tell us about the last Film you saw

pawel pawlikowski - ida

i love almost everything about this film, especially how it is meandering calmly and unobtrusively through its story, just like the central character, ida, an orphaned young woman who is about to become a nun in the early 1960s communist polish people's republic.

it's also a road trip coz ida is told to visit her outgoing aunt, the only living relative, before her vows, and both women shortly afterwards embark on the trip to find out more about the fate of ida's family under german occupation during ww2.

ida's spirit does not belong anywhere, she is completely free of any restrictive traditions, free to make her own decisions and find out whether the life, people and history she encounters outside the convent might suit her at all. she is a true introvert and thus the film is graciously leaving out all artificial emotions and strained attention-seeking.

... instead it offers a lot of "dead space" coz when it comes to pictures, less is always more.

i liked it more than jacques rivette's "the nun" with anna karina, even though it is also a great film, but it's more about suffering and victimization and not about unrestrained freedom.


Polish movie about Jews during WWII. Done million times over and how stupid do you have to be not recognizing the agenda behind it.
 
Polish movie about Jews during WWII. Done million times over and how stupid do you have to be not recognizing the agenda behind it.
I thought this was me Urbanus posting that but it wasn't though I agree. But I can watch a movie like that with critical eyes.

Lanterns is not stupid and perhaps we should all think about where she comes from in life and what shaped her world view?

As a german things must be complicated historically though swedes should be more ashamed than the germans cause everything the nazis did were swedish inventions and ideas and the race biology in Uppsala was the start of it all.
 

Parasite has won numerous awards and raked stellar reviews. A satire turns to tragedy as lives of two families on the opposite spectrum of S. Korean society intertwine. The film starts with captivating plot but as the movie progresses the storyline turns to be a bit unrealistic. It’s an ok movie and I give it 5 out of 10
 
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I felt this was a dreadful movie because of the awful actors. Portman is trying to copy Jodie Foster from "silence of the lambs" with a new accent and overall manly lesbian ways. Add to that the worst actor and face of all time in the awful Jon Hamm and you have a recipe for disaster but it does not stop there.

No, the director is playing with the picture format all through the movie. Sliding sides and 4:3 here and there which then turn to 16:9 and back again and even a letterbox format so I was sat wondering if we were going to see a round picture as well just for the hell of it and perhaps Chaplin or Laurel and Hardy looking out of it?

The movie itself then?

Well, Portman plays this astronaut (like people still believe they exist) who after returning to earth (the firmament hit her on the way up there) feels lost and that earth and life is too small and simple for her. The director and those who wrote it then get bored with the plot and go "hell we might as well make this a love movie" so she fools around with Hamm who then is found out to be f***ing every NASA babe and only allowing those up there again who were good at it.

Then Portman goes on a cross the country drive in her car and I was like "Yay, this might be about that psycho NASA babe who drove across the country wearing a diaper to save time" but sadly no diaper involved which would have completed this farce of a movie.

Only watch the opening scenes when she hangs in space watching the earth and waits for the sun (LOL like yeah you totally do that out there not protected by anything). "Give me a few more minutes" well yeah give her a crematorium while yer at it.

All through the movie I wondered why wasn't Jay Tando given the role instead of Jon Hamm in Mad Men not that I ever watched even a nano second of it but you don't wanna punch Tando's face like you do with Hamm's.



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Well done Ethan Hawke on creating a strangely emotional movie about a man leaving prison after 20 years finding a baby girl in a dumpster at his new job at the burger joint. I did not think much of this when reading about it but with very small means they have created a movie that is captivating throughout and that in some way left quite an impression.

Far from perfect and not a great movie or anything but still one that I enjoyed watching.

 
Just saw RAF, great movie about a 29 year old grappling with life in Vancouver and her relationship with a woman she meets on the street.
 
spike lee - clockers

kinda entertaining in a symphonic way, i must say, but not a really good film.
clockers, as one should know, are drug dealers working 24/7. location is a new york residential area mainly for black people called the project. the drug scene's very active and so are police and the homo-cide detectives.
story's kinda interesting but not really original, mostly stock characters from urban jungle crime films. the black protective mama, the promising kid gettin into trouble, harrassing white cops and the few white cops helpin the good black fellas, an army of hopeless drug addicts.
i liked the long camera movements accompanied by jazz or classical music which added a soft touch to the gritty murder scenes, like in silence of the lambs.
acting was pretty amateurish, especially among some of the black folks, the urban slang often sounding like a charicature of itself, which it probably is anyway. so lee added lotsa violin playin as a backdrop to the dialogues to distract the viewers attention from the novice acting.
a so-so film.
3/6 lanterns


Hmm this must be an adaptation of prices novel. Didn’t know it existed. I’ll probably check this out
 
happy to see that on mubi usa there has been launched a short sci-fi special with post-apocalyptic films a month ago. must've happened before the corona scare hit the country, as they now - like in europe - prefer showing escapist movies, like french relationship dramas nobody is interested in at the moment or documentaries on turkmen nomad life. which is a shame. they should be more courageous.

so, i was lucky to see "the quiet earth" last night on its 30th and thus last day possible.


it's a 1985 new zealand film dealing with a guy who works for a scientific research center that was secretly experimenting on universal time shifting and something went wrong, so that one morning he wakes up and everybody's gone.

film starts off like a robinsonade with the guy going through different stages of adapting to the new situation. he later meets a woman and a maori, and as a team of three, they try to destroy the mechanism that produces more and more time shifts. i quite liked the films despite its very ordinary characters. i would always prefer solitude to teaming up with such bland hetero characters, even in a post-apocalyptic world.

i just watched "the last man on earth" with vincent price from 1964. it's on mubi usa for another week, but it can also be watched on yt.


