Fedya

The Ear (1970). A deputy minister in the Czechoslovak Communist government and his return home from a party-like official function to find the power out, followed by some men standing outside watching them. They immediately fear that they're being spied on, a supposition fueled in part by the fact that a couple of other officials have been purged. However, the couple are also at each other's throats because their relationship is a mess (one review I read mentioned "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf"). At times this makes the movie uncomfortable to watch because the wife in particular is such a jerk. The movie is also a bit of a slog because it keeps flashing back to the party earlier in the evening. I don't think this one is available on DVD in North America, which is a shame because despite its flaws, it's actually quite good. I'm also quite surprised that it got made at all in Czechoslovakia after 1968. (It was apparently banned for years.) There's also one minor problem with the subtitles, in that they consistently use Ť/ť when Š is called for in proper names. 8.5/10

Wilson is a hagiography of a nasty man. I love the scene where he's serving coffee to all the white soldiers of various immigrant backgrounds going off to fight World War I, and he gives a sermon about Americans of all races coming together. Of course, at the time the movie was made, the military was still segregated; President Truman wouldn't desegregate it until about 1947. (And don't get me started on the Keefe Brasselle sequence in It's a Big Country. That's the sequence that should have been about equal rights for blacks, and not the infuriating stock footage sequence we do get.)

"When I'm good, I'm very, very good. But when I'm bad I'm better."

The Confession (1970). Costa-Gavras made this one after making Z, and there are some similarities. The Confession tells the story of Artur London (Yves Montand), a Czech Communist who fought for the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, but, after the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia, they started to purge people. The purges hit the folks who had fought in Spain in 1951, with a show trial of the men in November 1952. The movie is unrelentingly brutal, as London is routinely tortured in an attempt to extract a confession from him. The whole episode is also tough on his wife Lise (Simone Signoret), who has no idea what's happened to her husband. Like Z, there are some jumps around in time, so we know that London survives the show trials, although what happens to him in the end is still a surprise. The movie is extremely well-made but tough to watch at times, although not as difficult as something like Under the Volcano. I'd introduce people to Z first, however. 9/10.

I don't live within two blocks of anybody, so I don't see the problem.

Ahem. Tarrytown isn't Upstate at all. And those of us in the Catskills would generally claim we're not upstate either. (Meanwhile, Western New York has as much in common with the rest of the Great Lakes region as it does with places like Albany.)

And if they do get rid of the actor/actress distinction, the first year that more men than women are nominated, the same jellybean counters who whine about the melanin content of the nominees are going to scream about the genitalia of the nominees.

I don't see Desmond Llewellyn in the cast list....

I wonder if he means "General Discussions", or another well-known word.

You can see quite a bit of him in Spencer's Mountain.

Katharine Hepburn?

Nobody selected adult movies as their favorite genre?

Is it not Make Mine Mink? I've got that one on a DVD with Too Many Crooks, which is another great Terry-Thomas comedy.

So who has the Clara Bow role?

And a major plot point of Pinky was that the character could pass as white. As good of actresses as Lena Horne or Dorothy Dandridge might have been, could they pass for white?

Jakeem, I like Silver Streak and love that scene. But nowadays there seem to be a lot of people looking to be offended, who would take a scene like that, or the "Where are all the white women at?" scene from Blazing Saddles, out of context. Heck, at my alma mater, there were people who tried to terrorise those who wore the wrong kind of headphones.

Proof by assertion.

In my experience the people who claim to be fighting bigotry are the nastiest most totalitarian hatemongers of the bunch. Richard Pryor putting Gene Wilder in blackface in Silver Streak, and Wilder's attempt to act black: right or wrong?

For me, it's one of the local stations' weather app, a calculator, and a tsumego app. Not that the last one has helped my game very much.

Most of them also have a camera, which is useful. That's one fewer thing you have to carry around, and if you have an interest in photography you wouldn't have been using the sort of small camera smartphone cameras replace anyway. (You'd be spending all your money on lenses.)

You mean the one where Mama Bear brings the toilet paper on vacation because Papa Bear can't stand hotel toilet paper? I guess we learn from that one that a bear does not, in fact **** in the woods.

Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) Four real-estate agents for property developers (Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Ed Harris, and Alan Arkin) are given an ultimatum by their boss (Kevin Spacey, accompanied by motivator Alec Baldwin): whoever has the most in closings this month gets a new Cadillac; whoever closes the least gets fired. Of course, the agents are given lousy leads; they'll only get the good leads if they can close deals. Ed Harris gets the idea to burgle the office and steal the leads; everybody swears their way through the movie as they try all sorts of underhanded tactics to close deals of one sort or another. The performances are uniformly excellent, but with the exception of a supporting role by Jonathan Pryce, every single one of them is loathsome. I think I mentioned Under the Volcano earlier in this thread, and I was thinking about that movie a lot as I watched Glengarry Glen Ross: it's hard to watch when everybody is such a horrible human being. At least the protagonists in the Maysles' documentary Salesman all had a human side. 9/10, if you're prepared to watch a bunch of unremittingly repulsive people.

It's Greek to you, isn't it? (In German, they say "It's Spanish to me.")

It's Greek, not Russian. (The theta is a dead giveaway. I don't think any of the Slavic languages have used that sound since before the days of Peter the Great.)

Pete Seeger? One of the Weavers?