EricJ
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Posts posted by EricJ
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3 hours ago, cigarjoe said:
The only Coen film I've really not liked was the remake of The Lady Killers
Apart from the obvious "One essential movie they ever made" Raising Arizona (where they basically taught DoP Barry Sonnenfeld how to direct "Men in Black" by overdirecting everything into swirling kinetic cartoon surrealism), the only Coen film I've ever actually liked was O Brother, Where Art Thou, three years before the movie-musical form was rediscovered again.
And keeping in mind the yuk-yuk but not-too-bad Gene Kelly parody from "Hail Caesar", my advice to the Coens is to stop being hip-Millennial deconstructive about historical eras they were never alive to see but just remembered cheap jokes about, and just shut up and do more musicals. Like the old vaudeville saying, when the gags aren't going over, go into your song and dance.
3 hours ago, TomJH said:But the emotional coldness of (Kubrick)'s later work is a turn off for me.
It's Kubrick's emotional coldness that makes GOOD irony....Whereas the Coens' constant rib-nudging self-stylizations and chortling over stoners, bowlers, oh-yah Minnesota accents, or anything anyone said in the first half of the 20th century, is Bad Irony.
The essential Kubrick shot is watching the characters from a mile away--like HAL lip-reading the astronauts in 2001--and Kubrick's distance punches up our emotional distance from what's happening. The climaxes of Barry Lyndon, Paths of Glory, Clockwork Orange, etc. manage to make the "irony" sting enough to make the point, without feeling as if he was domino-toppling the characters for his own hip amusement.
Yes, the "Wacky Pentagon dialogue" from Dr. Strangelove could tip dangerously into Coen territory, but, like R. Lee Ermey's Wacky Marine Dialogue from "Full Metal Jacket", Kubrick knows how to play it as scary as satirical.
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3 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
REALLY?!?!
WHO ELSE!!!!!!!!????I’d love to start a support group or something.
seriously, I feel like I’m all alone on this issue sometimes...
You're not alone: Just mention "Hail, Caesar", and clear the dance floor...
Just recently I'd caught up on Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies (2015), where the Coens did final script-doctoring, and I'd seen enough Bad-Coen to cherrypick on first viewing by ear what parts of the script the Coens likely wrote (fresh off of their "We remember this and you don't" satires of 50's Cold-War), which parts were probably in Matt Charman's original script, and which parts were punched up with Spielberg's own urges for historical-nostalgia sentimentality:
Generally, the Coens parts were hip/ironic cheap-symbol sniggering at low-hanging targets about how messed-up our culture was in the 50's--For example, when we see children in a school being shown "Duck and Cover", that's Coen, and probably the "ironic" shot of the kids being traumatized into tears by it was as much Coen as Spielberg. (Although the scene where Tom Hanks' son fills up bathtubs because he believes he alone now has to protect the family from nuclear war was out of Spielberg's own memories.) In short, whenever we see Tom Hanks dealing with shady government guys in identical 50's-suits and black hats warning him of the Red Menace, all I could see was Matt Damon pedaling away on that little girl's bike from Suburbicon (2017).Yes, two movies the Coens didn't direct, but have their distinct smell all over them. You can dress 'em up with other directors, but you can't take 'em out in public.
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2 hours ago, Fedya said:
Boy meets tulip; boy falls in love with tulip; boy marries tulip.
Standard love story, isn't it?
Actually, the Tulip Mania of the 1630's has been in the trendy news a lot in the past few years, because it follows EXACTLY the same psychological economic-bubble patterns as Mortgage Derivatives and Dot-Coms. It's very likely they're teaching it more in high school and freshman Economy 101 classes now, because it could tell you--with pretty flowers--everything you ever needed to know about how the past Meltdown happened in the 00's, and why you shouldn't hoard up Bitcoin waiting to retire on it when it replaces world currency as we know it.
I haven't seen the movie, but I know the historical point the setting was trying to make: The tulip was still a brand new flower in 17th-cty. Holland, neato, and trendily in demand. That made new varieties more and more valuable for manor gardeners, but problem was, without professional tropical greenhouses, a tulip takes a full year for its owner to get into the profitable bulb-selling business. Tulips bloom in the spring, fade by summer, have to have their bulbs harvested and planted by fall, and sleep dormant through the winter.
So, if you're a high-rolling tulip dealer, how do you make your money in the winter? By getting together at tulip-trading sessions in the taverns, showing investors the Audubon-painting of a rare pink-and-white-streaked Semper Augustus, and sell them a signed promissory note reserving that bulb for the owner in summer. Of course, if you're an investor who wants to get in on the hot market, all you've bought is a piece of paper now, and a bulb six months later...So as value went up, investors found there was more money selling the imaginary promised future ownership papers of rare bulbs to other investors in rapidly price-jumping games of hot-potato, rather than the actual solid trade currency of the flowers themselves. And like mortgages, investors even began wagering on futures and securities of how high a flower's price would go, and did what they could to see it reach those figures. It was all about the hollow inflated price, and it never occurred to anyone to ask whether anyone was actually buying a flower, or what would happen if a bad frost killed the investment.
