What did you see this week? (and the current "schedule" for movie theaters)
Sunday, June 14, 2020 at 10:00PM 
It has recently come to our attention that y'all miss the part of the weekend box office reports that were essentially a "what did you see this week?" comment party. So let's revive that because who knows when the hell we'll be back in movie theaters. The release dates keep shifting back by a couple of weeks or a couple of months here and there. There are rumors that even West Side Story is vacating the Christmas slot even though filming wrapped up long before the shutdown. Currently here is the wide release schedule...
2020 SCHEDULE STILL LOOKS SOMETHING LIKE THIS THOUGH SUDDEN CHANGES ARE TO BE EVEN MORE EXPECTED THAN USUAL
July 24th - Mulan (lots of people think this will won't happen. We'll see...)
July 31st - Tenet (Tenet was originally thought of as going "first" but now it has ceded that 'honor' to Mulan)
Aug 7th - Spongebob: Sponge on the Run, The Empty Man (horror)
Aug 14th - Bill & Ted Face the Music
Aug 21st - Antebellum (Horror), Let Him Go (Kevin Costner & Diane Lane thriller)
Sept 4th - A Quiet Place Part 2, Honest Thief (Liam Neeson thriller), Monster Hunter (Milla Jovovich action)
Sept 11th - The Conjuring (another sequel)
Sept 18th - The King's Man
Oct 2nd - Wonder Woman 1984 (pushed back two months) and Without Remorse (Tom Clancy action)
Oct 9th - Death on the Nile
Oct 16th - Halloween Kills, Trial of Chicago 7 (Historical Drama)
Nov 6th - Black Widow
Nov 13th - Deep Water (Erotic Thriller)
Nov 20th - Soul (Pixar), No Time to Die
Nov 25th - Happiest Season (Romantic Comedy), Voyagers (Sci-Fi)
Dec 11th - Samaritan (Sly Stallone Action), Free Guy
Dec 18th - Coming 2 America, Dune, West Side Story
Dec 23rd - Top Gun: Maverick
Dec 25th - News of the World (Tom Hanks Western)
SO, MORE IMPORTANTLY, WHAT DID YOU WATCH AT HOME THIS WEEK?
Reader Comments (41)
Bonjour Tristee
Conversation Piece
Panique - best of the week
Tight Spot
Experiment in Terror
Affair in Trinidad
Romancing the Stone
8 Women
Shane
You Can’t Take It With You
And a few more that I can’t think of as I luxuriate in Palm Springs.
First-timers: Peckinpah Suite, Be Water, Upgrade, The Story of a Small Bug, Dave Chappelle: 8:46, and The Housemaid.
Re-watches: Hanna, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, and That Thing You Do!.
Rewatched BASMATI BLUES and YESTERDAY which still hold up after repeat viewings. Now planning to watch SAYONARA thanks to the link Nathaniel gave in a previous post.
I've already raved about Corpus Christi on another thread. I also watched a George's Franju double feature Judex an Eyes Without a Face, the latter a rewatch, and still good, stylish, grisly fun, and still a shocker. Now I need to see The Skin I Live In again!
Well just today I saw NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS. A lovely, stripped down sort of film shot with a lot of empathy.
Then I saw CABARET... for the first time. Minnelli and Fosse are obviously legends, but can we talk about how cute Michael York was?
2nd viewing of the 2015 Macbeth This is a "shame about the script" type film. But I also don't think I've seen a Macbeth that really works for me on the level that a dozen other Shakespeare play/adaptations work for me. But the score and cinematography are stellar.
I saw king of staten island and now i am ready tô
Bel Powley tô be legend! Shes amazing in a really good movie. I would cut about 30 min though
Angels in America. Still six hours and still magnificent.
I had time to watch slow cinema and surprised at how much I needed a different cinematic storytelling.
It Felt Like Love (2013) by Eliza Hittman. Her first film. So exquisitely told and paced. The narrative arc may not be new (coming of age, awareness of teenage sexuality, lust-attraction to the opposite sex) but how it was photographed, mounted, and acted were a thing of beauty. I like this one better than Beach Rats. The lead actress gave me Heather Matarazzo vibes via Welcome to the Dollhouse. Haptic cinema at its purest.
