List with No Name #16

7 thoughts on “List with No Name #16”

1. Underrated movies the lot of ’em! Only I haven’t seen Krull and Nothing but Trouble! Love the Cimino, the Wong Kar Wai and the Richard Kelly :) Oh, and the Altman was a recent discovery — a sweet one at that! (classic song, “He Needs Me,” used perfectly in Punch Drunk Love — wonder if that was Anderson’s choice (I mean, hey, the guy obviously loves Altman’s films) or if it was John Brion’s (knowing that Anderson loves Altman))

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   1. Nothing But Trouble fascinated me enough as a kid to watch it again several times as an adult. It’s grotesque, bizarre, unnerving, strange, ugly…there’s almost nothing redeeming about it. But it’s fascinating in all its ugly failure.

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      1. I had a similar experience with another one of Richard Kelly’s films: Southland Tales, which was distressful and, yet, somehow, fascinating to watch — worth the watch. For me, it’s another underrated movie.

         Movies can thrive on complications. I am thinking of the films of Dreyer (like Gertrud and Ordet) and Lynch (Wild at Heart and Inland Empire especially). Literature too: Kafka could turn unwieldy run-on sentences into whirling and entrancing phantasmagoric reading experiences; among others, Samuel Beckett and Pynchon, too, were masters of this sort.

         Any way… I just wikipedia’d “Nothing but Trouble” and I have a Harold Lloyd feature from 1918 a 1944 Laurel and Hardy… and, who’da’thunk Aykroyd for a director–ever!–, from 1991. Which one, if any?

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         1. Love Southland Tales—-I actually wrote about it here: https://biblioklept.org/2008/03/23/southland-tales/

            Love Inland Empire too—don’t know why so many professed Lynch fans haven’t seen it (I wrote about it here: https://biblioklept.org/2007/08/27/inland-empire/ ).

            The Nothing But Trouble I reference is the ’91 version with Aykroyd at helm—where he almost certainly shouldn’t be.

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            1. I just read your Southland Tales and I have read your review of Inland Empire before. In fact, I greatly admire that review. It was the first I ever read that made mention of the significance of Grace Zabriskie’s gypsy-spell-casting, which was something that clicked for me the second time I saw the movie.

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2. I watched Heaven’s Gate for the first time on the new Criterion Blu Ray recently. Between the sometimes barely audible dialog and the vague and beige characters, I had trouble getting into the film. If the film wasn’t gorgeous I wouldn’t have made it through it. The film looks amazing, the production value is apparent in every scene. Sadly, to the point of head shaking or hilarity, the movie completely falls apart in the last few scenes after the 3 hour and 15 minute build up. I feel the story behind the film and the documentary associated with it, Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate, make it a more interesting entry in film history.

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   1. I think you’re right about the documentary adding depth or other layers of meaning to HG. And yeah, it pretty much falls apart. But I still think it’s a wonderful and weird film.

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