skimpole
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Posts posted by skimpole
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I saw four movies this week. They were all interesting, even if none attracted my full attention. Torment and Miss Julie were both interesting movies, even if the hysterical undertone didn't quite cohere. Norte, the end of History is a Filipino film which is sort of an adaptation of Crime and Punishment. The movie, at four hours long, is an example of "slow cinema." There are long static shots where the camera doesn't move. Unlike in Ozu, there are few if any closeups. Essentially the Raskolnikov character is considerably more annoying than in the original novel, and does a lot more damage. Since I haven't been in the best of health that may have influenced my lack of enthusiasm about it. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a stylish vampire movie, which takes place in Southern California but where everyone speaks Farsi and looks Persian. It's shot in an interesting, but not fully realized black and white style. It needs more depth (and we never learn why there's a ravine full of corpses in the town.)
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I watched the ending of Darling Lili but quite frankly didn't get it. Did Rock Hudson lead an aerial attack on Julie Andrews' train. How did he ever know she was there or that she was in danger on it? Did he somehow get killed but come back in time for the ending? And why did Andrews' German superiors turn on her, other than to solve the problem of asking for sympathy for a German spy. And if people knew she was a spy, why did they all attend her postwar concert?
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I saw five movies this week. Lubitsch in Berlin is a perfectly adequate documentary about Lubitsch's early career. The actual Lubitsch movie I saw, Anna [not Anne) Boleyn is a rare drama, with Boleyn considerably more blameless than the actual queen. There are some interesting touches, and Emil Jannings certainly presents the king's lethal charisma. The Song of the Sea was nominated for an oscar as best animated movie this year. As such this film based on celtic mythology has some interesting stylistic touches. On the other hand the movie could be better (it has an uninspired older brother resentful of little sister plot). Darling Lili may be one of Blake Edwards' favorite movies, but it's too long and cumbersome. Apparently it was the studio's idea that it should be a ridiculously long roadshow musical: this is the rare example of a director's cut that is shorter than the released movie (by at least half an hour). The obvious point of comparison with Star! is Funny Girl. And it's easy to see why Star! suffers by the comparison. There isn't a really great song in the movie, or one that really reflects Gertrude Lawrence's emotional state. And since her romantic interest changes every half an hour in a three hour movie, there is a lack of emotional focus, so Andrews' performance suffers in comparison with Streisand.
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Just following up with a few lastshown dates:
@ cteddiesgirl
Show Boat (1929)
2009-04
Feudin', Fussin', and A-Fightin' (1948)
2009-04
@ skimpole
Death takes a Holiday (1934)
2005-12
The Godfather (1972) & The Godfather, Part II (1974)
2006-08
@ midnight08
Go Into Your Dance (1935)
2007-01
Mammy (1930)
no matches
Wonder Bar (1934)
2007-06
Wonderbar is directed by Lloyd Bacon and also stars Kay Francis, Dick Powell, and Guy Kibbee.
Go into Your Dance also starred Ruby Keeler, Glenda Farrell, Barton MacLane, and Phil Regan in a small role. I too would like to see these films, as they feature other people I follow.
Moviecollector, would you be able to know how often TCM has played Star! and Thoroughly Modern Millie? I'm vaguely interested in watching them and Darling Lili, but I don't have the time to watch all three on Friday, and I was wondering whether it would be likely that the two would come back on TCM.
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I think there's one fan of Jolson left - she's 109 and lives in Powdersville, South Carolina.
Hallelujah I'm a bum actually holds up pretty well. In other matters, Spirited Away was shown as part of TCM oscars in February 2006. Canadians didn't get to see it. Have Americans been able to see it since.
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Well my favorite movie of all time is Yellow Submarine, so I would probably choose that. But I'm strongly tempted to choose The Traveling Players because I would really like to see it again, and it isn't on region 1 DVD.
As for Riefenstahl, I think Stuart Klawans' comments in his review of I am Cuba are particularly germane:
Why not go all the way, then, and try looking at the film from the Castro-has-failed point of view? Let's say for the sake of argument that nothing was ever worthwhile about I Am Cuba, except for its flamboyance. By effecting that divorce between style and subject matter, we would be treating [director Mikhail] Kalatozov more or less as certain critics treat Leni Riefenstahl. Are the two in fact equivalent? Would we have any valid reason--other than a belief in the good intentions of one and the bad of the other--for justifying Kalatozov's propaganda but not Riefenstahl's?
