Last Movie Watched Thread

The Mansion of Madness (1973)

Alternately titled House of Madness (UK) and Dr. Tarr's Torture Dungeon (US), this Mexican film comes from a member/associate of the Panic Movement, Juan López Moctezuma. The Panic Movement, referring to the idea of Pan, sought to reveal new horizons to humanity's consciousness through shock theatre. Founding members were Alejandro Jodorowsky, Roland Torpor, and Fernando Arrabal. 

Cinematographer of Jodorowsky's first 3 films, Rafael Corkidi, does the camerawork here, and many stagings of shots have a similar feel to The Holy Mountain or El Topo. Also, a number of producers for Madness provided input to the first 3 Jodorowsky films. 

Before I introduce the hidden principal of this collective that produced a visually stimulating adaptation of Poe's "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether", I'd like to explain a bit about Poe's story. Written parodically in reference to Dickens's serials for social justice and topically the sanatoriums of the early 19th century, the story as film becomes a thought provocation regarding life under autocracy.  That said, the film does closely align with the characters and plot of the Poe story. Perhaps one of the first stories to utilise the plot device of: "A madman running the madhouse."

The real gem of the film is artistic advisor and set/costume designer, Leonora Carrington. British-born-and-raised, naturalised Mexican whose work in Surrealism recently yielded her being the most valuable British woman artist with a sale earlier in 2024 for some umpteen million pounds. Carrington probably had more influence over this film than received in a first viewing. After looking at her work more closely and doing a quick investigation of recent articles, the beginning and end procession of the film matches many themes of her work. Costumes, particularly the during the rituals, closely follow many of her artistic expressions. A foundation to Carrington's work is her time in a Spanish sanatorium. While she produced well-regarded works of Surrealism prior to her asylum stay, the sanatorium/asylum subjected her to assault, false imprisonment, and torture. The reason for her stay was an unraveling ensuant to her lover/partner, Max Ernst, and his arrest in Vichy France.

As a result of this viewing I'll be searching for her 1974 novel The Hearing Trumpet.

No longer looking forward to this!

...well, maybe a little.

Via the American Cinematheque’s 70mm festival:

I recently got a 70s Alessi stainless steel fruit bowl from Rochester-based eBay seller—I thought it was funny because it’s a very sort of 70s-stylish thing and Rochester is not where I’d think to go for that sort of things, but Kodak definitely drew interesting people there (at one point the majority of Fiat X1/9s—eccentric little angular roadsters, of a similar sort of 70s-chic—in the States were registered in Rochester and Huntsville, AL—Kodak and NASA). Part of that legacy of Kodak-engineered-and-funded good taste is the George Eastman archive, which sent two 70mm prints to LA’s Egyptian Theater:

The Last Emperor. This is one of my favorites but also the first time I saw it on the big screen. It’s one of the most beautiful, and having lived in Beijing there’s something great about seeing it so big. While there’s one wide shot where you can see the a bit of smog (even back in the mid-eighties), a clear sky in Beijing is like nowhere else—I don’t if it’s something about the latitude, having the right small proportion of dust to somehow scatter the light into a different sort of blue, or what, but it’s always good to see. By the time I lived there the big bicycle commutes were a thing of the past, and while it’s only a shot or two the bicycle rush hour scene has a push on the big screen that I didn’t expect but still felt familiar from the auto-centric Beijing forty years later.

fine performances from everyone—it drives home 80s-90s Hollywood racism that we wouldn’t see a lot more of these actors, though there’s a weird world where John Lone follows up his multiple-global-awards-nominated performance here with decades playing Lt. Cmdr. Data (maybe he cashes after the first season along with Denise Crosby). I’m also surprised Wu Tao, who played 15 year-old Puyi, didn’t do anything more. There’s a bit of an easter egg in that director Chen Kaige plays the turbaned, ethnically-ambiguous Imperial Guard captain (thinking of my ex who wanted to learn about her similar ethnic-minority-in-China heritage only for ancestry.com to report she was “100% East Asian”). And hey, it’s Peter O’Toole in 70mm again, less pretty (hard to believe it’s only 25 years between them!) but if anything more dandyish (I actually wore a dress shirt and sport coat to this—a good thing, too, the theater was cold!).

