The Poster Next Door

The poster for Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door has arrived and in the grand tradition of Pedro Almodóvar Movie Posters it's a work of art that any sane person should want to hang on their wall. The obvious reference is of course Bergman's Persona, with two women's faces intermingling, but them being down at the bottom laid out like a landscape, like mountains, makes me think of the poster for Rosemary's Baby as well. I'm sure that was also thought of. Anyway I'm also including the Spanish version below just to prove that the font design on these is beautiful in any language...

Triangle of the Small Seventh King

Tis the happiest day of the month, Criterion Announcement Day! These titles are all dropping in April of this year, starting with and most excitingly director Steve McQueen's five-film series Small Axe, which screened on the BBC in the UK and on Amazon here in the US. All five, set in the same West Indian neighborhood in London over the course of a few decades, are magnificent -- here is my review of Lover's Rock, and here is my review of Mangrove, and here is my review of Red White and Blue. I never reviewed the other two (because they didn't screen at NYFF like those three did) but they also rule. This set hits on April 25th.

Next up and nearly as awesome -- they've got Ruben Östlund's current awards-prospect Triangle of Sadness also hitting 4K and blu-ray on April 25th! (Love that cover.) Have you seen this movie yet? I've seen it twice but weirdly never reviewed it? I thought I had but... nope. Huh. Anyway I like it quite a bit! Yes it's fairly blunt in its aim but sometimes (I say this often) bluntness is needed. And everybody's absolutely stellar in it -- I'm happy that Dolly De Leon is probably going to get an Oscar nomination but we should also be giving more love to Harris Dickinson, who works real magic with an extremely tricky role.

We should definitely be talking more about the first sequence in the film, the excruciatingly awkward between him and Charlbi Dean (RIP) -- such a barn-stormer. Aaaanyway the other discs hitting in April are all upgrades to 4K from already existing Criterion blu-rays -- they consist of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (out on April 18th) and Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King (out on April 11th). I should probably try to watch the latter again someday -- I haven't seen it in ages because I hated it back in the day. Perhaps I've grown into it?

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

you can learn from:

The Living End (1992)

Jon: All I know is if I don't take a shower and 

brush my teeth in about two minutes, I'm gonna... 

I'm gonna fucking kill myself...

I'm a fag, okay? I can't stand being dirty.

A happy 62nd birthday to writer-director and MNPP icon Gregg Araki today! Yesterday I was saying that I should maybe watch a bunch of Bergman films over the holidays because the world has that Bergman feeling about it -- you know, grim and devastating -- but maybe I should watch Gregg's "Teenage Apocalypse" trilogy instead? (That includes his next three movies -- Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation, and Nowhere.) They're at least gay and goofy to go along with the grim and devastating. And the signs of Plague and Death that Bergman loves so much are played by, like, dudes wearing giant Lizard Alien suits in Araki-World. 

Is anybody else on the internet connecting Bergman and 

Araki like this? This is why y'all keep coming back right? 

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Hour of the Wolf (1968)

Johan: The old ones called it the "hour of the wolf." It

is the hour when most people die, when most children are born.

Now is when nightmares come to us. And if we are awake...

Alma: We're afraid.

Johan: We're afraid.

A very happy birthday to the legend Liv Ullmann today.

More Scenes From a Different Marriage

I guess I am going to have to go back and re-watch Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage for the first time since college now, since we've got this re-do starring Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac on the immediate horizon. From the creator of In Treatment and The Affair this is hitting HBO Max in September so they've just given us our first glimpse, and sure enough it looks like two beautiful people yelling at each other in a house, just like with Bergman! Watch:

I know everybody's up in arms about how dare they "remake Bergman" et cetera but who cares, let's live our lives and watch the pretty people scream at each other, whatever. I have nothing better to do and neither do you, dammit.

