Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Two feature length films behind him and just about become a must see film maker.
Took a bit of a break to enjoy streaming fare on other platforms but I'm back on Criterion with my first Roeg viewing tonight. It's a CC new addition: "Amid the decaying elegance of cold-war Vienna, psychoanalyst Dr. Alex Linden (Art Garfunkel) becomes mired in an erotically charged affair with the elusive Milena Flaherty (Theresa Russell). When their all-consuming passion takes a life-threatening turn, Inspector Netusil (Harvey Keitel) is assigned to piece together the sordid details. Acclaimed for its innovative editing, raw performances, and stirring musical score—featuring Tom Waits, the Who, and Billie Holiday—Nicolas Roeg’s BAD TIMING is a masterful, deeply disturbing foray into the dark world of sexual obsession." Should be interesting. And speaking of Garfunkel, they also just added the Paul Simon featured soundtrack of The Graduate. But YouTube is streaming it, too -
Watching: Darling Directed by John Schlesinger • 1965 • United Kingdom Starring Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde, Laurence Harvey Julie Christie won a best actress Oscar for her star-making performance as a restless model ascending the social ladder of swinging-sixties London as she bounces between affairs with two men: Dirk Bogarde’s earnest television reporter and Laurence Harvey’s cynical advertising executive. By turns seductively stylish and coolly satiric, director John Schlesinger’s international breakthrough—which also garnered Oscars for best screenplay and costume design—is a cutting look beneath the glamorous veneer of the jet-setting mod scene.
Jean - Luc Godard Onslaught today. I'd rather read him that watch his movies but one of these will occupy my early evening... Featuring: Breathless (1960), A Woman Is a Woman (1961), Vivre sa vie (1962), Le petit soldat (1963), Contempt (1963), Band of Outsiders (1964)**, A Married Woman (1964), Pierrot le fou (1965), Alphaville (1965), Masculin feminine (1966), Made in U.S.A (1966)**, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967), La Chinoise (1967), Weekend (1967), Le gai savoir (1969), Tout va bien (with Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972), Every Man for Himself (1980), Hail Mary (1985), For Ever Mozart (1996), Film socialisme (2010), Goodbye to Language (2014), The Image Book (2018)
I am one of those people who, when their attention has been peeked, needs to see or hear all of it. After viewing Joy Street I went searching for other films by Suzan Pitt and now I must find them. I really want to find out more about her work.
Understood. I'm going through that with Godard right now. You're probably aware of the Suzan Pitt documentary called Persistence of Vision.
I am now. I hear you with Godard because I’ve seen all of his work up until about 1972 and then I see all of the other films now available on the Criterion Channel and it is a case of not having enough time to fit them all in. It is kind of like how Roger Ebert described Werner Herzog “even his his failures are glorious” or something to that effect.
I hadn't seen this since it came out. Paid $2.50 to see it in the theatre: O Lucky Man! Directed by Lindsay Anderson • 1973 • United Kingdom Starring Malcolm McDowell, Ralph Richardson, Rachel Roberts Five years after IF…., director Lindsay Anderson and star Malcolm McDowell picked up the continuing saga of Mick Travis, now no longer a schoolboy but a wide-eyed, innocent young career man who goes from coffee salesman to spy to inmate to movie star as he gets a crash course in the realities of police corruption, small-town moral hypocrisy, and capitalist exploitation. A hallucinatory melange of surreal comedy, antiestablishment rage, and music (courtesy of Alan Price of the Animals), this kaleidoscopic epic is one of the most daring and iconoclastic British films of the 1970s.
I wish that Donald Ritchie had done commentary on all of Criterion’s classic Japanese films because I find him highly interesting. This is is based on one his books and he does the narration as well.
WOW! Certified Copy Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 2010 • Italy The great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami travels to Tuscany for a luminous and provocative romance in which nothing is as it appears. What seems at first to be a straightforward tale of two people, played by Oscar-winning actress Juliette Binoche and opera singer William Shimell, getting to know each other over the course of an afternoon gradually reveals itself as something richer, stranger, and trickier: a mind-bending reflection on authenticity, in art as well as in relationships. Both cerebrally and emotionally engaging, Certified Copy reminds us that love itself is an enigma.
This doesn’t count, but Criterion had their 50% off flash sale this week (I also had a $10 coupon code) and I picked this up on blu-ray. It arrived this morning.
This is one of my favorite movies. A very hypnotic urban ennui noir starring Willem Dafoe and Susan Sarandon, among others. Dafoe plays a drug courier working for drug dealer Susan Sarandon, whose bleak past suddenly clashes with his present midlife crisis. Lots of fine character actors in small early roles, a Michael Been score which seems intrusive at first but which works for the milieu, and a pretty potent presentation of the empty high-end casual and not-so-casual drug life.
On to another Lindsay Anderson. Pretty wacky, and of its time, I'd say. Britannia Hospital Directed by Lindsay Anderson • 1982 • United Kingdom Starring Malcolm McDowell, Leonard Rossiter, John Moffatt The final film in Lindsay Anderson’s Mick Travis trilogy is an audacious black comedy in which the recurring everyman played by Malcolm McDowell—now a reporter—finds himself caught in the madness as a crumbling hospital where sinister medical experiments are being performed prepares for a visit from the Queen Mother. Mixing wild satire with sci-fi surrealism, BRITANNIA HOSPITAL has proved polarizing since its release due to its unrelentingly scathing assault on the pillars of British society.
This makes its point quite well: A Special Day Directed by Ettore Scola • 1977 • Italy Italian cinema dream team Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni are cast against glamorous type and deliver two of the finest performances of their careers in this moving, quietly subversive drama from Ettore Scola. Though it's set in Rome on the historic day in 1938 when Benito Mussolini and the city first rolled out the red carpet for Adolf Hitler, the film takes place entirely in a working-class apartment building, where an unexpected friendship blossoms between a pair of people who haven't joined the festivities: a conservative housewife and mother tending to her domestic duties and a liberal radio broadcaster awaiting deportation.
Betty Blue Directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix • 1986 • France Starring Jean-Hugues Anglade, Béatrice Dalle, Gérard Darmon When the easygoing would-be novelist Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade) meets the tempestuous Betty (Béatrice Dalle, in a magnetic breakout performance) in a sunbaked French beach town, it’s the beginning of a whirlwind love affair that sees the pair turn their backs on conventional society in favor of the hedonistic pursuit of freedom, adventure, and carnal pleasure. But as the increasingly erratic Betty’s grip on reality begins to falter, Zorg finds himself willing to do things he never expected to protect both her fragile sanity and their tenuous existence together. Adapted from the hit novel “37°2 le matin” by Philippe Djian, Jean-Jacques Beineix’s art-house smash—presented here in its extended director’s cut—is a sexy, crazy, careening joyride of a romance that burns with the passion and beyond-reason fervor of all-consuming love.
A co-worker, who I turned on to the CC, informed me of this one. 16 films scored by Q. All look fairly intriguing.
