Flipside Movie Emporium

[Michael Scrutchin]

[beltmann]

[the night watchman]

[beltmann]

[Jim Harper]

Carpenter's always been a solid favourite of mine.

His later films are often unfairly maligned, but for my money they're pretty entertaining, with the exception of Escape from Los Angeles, which is less so.

In the Mouth of Madness, Village of the Damned, Vampires and Ghosts of Mars all have extensive replay value for me. I've already sat through each one five or six times. Hell, even Body Bags is fun, especially the first segment.

The only things that have me more excited than a new Romero Dead movie are a new Carpenter movie and the prospect of Dario Argento's return to glorious, bloody form. It's getting hard to type now with all the drool clogging up the keyboard.

[Jim Harper]

[the night watchman]

[Jim Harper]

[the night watchman]

Thanks, I might check it out.

Incidently, I've been looking at two box sets on DVD called Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected, which was apparently a British TV series. I like Dahl's short stories and, if you're familiar with this series, I was wondering if it's worth picking up.
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"If you're talking about censorship, and what things should be shown and what things shouldn't be shown, I've said that as an artist you have no social responsibility whatsoever."

-David Cronenberg

[Jim Harper]

[the night watchman]

Sounds good. I'm anxious to see "Royal Jelly," which I first read in Twilight Zone Magazine back in my teens. The final line gave me goosebumps.
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"If you're talking about censorship, and what things should be shown and what things shouldn't be shown, I've said that as an artist you have no social responsibility whatsoever."

-David Cronenberg

[beltmann]

8/1 ? 8/14

Features of the last two weeks, in preferential order:

Saraband (Bergman, Sweden 2003)

The Woodsman (Kassell, USA 2004)

My Architect: A Son?s Journey (Kahn, USA 2003)

The Children?s Hour (Wyler, USA 1961)

A Guy Named Joe (Fleming, USA 1943)

The Roaring Twenties (Walsh, USA 1939)

Looking For Fidel (Stone, USA 2004)

Persona Non Grata (Stone, USA 2003)

Criminal (Jacobs, USA 2004)

Murderball (Rubin and Shapiro, USA 2005)

Ma Saison Preferee (Techine, France 1993

The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (Hillenburg, USA 2004)

White Noise (Sax, USA 2004)

Coach Carter (Carter, USA 2005)

A Patch of Blue (Green, USA 1965)

Lemony Snicket?s A Series of Unfortunate Events (Silberling, USA 2004)

Alien vs. Predator (Anderson, USA 2004)

Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous (Pasquin, USA 2005)

Shorts in chronological order:

Oliver Stone?s America (Kiselyak, USA 2001)

Last Year in Viet Nam (Stone, USA 1971)

La Coquille et le Clergyman (Seashell and the Clergyman) (Dulac, France 1928

Ballet Mecanique (Leger, France 1924)

Anemic Cinema (Duchamp, France 1926)

How to Tell When a Relationship Is Over In 90 Seconds (Roche, UK 2004)

More than 20 years after he announced his retirement from film directing, Ingmar Bergman has made an unexpected follow-up to his 1973 masterpiece Scenes From a Marriage, which means Saraband ought to be a priority for anyone remotely serious about movies. The best news, though, is that it's an intense, worthy sequel, with world-class performances from Liv Ullman and Erland Josephson as the divorced couple who reunite for the first time in 30 years. As always, Bergman's closeups function as scalpels, cutting deep into the characters and their veins coursing with regret, yes, but mostly bitterness, selfishness, and despair. If Fellini was the great extrovert of the movies, then Bergman is its great introvert--for my money, he's one of the four or five greatest filmmakers in history. And for those well-versed in Bergman, Saraband makes several allusions to his past work, most conspicuously The Virgin Spring and The Best Intentions (which he only scripted, but is nevertheless all Bergman). And that movie poster doesn't seem right... it makes Saraband look like one of those autumnal, stately, reverent movies made by Merchant Ivory or Eric Rohmer, rather than the bilious, cracked, fully alive psychological torture chamber that it is.

