skimpole
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Posts posted by skimpole
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I suspect I've mentioned this before, but the problem I always had with The Fugitive is why is Harrison Ford able to find out his wife's murderer when he is a desperate fugitive, but unable to find him when he had a high-powered expensive legal team awaiting trial.
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I saw four movies last week. No End had interesting aspects, but like Kieslowski's three colours trilogy, it didn't make that great an impression on me. The Prince of Tides was much less impressive: melodramatic and contrived in places. La Cage Aux Folles was not a particularly good film. Dave Kehr has written it is amusing, but it would be much better if the director had a proper sense of timing. Indeed, one can see how inadequate the timing is as one watches the movie. It strikes me as more a way for audience viewers to celebrate their tolerance (it was made in 1979) as opposed to being a particularly brilliant farce. And was it supposed to be un-letterboxed? Finally, there's The Men who Tread on the Tiger's Tail, an early Kurosawa movie based on a Japanese legend. It's actually fairly good, although it's also rather short (it's under an hour) and hardly as weighty as his later movies.
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I saw three movies last week. The Grim Reaper was not enough to hold my interest as I was working on other matters as it played in the background. Portrait of Jason was much more interesting, even if I didn't quite catch the end. The portrait of a black homosexual (stereotypically effeminiate at the time), would have gotten more attention at the time than it does now, but the documentary did have a certain power. La Promesse, not actually the Dardenne Brothers first film, or even their first fiction film, but their first second film, in which their style of their future films becomes clear, is an interesting and compelling film. But I agree with Stuart Klawans that the protagonist's decency is a little too easily obtained.
I should also remind myself that I rewatched Nostalghia.
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The prime-time lineup for Tuesday, January 26, 2016 pays tribute to the trio receiving honorary awards from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences next month. ...At 10:15 p.m. is "A Woman Under the Influence" (1974), which stars Gena Rowlands in arguably her greatest film role. It was written and directed by her late husband, John Cassavetes.
Then at 1:00 a.m., there's Spike Lee's debut feature "She's Gotta Have It" (1986), which introduced Lee's Mars Blackmon character -- a familiar figure in a subsequent series of popular Nike commercials.
I hope Canada gets to see these movies. A Woman Under the Influence was shown on TCM and TCM Canada back in 2006, but the last time it appeared on TCM it was blacked out in Canada. The first week seems interesting, with Joseph Losey's M, Divine Madness and I believe the TCM premiere of Muriel, which certainly has in my view the best actress of 1963, Delphine Seyrig.
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Here are some links: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/postscript-chantal-akerman
http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2015/10/chantal-akerman-le-patron.html
http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/193985/chantal-akerman-1950-2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/movies/chantal-akerman-resolutely-upending-the-ordinary.html?_r=0
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Personally, I think They Won't Forget is, in contrast with I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Exhibit A in how the Code neutered American film. One reason was that the Code prohibited films that would put the administration of justice into disrepute, which included showing perversions of justice on film. So the movie waffles on the Frank's character innocence, and doesn't even give the two main suspects a motive for murdering Lana Turner. It also smarmily equates the anti-Semitic prejudice that led to Frank's murder with the "anti-southern prejudice" that objected to his lynching. Having Rains' character at the end speculating that the Frank character may not have been guilty is also contemptible.
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One of the reasons I'm somewhat unenthusiastic about John Ford's claims to be one of the great directors was that his comic relief never really worked for me. McCarey and Hitchcock were clearly funnier, and we're just dealing with the limited set of directors who were conservative Catholics.
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I'm going to suggest there's a difference between movies where the romantic effect depends on its ultimate failure--Days of Heaven comes to mind, and so does Annie Hall and In the Mood for Love--and those were you are angry at the injustice keeping the lovers apart, like Tess.
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Congratulations Speedracer.
