6u532b

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I met a girl at this movie we’re going out monday what could go wrong

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And Jesus is not my husband.

Notes for a trip to Havana.

—

They move into the crowd under two-story high windows overlooking Meyer Lansky's Hotel Riviera - freeze-dried 1959 Las Vegas.

A futurism from 1939, peeling aqua, aging science fiction. Wherever we are in the world, this place is out of the stream, outside history.

- Michael Mann, screenplay, Miami Vice, first draft, September 22, 2004

She believed that people are born every minute of their lives, and what they are in each of those minutes is what they are completely.

- Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba

—

Telex from Cuba, Rachel Kushner
The Strange Case of Rachel K, Rachel Kushner
Cuba Libre, Elmore Leonard
Our Man In Havana, Graham Greene
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
To Have and Have Not, Ernest Hemingway

Cuba, Walker Evans

Havana, Childe Hassam
Place Centrale And Fort Cabanas, Childe Hassam
Vista del Paseo del Prado, Childe Hassam

Detective Comics #595, Alan Grant/Novick/Mitchell

“Tanga,” Machito
”Manteca,“ Dizzy Gillespie
“Baila Simón,” Arsenio Rodríguez
Havana, 3am, Perez Prado

Havana Bound (A Mixtape)

• ¡Cuba Sí!
• Memories of Underdevelopment
• I Am Cuba
• Our Man in Havana
• Miami Vice
• Che: Part Two
• Cuba
• Mulata
• Pier 5, Havana
• One Way or Another

...plus 24 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A bunch of great movies that scored 33% or less on that piece of shit website.

Death to critical consensus.

[Editor's note: films that rise above 33% in years following release will stay in the list. History will be held able!!!]
_________________________________

“The critic is a “eur” between two poles: between those who make and those who see what has been made. […] The critic first sends an open letter to the author and this letter is then read by the possible audience of the film. The critic represents the interests of those who “make” on the side of those who don’t. Like some kind of lawyer. This seems to me at the same time normal and moral. But for others, it’s the contrary: they represent the interests of the audience on the side of the creator. They rather act like judges. They sort out “what es” and what doesn’t. It’s the consumer guide model.

This quickly leads to pure and simple conformity because, by definition, every audience—even enlightened, even adult—wants consensus.

When there is only the horizon of the social, when the world has disappeared, we find ourselves cemented to the mediocrity of the global village.”

— Serge Daney

• Here

  36%

• Knock Knock

  33% (now: 37%)

• Keep Your Right Up

  33%

• They All Laughed

  33% (now: 50%)

• Blackhat

  33%

• Domino

  33%

• 1941

  32% (now: 39%)

• How Do You Know

  32%

• When Will I Be Loved

  32%

• The Ward

  32%

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The Shop Around the Corner
• the Night
• Christmas in July
• The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
• Meet Me in St. Louis
• Christmas Holiday
• It's a Wonderful Life
• 3 Godfathers
• All That Heaven Allows
• Mr. Arkadin

...plus 63 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The potential for cinema to contain the other arts is often used to denigrate films that lean towards one more than the other, but within the history of film, Leigh's focus on – and expansion of – the theater is a fascinating digression.

And who's to say his pictures don't contain the other arts? His depictions of Thatcher's England echo the photography of early Paul Graham or John Myers, or the grotesquerie of Martin Parr without the sheen. Turner is painting. And it's a musical every time Allison Stean opens her mouth.

Leigh's biggest flaw, evident throughout but especially between 1977-1980, is not to take into Spinoza, who endeavored "not to ridicule, bewail, or disdain human behaviour, but to understand it." That said, critical consensus underrates Leigh overall – especially compared to Cassavetes – for reasons that are valid but minor in comparison to his contribution. He hit upon a way to write film without a pen, a process with rigor and humanity that puts characters first, and that's not nothing.

1. Four Days in July
2. The Short & Curlies
3. Life Is Sweet
4. Secrets & Lies
5. Meantime
6. Hard Labour
7. Naked
8. Bleak Moments
9. The Permissive Society
10. Career Girls

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"In broad daylight, even the sounds shine." – Pessoa

"The river is the only witness of our lives, not the city." – Madredeus, Lisbon Story

My idea of Lisbon is haunted by Phillip Winter, a recurring character throughout the cinema of Wim Wenders, who is variously a journalist, projector repairman, foley artist, or detective. "Winter's here," he puns by way of announcing his arrival, which is never a surprise in a Wenders film.

