CinemaInternational
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Posts posted by CinemaInternational
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Jaws in The Spy Who loved Me. Took his job seriously....
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"Tis a bit of unexpected casting news, but Oscar winner Emma Stone is being strongly considered to play Clara Bow in a 2021 release called Babylon, which focuses on the tumult of Hollywood's switch to sound. Brad Pitt is strongly being considered to play a composite character mostly inspired by John Gilbert. Stone's La La Land director, Damian Chazelle, is directing with Paramount releasing. The film currently is expected to be two and a half hours long. But maybe I am putting this up because i think its high time a film was made about Bow, and that Stone, while very talented, is a bit of a surprise pick (she's much taller that the real-life actress). But I think she can pull it off. Your thoughts?
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Parachute Jumper just became the 500th movie I have seen from the 30s! And before the end of the year I'll be at 4,000 movies seen in total!
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On 11/11/2019 at 10:19 AM, JakeHolman said:
They have a lot of top contenders true. But think of last year. Roma looked like it would win, and then, no, it was not it. There were reports that Academy members were angry that streaming films were up for Best Picture. I think it will carry over this year. Netflix will win other categories but will be iced out in Best Picture by Once Upon a Time in Hollywood or 1917.
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On 11/10/2019 at 5:59 PM, overeasy said:
There was a time when movies were based on genuine novels and plays that had been carefully crafted and parsed by their authors, editors and finally, the public. Much of cinema used this great source material. Certainly, the screenwriters and filmmakers managed to muck it up quite a bit from time to time, ("The book is better...") yet it was a deep well of material that, due to its tendency to include a first, second and third act, adapted well to the screen.
Fast forward. Now the source material is a comic book or "graphic novel." I'm going to say this straight out; this stuff is c*ap. The characters are simplistic, as are the plots. That's what Marty is responding to. The infantilization of the media. Stories that have no narrative heft. Stories that are pure adrenaline, but leave you with nothing. Over-caffeinated CGI-fests. It's dreck and he and Coppola know it. Current directors aren't going to say that, because they fear the blowback in today's snowflake world.
Flame away, if you must.
I think that the problem has been coming for a long time, but its only exploded in the last decade or so. Part of the reason why so many major studio films are the way they are is because of how blazing the Indie boom was in the 90s. Especially at Miramax. With the studios wanting to cater more to younger demographics, they relegated most of the "movies for grownups" to the indie studios. And then everything was in a holding pattern until the stock market crash in 2007. Many independents shuttered then and the major studios, by then used to blockbusters being their biggest, cut back on "riskier" titles, aka the dramas adults like. Then the comedies went. And streaming came. And the indies grew even smaller. So now, most of the big films meant for adults are released in the last quarter of the year, and you need to watch carefully because some come and go in a flash.
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Criterion Sale November
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Gone with the Wind.
Una O'Connor as Scarlet O'Hara
Jimmy Durante as Rhett Butler
Walter Brennan as Ashley Wilkes
Hattie McDaniel as Melanie Wilkes
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Did anybody catch the funny story Martin Short had about Bette Davis following The Big Picture? He said that she satirically had a sign on the door of her apartment saying "No Smoking Please".
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I saw it on a VHS tape yesterday. Wonderful film......
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6 minutes ago, TopBilled said:
There's a good book called The Best Old Movies for Families, written by Ty Burr.
Highly recommend it.
He talks about which titles went over well with his teen daughter and her friends.
I have a copy of that book as well. Its a great read, even for someone like me who doesn't have a child. It's author was nominated for a Pulitzer a few years ago.
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Two little suggestions though:
Hold off a bit on Citizen Kane and Casablanca. Both are famous classics, but their reputations proceed them and sometimes people can be disappointed in something they have heard so much praise about. Hold off a bit to see if they are hooked on classics to show them to them.
Stay far away from films with blackface scenes: Holiday Inn, Babes in Arms, unfortunately Swing Time. Go for Top Hat if you want to show them a Fred and Ginger. Also other types of people playing other ethnic backgrounds, even respectful to the cultures like The good Earth.
