FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby Harvey » Thu Dec 30, 2021 8:28 am

Definitely agree with Iamwhomiam and Jack, Don't Look Up is excellent. I also agree with Jack that the critique within the film is very widely applicable. (And note how many bad or lukewarm reviews there are, by now, a standard technique for limiting exposure to potentially dissonant ideas.)

Just one other such example of this, The Zero Theorem, 2013, by Terry Gilliam, which is also excellent, generated these reviews from Rotten Tomatoes:

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Two other films which are near perfect, each in their own way, both gleaned from my favourite film blog: John Llewellyn Probert's House of Mortal Cinema

Edgar Wright's latest is a superb ghost story, Last Night in Soho, 2021



Stunning, and certainly one which admirers of Kubrick may enjoy, Spencer, 2021 can be read in a number of ways. I'll leave it to Mr Probert to provide one of many such lenses:

https://johnlprobert.blogspot.com/2021/12/top-ten-films-of-2021.html

A film where image, music and especially Kristen Stewart's performance combine to provide moments of near cinematic genius, and possibly the only movie with aspirations for Oscar time to ever grace this site. Pablo Larrain's SPENCER plunges us into Great British Horror country from the off - that soggy, gloomy, stately setting of country houses that were home to so many mad scientists, sadists and satanists back in the 1970s. In fact the film SPENCER reminded me of a lot was dear old Norman J Warren's SATAN'S SLAVE, with our innocent and unsuspecting victim being prepared for sacrifice by a bunch of eccentrics, right down to her being weighed near the start ("for fun") by Timothy Spall in the Michael Gough (or possibly even Sheila Keith) role. "I'm lost," says Kristen Stewart's Diana at the very beginning as she's trying to find her way, alone and unaided, to her destination, giving the increasingly strange goings-on she finds herself involved in something of a CARNIVAL OF SOULS vibe.


And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby drstrangelove » Fri Dec 31, 2021 9:30 am

It's funny, because it was made in 2020 as a satire of the climate response, yet ends up released in 2021 and takes on new life as a satire about the covid response.

Such is the risk with allegories :rofl2
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby MacCruiskeen » Tue Jan 11, 2022 10:02 pm

The Lorelei, 1990. One of the oddest and most memorable single dramas ever produced by the BBC. The author was someone called Nick Dunning, and this script appears to be his only writing credit. It's beautifully filmed and edited, full of peculiar echoes and low-key surprises, with a great performance in the lead role by Amanda Redman (who would later play the gangster's wife in Sexy Beast).

A young geography teacher from London takes a solo walking holiday in wild North Wales. There she has a disturbing and inexplicable brief encounter ("It scared the flesh off me"), though there's nothing really ghostly or threatening about it. She dismisses the incident and returns to her work and everyday life in the big city. More strangeness ensues.

Full film, 1h 15m:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=je2QWjYIiuU

Directed by Terry Johnson
Written by Nick Dunning
Edited by Dawn Mears
Starring Amanda Redman and Michael Maloney
Broadcast: 22:10, 18th March 1990 on BBC Two
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby MacCruiskeen » Sat Jan 22, 2022 10:25 pm

^^ Watched The Lorelei again, and I think it's a collective masterpiece, badly underrecognised. Nick Dunning must have been channeling something that mattered to him. Struck again by how well the music and sound design works in conjunction with the briliant editing (Dawn Mears) -- e.g., the three falling objects (the sandwich plate, the dog's meat, the schoolbook), and then the final furious medley. Michael Maloney gives a really finely-judged ambiguous performance that leaves the audience asking the same questions as the protagonist. In 2022 the whole wonderfully weird "school play" sequence would undoubtedly be vetoed by the TV bureaucats as "irrelevant" or just "too long", but it's all essential (listen to the words the kids say). I can't think of many films, if any, that are so naturally acted and yet so disturbingly strange.

What does it prove when she opens the cupboard at the end?

Here's a good short essay on the film, comparing & contrasting it with a decidedly minor work by the great Alan Garner:

"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 Harvey » Sun Jan 23, 2022 4:33 pm

^ It is excellent.

Coming from an appreciation of Robert Aickman (The Swords) and M R James (A View from a Hill) and then there are my own experiences, very few of which I've described at RI (though certainly, it may not seem as if this is so) Lorelei struck me very forcefully when I first saw it. You've mentioned this film three or four times now on RI and I saw it the first time I noticed your recommendation here, a few years ago. I'm wondering if something in it speaks to you powerfully about the situation we find ourselves in today? And if so I wonder what you think it might be? I have some thoughts and feelings on the subject, but am curious as to whether yours are in any way parallel.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby MacCruiskeen » Sun Jan 23, 2022 8:17 pm

Damn, I knew I had written a few words about it online somewhere, but I had forgotten it was here. (Thought it was Twitter.) And, in an effort to avoid spoilers, I had given the same bare summary of the opening in almost exactly the same few words. It's déja vu all over again. Apologies for the repetition.

Harvey wrote: I'm wondering if something in it speaks to you powerfully about the situation we find ourselves in today? And if so I wonder what you think it might be?


I'd need to have a think about that. I first saw The Lorelei sometime in mid-2018, i.e, well before Coupvid-19 took us all hostage. (I'm pretty sure it was that Corse Present blogpost that put me onto it.) It fascinated me even then, and I'm not sure it has any general relevance to "the situation we find ourselves in today", so much changed by the pseudopandemic. The film resonates on a more personal level for me, but even that I can't easily pin down (like a butterfly). Certainly she reminds me of someone I once knew. Certainly I've wondered about branching paths and alternative histories/worldlines -- as he says in the cafe: "Another life, maybe." -- and about intuitions and premonitions, failures of nerve and leaps of faith, irrevocable decisions, moments of truth, lack of trust and loss of trust. The sheer strangeness of people. The sense you sometimes have of something big and unnnamable and momentous going on behind the most ordinary events and acts and conversations. And the way an unfamiliar place (or person) can unsettle and disorient you, shift and sharpen your perceptions, open you up, throw you into another dimension, maybe literally. There be dragons, and angels.

