the LAST FILM YOU'VE SEEN thread

Interesting. I guess I'll give War of the Worlds a go pretty soon. If nothing else, it'll probably be a visual experience.

I've already commented on Murderball and Happy Endings

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance - If you're an OldBoy fan (and you are), then there's a good chance that you'll like it.

9 Songs - It's an experiment but one that doesn't seem to have much thought process behind it. It was worth it for me just because of the musical performances. I'm still glad that Winterbottom made it, although if he had modest intentions then I'm not quite sure why he hired a model for unsimulated sex scenes.

2046 - Still mulling it over but I wasn't overly impressed.

Haven't seen The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Red Eye. Not sure if I really want to either.

I highly recommend The Constant Gardener. For me, Fernando Meirelles found a compelling story/screenplay to go along with his talent.

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It's gonna be a busy couple of weeks for me. I want to make a quick trip to the city to see Last Days, Junebug, Grizzly Man etc. but I also have to go to Toronto to pick up the schedule and choose my films (they don't allow it via phone/online anymore). School is starting next week so that's another problem. I'll also try to catch a couple of films at Latin-Beat program.

I want to see Hong Sang-soo's A Tale of Cinema at NYFF because for some reason it didn't make it to Toronto. Not sure if I'll have the time. I'm an FSLC member so I do have a good chance of getting in but I'll have to make my decision shortly.

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2046 - Still mulling it over but I wasn't overly impressed.

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"Still mulling it over" describes me too.

The Constant Gardener is a little out of the way for me to go to but it is in San Francisco.

I think I'll like Red Eye, but I may be wrong. the 40-Virgin film I will see with some friends who have totally different taste from me, it's dinner and a movie, just a social thing. The last thing I saw with them was March of the Penguins, which believe me, was not mon genre. I agree with Walter Chaw on that, though I'm not as angry a guy as he is sometimes.

If you can see Last Days, Junebug, Grizzly Man, etc., that's great. A good list.

Maybe I'll see you at the NYFF, I'm expecting to be there. How great to go to Toronto, but they make it hard to get tickets, I don't see thhe point.

Last film I've seen: My Father and I/Comment j'ai tué mon père (2003) DVD > Netflix.

Father who abandoned his family long ago reappears from Africa and hangs about contemplating the sterile existence of his now successful and rich doctor son. An elegant production; the son lives in a very grand chateau. Rather static and theatrical. It contains substantial longeurs. With Charles Berling as the son, Stephan Guillon as his happier, but no-account brother, Natacha Regnier as his well-bred wife, and Michel Bouquet (a very spry if deadpan 79) as the rather annoying father. Directed by Anne Fontaine, who I never heard of. I don't think this is enlightening enough to justify the unpleasantness. Berling is a steely fellow. The French title is "How I Killed My Father," but it could more accurately be called "How I Almost Killed MY Father" -- but that wouldn't be very catchy, would it? (Of course Berling's been in some more interesting films, like Chereau's Those Who Like Me Will Take the Train, Assayas' demonlover, etc. Now if I didn't like this much, why do I list it here? Well, I watched it with the English subtitles off and I understood over 85% of it, so that made it a plus for me. I watched the all-French version of Le Divorce and I lost a lot of it.

Red Eye has surprisingly gotten some good reviews but it seems very generic. I'm gonna avoid the Penguins.

When are you coming? What do you plan to see at NYFF?

Yeah, they sure make it tough at Toronto, no more options for submitting choices through mail either. I guess they want to process all the entries at the same time so it'll be fair because Toronto has now become the biggest, most important fest in N. America. I'll definitely try to get into Larry Clark's Wussup Rockers, but I'm sure that so will everyone else.

It's been a while but I liked the Anne Fontaine film. Quite cold but it was fun to watch. Strongly disliked her next film called Nathalie which had all the pitfalls of bad French films.

Never actually been to a film festival, wish I would have went to Chicago's last year, then I could have seen the Weeping Meadow, but I'll keep my fingers crossed.

I just watched Ley Lines (1999) - Takashi Miike

Another in a seemingly endless string of movies from Miike, the man is active. This is one of his crime films, and one that concludes an informal trilogy. The camerawork was exceptional here, but unfortunately it is somewhat wasted on this somewhat bland film. Wasn't overly impressed with it, and seems like a lesser work.

