Letterboxd — Your life in film

Just watched ROSETTA, directed by brothers Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne. This is a movie about a girl that lives in a trailer with her alcoholic mom trying to survive in poverty. Her holy grail in life is having a steady job so that she can have a regular life, which causes her to betray a friend so that she can snag their position. I had mixed feelings about the main character, because she knows th
at having a job is the…

Just watched Dennis Hopper's THE LAST MOVIE. This is a movie about a stunt man working on a western in Peru, who sticks around after the movie wraps. The townspeople that have watched the movie production build their own movie equipments out of sticks, and enact their own movie-ritual with the stunt-man as the sacrifice at the end. If you loved Hopper's Easy Rider...then you'll probably fucking hate this. After the mega-success of Easy Rider, everyone was hyped for this…

Just watched Kon Ichikawa's 47 Ronin. This is a movie about a samurai clan that loses their master through trickery, is disbanded by the shogunate, and plans revenge on those that planned the downfall of their clan. The IMDB lists over a dozen different versions of 47 Ronin, but I read elsewhere that there are many more. Ichikawa's version is a little odd, but I got used to it once I started looking at it as a samurai soap-opera. The…

Just watched David Cronenberg's A DANGEROUS METHOD. This is a movie about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and the friendship/fued between them that was caused by a patient-turned-psychiatrist named Sabina Spielrein. I read Jung's autobiography a year or two ago, and a lot of the scenes in the movie are true to history, although I'm not sure if the relationship between Jung and Spielrein is factual. All the actors put in great performances, especially Keira Knightley, who had to play…

Just watched William Friedkin's TO LIVE AND DIE IN LA. Friedkin is probably best known for directing The Exorcist, but I'll always prefer his cop-movies; this, The French Connection, and Jade. This movie seems like a cheesy 80's flick on the surface, but underneath it's very dark. Sure, it follows the cliched storyline every cop-movie does (2 cops on the case, one is crooked, the other straight yet eventually succumbingto corruption), but Friedkin always spices things up with his unexpected…

Just watched Hou Hsiao-hsien's THE PUPPETMASTER. This is a movie about a set of special puppets that come to life and kill...whoops, wrong movie. It's actually a movie about the life of Li Tien-lu, Taiwan's most famous puppeteer. This is basically one of those movies that tell the history of a country (Japanese colonized Taiwan) through the eyes of one person. Li Tien-lu himself is actually interviewed in several parts of the movie, telling a story that sets the scene.…

Just watched Jon Jost's LAST CHANTS FOR A SLOW DANCE (DEAD END). This is a movie about a dead-beat dad that drives around the state looking for work, but eventually spirals down to rock-bottom. I'm a collector of rare and hard-to-find movie, and this movie has been my holy grail for some time. I actually had to e-mail the director himself in order to buy a copy. But how does the movie itself rank? Well, it's not for the impatient…

Just watched Kenji Mizoguchi's UGETSU. This is a movie about a pair of married couples, whose husbands both go off looking for fame/fortune, only to be ruined by their own greed. This movie plays like a heavy-handed morality-tale at times, but what sets it apart is its fantastic camerawork (Mizoguchi is well-known for his one-scene-one-take shooting philosophy) and its dreamlike atmosphere. The two stories do seem cobbled together at times like you are watching two seperate movies editted together, but…

Just watched HOUSE OF WHIPCORD, directed by Pete Walker. This is a movie about a private court and jailing establishment for women who get off with just a "slap on the wrist" from the real legal system. In actuality, the prison is just an excuse for a couple of sadistic creeps to torture girls. The prison is run by the ugliest woman since Anne Ramsey from Throw Mama from the Train, and the guards are pretty butch...though there's no intentional…

Just watched Andrzej Wajda's KANAL. This is a movie about a platoon in the Polish Resistance at the begining of WW2, and how they all get wiped out. The movie starts out like a regular war movie, with the soldiers trying to hold a position against overwhelming odds, but then they are forced to escape into the sewers of the city, and at that point the entire movie shifts gears into an existential n
ightmare. The sewers (Kanals) turn into…

Just watched SHAME, directed by Steve McQueen (not the actor). This is a movie about a man who is a sex-addict, whos sister invites herself to move into his apartment, disrupting his life. This was a good movie, but it's a little more straight-forward and conventional than I would expect from a self-proclaimed video-artist like McQueen (especially after his debut movie Hunger). If you've seen any movie about addiction, then this one won't hold any surprises; you get to see…

Just watched Michael Haneke's FUNNY GAMES. This is a movie about a family that gets terrorized by a pair of young men...home-invasion style. This is a movie that turns a lot of people off; I wasn't even sure if I liked it the 1st time I saw it. Part of this can be attributed to the cold, distant style of Haneke's filmmaking, but it mostly has to do with the fact that it goes against the grain so a
ggresively.…