I loved the original The haunting and also loved The House on Haunted Hill remake.
As far as other haunted house movies go, I can't recommend Session 9 strongly enough if you haven't seen it. The Legend of Hell House is pretty good, and The Changeling is excellent.
I do not watch scary movies in general but liked The Haunting.
Session 9 sounds like the sort of movie that I should avoid, but John Rogers recommends it.
I'm not much of a haunted house movie fan, but The Babadook is fantastic. Or does that not count as it's not technically haunting?
Also I saw Personal Shopper recently and it's quite gripping, even if I'm not sure there's a there there.
Can't stand horror. It seems to me to rely essentially on the victims being helpless and the villains supernaturally capable. It violates my materialist worldviews. Or maybe I'm just a wuss.
Session 9 is sort of all right. Peter Mullan's good.
Most of the action in Get Out takes place in a scary house, but it's not haunted.
Can't stand horror. It seems to me to rely essentially on the victims being helpless and the villains supernaturally capable. It violates my materialist worldviews. Or maybe I'm just a wuss.
There's plenty of horror that doesn't work that way.
Ever see Crimson Peak? Saw it a couple months ago and liked it. It's a ghost story, with a big Gothic house and the appropriate imagery. Don't want to put in any more spoilers though.
3. Counts for me, I liked it a lot as well.
4. Have you ever tried The Shining? My kid didn't think it was scary, maybe you won't either. Timberline lodge rooms, the setting for the exterior, look to be booked through most of the winter.
9.last: oh well, there goes that meetup.
7: I don't make this argument with any degree of confidence as, being unable to stand horror, I've watched and read almost none of it.
9: No. I'll try it.
The People Under the Stairs. Just the name of the film scares the shit out of me.
Hou Hsiao-hsien is one of my favorite directors, possibly my favorite living director*. Flowers of Shanghai is as visually sumptuous as it is heart-breaking and the opening of Millenium Mambo brings up some a complex of emotions I can barely describe. Have you seen Three Times? I count myself so fortunate having seen all of his films projected in 35mm (with exception of The Assassin which I think was only released on DCP. All of his films reward repeated rewatchings.
*The other being Tsai Ming-liang, also Taiwanese and whose films are also visually stunning even when they depict the most decrepit of interiors, I don't think there's anyone better at shooting urban space than Tsai Ming-liang.
Is The Assassin any good, lw? I remember McManus saying it sucked, and his movie and book views were generally closer to conventional wisdom than the political ones. I would be overjoyed to learn that it didn't suck.
(OT: Any Canadians here: how strenuous is the walk to the top of Mount Royale (sp?), given a baseline of barely being able to walk around the house? Actually never mind. I think I can guess.)
13 Meant to add that Hou Hsiao-hsien owns an art house theatre in Taipei, I think there's a restaurant in it too and Tsai Ming-liang has a cafe and has his own coffee. If I were living there I'd make a point of visiting both places, and may take a trip there sometime next year to see them among other things. Just saying.
I've been neglecting my cinephilia, it's true. But I'm way out on the edge of the city, and it's fucking hot. One of the artier places is doing a David Lynch thing, I might get my ass in gear for Mulholland Drive.
15 The Assassin is very good but I have to say it's my least favorite of his films, maybe even counting his really early 80s films, the pre-The Boys from Fengkuei stuff (which was his breakout film and fantastic.
I'm not sure why it's the least favorite of his films and find that rather odd.
Another thing is that he really knows how to stage and block scenes. And relatedly the other thing about both Hou and Tsai (and especially for the latter) is they really know just where to place their camera. Billy Wilder famously had a sign that said "How would Lubitsch do it?" If I were a filmmaker I'd tattoo on the back of my hand "Where would Tsai put his camera?"
Firefox wants me to have necrophilia, btw.
Have you seen Feng Xiaogang? I've only seen a couple, and he seems to alternate art movies with CCP propaganda potboilers, but his photography and design are amazing. The Banquet, A World Without Thieves.
20 Some. Last one was I Am Not Madame Bovary. I'm not sure how I felt about it. I kind of liked that he was doing something a bit odd and different while at the same time thinking it didn't quite work. But I'll cut a filmmaker a lot of slack for a miss or a near miss when they go out on a limb and try something experimental or just plain different.
I never like the part of movies that devolves into mad violence in scene after scene, whether stabby or shooty. (Thinking, for example, of most of the last bit of The Shining.) Now that we're more or less inured to it, it's just not that interesting.
I'd love a genre where the big climax is whether the hero can talk down or otherwise finagle a situation to prevent any shooting from starting. That's a real skill.
Horror movies scare me too much, so I avoid them.
You want to make sure you watch The Shining under good sound conditions. How many times have I mentioned that I was hiking far in the background of one of the outdoor shots? A million, probably.
