Author Topic: The Top 100 Club (Sept 2015 - May 2017)  (Read 329310 times)

pixote

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Re: The Top 100 Club
« Reply #3410 on: May 30, 2017, 03:58:07 PM »


Assault on Precinct 13  (John Carpenter, 1976)

Since I've never read up on this film at all, it was surprising to learn that the title is short for Assault on Precinct 9, District 13. Likewise, since I didn't see or remember Teproc's review, it was surprising to learn that there's as much Night of the Living Dead here as Rio Bravo. Carpenter's successful and eerie score fuels those supernatural associations, turning South LA into an apocalyptic wasteland. At the same time, the amateur acting, familiar LA locations, budget art direction, archetypal characters, and even some of the banter in the dialogue all call to mind any number of 1970s cop shows.

Structurally, Assault on Precinct 13 deviates from traditional genre norms, with a screenplay that's really just two acts. The first act takes up exactly half of the film's running time, give or take, slowly letting four separate story threads converge. This convergence requires a series of silly coincidences, for which the film is admirably unapologetic. That's maybe the greatest virtue of the script: it just keeps moving the story ahead and never wastes time dwelling on its many narrative flaws. Thus the film has earned a reputation as a "lean" and "taut" thriller, even though that protracted first act probably gets most audiences restless, accustomed as they are to the first plot point coming a full twenty minutes earlier.

The second act of the film is a lengthy siege - the "assault" of the film's title. As with the first act, the gaps in narrative logic don't get in the way of its being entertaining. (I was however continually annoyed that they never collected the guns of their attackers, since their own arsenal was so limited.) There's nothing really exceptional about the scenes — no clever strategy or unexpected reversals or visceral connection — but it's all well executed in simple, unadorned fashion.

Grade: B

Up Next: The Square and/or Mommy

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jdc

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Re: The Top 100 Club
« Reply #3411 on: May 31, 2017, 02:44:41 AM »
This might be the first month since joining this club that I fail to be able to get a film in.  It is not lack of time but access to content but I am not giving up. If I can find subtitles for 8 1/2 then I should be able to get that one in tonight
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Teproc

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Re: The Top 100 Club
« Reply #3412 on: May 31, 2017, 03:51:16 AM »
The Last Laugh

[...]

Everything is conveyed with the faces, the posture, the camera movement. Yes! camera movement! That's trailblazing for this time period and is as interesting as the story.

Wonderful rewiew as always Sandy. I was also very impressed by the virtuosity at play with the camera, and of course the absence of title cards for the most part. The silents I've seen so far all seem to have strong connections to other art forms, be it literature, opera or theater, but The Last Laugh is pure cinema. It's incredibly impressive as well as deeply affecting, especially with that bittersweet epilogue.
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Teproc

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Re: The Top 100 Club
« Reply #3413 on: May 31, 2017, 03:58:10 AM »
Our Little Sister - Kore-eda is one of the best filmmakers working today. A recurring theme for him -- Maborosi, Nobody Knows, Still Walking, I Wish, Like Father Like Son -- is the importance of family. Families take on all kinds of configurations in the Kore-eda-verse, but whatever form it takes, family is the support system that people depend on. And it's always such a joy to see how he portrays these relationships. "I'm so happy that beauty still looks beautiful to me" says a character, and Kore-eda embraces the beauty of human kindness and familial nurturing. I choked up several times during the movie, watching these endearing characters bond with each other, learn about each other, and care for each other. Yes, the movie is a bit glossy and twee, but I don't find it unearned or dishonest. In a way, it's almost a Malickian film, with a poetic honesty that transcends absolute authenticity. Rating: Very Good (88).