Béla Tarr's The Outsider (1981)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Bright Future (2004)

I don't know what movies I'm going to at the NYFF, as many as I can handle I guess, especially French ones and ones by directors I admire like the Dardennes, Neil Jordan, Haneke, Soderbergh, Park Chon-wook, and Hou Hsiau Hsien. After that I'm going to Paris and stage a little mini-film festival of my own.
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[color=orange-red]The last film I watched: François Ozon's 1998 "SITCOM." DVD > Netflix. [/color]

White rats can make you gay

A wry look at the bourgeois family and sexual temptation. According to the French movie website Allociné this is Ozon's first full-length film. Perhaps that's not totally accurate. But assuming that it is, he got off to kind of a late start (he was thirty-one then, now he's about thirty-eight) but has had a pretty amazing, high-profile career since then. The father brings home a pet white rat and the sight or touch of it seems to make everybody go sexually haywire beginning with the son's dinner declaration that he's gay. Well-paced amusing outrageous polymorphously perverse and at the same time in a French way genteel, Sitcom has the bright glossy upper middleclass look you'd probably expect from a TV family comedy. An American newspaper reviewer said this is "John Waters crossed with Eric Rohmer," but for various reasons that is silly. At first I thought Ozon was somewhat derivatively channeling Almodóvar, and there is even an obstreperous Spanish housemaid. Ozon's personal touch is that she has an African husband who seduces boys in his gym classes. Ed Gonzalez got it right when he wrote that this is a bad movie but "its queering of genre conventions is still refreshing."

It's not revolutionary though, and that goes for all his films I've seen (Water Drops on Burning Rocks is still on my to-see list): Criminal Lovers, Under the Sand, 8 Women, Swimming Pool, 5x2. He's had fun with these and so have we, but there's a certain lack of conviction or consistent style (apart from the gay sensibility) and given that, it's worth looking back at this "minor" effort. It may have more meat in it -- and confront more personal demons -- than the slick ones with Charlotte Rampling.

We can track back those demons in the US DVD's one extra -- Ozon's very first film, a seven-minute silent in color made in 1988, Photo de famille (Family Photo). Like many fledgling efforts the cast consists of the young filmmaker's family members and they're used to show how a youth casually kills his whole family after dinner, poisons his mother, stabs his sister and smothers his father -- with a smile on his face every time, and then props up the dead bodies on a couch and poses with them for an automatic camera photo, throwing back his head and grinning from ear to ear. The young killer (Guillaume Ozon) looks like River Phoenix so that's a plus that would not have eluded the filmmaker whose young male principals in Les amants criminels were good enough looking to be given the full lush gay beauty treatment by the super-campy photo team Pierre et Gilles. Sitcom obviously realizes this early fantasy of intra-familial hostilities with a lot of embroidery added. Sitcom's siblings are played by an actual brother and sister, Marina and Adrien de Van (they sound like the incestuous siblings in Nabokov's Ada!), Marina being an old collaborator and schoolmate of Ozon's who's made films of her own. It's an amusing touch that Stephane Rideau, who's starred in and directed a number of gay films, plays the sister's straight boyfriend. I assume the Ozons in Family Photo are the actual brother and sister and mother and father. Ozon is doing the same thing in Sitcom; it's just more elaborate.

Posted on Chris Knipp website.

Unknown Pleasures (2002) - Jia Zhang-Ke

Not quite as ambitious or good as The World. Matter of fact I don't really think too much of this film at all. Just sort of went under the radar for me, no real impact left on me. Continues his theme of apprehension towards capitalism, and it's corruptibility. Maybe a second look is necessary for this, I don't know.

LA Confidential (1997) - Curtis Hansen

Almost forgot I watched this. Saw this one for the fourth time tonight, and I love this movie. It's so damn good that you rarely stop to appreciate anything but the plot. I did pick up some deep focus shots, and paid attention to Jerry Goldsmith's score a lot more this time around, but it's still the plot and acting that make this such a damn fantastic film. Granted I had someone asking me questions about the plot throughout the entire thing, but well that's to be expected I guess. Try to find a respectful way to say "stfu and watch the movie". But seriously though if it weren't for her, I wouldn't have watched it again.

I'd recommend that you give Unknown Pleasures another try sometime in the future. The fact that it's Jia's most humorous film shouldn't undermine its overall message, which, like you said, is his reservations regarding capatalism.

As for the humor, I recall a scene when the protagonist hears an explosion and runs to window and says, "Shit, are the Americans attacking?" We also witness him selling bootlegs of Jia's underground films on the street. And, of course, the dollar bill which roams around throughout the film and ultimately ends up buying a pleasure. I do agree with you that it's an inferior film to The World, which is slowly gathering momemtum.

Red Eye.
After watching this generic new Wes Craven thriller focusing on airlines and big hotels instead of terrified 20-somethings and houses, whose only originality is the new targets and techniques plugged into the right-wing politics of the plot, I'm doubtful that Cillian Murphy has a great future ahead of him, though both he and Rachel McAdams do a decent job as an evil terrorist-blackmailer and his almost too plucky victim. I should have seen 40-Year-Old Virgin instead. Or should I?

