I had heard of it because of the sex scene (it was one of those movies I wanted to see when I was a young teen, but no one would ever have let me rent it), but never seen it. I don’t have any education in film history or theory, so I didn’t know how influential it was until just now. Curious. I liked it and appreciated its overblown style, but got a little bored with all the time spent on people chasing each other through deserted Venetian streets.
3 Likes
Watched Get Out for the second time with a friend. Still a great movie.
Recently watched LAYER CAKE. It’s basically a much more realistic version of one of Guy Ritchie’s movies, but dealing with cocaine instead of guns (LS&TSB) or diamonds (Snatch) or weed (both versions of The Gentlemen). I actually liked it a lot. Not nearly as much as Snatch or LS&TSB but still pretty good.
I never could have linked that screaming lady (the friend/wife/sister of the Duke) with the mother in Paddington…
3 Likes
I watched The Zodiac Killer (1971), the first film about that guy. This is true exploitation because it was made while the killer was still thought to be freshly at large. As opposed to stalely at large, or dead, like’s thought now. It opens with the text:
"The motion picture you are about to see was conceived in June 1970. Its goal is not to win commercial awards but to create an “awareness of a present danger”, Zodiac is based on known facts. If some of the scenes, dialogue, and letters seem strange and unreal, remember - they happened. My life was threatened on October 28, 1970 by Zodiac. His victims have received no warnings. They were unsuspecting people like you - Paul Avery. Reporter, San Francisco Chronicle"
TZK is ultra low budget, making it a wonderful artifact of the time and place, but performances are terrible and the script is wafty. The first third is wall to wall mysoginistic idiots – ‘You tramp. Dumb broad. Quiet bitch!’. etc. One of these idiots turns out to be the first distracter candidate for being the Zodiac, giving a bit of an excuse, but it’s a slog to get through this period.
Once rolling, the film hits most of the known Zodiac events pretty effectively, and gratuitously throws in more for good measure. However cruddy a lot of it is, it does tap some good psychological insights about the kind of person who could have been Zodiac. So if you’re interested in Zodiac, or artifacts-of-their-time films, this is worth a look.
A major motive for making the film was to try to lure out and catch Zodiac at a preview screening. This is not a joke (by me now, or the people who tried it!)
-Wade
3 Likes
Definitely a very legitimate trigger warning. In my experience once the movie showed its hand, my reaction was a grim nod of understanding instead of feeling sorry that Jess was stuck in this elaborately punishing multitrack-looping layer of hell and I appreciated that they didn’t leave it ambiguous whether she was actually a bad person. It is upsetting - especially to consider that her son might be experiencing this over and over with her, but I hope to rationalize it that this is her own experience and her son and friends aren’t experiencing dying with her over and over again. But that’s definitely a harsh bit of content that deserves pre-warning despite being a massive spoiler.
2 Likes
Hm, the wake of devastated and raving people in this thread suggests I need to rewatch Triangle. I remember thinking it was good (overnight DVD rental when it was new out) but I wasn’t excited enough that I’d ever revisited.
-Wade
1 Like
Time to break my run of non-arty and not-of-conspicuous-quality films in this thread.
Thanks to Tubi, I rewatched a mysterious UK film I first and last saw at the Sydney Film Festival in 2008, called Helen, about a college student from a care home who participates in a police reenactment of another student’s disappearance. I loved it then and raved about it in sedate fashion, using my words. That’s hard for this film. Somehow, it has me questioning the meaning of every scene, not even in relation to the plot. And the images of her wandering around in that yellow jacket are indelible on the brain.
When I re-read my review after re-watching it, I agreed with what I said sixteen years ago, and specific notes were the same. That’s rare. I’d forgotten there were things so agonising I almost couldn’t look at the screen.
I recall the film’s creation was somehow community-based. The people who play are mostly local non-actors. Some of them have the same names as their character.
This is a very strange film and is plainly not much seen, but I think it’s exceptional. “Polarising” seems more accurate than saying it’s not well liked. I’ve seen random comments around the internet: 'This was the best thing I saw at (insert film festival here). That’s what I said about it at Sydney. And it was at a lot of festivals.
-Wade
5 Likes
That sounds interesting.
I recall the film’s creation was somehow community-based. The people who play are mostly local non-actors.
I wonder if some people are more forgiving to independent movies that use non-actors or amateur actors. Amateur acting presented in the wrong way can make dialogue seem stilted and empty, but professional acting that tries too hard at a weak script can make things seem contrived, which is arguably just as bad.
Sometimes things just work if they’re on the same level. I think Werner Herzog basically built his non-documentary career on this, where his earlier films are much more highly regarded than his later celebrity vehicles. He always nearly improvises the scripts as far as I can tell.
4 Likes
Yeah. I think in Helen, my sense is authority figures are mostly played by actors, and others by non-actors. I could be wrong about guessing at each person’s experience, but there is a divide in how they present, and anyone giving what approaches a speech is an authority figure. It certainly works in this film. They’re all unified by some strange mood.
