rms
Active Member
Oh well the cowboys and the oil workers sure, I was expecting some shit to go down too. I never thought something was going to happen with her and Jake like that though, not sure why you did. You should get out more, that way you might learn how to communicate clearly lmfao. Fucking sped.
rms
Active Member
About 8 days left on this, anymore lists?
@Funerary_Doom @MetalAges @-CC- @Atomic Tide @EternalMetal @Terasophe @TechnicalBarbarity @RadicalThrasher @Vegard Pompey @Phylactery @zerostatic @The Butt @Carpe Mortem @Krow @no country for old wainds @dwellerINTHEdark @EchoForever @Jimmy... Dead.
Whoever else...
@Funerary_Doom @MetalAges @-CC- @Atomic Tide @EternalMetal @Terasophe @TechnicalBarbarity @RadicalThrasher @Vegard Pompey @Phylactery @zerostatic @The Butt @Carpe Mortem @Krow @no country for old wainds @dwellerINTHEdark @EchoForever @Jimmy... Dead.
Whoever else...
rms
Active Member
TechnicalBarbarity
-TheNightsBane-
Vegard Pompey
ALLY TO GOOD, NIGHTMARE TO YOU
Many notable movies from this year I haven't seen so weird list but whatever:
1. The Wailing
2. Doctor Strange
3. Train to Busan
4. HyperNormalisation
5. Star Wars: Rogue One
6. Gantz: O
7. Personal Shopper
1. The Wailing
2. Doctor Strange
3. Train to Busan
4. HyperNormalisation
5. Star Wars: Rogue One
6. Gantz: O
7. Personal Shopper
Slayed Necros
Void
Slayed Necros
Void
1. The Handmaiden
2. Hail, Caesar!
3. The Wailing
4. Silence
5. The Void
6. Hell or High Water
7. Beyond the Gates
8. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
9. Don't Breathe
10. Christine
2. Hail, Caesar!
3. The Wailing
4. Silence
5. The Void
6. Hell or High Water
7. Beyond the Gates
8. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
9. Don't Breathe
10. Christine
Last edited:
no country for old wainds
Active Member
- Nov 23, 2002
- 26,565
- 9,580
- 113
20) Hypernormalisation (Dir. Adam Curtis)
trailer:
i don't always buy what curtis is selling, but at least he has the balls and the perspective to try. the rare documentary that's truly cinematic with no talking heads to be found, and of course extremely relevant to our current plight, concerned as it is with the way our leaders lost control/understanding of reality at some point in the last half-century and responded by constructing the illusory simplification we live in today.
19) Kubo and the Two Strings (Dir. Travis Knight)
a mother hits her head and will, without a hint of dory-esque comedy, slowly, frighteningly succumb to dementia. dad's already gone. later, a grieving kubo is chased by demons into a crowd of adults, friends; it subverts expectations in a small, disturbing way when they can do nothing to help him. it's a kids' movie about how nobody is immortal, not even mummy & daddy. your only options are despair (an unspoken threat of suicide hangs over everything), or to build that last great fortress against death: art. tell everybody a story, or tell yourself one. with its elegant, elemental metaphors, this hushed, intimate, wondrous fairytale is a decent attempt to cast laika as the western ghibli, even if its middle act is a little flabby and heavy on shenanigans.
18) Manchester by the Sea (Dir. Kenneth Lonergan)
lonergan never really seems fully comfortable doing anything cinematically beyond just staying out of the way and letting his actors flourish (in other words he needs to learn his limitations), but he's among the finest dramatists you yanks have got and i'm grateful he's chosen this medium to tell his stories. a thousand small details here add up to so much by the end, and the way he resists easy empathy or catharsis at every turn is super refreshing. don't get me wrong, this is no margaret, but it's weighty shit.
17) Creepy (Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
KK is a classical auteur, working with goofy genre material but always stamping and elevating it with his singular thematic obsessions and incredible skill in framing and blocking (probably THE modern master of negative space). i know i say it every time i list one of his movies, but there's no better horror director currently working.
16) The Love Witch (Dir. Anna Biller)
mileage may vary on the Feminism, but this is a gorgeous retro sexploitation picture pitched as high camp and full of funny visual details. so vivid it's like being sucked into another dimension.