Maybe I should rewatch Flowers of Shanghai. I remember approvingly squirming through it sometime in college.
Mossy and Barry should team up and make a road movie over the next year. I will help fund!
I don't understand Mulholland Drive. I did see it, and all I remember is not being able to pay attention and not having any clue what was going on.
25.1 Definitely rewards another viewing, and I know I'm a bit of a snob about it but if you can see it in the cinema do so. It's among the slowest of his films and Hou is known as being one of the foremost among practitioners of so-called "slow cinema" (of which I'm a big fan btw, as if you couldn't tell), so I can understand the undergraduate squirming. But the rhythm of it as it goes from one of the "flower houses" to the next and then circles around again and again and again, and the different moods of each, the different stories, the two especially tragic ones above all and then that final scene that just left me stricken.
27 It's a masterpiece and my favorite of his films.
25.2 I'm game!
and Hou is known as being one of the foremost among practitioners of so-called "slow cinema" (of which I'm a big fan btw, as if you couldn't tell)
Oh my god I will keep this in mind with your recommendations from now on, thanks!
Now impatiently waiting for lw to weigh in at length on Hou Hsiao-hsien. Very curious to hear what he's seen and what he thinks.
Mossy, have you seen any of Hou's or Tsai's or say, Edward Yang's (the other great master of the Taiwanese New Wave) films?
29 No, wait heebie, you'll like it, honest!
30: I don't think so. Like I say, neglectful. I loved this thing.
Seriously, one of the things I like best about his films are how engrossed you get in the people, they feel real and alive to you like in no other cinema (not The Assassin though, to me, which may explain my certain coldness to it.)
The great Japanese director (also a favorite of mine) Hirokazu Kore-eda* said he learned three things from Hou: "Films need people more than stories. Landscapes also harbor emotions. Music can blow like the wind through a scene."
That first one is especially important to me. And also also the second in what lw alluded to as his visually amazing movies (of which The Assassin is very much one).
*Heebie I would recommend you watch his Our Little Sister and if you don't love it then feel free to ignore all my recommendations that are not along the lines of Mad Max: Fury Road.
Have you seen Wong Kar-wai's 2046? Is that slow cinema? It was kind of entrancing, but also numbing. It felt far longer than it was.
I also think it was good, and I'd watch it again. But not my first choice.
Have you seen his In the Mood for Love? I think that is one of the best films ever made.
I wouldn't necessarily lump Wong Kar-wai in among the practitioners of slow cinema but it is definitely a tool in his tool-box and he uses it to very good effect when he does.
I mean one of the amazing things about cinema is that it can do real magic with the sense of time. Tarkovsky really understood this very well. And in the hands of a master (like Tarkovsky, or Tsai, or Hou, etc,) it can give rise to such a complex and bare emotional experience like nothing else I know. I find it addictive and would mainline it if I could.
*Heebie I would recommend you watch his Our Little Sister and if you don't love it then feel free to ignore all my recommendations that are not along the lines of Mad Max: Fury Road.
The basic problem is that I have trouble with almost all movies.
36 Addictive and exhilarating.
37 Well ok then.
36.1: No. We really don't have cinephile parity at all. And I don't appreciate the medium with the intensity you do. You've mentioning watching like 5, 6, 8 films in a day. I can't do that at all, even 3 in a day on TV leaves me feeling kind of sick.
I couldn't do 3 or more films a day on TV. I usually only have patience for TV shows, and usually silly trashy ones, or good sci-fi, etc,
But at the cinema I can do 3 no sweat, give me 4 or 5 and I'm in heaven. There's something about it that's very different from watching TV at home. Not just the big screen and the darkened room, it's the discipline of sitting in the seat and watching the film straight through and giving yourself completely and totally over to it. If I try that on my TV I check twitter, refresh this blog yet again, comment, refresh, twitter, etc.
You ever do acid, Mossy? In the hippie days?
40 Hardly. Just different. And special. In your own way. Dammit, heebers what I'm trying to say is you're all right and we love you.
41.last
Couldn't resist the Repo Man allusion there.
41: I get what you mean with the focus. I haven't tried serial viewings in cinema, maybe it would be different. Never done hallucinogens, no. My trust in my own brain is so tenuous as is, I'm terrified of fucking it up.
Ok, we've got a first scene: Mossy and Barry meet in Sri Lanka, drop some acid, watch some McHale's Navy reruns, comment sagely on an internet discussion of WWII, then head outside.
Where they meet . . .
[ajay, I think. an emissary from the king of the monkeys, maybe. what kind of movie is this, anyway?]
45, 46 I like it and Sri Lanka is on my wish-list of places to see.
Ajay seems like the kind of guy a monkey king would recruit as emissary.
46 A road movie with a bit of international intrigue and the occasional musical number though I cannot carry a tune for the life of me.
