Obscure movies

[Winstonm]

A Walk in the Clouds (1995), starring Keanu Reeves and Anthony Quinn.

[Zelandakh]

A big thanks to y66 for resurrecting this thread - somehow it completely passed me by the first time around. Some thoughts:

 

Peter O'Toole has always been an actor better remembered for selling rubbish than being involved in quality productions, particularly in the first half of his career. That said, his best film before 1990 must surely be The Last Emperor.

 

When Ken brought up Walkabout I was unsure if he meant the 1971 film or the 1996 comedy. I take it from the follow-up posts that the former is meant. What is perhaps not evident to those on the other side of The Pond is that the corresponding book is regarded as something of a literary classic and the film itself broke some fairly new ground at the time of its launch, featuring not only a relationship (albeit unconsumated) between a white teenage schoolgirl (age 14 in the book)and a young aborigine (implied in the film to be 16; in the 10-16 in the book) but also full-frontal nudity (Agutter being just 17 at the time of filming).

 

The film is also something of a lesson to budding directors on the use of montage, with the technique being used often within the film to highlight the sexual tension without anything more concrete to direct the viewers into the film's understory. The desert scenes are similarly designed to get over the vastness of the Australian outback, something that is also emphasised in the book but would presumably not have been obvious to a 1971 audience. How else would you achieve this using 1970s technology? It is essentially the equivalent of the scenes you sometimes see of a line traced on a map edited together with shots of the actors looking like they are about to collapse, only done in a somewhat more subtle way and not requiring the viewers to interpret a map of Australia. I would agree that the IMDB rating of the film (7.7) is too high but it is probably an above-average movie for its time given the rather large amount of totally awful movies at that time. That said, I would direct BBFers towards the book rather than the movie. The two are really completely different stories that happen share some similar elements (the children, the Australian outback and the name). Aside from that any further similarities are more coincidence than anything else.

 

Out of Sight on the other hand, is a film that I found to be total rubbish. Unbelievable, formulaic, poor acting (even by RomCom standards) - the only real positive it has going for it is Clooney's charisma. I can honestly see little to recommend this movie other than for fans of the leading actors.

 

Finally, the dance scene reminded me of a decent obscure movie I saw many years ago called Couscous (la graine et le mulet) which I will throw out there for anyone that is interested in such films. I will have to have a deep think about what I have seen since then that is worth mentioning. I know I have seen a few in the last years that were distinctly better than the typical Hollywood fare.

[Al_U_Card]

 

Finally, the dance scene reminded me of a decent obscure movie I saw many years ago called Couscous (la graine et le mulet) which I will throw out there for anyone that is interested in such films. I will have to have a deep think about what I have seen since then that is worth mentioning. I know I have seen a few in the last years that were distinctly better than the typical Hollywood fare.

 

Uh oh. I recorded La graine et le mulet on my PVR last week. Once I get past House of Cards, I'll let you know how I found the original (in French), should you be so inclined.

[Al_U_Card]

A decent movie with a somewhat bizarre ending. The title refers to elements in a couscous platter, (bulgur wheat and mullet fish) which is a principal component in the story line and an effective center-piece for the denouement. Here in Quebec, "graine" translates as "seed" but is also a colloquial reference to the penis.

 

Coming from a Waspish home environment, my own culture shock with French-Canadian society was front and center in the family dining scene. Rather than polite, serious dinner-time discussions, the raucous, raunchy and continuously interruptive melee of conversations at the table struck a chord. Having worked with and for several Egyptians, the Arab mentality was spot on as described. The lampooning of the French bureaucracy hit the mark and I agree with its description "a chier". ;)

 

At 2 1/2 hrs, a bit long but worth the watch. Despite the ending (which cost it a point in my rating) a solid 7.

[ggwhiz]

Peter O'Toole has always been an actor better remembered for selling rubbish than being involved in quality productions, particularly in the first half of his career. That said, his best film before 1990 must surely be The Last Emperor.

 

For pure fun My Favorite Year is one I definitely pull up every few years.

[Zelandakh]

That is a fair review. The scene that I liked the least was the man running around after the youths - I found it rather unbelievable. It is as you write though, a solid film with some good observations about people and culture for viewers that can sit through a (long) movie without any chase scenes or special effects.

 

A few other non-blockbusters I have remembered so far:-

 

Under the Skin showed lots of Scarlett Johansson but did not quite work for me despite a rather interesting back story (if you know Scottish mythology). It is interesting enough though with plenty of relatively obscure scenes to decipher, if you like a more active watching experience.

 

Blue is the Warmest Colour on the other hand is excellent with superb performances from the young leading actresses. Arguably the best story about love since (500) Days of Summer.