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If you're going for an even younger crowd, Bringing Up Baby would work. Kids would love it. I'd also reccomend The Thin Man, and maybe throw in some Hitchcocks like Rebecca or Strangers on a Train or yes, that old TCM standby, North by Northwest. Random Harvest would be a pick that they might not have heard of, but for most romantics, it does the trick very nicely. Pre-codes might interest them due to the snappiness and pace of them.
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Just now, cmovieviewer said:
It’s Mr. Scorsese’s opinion which he is completely entitled to. He was somewhat put in this position because someone specifically asked him about Marvel films. In this latest article he uses that response as a starting point to explain how he feels about the state of ‘Cinema’ in general which I have no problem with.
The main disagreement I have with the latest text is with respect to Marvel he should have stopped with the reply “I’ve tried to watch a few of them and that they’re not for me.” So for him to later on give specific comments about Marvel such as “What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk.” would be based on failed attempts at watching a few Marvel films. I don’t think Mr. Scorsese would appreciate someone making such specific comments about his films based on a few failed attempts at watching them.
Spoiler alert for Avengers: Infinity War - at the end of this film half of humanity is wiped out. If this is not mystery or emotional danger then I don’t know what is.
But now this controversy is approaching becoming merely click bait so I’m growing weary of it. Other than becoming sad at a time gone by in 'Cinema', I'm not sure what if anything Mr. Scorsese hopes can change by his comments.
I think the problem is bigger than Marvel, it's the whole way people watch things anymore really. Somewhere, a few years ago, it seems, more people started waiting for films to watch on streaming or decided to opt for more "peak" TV, and only went to theatres for the latest spectaculars. As a result, independent film has shrunk considerably, more films are forgoing theatres, and the major studios invested more and more on a smaller number of films. And so its become a bit of a crisis.
I was talking to Lawrence the other day in a thread about how I was even growing nostalgic for movie years 15 years ago (something I never thought I would say). Back then, many were wringing their hands on how poor the major studio films were. But you can list many of their productions in the early 2000s that would not be made in the current major studio climate.
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Scorsese wrote this op-ed in the New York Times. I am re-posting it here in its entirety, so you can read it without clicking on a link or anything:
QuoteWhen I was in England in early October, I gave an interview to Empire magazine. I was asked a question about Marvel movies. I answered it. I said that I’ve tried to watch a few of them and that they’re not for me, that they seem to me to be closer to theme parks than they are to movies as I’ve known and loved them throughout my life, and that in the end, I don’t think they’re cinema.
Some people seem to have seized on the last part of my answer as insulting, or as evidence of hatred for Marvel on my part. If anyone is intent on characterizing my words in that light, there’s nothing I can do to stand in the way.
Many franchise films are made by people of considerable talent and artistry. You can see it on the screen. The fact that the films themselves don’t interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament. I know that if I were younger, if I’d come of age at a later time, I might have been excited by these pictures and maybe even wanted to make one myself. But I grew up when I did and I developed a sense of movies — of what they were and what they could be — that was as far from the Marvel universe as we on Earth are from Alpha Centauri.
For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.
It was about confronting the unexpected on the screen and in the life it dramatized and interpreted, and enlarging the sense of what was possible in the art form.
And that was the key for us: it was an art form. There was some debate about that at the time, so we stood up for cinema as an equal to literature or music or dance. And we came to understand that the art could be found in many different places and in just as many forms — in “The Steel Helmet” by Sam Fuller and “Persona” by Ingmar Bergman, in “It’s Always Fair Weather” by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen and “Scorpio Rising” by Kenneth Anger, in “Vivre Sa Vie” by Jean-Luc Godard and “The Killers” by Don Siegel.
Or in the films of Alfred Hitchcock — I suppose you could say that Hitchcock was his own franchise. Or that he was our franchise. Every new Hitchcock picture was an event. To be in a packed house in one of the old theaters watching “Rear Window” was an extraordinary experience: It was an event created by the chemistry between the audience and the picture itself, and it was electrifying.
And in a way, certain Hitchcock films were also like theme parks. I’m thinking of “Strangers on a Train,” in which the climax takes place on a merry-go-round at a real amusement park, and “Psycho,” which I saw at a midnight show on its opening day, an experience I will never forget. People went to be surprised and thrilled, and they weren’t disappointed.