5 Off My Head: Siri Says 1945

With Sundance now behind us we can reignite some projects set to simmer, like our "Siri Says" series -- here I ask the lady who lives inside of my telephone to give me a number between 1 and 100, and then with whatever number she chooses I pick my favorite films from the movie corresponding to that year. I've done a lot of these posts by now and the remaining numbers at this point are getting slimmer and slimmer -- this translates to I usually have to ask Siri for a number about a dozen times before she gives me one I can work with. But today twas meant to be I guess, because she struck gold on first pick -- she gave me "45" right off the bat, and so today we'll talk our favorite out of The Movies of 1945.

I'd say my batting average for 1945 is decent -- scanning the list of movies out that year I'd probably seen about a quarter of them, although there are several big titles I've yet to see (Noir is a real weak-spot for me). Two of my favorite films of all-time were released this year, but beyond that I had a hard time picking getting my list up to 5 that I fully adore; a list of 4 would've been more honest, but I like the 5th one well enough it's not an absolute cheat. Meanwhile there's one you'd think I'd like better than I do (that'd be Hitchcock's Spellbound, which I've always had mixed feelings about) and there is one movie that I'm sure y'all love (that'd be Blithe Spirit) that I positively cannot stand. (Rex Harrison gives me hives.) All that said onto the list...

My 5 Favorite Movies of 1945

Brief Encounter

(dir. David Lean)

-- released on November 19th 1945 --

Mildred Pierce

(dir. Michael Curtiz)

-- released on October 20th 1945 --

Leave Her To Heaven

(dir. John M Stahl)

-- released on December 25th 1945 --

Christmas in Connecticut

(dir. Peter Godfrey)

-- released on August 11th 1945 --

My Name is Julia Ross 

(dir. Joseph H. Lewis)

-- released on November 27th 1945 --

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Runners-up: Dead of Night (various directors), The Body Snatcher (dir. Robert Wise), The Picture of Dorian Gray (dir. Albert Lewin), Spellbound (dir. Hitchcock), Isle of the Dead (dir. Mark Robson), Rome Open City (dir. Roberto Rossellini), Along Came Jones (dir. Stuart Heisler)

Never seen: The Lost Weekend (dir. Billy Wilder), The Bells of St Mary's (dir. Leo McCarey), Anchors Aweigh (dir. George Sidney), National Velvet (dir. Clarence Brown), The Clock (dir. Vincente Minnelli), Detour (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer), Children of Paradise (dir. Marcel Carné), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (dir. Elia Kazan), Scarlet Street (dir. Fritz Lang), House of Dracula (dir. Erle C. Kenton) 

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What are your favorite movies of 1945?

5 Off My Head: Siri Says 1958

My "Siri Says" series always starts and comes and goes and stops in fits and starts, but after last week's enormous 2016-a-thon -- where I named my 25 favorite movies of that absolutely fabulous year in film -- I'm feeling like pushing the rock a little further down the hill, checking off one more year in the history of cinema. So I asked Siri today to give me a number between 1 and 100 and (after several answers that we'd already done) she gave me the number "58." Which means today I'll be talking The Movies of 1958!

I've probably admitted this before in one of my other posts about the end of the 1950s but this period in movies, save a couple of bright spots, isn't especially my bag. It's all Rat Pack and technicolor Movie Musicals and bloated war epics, blah blah blah. Most of the mainstream respectable shit reduces me to groans. (Except Paul Newman, who reduces me to... different groans.) But on the sidelines there's some fun sci-fi / horror happening, and I've been known to enjoy me a sword-and-sandal picture now and again. This year introduced both Steve Reeves as Hercules and Christopher Lee as Dracula! Neither of those make my top five though...