Sri Lanka to Roc Island, we're crossing karaoke country one way or another.
I've only seen The Assassin and part of Three Times. Not enough to have thoughts about patterns of characterization or rhythm in his films yet, but interested to watch more. I thought of Rublev a few times watching The Assassin, similar use of powerful settings working as a main part of the film.
To 15, after seeing it once, I'd describe it as a series of great scenes that didn't come together as a movie all that well. But I don't understand Chinese.
26. Normal reaction, I think. I don't think it was intended to be a full-length film-- without looking it up, I thought it was shot to be a shorter pilot with some extra footage that got stuffed in. Lynch's vision of life in the US gets in the way of my liking his work, he's a talented weirdo rather than a visionary or a capable technician.
49: With a few 10-20 minute close-ups of you watching a movie.
Don't forget to bring the baiju.
41 Susan Sontag really expresses so well here my sense of going to the cinema:
But whatever you took home was only a part of the larger experience of submerging yourself in lives that were not yours. The desire to lose yourself in other people's lives . . . faces. This is a larger, more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience. Even more than what you appropriated for yourself was the experience of surrender to, of being transported by, what was on the screen. You wanted to be kidnapped by the movie -- and to be kidnapped was to be overwhelmed by the physical presence of the image. The experience of "going to the movies" was part of it. To see a great film only on television isn't to have really seen that film. It's not only a question of the dimensions of the image: the disparity between a larger-than-you image in the theater and the little image on the box at home. The conditions of paying attention in a domestic space are radically disrespectful of film. Now that a film no longer has a standard size, home screens can be as big as living room or bedroom walls. But you are still in a living room or a bedroom. To be kidnapped, you have to be in a movie theater, seated in the dark among anonymous strangers.
Just out from NYT, on-topic in multiple dimensions: Harvey Weinstein has been exploiting/abusing women for decades.
52 Tsai Ming-liang's wonderful Goodbye, Dragon Inn kind of does that and it's wonderful. My favorite movie about movie-going.
he's a talented weirdo rather than a visionary or a capable technician
I think he's all three of these things.
54: How utterly unsurprising.
What Mossy said.
lw, there's not a single film of his I wouldn't recommend but you might want to go with some from his coming of age trilogy, still fairly early and right after his The Boys from Fenkeui A Summer at Grandpa's, A Time to Live, A Time to Die, and Dust in the Wind Or his Taiwanese history trilogy, A City of Sadness,The Puppetmaster, Good Men, Good Women.
I think A City of Sadness and The Puppetmaster are the standouts here but they really all are.
As for Three Times I think the first story is the best but it's a great film.
I've heard he's hilarious in person, he knows his film history but he'd rather drink and do karaoke than talk film.
I knew I should have hit preview first.
Also, at the risk of spreading into a catchall movie post, Hou Hsiao-Hsien makes visually amazing movies.
Sorry lw, but at least I kept it to Hou Hsiao-hsien and the like.
To return to the haunted house movie I would consider Rebecca to be one of the finest. Manderley is such a dominating, brooding presence in it. It's one of the first things I think of when I think of the film. And Rebecca is the ghost haunting it.
15: It's the perfect time of year for a walk up Mont Royale, but if you're worried, why pressure yourself to get all the way to the top? It's all lovely. I remember the whole hike as an energetic couple of hours, as a student who smoked. My classmate with arthritis could do it, but we would start from at least halfway up (I feel as if there's a chalet and a park halfway up?) and go from there. Could you drive or cab as far up as you can go, walk down looking at the city, and have someone or a cab meet you partway down or at the bottom?
These are good points... although I have to admit, despite the entire point of this trip being solitude and meditation, the phrase "someone or a cab" gives me a pre-emptive fit of dire loneliness.
I'd love a genre where the big climax is whether the hero can talk down or otherwise finagle a situation to prevent any shooting from starting. That's a real skill.
I think Red River is kind of like that, but as a western also not really.
62: I was going to suggest Pulp Fiction yesterday. I actually typed up the comment and sent it, but then the Internet Connection God determined that it wasn't Unfogged-worthy.
re: 64
That is a good spot. Jules' speech.
Probably The Quiet Man, but I never finished the movie because one hour of John Wayne not punching or shooting is a good reminder as to why he was typecast as a guy who punches and shoots.
|| Londoners, I'll be in London the week of Oct. 16 for work. If anyone is interested in a meetup, I'd be thrilled to meet you and have non-work conversation. I can ask for a formal post but wanted to throw a low-key note here first. |>
67. Oh, he punches the guy eventually. A lot.
It's like reading Anna Karenina for the sex scenes.
We haven't had a Friday WTFuckery thread in a while, but I feel like one, so I'll start griping.
