FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

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Dark they were...

Postby Harvey » Thu May 19, 2022 10:31 am

This 2018 series came as a most welcome and involving surprise. I hadn't previously heard anything of it and had modest expectations. Based on a novel by Dan Simmons, it takes us to a space of daunting emptiness, almost completely hostile to human life which paradoxically, delivers a heightened sense of lived life and vitality.



The Terror season 1, a self contained story (the second season being another unrelated tale) is a telling of the famous disappearance of polar survey ships HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, lost during an attempt to find a Northwest Passage to the Pacific during the mid 1840's. This is not a faithful attempt to recreate whatever events actually did occur out there in the Arctic, because only a jigsaw of pieces is known. Some of those pieces come in the form of testimony by natives interviewed after the events about what they had seen and heard. Although a daunting level of verisimilitude is achieved by it's creators and it takes much account of the available scholarship, it is also a sustained meditation upon what their loss might mean and what it might indicate about a culture that tried and failed to exist there, by contrast with another older and more alien culture, sculpted by the inhospitable environment into something very tough, resilient and responsive to natures demands. In the face of modern technology, the native Inuit are all but helpless yet even with all their boats and guns, we discover that the interlopers when faced with aspects of nature beyond their experience, are equally helpless.

With minimal changes in setting and scenery, the same story could easily be an epic Science Fiction tale by Ray Bradbury, the ultimate hubris of technology beside nature or the ineffectuality of military culture to imagine what it does not know, or one man's journey toward absorption and eventual assimilation by an alien world.

Quite extraordinary.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby Harvey » Fri May 20, 2022 2:41 pm

Tarkovsky's, Andrei Rublev, available in high definition, the whole three hours...



Mirror, likewise.



Stalker, same.

And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby MacCruiskeen » Mon May 23, 2022 7:44 pm

^^ Glad to see Mosfilm have made the Tarkovskys available on YT again. (I think they were gone for a while.) Have you read Geoff Dyer's Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room? If not, I recommend it.

Here's a very different masterpiece, a film I had been hearing about for years and finally caught up with just before the first lockdown. It was a one-off showing in a packed cinema, a great shared experience.

There's no genre this movie can be pigeonholed in. The plot is easily told (no spoilers, because the premise is clear within five minutes): A man commits a murder and goes out of his way to leave clues as to his identity. He is the chief of the police force that will investigate the crime. Gianmaria Volonte gives one of the best acting performances in any film, right up there with David Thewlis in Naked and Peter O'Toole in The Ruling Class. The music is by Morricone. Link to the full film below. [ON EDIT: Apologies, I thought it had English subtitles, but it's just the Italian original.]

Image
https://media.senscritique.com/media/00 ... oupcon.jpg

Image
https://cps-static.rovicorp.com/2/Open/ ... x470_m0/11.

Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto, directed by Elio Petri, 1970.

Full film (Italian), 115m: https://vimeo.com/665264133
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby MacCruiskeen » Thu May 26, 2022 5:58 pm

Here's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), in the unlikely event that anyone here hasn't yet seen it (or even if you have).

Full film, 1h 47m: https://vk.com/search?c%5Bq%5D=eternal% ... _456239031
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby MacCruiskeen » Sun Jun 12, 2022 8:34 pm

Personal Shopper (2016, dir. Olivier Assayas) is one of the very few new films I've seen in the COUPVID era that have really stuck with me. Maybe some people have been put off watching it, as I was for a while, by the nondescript and vaguely misleading title. In fact it has little to do with fashion and nothing to do with glamour. It is a really unusual and thought-provoking film about ghosts and grief (and technology, and the exigencies of work).

This was the first time I'd seen Kristen Stewart on screen, and she's a very good actress, present in almost every frame and endlessly watchable. (I much preferred her in this to that gimmicky overlong Princess Di thing.) It's not a mere star vehicle, though. The supporting French and German actors also give strong, understated performances. Good to see an international co-production that isn't just another of those infamous "Europuddings."

The film is set in Paris, but it's in English.

(I was going to post the trailer, but I think it gives away too much.)

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https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71P ... SY679_.jpg
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby DrEvil » Mon Jun 13, 2022 3:21 pm

I prefer her in Underwater. Stewart vs. Cthulhu. Fight!

Okay, so it's a shit movie, but it does have frickin' Cthulhu in it.