My 5 Favorite Movies of 1958

Vertigo

(dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

-- released on May 28th 1958 --

Invention For Destruction

(dir. Karel Zeman)

-- released on August 1958 --

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

(dir. Nathan Juran)

-- released on December 23rd 1958 --

Mon Oncle

(dir. Jacques Tati)

-- released on November 3rd 1958 --

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

(dir. Richard Brooks)

-- released on August 29th 1958 --

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Runners-up: The Fly (dir. Kurt Neumann), I Want To Live! (dir. Robert Wise), Touch of Evil (dir. Welles), Bell Book and Candle (dir. Richard Quine), The Blob (dir. Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.), Hercules (dir. Pietro Francisci), Dracula (dir. Terence Fisher), Elevator to the Gallows (dir. Luois Malle), Terror in a Texas Town (dir.Joseph H. Lewis), The Long Hot Summer (dir. Martin Ritt), A Time To Love and A Time To Die (dir. Douglas Sirk)

Never seen: South Pacific (dir. Joshua Logan), The Hidden Fortress (dir. Kurosawa), The Left Handed Gun (dir. Arthur Penn), Indiscreet (dir. Stanley Donen), The Defiant Ones (dir. Stanley Kramer), Separate Tables (dir. Delbert Mann), Damn Yankees (dir. Abbott / Donen), The Young Lions (dir. Edward Dmytryk), Bonjour Tritesse (dir. Preminger), Lonelyhearts (dir. Donehue), Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (dir. Juran), The Magician (dir. Bergman)

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What are your favorite movies of 1958?

5 Off My Head: Michelle At 40

While we sit on both of our thumbs and impatiently wait for the tremendously exciting new adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's Scene From a Marriage that will star Michelle Williams and Oscar Isaac we might as well give our thumbs a momentary break from, you know, sitting upon, and use them  to wish the great and powerful Michelle an extremely happy 40th birthday today! She's been knocking our socks off and our thumbs out of places for a full two decades now, but as much good work as she's gotten across in that stretch of time I think it's not totally nuts to say she might be at the height of her powers right this minute, judging by the career-best work she just did on TV with Fosse/Verdon -- I cannot wait to see what her next spin for TV, with that Bergman joint, turns out. On that note, here are my faves...

My 5 Favorite Michelle Williams Performances

Gwen Verdon, Fosse/Verdon (2019)

"Maybe I should find a lover, too, then. 

How about that?"

Alma, Brokeback Mountain (2005)

"Jack Nasty! You didn't go up there to fish!"

Cindy, Blue Valentine (2010)

"I'm so out of love with you. I've got nothing left for you,

nothing, nothing. Nothing, there is nothing here for you."

Wendy, Wendy and Lucy (2008)

"I'm not from around here. I can't be an example."

Arlene, Dick (1999)

"Dick frightens me!"

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And some runners-up because this list could have been twice as long without me breaking a sweat: Synecdoche New York, My Week With Marilyn, Manchester-by-the-Sea, Certain Women, Take This Waltz, Meek's Cutoff, and her speech at the Golden Globes last year

What are your favorite Michelle performances?

Make Some Scenes

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Oscar Isaac and Michelle Williams are serious enough actors that I think we can at first glance try and take seriously the big news today that they are going to do an HBO limited series that will attempt to adapt Ingmar Bergman's seminal marital-despair classic Scenes From a Marriage for the here and now. Bergman's original 1973 six-episode series starred Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson and for six episodes rooted around in a long-term couple's secrets and lies in typical Bergman-ian clinical close-up; it is, as the kids say, a tough hard sit, but worth it because these are smart adults examining smart adult things.

Oscar & Michelle are also, I think smart adults, and its coming from the writer-director of Gabriel Byrne's series In Treatment which I didn't watch but have only heard stellar smart-adult things about, so hey maybe this will be riveting! I don't mistrust that these are two actors who understand the seriousness of adapting Bergman, at least -- it's not like this is set to star Archie and Veronica from Riverdale. (Although raise your hand if you would totally watch an episode of Riverdale set in the Bergman Extended Universe, lol.)

13 Cakes of Halloween #13

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When I started this series 13 days ago I mentioned that there was a specific film that inspired me to devote thirteen days worth of posts to a thing as ridiculous as Horror Cakes -- well here we are the final day and I can now reveal... nothing. 

Okay not quite nothing -- I can tell you what movie it was. It was Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (reviewed here), which is out in movie theaters right now doing very very well for a foreign film in the United States. Which is a thing that translates to: not enough people have seen it yet for me to properly talk about this sequence, which involves a central mystery of the film and which, when unspooled at just past its midway point, drops about ten megatons of deep meaning onto the premises.

