la description de Kanopy disait que le film était une comédie, mais la première moitié était plutôt terrifiant -- d'une connotation positive (mais je suis en accord qu'ils l'ont décrit comme « chorégraphie »). les modernistes de trois décennies avant auraient été fier... mais la partie du restaurant devenait ennuyeuse.

au début, j'avais pensé que j'aie été trop misérable pour sa fantaisie, comme je sentais avec le film de Georgiy Daneliya je me promène à Moscou. mais mon intérêt était attrapé quand la bande originale s'est coupé et l'enfant buvait du lait avec désespoir dans la rue tout seul, est même plus tard quand il se trouver à la prison. (passez votre souris pour révéler les spoilers) Les Quatre Cents Coups se passe autour d'un enfant qui est confronté à la loi ; la loi des parents, des enseignants et même l'état. et ces lois se mêlent entre eux, comme quand l'école échoue d'encourage le potentiel dans l'enfant qui fume et lis Balzac, parce que c'est la littérature et l'écriture à laquelle pourraient lui permettre a critiqué ces lois qui lui encerclent. quand écrire n'était pas à son avantage, il avait recours à façon plus direct, à vendre une machine à écrire, mais la loi lui attrape encore. l'apparence d'esprit léger du film auquel cache les thèmes sombres parallèle la réalité des enfants ; notre nostalgie pour les temps plus simples nous rendre ignorants de vraies difficultés que les enfants souvent font face.

what divides humans from animals isn't our technology or our reason but being able to say things like "I will pretend this conversation didn't take place." and to make it deleuzian-guattarian, it's humanity's repression that makes the neurotic paranoiac cardinal Lawrence and his speech on uncertainty. conclave is one of those movies where I feel fully conscious of betraying the cinema experience with my little laptop screen and its speakers. but, similarly with all quiet on the western front, it can feel almost obnoxious to be made constantly aware of the movie's high budget. I don't love Berger's hyperrealism, either. but it does work to contrast/emphasize the little unreal moments, like the other tables being drowned out during Lawrence and Tedesco's conversation (I guess the slow motion explosion too but I was less impressed by that). (hover to view spoilers) I think they also could've really committed to the realism if they left out the soundtrack but I don't expect so radical of a choice for a movie with such an unradical narrative. on the topic of catholicism, look at this cool church in taiwan.

très fou. au début, j'étais plutôt intéressé par l'aviateur, seulement pour l'attendre apparaître après trente minutes pour se dandiner dans son trench-coat, disparaître de plus une autre fois, et meurt. (passez votre souris pour révéler les spoilers) une chose bizarre quand on regarde les vieux films c'est qu'on doit se questionner si on regarde du vrai cruauté envers les animaux sur l'écran... j'étais surprise quand Christine et la maîtresse s'entendaient bien, la scène était tellement mignonne. (passez votre souris pour révéler les spoilers) j'ai aussi apprécié les scènes du théâtre, Renoir est sauvé ses plans les plus intelligents pour celui-là.

maybe lynch movies are confusing or surreal or whatever, but they don't hide anything; his characters don't have the depth to contain any secrets. they don't express, they perform. and I think that's the truest realism that movies as a medium can attain. pete thinks he's above pornography, but sex for him is no less a performance -- either for the detectives, or the scary pale man, or even for the headlights of a car. naturalistic dialogue in film has always been a little alien to me because there's nothing less natural than a human conversation, and David Lynch assures me that that's not something I feel alone.

cent fois mieux que à bout de souffle. simple de façon "less is more," j'ai aimée ses petites excentricités, comme les plans des arrières des têtes. comme c'était facile à suivre, je pense que le dialogue était économique (même quand c'était plutôt les bruits de rue que les mots). je pense aussi que parler est une charge.

