skimpole
-
Posts
4,289 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by skimpole
-
-
They are overrated movies. There are overrated movies that are actively pernicious. There are underrated movies. And then there are mediocre movies that however, have a brief moment of greatness, something that many overrated middlebrow movies will never have. I've never actually seen Under the Cherry Moon, best known for destroying any chances Prince had of having a film career. But I did see the end song, "Mountains" which in my view is great. City of Angels strikes me as a horrible idea for a movie. But I do love the song "Iris." What are your choices?
-
I'm not seeing Yellow Submarine or Absolute Beginners. I'm also not seeing The Umbrellas of Cherbourg or The Young Girls of Rochefort.
-
1
-
-
to be honest, I think Dunne, Garbo and Stanwyck are in an equal-part three-way tie for the mantle of "Best Actress to never win"...and both Dunne and Stanwyck should/could have both earned even more nominations than they did.
I'd personally nominate Myrna Loy and Judy Garland over Dunne, and Garbo as well. And there's also Setusko Hara and Liv Ullmann.
-
Best Picture Academy: The Life of Emile Zola
My Choice: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Other Nominees: Angel, The Awful Truth, Make way for Tomorrow, Humanity and Paper Balloons, Stage Door, Street Angel
Best Actor Academy: Spencer Tracy, Captain Courageous
My Choice: Jean Gabin, Pepe le Moko
Other Nominees: Cary Grant (The Awful Truth), Victor Moore (Make way for tomorrow), Fred Astaire (Shall We Dance), Sacha Guitry (Pearls of the Crown),
Best Actress Academy: Luise Rainer, The Good Earth
My choice: Zhou Xuan (Street Angel)
Other Nominees: Marlene Dietrich (Angel), Greta Garbo (Camille), Katherine Hepburn (Stage Door), Beulah Bondi (Make Way for Tomorrow), Ginger Rogers (Stage Door),
My choice Best Supporting Actor: Edward Everett Horton (Angel, Shall we Dance)
My Choice Best Supporting Actress: Gracie Allen (A Damsel in Distress)
-
1
-
-
I saw seven movies over the last two weeks. Speed Racer shows the continuing decline of the Wachowski brothers, as misc-en-scene does not make up for a very bland and obvious story. Despite a promising cast only Christina Ricci only shows only personality as the hero's girlfriend. Room has a good performance by Brie Larson, but I personally thought Rooney Mara gave a better performance. Aside from softening the original incident (the Austrian case that inspired the movie involved the victim's father, not a random stranger, and more than half a dozen children), my first thought on the first half of the movie was "this is the most portentous and self-important Saw movie ever made." The second half of the movie points out the continuing trauma and trouble adapting to the outside world. Gee, ya think? I know Larson's isn't rich, powerful or conservative, but one expects an interviewer wouldn't ask a woman why she didn't immediately give up her newborn child in the vague hope of a better life. The Scenic Route is a strange 1978 movie about a failed relationship, with shots based on famous Renaissance paintings. It's rather striking in its way. The Mermaid is the kind of movie you wish Hollywood knew how to make. Such a pity that this amusing and charming farce/romance/special effects extravaganza about a mermaid who tries to challenge the nitwit billionaire who is ravaging her natural habitat only to fall in love with him, isn't more amusing and inventive and charming. The VIPs is actually better than I thought it would be, with Burton and Taylor giving a good performance. Perhaps the fact that I listened to most of it in the background while working probably helped. Sabrina is a charming movie, if not one of Wilder's funniest or most profound movies. Certainly Wilder, Hepburn and Bogart is better than Wilder, Hepburn and Cooper. One wonder whether Cary Grant would have worked in the Bogart role, since it's hard to imagine why any women would even temporarily prefer Holden to him. Macbeth, the Fassbender/Cotillard version strikes me as less successful than the Polanski version. let alone Throne of Blood. Not always audible, much of its focus is emphasizing how desolate and poor medieval Scotland was. But this wasn't a problem with Polanski and Kurosawa's versions, so one wondered why they made the effort. And certainly the director botches Macbeth's two big scenes in the final act.
-
1
-
-
At the moment I am typing this, TCM is showing the original Sabrina, which although it played earlier this year, has not been on TCM that often. It makes me wonder about what other movies have a love triangle involving two brothers in love with same women. There may be other movies (Legends of the Fall? I've never actually seen it) where more than two brothers love the same woman. People could name those as well.
-
I have. Here are the comments I made about it back in January: "Spotlight is competent, interesting journalism about the Boston Catholic sex abuse scandal. One wishes it showed more cinematic flair and that the characters showed greater emotional engagement with their subject."
-
It doesn't look like a particularly brilliant month, but it's nice that not only Ordet is back, but TCM is also showing Gertrud for the first time in years. Also Absolute Beginners is back, at an unfortunately late time, while Diary of a Country Priest and King Lear appear very early in the morning.
-
1
-
-
"I'm hard o get...all you have to do is ask me"
Jean Arthur to Cary Grant ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS.