4 Days in France (2016) by Jérôme Reybaud. At first the story is ostensibly queer tourism in the rural interiors of France but Reybaud's film is an exciting intersection of landscape, desire and a different kind of awakening. A Parisian guy named Pierre drove to the rural villages in his Alfa Romeo armed only with his cellphone and a few clothes. His Grindr app is his map to engage in temporary trysts. But he is not really looking for sex as much as a compulsion for human connection. Pierre had so many colorful encounters with the locals -- men and women -- that are by turns surreal, exasperating, and deeply moving. I particularly like his encounter with a former teacher who is now a book seller of niche books somewhere in what author Marc Augé would call a non-place. Reybaud's film approaches the sublime ordinariness we see in films directed by Kelly Reichardt and Tommy Weber.
The Wayward Cloud (2005) by Tsai Ming-liang. Once again roping his regular muse Leng Kang-sheng playing a continuation of his Hsiao-Kang character, TML's story is about a porn actor and a listless woman he encountered in modern-day Taiwan in time of water shortage. There is a lot of winks to previous TML films like when the woman saw Hsiao-Kang for the first time and asked him if he still sells watches (a nod to their last collaboration in TML's What Time Is It There?). Scenes of 'acted' pornography, non-sequitur musical numbers, and long stretches of stillness abound; you don't necessarily watch it for the action scenes but how the scenery unfolds like some form of self-enlightenment. Like most of TML's films, The Wayward Cloud is like a snapshot of everyday life with occasional flights to fanciful and outrageously-costumed and -performed musical numbers. An acquired taste.
Syndromes and a Century (2007) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Much like TML's output, Joe Weerasethakul's film is not about plot but yet another meditation on nature, human connection, and animist spirituality. Monks, hospital care workers and singers populate this cinematic world in rural and urban settings. Also banal conversations, complete song performances, and a lot of walking is the film language employed here but once the rhythm is established, a mesmerising vibe kicks in that can either induce sleep or a heightened awareness of ordinary landscapes. The soundtrack is field recordings + industrial sound.
Bonjour Tristesse (1958) by Otto Preminger. This is like chamber music: so intimate, small scale life with timeless resonance. Jean Seberg's near incandescence perfectly captures Cecile's archness and insouciance. Beautiful colors, vivid characters, plus a cameo from Juliette Greco singing the title track. Compared to the slow films I watched, this one has a plot and a narrative structure that works diegetically. I found the David Niven character slightly creepy and disturbing though despite having good chemistry with Seberg, Deborah Kerr and Mylène Demongeot.
Hearts of Darkness A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
Cloverfield
Up next: Da 5 Bloods
Rewatched Paper Moon. Utterly delightful.
Great to see this feature again! What a responsive website.
I raved in another thread already about "Eyes Without a Face" (1960) which i saw at the beginning of the weekend. It will easily be one of my top 5 first views this month. No question.
Just finished another film in my personal at home Queer FF.. "A Moment in the Reeds" (2017) which i had missed at Frameline 2 yrs ago. It's a sweet, kinda standard young love story between 2 young men who face homophobia in their families. A low budget two-hander w/ a fair amount of improvised dialog. So pretty standard FF fare, but sweet. A Finnish student is home from Paris to help his dad fix up their cabin and meets young day laborer from Syria. Hot sauna times await. NathanielR-- it's Norweigian-adjacent enough that you might like. Did they have saunas in Norway too? Lots of talk about the beautiful summers and depressing dark winters.
I watched Quiz the AMC miniseries about a game show cheating scandal. Helen McCroy is quite good.
I watched Elles with Juliette Binoche
Fourteen - This is such a great film. I definitely recommend it.
Never Sometimes Always
I love how many of us randomly saw Bonjour Tristesse this weekend (I also saw it this weekend).
I'm really pysched for the eventual return of movie theaters, but I will say - this pause has been good for playing catch-up and re-watching old favorites. In the last week, I watched:
Out of Sight: Perfect movie, still holds up. Still the best that J-Lo has ever been.
To Be or Not to Be (1942): Really funny. Lombard amazing, Robert Stack gorgeous.
Kiki's Delivery Service: A gap in my Miyazaki list, and such a peaceful, calming movie.
25th Hour: I'd never seen this, and wonder if it's not a little overrated.
Professor Spouse was stressed and wanted comfort food this weekend, so we watched STEEL MAGNOLIAS. I definitely appreciate it a lot more than I did the first time I saw it, but it was maybe not the best choice as I'm going through some stuff as a mother. Wonderful Bechdel movie, though.