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I'm voting for Bogie56
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I saw six movies over the last three weeks. Goodbye to Language is certainly worth watching, even if as a complex modernist film it has no narrative, or at least no obvious one. And the version I saw wasn't in 3D. Wind over the Everglades is not my favorite Nicholas Ray film. It has some of the themes of his other movies, in this case an outlaw element (a group of ruthless bird poachers) who have some attractiveness before they meet their inevitable comeuppance. As an exploration of turn of the century Florida, it's less compelling than The Lusty Men. The Big Country, which I saw the following night, is kind of odd since Burl Ives plays a similar character to the one he plays in Wind (he won the 1958 best supporting actor oscar, and while not bad, he can't hold a candle to Orson Welles in Touch of Evil). I'm not the biggest of western fans, but there are interesting themes in this William Wyler directed film (such as a duel sequence which if not up to the standard of Barry Lyndon is worth looking at in its own right. Scenes from City Life is a 1935 Chinese film by Yuan Muzhi, director of the later and more successful Street Angel which I watched earlier this year. It has some amusing touches, although it doesn't really present a realistic picture of 1930s Shanghai, and Street Angel is the more interesting film. True Love by contrast can be clearly dismissed as a failure. Aside from the coarse language and sexual overtones this portrait of a disastrous Italian-American marriage is shallower than many sitcoms and never moves beyond stereotypes. There is nothing that shows the insight of Killer of Sheep, My Brother's Wedding or To Sleep with Anger. (And seriously what groom is so moronic that he doesn't realize he's supposed to spend his wedding night with his wife?) Clearly the movie of the last three weeks is Hard to be a God, Alexei German's final film, an absolutely brilliant sci-fi film about a medieval planet with truly brilliant misc-en-scene and complex, elaborate tracking shots with obvious relavance to Russian history.
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Although Lina Lamont is a horrible person, I have no real desire to see her lose in Singin' in the Rain.
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I expected The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions to be considerably better than they actually were, based on what I saw from the original The Matrix.
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Though I understand why people would consider Vertigo such a movie. It is unquestionably one of the greatest of all movies, and one finds oneself constantly returning to its themes, the supernatural mystery that turns two thirds of the way through the movie into something more common and brutal and then turns into something again more disturbing and sinister. "(The story is, among other things, a template for how Hitchcock makes a borrowed story his own.) The irrepressible allure of Hitchcock’s visual extravagance—his baroque swirl of caustic greens, voluptuous purples, acidic yellows, and fiery reds, and the indecent glare of daylight—conjures a torrent of unconscious desires beyond the realm of dramatic machinations; his happy ending, of health restored and crime punished, resembles an aridly monastic renunciation." Richard Brody
And yet there are other movies which have a greater emotional effect on me.
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I'm thinking less of movies about obsession, than about romantic movies that you feel intensely about.
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What romantic movies, whether good or not, or happy or not, have an obsessive quality in your imagination?
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Inigo: HELLO! MY NAME IS INIGO MONTOYA! YOU KILLED MY FATHER! PREPARE TO DIE!
[inigo corners Count Rugen, knocks his sword aside, and slashes his cheek, giving him a scar identical to Inigo's]
Inigo: Offer me money.
Count Rugen: Yes!
Inigo: Power, too, promise me that. [He slashes his other cheek]
Count Rugen: All that I have and more. Please.
Inigo: Offer me everything I ask for.
Count Rugen: Anything you want... [Rugen knocks Inigo's sword aside and lunges, but gets his arm caught by Inigo, who stabs his sword into Rugen's stomach]
Inigo: [Very quietly] I want my father back, you son of a ****. [He drives his sword through Count Rugen and then shoves him back against the table. Rugen falls to the floor, dead]
The Princess Bride
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Skimpole, I find the ending of PARIS, TEXAS horrific, as an innocent boy is taken from a stable home at the beginning to be given to a woman who has shown no signs of interest in him, or in being a mother.
Perhaps. But sometimes with love stories you need a little faith.
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I'd like to see some Rivette on TCM.
So would I
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As part of the sitcom that inspired this post in the first place, one of its qualities was that one characters's love was assumed to be so overwhelmingly powerful and true that the other two members of the triangle supposedly had no choice to submit it once they realized its existence. Which was understandably very annoying if you thought that it was the other two characters who actually had the genuine love.
