Film_Fatale
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Posts posted by Film_Fatale
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Happy B-day, Peter O'Toole!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(Aug. 2, 1932)
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Didn't David Lean himself supervise the restoration and prefer the 216-minute version?
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> {quote:title=TripleHHH wrote:}{quote}
> I cant imagine how Blu Ray can make a 50-70 yr movie any sharper, but thats just my opinion
The age of the movie shouldn't matter at all because most movies these days are still filmed in 35mm. If the transfer is done right, from an original negative or other good source, then there should be a noticeable improvement.
Some people may be disappointed in the look of a well-transfered 35mm movie simply because they compare it to stuff that doesn't involve film at all - like the animated movies from Pixar or Dreamworks, which look flawless in HD because they were made digitally.
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http://www.empireonline.com/500/
Empire Magazine, one of the UK's leading movie magazines, is conducting its first ever "500 Greatest Movies of All Time".
They do ask you to register before you vote, but hopefully that will keep people from voting many times.
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> {quote:title=MissGoddess wrote:}{quote}
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> Hmmm...that's tempting. I actually have no idea how much Blu-Ray players cost, are they
> very expensive? I keep putting off even considering one since so much of my dvd viewing
> consists of scratchy old black-and-white movies. I'm afraid they would look worse on Blu-Ray,
> if they even play on those machines.
Haven't checked prices lately; last I checked they were in the $400 range or higher for more fancy models. But they're widely expected to be reduced significantly in time for the holidays.
And, yes, I think any BR player will play regular DVDs (and even upscale them at that).
There are more and more classic movies available on BR every day, though a few titles that would really appeal to classic movie fans are not there yet (like *Lawrence of Arabia*, which will look awesome if they don't screw up the transfer).
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TiVo'd *The Two-Headed Spy* earlier today, so happy TCM finally was able to show this Columbia title!
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This NYT article caught my eye and may be of interest to anyone who might be able to attend the retrospective at BAM:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/01/movies/01goul.html
*An Angsty Leading Man Who Caught the Spirit of His Times*
August 1, 2008
An Angsty Leading Man Who Caught the Spirit of His Times
By DENNIS LIM
At the busy height of his unlikely career Elliott Gould was as much an embodiment of the times as a movie star. As the 1960s faded into the ?70s, Mr. Gould appeared in role after role that seemed to crystallize the ideals and anxieties of the era.
He played a reluctant swinger and an avid philanderer in the free-love comedies ?Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice? (1969) and ?I Love My Wife? (1970). With opposition to the Vietnam War cresting, his character in ?MASH? (1970), the irreverent Army medic Trapper John, became an instant anti-establishment hero. Within days of the Kent State shootings he was on screens as a radicalized graduate student in ?Getting Straight? (1970).
Mr. Gould, who turns 70 on Aug. 29, is being honored in his native borough, Brooklyn, with a series at BAMcin?matek that takes its title, ?Elliott Gould: Star for an Uptight Age,? from a September 1970 Time magazine cover. Mr. Gould will appear for two question-and-answer sessions as part of the tribute, which runs from Friday through Aug. 21 and features 10 films, all made between 1969 and 1976.
This was a tumultuous period for Mr. Gould, beginning with his swift rise from the Broadway minor leagues to the studio A-list, a vanguard figure of what the critic J. Hoberman has called ?Hollywood?s Jew Wave,? the ?leading man as schlemiel.? But after an intense experience working with Ingmar Bergman, Mr. Gould went on an existential walkabout, eventually returning from the wilderness with the help of his friend Robert Altman.
On the phone from his home in Los Angeles, Mr. Gould spoke warmly of the movies in the series. ?The films hold up as social comments in relation to what seemed to be a changing world,? he said. On the matter of being a generational symbol, though, he was more tentative. ?For an awkward audience that didn?t necessarily understand the order of things,? he said, ?I would perhaps say I was someone to identify with. One of the things about me is that I?m vulnerable. You can see through me.?
That touching transparency is central to Mr. Gould?s appeal both on and off screen. He has long been prone to bouts of public introspection. The 1970 Time profile pins its subject to the psychoanalytic couch, coaxing out details of his childhood in Bensonhurst, the only son of immigrant parents who had high hopes for his showbiz career, and his failed marriage to Barbra Streisand, whose early stardom saddled him with the nickname Mr. Streisand.
?I?m a little embarrassed about all that now,? he said. ?I let myself be known before I understood myself. But had I understood what I was doing, I couldn?t have accomplished it.?
