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Post by JangoB on May 8, 2024 15:58:01 GMT
Anthony Perkins in Crimes of Passion is one of the greatest unhinged performances I've seen. You know, that man is some kind of psycho!
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on May 11, 2024 4:34:51 GMT
Daniel Day-Lewis in In the Name of the Father – rewatchFinally rounded off my trio of GOAT-actor April birthday viewings with this. I’ve seen this movie a few times, and I’ve always thought DDL was great in it, though I used to rank several of his other performances above it... but over time I’ve come to admire this performance more and more, and now I’d put it in his top 3. Maybe the loosest of his great performances, I love how it sometimes feels improvised - like not only the great scene that’s often discussed on here where he speaks gibberish to his dad when they’re first in the prison cell together, but also the moment late in the film where he has the tape wrapped around his head and is totally unhinged. Overall, it’s an impressively physical performance, and it’s his physicality that initially makes him convincing as this immature, youthful punk, along with his child-like playfulness and anger. From there, he arcs the character beautifully - going from someone who’s like a scared, shaken little kid to a cynical rebel later on, and finally evolving into a more mature, self-assured, driven and focused man with nothing more to lose by the end. And of course a lot of what’s great about DDL in this film is his interaction with Postlethwaite – acting early on like a chagrined child scolded by a parent, alternately conveying annoyance and contempt as someone who can’t help but feel like a failure in his father’s eyes, but also the warmth and love of a loyal son during later intimate scenes... together they create a believable parent/adult child dynamic that’s painfully resonant.
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Post by PromNightCarrie on May 22, 2024 0:54:42 GMT
I rewatched The Favourite and I have to retract my statement about Poor Things being better. I don't know what I was thinking. This film is an example of when EVERYONE understood the assignment and delivered. Of course, Oliva Colman was absolutely brilliant. But tell me why this time around I felt Rachel Weisz stole the show? I found myself completely taken by her delicious performance as Sarah Churchill. Perfection.
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 6, 2024 19:58:49 GMT
Theresa Russell in Bad Timing (1980) - rewatch"A perpetual fear of the future" - that's a line from A Fan's Notes - my favorite book - dontchaknow - and that line both describes and presages Russell's character and predicament in Nic Roeg's lurid, episodic - sometimes insightful - and sometimes awful and awfully pretentious Bad Timing.......... Russell is achingly right in this part - and this character is both unwilling and unable to change - and of course she also can not see why her lover - a poorly cast but in a few scenes pitch-perfect Art Garfunkel can't live in the moment.........the film is a relationship quasi-"horror" movie like Looking For Mr. Goodbar (1977), Cruising (1980 - same year!), or the brilliant - but far more elusive - Arrebato (1979) where you may blow these movies off - and probably will the first time - and when you come across the films years later - totally reconsider your thoughts and wallow in their unpleasantness in a way that is hard to understand to people who've only seen any of them one time.............. and find your subsequent reaction bafflingly forgiving and charitable ...... Russell - in a performance that foreshadows Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer actually - is both heartbreakingly relatable and unfathomable - the movie effectively makes her unknowable and she has several scenes that seem campy and amateurish (the sex on the steps scene) but later in knowing the deeply sad, deeply disturbing ending - seems instead more clumsily pathetic and in its own way uncomfortably harrowing............... that scene - which specifically removes the need - or desire - to talk at all, to communicate - looms over the movie in a way where the female character is choosing her own silence before it's removed for her as an option anyway..........the movie is deeply feminist and yet as it plays it doesn't - at first - feel that way.......since the Russell character succumbs to her weaknesses rather than triumphing over them - it would never be made in 2024 - which also makes it like Looking For Mr. Goodbar, Cruising and Arrebato too of course...... The Garfunkel character - essentially a walking, unfeeling computer of a man - does something as repellent as any character I can think of in "serious" movie history - and his denial of it, instinctively, cruelly - is one of the several moments of "bad timing" (literally, an "interruption" in his denial)..........but then again so is the whole, inevitable, "perpetual fear of the future" - for both the younger Theresa Russell and then at almost every point in its fragmented timeline that we see after its already sad, opening scene........which is an ending as a beginning and a beginning to something worse.........
