Just like in my other eighty-one posts in this series, I want to take a second to single out the highlights of my recent film viewing. Most of the films I have been glad to see but only a very few have stayed with me. This series is my filter for those and my hope is one or two will be good to you as well.
Thursday, March 31, 2022
Favorite (four), eighty-two
Monday, February 21, 2022
Favorite (four), eighty-one
Just like in my other eighty posts in this series, I want to take a second to single out the highlights of my recent film viewing. Most of the films I have been glad to see but only a very few have stayed with me. This series is my filter for those and my hope is one or two will be good to you as well.
Tuesday, February 8, 2022
2022
2/6/22 I watched Felicity Morris' The Tinder Swindler. Fairly compelling story on Netflix told in a thrown together manner.
Sunday, February 6, 2022
Favorite (four), eighty
Just like in my other seventy-nine posts in this series, I want to take a second to single out the highlights of my recent film viewing. Most of the films I have been glad to see but only a very few have stayed with me. This series is my filter for those and my hope is one or two will be good to you as well.
Tuesday, January 18, 2022
Favorite (four), seventy-nine
Just like in my other seventy-eight posts in this series, I want to take a second to single out the highlights of my recent film viewing. Most of the films I have been glad to see but only a very few have stayed with me. This series is my filter for those and my hope is one or two will be good to you as well.
Sunday, January 9, 2022
Favorite (four), seventy-eight
Just like in my other seventy-seven posts in this series, I want to take a second to single out the highlights of my recent film viewing. Most of the films I have been glad to see but only a very few have stayed with me. This series is my filter for those and my hope is one or two will be good to you as well.
Sunday, January 2, 2022
All I Saw and Read in 2021
I have posted this one or two other times in the past. Here is all that I saw and read in 2021:
½ Betty Tells Her Story, Sylvie’s Love
1/3 Conversations With Friends
1/7 The Way Back
1/8 Richard Jewell
1/9 Rabbit, Run
1/10 Love Affair(s)
1/11 Before the coffee gets cold
1/13 Summer of 85
1/15 Wuthering Heights
1/18 Girl, Woman, Other
1/20 The Alchemist
1/23 The Outsiders
1/24 Tiger, Trivial Pursuits
1/31 One Hundred Years of Solitude
2/1 The Cost of Living
2/5 The Arbalest
2/6 Rounders
2/15 The Given Day, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
2/27 All The Light We Cannot See
3/1 Lovers Rock
3/3 The Society of the Crossed Keys
3/7 Corps a Coeur
3/13 David Bowie: The Last Five Years
3/14 The Gleaners and I
3/15 Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind
4/4 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
4/10 The Midnight Library
4/11 Nothing but a Circus
4/15 Malice Aforethought
4/16 The Correspondence
4/18 I Am Not Your Negro
4/21 Giovanni’s Room
4/25 Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool
5/1 Jim Brown: All-American, The Disciple
5/4 Ham on Rye
5/8 Thomasine & Bushrod
5/13 Home from the Hill
5/15 Me and My Gal
5/16 Nomadland
5/31 Dons of Disco
6/2 Hooligan Sparrow
6/6 About Some Meaningless Events, Songs My Brothers Taught
Me
6/16 Uncanny Valley
6/18 Parasite
6/20 A Screaming Man
6/21 Sound of Metal
6/30 The French
7/7 The Painter of Modern Life
7/15 Joji
7/20 Whereabouts
8/5 Kitchen
8/16 Mistakes Were Made (some in French)
8/19 My Mess Is a Bit of a Life: Adventures in Anxiety
8/21 Exterminate All the Brutes
8/22 Little Wars
8/29 Adolescentes
9/26 The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz
10/7 A Scandal in Paris
10/21 The Velvet Underground
10/23 Crimson Gold
10/24 Hill of Freedom, Le caporal epingle
10/27 There’s Always Tomorrow
10/30 The Yards
10/31 First Case, Second Case
11/1 Taking Father Home
11/2 Luxor
11/6 Test Pattern
11/7 Juvenile Court
11/10 Central Park
11/12 Passing
11/14 Near Death
11/15 Orderly or Disorderly
11/21 Ode, Remember My Name
11/23 Remember the Night, Who Killed Who?
