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What wasn't easy to watch about it for you? I like the film alright as a pleasant presentation of a few ideas, but in terms of your comment I can't recall anything difficult about it in terms of visual presentation or storytelling structure especially for somebody like yourself whose teeth are more than cut.

Mr Sausage wrote:The Delta Force (Menahem Golan, 1986): not a cast you expect to see in a Chuck Norris film: Lee Marvin, Hanna Schygulla, Shelley Winters, Martin Balsam, Robert Forster, Robert Vaughn, George Kennedy. I guess that's because it's really two films: the first half is a hijacking story, with two Lebanese terrorists hijacking a plane full of the above actors. A lot of the incidents are drawn from real life, including a moment where the German flight attendant is asked to go through passports and identify Jewish names. This gives us a scene where she screams "I can't! I'm German! Don't you understand?!" She does it anyway, unlike her real life counterpart. We also get scenes of concentration camp survivors screaming "not again!" It's harrowing for a while, but just goes on for too long and at such a high pitch. At one point a little girl goes sobbing up to her dad as he's being led away and begs him to take her stuffed animal. The second half of the movie is a dull Chuck Norris action film, where he rides around Lebanon on a motorcycle with rocket launchers mounted on it shooting everybody. There's half of a good movie buried in here. Unfortunately it, too, is carried along by a musical score of incredible awfulness.

I'll confess it's definitely stuck in the 80's with it's rockafire keyboard explosions but it works damn it. I remember when ABC used the theme for the opening of their coverage of the Indy 500 for years and years.

knives wrote:What wasn't easy to watch about it for you? I like the film alright as a pleasant presentation of a few ideas, but in terms of your comment I can't recall anything difficult about it in terms of visual presentation or storytelling structure especially for somebody like yourself whose teeth are more than cut.

Maybe it was the occasional 'longeurs'; and it was more one of those films to admire than to love.

How well do you know my teeth?

Okay, I was afraid to suggest it, but thought you were referring to its thematic content rather than its longeurs (though I never took notice of them personally).

knives wrote:Okay, I was afraid to suggest it, but thought you were referring to its thematic content rather than its longeurs (though I never took notice of them personally).

That's ok. No, the religious discussion - or this alleged 'blasphemy' - didn't bother me in the slightest; even as a currently-lapsed Catholic.

Just finished the Doubling the Canon update, which kept me busy for the past few months. For anyone interested here are the 80s new entries:

Höhenfeuer (Alpine Fire)
Bao gio cho den thang muoi (When the Tenth Month Comes)
Mer dare (Our Century)
Comrades
Elle a passé tant d'heures sous les sunlights...
Urusei Yatsura 2: Byûtifuru dorîmâ (Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer)
Los santos inocentes (The Holy Innocents)
Boon bin yen (Ah Ying)
Medea
Angyali üdvözlet (The Annunciation)
Przesluchanie (Interrogation)
Tian yun shan chuan qi (Legend of Tianyun Mountain)
Dao cao ren (Strawman)
Tenshi no tamago (Angel’s Egg)
Thief
Kin-dza-dza!
Death and the Mother
O Megalexandros (Alexander the Great)
Paradise
Silvestre
Chou tin dik tong wah (An Autumn's Tale)
L'amour à mort (Love Unto Death)
Glykia symmoria (Sweet Bunch)
Gadajace glowy (Talking Heads)
Aeg maha (Time Out)
RoboCop
Safa'ih min dhahab (Golden Horseshoes)
Prénom Carmen
Wend Kuuni (God's Gift)

Now I have to read the 30 pages of this thread to catch up...

Just saw Urusei Yatsura 2 on Wednesday (at an unofficial Japanese movie "seminar" at Harvard). Interesting, but not sure if this would make _my_ list.

I was persuaded to order the Terrorizers DVD from yesasia, after zedz and bamwc’s enthusiastic recommendations. If anyone else is thinking about picking it up, there are two different $3 off coupons for yesasia, both expiring today: NEWWEIBO3 should work for any purchase and NEWFACEBOOK3 should work for first-time orders.

Preacher, what did you think of Ah Ying? I watched it yesterday and plan to do a writeup soon.

the preacher wrote:Kin-dza-dza!