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Post by JangoB on Jun 7, 2024 2:07:14 GMT
Tommy Lee Jones, Diane Lane, Ricky Schroder but especially Robert Duvall in Lonesome Dove. Who knew that two words as simple as "Lorie, darlin'" could have such deep emotional resonance. Clint Eastwood & Gene Hackman in Unforgiven (a rewatch). Always adored Eastwood in this but it's the first time I've been so incredibly impressed by Hackman. Dennis Hopper, Sharon Farrell but especially the great Linda Manz in Out of the Blue. One of the best teenage performances ever. And if you haven't seen the movie, it's a must. Just be sure not to read anything about it. I was not prepared for where it went.
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 7, 2024 13:24:52 GMT
Donald Sutherland in Claude Chabrol's Blood Relatives (1978) - rewatchNot a great Claude Chabrol movie - he has a lot of great ones............not even a great "minor throwaway" one like The Bridesmaid (2004) - he has several of those too ...........but a very odd one - in English (!) and that starts as a boring police interrogation(s) procedural and gets far more interesting and bravura in its 2nd half extended flashbacks........ The film is not unlike the far better Garde à Vue (1981) which is more riveting and surprising...........but Blood Relatives has its finger on the same family relationships curdling and inverting............and Sutherland gives a performance of great empathy and sensitivity. There is easy intelligence and patience in his work and no Alpha male cop bullshit........he also interacts incredbly well with the female lead - an "adult-like" child........ not easy to do It's a strange movie in that you can guess the ending immediately - but not guess particular scenes which in Chabrol's case works to keep it watchable - and its last line is both sick and sad in ihat sickness - sort of like the "don't you know that?" line from Fargo (1996) ............which this is also not as good as...........um...........well it's not........
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 9, 2024 7:58:16 GMT
Léa Seydoux in The Beast (2023 / 2024 US)One of the world's great young actresses - who is having quite a run in the 2020s - is the rarest of all things: a risk taking movie star (like Emma Stone and few others).......and in The Beast she has quite a role - specifically for young females (younger than herself actually) I suspect - who will see themselves in it ..... Haunted and haunting, ravishing and ravished........and most of all terrified, alone - at the mechanisms that might leave us precisely terrifyingly alone ........if ever a movie should have been called "Past Lives" this is it Unforgettable in many ways, a big go for it work that is an immediate kind of cult film I think .......a movie of great feeling about the absence of feeling.......it is also a kind of sci-fi mumbo jumbo in a fun (and most definitely not fun) way - insanely cinematic, almost bursting at the seams with ideas and visuals - and Seydoux is the gorgeous face - and heart - at the center of it all ....
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 12, 2024 10:20:54 GMT
Ingrid Craven - Rainer Werner Fassbinder's ex-wife and unforgettable in his great Martha (1974) - in Shadow of Angels (1976) A film of a Rainer Werner Fassbinder play - he also co-stars but didn't direct........is almost parodically bleak: Antisemitic (at first) and yet also anti-Antisemitic (by the end), anti-Nazi, anti-Fascist, anti-Germany, anti-family, anti-straight and gay and er, um bisexuals, and you know males and females and anti-capitalism....and that's not all........whew.................oh and anti-felines....... The movie is rather (overly) conceptually stylized - almost operatic - but if you stick with it - it sort of pays off and the ending - part Bergman, part Mother Kusters Goes To Heaven - is so Uber-Fassbinder it's pretty intellectually exact and on point..........- like something out of Bergman's The Rite - with a Teutonic twist - which Fassbinder must have loved I reckon.........and of course Bergman later made his own version of a Fassbinder (the masterful From the Life of the Marionettes (1980)) Craven is excellent here as she suffers one abuse on top of another and her big scene - in a church - alone (at first) with God (Bergmanesque, again) is quite horrific and in this bleak structure quite inevitable too.......theatrical, artificial, distancing, perversely humorous, absurdist - really impressive in its range of different acting styles - often at odds with each other yet not appearing histrionic really.....Craven is very much a Fassbinder team player, a co-conspirator....... The kind of movie it's possible to watch and say "What the fnck was that?" - as both scathing criticism and a kind of high praise
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 14, 2024 16:40:32 GMT
Geraldine Page in Sweet Bird of Youth (1962) - rewatchAs close to a "Brando" as American movies have and while I've seen this a lot I'm always struck by how great she was playing one thing and suggesting a whole opposite thing simultaneously (her great line about "monsters" and how she is tough but weirdly not THAT tough) and when she gets needy, her desperation is vivid and palpable........not merely great acting but quite complex acting too - and remarkably nuanced in not compromising what's on the page - but still adding much to it ........