Re: Herzog, I don’t know if Nosferatu counts as later or earlier. But I know it’s a favourite film of mine and I’m hard pressed to point to specifics. Dracula stories are usually highly purposive, but like Helen, Nosferatu feels purposive and not purposive at the same time. It’s not easy to read in terms of the usual Dracula narrative. It probably highlights class a bit, situationally. I’ve even watched Herzog’s commentary on it but I forget what he said about preparing it.
I saw Herzog’s Signs of Life (1968) at uni and loved it (my friend and I were rolling around laughing at an absrd scene involving a fly being trapped in a jar or a shell. I forget if anyone else was laughing) but haven’t seen it since.
-Wade
2 Likes
I haven’t actually seen either but “purposive and not purposive at the same time” is a really good description of the ones I have seen.
2 Likes
Tom got to pick the movie today and we watched Bottoms, which was hysterical. Trope: high school losers hatch a plan to get cool and get into the pants of the cheerleaders. Twist: It’s a couple of lesbian BFFs who start a girls’ fight club to achieve it.
It’s raunchy/heartfelt and weird/basic and dumb/smart all at once. Tom picked it because it has Ayo Edebiri in it and she’s pretty great.
6 Likes
I love her, makes me proud to be a Bostonian. Bottoms is hilarious.
I watched Matt Johnson’s directorial debut The Dirties last night and was shocked how well he pulled off the hidden camera stuff, how convincingly it portrayed high school, and the sensitivity of its acting/writing (from a guy better known for comedy). Great movie, def check out the content warnings before watching.
I also saw In the Mood for Love with a lil’ film discussion group the other night and absolutely loved it - no notes, just a perfect endlessly dissectable gem of a movie for people who love the art of film.
5 Likes
I’m back to the post-Conan field with Hundra (1983) that I saw on Tubi.
In the 80s, I read Joe Bob Briggs’s review of this female barbarian movie, yet never encountered the film until recently when it was revived for Blu-Ray. With only 23 reviews on IMDB, it seems to have been MIA for 40 years.
Well, it’s a weird movie. A really primitive world, primitive characters, primitive attitudes, primitive happenings. No magic. It’s also the only lone female barbarian film I can think of from this time, apart from Red Sonja in 1985. And SHE (1984) is close but is post-apocalyptic and also more ensemble. Most female-led films in this genre seemed to go in for groups of women, like Barbarian Queen or Amazons
Hundra is the fiercest warrior in a tribe of women who broke away from – the female-oppressing world at large? – and went to live on their own. Except they need to get pregnant and have girls to continue. It’s already interesting at the start of the film when one of them gives birth to a boy and groans at her misfortune. Hundra jokes she prefers a horse between her legs to this sort of thing.
Pretty soon the tribe gets the opening-scene-of-Conan treatment: A rampaging male horde massacres the lot of them (though not without taking a ton of casualties themselves) except Hundra, who escapes.
We now jump to the Conan-ambushes-multiple-opponents scene as Hundra stakes out a rocky high ground to wait for her pursuers then hacks and kicks the lot of them to death. All with great location work and in coldly sunlit widescreen. So far, so great!
Things get more primitive after a wise woman tells Hundra she needs to get a man’s seed, have a girl and continue the tribe. Hundra doesn’t know much about this and tries it on with the first man she sees, a belching averbal dickhead who’s already cowed some female followers. It’s going poorly and he starts beating her up as well as trying to mount her. After several minutes of this, she’s sick of it, then she beats the shit out of him onscreen for five minutes. This is how all problems are solved in this film.
Things slug up when Hundra goes to the city in hopes of meeting someone less appalling. Her eyes are set on a priest, but he says he’d need to be aroused. Her solution is dreadful – to go to the temple devoted to the orgy cult of the bull, and learn to be womanly with makeup and such. Lest you think this is a dumb mysognistic film – well, it turns out it’s either more complicated, or more basic.
Spoiler alert for the end of the film in this paragraph – Hundra teaches the temple’s procuress of women to stand up for herself, and eventually, in an enormously satisfying scene, breaks her faux submissiveness and hacks and kicks to death every man in the orgy cult, in elegiac slow motion, over a period of about ten minutes, while Ennio Morricone’s rousing score plays.
With a pregnancy, baby, and basic stuff about settling down or continuing your life of barbarian combat, Hundra’s sort of like the core ingredients of a soap opera buried in a mountain of bloody combat and sex abuse of women. Laurene Landon who plays Hundra has all the physical power needed, does all her own stunts but one, and has no traditional acting range.
I found Hundra too sluggish and sexually weird in the middle to be broadly enjoyable, but it certainly stands out in the genre for all of the heroine’s gusto, for handling female oppression in some brazen fashion, for a Morricone score that’s a dry run for Red Sonja, and just for being different.