In Lisbon Story, Winter visits the Portuguese coast in search of a character from The State of Things, an earlier Wenders film that told of a film crew that ran out of money while on location in Portugal; its plot was a reference to The Territory, a Raúl Ruiz production that Wenders provided film stock to. Wenders went on to hire most of its cast & crew for his own movie, and from there the connections tumble:

- Ruiz returned to the city almost thirty years later to film Mysteries of Lisbon.
- Sam Fuller, who played a camera operator in The State of Things, returned to Lisbon to make Street of No Return seven years later.
- Robert Kramer, who also played a camera op in The State of Things (and co-wrote the film), made a documentary in Lisbon in '77 and a feature there in '88.
- Manuel de Oliveira, elder statesman of Portuguese cinema, has an important cameo in Lisbon Story (and of course he made many films in the city). At the time, he was the oldest living active film director in the world, a status he held for the next twenty-two years.
- Wenders made four films total in or around Lisbon: The Scarlet Letter, The State of Things, Until the End of the World, and Lisbon Story. Phillip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler) appears in the latter two.
- Alain Tanner made two films in Lisbon, one of which, In the White City, is the most Wenders-like picture not directed by Peter Handke or Wenders himself. It stars Brüno Ganz (who appeared in three Wenders films) as a sailor on shore leave wandering Cacilhas with a Super 8.

"It struck me as a distant city on the edge of a continent, facing the Atlantic and Africa and with its back turned towards Europe. A place to escape to and from." – Alain Tanner

"When one's feelings are overwrought, the Tagus is a nameless Atlantic, and Cacilhas another continent, even another universe." – Pessoa

- Martin Schäfer, who worked on eight films for Wenders, including as a cinematographer on The State of Things, was also a cinematographer on Pedro Costa's O Sangue, an outrageously cinephilic failure both set & filmed in Lisbon. (Someday when I forget how much I hated it, I'll watch it again to see that I was wrong.)

This is as much a watchlist as it is a collection of favorites but just for the record, my favorites are: The State of Things, In the White City, Doc's Kingdom and Lisbon Story.

• Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal
• The Territory
• The State of Things
• In the White City
• Doc's Kingdom
• Until the End of the World
• Lisbon Story

  Alfama

• Requiem
• The Mutants
• In Vanda's Room

...plus 26 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

ing thoughts, because when I keep them to myself, the narcissism of small differences makes me shadow project irritation about other people’s opinions all over the place. So I’m gonna… not do that.

(See notes)

• Tenet

  Images, objects and people move backwards while the world moves forward. How often do you see things in movies you’ve never seen before? “You’re not meant to understand everything in Tenet. It's not all comprehensible,” says Nolan. "It's not a puzzle to be unpacked, it's an experience to be had.”

  The galaxy brain shit they say makes me lmao, classic smartest dumb guy in the room shit, I love it. I'd watch these guys plan a wedding.

  “I don't understand what ppl don't get about this movie. Let them be hot and crash planes 😭” – Ally Millar

• Mahjong

  I was scandalized to find out that some people consider this a comedy. Surely, if it is a comedy, it’s not a very good one?! There are, of course, elements of comedy in the script and performances but not in the direction, and the direction is what makes the film, so, please, I’m begging you, let’s consider it for what it is, a relentlessly downbeat mosaic of an arthouse drama; that is, a picture by Edward Yang.

  "Alternating between the abrasive and the poignant, the sad and the terrifying, Mahjong offers a demonic tour of modern life that culminates in one of the most shocking, dramatically powerful murders I’ve ever witnessed in a film. This scene of forces spinning out of control virtually defines Yang’s dark sense of the present historical moment, even if he chooses to go beyond it and end on an unexpected grace note of tenderness and repose.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum

• Drive-Away Dolls

  This is not a cool movie, with most of Ethan Coen’s old tricks and all of his new ones coming across as hopelessly unfashionable, but there’s nothing wrong with being unfashionable, per se, and anyway we judge this as an Ethan Coen film at our peril: the author, if not the auteur, is Tricia Cooke. Is it better to be lightly likable than in fashion, better to be true to your experiences than in-step with every trend in film style? Certainly it depends, but as someone who soured on the Coens 20+ years ago, I came in with low expectations and left pleasantly surprised by how autobiographical it is. I’m not sure I care that it’s out of touch with the times.