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 16, 2024 19:07:57 GMT
Ken Ogata in Vengeance is Mine (1979) - Really odd, hypersexualized and hard to stomach serial killer film by Shōhei Imamura - that is almost a genre of its own - revenge drama, character study, slasher pic, crime epic ........Ogata is just riveting here and dominates scene after often shocking scene
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 18, 2024 7:37:20 GMT
Estefania de los Santos & David Pareja in The Coffee Table (2022) - Blacker than Pítch Black Comedy (really, wtf?) and utterly bleak horror fílm that ís líke Raísing Arzona crossed wíth a way more uncomfortable, stressful Hereditary - it's one of the most uncomfortable movíes I've seen lately actually .........and these 2 as a married couple in ther own exstential Hell really sell this stuff A genuinely mean film in every way ........almost unbelievably button pushing .......not for all tastes..... at all
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 21, 2024 9:53:50 GMT
Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable and especially Lauren Bacall in How To Marry A Millionaire (1953) - rewatch Delightful comic performances by all and in Bacall's case almost a "guy" performance as a tough talking gal who gets a lot of great lines to spit out........... and to think about too A lot of fun....
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 22, 2024 10:19:01 GMT
Michael Imperioli - The Sopranos - For All Debts Public and Private - rewatch On a bit of a Michael Imperioli kick since seeing him on Broadway (robbed of a Tony nod ESPECIALLY with Strong winning)......and this is one of his very best performances .......mixing an encroaching junk habit, self doubt / loathing, a near psychotic simmering vengeance and in a great scene his fathers legacy with his mother who he gently tells to "lay off the Bailey's"
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 23, 2024 9:56:04 GMT
Benoît Magimel in Claude Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two (2007) - rewatch
One of those chilly Chabrol films that if he had made it much earlier would be celebrated much more in many kinds of ways - instead he made this so late in his often awesome career you're encouraged to think he's made this a lot already...........but not quite - and Chabrol is at his most Woody Allen-ish here in taking a female lead.......and breaking her and breaking her story arc down - there's a lot of Chabrol's Madame Bovary here too..........except this is funnier ........cruelly of course........and this is also a story that is not exactly literal but highly symbolic......a dark fairy tale: Innocent (her literal name is French for "Snow" ffs) encounters the awful world..........world wins.........the film's title itself is symbolic.......and agan, cruelly, a joke....... Magimel is the ace up Chabrol's sleeve here - he plays the part of awful, creepy, dangerous brat in a way that is pretty far out there .....part De Niro in King of Comedy, part Roberts in Star 80 and part slightly effeminate Fashion Monster from Hell (you can literally laugh out loud at some of his suits)..........he is ON this guy right from the start : In the defensive way he reacts when asked what he does for a living (always a bad sign!) - to the end when his childishness cuts with a far greater power than he ever deserved to have..........Magimel is deliciously horrible.............. and he doesn't have a clue why he is that at all........
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 24, 2024 8:15:05 GMT
Especially Julianne Nicholson and sort of I guess Zoe Ziegler in Janet Planet (2024) Very meandering, extremely well meaning movie about a dysfunctional mom and her on the way to being fncked up daughter is a movie for people who say movies aren't about real life enough........but what if the movie though doesn't have quite enough dramatic conflict in it and aggressively annoys you to function as something you wantt to see? Sort or worth it though for its best scenes - and there are several that hit in very specific ways - and interplay in them - and reminds me of the relationship between a single mother / only child dynamic of someone I knew a long time ago and who maybe didn't turn out ok Nicholson - is yet again peerless among American actresses in what she can play - which apparently is almost anything really - and I think of the last few times I've seen her in Blonde, Dream Scenario, Mare of Easttown and this........and I'm low key stunned by her every choice in every role tbh
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Post by JangoB on Jun 24, 2024 10:11:40 GMT
Is it just me or does Jessica Walter give the greatest crazy stalker performance out there in Play Misty for Me? There isn't a second of that movie where you don't buy her as a total psycho. The intensity, the manipulation, the primal need for Eastwood's character, THE EYES! And with a sprinkling of hilarious black comedy as well. A full meal of a character.
