Petrarchive – Thread 3828

Few weeks back I've watched Kurosawa's "Cure", and it really stuck with me, much more so than "Pulse" or "Charisma". Superb psychological thriller kind of movie, and the psychological themes and social commentary land really well in it unlike with most of the genre. It's amazingly filmed, not just because of Kurosawa's overall directing talent and penchant for showing decrepit urban spaces in great detail, but more so because of its hypnotic rhythm that it induces in the watcher. Managed to make me feel escalatingly uneasy through the whole experience, without ever missing the beat or relying on cheap horror bit.

I watched Conclave last night. Meant to watch it when it came out, felt relevant these days.

Thought it was an okay political drama, wrapped in papal robes. The plot was kind of by the numbers (taking down the bad pope contenders in various ways, the good, progressive pope contenders trying to be in the lead) and the ending twist, while humorous, felt a little too silly (and, if it's a lefty criticism/satire, on the nose). The looks of the movie were quite nice though, costumes, set, etc. And the main actors had chops, but the supporting actors falter and don't feel like they have the gravitas that the subject demands. In general, fine enough to please, but not great.

Sometimes in April (2005) a made-for-TV film about the Rwandan Genocide. Starring Idris Elba as a moderate Hutu army officer with a Tutsi wife.

Pretty good film, doesn't pull punches when it comes to the violence and bloodshed. One standout scene is when Elba's character is forced to murder his friend and colleague at a roadblock - though the man is shot at the instant that Elba resolves to machete him, thus betraying his friend but proving his loyalty. The scenes at the end where the survivors hide in the marshes are very compelling too. It's hard to imagine how awful that experience must have been for those who lived through it (or, for that matter, didn't live through it).

Very much follows the orthodox narrative when it comes to the role of colonialism in racialising the Tutsi/Hutu distinction and also the status of the RPF forces as unambiguous saviours. Notably, the downing of the presidential LearJet is attributed to either the army or undetermined 'rebels' - it is not suggested that the RPF may have been responsible. It is likely that you do not get to make a film about the Rwandan Genocide in Rwanda if you do not follow the party line so this is perhaps unsurprising.

All in all a good film, worth a watch.

>>3829

Funny, I felt underwhelmed by Cure but kind of liked Pulse. There was clearly a lot of film-making craft in Cure: very well shot, tasteful color grade, good performances etc, but somehow it didn't quite cohere for me. Perhaps detective genre expectations were a factor-- I feel like the best crime/mystery movies have a very tight plot and a lean script, whereas the somewhat meandering discursive nature of Kurosawa's style fits an offbeat horror mold better. I wanted to like Cure more than I did-- it has such a large cult following that I'm sure there's something to it I'm missing.

How was Charisma? Worth a watch even for a Kurosawa skeptic?

>3831
I found it underwhelming, like a discount version of The Young Pope, with kindergarten politics. Even the aesthetics felt a bit flat, despite trying. (I'm still regretting paying to see it in theater).

The Seventh Seal. Pretty good, quite a philosophical movie.

>>3865
It might simply be because I watched Pulse few years ago, and Cure is much fresher in my mind. Plus I had also heard about Pulse's most famous scene prior to watching and that, similarly to what you're describing, its label as a horror film set certain expectations for me. Perhaps the lack of any sort of expectation from Cure did it for me, I went in not knowing anything. And while yes the plot meanders a lot, it ends up fitting together very well for me, with even seemingly minor scenes and iconography playing into the overall themes. I was taken by surprise by how dreadful and uneasy the film managed to keep me through the whole experience without releasing it until the very end, maybe the fact that it has little to no supernatural stuff compared to Pulse (that you will always try to spend some viewing time trying to dissect the logic of, fruitlessly in its case) helped with that. I should probably rewatch Pulse though.
Charisma on the other hand is even more meandering, and it’s a veeery weird movie to me. At least it left me very perplexed. It’s on YT, so you lose nothing by giving it a go, but I struggle to actually articulate any opinion on it, it’s left me very confused to say the least.

