That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Bunuel, 1977)

8.5/10
Bunuel's final film is pretty straightforward in plot, but there's so many little things that stick in the mind afterward - what's the significance of the characters on the train having all already met? What's with the brown sack Mathieu carries around? Why the backdrop of terrorism, aside from providing a great way to both begin and end the film? Who is in the wrong between Mathieu and Conchita, and how wrong are they, really? Ironically, what should be the biggest puzzler of them all (Conchita is played by two different women, and they interchange sometimes even within the same scene) turns out to have a pretty banal explanation - the original actress quit, and Bunuel couldn't settle on just one woman to embody the character. Both work brilliantly and the changes are never distracting. Anyway I thought it was a really interesting look at the sexual politics between men and women. Alternatingly funny, sad, and ridiculous.
I really have to dig into early Bunuel movies. It occured to me that aside from Un Chien Andalou, I haven't seen anything he's done pre-1960.

World on a Wire (Rainer Werner Fassbender, 1973)

8/10
Rainer Werner Fassbender directed this two-part sci-fi TV movie. It totals more than 3 1/2 hours in length but it really doesn't feel that long at all. Made in 1973, it prefigures some of what would come later in The Matrix and Avatar, but its central conceit (a scientist in charge of a "supercomputer"that replicates society 20 years in the future begins to question his own reality and sanity in turn) could have come from any number of Twilight Zone episodes preceding it. Its most attractive feature is the outlandish set designs, in the "futuristic as seen through the 70's" mode of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris. It drags a bit in the second half but overall it's pretty entertaining if not exactly enlightening.

Radio On (Christopher Petit, 1979)

7/10
A very strange British road movie from 1980, it features a disc jockey taking a road trip from London to Bristol upon hearing the news of his brother's death. It's shot in stark black and white with very minimal dialogue and features a great soundtrack, certainly of its time (Kraftwerk, Devo, David Bowie). It's puzzling to say the least, and I think I'd have to revisit it to find out just how much I liked it. Very interesting though.

Le Samourai (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967)

8.5/10
The second film in the Drive lineage was Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai, an effortlessly cool French noir film that really hit all the right notes for me. It really had it all - smart direction, icy cold performances (especially from Alain Delon), great visual style, good music, and a brilliantly restrained tone. Definitely could grow on me and make me like it even more.

The Driver (Walter Hill, 1978)

7/10
I watched two films in the lineage of 2011's Drive, this being the first. It features an unnamed getaway driver (Ryan O'Neal, adequate) on the run from an obsessed detective (Bruce Dern, awful) and getting tangled up with "The Player" (Isabelle Adjani, mysterious as ever). It's not bad for a 70's curio but I didn't get obsessed with it like I did with Two-Lane Blacktop or Vanishing Point, both of the same ilk. Quentin Tarantino calls it one of the coolest movies ever made but to me it was that exact "coolness" of the aforementioned two movies that was either lacking, or felt too forced in this case.

Blood Diamond (Edward Zwick, 2006)

6/10
I found myself liking this movie less as it wore on, as it fell into a lot of clichés and worn tropes. It's a well told story and does shed some interesting light on the situation in Africa, but everything develops pretty much as expected. I didn't really care much for the love story that felt shoehorned in and pretty irrelevant compared to the legitimate conflict it's juxtaposed with. Props to Leo though...he's never acted in a movie that I've truly loved but I don't think it's possible to find a more consistent Hollywood actor out there at the moment. No matter what the movie is, he finds a way to bring it.

Immortals (Tarsem Singh, 2011)

7.5/10
I wanted to see this movie just because of how ridiculous it looked (in a good way) and it pretty much lived up to its billing. Tarsem Singh (The Cell, The Fall) certainly has visual flair to burn and Immortals is nothing if not always sumptuous to look at. Everything plays out as expected - the story is nothing new and it's got holes, but it gets the characters from point A to B; the acting is generally pretty good save Henry Cavill, who has the charisma of a mop; and the special effects are of course the highlight. My one complaint was that the movie was actually slower than I expected it to be, especially in the early stages, and the battle sequences are surprisingly brief. Nobody's coming to this movie for a history lesson, so let's get to the killing already!

