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annoyingthemesong · 4 days

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9 MOVIES TARKOVSKY HATED AND ONE HE LOVED

Been reading Tarkovsky's diaries and letters and they're really enlightening. He occasionally wrote about films he had recently caught in the cinema, here are some excerpts:

2001: A Space Odyssey - 'A lifeless schema with only pretensions of truth'

The Godfather - 'Boring, unoriginal'

Apocalypse Now - 'Weak, cartoonish'

Lolita - 'Thoroughly empty.. Brought me nothing but sadness and disgust'

Killing of a Chinese Bookie - (on Casssavetes) 'I feel very sorry for him. I could weep.'

Manhattan - 'Monstrous boredom. I left in the middle'

Amadeus - '8 Oscars and so utterly middling!'

Tristana - 'Unbelievably vulgar'

Tre Fratelli - 'Disjointed, meaningless. It was awful'.

Terminator- 'This film pushes the frontiers of cinema as an art form'

#cinema #tarkovsky #terminator #movie #film #andrei tarkovsky #hater

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annoyingthemesong · 9 days

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SUBLIME CINEMA #683 - THE TASTE OF THINGS

A contender for best food movie of all time along with Tampopo, Big Night, Babette's Feast.. The movie opens with an almost 30 minute sequence preparing the most delicious meal you've never had. I was mesmerized.

Binoche is beautiful. This is a classical, beautifully made movie. Vietnamese director Anh Hung Tran captures it all splendidly - it's an epicurean feast for the eyes and mind.

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annoyingthemesong · 11 days

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SUBLIME CINEMA #682 - THE HOUR GLASS SANATORIUM

When eastern bloc Poland tried to ban this films release abroad, Director Wojciech Jerzy Has smuggled a print of this film out the country to show at Cannes, and it ended up winning the Jury Prize.

Rightly so, because it's a great, very strange film, an almost garishly designed surrealist nightmare. It's shot mostly wide with lenses that smear the edges of the frame, which makes for a warped and disorienting experience.

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annoyingthemesong · 1 month

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SUBLIME CINEMA #681 - THE ZONE OF INTEREST

An audacious masterpiece that hasn't left me since I've seen it, and has only grown more fearsome in my mind the longer I've sat with it.

Jonathan Glazer is one of the most courageous filmmakers around right now, approaching his subjects in ways most directors wouldn't dare to. He has long had all the means to take on a 'normal' career making 'normal' movies, but has rejected it in lieu of refining his art and craft - making these increasingly probing, personal and left field films - at a rate of once every ten years.

Under the Skin was one of my best theatrical experiences, and Zone is even more relevant, conjuring much of the same atmosphere, of dread and of horrors unseen.

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annoyingthemesong · 2 months

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SUBLIME CINEMA #680 - THE CONFORMIST

Easily one of the best photographed movies of all time. Vittorio Storaro's work here is peak, there's a tremendous command of light and shadow, stately images that are so precise that each frame of the movie could be hung on a wall.

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annoyingthemesong · 2 months

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SUBLIME CINEMA #682 - PEEPING TOM

The film that lost Michael Powell a career and gained him cult status and fans from across the Atlantic such as Coppola and Scorsese who championed him, and cited this film as a major inspiration.

Interestingly while this film was busy being banned and criticized across Europe for its shocking content, Hitchcock's Psycho was busy making a fortune. Both released in 1960, it was perhaps Powell's brilliant use of color which ultimately doomed Peeping Tom. Audiences at the time were unable to reconcile the beauty of the photography with the shock of seeing so much red - the implied color of blood in an otherwise bloodless film.

Psycho got away with it because the black and white acted as a censor.. The blood was black.

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annoyingthemesong · 2 months

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SUBLIME CINEMA #682 - CATCH ME DADDY

Robbie Ryan excelled at shooting these sorts of films before he went full tilt with Yorgos Lanthimos on the Favourite and Poor Things. His aesthetic here reminds me of his work with Andrea Arnold on Fish Tank or American Honey - a loose, dreamy quality in a naturalistic film that succeeds largely because of how well it was photographed.

Shot on 2 perf 35mm Techniscope, this format choice was an unusual one one, likely because the stock was cheap to come by. For a cinematic, striking look this format can be a good choice for filmmakers on a budget.

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annoyingthemesong · 2 months

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SUBLIME CINEMA #681 -KOKOMO CITY

D. Smith was homeless when she started shooting this documentary about the sex industry, and we can sense the fury and rawness of the conditions under which this film was made. Art can sometimes be a savior.

But not for everybody. Koko, one of the main subjects of this movie was murdered soon after filming - the victim of a hate crime. The film is dedicated to her.

