For a long time I was a member of Blockbuster. Their online catalog met most of my needs and they offered the option of returning mail-in rentals to brick-and-mortar stores in exchange for whatever on-hand inventory allowed, mostly new releases and crap. I had a good system: get the good stufff online and swap it out for the trash they kept on their shelves (of course, I exagerate). But when I began spending more money on foreign-region DVDs, I started to question my future with Blockbuster.
Being so close to Chicago, Facets was the obvious choice.
Long before Netflix popularized the mail-order rental, Facets had already coined the paradigm. When I worked at Borders in the 90s, pre-Internet-ubiquity, if someone wanted to order a movie, we would acquire it through the Facets Catalog (and it would cost upwards of $80.00 on VHS). While Facets may only boast of 42,000 titles, which is signficantly short of the nearly 100,000 titles that both Netflix and Blockbuster offer, many of the titles cannot be found anywhere else in the country. Just this past week, I watched Angelopolous’ The Travelling Players on VHS courtesy of Facets. While Facets does not currently offer streaming, with even the lowest level of membership you have the opprotunity to watch movies at the Cinematheque for free (and membership for 1 month is 1 penny less than general admission to a screening; just this evening I saw Julia Bacha’s documentary Budrus).
Below is a list of what is currently in my queue. Looking at the titles, half of them I don’t even recogize enough to say what made me add them. Others have been on lists that I have kept for years dating at least back to when Jonathan Rosenbaum would occasionally blog at the Reader in addition to his weekly columns and capsules. Other titles are products of directors whose names I’ve heard repeated on Twitter or maybe a podcast or a print magazine. Some, like the first listed, Chimes at Midnight, are movies I’ve only seen on VHS but, thanks to Facets stock of foreign-region DVDs, can now look forward to watching digitally.
Chimes at Midnight/Falstaff
Chacun Son Cinema (To Each His Own Cinema)
Black Girl / Borom Sarret
Herzog Docs and Shorts #2
Adventure of Iron Pussy, The
Weeping Meadow, The
Ulysses’ Gaze
Suspended Step of the Stork, The
Yi Yi
Case of the Grinning Cat, The
Quiet City
Dance Party, USA
LOL
Kissing on the Mouth
Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary
Terence Davies Trilogy, The
Histoire(s) du Cinema: Disc 1
Histoire(s) du Cinema: Disc 2
Histoire(s) du Cinema: Disc 3
Histoire(s) du Cinema: Disc 4
Celine and Julie Go Boating
I Stand Alone
Baise Moi (Rape Me)
Fat Girl
Real Young Girl, A
Ossos (Criterion)
Letters From Fontainhas (Criterion)
In Vanda’s Room (Criterion)
Colossal Youth (Criterion)
Casa De Lava (Down to Earth)
Class Relations
Sicilia! / Une Visite au Louvre
Bottom Land
Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet
Boy Meets Girl
Lovers on the Bridge, The
Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood)
Pola X
Boarding Gate
Demonlover (Director’s Cut)
Late August, Early September
Les Destinees
Woman is the Future of Man
Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors
Power of Kangwon Province, The
Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, The
Woman on the Beach
River Called Titas, A
Madhumati
Cloud-Capped Star, The
Wild Grass
This was my first of three viewings. I suppose it’s easier to briefly mention what I didn’t like about the movie, certainly that would take up less space than writing about the opposite. I’m not sure if it’s the writing or the performance of Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin, but each time I walked away from the movie feeling more affirmed in my belief that Mark Zuckerberg’s (Jesse Eisenberg) dealing with Eduardo was an act of survival rather than betrayal. Or perhaps if I found Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker a little more sinister, I could have believed Saverin’s dislike as anything but irrational and jealous. Other than that this movie really works for me.
I hadn’t watched this in almost 10 years, and then it may have been my first Tarkovsky. This was much easier to watch than I remembered. I attribute this increased ease to 10 or more years of watching movies to provide a strong critical framework in which to place the movie that’s Proustian in it’s attempt to model narrative form after memory, including unreliability and nonlinear fragmentation. The Mirror had come up in several of the write-ups for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, so this revisiting was s type of preparation.
This was my second viewing; the first was just over a month prior. This movie does not so much reward as it does demand multiple viewings, unless you are a much more sophisticated viewer than I, which is very possible. But as I mentioned last month when writing about Mysterious Object at Noon, the works of Weerasethakul are so different from what I generally watch that encountering his movies is like being inroduced to a new genre. The second half with its animal ghosts and totems and glowing tree is particularly amazing.
I walked into this movie blind. I was downtown with a friend and wanted to check out the Chicago International Film Festival and this was the screening that allowed us to walk down to Rossi’s and back. If Australian movies that borrow from the American Western can be divided between Ned Kelly on the I-really-wish-I-hadn’t-wasted-my-time side and The Proposition on the that-was-fawesome side, the former being a zero and the latter being a 10; Red Hill would be about a 4 or a 5. While the movie can boast of some beautiful landscape shots, nothing else worked for me in the revenge film dabbling in playing with genre conventions.
I don’t think I fell asleep watching this at the Chicago International Film Festival, but I exerted a lot of energy trying not to and Weersethakul’s movies require alll of one’s attention. While I can’t claim to have “gotten” this or even to have watched it under ideal circumstances, it really stuck with me in the following days. I really do love movies about memory, especially unreliable memory that is more authoritative than fact. Also monkey ghosts and interspecies sex with catfish are two ingredients for any masterpiece.
I wrote about this