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 25, 2024 6:55:04 GMT
Warren Oates in Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) - rewatch The movie begins tranquilly, lazily.......briefly, on a lake.......beautiful, dreamy, passive and quickly turns violent, ugly, on many levels deeply cynical and sad....... and Warren Oates is maybe the saddest, most "removed" character in American film history ......one of them anyway - he was the Neil McCauley of his day .......and Oates is as perfect a bit of "non-movie star" casting - he makes the movie seem stranger, odder, more impenetrable, more compelling... Love it or hate it.......it's something else .......and at the very center of it......so is he......
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Post by ireallyamsomething on Jun 25, 2024 14:26:02 GMT
Estefania de los Santos & David Pareja in The Coffee Table (2022) - Blacker than Pítch Black Comedy (really, wtf?) and utterly bleak horror fílm that ís líke Raísing Arzona crossed wíth a way more uncomfortable, stressful Hereditary - it's one of the most uncomfortable movíes I've seen lately actually .........and these 2 as a married couple in ther own exstential Hell really sell this stuff A genuinely mean film in every way ........almost unbelievably button pushing .......not for all tastes..... at all Saw this last month - one of the bleakest, most brilliantly uncomfortable movies I've ever seen. The central incident is an intense fear I share and have imagined, so it resonated with me especially. The way it straddles the lines between (the blackest) comedy (the structure is almost like a farcical play) and tragedy reminded me of Kim-Ki-duk's Moebius. And yeah, as you said the performances really go a long way towards maintaining this tricky tone - never quite winks at the audience and overtly lean into the comedy. I've been concerned lately that I don't seem to clearly remember certain films due to my questionable memory - I doubt I'll forget this one.
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Post by Pittsnogle_Goggins on Jun 25, 2024 15:21:32 GMT
Estefania de los Santos & David Pareja in The Coffee Table (2022) - Blacker than Pítch Black Comedy (really, wtf?) and utterly bleak horror fílm that ís líke Raísing Arzona crossed wíth a way more uncomfortable, stressful Hereditary - it's one of the most uncomfortable movíes I've seen lately actually .........and these 2 as a married couple in ther own exstential Hell really sell this stuff A genuinely mean film in every way ........almost unbelievably button pushing .......not for all tastes..... at all Saw this last month - one of the bleakest, most brilliantly uncomfortable movies I've ever seen. The central incident is an intense fear I share and have imagined, so it resonated with me especially. The way it straddles the lines between (the blackest) comedy (the structure is almost like a farcical play) and tragedy reminded me of Kim-Ki-duk's Moebius. And yeah, as you said the performances really go a long way towards maintaining this tricky tone - never quite winks at the audience and overtly lean into the comedy. I've been concerned lately that I don't seem to clearly remember certain films due to my questionable memory - I doubt I'll forget this one. I’ve read a bit of discourse on this film and just have no idea if it’s something I should subject myself to or not
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 26, 2024 6:43:08 GMT
Ralph Fiennes & Indira Varma in Macbeth (2023/2024) (film presentation of the play)
I have said this before but Ralph Fiennes gave THE best performance - male or female - I ever saw on a stage......and he has moments here that are as great as any I've ever seen in Shakespeare........and Indira Varma has more than just moments - she is flat out spellbinding and along with Isuzu Yamada in Throne of Blood is one of the very best, most vivid examples of the role........
Unlike Joel Coen's recent film - this version of the play is more "modernized" but complete but it also takes longer to really get cracking.......several production tricks highlight text and some of it is not the more famous text even
I said once that there was a lot of King Lear in Denzel Washington's Macbeth but that film was so lean and tight it really wasn't a faithful reading of Macbeth (in the middle at least)..........well this one is a more faithful reading but there's a whole lot of Richard III in Fiennes Macbeth......... it makes a good contrast depending on what you like.....