I still haven't seen anything else from Koreeda, and I really need to... emphasis on family certainly is something that speaks to me, and in the case of Our Little Sister, it's how authentic the family dynamics felt, how much I could see elements of my own family in the various characters, that made it work so well. I'd add that, while it certainly has a unabashedly optimistic view of family, it's not without nuance on that front either: they're flawed, but able to overcome that together. "Poetic honesty" is a very good way of describing the overall tone.
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Teproc

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Re: The Top 100 Club
« Reply #3414 on: May 31, 2017, 04:03:46 AM »
Timbuktu

"Justice" dispensed by those who do not understand their cultural ass from a hole in the ground.  If justice is pure law, then mercy and God is dead.

What a beautiful, smart film.  The wide shot of a river with nets, with a man crossing the stream is the smartest, best use of wide angle I've seen since Lawrence of Arabia.  This is a brilliant portrayal of the variety of cultures of Africa and the tragedy when one culture lords it over the others.  Very glad I saw it.

Best scene: a woman being flogged, with the sound of the leather tongs against a back being a familiar sound for those who have watched films about slavery.  But she finds the rhythm in the beating and begins singing to in, in defiance to the "no music" law.  I was just floored.

It was a bit slow, and I wish I had seen it on the big screen.  But the message and character building and cinematography was spot on, and possibly will make my favorites list.

4/5

Not much to add, glad to see Timbuktu doing so well this month. Certaily agree about that shot (pretty sure I voted for it that year pixote).

Numero Deux (1975)

Normally my first step when identifying films to watch for the club, I highlight those I feel I'm most likely to appreciate. A film by Godard would be rather the opposite. However the second step when identifying films is to see what is readily available, and with my move this was one of two films available in my new library district so with low cost I figured I'd give it a shot. It is definitely a Godard film. I reckon it is better than Film Socialisme. I was intrigued and oft horrified by the sexual content of the film (the characters definitely take a different approach to sex education), but ultimately the Godardness was too much. I'll just never be on board with his habit of waiving his nouvelle vagues in our face by stylistically obscuring the content. I say this as someone who more or less likes Peter Greenaway. Godard's formal choices never seem to have Greenaway's playfulness, rather seeming self-serious.

Yeah, I get that, but I actually did find it very playful... which isn't to say that it isn't self-serious, but I got the feeling that Godard was asking questions about gender relations and sex, rather than dispensing  answers from the mountaintop, something that this type of essay filmmaking can often feel like. I think the stylistic experimentation, such as his clever eschewing of "shot-reverse-shot" actually work very well with the content here, too.

Sorry you had such limited choices. :-\
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Teproc

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Re: The Top 100 Club
« Reply #3415 on: May 31, 2017, 04:13:47 AM »
Interstellar (2014)

There are so many moments where it’s clear Interstellar wants to be the 2001: A Space Odyssey of the 21st century. But screenwriters Jonathan and Christopher Nolan never have the guts to leave the audience perplexed. Stanley Kubrick’s arthouse science fiction classic is mostly notable for lengthy, wordless sequences, many of which leave the audience gasping for some understanding of what is happening.

In contrast, Interstellar is filled with sequence after sequence of in-depth explanations of astronomical phenomena and every detail of the mission. It confuses complexity in the details with intelligence. The obsession with details results is an unnecessarily complex plot that Nolan has to explain ad nauseam. It’s the same problem Inception has, a plot with so many layers that a large chunk of the movie is explaining the layers.

Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a farmer in a bleak future where Earth is slowly dying. When a scientific anomaly starts communicating with his daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy), it leads him to the hidden remnants of NASA who work in secret to save humanity. Before Earth declined, Cooper was part of a failed NASA mission and remains the only human on Earth to have been in space before.

NASA sent 12 ships through a wormhole near Venus to another side of the universe to find a habitable planet. Problem is they need someone on the other side of the wormhole to find which planet will work, either (a) come back and take a human remnant to that planet or (b) start the process of growing human embryos on the planet to breed a new home for humanity. And they decide Cooper should be a part of the mission.

There are so many details along the way, the need to explain every last move and step of the mission, details one would think NASA would go over with everyone before they launch the mission, but since this is a Hollywood film, Nolan strings along the audience and spoon-feeds Cooper the mission details over an hour and a half second act.