Actually, I think there's something to be said for good intentions. Put the worst possible construction on Kalatozov's film. Claim that it promoted a dictatorial regime that betrayed and bankrupted the Cuban people; you will still have to admit that I Am Cuba was meant to defend the Cubans' right to govern themselves, in conditions that would allow the poor to become a little less wretched. Judged in that way, Kalatozov's faults are essentially aesthetic misdemeanors--sentimentality, overstatement, tone-deafness. (He did not commit the graver crime of hero worship; Castro is mentioned a couple of times in I Am Cuba, and that's it.) Now put the best possible construction on Triumph of the Will. Claim that Riefenstahl was improbably naive and failed to foresee the ends of Nazism; you will still have to admit that Triumph of the Will was meant to praise the force of arms, the glories of regimentation and the inherent goodness of the Aryan race, all embodied in the figure of the Great Leader. Unlike Kalatozov, Riefenstahl was so deft that she committed almost no aesthetic missteps; but politicallly, h0r masterpiece is one giant felony.
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TCM has shown The Godfather before. And apparently it has shown Death takes a Holiday, though I don't know when it last showed it.
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I saw three movies this week. The Edward Dmytryk Obsession starts off interestingly, but it sort of bogs down once the police enter the scene and pursue Robert Newton to his inevitable fate. It occurs to me a conclusion was also the problem I had with Crossfire and The Caine Mutiny. The version of Mikey and Nicky was hardly the best, and it's apparently shorter than some versions. But it's still an intelligent and thoughtful movie about two friends in a somewhat corrupt New York milieu when everything starts to fall apart. Obviously different, except in terms of quality, The doll is another charming Lubitsch movie, this time with a more charming female lead, while the male lead is a bit of a twit.
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Also we get to see Twice upon a Time again.
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It's not the most interesting schedule, but I have been waiting to see Judge Priest. And it's encouraging that O Lucky Man, Red Desert and Band of Outsiders will be shown.
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I suppose I could be more impressed by John Barrymore. The same could be said of Michael Douglas. And also Jane Wyman, Glenda Jackson and Cher.
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I saw five movies last week. The Cider House Rules was, as Dave Kehr put it, "impeccably crafted and utterly impersonal." It's more of an idea of what an oscar winning movie is like, rather than actually a great movie. It has ideas, a fine cast, but no soul to inspire the actors to give great performances. Arrowsmith similarly has some interesting ideas, but everything about it, the Lewis source novel, the performances by Ronald Colman and Helen Hayes, the direction by John Ford, really have to try harder. Fortunately the other three movies are more successful. The Window is a good noir thriller, well worth watching. Two Days, One Night is even better, and arguably even more tense. For anyone who has every worried about getting or keeping a job, this story of a woman who has to beg fourteen co-workers so that she can keep her position is probably the most thrilling movie of last year. The charming and intelligent A Summer's Tale is also definitely worth watching, and especially by Hollywood executives who seem to have forgotten how to make romantic movies.
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There was a time when I thought that Ralph Fiennes would make an excellent Ashburnham if they ever made a version of The Good Soldier. Emma Thompson could be his wife, and Lisa Kudrow and Matt Perry could be the Dowells.
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I have an idea for a 1945 The ABC Murders with Marcel Dalio as Poirot, Cary Grant as Hastings, George Sanders as Franklin Clarke, Peter Lorre as Alexander Bonaparte Cust, and perhaps Montgomery Clift as Donald Fraser.
I've also thought of moving The Wicker Man to the fifties and having Peter Lorre in Edward Woodward's role.
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Do we have a winner?
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Has anyone seen Still Alice? More to the point, does anyone have a strong opinion on the best actresses of 2014? I liked Scarlett Johanson in Under the Skin and Tilda Swinton in Only Lovers Left Alive, but strictly speaking they're 2013 releases. I'm about to see Marion Couillard in Two Days, One Night later tonight.
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I think we've had at least one of these films on before, if not in Canada.
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Clearly tonight it's all the Mirimax you can stand.