 

Ex Machina is another one I enjoyed quite a lot, despite the plot not being particularly original or surprising. I suppose that speaks positively for the direction and acting that give the whole thing an intense and claustrophobic feel that pulls you in. Not exactly obscure though (but much more so than Out of Sight, which cost over 3 times as much).

 

Love was very dull, neither erotic nor interesting in terms of the characters with the wife being the archetypal cardboard cutout. It is the sort of movie you see people walking out of halfway in, along with pseudo-intellectuals trying to read all sorts of rubbish into the story afterwards to sound "arty". I strongly advise not bothering with this one.

 

Moon was ok for me as a sci-fi fan but so predictable that it would not make it to a recommended list. Probably decent if you like to watch passively and not think too much about where the plot is heading.

 

More to come but I cannot think of the names just now, especially as a lot of the movies I see come with German titles that are sadly instantly forgettable (even if the movie itself is good).

[y66]

From A. O. Scott's Dec 2009 review of "Police, Adjective":

 

True to its title, the new Romanian film “Police, Adjective” is a story of law enforcement with a special interest in grammar. Its climactic scene is not a chase or a shootout, but rather a tense, suspenseful session of dictionary reading.

 

I’m not being in any way facetious. The movie’s director, Corneliu Porumboiu, whose previous feature was “12:08 East of Bucharest,” has a talent for infusing mundane, absurd moments with gravity and drama as well as humor. The dictionary in that scene is a versatile comic prop, and also an instrument of instruction and humiliation. It is introduced by an officious police captain (Vlad Ivanov, who played the predatory abortionist in Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”) who wants to teach his underling a lesson.

 

To say exactly what is learned would not only spoil the ending — this is a cop movie, after all, with a bit of a twist in the tail — but would also blunt the bite of Mr. Porumboiu’s mordant satire. So let’s just note that the Romanian word for “police” is used as an adjective in two ways. The first usage applies to (I quote the English subtitles) “a novel or film involving criminal happenings that are in some degree mysterious, resolved in the end through the ingenuity of a police officer or detective.” In an unexpected and somewhat underhanded way, that describes the action of “Police, Adjective.” It is at least as relevant, however, that the other cited use of the adjective is to modify the word “state.”

 

“All states depend on the police,” says the captain, waving off not only his country’s specific history, but also a possibly significant distinction between its old totalitarian regime and its new democratic order. Mr. Porumboiu, whose hapless characters debate whether the revolution of 1989 really took place in their corner of the country, is not making an argument that nothing has changed in Romania since the bad old days. Rather, he is investigating the nature of bureaucratic authority and the perverse, crushing effects it can have on an individual.

 

His protagonist is Cristi, a detective played with brusque, weary likability by Dragos Bucur, who in previous roles (notably in Radu Muntean’s “Boogie” and Cristi Puiu’s “Stuff and Dough”) has embodied the malaise of early adulthood in post-Communist Romania. Cristi is working on a case that would, by the standard of American television cop shows, be less than trivial. He is gathering evidence against a high school student who smokes a little hashish and has been informed on by a friend and smoking buddy.

 

Cristi suspects that the one he calls the Squealer wants to get the other boy out of the way and make a move on his girlfriend, who also hangs out with them. And as Cristi follows them, stakes out their houses and files his reports, he feels more and more uneasy. In other countries, he explains to a prosecutor who is a little more sympathetic than the captain, the casual possession and use of small quantities of hashish is not really a police matter at all.

 

The crux of the drama in “Police, Adjective” is the tension between Cristi’s professional duty and his conscience, a conflict the dictionary is called on to adjudicate. And the substance of the movie is a series of slowly paced scenes that follow him through his routines. He deals with pushy or recalcitrant co-workers, trudges through days of surveillance work without changing his sweater and returns home for desultory conversations with his wife, Anca (Irina Saulescu), who matter-of-factly tells him that things are not working out between them and then continues as if nothing of consequence had been said.

 

At another point, as Anca, a teacher and something of a linguistic pedant, listens to a romantic pop song over and over on her computer, she and Cristi have a debate about images and symbols in literature. Why, he wonders, don’t people just stick with the literal meanings of words, and forget about all the fancy stuff. His position is a hyperbolically blunt statement of an impulse that drives much recent Romanian cinema, away from metaphor and toward a concrete, illusion-free reckoning with things as they are.

 

This can be called realism, but that sturdy old word is not quite sufficient to describe “Police, Adjective,” which is at once utterly plain, even affectless, and marvelously rich. Mr. Porumboiu’s style might be called proceduralist. Like Cristi writing his reports, Mr. Porumboiu scrupulously records details in a manner that only seems literal-minded because his technique is invisible, and his intelligence resolutely unshowy.