On a different note, Barry season three is currently running. It's about a hitman who falls in love with acting, with hilarious results. As a bonus it has action scenes that put most Hollywood movies to shame.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuXBHfzqszE

And the bestest show ever just started up again:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4EOW9oqZ4k
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby Harvey » Sun Sep 04, 2022 1:26 pm

A couple of intriguing and well-wrought pictures I'd never heard of, from 1999 and 2000 respectively and definitely well worth the time. Ravenous and Simon Magus, both star studded and interestingly overlooked projects.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
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"The greatest thing
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby kelley » Mon Nov 07, 2022 6:55 am

the remake of "All Quiet on The Western Front" streaming on Netflix has been on repeat in my household for hours on end the past two weeks

it's a real twentieth century meta-film homage and a cautionary twenty-first century tale possibly arriving too late in the telling

am spending a month in Wien and being about six hundred miles from Kyiv makes this film extra heavy at the moment

immediately in the number two war movie spot behind Klimov's "Come and See"

dark

brutal

powerful

layering of image and interpretation worthy of RI's attention

movie of the year no question
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby semper occultus » Mon Nov 07, 2022 9:11 am

MacCruiskeen » 23 May 2022 23:44 wrote:
Here's a very different masterpiece, a film I had been hearing about for years and finally caught up with just before the first lockdown. It was a one-off showing in a packed cinema, a great shared experience.

There's no genre this movie can be pigeonholed in.

Image


funnily enough I've just come across this thing - which - speaking as a devotee of 70's films generally - sounds hella interesting - the Italian crime film

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliziotteschi

Just as American police films, American crime thrillers, and American vigilante films of the time focused on the crime waves and urban decline in the United States of the 1960s and 1970s, poliziotteschi were set in the context of, or directly addressed, the sociopolitical tumult and violence of Italy's anni di piombo, or the "Years of Lead", a period of widespread social unrest, political upheaval, labor unrest, rising crime, political violence, and political terrorism from the 1960s to 1980s. During this period, paramilitary and militant political terrorist groups, both on the far left (e.g. the Red Brigades) and far right (e.g. the neo-fascist Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari) engaged in kidnappings, assassinations, and bombings (such as the Piazza Fontana bombing and 1980 Bologna train station bombing). At the same time, there was a period of especially violent conflict and disorder within the Sicilian Mafia, kicked off with the "First Mafia War" of the 1960s and culminating in the "Second Mafia War" of the early 1980s. Italian organized crime groups such as the Sicilian Mafia, the Camorra, and especially the Roman Banda della Magliana were actively involved in both criminal and political activities during this time, carrying out bombings and kidnappings, making deals with corrupt politicians, and forming strong ties to extreme far right groups and neo-fascist terrorist organizations. Accordingly, poliziotteschi films such as Execution Squad (1972) often featured political extremists and paramilitary or terrorist groups alongside or in addition to the more commonly featured apolitical mafiosi and gangster criminal elements found in Italian crime films.

unknowingly I did actually encounter this genre on a random film channel about a year ago - Machine Gun McCain - with John Cassavetes - which I really enjoyed & is clearly an offspring of this genre although a straight mafia-heist film
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby DrEvil » Mon Nov 07, 2022 5:31 pm

^^You might like the Italian TV series 'Romanzo criminale – La serie'. It's set during the years of lead, and revolves around two gangs of small time crooks who decide to join forces and take over Rome. The deep state is a constant presence and informs some of the plot points along the way (fascists, train bombing, P2, etc.). It's based on the Banda della Magliana.
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby semper occultus » Wed Nov 09, 2022 4:48 am

good point - I vaguely remember that but hadn't realised it fit into an older genre
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby Harvey » Mon Nov 21, 2022 7:34 pm

I saw it in 2019 or early 2020 I think, then I forgot about it. It's not bad.

And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
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"The greatest thing
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And be loved
In return"


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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby drstrangelove » Thu Jan 05, 2023 10:29 pm



love this writer/director duo. true paranoids.
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby DrEvil » Sat Jan 07, 2023 5:20 pm

^^Some of my favorite movies the last few years are by them (Resolution and The Endless in particular). I've been saving Something in the Dirt for a rainy day, because once I watch it there won't be another one for a while. I'm just a little worried they might get sucked up by the Disney machine. They already did a couple of episodes of Moon Knight and one episode for the next season of Loki.

Another movie in somewhat of the same weird horror vein is The Empty Man. Looking at the trailer it looks like just another teen slasher, but it is anything but - it's right up the Rigint high weirdness alley. The director David Prior also did the excellent The Autopsy, based on a Michael Shea short story, for Guillermo Del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities on Netflix.
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby drstrangelove » Sat Jan 07, 2023 11:18 pm

i also fear the bigger budgets, though happily found something in the dirt to be a step back from synchronic and a wider audience. hopefully they'll be wise like In-N-Out Burger. thanks for the recommendation!
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