There was certainly an element of bravado in some of his early career decisions. For ?Little Murders? (1971), a dark farce based on a Jules Feiffer play, Mr. Gould approached ? and briefly secured ? Jean-Luc Godard to direct. ?I wanted someone really avant-garde,? he said. But the relationship with the irascible Mr. Godard soon foundered.
Mr. Gould said, ?I told him: ?Look, the establishment here does not want to work with you. I want to work with you, and the establishment wants to work with me.? ? (Mr. Godard?s response, as Mr. Gould tells it, is not printable.)
The studio ended up installing the actor Alan Arkin as director. ?Elliott was a dream as an actor and a producer,? said Mr. Arkin, who added that the characterization of Mr. Gould as an emblem of uptightness was misleading. ?I?ve always thought he had a looseness about him.?
That easygoing quality is perhaps best showcased in the films Mr. Gould made with Mr. Altman. The partnership did not begin smoothly. Mr. Gould and his ?MASH? co-star Donald Sutherland found Mr. Altman?s improvisatory method off-putting and wanted him fired. ?Sutherland and I both took ourselves a little too seriously,? Mr. Gould said. ?But luckily I came around. Bob opened everything up for me.?
Mr. Gould and Mr. Altman teamed up for four more films, including ?California Split? (1974), in which Mr. Gould and George Segal play compulsive gamblers, and ?The Long Goodbye? (1973), a revisionist update of Raymond Chandler with Mr. Gould?s indelibly mournful take on Philip Marlowe. It was perhaps his definitive performance. He has recorded numerous Chandler books on tape since and said he hoped to play Marlowe again, in an adaptation of ?The Curtain,? one of the stories that inspired ?The Big Sleep.?
Listening to Mr. Gould talk, it is hard not to hear traces of Marlowe?s gently rambling voice-over in ?The Long Goodbye.? He speaks almost in a stream of consciousness, interrupting himself to remind his interviewer that he hasn?t forgotten the question and breaking off anecdotes to ask, ?Have you read this somewhere before??
The film from the BAMcin?matek series that he was most eager to discuss was ?The Touch,? Bergman?s first English-language movie, which Mr. Gould flew to Sweden to shoot right after landing that Time cover. ?I remember just about everything about it,? he said, starting with the dread that overcame him when he read the script and came to a sex scene that required him to strike his co-star Bibi Andersson. ?I immediately got a migraine.?
Mr. Gould said he relished playing an atypical role ? an alienated Jewish-American academic who wrecks the marriage of a Swedish couple ? but was emotionally ill-equipped to handle the shoot, and realized that Bergman might have cast him precisely for that reason: ?Ingmar came laughing to me one day with a picture of my character, who?s an archaeologist, dusting off a skull. He said, ?Bring this to your analyst in New York and tell him it?s Elliott finding himself.? ?
Whether or not Mr. Gould found himself, he came home with his perspective altered. He withdrew from an expensive Warner Brothers project, his production company folded, and he went for more than a year without work, eventually resurfacing with ?The Long Goodbye.? (The studio, United Artists, insisted he first take a sanity test.) Bergman later dismissed ?The Touch? as a low point of his career, but the film has special resonance for Mr. Gould. (It has been out of circulation for years, and BAMcin?matek will be screening Mr. Gould?s own print.)
As the memory of his ?70s heyday receded, Mr. Gould matured into an inventive character actor, staying visible in recent years with recurring roles on ?Friends? and in Steven Soderbergh?s ?Ocean?s? series. He had successful hip replacement surgery and is, he pointed out more than once, a proud grandfather.
?I?ve always been interested in participating and functioning as an older person,? he said. ?The idea is to continue to work. The work is the life. It?s how I learned about the world.?
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Happy B-Day, J. Lee Thompson!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(Aug. 1, 1914 - Aug. 30, 2002)
Happy B-Day, Dom DeLuise!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(Aug. 1, 1933)
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Netflix suscribers interested in getting a BR player in the near future may be interested in this bit of hardware news:
Finally today, in a little bit of hardware news, LG has just announced that their forthcoming BD300 networked Blu-ray Disc Player, due to hit stores here in the States this fall, will not only be a full profile 2.0 Blu-ray player... it will also allow you to connect to NetFlix's servers to stream thousands of movies and TV episodes through the player for viewing on your TV. Pretty interesting.
