cool movies i've seen - new thread

[jaime marzol]

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AMC is airing THE LAST WALTZ. i highly recomend it. it brought tears to my eyes, it was like a religous experience. real muscians playing real instruments, wow, what a concept.

and marty did a great job directing

[jaime marzol]

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dusted off my laser disc of TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE last night. i watched it through the capture card, and it is a shame how much picture tv overscan eats. it plays through the capture card and on to the tv. it plays full screen on the tv so you are always looking from one to the other to see how much your tv is eating, and it's considerable.

those scenes in the mexican village when walter huston brings that kid back to life, seeing the whole picture you realize what a beautiful film it is, and how badly your tv is ripping you off.

it begins with 2 down and out guys sitting on a bench.

having read a lot on the director, john huston, knowing how he thought and the things that appealed to him, i hit me that those 2 guys with no money, no prospects, no jobs, had a better chance of rising than any of us who have jobs. if you have a job, that's as far as you are going to rise. sitting on a bench with nothing to lose, the sky is the limit.

[Store Hadji]

Oh, Jaime, The Band, my my my, with Dylan wandering out at the end. Hmmm.

I recommend the new Yes DVD, Symphonic Live, which also has real musicians performing live and is very emotional for me.

[jaime marzol]

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hadj, i like Yes. will check it out if it crosses my path.

i rented tarkovski's STALKER. i'm not sure i liked it. i don't think i liked it but i could be wrong. took me about 8 hours to watch the first hour and thirty minute tape, took me about three hours to watch the second tape. could not sit through large chunks of it. curious if two weeks from now i'll get an urge to rent it again.

[Cole]

Watching STALKER (or any Tarkovsky film for that matter) is a little bit like taking a couple tablespoons of cod liver oil. It may be good for you, but…..What you need to do is watch L’ATALANTE (on New Yorker video only). If that doesn’t make you feel better, call me in the morning.

Cole

[jaime marzol]

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i saw L’ATALANTE listed on the sight & sound list, so your recomendation has foundation.

i have not seen it on the shelf of my artsy vid store in town but the last two times i went i just did not remember to look for it. i got Rules Of The Game, listed #2 on the list, but the tape was so worn out i was not able to watch it.

yeah, Stalker was like cod liver oil, but it had something going for it. three guys in a junkyard was interesting for at least 90 minutes. there is something to be said for that.

[Fredric]

Jaime,

I was kind of the same way. I said to myself "Well, that was weird and long." But then I couldn't get the film out of my head all that week or the next. I think the pacing is like Kubrick's in BL: deliberatley long in order to get the magnitude of what is happening to sink in. How do you give the illusion that a low budget, no-special-effect SF film is vaster in scope than it really is? You focus on each detail for a very long time. Image is releasing the DVD on October 15th, so I'll let everyone know if it still wows me.

[Harvey Chartrand]

What about Tarkovsky's Solaris, the Soviet Union's answer to 2001?
That one is long and slow but really creeps up on you.
Then it haunts you afterwards, especially that final image.
How can Steven Soderbergh possibly do the story justice with his quickie remake, shot in two months?
George Clooney is about the right age and bearing for the lead role, though.

[jaime marzol]

the trial was like that for me. i didn't like it, then in the wekks following the viewing it creeped up on me.

[Store Hadji]

I only hope Bogdonavich ultimately liked The Trial.

I don't know what director you're all talking about, but as to bad films I still felt compelled to view again, I'd list Begotten, the Czechoslovakian version of Alice In Wonderland (Pendercki was it?) and the recent Pi (which was a literate but crap rip-off of Lynch's nasty Eraserhead.)

[jaime marzol]

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TCM's Westerns Month:
taped anthony mann's DEVIL'S GATE, NAKED SPUR, MAN FROM LARAMIE (lbx), all 3 were outstanding. mann's MAN OF THE WEST was not so good. finally got a copy of leoni's ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST(lbx), haven't seen all of it, but what i've seen is tremendous. the copy i have now is almost 3-hrs long. AMC showed a leoni docu, and the original editor was speaking about an extra 40-minutes of footage that were going to be added in the next restoration. should be interesting to see. still don't like HIGH NOON.

saw BIG BRASS RING. it was not an awfull movie, it looked good, but it was drawn out, boring, and it seemed to run for 12-hrs. once i made it to the end i could not help feeling that i had just pissed away 2-hrs.

saw first half of abel gance's NAPOLEON, outstanding, an incredibly modern looking film, i was very surprised.

saw THE GOLEM, pretty darn interesting. german silent films have such a great look.

anthony mann's T-MEN, highly, highly recomended. it's a real wellesian treat.