The larger point I wish to raise is that while a love story ordinarily focuses on the relationship between the lovers, it would be possible to make a movie in which one character's love is so overwhelming that the other has no choice but to submit. Instead of focusing on the relationship, our sympathies would be with the character and wishing the other character realized the purity or intensity or whatever of the love offered.
Now the one reason why film makers ordinarily don't do this is that the most famous example of this is probably Vertigo. Does anyone need a spoiler warning for this? But of course James Stewart thinks he is an romantic relationship, when actually he is a fall guy in a cruel conspiracy. His obsession, and Kim Novak's guilt leads him to continue the affair, which of course ends in disaster? Can anyone think of a movie that tried to use this pattern mentioned above for a happy ending. There are romantic movies that focus overwhelmingly on one character. But Paris, Texas, the first example that comes to mind, is about a husband saying goodbye, not getting back together.
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"In the new disaster blockbuster 'The Towering Inferno,' each scene of a person horribly in flames is presented as a feat for our delectation. The picture practically stops for us to say, 'Yummy, that’s a good one!'"
Pauline Kael: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1974/12/30/a-magnetic-blur
"It asks us to believe that this tallest building in the world—a golden glass tower that’s a miracle of flimsiness, as it turns out—would have been set down in San Francisco, of all places....But then this is a movie in which Fred Astaire, as escort to Jennifer Jones, needs a rented tuxedo."
Yes, I remember being affected by The Towering Inferno when I saw it in two parts, the first half or so in 1981, and then it altogether sometime in the mid-nineties. I remember it being scheduled on TCM some time in 2007, but not successfully shown in Canada or since then. But Kael is dead right, as she usually was on a certain class of meretricious films.
Death on the Nile is a sentimental favorite, and its one advantage over Murder on the Orient Express is that its murder is a very clever piece of slight of hand. One might think it would be a better movie, since it's more visually open and more interesting things happen. But while Peter Ustinov gives a superb performance, Albert Finney is better and the cast in Murder is consistently better, while the script in Death is clearly lazier. And the introduction in Murder and the reenactment of the murder are very good indeed. (The music is better too.)
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East of Eden strikes me as clearly the best of his three performances, so it's clear that he had plenty of potential. The problem is finding great directors who more often that not are the creators of great performances. One could start with Kazan: A Face in the Crowd and Wild River strike me as promising, though I suppose he would be a bit old for Splendor in the Grass. I suppose it's conceivable to see him as Norman Bates in Psycho, and conceivably the Rod Taylor and Sean Connery roles in The Birds and Marnie. Among other great performances of the sixties one can imagine him as the protagonist in The Hustler and Two for the road. One can imagine a lot lesser work as well.
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2001: A Space Odyssey is not a musical, yet it arguably has the greatest synthesis of music and film in the history of the movies.
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Yellow Submarine was a great 1968 musical. In fact, it's my favorite movie. While I actually like musicals, and prefer them to westerns for example, few songs actually have any particularly great emotional impact on me. And since "Yellow Submarine," "Eleanor Rigby," and "All you Need is Love" are among my 100 favorite songs, that makes the movie particularly encouraging.
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Plot Holes
in General Discussions
Posted
"As for THE FUGITIVE, My guess would be that attorneys, no matter how high-powered, and despite what you often see on TV, aren't really trained well to investigate crimes, and since Ford's character essentially had nothing to lose, would be able to acquire pertinent info that wouldn't get kicked out of court on some technicality as it would if his lawyers obtained it in those questionable ways. Remember, one BIG piece of evidence Ford's character got was what he found AFTER breaking into the one-armed guy's apartment."
I'm sorry, but I'm not convinced. After all, the defense team in Reversal of Fortune is a lot more proactive. And it's not as if Ford's discovery takes a great deal of work. He basically looks up people who need their prosthetic limb reattached, a fairly simple search that his lawyers could have conducted themselves. (And considering that he faces the death penalty, you would think his lawyers could take a few more risks.)