And there are so many little nagging details along the way that start putting stress on the complex house of cards. Why did Cooper become a farmer and why didn’t NASA keep track of him if he was the best they had? How come NASA is so far inland and coincidentally so close to where Cooper ended up farming? Why doesn’t their advanced robot TARS go down to the planets and deal with all the dangerous situations solo since it seems the humans are just the things he has to save when the situation gets risky.

At some point, one has to decide to either look at all the flaws in the trees or just enjoy the forest. And there’s surprisingly a lot that still works with so many flawed trees. The emotional beats are consistently good and the main players all come across as people longing for connection but driven away from those they love by the drive to survive and keep the human race going.

And as a hard-science piece of sci-fi, it explores interesting concepts of how time becomes this enemy when doing space exploration. It’s one thing to explain it intellectually, but there’s an emotional impact and weight to it that makes the harsh realities of it feel a lot more human. It makes sense to tell a story that pivots on the relativity of time in the medium of film where time can be expanded and condensed through editing.

The exploration of space allows for great visual moments, particularly the wormhole and black hole sequences. Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography is gorgeous to behold and he captures a lot of that magical wonder that the best films about space are able to convey. It’s just a shame so many of his visuals have to be explained instead of absorbed. Once again, this film lives in the monolithic statue of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It’s refreshing for a science fiction film to be about the science and practicality of space in an era where space is mostly a background for action (Rogue One, Fury Road)  or high-concept, low-budget thought pieces (Midnight Special, Snowpiercer). It exists in this middle ground that vanished in the 21st century where everything had to be a big, dumb action blockbuster or a small, intimate Oscar contender or indie flick.

Interstellar would be quickly followed up by The Martian, a film with less ambitions, but a similar hard science sensibility and a much better execution. It too also has a lot of explanation, but frames it as scientific work instead of explaining to the new crewmember all the things he should have taken note of during the briefings.

There’s a wonder to this films existence, but there are many moments where it becomes clear that it could have been a much better film. Less exposition and more mystery would have gone a long way to making for a much more thoughtful film. Instead, Interstellar comes across as a compromise, a film that wants enough smart moments to get hardcore sci-fi fans, but enough explanation to make sure the average moviegoer won’t leave the film too confused or perplexed. The film’s boldness is executed to be safe and profitable, hampered by its desire to appease instead of having the boldness to challenge and confuse.

I don't know if Nolan intended Interstellar to be 2001, but I certainly didn't take it that way. Yes, there's the wormhole sequence, but it otherwise doesn't have a similar approach at all: 2001 views humanity as a whole, with characters being as bland as possible because they're stand-ins and nothing more... Interstellar, for better or worse, is a very emotional film. It's not about concepts, it's about people... which many will argue Nolan can't handle, but I think in this case he did.

I guess I don't share your problems with over-explaining things, at least not until the last 30 minutes or so. That's where I could have done with less straining to make everything work, but what you dismiss as "details" earlier in the film is what I kinda love about films like this, The Martian being another example as you mention.

What really makes the film work for me though, is that feeling of exploration, of humanity getting out of its cradle into the vast, unknown universe... there's the wormhole sequence, but everything that happens on and around the first planet is everything I wanted from it, both as a spectacle and on an emotional level.
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Teproc

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Re: The Top 100 Club
« Reply #3416 on: May 31, 2017, 04:17:15 AM »
Cyrano de Bergerac (1990)

With an adaptation of a story as well known as this, it seems a weakness will generally be scenes that are doing heavy plot lifting because as a knowledgable viewer (even if I knew only the skeleton of it), we don't need the labor. The film starts smartly with the scene at the theatre, playing on Cyrano's character, all banter and bravado. It was at these lighter moments that the film felt freshest. But this is a rather long-feeling movie with many of the other scenes grinding it down at times. I could see a 110 minute cut of this film being a full-throated success.