Worth a watch if it's playing near you and worth a watch IN the theater to get the sound design bells and whistles which are quite striking
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 27, 2024 10:44:59 GMT
Shinobu Otake in Original Sin (1992) - rewatch - sort ofI had seen this before in a terrible print but this print actually restored at least one whole scene which goes into a subplot....... The movie is extremely satisfying - a cross of The Postman Always Rings Twice and a bit of Double Indemnity but with broader specifically Japanese behavioral and character strokes that make it, its own beast and a genuinely hard to guess - or fully get the ending. The movie has a rape "forgiveness" in it - always hard to pull off and yet does it because Otake is no typical femme fatale.........she's not really "hot", she is extremely bored, her evil is particularly banal........her choices seems to matter as much as any other and at one point you wonder who - if anyone at all might be killed.........and scenes start to suggest that you could also see everyone killed too........you never forget that rape because it sums up the movie - and your ability to see what is "really" happening in the interal logic of subsequent scenes Otake conveys suffocation, being trapped and not actively seeking - well anything - in fact the John Garfield character chooses her (and rapes her) almost solely because he is kind of insane ....and to Otake.......well so is her life really and he just pushed the momentum forward anyway........I mean something was bound to happen.........well wasn't it?
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 28, 2024 9:53:17 GMT
Orson Welles in The Stranger (1946) - rewatchWas Orson Welles the best "pre-Brando"American actor"? You could argue for it in a way..............and he's pretty ace here in handling some hard to make sound natural dialog in a way that was his specialty...........this is a role that takes on another dimension solely because Welles chose to play it...........it wouldn't work as well with Joseph Cotten or an actor less grand. The film looks like Hitchcock but it also looks like Welles with moody deep black shadows and deep focus shots that are quite tricky and tie into the plot of what is real and what is not - ie duplicity is part of the theme here visually and narratively - appearances vs. truth.......The Stranger has a memorable ending scene for his character too........ A bit underrated I'd say......
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 29, 2024 10:15:22 GMT
Mary McDonnell and Alfre Woodard in John Sayles' Passion Fish - rewatch 2 lovely performances dependent on each other actually of 2 amazingly well crafted John Sayles original creations - nobody was better than Sayles in his great run - and he was astonishingly diverse writing across race, gender and class in a way no one else was........ The kind of movie like Ruby in Paradise and Ulee's Gold that has all but vanished from American film - in fact, they are almost kind of forgotten as ever existing anyway......this movie has an amazingly deft touch at acting a kind of gentle, humorous but not benign (at all) sketches of the the emotional baggage people carry around and get trough
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sophiefox
Junior Member
Posts: 272
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Post by sophiefox on Jun 29, 2024 15:14:32 GMT
Cheryl Smith, Colleen Camp, Rosanne Katon & Jo Johnston in The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974). i was already a fan of Cheryl Smith & Colleen Camp but for Jo Johnston in the lead role, this movie was her only credit as an actor and given that, her performance was impressive. i was also very pleased to see young black actress Rosanne Katon in the main cast who was given a lot to do and she did just excellent in her first movie role, very moving. great movie that walked the fine line between (s)exploitation and romantic drama with feminist undertones, an engaging story, well written and believable characters, a good unambiguously presented message that doesnt shy away from social criticism. definitely underrated and probably totally misunderstood bc it starts off as your usual college girls sex romp and ends on relatively high notes. i did not expect that. and again, the female cast is especially fantastic and deserves so much more praise.
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Post by pacinoyes on Jun 30, 2024 11:27:01 GMT
Harvey Keitel, Richard Pryor and Yaphet Kotto in Paul Schrader's Blue Collar (1978)- rewatchOne of the few Amercan movies about working......because in American movies people don't have actual jobs.....they are all spies, crime lords or some bullshit....... The peformances make you feel it in your bones ........feel it in your wallet too......been to a grocery store lately? Yeah.....that's what thought ......how's your "empathy"? Pryor in particular seems very current and relatable - funny, smart, pissed off........ dangerous......a movie up there wth Silkwood and Norma Rae .......and a lot more expansive than both of those too.....
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