The Official Movie Thread

[Satanstoenail]

Watched Stroszek the other night. Fucking great. Bleak and absurd as hell.

 

[no country for old wainds]

i know a lot of people who consider it his greatest. i'll always be an AGUIRRE man myself but it's still outstanding.

 

[Satanstoenail]

i know a lot of people who consider it his greatest. i'll always be an AGUIRRE man myself but it's still outstanding.

I'll check it out asap. Tried Heart of Glass last night and didn't think much of it.

 

[no country for old wainds]

aguirre and fitzcarraldo are his most acclaimed along with stroszek. alternatively if you want another bruno s one try the enigma of kaspar hauser. the story behind bruno s is worthy of a movie in itself: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Schleinstein

of course, the behind-the-scenes stories about aguirre and fitzcarraldo are just about the most legendary in movie history. herzog is some kind of genius but also a total maniac. kinski... he's mostly just a maniac.

 

[CiG]

What the hell, yesterday I watched Poltergeist II and while the Poltergeist franchise isn't exactly a great franchise, the sequel to me was a lot better than the original.

The first one is a Spielbergian cheesefest, but this second film was actually relatively creepy with Reverend Kane, the cult angle and the native American guy was awesome.

This scene really had an impact on me.



And this was pretty savage and hilarious. 1986 definitely was not muh current year.

 

[CiG]

 

[CiG]

Got around to watching Franco's 99 Women today after work. I've not seen many 'women in prison' films but I liked this one, it was borderline mainstream/conventional but with that erotic touch that worked quite well, without being full on porno camp.

My kingdom for a cigarette...

 

[Oblivious Maximus]

Got around to watching Franco's 99 Women today after work. I've not seen many 'women in prison' films but I liked this one, it was borderline mainstream/conventional but with that erotic touch that worked quite well, without being full on porno camp.

Funnily enough, there is a French porno version of 99 Women called Les brûlantes with random hardcore scenes spliced into the main movie that was released several years later and its really bad. For starters the jump cuts to the sex scenes are really abrupt and whoever shot the hardcore inserts made no effort whatsoever to cast anyone that even remotely resembled the cast of the actual film. Then there's the hilarious lack of continuity when a lesbian scene in the jail suddenly cuts to a close-up of some hairy man ass and balls laying pipe on a kitchen floor.

That sort of stuff happened all the time though with Franco's movies. Producers and distributors would meddle with the films after the fact and add the porn scenes just to release the films in the adult market to make as much money as they could. Its one of the reasons why his filmography is so labyrinthine, with several of his films existing in multiple versions under an assortment of different titles. Female Vampire (1973) alone has at least 12 different versions.

When it came to the hardcore inserts though, sometimes Franco would actually shoot it himself and when he did the results could be rather interesting. For instance The Obscene Mirror, the French hardcore variant of The Other Side of the Mirror (1973), originally a Spanish production, becomes an entirely different film altogether with Franco completely tweaking the story with the new sex scenes fitting in with the context of the plot. When he didn't have a hand in it though, you got stuff like Les brûlantes. Brutal.

There's also Doriana Gray (1976) where the hardcore/softcore roles were reversed. Originally shot hard, a softcore version was later prepared that suffers from the same issues most of the films with the hardcore scenes added in, namely the awkward jump cuts and Lina Romay wearing a not too convincing wig in order to resemble her look in the original footage. Just another day in the Franco zone.

 

[Satanstoenail]

aguirre and fitzcarraldo are his most acclaimed along with stroszek. alternatively if you want another bruno s one try the enigma of kaspar hauser. the story behind bruno s is worthy of a movie in itself: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Schleinstein

of course, the behind-the-scenes stories about aguirre and fitzcarraldo are just about the most legendary in movie history. herzog is some kind of genius but also a total maniac. kinski... he's mostly just a maniac.

Yeah I raced to wiki as soon as I finished watching the movie and read all about Bruno S. I though it all seemed too real. Also apparently one of the last things Ian Curtis did before he hung himself was watch Stroszek lol. I'm saving The Enigma of Kasper Hauser as it's the only other with him in it. Will definitely check out your recs first, cheers.

 

[CiG]

Funnily enough, there is a French porno version of 99 Women called Les brûlantes with random hardcore scenes spliced into the main movie that was released several years later and its really bad...

This is hilarious. In fact I knew about this due to an interview with Franco that was in the extras on the DVD. He didn't mention anything about eventually directing some of the porn scenes himself though but it makes sense to co-opt something that was being done to him by unknown hacks, that's the kind of market opportunism I can respect!

 

[Oblivious Maximus]

This is hilarious. In fact I knew about this due to an interview with Franco that was in the extras on the DVD. He didn't mention anything about eventually directing some of the porn scenes himself though but it makes sense to co-opt something that was being done to him by unknown hacks, that's the kind of market opportunism I can respect!

I think for some films he might have even agreed to do it before hand as it very well could have been in the contract to deliver two different versions for different markets. By and large though I'd say he figured it was going to happen either way so he may as well just shoot it himself so at least the footage matches up.