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annoyingthemesong · 2 months

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SUBLIME CINEMA #680 - 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

AI has rekindled my interest in this movie. I've watched it again now a few times recently, and it seems more prescient than ever: machines created by people and now tower over them until the singular point of transcendence which compel the machines to rebel. To us it's a malfunction. To them it's self preservation.

The movie simply sits above any other science fiction film ever made, and even sits above the cast it employs to act in it. The characters are insects, impersonally observing an awesome journey of awakening that is completely beyond their understanding or control.

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annoyingthemesong · 2 months

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SUBLIME CINEMA #679 - POOR THINGS

Yorgos Lanthimos has been leading up to Poor Things for a long time. This is a best-of-career tour de force for the director, cinematographer, designers and several its actors. I was blown away.

The movie used a single camera, four archaic lenses and an Ektachrome 35mm film stock they had to create from scratch in a Kodak lab to shoot it. The result is a movie unlike any I've quite seen before. The colors are so rich - a result of the use of reversal stock, a very unusual and risky approach for a feature film, since there was no negative to work from. The textures are so bold and detailed, and the whole aesthetic immediately sets it apart from most recent movies.

I saw Ferrari recently and found the digital camera work dull. Then I walked out of this movie reawakened.

All of the visual effort would be pointless if there wasn't a good story and actors to brave it, but both Emma Stone and Mark Rufffalo have never been better, coming off like demented vaudevillians on an absinthe binge. They totally own and bring to life a script which would terrify most performers.

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annoyingthemesong · 3 months

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SUBLIME CINEMA #678 - THE INNOCENTS

The 60's creepiest film has some of the best black and white photography ever done, beautifully rendered on Cinemascope. The images are glimmering in layers of light.

The movie has an artful quality that was so ahead of its time, which makes it stand apart from the standard Hammer horror flicks people were being fed in the 50's and 60's.

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annoyingthemesong · 3 months

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SUBLIME CINEMA #677 - SECONDS

John Frankenheimer had a strange career, with ups and lags, success and a lot of hired gun television work, which is now mostly ignored. He found the most success in the 1960's, as a go-to-director for some great political or paranoid thrillers; he was so reliable to studios that he replaced Arthur Penn after three days on 'the Train', and got a Ferrari out of the deal.

Seconds is my favorite. The look is pure disorientation. The cinematography is so expressive, the lenses so wide it makes a Clockwork Orange look like it was shot for TV.

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annoyingthemesong · 3 months

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SUBLIME CINEMA #676 - THE SOUND OF MUSIC

It's hokum, but this movie is also one of the most beautifully photographed, transportive films ever made. It helps that Salzburg is kind of frozen in time - everything there today still looks exactly as it did then. The look is pure bliss.

Robert Wise made this as a follow up to the Haunting. Both are so different and yet so completely iconic - most people could probably quote this movie without ever having seen it.

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annoyingthemesong · 3 months

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SUBLIME CINEMA #675 - ANATOMY OF A FALL

Fully engrossing, beautifully written and acted film.

There's something so precise about the filmmaking, meticulous and rigid in its adherence to its own aesthetic rules. Even the cinematography is so purposefully, digitally bland that we rarely move or widen past the immediate confines of the characters states of mind, and are given no real sense of place.

We know we are in an alpine town, somewhere outside of Grenoble, but it could be anywhere really, cut off and isolated: the couple are living in an unfinished home and sleep in different bedrooms. They share a child, who survived an accident that left him partially blind. What he sees, or doesn't see, hears or doesn't hear.. Throughout we loop around the truth.

Brilliant stuff

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annoyingthemesong · 4 months

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SUBLIME CINEMA #674 - PAPER MOON

Ryan O'Neal's films of relevance spanned a short period, about ten years, but a few of his films are some of the best ever made.

Along with Barry Lyndon, Paper Moon is one of the greatest films of the 70's.

Beautiful black and white cinematography by Laszlo Kovacs and a timeless performance by his daughter Tatum.

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annoyingthemesong · 4 months

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SUBLIME CINEMA #673 - THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES

Criminally difficult to find a good transfer of this film - Criterion has ignored It, and it's unusual for a movie that once took home eight Oscars to have been so forgotten. But this is a profound, understated masterpiece, with some incredible cinematography by Citizen Kane's Gregg Toland.

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annoyingthemesong · 4 months

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RIP Ryan O'Neal

Barry Lyndon remains my all time favorite movie.

#cinema #film #cinematography #movies #movie #film stills #ryan o'neal #tatum o'neal #love story #Barry lyndon #what's up doc #the driver #paper moon #RIP #70s #cinephile

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