15) Nerve (Dir. Ben Safdie, Joshua Safdie)
there's only so much sucky writing i can justify (is the LVP 'you think that takes NERVE?!' or the secret teen durk werb hacker society? swipe to vote!), and the culminating indictment of gen z detachment/viewer complicity in violent spectacle is intolerably heavy-handed, but whenever it commits to iphone set pieces of escalating nastiness slathered in digital dayglo, with even the lame YA shenanigans framed to emphasise their superficiality, it's a handchewingly immediate hypermodern satire.
14) 20th Century Women (Dir. Mike Mills)
kind of a double edged compliment but this is way better than a progressive hipster coming-of-age epic by the director of beginners has any right to be.
13) Certain Women (Dir. Kelly Reichardt)
i kept thinking of carver and of jost, but reichardt is all her own, a genuine master of framing and tone whose understated, elliptical style somehow invests spaces and movements and faces with meanings that bypass the brain and settle in the bones. in each story silences rupture before quieting again, and all the while you're tapped into the characters' states of being as they navigate a world (or, in the extraordinary third act reversal, a person) from which they share an essential disconnect. i'm still iffy about a few of the more on-the-nose dialogue/narrative strands (esp. the part with the male lawyer), but they're minor quibbles which fall away into insignificance by the time the breathtaking third part wraps up.
12) A Quiet Passion (Dir. Terence Davies)
the depth of perspective that engenders immortal art paradoxically, tragically prevents the artist from living. "alone in her rebellion", emily dickinson sees too deeply into the nature of the game and can't bring herself to play it, contorting with resentment toward those who can. this insight penetrates beyond the social; davies' palette captures her obsession with light, the way its shadows darken and lengthen over time. as damnation approaches, her spunky hollywood wit is gradually, chillingly poisoned.
11) Toni Erdmann (Dir. Maren Ade)
the biggest cannes darling of the past five years until parasite came along, and while i wasn't completely bowled over there really is nothing like this, and probably never has been. love the incremental escalation of absurdity into this novelistic accumulation of small disturbances, and the trust ade puts in my willingness to accept its intrusion. dislike the blunt social commentary and broad corporate caricature, ill-suited to a film that otherwise seems to hold a cliché-resistant ComplexLikeLife inconclusiveness as its raison d'être. there are two films here; a buddy's "a below average episode of Peep Show" quip is harsh on one but might be fair to the other.
10) Yourself and Yours (Dir. Hong Sang-Soo)
]
useless horny men, lying manipulative women, soju, more soju, maybe some beer, awkward conversation, artifice and unpleasant truth, cafes and bars, filmmakers and writers, shitty poetry, slow zooms, structural gambits, doubling, autocritique, walking through the city at night, mindfuck ending. just another hong sang-soo movie, in other words. they're all the same and they're all different in these subtle but seismic ways and they're all great. my favourite director of the '10s along with johnnie to for sheer volume of quality.
9) Elle (Dir. Paul Verhoeven)
verhoeven butts his pulp tendencies up against the european arthouse, draws heavily from bunuel and renoir, and once again makes a film that pisses on the hypocrisy and perversity of convention. declining most specifically to be a Movie About Rape, ELLE is simply about an extraordinary woman--played by huppert in a near decade-conquering storm of a performance--who drags the film wherever the hell she likes, fuck you and the narratives you attempt to impose upon her (even PV sorta stands aside).
8) The Wailing (Dir. Hong-jin Na)
"You know you're gonna have a bad day when you wake up to 20 missed calls from your shaman." - Vegard Pompey
7) The Alchemist Cookbook (Dir. Joel Potrykus)
it's christmas, and so joel potrykus 'abuses science', cranks some pixies, crunches some bugles, plays waaay too much don't starve, and dives into the mind of another deranged, disenfranchised degenerate. the inspiration is evil dead instead of office space, there are no white people to be found and the money-shot reference this time is sansho the bailiff rather than mauvais sang, but it's another potrykus punk classic through 'n through; if ydgi, retreat back to green room and be thankful you're one of the lucky ones.
