JonasEB
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Posts posted by JonasEB
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Nagisa Oshima's Empire of Passion on June 15th.
Jean-Luc Godard's Les Carabiniers and Luchino Visconti's The Damned on June 17th.
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Francis Ford
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My Comcast guide says...
Inspiration - 1931 - Greta Garbo
Also, the article in the site's schedule links to the Garbo film. It's all faulty database stuff, it's definitely going to be the Garbo film. I can't find the 1928 silent film in the silentera.com database and the IMDB page - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020027/ - indicates that it is either lost or hasn't been seen for a very, very long time.
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> {quote:title=filmlover wrote:}{quote}
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> *Too Late Blues* (1961) Bobby Darin - DVD and Blu-ray
The John Cassavetes film? Finally, that's wonderful news!
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The silent Seventh Heaven has never been on FMC to my knowledge (the sound remake has) but they did show Street Angel last month.
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> {quote:title=UncleBTO wrote:}{quote}Why are clips shown where Directors slam the Pan-And-Scan process, yet it's lauded how some dude is recreating the music for certain movies that attempt to recast certain characters in a whole new light?
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> ps. Letterbox has some validity if your TV is about four or six feet wide. I don't believe my position is unique when I say that mine is not. The result is that Letterbox movies are less than 12 inches top-to-bottom, and thus are completely unwatchable!
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There's a huge, obvious, gaping, extraordinary difference here...
People were forced to watch pan & scan movies on TV for decades, the only people who are going to see this guy's recreation project are people who actively look for it - which will be next to no one. It literally has zero impact, while pan & scan inarguably, irrevocably, ruined movies.
Letterbox is never less than valid even if your TV isn't "four or six feet wide," (ridiculous) and there's yet another, very, very obvious tonic to this whole situation - it's called a 16X9 TV. You can get 40+ inchers for $500 bucks now. You're mad if you actually believe watching a CinemaScope film pan & scanned is a better experience.
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> {quote:title=kriegerg69 wrote:}{quote} Just because a film has a lovely use of COLOR doesn't necessarily make it a wonderfully PHOTOGRAPHED film...many examples cited here seem to have been cited because of the look of the color...many were cited in the other thread about the best COLOR in a film (Red Shoes, for example).
Well if you didn't intend it to, it does read that way. In context of the argument you're making, there's no qualification that would indicate otherwise. It would have made more sense to cite a film in that spot that you think relies on color alone and not on composition.
You've made a distinction in your initial post but didn't offer any example from the thread of what is merely "good color" vs. "good cinematography (in color)".
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You're splitting hairs. The first post says, "...both color and composition."
Are you really saying The Red Shoes isn't a wonderfully shot and composed film regardless of its brilliant color? First time I've ever heard that.
What if the quality and use of the color is precisely WHY the photography is effective to begin with? French Cancan is studio-bound and intentionally artificial; the wonder of the cinematography is in the way Renoir moves color around. That's why it's good. These things aren't mutually exclusive at all.
Practically every film mentioned in this thread is justifiable.
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Not necessarily the "finest" but some that I really, really like...
Technicolor:
Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944) - http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Meet-Me-In-St-Louis-Blu-ray/28203/#Screenshots
French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1955) - http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/French-Cancan-Blu-ray/12780/#Screenshots
Not Technicolor:
Szindbad (Zoltan Huszarik, 1971) - http://criterionforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=342795#p342795
Equinox Flower (Yasujiro Ozu, 1958) -
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John Ford's Tobacco Road...no, I am not kidding.
Perhaps it had a lot to do with seeing The World Moves On - one of the few films I genuinely despise - but my second viewing of Tobacco Road was very pleasant. Charley Grapewin, tasty Gene Tierney, Ward Bond punching out the jerk son and flipping a car over with his back - good stuff. It's not Judge Priest or How Green Was My Valley (what is?) but it's definitely not the travesty it's usually painted as.