J. Edgar (Clint Eastwood, 2011)

4.5/10
This is a holy mess of a movie, which would be slightly more forgiveable if it were shorter, but it crams so much into a ridiculous 2h30m (or thereabouts) running time that it becomes a tedious chore about halfway in. There are some good parts (the acting is the highlight) and the movie is interesting just by virtue of Hoover himself and the time he lived in...but this is not a good film. The pace is just completely off - the movie struggles in a big way to find any kind of rhythm or build or climax and it just feels like bits of Hoover's life loosely strung together. And I know a lot of people have mentioned it but the make-up is definitely a problem - Naomi Watts is best, Armie Hammer is worst, and DiCaprio is somewhere in the middle, and too often you're reminded of the fact that you're watching actors in plastic and make-up instead of being able to get lost in the story. Just a weird, forgettable misstep.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (Phil Jutzi, 1931)

5/10
Often overlooked in the wake of Fassbender's version, Alfred Doblin's novel was actually first made into a movie 50 years prior, with Doblin himself co-writing the screenplay. Usefully included in the Criterion release of the Fassbender edition, I decided to see how the same story was told in 80 minutes, versus Fassbender's 898 minutes. As you'd expect...it's a tiny bit skimpier on some details, heh. It really distills Doblin's own story down into a pretty generic tale of redemption and even slight propaganda. In fact, propaganda aside, I can't really see what the point of making the novel into a movie was at this point. It's not often a more recent adaptation crushes the older into dust but I think Fassbender's clearly did that.
As a side note, I feel like I've devoted so much time to a story that I haven't particularly cared for that I might as well say to hell with it and read the original novel too.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin, 2011)

5/10
Sean Durkin both wrote and directed this movie, his debut feature. It's a superb showcase for his directorial skills - not only is the film photographed beautifully (in the kind of hazy, muted style that recalls old Polaroids), Durkin evinces a tremendous performance out of newcomer Elizabeth Olsen and juggles the main storyline and the flashback sequences quite well. It's his skills as a writer that do his film irreparable harm. None of what I mentioned just before can disguise the fact that this is an incredibly vacuous story, littered with clichés from the rapist cult leader to the rote, success-obsessed family Olsen has to fall back on and down to the woman insane herself. There's nary a sympathetic character in sight, and I'm still not quite sure why or if we're even supposed to feel anything for Olsen's character at all. All the beautiful shots and nifty tricks come across as window-dressing for a clearly subpar story. Hopefully on Durkin's next project he either comes up with something more interesting to say, or hires someone who can, because he clearly has talent as director.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rainer Werner Fassbender, 1980)

6/10
What can you do when you're in the middle of a 15 1/2 hour long film/TV series/serial/whatever and you're just not that into it? Just keep on pushing through, I guess. There were moments of brilliance in Rainer Werner Fassbender's lengthy adaptation of Alfred Doblin's novel but too few and far in between for me. The story centres around the massive Franz Biberkopf, newly released from prison on account of killing his lover/prosititute, now attempting to go straight in 1920's Berlin. There were things I really liked: the poetic tone of the entire series; the brilliant character Reinhold, the closest thing in the story to an antagonist; the depiction of 1920's Berlin and all the little details like the "KINO" sign constantly strobing into Franz's apartment; his landlady Mrs. Bast; the incredible, dreamlike episode 12 with Reinhold and Franz's new love Mieze; and the surreal epilogue which blew the doors off everything preceding it, reminiscent of what David Lynch did on Twin Peaks some 10 years later. Overall though I was bored a lot of the time - it was hard to see the point of a lot of what was happening on screen, and it seems like an obvious thing to say about a work lasting as long as this one, but it really could have benefitted from being a lot shorter. It's certainly an experience and I'm happy, in the end, that I undertook it, but it's not something I'll be revisiting any time soon.

Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979)

8/10
The first time I've been equally impressed by Woody Allen as a director than as a writer, Manhattan has some really beautiful photography...not what I was expecting, to be honest. Black and white really served the movie well. I didn't find it to have the same depth as Annie Hall but it was almost as charming, and I found it more likeable than Hannah & Her Sisters (the only two similar Woody movies I've seen to compare it to).

The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (Stan Brakhage, 1971)

8/10
I've been watching a lot of Stan Brakhage shorts lately. I won't rate each one individually but since the above is half an hour long and a pretty major entry in his filmography, it'll be my jumping off point. It's a brutal, uncompromising depiction of actual human autopsies, worlds removed from the stuff you'd see on an episode of CSI. It builts to a frenetic finish that (somehow) leaves you feeling quite tense. After it was over all I could think of was "wow...what an appropriate title".
Other favorites viewed so far are Window Water Baby Moving, a beautiful and unflinching film about his wife giving birth, and Kindering, a dream-like short with children's singing looped in reverse. Cat's Cradle, Mothlight, Eye Myth, The Wold-Shadow, The Garden of Earthly Delights, The Stars Are Beautiful, I...Dreaming, The Dante Quartet, Night Music, Rage Net, Glaze of Cathexis, Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse and Untitled (For Marilyn) have all been enjoyable on one level or another.