[Jeff Wilson]

Last week at the Detroit Film Theater, I saw Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid, which is a hilarious relic of the Rat Pack era. Dean Martin plays the public perception of himself, a singer named Dino, who needs to get laid everyday or suffer migraines. Peter Sellers was initially cast also, but replaced by Ray Walston, who does such a good job I can't imagine why Sellers was given the role. I can see why the film was altered before release, given the risque nature of the plot and dialogue. Well-worth catching if it makes it home video or a revival house near you.

[jaime marzol]

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tcm showed KISS ME STUPID in lbx, extra wide lbx. looked great. crisp, fresh looking print. i liked it a lot.

rewatched LOST WEEKEND, i think it's wilder's best flick. 5 GRAVES TO KAIRO also kicks ass.

has to be wyler's best flick, DEAD END. it's as radical as they come.

[Harvey Chartrand]

For all you Stalker fans out there, this write-up from Turner Classic Movies:

A timeless, chilling film about a piece of land, called "the Zone," that seems to exert mysterious powers over those who enter it, Stalker (1979) is a notably minimalist piece of science fiction from Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. Based on a 1973 novel, Roadside Picnic by Soviet science fiction writers Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky, Stalker is a film that unfolds more in the realm of the internal mind than the external post-apocalyptic universe depicted in the film. As Louis Menashe so rightly observes in Magill's Survey of Cinema, "It is the viewer who imparts the 'special effects' through imagination and intuition." For this reason, Stalker's brand of conceptual science fiction has made the film something of an intellectual's cult film.



A trio identified simply as the Stalker (Aleksandr Kajdanovsky), the Scientist (Nikolai Grinko) and the Writer (Anatoli Solonitsyn), enter the Zone in search of a place where, it is rumored, any wish will be granted. Though the territory is surrounded by barbed wire and heavily guarded by the military, the men manage to penetrate the Zone, thanks to the experience of the Stalker, who has led other expeditions into the area, but at great personal cost, including a daughter permanently deformed by his exposure to the Zone's menacing forces.



Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Stalker as a work of science fiction is how Tarkovsky is able to convey the terror and suspense the Zone inspires with a minimum of special effects. Most often his signature vocabulary of the natural world and water are used to create a kind of living, spiritual presence in this empty, de-populated world. Some of the settings for the Zone have a postindustrial eeriness, of decaying factories, destroyed tanks and the detritus of a lost civilization which give the place a sense of post-apocalyptic foreboding, as if the Zone is some remnant of our own failed science and industry. As the men move deeper and deeper into the Zone, aspects of their personalities are revealed, and a kind of psychological truth serum causes the men to reveal their true selves.

The existential ruminations of these men of intellect and reason as they confront the failings of their own knowledge have been compared to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The intellectual ambiguities of all of Tarkovsky's films, including Stalker, also led to clashes with the Soviet authorities who disliked the abstraction of his images and meaning, and who claimed the director was "narratively obscure."

The director countered, "It's not that I don't want to be understood, but I can't, like Spielberg, make a film for the general public - I'd be mortified if I discovered I could."

But unlike other Tarkovsky productions, specifically Andrei Rublev (1969) and The Mirror (1975) the Soviet government requested no significant cuts in the film. Since its release, and the Chernobyl disaster, the ominous tone of Stalker seems like a harbinger of a potential nuclear holocaust to come. While Western critics were intent, upon the film's release, to read it as a political allegory, and "decode" its message about the Soviet government, such a reading denies the potent, universal implications of Stalker, about humankind's spiritual struggles, our loss of contact with nature, the privileging of the material over the spiritual and our quest for meaning, which make Tarkovsky's film an enduring masterwork.

Always an innovator in his use of stark, expressive cinematography, Tarkovsky created an additional, moody effect with his use of film stock in Stalker. For scenes shot outside of the Zone, Tarkovsky used a noirish black and white film endowed with a deep sepia tint. But once inside the Zone, Tarkovsky changed to color stock which the director felt gave a more otherworldly effect compared to monochromatic realism.

Like Tarkovsky's other films, Stalker is more about the emotional effects created by Aleksandr Knyazhinsky's somber, meditative camerawork than concrete, easily explained meanings. Stalker is first and foremost a profoundly ambiguous, but deeply felt film whose operations are often as mysterious as the Zone of its storyline.

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Producer: Alexandra Demidova
Screenplay: Boris Strugatsky and Arkadi Strugatsky based on their novel Roadside Picnic
Cinematography: Aleksandr Knyazhinsky
Production Design: Andrei Tarkovsky
Music: Eduard Artemyev
Cast: Aleksandr Kajdanovsky (Stalker), Nikolai Grinko (Scientist), Anatoli Solonitsyn (Writer), Alisa Frejndlikh (Stalker's Wife).
BW & C-163m.

by Felicia Feaster

[Fredric]

Just got Criterion's Solaris DVD: absolutely stunning. The man really had a vision.