  Drive-Away Dolls is based on a script Cooke and Coen wrote in the 2000s, originally called Drive-Away Dykes before the studio objected, and based on Cooke's experiences hanging around lesbian bars in the ‘90s. Cooke and Coen are married but each have separate partners. Personally, as someone who hung out at Cattyshack in the 2000s (which one of the clubs in the movie is based on) and whose partner is poly, I’m drawn to Cooke’s specificity, and I came to enjoy the picture's cartoonish-ness. Lots of things in it don’t “work” but a fixation on what works is pedantic and soulless:

  “The great battle in making any film is between the kingdom of what "works" and the kingdom of the good. If it only "works" but does not sing, it's worth asking who or what the film is actually working for.

  “Put another way: films that only "work" are purely satisfied with completing some sort of transaction - often to obtain the impression or outline of a pleasing thing. Done well, they have a kind of perfection of their own - it just happens to be a perfectly low ceiling.” – Nathan Douglas

  Is the movie good enough to acquire a cult following years after the fact in the way that Jennifer’s Body or But I’m a Cheerleader did, or will Coen Brothers stans continue to hate on it? Why not both?

• The Bling Ring

  Watching this with someone younger, 2013 feels like a world away now, and also like the year when “it’s chill” peaked as a phrase. Incredible how much rap changed in a decade (this is right before modal took over). I don’t laugh as hard or as gleefully at Emma Watson’s vapid character anymore, and I almost feel bad for the kids at the end, but Coppola films everything with just enough distance, I could look at the clothes all day, and “I wanna rob” will never not be iconic.

• Terrorizers

  It goes without saying that the two greatest songs in movie history, and by extension the two greatest pop songs of the twentieth century, are “Sinnerman” by Nina Simone, and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” by The Platters. I don’t like puzzle films but I do like unsolvable puzzle films, it seems; mostly, though, I’m beguiled by the moments of poetry when photographs blow in the breeze to the sounds of "They asked me how I knew…”

  Movies can be divided between art and entertainment—prestigious film festivals do so almost as a rule—but a more useful demarcation is made between art, entertainment, and poetry, which emerges from either without regard to its source. "An image, much like life, sometimes has meaning, and sometimes doesn’t,” says Tsai Ming-Liang. “That’s what makes a film feel real.”

• The Verdict

  Imagine if the scolds shaming you and calling you an alcoholic on social media for having two and a half drinks saw hopeless attorney Paul Newman playing pinball and shooting Booker’s in broad daylight, chasing a raw egg with a whole beer before wandering into court to disappoint victims of the system. Pathetic. Sickening. Incredible. They could never. An inverse 12 Angry Men, as many people have noted. Script by David Mamet.

• Prince of the City

  Even a cop who tries to do the right thing is a hapless fuck. I’m reading Blue Blood by Edward Conlon, and wanted to watch a movie about police. I hate police, obviously, but I like movies about police in the same way that I like movies about prison and don’t like movies on submarines. (I also got to know cops when I was a city councilor, and have complicated feelings about them as humans). I’m not sure I’m totally on board with what Treat Williams is doing but the ending stays with you.

• The Rat Catcher

  This happened to my buddy Joel

• PlayTime

  A better predictor of our sterile humiliating tech-bro future than most sci-fi—I mean, Manhattan looks like this right now—Playtime is one of the great movies about set design, taking The Ladies Man to the next level and becoming a picture all about geometry, all about choreography. Tati practically invents the so-called Internet of Things while absolutely eviscerating modern architecture— what Brian Eno said, “glass is the first sign of a lazy architect”—and by showing how humans accustom themselves to their environment without regard to some literal-minded engineer’s idea of how they’re “supposed” to interact with the world, he basically predicts desire lines.

