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Ishmael Lasting

ishmaellasting@mastodonapp.uk

<p>Have been described by a number of people as &#39;the wittiest person on Mastodon.&#39; (Zero is a number.)</p><p>Writer of sorts. Not really here to talk about that though. So far, I seem to be mostly talking about la cinema -- art house, cult and classic mainly. (Side note: If you understand the L&#39;angle du hasard reference without Googling it, that&#39;s numberwang).</p><p>Also, will post whatever other misbegotten ideas pass through my brain as my synapses misfire.</p>

Posts

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    #LetterboxdFriday DOOR III [🇯🇵 ] None of these Door movies have any connection to the others, except that they have doors in them.Idea: Let&#39;s just retrospectively claim any horror movie with a door in it is part of the franchise ⭐⭐⭐ CARITA DE CIELO [🇲🇽 ] Acceptably entertaining screwball(ish) comedy ⭐⭐⭐ AVENTURERA [🇲🇽 ] Gloriously overcooked melodrama with dance numbers and people wearing bananas on their heads. ⭐⭐⭐⭐ BYE BYE LOVE [🇯🇵 ] A while back, I decided I was overusing the t...

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    #LetterboxdFriday THE HIRELING - 🇬🇧 A chauffeur, traumatised by the war, falls for a depressed aristo. It doesn&#39;t end well for him. There&#39;s a lot going on here. It has a literary depth to it. But it&#39;s dry ⭐⭐⭐ THE RED &amp; THE WHITE - 🇭🇺 🎶 War! (Huh, good god) What is it good for? Eastern European arthouse films made in opposition to it. Say it again 🎶 ⭐⭐⭐⭐ TOUCH OF EVIL - 🇺🇸 Classic, innit. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ MR ARKADIN - 🇫🇷 🇪🇸 Not sure which cut of this I saw the first time around,...

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    Apparently, Keir Starmer has told European leaders they must face up to the fact that relations with the US are &amp;#39;under strain.&amp;#39; This from the man who repeatedly claims he doesn&amp;#39;t believe the UK has to choose between closer ties to Europe and closer ties to the USA. This from a man who sent the King to Congress to argue that the relationship between the UK and US was &amp;#39;unbreakable and irreplaceable.&amp;#39; He&amp;#39;s got some hide, hasn&amp;#39;t he? In a worl...

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    #LetterboxdFriday In 1946, in a &amp;#39;Where were we before we were so rudely interrupted?&amp;#39;&amp;#39; gesture, 11 films tied for the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. These are 4 of those films. ANTOINE &amp;amp; ANTOINETTE - 🇫🇷 A working class couple win the lottery and lose the ticket. Masterfully directed. Comfortably the best film of these four ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ PASTORAL SYMPHONY - 🇫🇷 A pastor takes in a blind orphan, falls in love with her when she grows up... and his love riva...

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    &amp;#39;Girls will be boys and boys will be girls It&amp;#39;s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, except for Lola La-la-la-la Lola&amp;#39; Always very easy to take the piss out of #Moby, but I&amp;#39;m not sure how anyone can come away from The Kinks&amp;#39; #Lola and think it&amp;#39;s &amp;#39;unevolved&amp;#39;. Bizarre take. Would you write it exactly the same way nearly 60 years later? No, probably not. But Ray Davies was one of the great pop lyricists and Moby... also works in t...

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    #LetterboxdFriday THE GARDEN OF STONES - 🇮🇷 A man gets a vision and starts stringing stones up in trees and doing dervish dances. The authorities come out to take a look. &amp;#39;No, he isn&amp;#39;t crazy. He&amp;#39;s an artist.&amp;#39; Strange, but mesmerising film ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ CRIMSON GOLD - 🇮🇷 A look at inequity in Iran drives a pizza delivery man to extreme but futile action. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ HOW TO IRRITATE PEOPLE - 🇬🇧 Proto-Python TV sketch show special that needed more work and less sexi...

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    #LetterboxdFriday THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN - 🇬🇧 Hammer Studios. Peter Cushing. Christopher Lee. You know the score. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ THE BRIDE! - 🇺🇸 First 45 minutes: &amp;#39;I don&amp;#39;t know what its detractors are talking about - this film is clearly a masterpiece.&amp;#39; Final hour and 15 minutes: &amp;#39;OK... they may have a point.&amp;#39; Fun. Ambitious. Messy. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ THE VANISHING - 🇳🇱 Classic feel bad Euro horror. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ THE STRANGER - 🇫🇷 Fairly faithful adaptation of t...