In The Woodsman, Kevin Bacon gives one of the most physical, moving performances I've ever seen in my life, suggesting a man's cavernous inner life and psychological struggle almost entirely through his eyes, lips and hands. [pasted from another thread]

The structure of My Architect is so simple, the dividends so profound. At a time when most documentaries look like dishwater?such is the legacy of digital camcorders?I especially appreciated Kahn's careful, magical compositions of the architecture.

I finally caught up with Cagney?s The Roaring Twenties, and while it's a tad moralistic for my tastes it still compares favorably to, say, Public Enemy or the original Scarface. Its theme that everyone is corruptible in times of desperation is mapped out well, and man, Bogart sure can play mean.

Ma Saison Preferee reinforced my hesitant admiration of Andre Techine, whose movies are always psychologically interesting but, for me at least, too often feel like watching people pinned under glass.

The trio of French silent shorts were part of the Anthology of Surreal Cinema, Volume 1 DVD, which also includes Clair?s Entr'Acte, which I had already seen (in a longer version, too). I had been trying to see the others?especially the Duchamp?for years. I'm also looking forward to picking up Kino's 2-disc Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and '30s.

Eric
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"When I was in Barcelona they showed pornography on regular television. I'm assuming it's the same way in Mexico since they also speak Spanish." - IMDb user comment

[Danny Baldwin]

8/1 - 8/16 (In preferential order:)

Abre Los Ojos (Amen?bar, 1999)

Se7en (Fincher, 1995)

(repeat of:) Guess Who (Sullivan, 2005)

The Skeleton Key (Softley, 2005)

Downfall (Hirschbiegel, 2005)

Born into Brothels (Briski, Kauffman; 2004)

Blade: Trinity (Goyer, 2004)

Up and Down (Hrebejk, 2005)

Fantastic Four (Story, 2005)

Stealth (Cohen, 2005)

The Evil Dead 2 (Raimi, 1981)

Maborosi (Koreeda, 1995)

The Dukes of Hazzard (Chandrasekhar, 2005)

The Evil Dead (Raimi, 1981)

Two weeks and two days of disappointments, although I found Abre Los Ojos to be amazingly effective while being totally all over the place and Se7en to be thoroughly terrifying. Not to mention, I was pleasantly surprised by how clever The Skeleton Key was. Also: believe it or not, I think Blade: Trinity was the only film in the trilogy that I could actually get into, despite Ryan Reynolds' performance and dialogue. "A mother fuckin' vampire Pomeranian? That's some fucked up shit!"

But let's get back to the negative, eh? Born Into Brothels is a relentlessely self-congratulatory "liberal-wisdom" movie with nothing to say about its subjects and everything to say about its maker. If I hear "Auntie Zana" one more time...

Downfall was also a huge let-down for me, despite some good performances and a fascinating way of connecting an entire cast--or military movement, whichever you prefer--through human reactions to inhumanity, without, of course, justifying pure evil.

I'm not sure if Up and Down just wants to be funny--sometimes it is--or some kind of pro-amnesty statement. I found half of its duel-storyline to be interesting and the other half to be cookie-cutter.

Maborosi, despite being pretentiously awful, provides me with a peculiar interest in Koreeda's films, especially Nobody Knows. The one element of this effort he handles well is his child-actor cast, which is of greater focus in his more recent work.

And, I know what you all are thinking about my ranking of the Evil Dead movies. No, it's not a mistake. The first, I find, is absolutely wretched. Not funny, cult-spirited, scary--whatever the hell it wants to be. It was the first time I've ever felt disconnected from a Bruce Campell performance. The sequel is somewhat better and substancially funnier, but I still couldn't help but think it was a waste of my time.

Jessica Simpson's ass is about all Dukes has going for it, aside from an ocassionally funny remark out of Seann William Scott. The entire third act is a chase scene. You've been warned,
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Danny Baldwin

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