I thought today was going to be unusually good and productive, and I actually did get a few things done early on. But things have started to drag since then. And the first time I went to the bathroom I noticed (a) that there was a stain on my pants, which I'll blame on Atossa's breakfast if anyone asks but I'm not actually sure it wasn't there before, and (b) I forgot to put a belt on this morning. Not that it matters but it's annoying. Especially since the belt thing is because my morning routine still hasn't recovered from the bike accident. Update on the accident: doing better but definitely not 100 percent yet. Yesterday I had a doctor's appointment, for which the doctor was only 90 minutes late, and also was a sexist jerk to the doctor (I think) who removed them. (I whispered "sorry" to her on the way out the door, I think she heard me, that counts for something right?) On the plus side, I got the stitches out. I got instructions on new ways to wrap up my fingers, and exercises to work on my mobility, and a follow-up appointment in 3 weeks. Hopefully the doctor will be less late for that one.
So, not horrible now that I write things down, but annoying that this is becoming the new normal. Definitely ready for the 3-day weekend.
23, 62. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance maybe. Also pieces of Deadwood, though in a bunch of cases mayhem instead of guile is the outcome there.
Rockford or Columbo also.
The Quiet Man fight scene rivals the one in They Live.
Jules' speech? Like the faux-biblical bit? Does that end in intentional gunfire?
75: Not the one at the end. He's having a transitional period.
Not actually at the end, somewhere in the middle, since Vincent is still alive.
74: Then why didn't they put it in earlier, before everybody gets bored? I guess back before movies at home, you could have a long, boring build up and people would stay still.
Does he win or does Maureen O'Hara?
Oh man. Apparently Amazon is making a Philip K. Dick anthology series next year, and Janelle Monae is involved. (Via her IG)
Does Philip K. Dick have the highest ratio of adaptations to readers of any writer ever?
Does Philip K. Dick have the highest ratio of adaptations to readers of any writer ever?
Actually it looks like the first 3 episodes already aired in the UK, Channel 4. Reviews mixed.
85: I bet more people finished that than Malory.
Actually it looks like the first 3 episodes already aired in the UK, Channel 4. Reviews mixed.
It's better than I feared it would be, not as good as I hoped, though that's possibly down to the choice of stories. I liked the first one quite a bit. The second less so. Will report back on the third one tomorrow.
Second request for griping thread!
85: I bet more people finished that than Malory.
Okay, that's true, though I'm not sure "finishing" was part of the criteria. And what are you counting as an adaptation of Mallory? Any work with King Arthur, or does it have to be more specific than that.
90: By the power vested in me by heebie-geebie, I proclaim that this is now the griping thread.
Finishing strikes me as a reasonable criterion. I'm going to say any Arthurian work in English postdating Malory.
I no longer need to gripe because I'm laughing too hard at this tweet:
https://twitter.com/hannahgais/status/913536745135857665
Oh, Friday joy...
68: You should totally bump this to it's own thread!
I can really only come into London on the weekends - it's just long enough of a trip that it's quite difficult to do after work. But I'd be up for something if it worked for you and others!
What area, roughly, will you be in? I have lots of food recs, not necessarily because I've eaten there but maybe because I've always wanted to so SOMEONE should. And are you going to be super tired, or will museums, etc be fun?
Personally, I like just walking around and riding the Tube, but that might not appeal to everyone. :)
That reminds me that I will be in Pittsburgh in late October, with probably free time to meet up on October 26 (a Thursday).
OT: I made meatballs again. I'm getting pretty good at it.
Technically, I had help, but he can't drive to the grocery store so I get all the credit.
96: I'll e-mail heebie and request it. I will be there on a Sunday (arrival) and a full day Saturday before I fly out. I'll be near Hammersmith Hospital. I won't have a bunch of free time, but definitely have to eat! I might make it to a museum or two if I am lucky.
Enjoyed the third episode of Electric Dreams. It had the best combo of Dickian unstable reality premise and British execution so far. Also, Timothy Spall.
68/101: I can recommend some good food/pubs around the museums. What's your thinking for meetup location/date?
103: I arrive early on the 15th and depart early on the 22nd. I could do the Sunday I arrive or the Saturday before I leave if weekends are easier, per 96, but really, I'm free outside of work hours (I think after 4 on weekdays?). For location, I have no idea. I don't mind taking transit to somewhere more convenient to the locals.
In fat/carb/wine stupor.
The third most enjoyable kind of stupor.
97: My in-laws will be in from Germany, although I might be able to sneak out, depending on time and location.
Because the other threads are remarkably on topic: I hope the whole administration does this.
Can they start with drawing clocks?
Such big hands on my clock.
Could we give them the MMPI and just pretend it's an IQ test?
I just want them to take the test, against the clock, on live TV, with Anne Robinson as quizmaster.
"You are the weakest link....goodbye!"