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    #LetterboxdFriday THERESE RAQUIN - 🇫🇷 The kind of technically solid, high quality but sterile literary adaptation that provoked the French New Wave -- so I suppose we should be grateful for that ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ FATA MORGANA - 🇩🇪 Werner Herzog&#39;s lyrical documentary about mirages. Or something ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ OUT OF THE PAST - 🇺🇸 Weirdly (to me anyway), I hadn&#39;t seen this before. Has absolutely everything I could possibly want from a classic noir. Gorgeous photography, smart-arse &#39;hard-boiled...

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    @arratoon@beige.party I did indeed watch it on Criterion. And Nightfall may very well be this evening&#39;s entertainment

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    #LetterboxdFriday BROKEN VOICES - 🇨🇿 🇸🇰 Subtle, based-on-true-story drama about grooming and abuse in a prestigious girls&amp;#39; choir. Beautifully acted by its young cast ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ FRAULEIN - 🇩🇪 A young woman from Bosnia changes the outlook of an older woman from Yugoslavia (&amp;#39;No-one calls it that any more&amp;#39;) through what the blurb calls &amp;#39;an unlikely friendship&amp;#39;. Solid enough, but hits a few too many cliches along its way ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD...

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    #LetterboxdFriday RESURRECTION - 🇨🇳 This is quite something, although at 2hrs 40, I suspect it requires a higher than average tolerance for not knowing quite what&amp;#39;s happening for long periods of time ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA - 🇯🇵 Grittier remake of Japanese classic that isn&amp;#39;t quite as good, but does stand on its own merits ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ EMMA (TV FILM) - 🇬🇧 Kate Beckinsale makes no attempt to be likeable as Emma. Thumbs up. Sam Morton is a good Harriet, because Sam...

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    #LetterboxdFriday MAI &amp;#39;68, LA BELLE OUVRAGE - 🇫🇷 Fairly straightforward documentary with footage from the protests alongside testimonies of the people who were there ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ SUMMER OF SOUL - 🇺🇸 The footage from the Harlem Cultural Festival is magnificent and alone earns the five stars, but the documentary also does an excellent job of contextualising the event and its &amp;#39;disappearance&amp;#39; from public memory. Look at that Gladys Knight &amp;amp; The Pips dance routine! ⭐...

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    #LetterboxdFriday HARAKIRI - 🇯🇵 Stone cold classic, innit ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ TOKYO TWILIGHT - 🇯🇵 Peak Ozu ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ONLY ON MONDAYS - 🇯🇵 Possibly the most French New Wave Japanese New Wave film I&amp;#39;ve seen. Starts off like an artsy exploitation flick, gets dark, ends with a cathartic visual joke about patriarchy. Also, lots of long close-ups of Mariko Kaga&amp;#39;s face = cinema! ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ FULL CIRCLE - 🇬🇧 🇨🇦 Atmospheric ghost story with Mia Farrow as a bereaved mother. I couldn&amp;#3...

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    #LetterboxdFriday THE PASSION OF ANNA - 🇸🇪 Ingmar Bergman. Sven Nykvist. Max von Sydow. Liv Ullmann. Bibi Andersson. Never goes too far wrong, does it? NOROI: THE CURSE - 🇯🇵 A journalist investigates paranormal events that (I don&amp;#39;t think it&amp;#39;s a spoiler) all turn out to be linked. Nicely woven found footage folk horror 12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST - 🇷🇴 At 12:08pm on the 22nd of December 1989 Nicolae Ceaușescu fled Bucharest. Dry comedy mostly focused around a TV debate about wh...

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    Judging from the clips, SNL UK has a curiously mid-Atlantic pitch. There&#39;s a space in British television for a mainstream, topical sketch show, and maybe it&#39;ll develop into something as the overall reaction seems to have been &#39;not as horrible as anticipated&#39;, but you simply can&#39;t appeal to a British mainstream sensibility and an American mainstream sensibility at the same time. So if they don&#39;t do a reverse &#39;Office&#39; and basically go in their own direction with it...