Park Chon-wook: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002).
Made before Oldboy (2003) and now part of a "revenge" trilogy. The third one, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, came out this year and I expect to catch it at the New York Film Festival. I haven't written an extended comment on Mr Vengeance yet. This is more gruesome than Oldboy and seemed to me to drag in the middle, while picking up momentum nicely in the latter part. Park's movies are as baroque and decadent as the late Jacobean "revenge tragedies" of 17th-century England, and there may be other similarities. An English university course outlined on the Internet uses the following statement as the basis for its first essay assignment:

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"Jacobean theatre interrogated structures of belief which legitimated prevailing power relations, and...it often did this by seizing upon, intensifying and exposing those contradictions in the prevailing social order which it is one of the effects of ideology to efface" (Johnathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, p.xxiii).

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Well, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance has a rich man and a poor, disabled youth lined up against each other, and the boy's revolutionary girlfriend leaflets mafiosi and the public alike with screeds against neo-liberalism and corporate dominance. In other words, this one reads as more political than Oldboy.

"I don't know what movies I'm going to at the NYFF, as many as I can handle I guess, especially French ones and ones by directors I admire like the Dardennes, Neil Jordan, Haneke, Soderbergh, Park Chon-wook, and Hou Hsiau Hsien. After that I'm going to Paris and stage a little mini-film festival of my own."

That's nice. I didn't know that you were a HHH fan. Even if you were to miss the Dardennes and the Haneke at NY, you can probably catch them in Paris.


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Benoît Jacquot's Seventh Heaven (1998)

Shinji Aoyama's Mike Yokohama: A Forest with No Name (2005)

I don't know what will be on in Paris when I get there, I think it's best to see things when you can. There will be new things opening in Paris I'm sure. The Parisian cinematic fare last September was pretty interesting, and quite different from what you got here. Another thing I'm thinking of doing is buying some DVD's there. I don't have an all-region player but I can watch them on my computer. As you may recall I did that -- bought and sent back a little pile of DVD's -- in Italy last year, with some good results -- Gianni Amelio, and Buongiorno, notte, several interesting things by Pupi Avati and my favorie Muccino, his first, Come te nessuno mai (not available on US DVD).

If I'm becoming a fan of HHH, it's entirely thanks to Filmwurld. I've only seen three so far, Puppetmaster, Flowers, and Goodbye, South, Goodbye. Netflix doesn't have much else that I haven't seen, just a couple. Some of his highly regarded movies, such as Boys from Fengkuei, appear hard to come by. Kevin Lee had a good, very personal, essay on it in Senses of Cinema. I ignored Milenium Mambo when it was showing here because I'd hever heard of Hou then.

When I said "directors I admire," some of them are ones I think I'm beginning to admire, and some are ones I used to admrie who I hope will still do good things, such as Soderbergh and Neil Jordan....

I appreciate your comments on Jacquot and Seventh Heaven on the DVD Releases thread and have put Seventh Heaven on my Netflix queue. It's not clear to me if all the other movies by him tht you mention in your first paragraph about Seventh Heaven are available on US DVD's. I like The School of Flesh very much, have a copy on tape and have watched it many times, but I was a bit disappointed (at least at first viewing) in A toute de suite, though I certainly preferred it to Lila dit ça (they came here in close succession, they opened in NYC about the same week). I have seen nothing else by Jacquot and a lot of his work is not available on US DVD's, it seems (How many of the best ones are?), and only four are available from Netflix, two of which are coming, not yet available.

I wonder what's going to happen to all the stuff on videotape that isn't going to make it to DVD. A friend just mentioned that the bigger local libraries are now removing their videotapes and paring down to just DVD's. They seem enamored of the new medium, as are the big commercial rental stores, but for the purpose of renting or lending, it's not at all clear that DVD's are an improvement on tapes; in fact they seem to degrade more quickly, because they're rather delicate and if they're handled roughly, they're ruined and unwatchable. And anyway removing the tapes from the shelves means a fair number of films will just not be available any more that we might need to see.

When there was still a big Tower Classical store in Berkeley (now long gone) with a large, well informed staff, I remember one guy saying that there were tens of thousands of CD's already out of print. There is no permanence in these new media.

I hope somebody will watch Gianni Amelio's Le chiavi di casa/The Keys to the House. I saw it in Italy and in NYC, but I don't think it ever got here. Now it's at Blockbuster, so... watch it, people!

Lamerica is on my Netflix queue so I'll finally get a chance to watch it. Oscar has said he likes it the best, I think. But I was very impressed by both The Way We Laughed/Così ridevano and The Keys to the House. Both amazing.