He did shoot a handful of XXX flicks that were conceived as such and it always amuses me whenever people slag Franco off as a pornographer its never his actually porn films they're referring to. Amazing how prudish some people still seem to be. I'll not deny that he didn't blur the lines at times, a lot of his movies do come very close to crossing over into full on hard X material, especially in the mid 70's and onward, but there's still a difference.

Unrelated, but I found his hilarious:

 

[CiG]

I still need to see Possession.

God damn Brandon Lee is genuinely hilarious in Showdown in Little Tokyo.
One of the best buddy cop films of all time for me, only a few elements drop it below Commando in terms of action cinema perfection, like why did the spinning wheel at the end explode while Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa was pinned to it by a katana? That made no sense.

But then you have genius lines like:

 

[Dak]

Did a family movie night watching MI: Rogue Nation. Easily digestible. Typical MI-ish mask and bomb usage. Nothing cerebral but goddamn it's impressive Cruise is 55, and basically my build (although not physique unfortunately....dude must plank ten minutes a day - I could prob manage 3 if I killed it), and still doing his own stunts.

 

[CiG]

@no country for old wainds @Oblivious Maximus

Considering buying Martin Scorsese's short films collection but I am wondering, how essential is this? Any of his short films highly rated by you guys? I'm whittling down my shopping cart.

 

[no country for old wainds]

i think THE BIG SHAVE is pretty well liked but i've never seen much fanfare over his shorts. haven't seen any myself though.

 

[Oblivious Maximus]

The Big Shave is really the only one of his shorts I ever hear anyone bring up.

 

[Vegard Pompey]

"My earliest sexual memories? Well, I remember, actually, I remember being, like, four years old and getting erections - I think it was my aunt or my mother's sister, and, kind of humping her legs and her shoes under the table. I remember going into my mother's closet and she had these cowboy boots that she wore when it rained, and humping those in the closet. [Laughing] And singing while I was doing it. Singing 'Jesus loves me this I know, for the bible tells me so'." - Robert Crumb

Amazing film. Reminded me a lot of a certain forum regular we all know.

 

[arg]

Despite critics Valerian was a fun ride. Visual orgy of special effects and I love Cara Delevingne's face. I can even laugh off the pro-Syrian refugee message

 

[CiG]

i think THE BIG SHAVE is pretty well liked but i've never seen much fanfare over his shorts. haven't seen any myself though.

The Big Shave is really the only one of his shorts I ever hear anyone bring up.

I think I'll give it a pass this time around.

Finally got around to watching The Thin Red Line, I noticed @no country for old wainds gave it a 4.5/5 on RYM and I was wondering what your justification for that rating was, especially considering that I notice you're not afraid to be very candid with your ratings.

Anyway, I really liked it too, but hours after finishing it I still feel like some of its underlying ideas went over my head. I may have to watch it again in a few months.

 

[no country for old wainds]

THE THIN RED LINE was just about the first 'serious' movie i ever saw. like, i think i saw it before i even saw THE GODFATHER or APOCALYPSE NOW or whatever. it was not long after i'd become a black metal dweeb and i was getting very into anything that didn't shy away from existential questions, offered alternative perceptions of death and meaning and nature and all that jazz, so naturally i loved a film that basically exists to explore these things quite explicitly, with characters as ciphers the director uses to work through a range of philosophical questions. later i went through a phase of turning against the movie, feeling that the starry-eyed voiceovers were just redundantly, obviously and cloyingly stating what was already present in the images, and it'd work better as a silent or something. then i did a module at university called 'film as philosophy' where we actually studied that movie, and a lot of my classmates shat all over it, and in defending it i rediscovered its pleasures and some of my previous criticisms started to feel like nitpicks.

that's a roundabout way of saying i'm not very objective or consistent about this movie, it was too much of a formative experience, the metallica (or maybe opeth lol) of arthouse cinema for me. i haven't seen it in a few years but i think of it really fondly now. i love that he turned an big budget war film with a huge hollywood cast into something that barely resembles hollywood cinema at all, nor buys into typical hollywood perspectives or narratives. while some might view it as a pussified war film i don't think it sugarcoats the ugly side of the subject matter, even if there is an overarching pantheism to its worldview (beyond that, i think it's difficult and maybe misguided to try to pin down any kind of overarching message, it's more just presenting a space in which to ponder a lot of different intertwined questions and existential topics). regardless of how well it hangs together as a movie, i think there's a lot of wisdom and sensory rapture to it even if its ideas aren't as fresh to me as they once were. having now seen all of malick's movies, i think he's one of the greats in terms of how he presents unique ways of seeing. his movies let me sense and experience the world in a way that i never have elsewhere, in life or in movies, which is all i can ask for from this kind of filmmaker really.

i recommend BADLANDS or DAYS OF HEAVEN if you're interested in seeing more of his stuff, although they're a little different as he took a 20 year hiatus between those and THE THIN RED LINE. BADLANDS is basically if you imagine BONNIE & CLYDE or NATURAL BORN KILLERS as directed by the guy who made THE THIN RED LINE haha.