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Flirting With Disaster  

I just rewatched this hilarious film by David O. Russell.  It stars Ben Stiller as a new father who goes searching for his birth parents.  Mary Tyler Moore and George Segal are very funny as the N.Y. Jewish intellectuals who adopted him. Ditto Lily Tomlin and Alan Alda as his hippie birth parents.  I had forgotten the two Lynch alumni in this movie--Patricia Arquette as Stiller's wife and David Patrick Kelly as a trucker first mistaken as Stiller's father.  Also very funny are Josh Brolin and Richard Jenkins as gay detectives.

I'm in the middle of watching Die Sopranoss SS3e02.

Edit:

"His mother was worse."

Bad Lieutenant:  Port of Call New Orleans  

I've seen many movies since I last posted, but this is the first I found worthy of recommending.  Werner Herzog's movie with Nicholas Cage as a decorated detective descending into hell after getting addicted to pain killers as a result of a bad decision he made in a post-Katrina situation is a great piece of film-making.  Cage is finally in a movie worthy of his talent.  

Fantastic Mr. Fox

 Loved it!  I laughed and laughed...Wes Anderson and great animation, real stop motion photography of 3' high puppets with totally expressive faces.  Fast and fun (full disclosure I cried, too).

 Distant - by Turkish photographer/director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. 

 I am so glad that I stumbled on this director!  Amazing to look at--obviously Ceylan's first love was photography.  The film is full with long, technically perfect, striking shots of Istanbul and Turkey's countryside.  Except for a confrontation at the middle of the film, there is almost no dialog, but the faces of the two main characters express volumes.  One character is a successful photographer in Istanbul.  The other is a relative of his from his rural home town, who has lost his factory job, and descends on the photographer's solitary existence looking for help.  Chekov and Tarkovsky come to mind.  A seemingly simple story that  is full of emotional power and stunning visuals. I'll buy this one.

Here's a link to a gallery of Ceylan's photography--it will give you a good idea of the mood of  his film. 

http://www.nuribilgeceylan.com/photography/turkeycinemascope1.php?sid=1

There was a fiish..iinn the percolatrr!

I saw Splice.  I really enjoyed it.  It was different than I thought it would be.  I thought it was going to be like Alien, but it was more like Frankenstein or ET from hell. 

I also saw Trash Humpers.  It is better to just show you a trailer.  I really liked this movie as well.  It is uncomfortable to watch, but hard not to watch.  www.trashhumpers.com

A Serious Man  

I loved this movie.  The Coen Bros. are amazing!  I haven't laughed so often and long in a movie in quite a while.  The genius of it is as I was laughing, another part of me was thinking, ooh, this is so sad.  Now, it could be that the humor of this movie can only be grokked by a specific population.  I may have been raised a Presbyterian, but my youth was spent in upstate NY where middle-class Jewish families were in abundance.  I spent many hours in those homes, and went to a dozen Bar and Bas Mitvahs, so I get all the Yiddish humor.  I was also a teenager during the late 60's, so I completely recognized the classrooms, the furniture, the clothes, the ever-present transistor radio that plays a key role in the movie. ( I would go to bed with my transistor radio playing under my pillow, so I could listen to Cousin Brucie on WABC undetected.)  Great "old" Yiddish story invented by the Coens begins the movie and sets the stage for the events to befall poor Larry Gopnik.  

Spent the weekend in France, first with Jean-Pierre Melville and then with Olivier Assayas.

Le Samourai  One of the pleasures of our Guess The Movie thread is that Booth always turns me on to great films I've missed.  Le Samourai is my favorite this time around.  Could Alain Delon have been more beautiful in his youth, or more perfect for this role?  He plays a lone assassin in this homage to film noir that goes far beyond the genre in its existential look at life and the inevitability of death.  The opening shot (which you can see in the GTM thread) has to be one of the most beautiful in cinema.  See this movie!

Summer Hours  From the black and white beauty of Melville, to the lush colors of the French countryside.  From the silent loneliness of one man, to the noise and commotion of family.  But still the focus on mortality.  Summer Hours follows the decisions of three siblings who must deal with the estate of their deceased mother, a gorgeous country home filled with valuable objets d'art.  A moving look at our relationship to material possessions, generational differences, and our increasingly global lives.  There is a scene in the Musee D'Orsay that moved me to tears. One of the sons and his wife are looking to see how their mother's Louis Majorelle writing desk and 2 panels by Odilon Redon have been displayed, along with a Felix Bracquemond vase that had always been filled with flowers, now captive in a glass display cube.  Young tourists walk by these gorgeous objects with their cell phones to their ears, unaware of how central they once were in a family's life. Simple subject, beautifully executed.

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnsassus  

I don't know about the other Gilliam fans out there, but I thoroughly enjoyed what is Gilliam's most entertaining film since Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.  Christopher Plummer and Heath Ledger are a joy to watch.  Gilliam describes in his commentary the many bizarre "coincidences" that occurred surrounding this last performance of Ledger's.  Most striking is this speech delivered by Johnny Depp (that would have been spoken by Ledger) written in the script long before Ledger's death.  A woman of a certain age is offered a choice between the One-Night Stand Motel (with the devilish Tom Waits waiting inside) or  trip down a gondola floating on a river with a large pyramid looming in the background.  The woman sees three flower-bedecked rafts floating down the river, with the images of Valentino, Lady Di, and James Dean.  "They're all dead", says the woman.  And Depp/Ledger's character replies,  "Yes, but...immortal, nevertheless.  They won't get old, or fat, they won't get sick, or feeble.  They are beyond fear, because they are forever young.  They are gods, and you can join them....And remember, nothing's permanent, not even death."

Robert Altman's Three Women.  I thought I had seen nearly every Altman movie, but somehow missed this one, from 1977.  But DL must have seen it, since Mulholland Drive draws on it heavily.  Sissy Spacek is a blond innocent who moves to California, becoming obsessed with  a dark-haired Shelley Duvall.  When Spacek's character, Pinky, is spurned by Duvall's character, she attempts suicide, after which Pinky has amnesia and the 2 women seem to switch personalities. (Sounding familiar?)  There is even a strange acting elderly couple, supposedly Pinky's parents.  And a change in tone to the surreal after a dream sequence.  And cowboys as minor characters.  Altman adds a third woman in to the mix, an artist who continually paints strange murals wherever she can.  A great film, and certainly worth seeing if only to see the similarities to MD.

Hobo with a Shotgun

A seriously SICK movie. Makes Machete look spineless.