I watched Guadagnino's 'Challengers' last week and found it a bit mediocre, although it was notable for its depiction of what romance is like for ordiary modern 20-somethings nowadays: flicking through dating apps, unglamorous, being down-low bisexual, etc. I don't like anything by Trent Reznor either so the soundtrack didn't speak to me.

The Brutalist, which I saw a little while back, was simply awful. It is remarkable that no-one in the media picked up on its pro-Zionist messaging.

>>3867
Haven't seen the Young Pope actually, but been meaning to give it a go. I like Sorrentino a lot.

My roommates dragged me to see Sinners in theaters, which was among the worst movies that have graced my eyes. So you can count yourself luckier than me.

I watched Conclave on a plane which feels like the kind of viewing it deserved. It's hard to describe how inadequate the script is to the rest of the film. The performers were A-level, but the script gave no one a great moment to deliver. The costumes, set, and staging were all vivid but without any purpose or insight. The plodding drama eliminated one rival after another in a way that achieved no higher synthesis or complication (>>3867 "kindergarten politics" is a good way to put it). And so the ending seemed absolutely absurd (actually "silly" is the right word, thank you for that >>3831) in the sense that it was untethered from everything else.

The fact that this is supposedly inspired by real personalities is, I think, the worst possible explanation for how boring it is. Why fucking bother making a roman-a-clef if they're just going to be sequentially subtracted out of the plot? Why not put the different personalities in a room and let them shout slurs at each other?! At least that would be something you couldn't get from the news.

>>3883

Conclave gave me such an appreciation for Young Pope that now I'll die defending it. At least YP has a perspective, even if that perspective is often bonkers.

It does delight me that the appreciation for TYP is shared. I have fond memories of /tv/ threads discussing Voiello's motives.

Saw Taymor's Titus (1999) recently. Really fun. The general absurdity of how she chose to depict it adds to the original play rather than taking from it. Although, of course, the actors made it shine through when it started dropping off. Unsurprisingly, Hopkins does a great job, especially during the dinner/feast scene. Lennix plays Aaron (imo one of the best Shakespeare villains) perfectly.

Anyways, great movie. It reminded me a lot of Brazil for some reason.

Watched Kieslowski's 'Double Life of Véronique' for the nth time: an unusual and poetic work about doppelgangers, the nature of sensorial experience, love, and inexplicable connections between strangers. It is lucid but difficult to understand, the plot incoherent but the mood powerful. It also features a beautiful Irène Jacob, who never had a better role than this.

Watched "My Cousin Vinny" last night. Good, funny, unpretentious film. Marisa Tomei deserved her Oscar just for being insanely hot.

I watched Radio Days a couple nights ago. It's my first Woody Allen watch. Actually liked it more than I expected, but I was biased by how much I enjoyed Orson Welles' hatred of Allen. It was pretty humorous throughout, and had a great, cohesive veneer of nostalgia. I mean, some really great bits, like the limbless baseball pitcher. Some moments were cloying, but I appreciated that this particular movie keep it moving and didn't linger too long on moments. On the other hand, I don't know how well the episodic format really worked out. It does an excellent job setting up scenes, and we do have a lingering thread of childhood Allen to keep chugging along, but it feels to falter a little in making a truly excellent movie. Like, the episodic format perhaps cannot sustain a really put together great movie, due to the fact that it is naturally fractured.

But this movie did make me more disposed to watching another Allen movie. Crimes and Misdemeanors and Annie Hall are on my watch list.

Just watched norbit. Haven't seen a film that so well covers the horror of the obese body. Quite funny if you can appreciate low-brow.

>>4780
A true patrician in our ranks.

https://www.spin.com/2017/05/its-been-ten-years-since-brian-wilson-said-his-favorite-movie-was-norbit/

I saw Good Will Hunting for the first time recently. Went a bit hard on simple cliches and one-dimensional characters, with a few exceptions. I think they did relationships between the characters nicely, though. I even liked how unsubtly the pretty-straightforward the lessons were served, something almost nostalgic about it.

Haven't watched a movie in a while, but the last one was Back to the Future.

I was visiting my mother back home for a couple of days, and one evening we decided to watch a movie. Neither of us had seen it, and it seemed like a wholesome and fun adventure, perfect for this sort of occasion.