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    @onuryasar@mastodon.online Ha. I&#39;d review things on Letterboxd if you could restrict who can see them to just the people who follow you already. But public reviews feels too close to getting into the &#39;likes&#39; and &#39;follows&#39; game of social media to me. It&#39;s quieter over here on Mastodon

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    #LetterboxdFriday MARTY SUPREME -🇺🇸 Liked it, didn&#39;t love it. Three main reasons why not: 1) 2.5hr character study of a man who doesn&#39;t really have one. He&#39;s driven, he&#39;s unscrupulous, he&#39;s self-absorbed. I get it. What else have you got?. 2) Stuff-stuff-stuff, busy-busy-busy, happen-happen-happen makes it feel a bit one-note. 3) That&#39;s an ending straight out of the Hays Code -- be as much as a villain as you like, as long as you get punished or find redemption in the...

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    #LetterboxdFriday DAGUERREOTYPES - 🇫🇷 Agnes Varda films the shopkeepers on her street. And it&amp;#39;s wonderful ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ RUE DAGUERRE IN 2005 - 🇫🇷 Basically a DVD featurette -- remember those? -- going back to the same street 30 years later. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ NO OTHER CHOICE - 🇰🇷 Park Chan-wook&amp;#39;s dark comedy about the ruthlessness capitalism can enforce on us all ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ LATE AUGUST, EARLY SEPTEMBER - 🇫🇷 In 1990s French cinema, everybody was a writer with a literary agent. Everybody...

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    #LetterboxdFriday WHEN I SAW YOU - 🇵🇸 A defiant little boy in a refugee camp decides to walk back to Palestine. On the one hand, he should probably listen to his mother more. On the other hand.... Excellently paced drama ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ GABBEH - 🇮🇷 Elderly couple wash a rug, magically bringing to life one of the characters in the design to tell the history of her tribe. Colourful, lyrical and strange ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ TEN - 🇮🇷 A woman drives a car and has a number - of conversations with passengers tha...

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    @hex @onuryasar Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of my favourite films. Top 10. Well, depending on the day. But it floats around there. And -- *drum roll* -- I&amp;#39;m not that fond of musicals generally. But because it&amp;#39;s sung-through among other reasons, yeah, masterpiece

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    @hex @onuryasar I think that&amp;#39;s true. And it&amp;#39;s true of pretty much all the musicals I like (Dancer in the Dark is another favourite). It&amp;#39;s the convention and the lightness I don&amp;#39;t like... because I&amp;#39;m a grinch. It&amp;#39;s also, incidentally, why I hated La La Land. That borrows its template from Umbrellas, but when the love story is spoilt rich kids whose time together is disrupted by Hollywood career aspirations instead of someone being drafted into the...

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    #LetterboxdFriday NEECHA NAGAR - 🇮🇳 Curious hodgepodge of styles: by turns social realism, expressionism, melodrama. And it&#39;s Hindi, so it inevitably throws in some musical numbers. The people of &#39;the Lower City&#39; rise up against the cruelty of the municipal government. No-one actually mentions the British, but it&#39;s India in 1946. The subtext is clear. (&#39;This our land, not your land&#39;) Movie&#39;s in a bloody awful state though. Memo to India: &#39;film preservation&#3...

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    #LetterboxdFriday HONEY DON&#39;T! - 🇺🇸 Ethan Coen makes another pretend Coen Bros film. Has a number of the elements we associate with real Coen Bros films, but doesn&#39;t quite work ⭐ ⭐ SHALL WE DANCE? - 🇯🇵 Married man going through middle-age crisis sees a pretty young woman in a window and joins a ballroom dancing class... but it all turns out much more charming than it sounds. Only Japanese film I&#39;ve ever seen that talks reverently about Blackpool Winter Gardens ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ SUM...

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    #LetterboxdFriday Ingrid and Alfred double-bill: SPELLBOUND - 🇺🇸 - Two main problems with Spellbound. 1) The silly, po-faced psychoanalysis stuff does weigh it down, and 2) Hitchcock just happened to make better movies using this &#39;man on the run&#39; template both before and after it ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ UNDER CAPRICORN -🇬🇧 - Uncharacteristic slowburn period drama from Hitch. He considered it to be a &#39;mistake&#39;. The Cahiers du Cinema lot thought it was among his very finest films. I don&#39;t en...