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May 20th
Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game at 2:00 AM ET and Partie de Campagne (A Day in the Country) at 4:00 AM ET.
Really interested in the latter - it's not available in the U.S. and I'm curious as to what source it's coming from.
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The problem with a TCMHD is that TCM needs to acquire a large selection of HD masters before they can have a legitimate channel. I don't think they want a lot of SD programming on an authentic HD channel...but they also don't want to repeat the same things over and over and over again.
Most of the studios are ready to provide HD masters of their holdings including the classic films, most DVDs were made from HD telecines, the problem is gathering enough of them - it's a lot of time and money.
I think it's possible that a genuine HD channel may debut around TCM's 20th anniversary in 2014 but you can't be completely sure about that.
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I didn't get to watch the premier of that, I'll see it when it repeats.
I've heard it was a "Public Domain" quality print so it may have been inherent to TCM's source. I definitely know it didn't happen with the Ozu and Laurel & Hardy silents mentioned by the OP (on the SD channel that is.)
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TCM doesn't do this on purpose. This is only a problem with a few films on the TCM "HD" feed, not the regular channel. It's caused by whatever system they use to upscale SD masters (which is all the "HD" channel is right now.)
Until they sort that problem out, there is a simple solution - just turn it back to the regular channel.
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Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1952)
The Savage Innocents (1960)
Red Psalm (1972)
Dust in the Wind (1986)
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Spike Lee - It's definitely Ace in the Hole (he's on the Criterion DVD.)
Jules Feiffer - I could see Gold Diggers fitting this one.
Regis Philbin - Somebody Up There Likes Me (can't you just imagine the way Regis would say that?)
Anthony Bourdain - Rififi
Jim Lehrer - Fat City
Ellen Barkin - The Searchers
Debra Winger - My Fair Lady
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It's a shame Criterion didn't do more with Certified Copy. After such a long delay and at $40 SRP it would have been beneficial to include another early feature film (as Close-up did) or some of Kiarostami's short films (although a box set of the Koker films may be coming soon, so I assume they're saving many for that project.)
And that cover - it's modeled on the male lead's book briefly seen in the film but...I don't like it.
Hopefully another substantial feature is added, otherwise I can't recommend this edition over the already stellar Region Free (and cheap - currently less than $10) U.K. Artificial Eye Blu-ray (or alternatively, this DVD-only Artificial Eye box - http://www.artificial-eye.com/film.php?dvd=ART519DVD - in each case superior to the corresponding Region 1 edition and, again, less expensive.)
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> {quote:title=Lori3 wrote:}{quote}I think that the "Suggest A Movie" page is still not working. I put in the same request that I posted on this thread, and earlier today I went to check to see if my request was still there and I couldn't find it anywhere. Do you or anyone know what I need to do to complain about this?
TCM gets all of the requests, the page itself is just buggy. I've made requests one day, checked them the next - they weren't there - but would eventually see them days or so later when the odd bug leaps over a few days to the days that formerly seemed to be "skipped." But they're not, they're getting everything.
[f-414] - This subforum is for the Suggest a Movie page. The current first thread is a general complaint thread.
I recommend using Suggest a Movie instead, as this REQUEST A MOVIE thread only pops up infrequently and was created while Suggest a Movie was temporarily gone. I doubt this thread is being checked.
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Also 2010's Moguls and Movie Stars series - November was mostly full of silent films.
But a month with silent films three times each week, all night long, that would be very desirable.
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> {quote:title=hlywdkjk wrote:}{quote}Peggy Noonan
> The Wall Street Journal, December 27
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> *Final note.* We are at a point in our culture when we actually have to pull for grown-up movies, when we must try to encourage them and laud them when they come by. David Lean wouldn't be allowed to make movies today, John Ford would be forced to turn John Wayne into a 30-something failure-to-launch hipster whose big moment is missing the toilet in the vomit scene in Hangover Ten. Our movie culture has descended into immaturity, deep and inhuman violence, a pervasive and flattened sexuality. It is an embarrassment.