Needless to say, it was extremely awkward. The worst part is that it could have been a thoroughly decent and all right movie if they just cut the oedipal subplot.
The idea of a teenager having to be his parents' matchmaker in a time travel scenario is really engaging on its own, so there's really no need to complicate it further.
In addition to this, the resolution to Marty's mom having a crush on him ultimately has no bearing on the matchmaking plot. It's just a gimmick that creates a couple of "funny" scenes before she realizes that "this feels wrong" without any real reason.

Other than that, the acting, direction and writing was good. I just wish it had an "awkward" disclaimer.

Watched "Bonjour Tristesse" last night at the theater. It's an adaptation of the book, and also a new rendition of the first movie. It's very bad. Don't go. Some of worst acting I've seen in a "real" movie. So very wooden. In a scene where a character plays the guitar, you can also seem him obviously not strumming. How can you not even act enough to fake play a guitar?

Decent cinematography. This maybe is only by virtue of it being set in a beautiful location, where even a monkey could take nice looking photos with a handheld. That cannot save this movie though, especially by having a god awful script. The dialogue makes me wonder if the scriptwriter had ever interacted with another human being. Clunky, yet grating.

The movie obviously wants to follow in the tradition of relaxed Mediterranean films that have a tinge of drama and seriousness within the levity of the idyllic beach, but can do neither. Scenes on the beach feel embarrassing or pointless, and the seriousness is laughable.

All in all, mediocre at its best.

trying to get into robert altman but his movies kind of piss me off if i'm being honest

>>6148
Love Long Goodbye, haven't seen any others yet, but I have high expectations for when I do.

Watching some Italian stuff recently. First time watching 8 1/2 and La Strada -- both good but flawed in their own way.

8 1/2 had truly excellent cinematography, and very tonally precise performances, but it's also self-indulgent to the point of ugliness. The 'creative angst' thread was much more interesting than the 'I want to fuck anything that walks' thread, unfortunately not reflected by their respective screen times. I see now that All That Jazz, a movie that I loathed, borrows much (most?) of it's DNA from 8 1/2. However self-indulgent I found 8 1/2, All That Jazz was far, far worse. The 8 1/2 DVD had included a nice introduction from Terry Gilliam-- his enthusiasm and admiration was very earnest and made me feel more warmly about the movie in retrospect.

Gonna check out some classic neo-realist stuff next and see what I think.

>>6179
Bicycle Thieves is very good, as an example of neo realism.

Just watched 'Norbit', didn't like.

Watched The Wailing last weekend, and it was superb. Wonderfully filmed and one of the rare occasions when movie managed to keep me guessing about its plot and who to root for until the very last moment. I highly recommend.

Watched Roeg's Performance, really good, a lot of fun.

The Surfer was actually ok, which never seems to happen with recent movies.

Watched The Luckiest Man in America (2024) starring Paul Walter Houser on a flight last weekend. Another mid-to-low-budget movie that barely stretched one fun idea into 90 minutes of content. Every frame filled to the brim with saturated 80s nostalgia: big frame glasses, shoulder pads, moustaches, blocky neon lighting, and centered around 80s pop culture.

Performances were alright, but felt like a lot of the actors didn't have much to work with, especially Walton Goggins who was top billed but probably due to his later blow-up because he mostly serviced each scene as the vain game-show host character. No emotional core for someone who is supposedly a main character. It was good to see Maisie Williams still doing work. Other notable character actors included the teacher Carmela slept with in The Sopranos, Patti Harrison from I Think You Should Leave, Damian Young shows up as corporate asshole and Johnny Knoxville has an oddly placed cameo as a liminal talk show host that interviews whoever appears to wander onto his live taped set.

Glad I saw it on an airplane!

>>6205
The Wailing is so good. Watched it for a class and left for home after dark and during a storm. Felt so unsettled the whole commute.

Rewatched Parasite, worse than I remember.

Far From Heaven. Saw it on the big screen. The set and costume design was great, being a 50s period piece and all, and the cinematography was splendid.

It plays the 1950s setting straight for the most part which I wish more historical films would.