 

“Police, Adjective” tells a small story well. At the level of plot, it is consistently engaging, and the psychology of the ambivalent detective, a staple of film noir, is given a new twist in the character of Cristi. But the more closely you look, the more you see: a movie about a marriage, about a career in crisis, about a society riven by unstated class antagonisms and hobbled by ancient authoritarian habits. So much in this meticulous and moving film is between the lines, and almost nothing is by the book.

My wife an I both enjoyed this movie. It may move a little too slowly for some. Now streaming on The Criterion Channel.

[foobar]

Couple of films for starters (warning: neither of them are for the squeamish):

 

Raw (French, 2017): A vegetarian goes to college and accidentally tastes meat; enough said, but highly recommend by this vegan 😁

 

Wake In Fright (Oz,1971): A cult film set in the Oz outback

[y66]

My wife and I recently watched 3 movies on the Criterion Channel by the Dardenne brothers: L’Enfant (The Child), Le Gamin au Vélo (The Kid with a Bike), and La Fille Inconnue (The Unknown Girl). If Bernie Sanders grew up in French-speaking Belgium and made movies about moral choices people make, with a humanist theme, he might have made these. The movies are slow moving and minimalist which is fine with me. Manohla Dargis used "rapturous" in her review of The Kid with a Bike which it was for me at times.

 

We also watched the brothers' commentary on The Kid with a Bike, in which they talk about where they got the idea for the story and how they make movies which I found interesting.

[y66]

The Misfits with Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Eli Wallach and Montgomery Clift. Written by Arthur Miller. Directed by John Huston. Reviewed by Tim Robey at The Telegraph. Miller said the cowboys he'd met regarded themselves as not much of anything which is how they come across in this movie. Worth watching if you're a fan of any of these guys. The photography is amazing.

[y66]

From A. O. Scott's review of Winter's Bone:

 

Even before the real trouble starts — with suspicious lawmen on one side and a clan of violent drug dealers on the other — Ree Dolly faces more than the usual litany of adolescent worries. Her father, locally renowned for his skill at cooking methamphetamine, has vanished, and her emotionally hollowed-out mother has long since abandoned basic parental duties, leaving Ree (Jennifer Lawrence) to run the household and care for her two younger siblings. The family lives in southwestern Missouri, a stretch of the Ozarks that is both desolate and picturesque, words that might also suit “Winter’s Bone,” Debra Granik’s tender and flinty adaptation of a novel of the same title by Daniel Woodrell.

 

“Winter’s Bone,” warmly embraced at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, belongs, at least at first glance, to one of that festival’s familiar genres: the regional-realist morality tale. These days, American independent cinema abounds in earnest stories of hard-bitten people living in impoverished corners of the country, their moral and emotional struggles accompanied by acoustic guitars and evocative landscape shots and generally uninflected by humor.

 

The faces in “Winter’s Bone” are certainly mirthless — not only Ree’s, but also those of the relatives she turns to for advice and protection when her predicament becomes desperate. The topography of chilly hollows and ragged forests is filmed in a way that emphasizes its bleakness. There are banjos and fiddles, as well as guitars, and some beautiful old mountain ballads are performed on camera. Some of the cast members are nonprofessional actors, and nearly all are wary, watchful and taciturn, speaking their few words in faultless regional accents.

 

What distinguishes Ms. Granik’s film from, say, Courtney Hunt’s “Frozen River” — to cite another recent Sundance favorite with cold weather in its title and grim Americana on its mind — is that this harshness is not there to illuminate a sociological condition. Something more primal, almost Greek in its archaic power, is at stake in “Winter’s Bone,” and its visual and emotional starkness do not feel like simple badges of authenticity.

 

This is not a story about drugs and family life in a particular region of the United States, even though it displays some impressive local knowledge (much of it derived from Mr. Woodrell’s book). It is more deeply about tribal ties and individual choices, about a stubborn girl’s sense of justice coming into sharp and dangerous conflict with deep and intractable customs.

[y66]

"Silver Lining Playbook" with Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro and Jacki Weaver. De Niro is such a scene stealer and super likable old white guy.

[ggwhiz]

Not that obscure? but watched Icarus on Netflix, the Academy Award winning documentary.

 

A very chilling look at how the old KGB guys are still running amok.

[y66]

Paris, Texas by Wim Wenders (1984) based on a screenplay by Sam Shepard. Got mixed reviews. My wife and I enjoyed it.

[ggwhiz]

Found a British film on Netflix, Death at a Funeral.

 

The imdb rating of 7.4 is unusually high for a comedy but MAN! it was laugh out loud hilarious.

 

Zombieland was very good and got a 7.7 rating but this was better.

