Movies I watched this week #59
(At this point, I have so many movies on my ‘Watch List’, that my selections of what to see next are completely random, one from here and two from there..)
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Encanto, the 60th (and latest) animation from Disney, took a page straight out of Gabriel García Márquez, creating a convoluted Colombian Macondo-like village in his magic realism style - for children. Many story lines could come directly from ‘100 years of solitude’: The swarms of yellow butterflies, her sister who is like Remedios The Beautiful, the all-powerful Abuela family matriarch, the magical powers of each Madrigal member. (Photo Above) - 9/10.
This is how they made it.
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Charlotte Rampling X 3:
🎦🎦🎦 ...”I want you to find my Velma”... Farewell, My Lovely, a classic neo-noir with Robert Mitchum as an aging Philip Marlowe, and Charlotte Rampling at the peak of her Femme fatale period. With a fantastic mid-70′s cast: Harry Dean Stanton, pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone, Walter Mcginn (The mailman from ‘3 days of the condor’), Joe Spinell (’Willi Cicci’) and even crime novelist Jim Thompson as her old, senile judge husband. The opening shots with Marlowe's Theme on the soundtrack hooked me in. 7/10.
🎦🎦🎦 Euphoria - like the Norwegian film 'Selvmordsturisten’ ('Exit Plan’), this English-speaking Swedish drama takes place in a luxurious end-of-life resort hotel that caters to (wealthy) clients who want to die on their own terms. Alicia Vikander joins her estranged sister Eva Green for her last few days before ‘going away’ in a slow and uninteresting story. 3/10.
🎦🎦🎦 Night Train to Lisbon, another of Billie August’s literary bon-bons for international armchair tourists. Dull Jeremy Irons with his usual upper class lisp is a Swiss professor of philosophy, who saves a young woman from jumping off a bridge, and who then spontaneously leaves everything behind to follow her past clues to Portugal. A stiff formal drama with a constant voice over, reading passages from a memoir by a mysterious writer who had died years ago. And like many European co-productions, everybody speaks English with a jarring accent, no matter where they come from. Mush - 2/10.
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Somebody on Metafilter wrote that Love and Leashes is “possibly the best BDSM rom-com film of any type I've ever seen". Except that it wasn’t: A milquetoast Korean kink affair between two young office workers, who experiment with some mild forms of B/D games, done in typically-shallow Netflix-style aesthetics. 2/10.
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My fourth & fifth Paolo Sorrentino:
🎦🎦🎦 This Must Be the Place: Sean Penn plays a strangely unusual role, a directionless, middle-aged retired goth rock star, emotionally-stunted (but in a loving relationship with his glowing wife Frances McDormand.) And then, in the middle of the film, his father dies, he re-discovers his Jewishness(!), and embarks on a journey to find an old Nazi war criminal who had tortured his father in Auschwitz.
With David Byrne as himself! This one requires a second viewing to fully assess and appreciate.
🎦🎦🎦 Il Divo, his 2008 biopic of Giulio Andreotti, Italy’s powerful and corrupt prime minister during the First Republic. Toni Servillo plays him as a silent, duplicitous and pragmatic schemer who manipulated the powers that control Italy: Businessmen, politicians, The Vatican, and the Mafia. Visually mesmerizing but dramatically not too exciting. 4/10.
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So I “Had to” watch David Byrne's American Utopia again - What a terrific, infectious concert! Wireless choreography & a brilliant inspirational party. Includes a joyous version of ‘This Must Be the Place’. One of the best 2020 films, of any type.
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Au hasard Balthazar, Robert Bresson’s story of a saintly donkey. A heart-breaking parable of Christian faith, seen in the journey of the mistreated Balthazar, suffering for the sins of humankind.
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The Hilariously-Raunchy Ali Wong X 2:
🎦🎦🎦 Ali Wong: Don Wong, her third Netflix stand up special, (and the first where she’s not performing pregnant). I love her, and find her outrageous exposures funny & sexy. She is so funny, I watched it twice.