Cyrano's humour and wit are certainly the hook of the film (and any version of this story), but Depardieu does wonderful work in playing both the boisterousness and the tragedy here. I find the ending much more powerful here than in the play (in its written form anyway), because of his performance. I guess I don't mind the plot scenes, because the characters are generally entertaining enough that they're still fun to me.
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Teproc

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Re: The Top 100 Club
« Reply #3417 on: May 31, 2017, 04:23:02 AM »


Assault on Precinct 13  (John Carpenter, 1976)

Since I've never read up on this film at all, it was surprising to learn that the title is short for Assault on Precinct 9, District 13. Likewise, since I didn't see or remember Teproc's review, it was surprising to learn that there's as much Night of the Living Dead here as Rio Bravo. Carpenter's successful and eerie score fuels those supernatural associations, turning South LA into an apocalyptic wasteland. At the same time, the amateur acting, familiar LA locations, budget art direction, archetypal characters, and even some of the banter in the dialogue all call to mind any number of 1970s cop shows.

Structurally, Assault on Precinct 13 deviates from traditional genre norms, with a screenplay that's really just two acts. The first act takes up exactly half of the film's running time, give or take, slowly letting four separate story threads converge. This convergence requires a series of silly coincidences, for which the film is admirably unapologetic. That's maybe the greatest virtue of the script: it just keeps moving the story ahead and never wastes time dwelling on its many narrative flaws. Thus the film has earned a reputation as a "lean" and "taut" thriller, even though that protracted first act probably gets most audiences restless, accustomed as they are to the first plot point coming a full twenty minutes earlier.

The second act of the film is a lengthy siege - the "assault" of the film's title. As with the first act, the gaps in narrative logic don't get in the way of its being entertaining. (I was however continually annoyed that they never collected the guns of their attackers, since their own arsenal was so limited.) There's nothing really exceptional about the scenes — no clever strategy or unexpected reversals or visceral connection — but it's all well executed in simple, unadorned fashion.

Grade: B

I never found myself thinking about the plot watching this. If you say there are inconsistencies, I'll believe you, but I was so into it as a thriller that I just didn't see them at all. I guess the coincindences don't bother me because there is a supernatural tinge to the whole thing that kind of justifies them. The score plays a huge role there, and it really is an embodiment of the film: very simple, but incredibly efficient. I also don't get what's wrong with the acting, but I seem to be alone there.
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ses

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Re: The Top 100 Club
« Reply #3418 on: May 31, 2017, 01:06:47 PM »
I've had kind of a weird month, I started A Man for All Seasons, and I just couldn't get into it, tried to stream Dawn of the Dead, but the quality was so bad it was distracting, so I finally settled on The Life of Brian because it had been many, many years since I first saw it.  I will have a review up this evening.
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jdc

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Re: The Top 100 Club
« Reply #3419 on: May 31, 2017, 04:18:54 PM »
8 1/2

It would probably be better to wait a day to think more about this and probably would have been better to have watched without so much wine, but hey, that's Italian.  I really had little knowledge of the film other than it was considered one of the greats.  I must admit that I had seen Nine more or less, it has been played in the background a few times at a friend's place which I thought was some kind of musical sequel to this. But I am not thinking it is not so much a sequel but a musical retelling of the same story?  Not quite sure as I never watched it closely enough to follow the story but parts certainly seem to mirror this one

I am not so sure I am pulled into this as a movie as much as I am wondering how much of this is just the director trying to exercise his demons.  I sort of see how films like Barton Fink or Bird Man must have some inspiration from here as well as anything of Woody Allen when you are not sure if he is making a film or exposing his possible ugly soul, which makes it sort of fascinating.

I looked through the rest of Fellini's films and have to admit that I don't really know anything else, I always knew he was famous and it seems only because I know heard of 8 1/2.  I am not sure to explore more? Do they have a similar meta aspect to them (assuming a lot of this is meta?)...

Only downside is that I watched this from a small laptop, I can see this would be worth the blu-ray purchase on my large screen back home. 

"Beer. Now there's a temporary solution."  Homer S.
“The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations” - David Friedman

 

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