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> {quote:title=lzcutter wrote:}{quote}
> 'd like to see Warner Home Video do a complete digital restoration on this one from the ground up.>>
>
> Didn't they do that a few years ago when they released all three films in the box set?
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> Or am I mis-remembering?
I think they did. Not only that, but the Box Set has since been re-issued on Blu-Ray, I think.
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Happy B-Day, Mario Bava!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(July 31, 1914 - April 27, 1980)
Happy B-Day, Geoffrey Lewis !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(July 31, 1935)
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*Amazon Kicks Off Disney Blu-ray Sale*
Wed Jul 30, 2008 at 03:00 PM ET
Amazon kicked off a new Blu-ray promotion this week, offering 72 Disney titles at significant savings.
There's no word on how long this latest promotion will last, but with the launch of Amazon's Disney Promotion, which showcase 72 of the studio's most popular titles at up to forty percent savings, fans should be able to grab some good bargains.
Listed titles include 'Ratatouille,' 'Pirates of the Caribbean,' 'National Treasure: Book of Secrets,' 'The Prestige,' and 'Dan In Real Life,' among many others.
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It's an OK little B-movie. Can't imagine what it is that drives folks like QT to devote 2+ years of their lives to remaking relatively obscure B-movies from the 70's.
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> {quote:title=iowahawkeye wrote:}{quote}
> discounts from Amazon seem to stay at 31% or higher, and no special incentives to buy early.
Actually in some cases they do seem to provide an incentive to buy early. The latest "Classic Musicals from the Dream Factory" has a SRP of, like, $69.99. Amazon offered it for around $50 right at the time of release, then brought the price back up to $69.99 and kept it there up until the last time I checked. I ended up ordering from another online retailer, where I found it for around $42.
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Some interesting comments by an L.A. Times blogger:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/the_big_picture/
New 'W' trailer: A walk on the wild side with Bush
05:40 PM PT, Jul 28 2008
It was just a couple of weeks ago that conservative commentators were all saying that liberals were humorless dolts, offering as Exhibit A the outraged reaction to the New Yorker's hilarious Barack Obama as Muslim terrorist cover cartoon. So I'm betting those same commentators will heartily embrace Lionsgate's first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's "W," which just posted today on YouTube (with the admonition: "This is not a fake"), focusing on the young Dubya, acting like he's starring in a boozy remake of "Old School."
The reason "W" got turned down at every big studio in town wasn't because anyone was politically nervous about making the movie--Bush is too unpopular today to worry even the most timid Hollywood studio chief. In fact, the studio that came closest to saying yes was the Rupert Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox, which figured that having Fox release a wild-eyed anti-Bush movie would cause so much buzz that it would be a unique marketing ingredient unto itself.
The real worry has always been that the story itself was HBO docudrama material, with too many talky scenes set in White House war rooms. The Lionsgate trailer shrewdly explodes that notion. It opens with Dubya (played by Josh Brolin) being dressed down by his dad ("I remember correctly, you didn't like the sporting goods job...") before careening off into hard-partying, tail-chasing territory, ending up with the infamous drunken-driving incident that prompts another stern lecture from Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell), who says derisively: "Who do you think you are, a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." To make sure we get the point, the scenes are accompanied by George Thorogood's version of the roadhouse standard "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer."
The music then shifts to the serene "It's a Wonderful World," which plays as the trailer poses a question that could perhaps make us curious enough to see the movie in a theater. It asks: "What Drove George W. Bush ... From Here ..." (Dubya brawling with his old man) "To Here?" (Dubya in the Oval Office, cowboy boots cockily propped up on his desk). Movie executives always preach, ad nauseam, that a successful film needs a hero who overcomes a series of obstacles, making him a very different person at film's end from what he was at the beginning. "W" sounds like it fits the bill quite nicely, as long as you grade on a curve when it comes to the part about overcoming the obstacles.
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> {quote:title=filmlover wrote:}{quote}
> Information has just been released on what extras will be in the Planet of the Apes Blu-ray box set of five films.
>
Thank you for that info, filmlover. Now, although very rarely like to post info about the DVD releases of recent movies (because those announcements are already everywhere) I would like to make an exception for the new Indy movie, because the whole series has been a homage of sorts to old movies and serials.
http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=68410
Paramount Home Entertainment have announced the Region 1 DVD release of *Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull* on 11th November 2008. The latest Indy adventure arrives as a two-disc set with all other information TBC. At this time no Blu-ray version has been announced, though it would seem unlikely that one isn?t coming.