Personally, I've always thought it was a bit of a pain that the same line appears in To Have and Have Not
-
Jack Nicholson in Reds: "If you were mine, I wouldn't share you with anybody or anything."
-
1
-
-
There are romantic movies that start off with one of the couple engaged to someone else: The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, Bringing up Baby, and What's up Doc are all obvious examples. That is NOT what I'm thinking. I'm not dealing with a movie with one member realizing that they're engaged to the wrong person. I'm thinking of a movie about a couple where we learned they originally got together by cheating on the people they were with at the time. The movie would clearly be post-1960 and I suspect the movie ended with them being unhappy. I'm reminded of Frasier where Niles and Daphne got together almost immediately after Niles had gotten married for the second time. There's also Reversal of Fortune, obviously no one idea's of a romantic couple where Sunny von Bulow first slept with Claus as revenge for her husband's infidelities. What other movie am I thinking about?
-
Jean Gabin in Pepe le Moko
-
I first watched the Oscars in 1981, not being aware how unlikely it was that the oscars would choose an unexpected winner. In 1982 Chariots of Fire surprised everyone by winning. In 1983 Gandhi swept the awards, a choice I agreed with and still do. By contrast in 1984 I had no strong feelings about the nominees. Had Fanny and Alexander been nominated for best picture and in the acting prizes, I would have watched it. But it wasn't, so I believe I didn't bother.
-
There are 17 or so Ozu films that are lost, including his first one Sword of Penitence. Mizoguchi made dozens of movies before 1933, none of whom survive completely, and almost all of which appear to be completely lost.
-
1
-
-
Updated earlier this month: http://theyshootpictures.com/gf1000.htm
-
I saw five movies last week. Was there a pressing reason to remake Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan at a crude calculation of more than six times the original budget? Certainly Star Trek into Darkness is very much the lesser movie. I am not a big fan of sports movies, and certainly not of boxing. But When we Were Kings is actually a pretty good documentary. It's striking that George Foreman was considered the favorite, since all I know about the fight was that Ali had won. Even growing up in the seventies and profoundly uninterested in sports, I couldn't avoid Ali. I had forgotten that Foreman was the other boxer, and all I knew about him was that he appeared in a joke in The Big Bang Theory (Amy Farrah Fowler agreed with her mother to date once a year, in return for her mother's silence on the subject and for use of her George Foreman grill.) One striking thing was that although Joseph Mobutu clearly ruined his country, the dancing women are both musically interesting and have a certain charisma, unlike other dictators which are just creepy. Anamolisa is, I'm afraid, a miss from Charlie Kauffmann. It's not as clever or ingenious as Synecdoche, New York. Simply using model puppets isn't good enough. I mean I can understand why you would feel miserable if everybody in the world except one sweet pathetic woman sounded like Tom Noonan, but you need more to justify Thewlis' womanizing. The Embrace of the Serpent is clearly the movie of the week. This is a interesting, at times powerful movie about Amazonia and colonialism. Particularly striking is one scene involving the main characters stumbling on a rubber plantation, then another scene encountering a mad messiah. There are interesting aspects to Heart of a Dog, though an early comparison between a dog fearing hawks and New Yorkers fearing death from the skies after 9/11 sounds rather dire. I suppose you have to be a dog person to fully appreciate it.
-
1
-
-
Five movies this week: let's start with Steve Jobs. As a movie, one may question how much this borderline sociopath deserves, and one way wonder how neat and contrived the three act structure is. Having said that, it's certainly clear that Fassbender gives a remarkable performance, certainly better than DiCaprio in The Revenant, let alone Matt Damon in The Martian. One is inclined to compare it with Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game or Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything. Certainly, by that standard Fassbender is clearly superior: Cumberbatch, by contrast, is a Sheldon Cooper impression with delusions of oscars, while Redmayne doesn't even do much as Stephen Hawking. Flying Down to Rio is a nice light comedy with an obvious problem: the trio at the core are clearly less interesting than supporting players Astaire and Rogers. Future movies would solve that problem quite nicely. Son of Saul presents an interesting dilemma. Most of my favorite critics, Rosenbaum, Hoberman, Klawans and Kenny have praised the movie highly, though Edelstein and the Self-Styled Siren were clearly less sympathetic. So why was I not moved more by this movie which showed considerable skill and some intelligence in presenting a sonderkommando's experiences? Why did I think that the scenes in the changing room of Auschwitz and the constant presence of the corpse of the "son" resembled the least successful aspects of Schindler's List? Part of the problem was that anyone with a little knowledge of the subject knows that isn't going to end up well. And under the circumstances, it's hard to begrudge the protagonist any epiphany or redemption, while at the same time wondering what can be learned from such extreme experience? Star Wars: the Force Awakens starts off with greater competence than the first two movies of the last trilogy, and the characters nicely introduce themselves. Then it slowly dissipates the good will it gathers by too slavishly copying the original movie, without showing the technical skills that Lucas managed to achieve in the worst of the movies. The best Star Wars film since The Empire Strikes Back? More the best Star Wars movie after The Revenge of the Sith. So the best movie of the week is Alain Resnais' Je 't'aime, Je T'aime, finally available on DVD in which a man goes back in time as part of a scientific experiment, and finds himself living his unhappy love affair, all out of chronological sequence. It's the marriage of Chris Marker and Eric Rohmer!