I don’t know if Puyi’s sexuality was general knowledge at the time—as bad as it sounds the straightwashing of Puyi is one thing makes him more relatable. The guy’s life was truly bizarre, sociopathically cruel on an interpersonal level only to learn empathy in his forties and fifties (and by all accounts he was actually rehabilitated, even if it wasn’t as nice a process as depicted here). I’m not sure of the zombie Manchu emperorship was really that much weirder than the various moribund early 20th century European nobilities, but I think inserting mutual desire into Puyi’s marriages is good for the film.

It’s odd they translate one historical figure’s name as Eastern Jewel, which is a literal translation of one of her Chinese names—though I guess it makes sense given the way her character assimilated her background as a Manchu noble into Japanese militarism. The actual person—wikipedia uses Yoshiko Kawashima—is fascinating but I think The Last Emperor’s version hits closer to how most of us would react to actually meeting her: blib and bratty, like any other reactionary. Some of her lines might sound cartoonishly evil without the knowledge that the Japanese were, in fact, that bad. It’s also another gutsy performance from Ryuichi Sakamoto, a war criminal like in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence but arguably more chilling since there’s no psychosexual level underneath like in that film, just pure racial supremacism.


Apocalypse Now. I wasn’t sure about this, but since I’d recently seen A Streetcar Named Desire why not go for a bit more Brando? This is one I’d only seen in AP English after we read Heart of Darkness. In the beginning, with the layered images and dissolves, someone in my class shouted “oh god it’s so seventies” and I have to admit that stuck in my head and I almost laughed during the opening. It’s good, I know I praised being more formally adventurous and expressive in editing in the last of these little summaries I did, and I stand by that, and the editing and visual storytelling of Apocalypse Now is great, but sometimes something just sticks in your head.

This is a real movie for voices, too. Neither Sheen nor Brando really have traditional masculine-hero voices. Dennis Hopper and a couple of the sailors, man, they really got on my nerves, man. I forgot how funny/absurd Kilgore was and how much of that was because he was so specific instead of just having an absurd demeanor (apparently Kilgore was inspired in part by Ariel Sharon, who went swimming in the Red Sea during the Six-Day War). It’s also legitimately exciting to watch, which sort of works in its favor as “anti-war” in that you can feel why they unleashed all that firepower even if you can see it’s plainly wrong.

This is also a wholly American movie—the Vietnamese or Cambodians (well Filipinos) don’t really matter. I think that works here, though, as the Americans are using southeast Asia as a place to live out their own narratives (and avoids the narrative dehumanization of the locals that Chinua Achebe read in Heart of Darkness, even if the behavior from the film’s characters is inherently dehumanizing). Kurtz’s and Willard’s falls aren’t from their removal from modern Western civilization, it’s a way of living out its possibilities in a way that would be “unsound” outside the realm of fiction.


Patton. Given such conflicts as in Ukraine I couldn’t help but think about all the machinery in Apocalypse Now, like everyone was masturbating with the equipment they really wanted to stick into the Fulda gap. Here we “finally” get our war in the Mediterranean and Europe, authored by Coppola in a movie that’s, if not pro-war, at least pro-warrior (another contemporary tie-in—having seen what tank battle’s like via Nagorno-Karabakh footage it’s easy to see how the slapped soldier ended up that way, even before considering we now think that sort of PTSD reaction’s probably in part the response of micro-tears in brain tissue, a literal physical injury). It’s a straightforward classic, and hey another Streetcar toe-in with Karl Malden!

This one wasn’t from Rochester but, via corporate consolidation, the Disney archive of all places. It’s kind of funny because I first saw the earlier parts of this movie as a little kid, late (or at least late by five or six year-old standards) at night with my dad, and it was one of those “oh, this is what grown-up entertainment—and actual war—are like” eye-opening and mind-expanding moments.

Wicked Little Letters 2023
Delightfully foul mouthed movie about a bunch of poison pen letters sent to the upstanding members of a small British community in1920, the scandal they caused, the attempt to railroad a boisterous Irish woman for sending them, and the efforts of a few of her friends to find the real culprit. Great movie, entirely worth watching just to hear the hilariously profane letters read aloud by Oscar winner Olivia Coleman and others.