A SECRET LOVE was so, so amazing. I thought it would be sad or infuriating. It wasn't. It was perfect.
STUDIO 54 (2018 documentary) was good, but very slanted about its subject. I have many opinions.
GRACE OF MY HEART was another of the professor's comfort movies. I had never seen it. It's good but it's been a week and I've already forgotten it.
"Chariots of Fire" (1981) which has aged well. 'Victim" (1961) a landmark of gay cinema which still work as thriller - was Dirk Borgarde nominated for an Oscar? '"The Fan" (1981) on blu ray from Scream Factory- it's worth buying just for the hysterical commentary track
Yay, it's back! And I've seen so many good suggestions here.
As I mentioned earlier, my favorite discovery of the last few weeks is I Know Where I'm Going, an early Powell & Pressburger film. It's not perfect but pretty amazing considering it was probably completed during the war. It was nice to see Wendy Hiller (not their first choice) in a leading role, and a leading man I'd never seen before. I guess it fell into obscurity because it couldn't compete with Brief Encounter which I think came out the same year? This one is "happy" not sad, and also it has some of the same sort of magical/spiritual stuff in it that was going around at the time. Think Going My Way, Ghost & Mrs. Muir, The Bishop's Wife, It's A Wonderful Life, etc.
I also managed to tackle a rewatch of New York, New York which I had not seen since it came out. I remember being sort of bitterly (though not completely) disappointed with it when it came out. In this rewatch, I was thinking for a long time that all the movie needed was a title card at the beginning talking about bipolar disorder and PTSD. I DO think that would help, but ultimately the movie is completely undone by the structure and/or editing.
The first two hours are kind of a wan cinderella story about "making it" in the music biz. Robert De Niro is great but no one cares about his saxophone playing. There's lots of verbal and physical abuse, blech. Eventually the final hour has Liza's rise to stardom with a perplexing hour of great musical numbers.
This movie needs a complete rethought. I wish Scorcese would blow up his timeline and pace out the musical numbers so they come once every hour. I don't see any reason why you couldn't have a flashback style to the movie, or just outright blow up the timeline a la Pulp Fiction of Little Women.
Right now the movie is less than the sum of the parts, and the parts are terrific,
Re-watching The Sopranos, which is as entertaining, engaging and artistic as any film. Gets better as it goes along, too.
I watched Shadow on the Wall with Ann Sothern and Zachary Scott and a pre-Reagan Nancy Davis. Gigi Perreau is so good. How did I not know who she was?
Love seeing this feature again!
I've started watching the films featured in "Tell Me: Women Filmmakers, Women's Stories" on Criterion Channel. Every film I've seen so far has been compelling, but Betty Tells Her Story was the most moving. All of the films have made me think about how women's roles have changed and how they have not. I am going to watch everything included in this feature.
Also on Criterion Channel, I watched I Am Waiting, a melancholy Japanese noir. I loved the tone and will seek out other films by the director, Koreyoshi Kurahara.
I saw Lore on Kanopy and wasn't sure how I felt about it, but ultimately found it interesting to see a new perspective from Germany on WWII.
Via TCM, I rewatched Royal Wedding and The Women, old comfort food, and I also rewatched Nora Ephron's debut, This Is My Life, to follow along with the Blank Check miniseries. It deserves to be so much better known.
On tv, I finished Mindy Kaling's Netflix sitcom, Never Have I Ever, and Quiz on AMC. Both were okay. I have been watching Schitt's Creek as well and love it. Catherine O'Hara needs to win the Emmy.
I actually did return to movie theatres this week. One opened nearby (middle of nowhere small town midwest) and I ended up going. I felt pretty safe since there was at most three other people in the large auditorium and I had a mask on/blanket down on the seat. Went to Forrest Gump, Beetlejuice, and Saving Private Ryan, none of which I had seen in theatres. All really memorable experiences and it was so wonderful to be back. I'm still pretty hesitant about a more crowded auditorium such as what we would probably get for Mulan/Tenet.
At home, I watched Da Five Bloods, The Little Stranger, and M. Da Five Bloods is well worth watching - gets messy in the last hour, but I think it's going to sit well with me and improve on rewatch. The Little Stranger is underrated and deserves better than it got. M was very chilling and it was so interesting to see what its influenced.
