kingrat
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Posts posted by kingrat
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For those who haven't seen Paris Is Burning, it's a documentary about drag competitions and some of the contestants. It's interesting, well-done, at times heartbreaking, though I could probably think of several hundred other films more worthy of preservation. Documentaries are usually not well-preserved, and because their material often comes from different film sources, that is an additional problem.
The most heartbreaking part, perhaps, is the "Executive Realism" competition, in which several young African-American men are dressed up in full business attire, complete with attache cases.
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At least all the choices from Steamboat Bill Jr. to Point Blank are good, either for the quality of the film or the historical importance or both, and it's good that silent movies and independent productions are being preserved.
About one of the later choices, my only comment would be, "Geez, Louise."
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Big shout-outs to skimpole for writing about Jack Nicholson's performance in Chinatown and to Bogie for writing about John Cazale's performance in The Godfather II. Really fine appreciations of two great performances.
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Leisure suits are out of fashion??? Gosh, why didn't somebody tell me?
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I thought I'd add a different perspective by listing the:
1974 TOP TEN BOX-OFFICE
1) Blazing Saddles
2) The Towering Inferno
3) The Trial of Billy Jack
4) Young Frankenstein
5) Earthquake
6) The Godfather, Part II
7) Airport 1975
8) The Life & Times of Grizzly Adams
9) The Longest Yard
10) Benji
This should be another example for those who think box-office has anything to do with quality. But I'm sure someone somewhere thinks that The Trial of Billy Jack is a better movie than The Godfather, Part II.
Lawrence, if you were also living in the South in 1975, you know how incredibly popular Billy Jack and its sequel were. The Towering Inferno, The Trial of Billy Jack, Earthquake, Airport 1975, Benji, The Longest Yard, The Life & Times of Grizzly Adams--this is a compelling picture of popular taste at the time.
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Lawrence, thank you for letting us know about the life of G.D. Spradlin, an actor I've always loved. He'll get a great role as the Tom Landry character in North Dallas Forty and will probably give the best supporting performance of 1979.
Thanks to everyone who mentioned a film I should make a point of watching, Celine and Julie Go Boating.
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There's something about the Ronald Colman character in THE TALK OF THE TOWN that suggests he might be more interested in his valet than in poor Jean Arthur.
Ann Todd must like bad boys and verbal abuse, or she wouldn't end up with the successful suitor in THE SEVENTH VEIL.
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A question about Liv Ullmann's performance in Scenes from a Marriage: Like some of the rest of you, I love Liv Ullmann in just about anything. She's a very skillful actress, she's an attractive woman, and she's a great camera subject I'm always willing to look at. So why don't I have a clear sense of the woman she plays in Scenes from a Marriage?
Erland Josephson I get: the character he plays is an intellectual and a jerk, not necessarily in that order, incapable of fidelity, not really a bad guy but not a particularly good one. Liv's character mainly reacts to him. She's the generic wronged wife, intelligent Swedish version. She doesn't (thank God, some might say) "find herself" a la An Unmarried Woman, but her character isn't as sharply focused as the one Bibi Andersson plays in the first act, which to me is by far the best part of the film.
Consider, as a point of reference, La maman et la putain, which revolves around three characters (Alexandre, Marie who is keeping him, and Veronique his new girlfriend), and each of the three is a strongly defined individual, even more than the Josephson and Andersson characters in the Bergman film.
Perhaps Bergman wants the wife to be a representative rather than an individual character, but if so, that seems to me unfortunate. I believe the weaknesses of Bergman's script limit what even a terrific actress like Ullmann can do with the part.
I saw the movie not long after it first came out, and watched it on TCM a couple of years ago mostly to see if my initial impression of the film was too low. Maybe a bit--I did like the first act better--but it seems to me one of Bergman's lesser efforts.
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The performance of the year by a country mile, as far as I'm concerned, is given by Sissy Spacek in Badlands. I'll gladly praise Terrence Malick for his vision and his direction, and the work by two different cinematographers, and the imaginative use of music, but I can't really imagine the film working without Sissy Spacek, who has the right kind of small-town innocence, a certain passivity, and yet a little core of knowingness and a certain lack of concern with moral standards. What other voice could have made the voiceover work, and made so clear the difference between events and the way the girl thought of them?