This is one I'd been meaning to mention (not sure anyone else has yet), though I saw it a while ago: bizarre late Soviet SF comedy, in which a couple of hapless men get teleported to a barren and apparently lo-tech alien planet (bearing a certain resemblance to Tatooine). The humour is pretty broad and slapstick, revolving around misunderstandings over language and customs, but I enjoyed it. Touches of Gilliam. Not necessarily final list material, though.

Russian and East European science fiction from this period is an intriguing and underexplored vein (currently being promoted at a certain backchannel), full of dystopian scenarios. I've barely dipped a toe, but one acclaimed name is Konstantin Lopushansky. The one of his I've seen is the apocalyptic Visitor to a Museum (1989), which has grandiose Tarkovskian aspirations and largely carries them off. However, I remember being somewhat put off by a heavy air of religious allegory that made Stalker seem positively subtle in comparison. Still, I have high hopes for Letters from a Dead Man (1986), his preceding post-nuclear parable.

Kin-dza-dza is most interesting to me for the way that it captures the process of learning a new language completely from scratch. Not many films, sci-fi or otherwise, seem to really focus on the idea that learning a few essential words and phrases slowly begins to open up a world more and more, until there is a kind of faint nostalgia for the early scenes of not knowing what the heck was going on (something which helps to play into the bittersweet ending as well).

Koo!

bamwc2 wrote:Preacher, what did you think of Ah Ying? I watched it yesterday and plan to do a writeup soon.

Oh, I liked it, not enough to make my list (I think the only Hong Kong contenders are "Boat People", "An Autumn's Tale", "As Tears Go By" and "The Killer") but easily recommended for anyone who likes naturalistic cinema and intimate characterizations.

I'm afraid I'm not optimistic enough to be searching for the greatest films of the 1980s among Chuck Norris vehicles , so instead I'm trying to revisit old favourites to sort out my rankings.

Dust in the Wind - Sublime Hou film that sees him at the height of his powers during his first phase of greatness. The emotional undercurrent of the film is so muted that when the knife finally slips in, you just gasp (or, if you're my wife, cry out "NO!" at the screen). The film presents a quiet, drifting portrait of lives ambling along, in a village and in Taipei, and Hou steadfastly refuses to fill in gaps which alert viewers can fill in for themselves. We have to figure out how much time has passed and what has happened between the opening village scenes and the scenes with Huen and Wan in Taipei. We're expected to recognize and work out the significance of recurring locations without the benefit of expository dialogue like "Wow, it must be cool to live in a movie theatre!", and we're expected to make similar inferences with regard to character relations and off-screen plot developments. It's a form of realism where we don't receive privileged expository information about characters (nobody announces their feelings as they tend to do in Western films) but instead have to observe and deduce. In this film, it's absolutely essential that the narrative mode is so oblique, because the central relationship is characterised by reticence and ambiguity, and the dramatic power of the film entirely hinges on that fact.

Like most of Hou's films, conventional narrative shorthand is shunned and instead we get the messiness, complexity and uncertainty of life, or at least a reasonable facsimile of it. When Wan's failure to get a lunchbox to his boss's son provokes a severe dressing-down, he doesn't lose his job as a consequence, though he leaves soon afterwards for other reasons. People get over stuff, it doesn't just become a plot pivot to get a character from point A to point B. And when the film threatens to get all Bicycle Thieves on us, Huen asks Wan if he really thinks what he's doing is a good idea and he figures, probably not, and so that plot thread is dropped (though the economic implications of it inexplicitly resound through the rest of the film). There's a character who's casually introduced early on and goes on to have real significance, an old, obvious trick, but with Hou he's counterbalanced by all the many characters who are introduced just as casually and never appear again, or continue to casually appear but never impinge to any great extent on the main plot.