🎦🎦🎦 Always be my maybe is Ali Wong’s first written and produced film. It’s a sweet (albeit predictable) romantic comedy, about two childhood friends who end up falling for each other when they grow up. With Keanu Reeves playing an exaggerated douche version of himself.
...”I want to hold your purse “...8/10.
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Nightwatch, a cliched Danish serial killer film from 1994. With very young Nikolaj Coster-Waldau in his debut role, as a night watchman at the local creepy morgue. Also with Kim Bodnia, 2 years before ‘Pusher’. Unsuspenseful and unoriginal. I was going to watch the American remake with Nick Nolte right after this, but decided that “No, one was bad enough”. 1/10.
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First watch: It’s a wonderful life, Frank Capra’s sentimental Christmas classic, the colorized version. An alternative timeline with some interesting anti-capitalist message. Jimmy Stewart as the naive, sexually-ignorant community leader in the Norman Rockwell small town America.
...”Bye George I’ll see you in the funny papers...”
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Documentarian Louis Theroux's Forbidden America: Extreme and Online, his latest BBC series. A scary look at the young neo-nazi, white-supremacist movement that is growing on the internet, and - basically - preparing for the beginning of the Race Wars. After drump, unashamed fascism is mainstream. 8/10.
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2 Gus Van Sant re-watches:
🎦🎦🎦 First watch in many years: His Good Will Hunting, written by 20-something Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Lots of Good Will, not enough hunting...
🎦🎦🎦 To die for, with narcissistic Nicole Kidman at her most glamorous, young Joaquin Phoenix strutting, and wooden, bland Matt Dillon, in a glitzy Hollywood-style murder tale about “TV Celebrity Fame”. Also, David Cronenberg as ‘Man at lake’. 4/10
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Ted K, a new biopic of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. It wasn’t as bad as most biographies, still it depicted him as a lonely, psychopathic hermit. Not a judgemental piece, and without exploring too deeply his background & circumstances. 4/10
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3 Olde Tyme comedies:
🎦🎦🎦 I discovered Voleflix, a new collection of public domain films, and there I watched Safety Last, Harold Lloyd’s silent era romance, with the famous ‘Dangling Clock’ scene. It’s the first time that I was able to see it in full. The whole (full-length) film is a set up for the ‘Climbing the side of a skyscraper’ 30 minute climax, and is indeed a nerve-racking suspense. Lloyd did the stunts himself, despite having lost a thumb and forefinger four years earlier, which you can’t notice, even if you look for it. 8/10.
🎦🎦🎦 Buster Keaton appeared in 14 of Fatty Arbuckle shorts between between 1917 and 1920. In The Cook, he’s a waiter dancing like an Egyptian, and Fatty is the cook. A fun slapstick. Observation: It seems like this was the period when people were introduced to eating spaghetti for the first time, so the spaghetti gag had special resonance. This film was believed to be lost, and was discovered in 1998.
🎦🎦🎦 My first Abbott and Costello, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a horror “comedy” with Bela Lugosi as Dracula, Lon Chaney Jr. as The Wolfman. A&C were the highest-paid entertainers in the world during World War II - inconceivable! 1/10.
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Black moon, Louis Malle’s strange “fantasy”, a surrealistic wet dream Buñuel-style (and co-written by Buñuel’s daughter-in-law). It has a fat unicorn, and a lethal gender-war, it has 9-10 naked blond children chasing a giant sow, mute Joe Dallesandro decapitating an eagle, it has a pretty 15-year-old (Rex Harrison's granddaughter) who breastfeeds an old lady and who has a snake slithers into her crotch, and so much more. But there’s no sense, or explanations to any of it. It’s just an experimental metaphor for some kind of a adolescent dream. 2/10.
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Circus is a poetic short story written by Tom Waits, narrated by Ken Nordine, and illustrated by Joe Coleman.
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(My complete movie list is here)
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