I don't know. You've got me thinking now about what a violent hiatus these last two years have been, or else they've marked a radical and permanent change. It now looks almost quaint to see people in a film just meeting and parting freely, going to pubs and cafes, taking off on spontaneous weekend breaks without any fear of curfews or quarantines, working in a school with nobody "distanced" and not a single mask in sight, milling around in rehearsal rooms, just breathing and being, falling in and out of love, taking major and minor risks in every moment despite the possibility of getting hurt or hurting someone else, because there's no life without risk.

Worth noting too that the film is only 32 years old and the world looks much the same now as it did then, yet it's a world without computers or smartphones or internet. Maybe high weirdness (another word for unfiltered reality) finds it harder to get itself noticed when everyone's encased in a digital carapace, constantly being lured off elsewhere (though only mentally and only into manufactured realms) and therefore rarely fully present in any one place or time.

Be Here Now, or...

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Ad campaign, 1994
"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 Harvey » Tue Jan 25, 2022 2:58 pm

The final scene suggests she has not only come to terms with her experience and apparent loss (she participates in its erasure at a number of levels) but that the knowledge gained from her experience outweighs the excitement, pleasure and companionship of continuing to possess the relationship which grew from it. I must admit, all of that didn't register as forcefully on my first viewing which left me more pleasurably disturbed than not. But the disturbance caused by her experience and its denouement will remain a disjunction in her life, a warning and a lesson. The butterfly/moth motif (containing references to premonition, Icarus, ephemerality, death/destruction and transformation) also points to a potential future for certain of her pupils which, it is hinted, might perhaps somehow have been unrealised if her own desires were to be fulfilled. It's a very particular perspective, but then again, that's the value of art.

In the end, whatever events happen to us, no matter how astonishing, fantastic or terrifying, we become remade, we become re-formed by those experiences. What we do with ourselves in their wake is up to us.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby Harvey » Wed Feb 09, 2022 7:21 pm

Has anyone else watched Omicron (1963) yet? Disturbingly relevant, but whose joke is it?
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby Harvey » Sat Feb 12, 2022 6:40 pm

I wanted to mention this a couple of years ago but kept forgetting about it. I look at the fulsome praise this received (I loved it) beside the sneer campaign against Under The Silver Lake for example and I have to wonder....

And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby Harvey » Wed Feb 23, 2022 5:52 pm

Frequencies 2013.

And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
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And be loved
In return"


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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby Harvey » Wed Apr 20, 2022 5:03 pm

This worthy effort from 2017 contains the seeds of something greater than itself, but from our viewpoint in 2022 it does a fine job of re-contextualising the last two years for a mainstream audience, while opening the door to a larger context almost entirely missing from the mainstream.

UK18 (2017)

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

Postby DrEvil » Fri Apr 22, 2022 3:53 pm

A couple of very excellent TV shows of the mindfuck variety:

Severance

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

Devs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp9LMsI6uJ8

There's also Outer Range. I've only watched one episode so far, so I don't know if it's actually good, but the first episode gave me Skinwalker Ranch vibes.
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Apr 22, 2022 4:37 pm

.

Got through 15, 20 minutes of Severance. Ponderous, humorless, way too serious. If it was funny, I'd have doubtless gone for more. All this slogging character-and-universe-building work to start, because it's got to come in seasons, not just a damn movie. And what's the point? Normalizing what's already underway, including the obvious ideas that it's sinister and nothing is as it seems? Investing us emotionally in these ciphers and thus humanizing our acceptance of it? Making the real-life version seem like it's better than the TV exaggeration? (Even as, gradually, it becomes less and less of an exaggeration?) Possibly, at the end, it serves up the revolution, quick and easy? Or renders it pointless? Either way is just as good. Brought to you by Apple! The Devs trailer promises the same, ideologically, but is probably worth a gamble, given the author's pedigree and the more naturalistic acting style suggested in the trailer.
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby DrEvil » Fri Apr 22, 2022 7:25 pm

I thought Severance was hilarious at times. Not "haha - obvious joke" funny, but in the absurdity of the whole thing (plus the brother-in-law). But nothing is resolved - it ends on a cliffhanger - so there is the possibility it goes off the rails in the future. Depends if there's a plan or not. But I did enjoy the ideas presented and how they handled them, like the work versions of the characters being trapped in the office forever, and basically creating a cargo cult around the mythology of the founder and the other departments on their floor because it's all they know.

Devs is a finished story. Essentially a six hour long Alex Garland film, so if you like his other films, definitely give it a go.
"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 » Thu Apr 28, 2022 6:01 pm

At least Devs was able to develop its own premise intriguingly, even if its destination is the same big (transhumanist) nowhere.

Severance (I gave it a try) presents us with almost everything we already know without any of the good bits. We're already the corporate cattle, the lab rats in Apple's maze. Having been treated to this televisual recapitulation of our lives, dissociation, deracination, corporate dissembling, corporate narrative control, divide and rule, repressed alienation, banality, the cult of work... What audience approval exists seems very much in character with the autistic hegemon inside the story. As though we should be delighted (or grateful) to have our own experience regurgitated slowly and tediously back to us by a glittering Hollywood cast.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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