  Can you believe they built this city?? A mid century modern Airplane!. I’m so glad I don’t have to watch it on a tube TV.

• Raiders of the Lost Ark

  Raiders is more of a comedy than I give it credit for, it has a certain Walsh-ian forward momentum, and I can appreciate any fleeting moment that could’ve been in 1941, but I watched it too much as a kid, and it’s worn out its welcome. The series does a great job of showcasing Ford's world-weary jerk thing, I’d just rather watch him tell David Blaine to “get the fuck out of my house.” That’s Harrison Ford at his best. This is a little too close to Colonial-Imperialism the Movie. That said, Nazi face melting still rules, now more than ever.

...plus 37 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Films produced by or associated with Diagonale, Paul Vecchiali's production house, which Serge Bozon called the last major school after the French New Wave.

• Earth Light
• Tam Tam
• The Theatre of the Matters
• La Machine
• Flames
• Maladie
• Fine Manners
• Drugstore Romance
• Simone Barbès or Virtue
• Nightmare

...plus 22 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

“In Sautet’s world, amid the café meals and quick drinks, and the hearty Sunday lunches in the country, the spectre of failure, joblessness, and a loss of meaning are always banging at the door. Love and something to believe in are slipping out beneath it. It is a world evoked in rich particularity, pure in its inventive multiplicity of means and manners, a whole richly conceived, a humanity fully felt.” – A. Jay Adler, Claude Sautet: Purity and Invention

Supreme masterpieces: Cesar and Rosalie; Une histoire simple; Mado; Vincent, François, Paul... et les autres; Garçon!; Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud

Iconic pulp: Classe tous risques, L'Arme à gauche

Other: Max et les ferrailleurs and Un mauvais fils are both terrific; Les Choses de la vie is strained seriousness but certainly impressive. Quelques jours avec moi and Un cœur en hiver need another look but they're far from bad.

1. Cesar and Rosalie
2. Mado
3. Waiter!
4. Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud
5. Vincent, Francois, Paul and the Others
6. A Simple Story
7. The Big Risk
8. The Dictator's Guns
9. A Bad Son
10. Max and the Junkmen

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

It was pure luck that I drove two hours to watch La maison des bois, even though I'd never seen a thing by Pialat. That was years ago but his films stick with you.

“He generally only uses one lens, the 50 mm, which, as everyone knows, reproduces the perspective of human vision,” says Nestor Almendros. As Fergus Daly writes, Pialat films retain "the intensity of the shoot, the situational power play amongst cast and crew"; they resemble Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore and anticipate Abel Ferrara.

Did anyone use classical or chanson better? The best arguments for Pialat's genius may be in Duparc's L'invitation au voyage, Bach's Cantata #147, Ravel's Trois beaux oiseaux du paradis, Gorecki's third symphony, and Klaus Nomi's Cold Song.

1. Love Exists
2. The House in the Woods
3. A Nos Amours
4. Van Gogh
5. The Son Of...
6. Police
7. Under the Sun of Satan
8. Naked Childhood
9. The Mouth Agape
10. Loulou

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Week 1

Yuki's Sun (Miyazaki, 1972): trailer for a TV pilot that never aired.

Panda! Go Panda! (directed by Takahata, written by Miyazaki, 1972)

Panda! Go Panda!: Rainy Day Circus (directed by Takahata, written by Miyazaki, 1973)

Week 2

Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro (Miyazaki, 1979)

Chie the Brat (Takahata, 1981)

Week 3

Gauche the Cellist (Takahata, 1982)

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Miyazaki, 1984)

Week 4

Castle in the Sky (Miyazaki, 1986) with egg on toast or nimono, soup, stew 🍲

The Story of Yanagawa's Canals (Takahata, 1987)

Week 5

My Neighbor Totoro (Miyazaki, 1988) with bento box 🍱

Grave of the Fireflies (Takahata, 1988)

Week 6

Kiki's Delivery Service (Miyazaki, 1989) with pancakes & milk 🥞🥛or herring pot pie 🥧

Only Yesterday (Takahata, 1991)

Week 7

Porco Rosso (Miyazaki, 1991) with pasta bolognese 🍝 or salmon in bechamel sauce lol

Pom Poko (Takahata, 1994)