From Joe Bob Briggs’ review of Hundra: ‘We are talking in excess of seventy corpses. Heads roll repeatedly. We’re only talking fourteen breasts because I don’t count dead ones. No motor vehicle chases, but one orgy makes up for it. Great kung fu.’
The trailer says, ‘There is a seed of Hundra in all women!’
-Wade
5 Likes
I recently watched Turbo Kid (2015) again and it honestly holds up to the test of time.
The world has gone to shit and what remains is a desolate wasteland where scavengers roam. Water is power and there is, let’s say, an interesting way of collecting it. The movie is low-budget and very well made. It’s quirky, goofy and gory. Movie nerds know this movie well, but it really is quite accessible to more mainstream viewers who like a little gore.
“MAD MAX ON A BMX” 
Watch it for free on Tubi.
2 Likes
Just saw MaXXXine, the final movie in Ti West’s X trilogy. Mia Goth remains just fantastic-- it’s clear she’s West’s muse and she’s just perfect here as in the first 2 movies. It’s a slick yet grainy and seedy film that captures the feel of 1985 very well. I was too young to have seen Hollywood in 1985 (I was in the 9th grade!), but Tom lived in LA at that time and assures me it was just disgusting then.
It’s my least favorite of the 3 movies, though-- it felt scattered, too many serial killers and bad guys and chases. Still, I love West’s style and the ways he stays faithful to the genre while innovating just enough. Also, my day is always greatly improved when I see a movie with Giancarlo Esposito in it, and he was as great here as ever. The whole trilogy is worth seeing if you can stand the whole sex-and-horror thing. Pearl was the best of the 3, I think.
2 Likes
Yeah, I thought she was great in this, too.
I also found it to be my least favourite of the three films. I thought it had the weakest end. That’s not the only reason, but it doesn’t help. My fave remains X.
-Wade
2 Likes
Last week I saw something really radical. In A Violent Nature. A Sundance-endorsed slasher film, that is, as everyone keeps saying, arty-leaning as well. You could call it an inversion of slasher films. How?
Summarily, a typical slasher film situation occurs – a group of young people visiting the woods share a story about a lumberjack massacre that took place there decades ago, and which might have been carried out by a victimised ghost. The entity is roused and begins to kill them. But 90% of the film’s run time is spent with the entity, not the young people.
So almost everything that normally happens offscreen in a slasher film happens onscreen, and vice versa. If you wondered what Jason did between kills in a Friday 13th, now you see him plod through the forest in Kubrick-like tracking shots, silent, for minutes at a time.
As such, there’s a lot of unbroken woods atmosphere and beauty. There is very little conventional suspense. I saw a woman review the film on Youtube and describe it as almost ‘chill’. There is, however, extreme gore in places, but again, transformed by it not being delivered through the concerns of the people it’s happening to.
If you take a lot of people who like slasher films and haven’t tried an artier film with longer shots, you can see where high bafflement with this film comes from. But it’s also excited a lot of people.
I find it’s rare that conceptual art that sticks to its concept for the duration is entertaining. Sometimes it’s not even engaging for ten seconds. But I really liked this film. By its nature, it does not and cannot offer too much obvious excitement of a recognisable kind, which prevents me saying ‘love’ for now. It offers other things that accumulate. As conceptual art executed for 90 minutes that also functions as an out and out genre piece in the most out and out of genres, this is a radical film, and a success.
This film’s had a lot of hype, and seems to have taken a while to get to Australia, but I’m lucky it got a release here, especially since it’s R-rated. (I don’t mean American R, I mean Australian R18+, which is rarer than hen’s teeth, now.)
-Wade
4 Likes
I appreciated the vision in IaVN, but came away from it underwhelmed. I think that in this movie, when people do dumb shit, it seemed more egregious because they’re not doing anything else except being grist for the mill, and mostly doing that by being idiots, even the experienced guy who should know better.
I did like how there’s no time taken to get things going. The film assumes you know how supernatural horror movies go, so in the first 3 minutes, a necklace is taken from a ruin and a body emerges from the ground. Where it succeeded was in the relationship between the movie and the watcher-- you know the tropes, it knows you know the tropes, and it doesn’t waste any time with explaining anything.
2 Likes
I finished The Game by David Fincher today. Me, I really liked it, though I can see why people might be underwhelmed. I’ve mentioned on another chat it’s “like Saw without the violence”, but 1. I haven’t watched Saw and 2. I really don’t think I agree with said my statement anymore. I think a better explanation is: it’s David Fincher with much less violence. It’s good. It keeps twisting and turning, though it’s really all fairly expected stuff.
…and this is the problem with youth today. 
I watched this the other day and it brought a smile to my face.
It covers a fight scene with the Millennium Falcon and if you just close your eyes and listen to that segment… you’ll start to realize the true magic of Star Wars.
1 Like
I remember that movie. It’s with Michael Douglas iirc. I wasn’t super excited when I had seen it, but I enjoyed it. 
1 Like