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> {quote:title=filmlover wrote:}{quote}
> CK, you have been asked _time and time and time and time again_ (I've lost track there have been so many times!!!), not just by me but by several others here, to stop posting info that has already been listed. You could do us all a real service by not posting anything here anymore. We have tried to advise you to check on things in previous posts...there is an excellent search feature available...but you just continue to do what you want day in and day out. You've proven that you don't care about anything that others have already done the research on and posted, and you just keep posting blindly.
>
> You are not bringing anything to the forum. I hate sounding arrogant and it will sound that way to others who are just encountering this thread for the first time, but if they were to read even a little further in, they will find this has been going on for months now. I have always thought that everyone contributes something special to this column, but you, you don't contribute. You just repeat things others have listed. Why don't you stop? Please do this thread a service and don't post here.
filmlover, some people just can't be reasoned with. I can only think of two possible reasons: either the person in question lacks the ability to reason with others, or the person in question simply doesn't care about others because he's too self-absorbed. Add to that the very obvious fact that the person in question is simply starved for attention (presumably because he doesn't get enough attention at home or at school) and the only thing that can come out of that is... what we have been seeing here.
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Happy B-day, Peter Bogdanovich!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(July 30, 1939)
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> {quote:title=Hobsonschoice wrote:}{quote}
> I believe the special effects people in days of old had to be more creative. I put the following special effects up against anything being produced today...
>
> - King Kong
> - Beauty and the Beast (Cocteau)
> - A Midsummer Night's Dream
> - The Wizard of Oz
> - The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
I would add *The Thief of Bagdad* to that list. From what I remember of the audio commentary and/or bonus features on the Criterion DVD, it was reportedly the first movie ever to use blue-screen effects. The effects might look rudimentary to people who grew up with CGI, but as Marty Scorsese mentioned in the audio commentary, these movies worked because you used your imagination when you watched them. Most folks at that time had grown up listening to radio, so using their imagination came naturally to them (Scorsese's opinion, not mine).
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> {quote:title=filmlover wrote:}{quote}
> yeah, I just saw that article about Batman on digitalbits.com and was going to post it here. It sure would be nice if Fox and Warners would get together on this.
Exactly. How hard is it to agree to make a pile of money together?
One other thing that may or may not be of interest to TCM movie fans. It has come to my attention that Gus Van Sant's indie feature *Paranoid Park* is a Blockbuster exclusive in the U.S. However, it is available to the public through amazon's Canadian site, *amazon.ca*
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laffite,
I've mixed feelings about *In Bruges* because I enjoyed it thoroughly when I watched it in the theater, but it didn't seem so good on a 2nd viewing on DVD. As for TDK, I had the great misfortune to have to sit through the darn thing twice. Once in regular 35mm, and then again in an IMAX screen. That's 5 hours of my life I will never get back. And I also don't think that TDK captures the magic of Batman in comics. Not only that, but it is heavily loaded with political messages (this is NOT just a matter of interpretation, Chris Nolan stated _on the record_ that it was completely intentional and that he meant for the movie to have a strong parallel with modern-day politics).
One recent movie I would definitely recommend is Gus Van Sant's *Paranoid Park*, which is now out on DVD in the U.S. and Canada - although U.S. residents can only rent it from Blockbuster, which has exclusive rights to it. In Canada, however, it is available from amazon.ca
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> {quote:title=CineSage_jr wrote:}{quote}
> Do you mean a World War II film made during World War II, or one made post-war.
CineSage, the OP said it had to have been made between 1940 and 1945:
> {quote:title=Klaatu wrote:}{quote}
> Here's the one and only ground rule - the film would have to have been made between 1940 (I know the war began in 1939 but the US didn't enter in until the end of '41 - though war was in the winds before Pearl Harbor) and 1945. I'll be showing The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) for Post-War America, but there are so many great war films from which to select it's tough to know which way to turn.
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mickee,
It is still an unrelated issue, as far as I can see. There are other reasons why any thread could suddenly be pushed to page #2 that have _nothing to do_ with what you seem to be alluding to.
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*Sony to Double Dip 'Casino Royale' (2006) Blu-ray in October*
"The Great Man Votes" (remade as "Swing Vote")
in Hot Topics
Posted
I think I watched the 1939 film *The Great Man Votes* last time it showed on TCM, but I would really love to watch it again, especially now that the remake *Swing Vote* is out.
TCM programmers, please schedule this if you have a chance!