Sixty or 70 years later, we’re still watching those pictures and marveling at them. But is it the thrills and the shocks that we keep going back to? I don’t think so. The set pieces in “North by Northwest” are stunning, but they would be nothing more than a succession of dynamic and elegant compositions and cuts without the painful emotions at the center of the story or the absolute lostness of Cary Grant’s character.
The climax of “Strangers on a Train” is a feat, but it’s the interplay between the two principal characters and Robert Walker’s profoundly unsettling performance that resonate now.
Some say that Hitchcock’s pictures had a sameness to them, and perhaps that’s true — Hitchcock himself wondered about it. But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.
They are sequels in name but they are remakes in spirit, and everything in them is officially sanctioned because it can’t really be any other way. That’s the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption.
Another way of putting it would be that they are everything that the films of Paul Thomas Anderson or Claire Denis or Spike Lee or Ari Aster or Kathryn Bigelow or Wes Anderson are not. When I watch a movie by any of those filmmakers, I know I’m going to see something absolutely new and be taken to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience. My sense of what is possible in telling stories with moving images and sounds is going to be expanded.
So, you might ask, what’s my problem? Why not just let superhero films and other franchise films be? The reason is simple. In many places around this country and around the world, franchise films are now your primary choice if you want to see something on the big screen. It’s a perilous time in film exhibition, and there are fewer independent theaters than ever. The equation has flipped and streaming has become the primary delivery system. Still, I don’t know a single filmmaker who doesn’t want to design films for the big screen, to be projected before audiences in theaters.
That includes me, and I’m speaking as someone who just completed a picture for Netflix. It, and it alone, allowed us to make “The Irishman” the way we needed to, and for that I’ll always be thankful. We have a theatrical window, which is great. Would I like the picture to play on more big screens for longer periods of time? Of course I would. But no matter whom you make your movie with, the fact is that the screens in most multiplexes are crowded with franchise pictures.
And if you’re going to tell me that it’s simply a matter of supply and demand and giving the people what they want, I’m going to disagree. It’s a chicken-and-egg issue. If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course they’re going to want more of that one kind of thing.
But, you might argue, can’t they just go home and watch anything else they want on Netflix or iTunes or Hulu? Sure — anywhere but on the big screen, where the filmmaker intended her or his picture to be seen.
In the past 20 years, as we all know, the movie business has changed on all fronts. But the most ominous change has happened stealthily and under cover of night: the gradual but steady elimination of risk. Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption. Many of them are well made by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all.
I’m certainly not implying that movies should be a subsidized art form, or that they ever were. When the Hollywood studio system was still alive and well, the tension between the artists and the people who ran the business was constant and intense, but it was a productive tension that gave us some of the greatest films ever made — in the words of Bob Dylan, the best of them were “heroic and visionary.”
Today, that tension is gone, and there are some in the business with absolute indifference to the very question of art and an attitude toward the history of cinema that is both dismissive and proprietary — a lethal combination. The situation, sadly, is that we now have two separate fields: There’s worldwide audiovisual entertainment, and there’s cinema. They still overlap from time to time, but that’s becoming increasingly rare. And I fear that the financial dominance of one is being used to marginalize and even belittle the existence of the other.
For anyone who dreams of making movies or who is just starting out, the situation at this moment is brutal and inhospitable to art. And the act of simply writing those words fills me with terrible sadness.
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Just now, TopBilled said:
NIGHT AFTER NIGHT (1934) is on disc...so is YOU AND ME (1938).
Probably his best Paramount film is SOULS AT SEA (1937) in which he shares lead billing with Gary Cooper. That one has aired on TCM but surprisingly is not yet on home video.
Souls at Sea is on DVD, just only in set form. The TCM Vault Universal Rarities collection.
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1. The Landlord
2. The Ballad of Cable Hogue
3. Darling Lili
4. Donkey Skin
5. Patton
6. Lovers and Other Strangers
7. Puzzle of a Downfall Child
8. Sunflower
9. The Walking Stick
10. Catch-22
11. The Great White Hope
12. Ryan's Daughter
13. I Never Sang for My Father
14. Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon
15. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
16. The Aristocats
17. The Only Game in Town
18. The Wild Child
19. Brewster McCloud
20. Diary of a Mad Housewife
21. Five Easy Pieces
22. Airport
23. The Conformist
24. MASH
25. On a Clear Day You Can See Forever -
A few months ago when the 1969 set Tarantino film was opening, I asked what your favorite films of 1969, 50 years ago this year, were. Now we are less than 2 months away from the first year of the 1970s turning 50. So with that in mind, a retrospective look at that year is in order. Just feel free to make a list of your favorites, or just name a film or two. Anything you wish.