For me Badlands stands head and shoulders above any other American film of 1973, which is not to dismiss Chinatown, Day of the Jackal, Scarecrow, and others. Martin Sheen and Warren Oates also contribute fine performance to the film.
A performance likely to get lost is the wonderful comic turn by Jacques Renard in La maman et la putain, the other great film of the year. Renard has a very small filmography, per imdb, yet with his excellent comic timing he steals every scene he has with poor Jean-Pierre Leaud. Renard is definitely my pick for best supporting actor of the year. He and Leaud play slacker pseudo-intellectuals who hang out in Paris cafes, and don't do much except mess around.
La maman et la putain is referential in a way I usually don't like, but in this case the references work with merciless brilliance. The viewer really needs to know that Truffaut had cast Leaud as his alter ego in more than one film, and that Godard had cast him as a character to be taken seriously in his political film Masculine Feminine. It helps if the viewer knows that Truffaut had cast Bernadette Lafont in his early short film Les mistons, and that Lafont, here playing the "mama," had played the promiscuous girl in Chabrol's Les bonnes femmes. Lafont had aged rather shockingly in the years since Les bonnes femmes, and that too seems to be part of the story.
The brilliant writer-director Jean Eustache positions his film so that it trashes both Godard, who stood for the political film in France, and Truffaut, who stood for the personal film. Jean-Pierre Leaud as an adult actor has little to contribute to a film but good looks, shallow charm, and a certain insipidity, but those are exactly the qualities needed for Alexandre, the main character. Because the film is apparently in large measure autobiographical, Eustache seems to be just as ruthless toward himself as he is toward Godard and Truffaut.
Bernadette Lafont is first-rate, as usual, as the woman who's keeping Alexandre, and Francoise Lebrun is equally strong as Veronique, the girl who sleeps around. The only putain in the film, however, is Alexandre.
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Sat. Dec. 3rd/4th--All times E.S.T.: One film by day, three of the nights' offerings:
9:00 a.m. "Ride Lonesome" (1959)--A taut Budd Boetticher western with Randolph Scott.
9:30 p.m. "A Scandal in Paris" (1946)--Early Douglas Sirk; TCM webpage has no information on it, except for an article. A TCM Premiere??
11:15 p.m. "Lured" (1947)-- Sirk directs Lucille Ball, George Sanders, and Boris Karloff in a very good Victorian noir.
4:00 a.m. "The Fox" (1968)--Based on the D.H. Lawrence story, film hasn't been on TCM since 2007(?).
A Scandal in Paris has been shown on TCM before, though not in the last three or four years. Douglas Sirk directs a period film on a very small budget, and you may enjoy seeing how he makes the most of his resources. George Sanders makes a splendid master thief, as you might expect. I like the film.
I'll enjoy filmlover in recommending the other three movies, too. Ride Lonesome is probably my favorite Budd Boetticher western. Sirk doesn't particularly know how to direct a thriller, but Lured is interesting anyway, with Lucille Ball and Boris Karloff sharing a big scene, and George Sanders getting to say, "I'm an unmitigated cad." Lucille Ball gets to wear a really spectacular gown.Definitely worth seeing.
The Fox was a big hit back in 1968, probably because it was franker about sex than most other films had been. The lovely Anne Heywood grows close to the neurotic Sandy Dennis, but Keir Dullea drives them apart.
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Thank you, TCM, for showing Sherman's March, which I had never heard of, but liked very much. It's funny: I thought I'd like Grey Gardens, but was put off by the exploitation and the shaky camerawork. Grey Gardens seems to have the shaky camerawork = authentic real life equation which I don't believe for a minute. Sherman's March looks like the work of a professional filmmaker.
Yes, McElwee is a kind of Southern Woody Allen without the wisecracks, but the film is also a time capsule of the early 1980s in the South, complete with a cameo appearance by Burt Reynolds as the star the women are swooning over. Where else can we find the Easter Bunny, survivalists, Burt Reynolds, and a life-size plastic hippopotamus in the same movie?
The appearance of the Easter Bunny, just as a preacher is explaining to one of McElwee's girlfriends about the End of Days, is particularly wonderful.
Please, TCM, give us an encore presentation.
