Author Topic: The Top 100 Club: Knocked Out Loaded  (Read 13242 times)

1SO

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Re: The Top 100 Club: Knocked Out Loaded
« Reply #50 on: October 13, 2019, 10:18:26 PM »
It's been a crazy ride. As you know, there are only a few films on your list I haven't seen, none of them are appealing on their surface, most look like those choices that give your list personal charm and I really wanted to return with something positive.

I started with Amour fou, which turned out to be my least favorite of the bunch. Just couldn't get into it. Can't point out anything it was doing wrong, just a brick wall around my brain, similar to Love & Friendship (2016) and most Italian neorealism.

Next was Araya, which is my 2nd favorite of the group but still not something I was excited to write about. The film's fine, but I can't figure its inclusion in a Top 100. It's also a little funny how tightly it focuses in on salt. Seriously, don't take a drink every time somebody says "salt". (According to my subtitles the count is 92, which is more than once a minute.)

The Crazy Stranger was next. Similar to the first two, it was okay but I never got involved and couldn't think of anything to say about it.

Along comes Border Radio, and considering it's my favorite of the group I was surprised to read how much it's not liked, especially by The Criterion Forum. This is a group that doesn't have a problem with Slacker, Clerks, early Jim Jarmusch, Jubilee and the work of Hollis Frampton. Like those titles (only replace Frampton with Wim Wenders), what it lacks in plot it makes up for with an attitude. Not 'attitude' as in bluster and chutzpah, but an attitude as in the capturing of a specific time and place. Possibly not even a real time and place, but one that's filtered through the filmmakers' interpretation. I don't even know what you would call this specific music scene - alt punk with a western flair - but it forms the veins that pumps blood through the experience. Easily dismissed as messy and amateurish, but if you're here for acting and plot you've come to the wrong film. It's not even hiding that it's asking you to evaluate it on different criteria.


Looks like I get to save Time Regained for the next round.

smirnoff

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Re: The Top 100 Club: Knocked Out Loaded
« Reply #51 on: October 13, 2019, 10:38:05 PM »
What do you think of Breathless 1SO?

1SO

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Re: The Top 100 Club: Knocked Out Loaded
« Reply #52 on: October 13, 2019, 11:27:38 PM »
Had to check the Top 100 to see which Breatless you were talking about. (My hate for Jean-Luc Godard starts there. It's far from his worst, but it's the one I stupidly watched more than once.) I prefer the Jim McBride remake, as does KOL and Mark Kermode, but I'm still not a fan. McBride's next film The Big Easy is a guilty pleasure of mine.

Knocked Out Loaded

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Re: The Top 100 Club: Knocked Out Loaded
« Reply #53 on: October 14, 2019, 03:46:10 AM »
How can you not love Richard Gere browsing Spiderman comics?! ;D
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Teproc

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Re: The Top 100 Club: Knocked Out Loaded
« Reply #54 on: October 26, 2019, 11:16:47 AM »
The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1982)

Strikingly similar to Taxi Driver in so many ways, but with rather key differences. It lacks the apocalyptic mood of that film, set both by the way Scorsese shoots New York at night and Herrman's haunting score, but it is also a much cleaner, well-constructed story, especially when it comes to the ending. The ending to Taxi Driver is vexing to me in that I just can't reconciliate it with the rest of the film, but The King of Comedy has a perfect ending, perhaps the best Scorsese has ever done. "King for a night" indeed: Rupert Pupkin is so much easier to empathize with than Travis Bickle, obviously because he's not actually violent. What he and Masha do is unquestionably wrong and shows complete disregard for other people : they're narcissists... but it also speaks to something that we all have in us in a way that is easier to empathize with than what Travis Bickle has going on. To have Rupert get a triumphant ending of sorts is certainly an indictment on our society and the way many media outlets play into that very narcissism, but it's also satisfying, which makes said indictment much more effective, because it implicates us directly.