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> Credit, then, to those who make movies for grown-ups. I end with words I never expected to say: "Thank you, Harvey Weinstein. WELL DONE."
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Not...true. Proactive moviegoes know better, Peggy Noonan seems to expect things to be dropped into her lap. She's just perpetuating the same falsehood that damages not just film culture, but culture in general. Strike 1!
Every year, at this time of year, we get a lot of movies for "adults" because the industry has found a way to market them in a particular way - this includes making people think "movies for adults" are rare but every time this year we get more and more movies like The Iron Lady or My Week With Marilyn. They're very successful too - another thing perpetrated by marketing or hype, that they're not successful - so there's no reason for the studios to change the policy we've had for about 30 years now - using "indie farms" (my term - Weinstein Co., Fox Searchlight, etc.) to produce "adult" fare at the end/beginning of a year, making blockbusters and cash-cows for the rest of the year.
What this strategy that the studios and people like the Weinstein's use does do, however, is keep people from looking farther than they should to find movies. We don't have to pull for movies for adults, they're abundant, we just need to look for them. Not even Certified Copy, maybe the best film of 2010 and starring the beloved-by-practically-every-facet-of-filmdom Juliet Binoche, got any mention from the mainstream press.
"Descendants of Lean" type films still come around every few years - The English Patient and Atonement, Strike 2 for Peggy Noonan - but just like "Epic Lean" I don't think much of these films. As with Lean then and as with English Patient and Atonement now, superior things are ignored in their favor: The Leopard in 1964, Mysteries of Lisbon in 2012. The Academy is still pushing the same artistic values they always have, and continue to suppress the very same things.
If Raul Ruiz can make a wonderful 5 hour period film in this period for less than $5,000,000 then we're still capable of enormously great things - it's on us to pay attention, not to expect the powers that be to drop them in our laps, and it's only our loss when we do not do these things.
John Ford: Westerns still manage to get nominated for Best Picture, but the mainstream still can't recognize Heaven's Gate for what it is so I'm not sure America deserves a John Ford when they so violently screwed over a descendant of Ford (and of Luchino Visconti/The Leopard) 32 years ago and continue to scoff at it to this day. (Note: Only one John Ford western was ever nominated for Best Picture, the conventional Stagecoach. The post-war westerns, some of his most important work, were ignored or faintly patronized at the time, never recognized for the rich view of civilization, myths and heroic figures, and our country that they were. We weren't any more interested in what he was really doing then than we are today.) Strike 3!
I don't weep for culture, I weep for us, for we do not appreciate what we already have, we hide it and ignore it (as we always, always, have.)
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> {quote:title=phroso wrote:}{quote}The positive hype seems to be the result of wishful thinking by film critics and buffs, who would like to believe that all black-and-white movies are automatically masterpieces.
There are plenty of film critics and "buffs" (don't like this word - implies people who obsess over trivia) who have mixed feelings about The Artist or don't like it at all and most of the reviewers praising The Artist to the heavens have done nothing to help most other black & white films of the last thirty or so years to reach the top of the Oscars (or any part of it for that matter.)
This is a bit of another post from another thread about The Artist that I made...
> {quote:title=JonasEB wrote:}{quote}It's awfully cynical of me, but the reason why The Weinstein Co. picked up the movie in the first place is because they knew they could advertise it in a very specific way to specific people and get these results.
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> It's as focus grouped and market tested as any of the blockbusters but in a different way. The Artist passes market muster not because it conforms to a formula but because it has a...level of quirkiness and obvious difference that can easily be marketed. The Artist has obvious differences in its appearance from the normal product we get, but at the same time it appeals to the same things that audiences always like at the movies - sentiment, conventional plotting, etc. (Not that I'm opposed to any of these things mind you.)