Arctic Convoy. Pure meat-and-potatoes Norwegian World War II suspense…or it would be if our lead character, the ship’s first officer, weren’t so loathsome. Sure he’s traumatized by being torpedoes last convoy, but he wants to turn tail in what’s as close to a pure good-and-evil struggle as can be found, mostly makes wrong decisions, and keeps the captain (injured in a German attack) drugged on morphine so he can take command and turn the ship back. That’s kind of evil! He does “save the day” in the end, as in he has an idea that rescues them…from a situation they wouldn’t have been in if it weren’t for the uninterrupted string of tactically and morally wrong judgments. It’s not really a turning point for the character, though, and another one point-blank says “I supported your idea, not you.” A rare case where the characters end up more self-aware than the writers, they really needed to figure out a real arc on this one. Otherwise it’s a pretty cool (ha!) movie, though, and good representation for us dark-haired, kind of ugly Scandinavians.

A.I.: Artificial intelligence. I’d never seen this before. Although the nineties (now-)retrofuturism’s part of the appeal, the uncanniness of this film feels very ahead of its time, anticipating Glazer, even, in tone and characterization (especially in the first third, which you can tell is the original SF story). It’s amazing how Osmont and Law can be live-action uncanny, and how Osmont loses that and becomes more human as the film progresses. It’s truly impressive acting and directing.I also love how Jude Law’s “ideal” ladies’ man scans as a bit gay, truly a idealized kind of heterosexuality designed with a specific type of customer in mind and something that reminds you there’s none of the risk that comes with an organic man. The organic kids are pretty believable, not really evil, just not fully able to contextualize David, who lies in an uncanny space between thing (the chubby kid at the pool party, for instance, doesn’t really intend any malice even if he doesn’t treat David like a human—which he isn’t), friend, and rival. Hey, Brendan Gleeson’s great, too (Chris Rock’s cameo is so Chris Rock it briefly jolts you out of the movie, though). ACTRESS is too cute as well, hard for this adult viewer not to read something Oedipal into her and David’s relationship.

You can really tell Robards is Lauren Bacall’s son when from certain angles, too, the spacing of his eys just jumped out of me.

I actually don’t think the film—at least pre-ice age—was neither Kubrick-esque nor maybe aspects of the pre-ice age felt a bit Spielbergian (and his raw craft and ability with child actors specifically). It’s a good third thing, which is to Spielberg’s credit. but it really felt distinct.

It think it’s pretty well-documented that the full story is what Kubrick was originally working from, and it actually doesn’t surprise me so much—he had a lot more range than people appreciate. Spielberg does fall a bit into Kubrick aesthetic homage in the end—hard not to think of Bowman’s trip across the universe during across and into the glacier. There’s a definite thematic echo of Bowman’s simulated environment as David returns home, too, but that’s a thematic rather than aesthetic commonality. The far-future robots are very Spielbergian, though I think it works. I thought of an observation in Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, where he notes that the general profile twentieth-century alien sightings—lithe body, large head, dream-like state—echoes descriptions medieval and early modern visions of the Virgin (you can really see this in some early Dutch painting). That’s a mythology Spielberg dips into, and while I think he knows the feelings described I don’t think that extra level of conscious analysis is intended.

I don’t think it’s intended is the one thing that bothers me about the end. David’s an Adam to these machines, ones that have a sophisticated sense of self and clear ability to invent. I think the movie supports the reading that the ending is a simulation, the Ben Kingsley robot’s explanation his version of a fairy tale (though a straight reading kind of anticipates Interstellar), and a chance for David to finally join his mother in the human experience of death. I’d be more comfortable, though, if that were a little clearer (and, while I don’t think this is supported by the movie at all, I’d prefer it to be an outgrowth of David’s ability to synthesize his memories into fantasy to find a place to fulfill his wants). It’s a legit tearjerker, though, and this movie deserves more than its mixed reputation.

MrsLangdonAlger, I thought it wonderful When I saw it.

“Someday this war's gonna end,” may be the best line, or at least the best delivery, of the movie.  There's almost no value judgment to it, just an acknowledgement that this surreal situation is, and one day, it won't be anymore.

My recollection is that there's actually a line of a newscaster saying "Scientists are calling this phenomenon 'lava'" but I might have just imagined it amidst the unbelievable stupidity of this movie.

My favorite lava fact is that lava is much denser than humans, which means you wouldn't actually sink into it, you'd just float up near the surface, burning!

Borderlands wasn't as bad as reported. I half paid attention to it while doing other things, and it was acceptable background viewing. Thoroughly mid. I couldn't tell you much about what happened.  I wouldn't pay to see it, or give it more than passing attention, but I'd rather watch it 10 times than Rise of Skywalker once.

Too late.