now, this rang true in our corona times despite being mostly a zombie-vampire film. the apocalypse is caused by a plague-like virus coming from europe and being airborne through the wind to the us, where people are killed by the millions. unlike corona, this virus has a clear symptom, blindness, but people die shortly after that anyway. if you dont burn their corpses, they'll return as zombies trying to feed on your blood.

vincent price plays a male survivor who is - again - a scientist who tried to find a vaccine and who, as it turns out later, is immune coz he was once bitten by a bat that carried the virus but it had been weakened by the bat's immune system before it entered his body.

some of the images are horribly and fascinatingly up-to-date, like the military transporting the enormous number of corpses to the city's burning ground (ice rink in spain) and the effects of social distancing, like the depeopled city, which is hard for price to cope with, who has been on his own for three years, and because he is visited each night by a bunch of zombies trying to get into his house shouting, "morgan, come out, come out, morgan!" social distancing has never been harder, i guess, with so many debile zombies around.

bit boring were the constant reminders of how perfect and nice life in america had been for the protagonist and his family before the virus hit.
anyways, surprisingly entertaining film based on an above-average script.
 
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what an awful british television production by the bbc from 1984.
pretty sure margaret thatcher loved watching all those working-class peeps being incinerated, left alone, starving and slowly dying of radiation. problem solved. the children watching it on tv for ever traumatized.



as life goes on coronation-street-like in sheffield at the beginning of the film, all tediously boring like on a never-ending sunday, the super powers are fighting their proxy wars in distant regions of the world, when suddenly several nuclear bombs hit britain. the film follows several members of two families who were brought together bc of a wedding of lower middle-class and pregnant ruth and working-class jimmy. jimmy dies on the spot and pregnant ruth makes it into the tenth year after the attack, in a britain that has regressed into the medieval times if not the stone age.

the film shows the social, medical, political, environmental and economic effects of a nuclear attack in cadaverous detail. this is informative and interesting, but you just wonder why there is no global perspective in this scenario, as if sheffield was the world.

what really pissed me off was the very lengthy depiction of the blind mass panic after the attacks with women dutifully wailing and wailing non-stop and then, inevitably it seems, being reamed out by the men commandingly shouting at them to shut up ffs, which made them wail even louder, and so forth. this was nerve-racking and simply too much. there were absolutely no characters showing some crisis management or leadership skills, just what what can be expected from the working-classes.

i remember how these hopeless desaster films presenting more or less realistic horror scenarios depressed me in the 1980s. and i am pretty sure now, that this was their first and only intention. they were kind of negative counter narratives to the marxist or socialist utopian visions of a better and fairer world.

 
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what an awful british television production by the bbc from 1984.
pretty sure margaret thatcher loved watching all those working-class peeps being incinerated, left alone, starving and slowly dying of radiation. problem solved. the children watching it on tv for ever traumatized.



as life goes on coronation-street-like in sheffield at the beginning of the film, all tediously boring like on a never-ending sunday, the super powers are fighting their proxy wars in distant regions of the world, when suddenly several nuclear bombs hit britain. the film follows several members of two families who were brought together bc of a wedding of lower middle-class and pregnant ruth and working-class jimmy. jimmy dies on the spot and pregnant ruth makes it into the tenth year after the attack, in a britain that has regressed into the medieval times if not the stone age.

the film shows the social, medical, political, environmental and economic effects of a nuclear attack in cadaverous detail. this is informative and interesting, but you just wonder why there is no global perspective in this scenario, as if sheffield was the world.

what really pissed me off was the very lengthy depiction of the blind mass panic after the attacks with women dutifully wailing and wailing non-stop and then, inevitably it seems, being reamed out by the men commandingly shouting at them to shut up ffs, which made them wail even louder, and so forth. this was nerve-racking and simply too much. there were absolutely no characters showing some crisis management or leadership skills, just what what can be expected from the working-classes.

i remember how these hopeless desaster films presenting more or less realistic horror scenarios depressed me in the 1980s. and i am pretty sure now, that this was their first and only intention. they were kind of negative counter narratives to the marxist or socialist utopian visions of a better and fairer world.



Marxist Defeatism is very British, but I think you're right that it was meant to depress. They wanted to demand socialism while never getting it.
 
i wanted something brutal and there was "sympathy for mr. vengeance" on mubi.uk.
a south korean film superbly directed by park chan-wook


first part of a revenge trilogy. a deaf-mute brother tries to find a way to save his sister who needs a kidney transplant.
what begins rather innocently and sweet, gradually turns into the most violent and gory blood-shedding thing of a film i have seen for decades.

i loved the masterfully perfected cinematography and directing work but felt a bit irritated by the story itself. the screenplay has something of a television screen thriller. maybe this contrast is intentional. maybe it tells us something about south korean culture?

the other two parts are still available on mubi.uk but somehow i dont feel like watching more of this sort of gorenographical storytelling at the moment.
 
haven't discovered this one yet. has it been released recently?

It's available in my country at Mubi.com. it finishes today at midnight. I wish I knew how to record it for you. You have to watch it thinking about it was filmed almost a century ago.
 
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It's available in my country at Mobi.com. it finishes today at midnight. I wish I knew how to record it for you. You have to watch it thinking about it was filmed almost a century ago.
Looks like the full film is on youtube, at least in the UK. I'll watch it.
 
B-movie.
It's a marvelous documentary about West Berlin and its underground music scene between 1979 and 1987. A lot of very rare archive material and focused on Malaria, Einstürzende Neubauten, Nick Cave, Die Tödliche Doris, Die Artze, Die Toten Hosen, Heino :)squiffy:)... A true masterpiece and something more than just another music documentary.
 
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