I also can't, much to my chagrin and consternation, gif the moment's pay-off, because it's a huge pay-off in the film and one of its most bedeviled and striking images, and I'd hate to ruin it for anybody. What I will say is that this movie, which isn't a Horror Film, has one of the decade's best Horror Images in it all the same.

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It's somewhat reminiscent of the "God" conversation in Bergman's film Fanny & Alexander -- "Who's behind the door?" -- which I've noted before I find to be one of the scariest moments in any not-horror flick and so if I'm bringing this shit up know it's for good reason. Anyway let's just say that the rich family in Parasite has a son who has birthday and cake-adjacent trauma and by the end of the movie... that trauma will have been quadrupled.

"Let them eat cake" has never been as pointed. Anyway parallels between the rich family's kids and the poor family's kids in Parasite are themselves rich, and I think this also pays off when it comes to cake -- the gift that poor family's son is given, which has been heavily featured in the film's advertising (see this recent poster), is a scientific rock specimen which set upon a little base, and which...

... is often lugged around just like a cake. 

That the rich family gets fluffy delicious cake while 

the poor family gets a big cake-shaped rock, well...

... I don't think anybody's arguing that Parasite is subtle.

But effective. It's effective, and it's goddamned true.

That brings this year's Halloween celebration to a close! Click here to see all of the "13 Cakes of Halloween" and if you have any favorite cake scenes in horror movies I didn't talk about tell me about them in the comments. After all, we can be Cake Boys every day!
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Threesome's For Everybody!

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I totally should have mentioned this in my post earlier today on Rainer Werner Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy since those three movies are included in this series, but hell this is worth its own post I think -- Film Forum here in New York is doing a screening series starting this Friday and running through May 16th called "Trilogies" that is, you guessed it, showing a truly mammoth collection of tri-connected films. Including those just mentioned Fassbinder films, and including the Godfather trilogy, including Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher trilogy (starring Mads Mikkelsen above) which I somehow still have yet to see (I keep waiting to see it on a big screen so now's my chance!), including, well, who doesn't the series include is a better question. There are films by Pasolini and Satyajit Ray and John Ford and Sergio Leone and Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Aki Kaurismäki and Rossellini and Cocteau and Bergman and Wadja and on and on and literally onnnn. Check out the entire line-up right here. It's truly astonishing stuff -- the reason I live in this city.

5 Off My Head: Righting Scorsese's Wrongs

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Making lists is a futile sort of business. The second you've made one, and every single second thereafter, ten things you totally forgot about stampede across the roof of your brain, having their way with you. It's utter torment. It's probably one of the mid-levels of Hell, like the staircase between the third and fourth ring. So I forgive Martin Scorsese for forgetting some vitals when he listed "The 39 Essential Foreign Films"...

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Martin Scorsese’s list of 39 essential foreign films. pic.twitter.com/eLh09iojJ3

— Dharma Bhagalia (@Kloppholic) January 17, 2019

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Before you ask no, I do not know the context of that note - who he was sending it to or why. I guess it's to "educate" someone - hence there being no films later than the 1970s. Anyway laying the blame on forgetfulness when it comes to the titles "missing" is awfully brassy of me - perhaps it stands to reason that Martin Scorsese, a 76 year old heterosexual film-maker from Queens, might have different tastes than I do? I suppose it's possible! Anyway I figured I'd take a little of Marty's torment on and make my own (far less substantial) list and give us...

5 Foreign Films I'd Add To Marty's List

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
-- directed by Jacques Demy --

In the Mood For Love (2000)
-- directed by Wong Kar-Wai

Persona (1966)
-- directed by Ingmar Bergman -- 

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975)
-- directed by Chantal Akerman -- 

Belle de Jour (1967)
-- directed by Luis Buñuel -- 

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Of course I could go on and on,
which is part of the problem in the first place.

So y'all give me your five in the comments to keep it going...

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