Formally, the film is exquisite, and the BluRay looks terrific. I remember there being gripes about the image quality when this was released, but it looks sharp and well-balanced to me. The splashes of colour (apart from jungle green) that some commentators complained were garish are maybe three or four instances in the entire film and are obviously intentional: they're small, synthetic details (reels of rayon thread, a pair of blue shoes that are completely out of place in the grey / brown village setting, worn by a character who is out of place in that setting and who has previously featured in an extended scene in which she is deliberating buying shoes to take back to the village for her entire family - how somebody can watch the film and think "wow, those shoes really stick out like a sore thumb: that's obviously a mistake in the transfer!" is beyond me). The weakest part of the transfer as far as I could see (and the same goes for The Terrorizer from the same source) is that whites tend to get blown out.

Oh, and this is one of the films that establishes Hou as possibly the last great director of trains. There are point of view sequences of trains going in and out of tunnels in the jungle that are just exhilarating.

I don't know how many Hou films I'll be able to find space for in my 50, but this will definitely be one of them.

zedz wrote:I'm afraid I'm not optimistic enough to be searching for the greatest films of the 1980s among Chuck Norris vehicles

I wouldn't call it optimism so much as perversity.

Dust in the Wind is certainly one of my top favorites (among the many Hou films I love). I never did get the Blu-Ray, but the DVD certainly gives one an adequate sense of the film's greatness. Hou and trains (like Ozu and trains -- and perhaps Rivette and trains) -- a match made in heaven.

Michael, have you seen Jia's I Wish I Knew? The Hou interview in that film is shot as a homage to his train sequences.

Mr Sausage wrote:

zedz wrote:I'm afraid I'm not optimistic enough to be searching for the greatest films of the 1980s among Chuck Norris vehicles

I wouldn't call it optimism so much as perversity.

Hou's Chuck Norris, anyhou?

zedz wrote:Michael, have you seen Jia's I Wish I Knew? The Hou interview in that film is shot as a homage to his train sequences.

I recently found this DVD -- after having mislaid it. So I finally should get around to seeing it.

My Twentieth Century (Ildiko Enyedi) - This will probably be the most beautiful film on my 1980s list: stunning black and white cinematography wrapped around a subject that delivers extraordinarily photogenic material every few minutes (frosted windows, lightshows, low flights over perfectly reflective lakes, trains, Victorian libraries etc.)

The story is a kind of ludic, erotic fable in which twin waifs are separated in childhood but wend their way back together in Budapest a decade later, by which time one has become a glamorous con artist and the other an anarchist. In spectacularly cinematic fashion, they finally rediscover one another

Spoiler

in a hall of mirrors.

In the meantime, Tarkovsky alumnus Oleg Jankowski plays a disciple of both Edison and Tesla (the film is also concerned with burgeoning 20th century technologies) who runs into both women at different times and, naturally, mistakes then for a single, peculiarly inconsistent, person - at least until the confusion is sorted out by a magical donkey. The presence of totemic animals adds to the fable-like atmosphere. That donkey mysteriously materializes in real life from out of a childhood dream, there's also a significant pigeon or two, a flashbacking chimp, and a stunning non sequitur sequence in the middle of the film featuring a dog that seems to be auditioning for The Parallax Corporation.

I have no idea whether her later features are any good, but this is a spectacular debut.

A couple of images from the film (just taken with my phone, not indicative of DVD quality):

What's the best Tetsuo option? The Third Window release looks great, but I'm still RA locked.

knives wrote:What's the best Tetsuo option? The Third Window release looks great, but I'm still RA locked.

The very best option is skipping it entirely.

That's an option I could never take.

Recently had my first underwhelming experience for the project - it was a film I really expected to like but didn't. Weird, as I like Pialat's other work (and 'The Mouth Agape' was a top ten for the 70s). But I just couldn't like 'A Nos Amours'. And I don't think 'Under the Sun of Satan' will be near my top fifty either.

Still, a film I did like recently was 'Shadow of the Earth', a Tunisian film by Taieb Louhichi. A tribe living in a remote part of Tunisia have so far remained true to their values and shunned modernity. However, they find their self-sufficiency threatened by both nature and the army. It's hard to track down - lucky, we have a copy recorded from Channel 4 ages ago.

Does anyone have a recommendation as to which version of My Brother's Wedding should be seen first? The director's cut is almost 40 minutes shorter!

I think both domino and I both preferred the longer cut. Or else we both preferred the shorter cut. I can't remember, I was too unnerved by the "domino and I both preferred. . ." part.