Week 8

Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki, 1997) with okayu (rice porridge)

My Neighbors the Yamadas (Takahata, 1999)

Week 9

Spirited Away (Miyazaki, 2001) with steamed buns, onigiri, etc 🍙

Howl's Moving Castle (Miyazaki, 2004) with bacon & eggs 🥓🍳 or uhh white bread & cheese? 🍞🧀

Week 10

Ponyo (Miyazaki, 2007) with ham, ramen 🍜 or boring-ass american sandwiches 🥪

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (Takahata, 2013)

Week 11

The Wind Rises (Miyazaki, 2013)

The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness (documentary, 2013) with Siberia cakes??

• Yuki's Sun
• Panda! Go Panda!
• Panda! Go Panda!: Rainy Day Circus
• Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro
• Chie the Brat
• Gauche the Cellist
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
• Castle in the Sky
• The Story of Yanagawa's Canals
• My Neighbor Totoro

...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Jacques Becker made 9 or 11 masterpieces and one dud, many of which have, as he put it, “no beginning, no end, and virtually no story.”

"His films are impeccably put together; it's worth recalling that, like Hawks, he trained as an engineer. But unlike Hawks, he never developed much taste for it, and his piano studies at the Schola Cantorum may be more relevant: his instinct for rhythm, and the light, glancing elegance masking an underlying depth of feeling, often recall Faure or Ravel." (Phillip Kemp)

Becker's direction was light and understated. Like Gerry Mulligan or Jimmy Giuffre, he underplayed his horn. The key to a Becker movie is in dead time: springy moments of in-between that don't advance the plot but rather and forever make a world.

There's something mystical about the intuitions embedded within these films, which seem to generate their own space & time. Let color be your guide: Arsene Lupin is a trifle, Ali Baba is a dud. In black & white, Dernier atout is a beginning and the rest are gems to see over & over & again.

• Rendezvous in July
• Antoine & Antoinette
• Rue de l'Estrapade
• Edward and Caroline
• Touchez Pas au Grisbi
• Le Trou
• The Lovers of Montparnasse
• Casque d'Or
• It Happened at the Inn
• Paris Frills

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Mad Max: Fury Road
2. Blackhat
3. Pasolini
4. A Master Builder
5. She's Funny That Way
6. Ricki and the Flash
7. Bridge of Spies
8. The Grief of Others
9. Trainwreck
10. The Visit

...plus 22 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Some great films that rely on the magic of the set.

• The Red Shoes
• All That Heaven Allows
• Written on the Wind
• Sergeant Rutledge
• The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
• Paradise Alley
• Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
• One from the Heart
• Querelle
• Diesel

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"I sort of feel like my job is to be a conduit to opportunities, to maximize the creativity of the day itself—because that’s when the cameras are running."

Perfect Sense is Mackenzie's most beautiful film but the intensity of its poetic melodrama exists in counterpoint to You Instead, which is so free and easy. Like The Little Fugitive, On the Bowery, or Jazz on a Summer's Day, You Instead incorporates the real world into its fiction, and the frenzy of production is mirrored by a spontaneous mise-en-scene that may, in fact, be Mackenzie's greatest accomplishment.

You Instead and Starred Up were both edited on the fly; Starred Up and the Chris Pine sections of Hell or High Water were shot in sequence. "The way I work, I don’t have a script supervisor, I don’t have a clapperboard, I don’t have monitors on set. So it’s all quite free."

Don't bother: Asylum, The Last Great Wilderness

1. Perfect Sense
2. You Instead
3. Spread
4. Hell or High Water
5. Starred Up
6. Young Adam
7. Hallam Foe

1. Boyhood
2. The Immigrant
3. Goodbye to Language
4. Dumb and Dumber To
5. The Grand Budapest Hotel
6. Gone Girl
7. Breakfast with Curtis
8. Starred Up
9. Person to Person
10. Jealousy

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

“…there’s work, traffic; the days as we know them…”

1. Silver Linings Playbook
2. Perfect Sense
3. You Instead
4. 4:44 Last Day on Earth
5. In the Family
6. The Color Wheel
7. Magic Mike
8. Moonrise Kingdom
9. This Is 40
10. Margaret

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.