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> I haven't seen The Artist yet, I very well might enjoy it, but I have wider concerns about its portrayal of silent films, chiefly, that it exploits the idea that silent films are different from sound films when they really aren't; it's only the most superficial difference. It's a novelty I don't appreciate. I get the feeling that 90-99% of the people who see The Artist won't seriously engage themselves with silent films, that ultimately the film's novelty only hepls itself and does nothing to improve the conditions real silent films face.
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(And I really would like to be proven wrong on that last point: If The Artist was the catalyst that finally forced Warner to unleash the cache of silent masterpieces they've left to waste in the vaults on DVD and, I wish, on Blu-ray then it would be a rousing success in my eyes.)
Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Three Times (the middle part of which is a silent film - and it's just like his other films) and Guy Maddin's films (often black & white and playing with silent attributes) didn't/don't achieve this market penetration because they neither fit what a modern audience might expect from a silent film nor do they fit the same audiences' model of what a movie is today. The Artist toes the former line and fulfills (or seems to, again I haven't seen it) the expectations of the latter. It's loaded in many ways and it's easy to build something out of it.
> {quote:title=Aly_M wrote:}{quote}Also, I am suprised no one has pointed out that the subplot is exactly like a star is born.
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> Frankly I don't see the purpose of making a silent film today and if they are trying to do a tribute to silents, why are they making it a musical? Who heard of a silent musical? They did not do tap dance routines like that in silents. It just really annoys me, the whole film. Is there anyone out there who is anything other than rapturous about "the Artist"?
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The Artist is in the tradition of films like the silent Show People, the "Star is Born" predecessor What Price Hollywood, Singin' in the Rain, etc. It's deliberate and a lot of writers actually have pointed it out. And there are actually a lot of "musical" moments in silent film history.
My issue with The Artist is not that it would dare be a silent film in 2012 but that it places silent films in relief for an audience in a way that isn't exactly truthful about what silent films mean to film history. As much as I like Kevin Brownlow's writing and work, I disagree with the notion that silent films are essentially different from sound films - it's all cinema and practically any good film since 1929 does things the way that any silent would have done them. Instead of reconciling something "alien" with what is familiar, we should affirm that silent films are like any other film. More people would appreciate silent films if they could see that it's not really different from a sound film and that the accomplishments of silent films are practically 90%+ of what the art form is.
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I have problems with Abel Gance's work but sitting through a 5 hour silent film isn't one of them.
Now, if it were a five hour long American early talkie from 1929/1930 - that would provoke doubt.
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> {quote:title=calvinnme wrote:}{quote}Blu Ray isn't going to do anything for the kind of films I like. If you have good eyesight - I really don't anymore - and like more modern films then I could see why you might want to upgrade to Blu Ray.
Well, as far as many early sound films only exist in multi-generation duplicate elements, maybe, but it's completely false that films from that era won't benefit from higher video and audio resolution. Even the problematic ones I think improve with the lower amount of video and sound compression and better motion
If you personally have no use for Blu-ray, that's fine - a lot of the films you like may never come out on the format - but everytime someone says something like this it only makes it more difficult to get any older film out on the format.
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No Superbowl for me - I don't like football and 99.9% of Superbowl commercials are terrible, not funny or clever at all (can't believe people fawn over this crap every year.)
I'm not watching TCM either, there's nothing I need to see on Sunday, but I may end up watching a couple of Powell & Pressburger films I've never seen and just got on DVD ("Battle of the River Plate" and "They're a Weird Mob.")
Gaumont Secures Funding to Restore 270 Films
in Hot Topics
Posted
Well, Blu-ray, for one. The Criterion was made from a standard definition master from the 1990s; it still looks good but there's definitely room for improvement considering the film itself is in quite fine condition. This would get the same amount of improvement from the Blu-ray format over DVD that any modern film would.
Masters of Cinema in the U.K. have already announced that they're doing a BD of Joan from this restoration but it's still a couple of years off.
"Minimum of 2K" is definitely good news - the majority of these 270 will probably be 2K but the heavy hitters will almost certainly be 4K (like Gaumont's brilliant French Cancan a couple of years back.)