j'ai le regardé avec une fièvre. je manque à l'animation cellulo ... le biologie/technologie des personnes bleus était amusant, mais je devenais ennuyer quand ils n'étaient pas sur l'écran. je n'étais pas investi dans les personnages non plus. ça ne me dérange pas pour quelque chose qui est plus intéressé par la construction d'univers, mais la scène ou la grand-mère est morte est tombée à plat. (passez votre souris pour révéler les spoilers) aussi, le film me rappele de ce tableau par dali

j'adore claire denis et même plus isabelle huppert. denis décrit les formes les plus subtil d'une personnalité coloniale : maria n'est pas courageuse, mais arrogant. elle pense qu'elle appartient, mais elle peut seulement appartenir aux conditions de l'exploitation. comme dans beau travail, denis est capable d'écrire les personnages qui font toujours les mauvaises décisions de façon que m'intrigue au lieu de me frustre.

the letterboxd description puts it so harshly lol. it was lighter than that -- more melancholic than sad -- and I thought the scenes with lena's friends were cute. but I can agree that her boyfriend is useless. it was satisfying when she finally rejected his proposal, and so eloquently too: I'll probably never be able to explain to her, why, despite all your wonderful qualities, I won't marry you, volodya. (hover to view spoilers)

la cinématographie/alain delon est belle/beau mais je ne sentais rien de plus.

the set is so fun I cringed just as much as anikeyeva (my favourite) when they started taking the animals as pillows. I can hear the zipping of the big moving fish even now... I think the ending works because the viewer forgets about the sleeping man just as well (at least I did); it was a relief because Ryazanov writes his characters so endearingly that I couldn't wish for even the most irritating ones to have lost their garage. (hover to view spoilers) and I love this poster.

maybe I don't know how to have fun but I almost hated this as much as the white sun of the desert. I think I just don't understand action movies, I get bored of feeling impressed after 5 minutes. I also can't agree with the child soldier thing.

I was more invested in the romance than really warranted... what's refreshing about soviet cinema is there is no moral imperative to make a lazy, both-sides-bad, forgiveness narrative that disguises itself as "nuance." people are quick to denounce anything soviet as propaganda but it is no where near as obnoxious as that produced by the united states.

mostly uninteresting after Yuri Bogatyryov disappeared/when oblomov got out of bed. Except for the theatrics at the one point where olga and oblomov met in the night, that woke me up. definitely revived my interest in reading the book; I started it years ago and never finished.

every shot reminds me of the adjectives an old art teacher of mine would repeat again and again to describe neoclassical paintings: cool and quiet. a lot of the time I have to strain to follow dialogue in Tarkovsky movies only because the visuals alone have my attention. this frame is a favourite.

I think I have to have lived in the 30's to understand sergei eisenstein movies.

westerns (or easterns) never really appealed to me but Mikhalkov has too much fun stylistically here that I loved it, even when the plot was hard to follow. this is one shot I particularly liked. the soundtrack is also memorable. and I am very fond of Yuri Bogatyryov...

despite being of a larger scale than his other movies, Tarkovsky preserves an intimacy with his main character, andrei roublev. much of the duration of the film does not even center roublev particularly, yet he remains in the back of the movie's "thoughts," even when we only see fields of tatars on horses or liquid metal filling a bell mold. part one alone made the strongest impression on me: the man on the balloon, the skomorkh, the pagan ritual, the ants and theophanes' bloated feet... andrei roublev closely competes with mirror as my favourite tarkovsky movie.

though it's an earlier work of tarkovsky's, ivan's childhood contains some of his most lasting imagery, like the shots of ivan and his mother at the water well, as well as the photo of ivan at the end.

soo fun daneliya is so fun. I would never willingly watch comedies until my addiction to mosfilm... the soundtrack plays in my head all the time. also need this poster.

it was alright. I think after come and see and the ascent (1977) no other war movie can live up to my expectations.

I wish men in real life could be as competent as thief george miloslavsky

I was curious how the monologue-dialogues of russian literature would translate to film (also wanted to see more of Mikhalkov after relatives). the performances were impressively balanced between theatrical and natural. like relatives, an argument scene made the greatest impression on me -- the one between the aristocrat and the bourg at the dinner table. the final scene of platonov trying to drown himself but accidentally jumping into the shallow end was also so funny; so satisfying to see him lose at everything... (hover to view spoilers)

this is what I meant about the reward of picking movies blindly in my the first teacher review. first thought the yelling would be obnoxious but the later mother/daughter argument scene became maybe one of my favourite movie scenes ever. what I like about soviet cinema is that most actors look like everyday people, and that woman characters are even allowed to be a little annoying without risking crucifixion!

