for by:
@AbelTim (2nd place)
@Bourbon (3rd place)
@zerostatic (3rd place)
@Einherjar86 (8th place)
City of God directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund
Voted for by:
@Anom@nder Rake (1st place)
@challenge_everything (1st place)
@AbelTim (3rd place)
6th) The Bourne Identity directed by Doug Liman
Voted for by:
@TageRyche (2nd place)
@Anom@nder Rake (3rd place)
@zabu of nΩd (4th place)
@Bloopy (6th place)
TOTAL POINTS: 29
Voted for by:
@TageRyche (2nd place)
@Anom@nder Rake (3rd place)
@zabu of nΩd (4th place)
@Bloopy (6th place)
TOTAL POINTS: 29
5th) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets directed by Chris Columbus
Voted for by:
@dwellerINTHEdark (3rd place)
@challenge_everything (4th place)
@TageRyche (5th place)
@Burkhard (6th place)
@zabu of nΩd (6th place)
TOTAL POINTS: 31
Voted for by:
@dwellerINTHEdark (3rd place)
@challenge_everything (4th place)
@TageRyche (5th place)
@Burkhard (6th place)
@zabu of nΩd (6th place)
TOTAL POINTS: 31
4th) Irréversible directed by Gaspar Noé
Voted for by:
@AbelTim (1st place)
@Oblivious Maximus (2nd place)
@challenge_everything (3rd place)
@CiG (4th place)
TOTAL POINTS: 35
Voted for by:
@AbelTim (1st place)
@Oblivious Maximus (2nd place)
@challenge_everything (3rd place)
@CiG (4th place)
TOTAL POINTS: 35
3rd) Dog Soldiers directed by Neil Marshall
Voted for by:
@RadicalThrasher (2nd place)
@Bloopy (4th place)
@challenge_everything (5th place)
@CiG (5th place)
@Einherjar86 (5th place)
@Anom@nder Rake (6th place)
@AbelTim (7th place)
TOTAL POINTS: 37
Voted for by:
@RadicalThrasher (2nd place)
@Bloopy (4th place)
@challenge_everything (5th place)
@CiG (5th place)
@Einherjar86 (5th place)
@Anom@nder Rake (6th place)
@AbelTim (7th place)
TOTAL POINTS: 37
2nd) 28 Days Later... directed by Danny Boyle
Voted for by:
@Einherjar86 (1st place)
@zerostatic (2nd place)
@dwellerINTHEdark (4th place)
@Bourbon (5th place)
@Bloopy (8th place)
@CiG (8th place)
@RadicalThrasher (8th place)
@AbelTim (9th place)
@Anom@nder Rake (9th place)
@TageRyche (9th place)
TOTAL POINTS: 47
Voted for by:
@Einherjar86 (1st place)
@zerostatic (2nd place)
@dwellerINTHEdark (4th place)
@Bourbon (5th place)
@Bloopy (8th place)
@CiG (8th place)
@RadicalThrasher (8th place)
@AbelTim (9th place)
@Anom@nder Rake (9th place)
@TageRyche (9th place)
TOTAL POINTS: 47