[Al_U_Card]

"A little chaos" with Alan Rickman and Kate Winslet. A period piece set in Louis XIV's France during the construction of Versailles. Despite one minor incongruity in the plot line, a fine romantic drama produced and directed by Rickman. 8.5 / 10.

[Winstonm]

Mark Perez wrote a quirky and amusing script for Game Night. 2018, WB

[helene_t]

Poi E

 

https://www.nzfilm.co.nz/films/poi-e-story-our-song

 

A cute film that gives a window into contemporary Maori culture.

[Al_U_Card]

Just watched "La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes". (The little girl who was too fond of matches.) My wife loved the book and it had 5 stars so ... at least I didn't fall asleep despite it being fairly late in the evening. Moody and somewhat scattered, it contains a sort of gothic 2.0 horror that was somewhat appealing. Not highly recommended but an easy watch.

[y66]

24 City by Jia Zhang-ke:

 

An experimental fiction-nonfiction hybrid, it takes place in the southwest city of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province. (It was shot before last year’s catastrophic earthquake.) The focus is a state-owned factory building, a ruined monument to precapitalist China, or rather to its workers, who helped turn the country into a global power. Mr. Jia managed to catch the sprawling, colloquially named Factory 420 — which originally manufactured fighter aircraft engines before branching out to refrigerators and the like — as it was being demolished to make room for a mixed-use development that will spread across 3.3 million square feet, house 60,000 residents and include an eight-screen multiplex that is unlikely to show his work.

 

That might change, though it’s hard to believe that his movies, with their lengthy takes and generous silences, will ever attract a popular audience of any nationality. Given his rarefied style, it was instructive to read in a recent New Yorker profile that Mr. Jia has been criticized by some Chinese intellectuals for “abandoning his most subversive themes.” This criticism might be due to the fact that Mr. Jia, who once flew under the government’s radar, now shoots his movies with its official approval. Or that the state-owned company that redeveloped the factory also helped pay for “24 City.” Whatever the case, Mr. Jia doesn’t seem to have sold out for the state’s blessing, at least as far as this Westerner can tell. -- Manohla Dargis NYT 2009

[johnu]

The Big Bus, an early disaster comedy movie that predated the Airplane movies. A giant, nuclear powered bus that makes a cross country trip dodging natural disasters and sabotage.

 

Among the memorable quotes,

 

"You eat one lousy foot - they call you a cannibal!"

 

"I ate the seat cushions like they told us to in training!"

[helene_t]

Saw a couple of obscure films recently at the Hamilton Film Society

 

Intersexion, a documentary about intersex people, gave a nice varied perspective on the intersex phenomena by interviewing a lot of intersexed people with very different stories. Technically it was a bit amateuristic, though.

 

https://www.intersexionfilm.com/

 

Western, a German film about a German construction team in Bulgaria and their conflicts with the nearby village was a kind of film that would be interesting if based on a true story, but it isn't, so I am not sure what's the point. It is technically reasonably and the actors are believable, albeit with superficially described personalities. Not a film that made me excited, though.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_(2017_film)

[barmar]

The Big Bus, an early disaster comedy movie that predated the Airplane movies. A giant, nuclear powered bus that makes a cross country trip dodging natural disasters and sabotage.

I remember that, it was intended to be the ultimate spoof of movies like "Airport" and "The Towering Inferno".

 

I thought it was considered notoriously bad, but Rotten Tomatoes has it at 78% from reviewers (but only 9 reviews, they're not from when the movie originally came out, and they're just mildly positive or negative) and 58% from the audience.

[y66]

I'm on a David Lynch kick after taking his new Master Class which blew me away. I recently watched "The Elephant Man" which also blew me away as did Vincent Canby's perceptive review. It really is a small world. There was Merrick talking about how beautiful his mother was and how he "must have been a disappointment to her" which are words that Lynch has used when talking about his mother. And there was Anne Bancroft giving Merrick a book of Shakespeare's plays, the same Anne Bancroft who took it upon herself to teach her dyslexic son Max how to read and, whose husband, the producer, who doubted that Lynch was the right guy for the film, was instantly persuaded when they first met in a Bob's Big Boy "way out in the valley." The acting by John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins was so good.

[y66]

Blood Simple by the Coen brothers. Not obscure perhaps. Hard to believe this was their first film.

 

[opening voice-over plays against dissolving Texas landscapes--broad, bare, and lifeless]

 

The world is full of complainers. But the fact is, nothing comes with a guarantee. I don't care if you're the Pope of Rome, President of the United States, or even Man of the Year--something can always go wrong. And go ahead, complain, tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for help--watch him fly. Now in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else-- that's the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas...

 

[cut to headlights rushing down rain-swept country road at night, tires swishing on wet asphalt]

 

And down here... you're on your own.