I forget

I have a fondness for Daneliya but this one was too sweet for me

generic war movie

one of those frustrating situations where I can hear voices accusing me of "taking it too seriously" for daring to think a little bit. it is deeply cruel on 10 different levels to pretend to offer women liberation because you want to have sex with them, on top of the orientalism swearing that the white men are the progressive ones here; this is the kind of movie that reminds you that many male directors fail to even conceive of women existing in their audience. and it was really boring.

my first (and only, as I'm writing this) Akira Kurosawa movie. the scene where they get lost was so hard to watch. (hover to view spoilers) but it pays off when Kurosawa relaxes tension as well as he builds it, developing the cutest friendship between dersu and the captain.

people like this movie for the ending but I liked it until the ending. I think the monsters were too alien-like and I would've liked them to have been more demon-like. (hover to view spoilers)

russians do hamlet better

I first watched solaris in high school and hated it -- I was expecting sci-fi, not Tarkovsky. but when he later became a favourite director of mine, I owed it a rewatch. Tarkovsky takes the best advantage of the alienation/distance inherent to sci-fi, not only of the viewer but between characters to each other and their environment; each one on the ship seems entirely alone. especially with how it culminates into what is probably one of the greatest movie endings ever...

soviet comedy dares ask: what if a normal guy was mistaken for an evil guy

"indeed, animals, too, show that they are capable of such behavior when they are being hunted; they manage to put their pursuers off the scent by making a false start ... but an animal does not pretend to pretend. he does not make tracks whose deception lies in the fact that they will be taken as false, while being in fact true ones, ones, that is, that indicate his true trail. nor does an animal cover up its tracks, which would be tantamount to making itself the subject of the signifier" -- lacan (the subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the freudian unconscious)

3 stars for lyuba alone!

I forget everything about this (in writing a month later). but I remember I was entertained at least.

I chose to watch the first teacher at random from the mosfilm youtube channel and I've been chasing the feeling since of discovering good movies without having ever heard of them. Konchalovsky really well shows the failure of reform in face of structural issues; it's so frustrating to watch the collective defense of a rapist for the sake of tradition. this poster is also a favourite.

even the most elaborate sci-fi worldbuilding won't interest me as much as being left alone to guess at the logic of Tarkovsky's worlds. also, his movies have the best colour grading for trees...

what everyone else has said: boring and flat but technically impressive. watching it after lawrence of arabia made it especially underwhelming.

wasn't sure about an over 3 hour epic but I enjoyed it! I was skeptical about lawrence initially as the typical british hero character but the movie caught my interest as early as when he overslept after promising to wake the others in the morning. (hover to view spoilers) the generic orientalist soundtrack is largly disappointing though.

I wanted to watch Hsiao-hsien's a city of sadness but I couldn't find a subtitled version in good quality, so I watched his flowers of shanghai instead. seeing this only grew my disappointment over missing out on Hsiao-hsien's other film; the mood/atmosphere of flowers of shanghai is so beautifully done. I'd describe it as an "impression" -- slow, hazy and vague, but unforgettable. just listen to the soundtrack alone... I need more plotless, small-scale historical movies like this!

my fourth Wong Kar-wai movie. I had seen the other three in high school (in the mood for love, fallen angels, happy together), and chungking express reminded me of what I loved so much about his films back then. I'm usually too bitter and resentful to enjoy romance but Wong Kar-wai captures something so sweet and fleeting that I can't help but be a little charmed...

I couldn't get through yi-yi when I first watched it but after developing some patience I gave Edward Yang a second chance and I was made embarrassed of my past (high school) self. taiwanese cinema is so very good at having style without expending substance.