-
2
-
-
Sometimes I just have to take a nap after six or seven regardless of what's on TCM. I will take one later today, so in all honesty I can't blame it on Steel Magnolias, a movie which otherwise I have no interest in seeing.
-
The problem with "melodrama" is that the term has several different meanings.
2. There's the generally unflattering sense that Swithin mentions: characters are all black or all white, situations are exaggerated and highly improbable. Any genre can be melodramatic in this sense. If I called Billy Zane's character in TITANIC melodramatic, and is it ever, it would be in this pejorative sense.
3. Melodrama = soap opera. Enter amnesia, evil twins, etc.
4. Melodrama = domestic drama. Our Douglas Sirk and Delmer Daves favorites.
6. Some of the melodramas in categories 3 & 4 were traditionally called "women's pictures." A friend suggested that more men will watch these films, which many of us love, if they are called "domestic melodramas."
But clearly not all domestic dramas are melodramas. One might argue that most Bette Davis movies before All About Eve are melodramas. But A Woman Under the Influence, Scenes from a Marriage or Long Day's Journey Into Night are not melodramas. On the one hand they are intelligent attempts to deal with domestic crisis. By contrast, Douglas Sirk's movies are intelligent dissections of the melodrama form. People act with an emotional intensity that is unusual in real life, coincidences and happenstance play a prominent role. They're presented with an skeptical and highly stylized eye. Families often act in painful and self-destructive ways. Rarely, however, do mothers try to cover for daughters who murder their stepfathers while carrying on affairs with them. Titanic is a melodrama: the only reason Billy Zane's character doesn't tie Leonardo Di Caprio's character to the railroad tracks is because both are on a sinking ocean liner. By contrast, Casablanca is much more than a melodrama. If somewhat contrived, the conflict between love and duty is a real one. Strasser serves as a melodrama villain, but since Nazis actually act like that, he isn't really a melodrama villain. And the dialogue is too witty and intelligent to be part of a melodrama. I'd also suggest that non pejorative dramas can be distinguished from melodramas by their greater psychological truth. In The Return of the Native just before Eustacia Vye leaves her husband after a violent disagreement that will ultimately lead to her death, her husband helps her tie her bonnet on. That kind of detail tends to be missed in the melodrama form.
-
2
-
-
Double features from Kiarostami, Antonioni and Fassbinder, plus what I think is Minnelli's last film.
-
1
-
-
I will say that the ending of Carol is actually fairly good, and while Brooklyn isn't as good a movie, that ending works well too.
-
1
-
-
He spoke very little on camera, Voice little high pitched, intimidating as Barney Fifth.
Gore Vidal said the same was true of Teddy Roosevelt.
-
Three movies this week: Carol I immediately compared to Brooklyn, since both movies take place within months of each other in New York. I very much admired the cinematography, which really provided a sense of place and time, compared to the somewhat more artificial arrangements of Brooklyn. Also Mara and Blanchett's characters struck me as more real, while Ronan, despite all her skill, seemed to be playing a generic demure Irish Catholic immigrant with some depths. So clearly a much more successful movie. The Revenant also struck me as better than I thought it would be, since I had not been the biggest fan of Birdman, or of other Inarritu movies. But there the tracking shots are rather more impressive given that it's shot in difficult forest scenes, rather than backstage at a theatre, there's no attempt to pretend we're watching Russian Ark, and the circumstances are undeniably gripping. Live and Let Die benefits from the best of the Bond theme songs, and one of the few great songs Paul McCartney wrote after leaving the Beatles. But otherwise the movie is pretty mediocre, with dull chase scenes, a scene involving waterboats that was probably impressive in 1973, unpleasant racist overtones, a rather dull romantic interest, a wasted Yaphet Kotto who dies one of the silliest deaths in a Bond movie, and a final fight scene in a train which seems idiotic since it was done much more famously and effectively in From Russia With Love.
-
2
-
-
The director's cut of Blade Runner is clearly better than the theatrical version. There are, of course, several versions of them, but essentially the cut eliminates Harrison Ford's voiceover, removes the happy ending, and provides several clues that Deckard is in fact a replicant. Does the director's cut of Alien change it in more than a superficial way.
Top 100 Musicals - Did I Forget Some?
in General Discussions
Posted
Not seeing Monte Carlo or The Smiling Lieutenant. Are concert movies ineligible? Also not seeing any Bollywood movies, The Boy Friend, Hallelujah, I'm a Bum or the Ingmar Bergman The Magic Flute. Most striking of all, I'm not seeing South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.