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I saw a little of Grey Gardens last night. Interesting, though it certainly exploited the two women. Like a Tennessee Williams play but without Southern accents. Speaking of accents, I eventually turned off the TV because I just couldn't take any more of Little Edie's gosh-awful accent. Maybe the most unpleasant regional/class accent in the English-speaking world?
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Oh, I just finally watched Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007).
Once is enough for this one.
I may divide the crowd by saying that I hated the songs. Just dreary 'talking' singing like they did in the dreadful Les Miserables (2012).
I even hated the over-baked look of Sweeney Todd. The obvious steel blue grey tones of the entire film.
Bogie, this last sentence could apply to 50% of today's films. 75%?
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I prefer to think of the curtains as a Macguffin.
Somehow one doesn't expect the "treatments" in a movie about a loony bin to be "window treatments."
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There's also Search for Beauty, with a couple of rear-view naked guys slapping towels at each other in the locker room.
Buster Keaton appears to be naked in the swimming pool scene in The Cameraman.
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According to Wiki, the vote of the New York Film Critics for best actor had Stacy Keach as the winner, according to the then-current rules. However, apparently because the plurality was not large, the rules were changed in midstream. Neither Stacy Keach nor Marlon Brando could win a majority, and the compromise choice was Laurence Olivier in Sleuth, which must have pleased Joseph L. Mankiewicz, at least.
But according to the rules going in, Stacy Keach wuz robbed.
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Not surprisingly, Joseph L. Mankiewicz wanted the best actor awards to go to either Laurence Olivier or Michael Caine in Sleuth. About Pacino's win from the National Society of Film Critics, Mankiewicz groused that Pacino didn't do anything that Julie Garfield (Julius Garfinkel, better known as John Garfield) hadn't done a dozen times in similar roles. I like Pacino's performance, but Mankiewicz does have a point.
I love LawrenceA's suggestion that had Garfield lived, he would have been the right age to play Don Corleone.
The real controversy this year came from the New York Film Critics Society, which changed rules in mid-vote. I'll wait for Bogie to post those results to elaborate.
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Ice was my #2 of 1970, big fan. Have you seen Milestones, Portugal, or Route One, USA, skimpole?
The Best Films of 1973
5. Badlands
7. The Mother and the ****
These are the two films of the year for me, among the half dozen best films of the decade. Kilgore, I've praised the Eustache on more than one occasion, on this site and another, but no one else seems to have seen it or doesn't want to talk about it. Perhaps I would have run screaming from the theater if I'd seen it on the big screen, but in two sittings with the VHS tape the Zen nihilism is exhilarating.
Not to take anything away from Malick's superb first film, which I also love.
Kilgore, you'll probably like Spirit of the Beehive better than I did. I liked it, but wasn't ecstatic about it, as some others are.
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Thanks to Bogey for mentioning the excellent Robert Preston, who effortlessly steals every scene in Junior Bonner in which he appears, just the way the character he plays steals his son's horse. It's distinctly odd to see Steve McQueen play a pathetic loser emasculated by his own father, and I'm not sure that's what Sam Peckinpah originally intended. Preston plays a bad boy who's still getting away with everything.
And thanks to Swithin for drawing attention to Richard Castellano, who for my taste gives the best performance in The Godfather. As I've said too many times, I don't care for Brando's gimmicks and fakery in this film.
For me, the best performance of the year, and possibly the decade, comes from Stacy Keach in Fat City, which would have my vote as best film of the year. I recently saw this again on the big screen and was stunned by both performance and film. The slow tracking shot of a smalltown street, over which Kris Kristofferson sings "Help Me Make It Through the Night," provides a powerful opening for one of John Huston's best films.
Bad romantic choices and unfulfillable dreams are what Fat City is all about. Could Stacy Keach make a worse choice than the loud, drunken, and volatile Oma, so believably played by Susan Tyrrell? Jeff Bridges is trapped in a small town and low-paying jobs by the pregnancy of his girlfriend (Candy Clark), but dropping out of school to marry him is an equally bad choice on her part, even if both of them are decent and likable people. Then there's the boxing coach, wonderfully played by Nicholas Colasanto, who can't help believing that every new boxer he meets is the one that will carry him to the big time.