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One thing about turning mediocre novels into good movies: it's interesting to ask why Preminger's versions of Advise and Consent and Exodus are less successful than The Godfather and The Shining. I've never read any of these four novels, but the problem with Puzo's novel is that it's essentially pulp fiction. And that's partially the problem with Stephen King. But with good direction and good acting you can get around those problems. Another important aspect is that Coppola and Kubrick found something in these novels that was intelligent and profound. By contrast, the problem with Advise and Consent and Exodus is that Preminger doesn't challenge the essential flaw with those novels, which goes beyond the lack of literary quality. Much of Preminger's work deals with ambiguity and these are part of both movies. But while in Exodus he discusses differing Zionists, and allows the British to have a say, there is virtually nothing from the Arabs who were, at the time, more than two-thirds of the population. As for the original Drury novel, much of it is based on resentment over the Alger Hiss affair, and it's good cinema that Preminger makes the final vote over Fonda's character a tie-breaking vote than the more ideologically satisfying rout that Drury has (it's also more plausible politically, since an administration would withdraw a candidate rather than lose so badly.) But the core of the movie and the novel is how a sinister liberal pacifist manages to use a colleague's homosexuality to make him commit suicide, which is based on an actual incident of a powerful and high profile Republican using a Democratic colleague's son to blackmail him (and which ended with his suicide). And it says something that this imaginary liberal demagogue is censured by the Senate (revenge by Drury for the McCarthy debacle), which contemptible Southern reactionaries are praised as honorable southern gentlemen.
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I saw five movies over the last two weeks. The Theory of Everything is clearly the least impressive of a not particularly good collection of best picture nominees this year. Everything about it is off. Redmayne and Jones do not make a particularly good couple even when Stephen Hawking is in good health. It is not clear what attracts them to each other. The movie doesn't really show Hawking's genius, it just has other characters tell the audience about it several times in the movie. It's not really a love story, since the movie is about the dissolution of their marriage, and Hawking's children vanish for the last half hour of the movie or so, apparently because the producers didn't want to pay for extra child actors. And since Redmayne is immobile and inarticulate for most of the movie, I fail to see what is so special about his performance. (And the last line is sentimental codswallop.) Whiplash is certainly a much more enjoyable movie, although even I, who know nothing about jazz, was somewhat impatient over whether J.K. Simmons was supposed to be Anton Walbrook in The Red Shoes or R. Lee Emery in Full Metal Jacket. People who do know more me than jazz find much more false notes about it. As one rare critic notes, it's essentially a sports movie, or an army movie. Of the latter, I also saw The Great Santini. I remember at the time it came out, that it was the little movie that could, and I suspect it was more appreciated than usual because 1980 was a time when many big budget hollywood pictures were falling flat on their face. Its success also suggests a widespread faith in authority figures even if, like Duvall's character, they have done little to deserve it. (Reagan was elected a month or two after its re-release.) I'm not impressed by it: as Dave Kehr says it's "Overcalculated, thoroughly false humanist mush—one of those 'real movies about real people' without a single authentic moment." One false note in particular, the **** who ends the life of the movie's token black character is named Red. And there's the contrived ending which allows Duvall to die a heroic death in somewhat unwarlike circumstances. I suppose the best movie I saw recently was Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxograther, a documentary about an early forerunner, if not exactly, of motion pictures. I also saw a Lubitsch silent, I don't want to be a man, which at 45 minutes is barely a feature. It deals with the old plot of a woman complaining of her lot, but then realizing that it's better than being a man. But Lubitsch, of course, does several interesting things, including tranvestism!
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This one could be better known, from It's Always Fair Weather:
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The Verdict is clearly not a premiere. It's been on TCM before and I've used it for one of my programming challenges.
Barry Lyndon, earlier this week, clearly was a premiere.
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Let's look at this alternate oscar list:
Oscar Best Pictures that are actually the best Picture: 8
On this revised list: 20
Changes that are an improvement: 49
Changes that are for the worse: 12
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I've been interested in the Russian Revolution since I was a child, so I don't suppose I would ever find Nicholas and Alexandra dull. And since I'm a Tom Baker fan I also admire his Rasputin. But the film itself is fatuous, showing too much respect to two nitwits who completely misjudged the situation and their people. It's striking on rewatching it that the entire 1905 revolution after Bloody Sunday is just elided.
watched amc last nite
in General Discussions
Posted
If I don't start watching a series at the very beginning, or shortly thereafter, or if the reruns are not easily available, I tend not to watch it at all. So I never saw Breaking Bad or Mad Men. I suppose at some point I should watch the last 2 1/2 seasons of The Sopranos, but I've been too busy watching movies to do so.