A great ending then, but part of me wishes I could somehow slap this and Taxi Driver together to get something mysterious and entrancing as well as narratively tight. Because the first act here is pretty laboured, a necessary step to get to the place Scorsese wants to take us, but nothing that interesting in its own right. Anytime Jerry Lewis is on screen works great though, as he plays the mix of exasperation, kindness, anger and fear that Pupkin causes him to feel exactly right. DeNiro is good too, but perhaps a little mannered for my taste. I guess it makes sense for the character, but it has that showiness specific to method actors that I don't respond to quite as much.

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1SO

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Re: The Top 100 Club: Knocked Out Loaded
« Reply #55 on: October 26, 2019, 12:42:32 PM »
part of me wishes I could somehow slap this and Taxi Driver together to get something mysterious and entrancing as well as narratively tight.

I imagine Todd Phillips said this at some point.

Teproc

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Re: The Top 100 Club: Knocked Out Loaded
« Reply #56 on: October 26, 2019, 12:44:42 PM »
part of me wishes I could somehow slap this and Taxi Driver together to get something mysterious and entrancing as well as narratively tight.

I imagine Todd Phillips said this at some point.

Joker definitely feels to me like someone wrote "Taxi Driver + The King of Comedy + The Joker = Great" on a napkin and called it quits after that as far as screenwriting goes. ::)
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colonel_mexico

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Re: The Top 100 Club: Knocked Out Loaded
« Reply #57 on: October 28, 2019, 09:10:03 PM »
LOS OLVIDADOS (1950) - Wow, what an incredible piece of cinema.  The imagery, the characters, the incredible story blurring the lines between fiction and truth.  Having studies a bit of Latin American history the movie kept bringing me back to the concept of the Law of Conservation of Violence, which essentially says where violence is done will be expressed somewhere else down the line.  Jaibo represents this form of incarnate violence, the menace to society whose only expressing himself as the product of the environment that has shaped him into the irredeemable "bad guy."  The characters are Howard Hawksian-not overly sympathetic, likeable, but highly flawed (no heroes, but faint glimpses of the beautiful humans the characters portray).  It seems so realistic its as if this was a documentary come to life.  Pedro's mother represents many things to me on many levels and is particularly instructive on the complicated relationships Latino men have with their mothers.  The blind el musico who is no hero and loves to lament of the good old days of order and reform under General Porifirio Diaz. His cry at the end that the vagabond children should all be killed before they're born is a powerful statement, but one that is also simply a treatment of a symptom of the disease.  The poverty is the violence, the disease which should be treated as opposed to building walls or wishing others to be dead.   The ending is the most gut wrenching and while not surprising, still I wished for some small measure of happiness or hope, but perhaps that would have taken away from the sheer brilliance and power of this film.

Masterpiece, thanks KOL for pointing me to this.
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smirnoff

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Re: The Top 100 Club: Knocked Out Loaded
« Reply #58 on: October 28, 2019, 10:26:09 PM »
Breathless (1983, Jim McBride)

I'm struggling to find a way to approach this movie to like it. Not through Richard Gere's character who I hated throughout the film. Certainly not through Valérie Kaprisky's character who, even after learning he's committed murder still cannot resist him. She's a complete airhead. Not through the scenes like this, which I can't tell if I'm supposed to take seriously or not.



To hear Kermode talk about it, it has to do with how the film captures Los Angelas, how it was ahead of it's time in having a character versed in pop culture (Silver Surfer in this case), how Gere was giving a great and deliberate over the top performance (I had no issues with any of the performances). He finds it audacious and inventive, and praises the "jukebox" soundtrack. Overall it just sounds like he finds the film to be a tonne of fun.

Maybe I'm trying to take the film too seriously... but unless it's an outright comedy, that's just kind of what I do. So I'm probably not compatible with whatever form of filmmaking this is. 

Odd film. It is unique. Definitely gives you're list personal charm, KOL. :)

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Re: The Top 100 Club: Knocked Out Loaded
« Reply #59 on: October 29, 2019, 10:45:14 PM »
Paper Moon
A fantastic character driven con movie. Con movies are at their core about the charisma and personalities of the leads, and both Ryan and Tatum O'Neal are great. This is also a really charming road movie, and father-daughter bonding movie. It works on many levels, but key is the great acting and the ease in which we connect with the duo. Really enjoyed this!
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