6) Silence (Dir. Martin Scorsese)
it's hard reconciling marty's palpable empathy for his protagonists with his unflinching presentation of their deeply destructive flaws, and a remake of taxi driver with the subtext foregrounded is still misread the same way. the usual paradoxes are explicit but no less uncomfortably complex: rodrigues' faith is indistinguishable from narcissism (the pool shot his “you not talkin' to me?”), much of the enemy rhetoric rings true, and his martyrdom leaves calamitous collateral damage in its wake.
5) The Handmaiden (Dir. Park Chan-Wook)
another dense, vivid, knowingly ridiculous gothic melodrama, but more stirring than its (still underrated) predecessor stoker (which was written by prison break's michael schofield, a fact i will never get tired of repeating). on one level it's straightforward feminist wish-fulfillment about weapons of oppression repurposed as tools for self-realisation and liberation at the oppressor's expense, but park analogises this with his own artistic mission, attempting to liberate korean identity by twisting its most stifling perspectives and traditions toward more progressive ends.
4) The Salesman (Dir. Asghar Farhadi)
farhadi makes tragedies about normal, empathetic people whose actions in the face of crisis, confined and shaped by iran's social and legal structures, systematically lead to ruin. here we have the usual identity crises, stressing of familial bonds and tensions between traditional and modern (tehran is visibly in the process of radical upheaval), with an emphasis on iran's strict segmentation between public and private, performance and reality, eroding those barriers until the actor protagonists are confronted IRL by the characters they're playing on stage. few reviewers seemed to notice that the 'anonymous' prostitute is actually hiding in plain sight; a sly panahi-esque joke at the expense of the censors.
3) Personal Shopper (Dir. Olivier Assayas)
the modern world replaces spirituality with veiled, surrogate forms of the same. everything from work to art to technology increasingly serves to mediate between our physical reality and a perceived other. the chill comes from the idea that this metaphysics underpinning our lives and identities may be plain old projection, exemplified by the way assayas' fluid approach itself invites and frustrates interpretation, never showing its hand as a window nor a mirror.
2) Nocturama (Dir. Bertrand Bonello)
the culmination of a recent spate of movies (inc. the bling ring, spring breakers, even cosmopolis) which present 'late capitalism'--its worldview, its fashions and media--as a hall of mirrors, so all-encompassing that critical distance is unavailable. good luck even defining it, let alone opposing it. nocturama is fundamentally incoherent, even surreal as it degenerates from ideological revolution into dawn of the dead, but the frustration turns to horror when we realise that's what bonello intends, because it's exactly who we are. bet adam curtis would love it.
1) A Bride for Rip Van Winkle (Dir. Shunji Iwai)
not just a cautionary tale about the artificiality and mutability of identity in the virtual age; in a society which subsumes the individual into its prescribed narratives, that artifice is revealed as vital for self-actualisation. given the plot of this unmoored drama (a shy, anonymous woman is flung from her ordinary life into a series of movie-ish twists with the help of a scheming director), iwai extends the point to art as well: there's nothing more real nowadays than finding oneself onscreen.
---------------
1. a bride for rip van winkle
2. nocturama
3. personal shopper
4. the salesman
5. the handmaiden
6. silence
7. the alchemist cookbook
8. the wailing
9. elle
10. yourself and yours
2. nocturama
3. personal shopper
4. the salesman
5. the handmaiden
6. silence
7. the alchemist cookbook
8. the wailing
9. elle
10. yourself and yours
no country for old wainds
Active Member
- Nov 23, 2002
- 26,565
- 9,580
- 113
I need to finish Nocturama. Started it ages ago but for some reason lost interest halfwayish and never went back to it.
no country for old wainds
Active Member
- Nov 23, 2002
- 26,565
- 9,580
- 113
the second half is what makes it great haha, i think i did something similar first time around. although i’ve come to appreciate the first half more in a jean pierre melville kinda way, basically one long meticulously constructed terrorist attack.
Bloopy
Active Member
I'll offer to tally this up while CiG's PC has gone 2020. Will give @TechnicalBarbarity one more week to reappear with a list unless the council gets restless.
rms
Active Member
no country for old wainds
Active Member
- Nov 23, 2002
- 26,565
- 9,580
- 113
i wouldn’t hold your breath, i’m still waiting for tech’s 2019 list after 6 months
TechnicalBarbarity
-TheNightsBane-
Lol. My bad man, i've been on the move going in and out of town for the past few weeks. I'll put my lists together once i get home.