Recently I've been making forays into Takeshi kitano's works. Despite initial mixed (but overall positive) impression on his first movie, Violent Cop, his movies have been really growing on me, especially Sonatine and Hana-Bi. There's amazing mix of deadpan humour, melancholy and unceremonious, sudden outbursts of violence about his works.

>>6665
I really liked Violent Cop, but I felt like it established the core of his recurring on-screen persona so clearly and completely that some of his other films felt like they were retreading the same steps with less vigor. I thought Boiling Point was good in that Kitano's character played a supporting rather than leading role, allowing his worldview to be demonstrated through other characters as well. I was thinking of Hana-bi recently because I just watched Itami's A Quiet Life, which had a similar children's picture book storytelling mechanism. I wonder if that's an established trope in Japanese film or just a 2-movie coincidence... Haven't seen Sonatine yet, what did you like about it?

I understand what you're getting at with Kitano's persona and wile it is true to an extent, I think he managed to pull it off reasonably well. While, of course the mannerism and quiet deadpan delivery are the same, the characters he plays do differ a good bit: like in the Violent Cop he really just plays sociopathic and emotionally stunted brute who celebrates violence for its sake. His job as cop, his revenge are all excuses and vehicles towards applying it. In Hana-Bi his character is somewhat different. I don't know, maybe I'm rambling. Ironically I hate when Eastwood does similar thing and it always feels very self-indulgent to me, but with Kitano I think it's mostly been working out. Dunno, maybe I'm just a weeb.
It's hard to say why Sonatine is a nice movie without going a tiny bit into spoilers territory I think, so I'll say this much: half of the movie is Yakuza doing Yakuza things, and the other half is said Yakuza group having summer vacation in the house by the beach in the middle of nowhere. It's a very specific mood.

short film recs? anything goes, under 60 mins

>>6682
Six Shooter by Martin McDonagh

>>6683
thanks, blud

Not a film but a TV show. I just finished watching the 1981 television adaption of Brideshead Revisited with Jeremy Irons as Ryder. Really enjoyable show, very faithful to the specifics and the themes of Waugh's novel.

The setting they chose for Brideshead is perfect, so impossibly grand and rarefied. Much of the story is narrated by Ryder in the same manner as in the novel, which is a great choice both because it allows the show to deal properly with the themes of the story and also simply because Irons has such a phenomenal voice. He is also very handsome - almost outshining Sebastian - which changes the aspect of the story somewhat. One sort of assumes by default that Sebastian is attracted to Charles based on his good looks rather than his being completely removed from the world of the Marchmains. I suppose, to be fair, it can be both reasons at once.

The show does do a good job of rendering the relationship between Sebastian and Charles - romantic, yes, but not necessarily erotic. I think an adaptation today would possibly fall into the trap of making them *wink wink nudge nudge* lovers, which would be both unfaithful to the source material and also instantly make their love for each other far less boring and more explicable.

The show does drag its feet in the latter stages, making it perhaps a little slow, especially if you know the plot already. Maybe I am just zoomer brained. I have never seen a modern TV show willing to be so contemplative and so gently paced. Probably it was only possible in an era where the viewer didn't really have the option to watch something else. The final scenes between Charles and Julia are truly moving and serve to justify the long build-up.

>>6759
* far more boring and more explicable

I watched The Zone of Interest. Good but quite long without much going on. I don't understand why he was retching at the end when three minutes earlier he was 'pleased as Punch' that the extermination of the hungarian jews was going to be named after him. Was it because he was ill from inhaling smoke? Then it's an irrelevance and a weird way to end the film.

>>6781
to add, though, the scene where the older boy play-acts killing his little brother in a gas chamber is one of the most stomach-turning things I've seen in cinema...

as beautiful as everyone said it was.

>>6682
Ward 13
Sunbelly
At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World
Le manoir du diable
Chronos

>>7157
Ward 13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihkaDQFivrM&t=1s
Sunbelly https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2022/09/15/sunbelly/
At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xr2oej
Le manoir du diable https://archive.org/details/le-manoir-du-diable-1896-georges-melies
Chronos (extract) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TCmip_NNxg
Chronos look nice, like a different Koyaanisqatsi.