11/24 Manuel on the Island of Wonders
11/25 Lovers of the Arctic Circle
11/26 The Little Richard Story, Elf
11/27 US Go Home
11/28 Cops
12/2 God’s Comedy
12/5 In the Same Breath, Out of the Blue
12/8 Gang of Four
12/12 The Metaphor, A Perfect Couple
12/13 To Sleep with Anger
12/14 The Chorus, The Argyle Secrets
12/15 Le ciel est a vous, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in
Four Acts
12/16 Sweetie, Our Sunhi
12/17 A Letter to Elia, Annette
12/18 France, Summer of Soul, The Sparks Brothers
12/19 The Terrorizers, Zola, The Grass Is Greener
12/21 Wheel of Fortune and Fantasty, Travolta et Moi
12/22 HHH: Portrait of Hou Hsiao-hsien
12/26 Scattered Clouds
12/27 Cry Macho, The Dead Zone, Scene of the Crime, Our
Daily Bread
12/28 The Corporation, I Knew Her Well, Alive in France, The
Projectionist, Micki & Maude, Victor/Victoria
12/29 Lianna, Rendez-vous, Memoria, Deep Cover
12/30 Designing Woman, Edouard et Caroline, Sleuth
12/31 Drive My Car
*Additionally, I watched perhaps more TV than ever watching in its entirety The Plot Against America, Unbelievable, Unorthodox, The Crown, This Is Us, Killing Eve, Mare of Easttown, Queen's Gambit, Succession, 100 Foot Wave and Hacks
Saturday, January 1, 2022
My Top Films Seen in 2021
Here are the films, new and old, that I saw and most admired in 2021.
Saturday, December 18, 2021
Favorite (four), seventy-seven
Just like in my other seventy-six posts in this series, I want to take a second to single out the highlights of my recent film viewing. Most of the films I have been glad to see but only a very few have stayed with me. This series is my filter for those and my hope is one or two will be good to you as well.
Friday, December 10, 2021
Favorite (four), seventy-six
Just like in my other seventy-five posts in this series, I want to take a second to single out the highlights of my recent film viewing. Most of the films I have been glad to see but only a very few have stayed with me. This series is my filter for those and my hope is one or two will be good to you as well.
Monday, November 22, 2021
Favorite (four), seventy-five
Just like in my other seventy-four posts in this series, I want to take a second to single out the highlights of my recent film viewing. Most of the films I have been glad to see but only a very few have stayed with me. This series is my filter for those and my hope is one or two will be good to you as well.
Thursday, October 28, 2021
Favorite (four), seventy-four
Just like in my other seventy-three posts in this series, I want to take a second to single out the highlights of my recent film viewing. Most of the films I have been glad to see but only a very few have stayed with me. This series is my filter for those and my hope is one or two will be good to you as well.
Friday, July 16, 2021
2021
7/15/21 I watched Dileesh Pothan's Joji. I am not expert enough on Macbeth to understand how clever the film is an adaptation. As a pure viewing experience, I found the music overdone and the style all a bit of a mess.
8/21/21 I watched Raoul Peck's Exterminate All the Brutes. Peck's perspective and research make a story that needs to be told. I just grew weary of the way Peck chose to tell it.
10/22/21 I watched Todd Haynes' The Velvet Underground. Interesting if you are like me and know very little about the history of the band. Not as interesting from an aesthetic standpoint as I would have hoped from one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers.
11/12/21 I watched Rebecca Hall's Passing. An incredibly interesting premise with a style that is so mannered it becomes suffocating quickly.
12/5/21 I watched Nanfu Wang's In the Same Breath. It was interesting to learn more about how and why China handled the start of COVID. The style of the documentary just did not hold my attention.