What seems evident on second viewing is the way Huston doesn't push us to take a particular view of his characters. No one is condemned or pushed forward as a hero. Huston is content to observe, carefully, even, in a way, lovingly. Fat City could be seen as a downer; it's anything but a warm and fuzzy feel-good movie. However, the darkness of the film doesn't come from the anti-war misunderstood student smugly countercultural spirit which has made some of the films of this era seem dated. Fat City did not seem like a masterpiece to me when I saw it on first release, but it does today.
We may disagree about which movie scenes feel like real life. I have a friend who feels that way about Husbands, which to me seems as stylized and ersatz as Pillow Talk; the scene in Raging Bull where DeNiro forces his brother to say he slept with DeNiro's wife seems to me a superior version of the scenes from Husbands--it may not feel like real life, but Scorsese is a more talented director; and the opening scene of Fat City, where Keach gets out of bed and stares in the mirror, or the scene where Keach cooks dinner for Tyrrell and they fight are the ones which feel like real life to me.
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Baccarat is the game which obsesses Bob le Flambeur.
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Thanksgiving night we saw Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them. Probably not recommended to those who hate the Harry Potter films.
Harry Potter fans will probably like it. Not on a par with the first four Potter movies, but pretty close in quality to the others. Lots of entertaining CGI beasts. Eddie Redmayne and Katherine Waterston are charming as the leads. Carmen Ejojo, who plays the president of the American magical congress, has very striking looks.
The dialogue is not always easy to understand, and the film is probably twenty minutes too long, a statement which could safely be made about 90% of the movies made today. I thought the movie was fun, although it had trouble getting around to a stopping point.
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I probably phrased this poorly, but The Story of Adele H. is indeed one of my favorite Truffaut films. Two English Girls is much more flawed, but some of the elements were in place for a wonderful film. Nonetheless, I like it better than, say, The Last Metro or Day for Night, which are less flawed, but to my mind less interesting. It's only fair to say that The Last Night and Day for Night have more fans than Two English Girls.
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Lawrence, from your list the only ones I've seen are Plaza Suite, The Raging Moon, The Trojan Women, and Two English Girls.
Plaza Suite is by-the-numbers Neil Simon. If you generally like the movies made from his plays, this one certainly has some good players. To me, in some ways the most interesting thing about the film is Jane Fonda's attempt to play a Jewish New Yorker in a Neil Simon comedy. Many a less famous actress would have less work to do. It's interesting to see how Fonda approaches the part, though I wouldn't call it a finished performance.
The Raging Moon would have been better in black and white. At least in the VHS version I saw, the color cinematography is not very good. Malcolm McDowell and Nanette Newman turn in strong performances as two paraplegics who meet during rehab and fall in love. As is usual with Bryan Forbes, this doesn't have the feel-good ending Hollywood would have wanted, though that might actually have been better in this instance.
The Trojan Women is a good version of Euripides' play, with Vanessa Redgrave as Andromache and Irene Papas as Helen. The introduction of Helen is particularly nice.
Two English Girls would be the Truffaut film I'd put just below the first three and The Story of Adele H. Georges Delerue's music is superb, one of my favorite movie scores, and Nestor Almendros' cinematography is also outstanding. The film is worth seeing for their contributions alone. I also like the script, though some may not. The two female leads are, to my taste, only adequate, and Jean-Pierre Leaud, not one of my favorites, not even that. I suppose the story works if the young Frenchman gets by on insipid and shallow charm, but so much more could have been done with a stronger cast. In a couple of years Jean Eustache will cast Leaud as a character who gets by on insipid and shallow charm, and that will work brilliantly, though Leaud probably wasn't in on the joke.
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Make a movie out of one of Frank Baum's other 13 Oz books.
Return to Oz sort of did this, combining elements of both The Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz. Not that a dramatization of each one separately wouldn't have been better.
They were many stage dramatizations of various Oz books or combinations of Oz books or vaguely inspired by Oz books in the early years of the century. Baum was involved in some of them himself.
March Schedule Is Up
in General Discussions
Posted
Cluny Brown, rarely shown on TCM, is a must for fans of screwball comedy and especially for fans of Jennifer Jones, who is both radiantly beautiful and very funny. Jones and Charles Boyer make a great romantic couple. Helen Walker has a nice supporting role, and Una O'Connor's part consists only of a series of significant coughs.