>>7159
Thanks for collecting the links.
Entirely correct re: Chronos; Ron Fricke was the director of photography for Koyaanisqatsi and went on to direct several others in the same vein without the involvement of Godfrey Reggio. Baraka and Samsara are also good in much the same way, though it gets a little formulaic once you've seen a few. No Phillip Glass for any of Fricke's solo films unfortunately. Oh well.

I just saw Weapons, it was very good. Filters allegorycels

Limbo (2021) was very good.

The Naked Gun is pretty good. It did a great job of capturing the style of the originals, which had to be difficult with the way comedies are these days. Feels weird saying this about a Naked Gun movie, but I think comedies today are less subtle. I would be interested in learning what younger audiences think about it.

Stumbled on it thanks to the recent Columbine thread on RSP. A charming time capsule of the Y2K era; they made this thing like four months after the shooting lmao. The film inadvertently makes the shooters look a little sympathetic and naive. The killing scene is tacked onto the very end and is the worst part of the movie, somehow.

Satirizing every aspect of the culture and circumstances surrounding (pre-2010s) school shootings is somehow more cathartic than taking it deadly seriously. I wonder if society had gone this route instead of hushed dismay: could we have avoided the trendfollowers by making it seem cringe instead of inadvertently crafting a mystique?

Also, surprise appearance by Today Is The Day. Literally soyfaced at my screen, lol.

It's on IA in full if you are interested.

Original ideas are shunned like lepers in today’s Hollywood, so what were the chances Eddie Murphy would last the decade without climbing into another fat suit? The only thing novel about the comedian’s latest multirole orgy of lowbrow physical comedy, “Norbit,” is that it jiggles into theaters concurrent with Murphy’s Oscar nomination for “Dreamgirls.” It’s the movie-biz equivalent of a pre-election scandal.

Make no mistake, “Norbit” is a horrendous movie. Crude, overlong and mean-spirited, it plays out like an unfunny, ill-conceived attempt to evoke Steve Martin’s politically incorrect buffoonery in “The Jerk.” In fact, Murphy and director Brian Robbins conjure something closer to “Pluto Nash.”

With her monstrous carriage and sure-to-be-repeated-around-water-coolers-come-Monday-catchphrase (“How you doin’?”), Rasputia makes for a fine spectacle of cartoon gluttony, but little else in “Norbit” pulls its weight. How we doin,’ honestly? Not so hot.

>>7189
What's the point of posting someone else's work without attribution? We can all tell it's an excerpt from an Ebert column or smth (A little spooky how the not only the references but style of speech are so quickly outdated...)

>>7171
Hadn't thought about the crazy person in your picture for a long time

I have distractedly watched Too Much, the latest Lena Dunham tv show: US woman is dumped by her boyfriend (who now dates a perfect woman); she leaves for the UK and meets a pretty guitarist.
There are some nice things here and there, but every character is performing for an invisible audience (Insta, I'm guessing - except no one seems to be aware of it, not even the director). In the end, I got tired of it because it was mainly the spectacle of people reveling in drama (manufactured emotions and volatility). Closest literary object would be a novel written with a string of BuzzFeed headlines. It was noisy.

(Not a movie but I can't be arsed with making a new thread.)

>>7185
Interesting review. I totally agree that from a 'cultural engineering' perspective framing school shootings as extremely cringe would probably have been effective.

Whisper it, though, but it seems like the epoch of mass shootings has somewhat passed? Feels like a while since there's been a big one. I guess since the Las Vegas guy set a highscore that no one else is going to beat it took away some of the appeal.

>>7209

Mass shootings were a ZIRP. Everyone is either too busy or too broke to buy a gun

>>7209
I somewhat agree with what you are getting at. I think the specific "go to school and target the kids at random" style of mass shootings is a little bit over the hill, yes, (at least in the US-- there was one in Austria recently, shoutouts to globalism). But I believe the US is on the cusp of a new kind of vigilante violence that will essentially take the place of school shootings in the public consciousness. Perhaps they will be more along the racial vein like the Walmart shooter. When it appears it will be just as "obvious" as a concept as school shootings were in hindsight.