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Just now, LawrenceA said:
Not many. Here are the 7/10's that I've seen, in no particular order:
- Yesterday
- Us
- The Laundromat
- The Dead Don't Die
- Spider-Man: Far from Home
- Avengers: Endgame
- Godzilla: King of the Monsters
- The Highwaymen
- IO
- Shazam
- Alita: Battle Angel
Those last two were a big surprise, as I wasn't expecting much. I also liked the documentaries Rolling Thunder Revue and Fyre.
I'm holding out hope that some of the titles I haven't seen yet will help fill out my Top Ten of the year. I'm looking forward to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Joker, The Irishman, Knives Out, Uncut Gems, Jojo Rabbit, The Lighthouse, Little Women, Marriage Story, Motherless Brooklyn, Doctor Sleep, Honey Boy, Bombshell, 1917, and The Two Popes.
I did like Yesterday a lot (the only others I saw from this year so far were Toy Story 4, Downton Abbey, Late Night, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World and Dumbo), but I haven't seen any of the others, although Us, The Laundromat, and Shazam! will be on the docket. Maybe The Highwaymen and Spider-man too.
Year-end titles are always the most intriguing of the year anymore and are often quite intriguing, but i find myself even getting nostalgic for movie years even 15 years ago. It seemed more fruitful for good movies over all back then. Am I crazy for thinking that?
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Really, it's all harmless fun, but really it doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things. I mean, i don't think that any of us are really in an Olympic style race to climb higher or higher. The reputation points I brought up, I have only checked them once maybe twice before today. they're fun, but nothing to get into a hissy over.
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On 11/2/2019 at 2:56 PM, LawrenceA said:
My choices for 2019 probably won't be set until midway through next year as I catch up with all the notable end-of-year releases. As of right now, I've only seen 2 movies from 2019 that I gave an 8/10 or higher rating (Midsommar and Dolemite Is My Name). Usually all of my top ten choices are 8/10 or higher rated, as well as my runner-up movies.
Just out of curiosity, were there many from the early part of this year that received a 7 (aka an almost reccomend grade) from you? I ask because so far, much of this year seems a bit flat to me.....
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Let's not forget what happened in 1987, shall we? Bette Davis appeared on The Tonight Show and got an ovation just for lighting her cigarette.
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20 hours ago, TopBilled said:
This romantic comedy drama opens today:
And is bound to be present in at least three acting races and Best Picture..... and Laura Dern will probably win. It hits regular Netflix in a month's time.
This weeks other releases included Midway, Roland Emmerich's take on the famous WWII battle, Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining, Honey Boy, Shia LaBeauf's autobiographical tale, and Last Christmas, over which everybody is talking about the twist ending ..... but if you've ever heard the 80s Wham! song after which it was named (and after all the Christmases where they have put it on the radio, who hasn't?), the twist is glaringly obvious. Just look at the lyrics to the song.
oh, and one other film too, a documentary called The Kingmaker, about Imelda Marcos. Seems to be a top candidate for Documentary at the Oscars.
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Just now, Hibi said:
Where do you see those? I can't find them on mine (the reputation points).
On the page, I linked up above.... and again here, just for safekeeping
http://forums.tcm.com/topmembers/?filter=pp_reputation_points
TheCid reacted to my one post, so that's one more point it seems.....
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Just now, Hibi said:
What a joke! For posting urls????
I don't know how exactly it all works. I was just going by the numbers on the page....
Disney Plus Launched...
in General Discussions
Posted
Miracle on 34th Street, the Star Wars series, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Sandlot, Rookie of the Year, Millions, one Garfield the Cat film, and (maybe) Never Been Kissed. Most of the rest of (adult-oriented contemporary) Fox will likely be appearing on the now completely owned Hulu. But Fox got the short end of the stick....