12/17/21 I watched Leos Carax's Annette. There is real exuberance and a supercharge in Carax's last two films. Partly I attribute it to the fact that I cannot think of anyone else in film right now where the work feels as much in an ongoing discourse with the history of cinema. In his latest, David Lynch looms large. You feel his influence on the way the young girl Annette looks, who can't help but make you think about the baby in Eraserhead. You also see it in the way Carax stutters the lights in the beginning and the stylistic device he uses several times that is pure Lynch - the visual separation of body shots that I know you find in Twin Peaks but that I also seem to recall in Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr.
Carax's cinema could always be looked at as a love letter to the medium and its endless beauty and possibilities. So it only makes sense that Carax is channeling Lynch, one of the most liberated of filmmakers who continues to defy any claims of cinema's boundaries or imminent death.
I settled on the phrase above "an ongoing discourse with the history of cinema" because Carax's rear view has always gone farther back than most of his peers who have a hard time citing anything film-wise released before Kubrick's 2001. Carax in his latest is in a dialogue with the musical, the early Disney films, and as much with the first 50 years of cinema as the last 76.
12/18/12 I watched Bruno Dumont's France. A film that felt like a departure for Dumont, not as style heavy as some of his earlier work nor set in the provinces where he excels at capturing the land and people. It never fully got me in the way films like L'humanite and P'tit Quinquin did.
12/18/21 I watched Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's Summer of Soul. One of these documentaries where the story is so great that it's astounding the footage has sat on the shelf for 50 years. That in and of itself speaks volumes about the situation of race in this country. Some of the performances are simply grand from Sly to Mavis Staples to The 5th Dimension.
12/18/21 I watched Edgar Wright's The Sparks Brothers. Although Wright's storytelling quickly feels a little repetitive, the story of the band is fascinating and almost entirely new to me.
12/21/21 I watched Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. My first experience with the cinema of Hamaguchi and I am as excited about what he might do as I have been with any new filmmaker in a while. Hamaguchi uses music like Hong Sang-soo and at first glance his filmmaking might simply seem like alt Sang-soo. But Hamaguchi's world is not as distilled as the Korean filmmaker's. Hamaguchi utilizes more locations, pushes deeper into more taboo places (sexuality, even homosexuality) and ultimately creates moments and cinema that because they feel less controlled feel more dangerous than the work of Hong Sang-soo. Many people may call Hamaguchi the Japanese Rohmer but in his playfulness, even daring, he seems as close to Rivette as he does Rohmer. ''
12/27/21 I watched Clint Eastwood's Cry Macho. As much as I wanted to feel this late Eastwood, it never rose above metaphors and tributes to the Eastwood character that have affected me far more.
12/29/21 I watched Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Memoria. It is the third or fourth film I've seen by the Thai director and I continue to struggle with his work even though many people I admire view him as one of the most important directors working today. I admire his patience, his use of sound, his framing and his work with actors but I never fully follow what he is trying to say. And I never feel like the arduous journey he is asking of the spectator is worth the long haul.
12/31/21 I watched Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car. While I found this more formally impressive than Hamaguchi's other 2021 film, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, emotionally it was not near as powerful for me. It still signals Hamaguchi as one of the most interesting young filmmakers at work.
2/1/22 I watched Hong Sang-soo's Introduction. What particularly struck me in this, one of Hong's latest films, was the amount of long takes and what seemed like the first dream sequence I can recall in one of his works.
3/19/21 I watched Reinaldo Marcus Green's King Richard. It has a Hollywood style, particularly plenty of moments where the music helps to engineer the way you feel. Yet, I was impressed by the way in which the story was told and how Green earned some emotions I did not see coming.
3/19/21 I watched Morgan Neville's Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain. Fairly interesting look at how Bourdain arrived at celebrity and why he might have decided to leave it all behind.
3/22/22 I watched Cary Joji Fukunaga's No Time to Die. Overlong and bloated with very little of the directorial magic Fukunaga exhibited in the first season of True Detective.
4/29/22 I watched Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan's Our Towns. I absolutely loved the book. The documentary though fell completely flat for me.