********OSCARS ARE NOW DELAYED TIL APRIL 2021!!!********
I didn't watch as much as I wanted, but from Sunday (6/7) to Sunday (6/14) this is what I got through:
The Queen (1968)
The First Wives Club (1996)
Something”s Gotta Give (2003)
French Kiss (1995)
An Unmarried Woman (1978)
Da 5 Bloods (2020)
The Hunt (2020)
365 Days (2020)
All were first time viewings with the exception of An Unmarried Woman, which I was really happy to finally revisit thanks to Criterion.
365 Days is a hilariously ridiculous Fifty Shades knock-off that I had a lot of fun watching on Netflix. The plot is reprehensible, but I gotta admit it was also pretty hot.
David - and the eligibility window will include films opening in January/February!!!
I watched Star Trek The Motion Picture. It was better than I remembered. Also began watching the series Castle Rock. So far so good.
Rewatched In Her Shoes. Toni and Shirley were fabulous and Cameron Diaz would have been on my ballot for Best Actress that year.
The Eddy on Netflix. I don't give a damn what critics say, this is a fantastic show. What will it take to get people to watch this one and Giri/Haji over the fukking Tiger King?
Also, Knives Out with the family. Super thrilled to hear my oldest say that Toni Collette is a goddess and her favorite actress. She's got great taste.
Watched "I Am Not Your Negro" at home, which was moving and fascinating structurally. Then did a social distanced outdoor movie projected on friend's garage door for his kids--JJ Abrams "Star Trek"--which we all found entertaining and just right for sitting out under the stars with a cocktail (the adults) and some yelling back at the screen (everyone).
Shirley on Hulu
Watched the Blu-ray of Life of Pi. The shots on the water & on the island really are a marvel to look at. Reaffirmed that I never want to share a boat with a savage tiger.
Had to get my fix and I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Always a joy to experience. Melinda Dillon certainly is great to watch. Teri Garr as the bewildered wife and Richard Dreyfuss is so energetic. Glad it was awarded Best Cinematography!
My watching was Smackdown related (THE HOURS and CHICAGO) and DA 5 BLOODS.
Citizen Ruth for the first time. Triple pleasure of Laura Dern, Swoosie Kurtz & Mary Kay Place :)
I also watched High Life.
My family of six is having a Cate Blanchett festival at home all. We’ve seen Notes on a Scandal, Veronica Guerin, Paradise Road, An Ideal Husband, Hanna, and Benjamin Button in a span of three days.
Today we watched some episodes of an Australian tv show called Stateless, where Cate has a supporting role. She plats the partner of a cult leader and she sings and dances! What a delight. I wonder whether this show will ever be shown in America, The Handmaid Tale’s Yvonne Strahovski is actually the lead.
We still have a long way to go and hopefully, we get to see all before we all go back to work or school.
'Doubt' with its magnificent cast.
I had a ticket to see The King of Staten Island but at the last minute the filmmakers pulled it from theaters and drive ins, even though Apatow was promoting seeing it at drive in on his social media. Still waiting for an explanation for that buffoonery. So I saw Sometimes Always Never instead and now I know how to/not to button a coat and oh my god, Scrabble?
Da 5 Bloods ***** / A+
Artemis Fowl ** / D
Fellini's 8 12 ***** / A+
The Hidden Fortress ***** / A
Bad Education (HBO) ** 1/2 / D
Reality Z (Brazilian remake of Charlie Brooker's Dead Set) ** 1/2 / D
The Danish Girl ***** / A
Cats *** 1/2 / C+ (seriously, flawed but actually good and even interesting? WTF is wrong with reviewers nowadays? Can't they praise the will to make something unique, brave and different? Are we going to stick to the mainstream?)
I finally saw VICTIM, the very early gay movie starring Dirk Bogarde. I think I had avoided it for years because I could never find a good print of it and I really wanted to give it a proper viewing.
They showed it on TCM and it looked really good. The really surprising thing to me is that I enjoyed it as a movie. A sort of minor thriller with police procedural elements. It was well filmed and didn't look nearly as cheap as I was expecting.
You can't really judge the film by today's standards, but for the time it must have been shocking. A few of the supporting characters are actually sympathetic to gay people as in "they can't help the way they're made." Bogarde has to be "sin free" and just struggling with his attraction, but that's good enough for the times since I know a lot of people still like that even now.
Hannibal (Series) rewatch, halfway through, great show.