Orpheus

Tonight I'm watching Jean Cocteau's "Orphée" from 1950.

Let's get a thread going about some serious European kino.

This looks interesting, fantasy is not really my thing but if it's drawing greek mythology and not elves and pixies, i'm down.

Will reccomend italian film Wages of Fear if you haven't seen it.

Yeah, all I know about this picture is that it will be "fantasy" enough at least to have interactions with a personification of death (but the setting is modern).

A clever line just now: Introducing Orpheus, who is a poet and disliked by other poets.
He says, "The public adores me", to which his one friend replies, "The public is alone".

The best telling of this story is Shredder Orpheus.

Sounds like the other poet is bringing the bants. That's a weirdly phrased sentence though, like it's supposed to have a secondary meaning that the public is not just alone in thinking much of him, but alone in general.

so does he get his head cut off and chucked down a river?

No, but he gets stupid-kidnapped. By which I mean he gets kidnapped in that sort of non-violent way where a number of escalating alarming revelations should tell him that he should run, but he just keeps trying to ask, "What's going on?!"

About halfway through this, the car stops for a train and I'm like, "Why aren't you jumping out and running?!"

Huh, now that they've introduced Orpheus's wife, I just noticed that that isn't her in the poster.
The poster has him cuddling with death.

Kino as fuck, this shot.

Especially since he walks past and steps on the little bootie while saying the line.

And this year's winner of the Josef Mengele award for excellence in Jewishness goes to…

Supernatural stalkers are kind of a turn-on for me.

Wow, so this is really one of those movies where only the supporting characters are remotely decent human beings.

Death kills Orpheus's wife because she's got the hots for him, and then as soon as Orpheus finds this out, he's like, "Oh shit, really?"

So I'm pretty sure that that went a lot differently from the greek legend even though they still hit the high points.

Like, they (being the underworld bureaucracy) put the curse on orpheus's wife where if he looks at her she'll be "lost forever", but she knows that he prefers death over her, so she intentionally causes him to look at her in a mirror.

Although then, when Orpheus himself dies, Death does this really impassioned version of her speech for new servants where she's usually just like "will you obey me", but then she starts throwing in, "What if I condemned you!? Tortured you?!"

like wow kid your probably the only person who has ever seen this movie before

Can't tell if sarcasm.

I'd literally never heard of it, BUT its criterion collection, BUT does that really mean anything?

Where are my Rossellini niggas at?

Is it me or does she look like a mannequin.

Also, I wanted to ask you guys for a movie but I wasn't sure if it deserved it's own thread. Should I start a thread or just ask here?

Do you have any criteria other than being a movie?

And no, I don't think that's a mannequin. The woman is just exceedingly French.

So I looked ahead in my watch list, and my next two movies are also french, so I guess I'll keep using this thread for a while.

Tonight I'm watching Georges Franju's "Eyes Without a Face"; French horror kino about a woman who gets a face transplant.

Her mask was apparently the inspiration for Mike Meyer's and the violence and gore are said to be unflinching yet not exploitative.

Okay, right off the bat, I had to stop and share the opening music, which I can't tell if its amazing or amazingly bad.

This did happen to be attached to the full movie on youtube if anyone wanted to watch it, I suppose.

So in my reading I heard that somebody gets torn apart by dogs in this movie, and just now when someone was parking their car, you could hear the barking of a kennel throughout the garage.

I don't know if they'll return to the dogs before the big scene with them, but that's a good way to set up a payoff without creating Chekhov's dog.

Mask-girl a cute

Y'know, I knew I'd eat those words.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

This scene is just so slow and meticulous, and there's no score.
There's not even any exaggerated squishy sounds of the cutting and scraping.

Have you ever cut into a porkchop or steak? It's much the same.

This seemed a little different. More like removing wrapping that's been stuck on with adhesive without damaging it.
They were really getting under there with the forceps.

A good line just now: They'd alluded to the surgeon father being a control freak. In the first scene where we see the daughter with her new face, he tells her to smile and she does, but then he raises his hand and says, "Not too much".

Woo, Chekhov's dogs!

Sounds like the last name of a French poet.

Y'know, now that you say that, I don't know if they say Orpheus' last name in the movie.
The movie has him as kind of this rockstar poet (very french concept), and people who recognize him are just like, "Its Orphee!", like he's Elvis.

Sorry what I meant to say was can you help me find a movie. The movie is from the 50's or 40's and it's about a guy who hears a voice claiming to be God on the radio and people get freaked out about it. It was supposed to be philosophical or something.

Well, there's a 1950 movie about the whole WORLD hearing radio broadcasts from god called "The Next Voice You Hear…", which has Nancy Reagan in it.

Thank you.

Tonight I'm watching 1970's "My Night at Maud's", by Eric Rohmer.

Read about this a couple of days ago and it gave me the impression that the whole movie is just two people talking or something.

Okay, I'm starting to get a feel for this movie.

It has been almost entirely people talking, but they've introduced Maud, and she's straight-up classy/sexy waifu material who may or may not be trying to seduce the protagonist who's this big catholic wet blanket.

Correction: The protagonist who's this big THICK catholic wet blanket.

oh my god.
Spoilers: SHE LIED. THERE WAS NO "NEXT ROOM" TO SLEEP IN.

I don't really know how to feel about this movie. I don't think I've ever watched anything that was so overwhelmingly french.
I also don't have any basis for judging whether any of the characters were acting weird or just being very french.

The whole thing WAS talking, and I guess it was reasonable complicated after all those conversations stack up, but at the same time, there's no climax or central conflict that gets resolved

I mean, you COULD claim the conflict was the main character's desire to get married, which gets resolved, but his much greater conflict is the contradiction between his religiosity and his desire to pursue women. (perhaps resolved by confession?)

Also, Maud was super-hot throughout. Not even in a vulgar sex-pot kind of way, but in a "Smiling while you talk like we have a secret" kind of way.

Jesus, ANOTHER french film tonight, so I'll save this thread from the abyss, I guess.

...

Whoops, hit enter and it posted.

So tonight I'm watching "No Fear, No Die" from 1990, which is apparently about niggers training game-cocks.

Jesus, that's the mother of all George Takai "Oh My" lines.