Until that one market when it turned out nobody who showed up was buying--Everyone had gotten in on selling, and had no one to sell them to. And like the quarterly-report news that Merrill Lynch might be having trouble with mortgages, tulip investors panicked once they got the word, tried to unload their burden, and the price went through the floor overnight.
Suppose it's easier to use the setting as a love story than a "metaphoric" post-Meltdown history of the events, but seems like just a distraction to use it as mere period dressing.
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9 hours ago, Thenryb said:
Now this is really thread necromancy!
Yeah, but takes me back--
I remember back during the first DVD Renaissance (approx. '00-'01, a year before the '02 post), when the most people who owned DVD players were kids with Playstation 2's:From '97-'99, most of the titles had been recent boom-boom action hits, but after '00, studios were starting to make the big push for vault-restoring their essential studio classic titles, and those same kids on the disk-fan forums (most of them gamers) were encountering the classics for the first time...When was the last time YOU got into a discussion about what the heck that 2001 ending was all about?
And then, of course, fans' belief that Everything MGM/UA Did Was Evil, after the big blowup over Yellow Submarine's ratio: Oh, the days of "Let's start a petition! We demand that MGM stop catering to the 4:3 crowd, and release the true widescreen versions of Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind!"
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On 3/16/2018 at 2:40 AM, Gershwin fan said:
Taming of the Shrew and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf really capture her quintessential "style" the best of all her films.
Styles, plural: Half of Liz's roles were glamorous, the other half she was typecast as misogynistic Virginia-Woolf shrews in Tennessee Williams-style dramas.
She managed to be 110% perfect casting for Kate for BOTH reasons. There are some Shakespearean films so dream-cast, you just want to retire the role.
(Although I'd heard Holly Hunter played a cowgirl Kate up against Morgan Freeman for NYC Shakespeare in the Park in the late 80's, but that's never been filmed.)
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10 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
The thing I like about TAXI DRIVER the most, oddly, is the final violent confrontation sCENE- Which it has been building to for the entire film, and then when it happens it’s fast and ugly- no slow, operatic, romantic glorification of the bloodshed the way we have today.
When Scoresese directed it in 1976, he and Paul Schrader thought they were doing a "modern" update of Dostoevsky's "Notes From the Underground" (about a depressed misanthropic loner who inspires another sad female depressed loner by being sadder than her), but the idea of the Gun-Toting Loner shooting up schools or college campuses just wasn't in 70's culture yet--That's why they had to bring the "Political candidate" subplot in, to suggest where the Lee Harvey Oswald's of the 60's came from, and where they'd still come from in the Nixon era.
It's a good performance by DeNiro, but, like his good performance in "The King of Comedy", you're watching DeNiro go all-out and throw himself into playing a creepy loser. He can do it, and then he can turn around and do comedy in the next scene, but it's still a role that's more admired than loved.
And then, of course, even that realistic sudden-violence climax has to be wrapped up with the nice, happily "ironic" ending where Travis is considered a "hero" by the press for saving Jodie Foster from her messed-up life (there's some more unintentional irony
), and, because of our twisted fame-culture, gets to return to the good life, Cybil included. The confrontation is something Scorsese could do for scary effect with "GoodFellas" in the 80's, but back in the Abe Beame-era NYC of the 70's*, everything had to be social criticism.
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(* - Still, it's that doomed 70's Mayor-Abe NYC that you miss about great old gritty-70's movies. I've been watching "The Warriors" and "The Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three" on streaming, and those dirty subways just take you back...)
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38 minutes ago, cigarjoe said:
Hint stick to Disney or pre 60s movies....
Speaking personally, just because someone didn't like it didn't mean it's not thematically confused...
Would you have preferred it if Fedya had gone the Cybil Shepherd route and said "Gee, he's creepy, oily, a loner, conversationally challenged, stalks me at work, and took me to a porno for our first date, but there's just something unexplainably sad and magnetic about him..."?
9 hours ago, speedracer5 said:I, Tonya (2017).
Aside from her personal life, Harding is depicted as having a very hot temper--especially when it comes to what she perceives as low marks from the figure skating judges. In the film, Harding is depicted as having an uphill battle when it came to getting the scores that she felt she deserved for her routines. Harding could perform the difficult triple axel and her technical score should have reflected it as such. The judges are shown admonishing Harding for her tacky homemade costumes and less classy music.
I remember the real-life incident, when Tonya was playing her fifteen-notorious-minutes fame to the Jerry-Springer crowd, saying "I've got dollar signs in my eyes, I did it for those Olympic promotional tie-in deals!"
And then when some of us were curious to tune in her Olympic competition, IIRC, she fell on her rear so many times, we thought the only Olympic tie-in deal she'd get would be from a pillow company.
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1 hour ago, LawrenceA said:
That's a different Captain Marvel. Marvel Comic's Captain Marvel is not to be confused with Fawcett/DC Comics Captain Marvel.
Marvel's Captain Marvel
Fawcett/DC's Captain Marvel/Shazam
Because of that Marvel movie, the DC movie will not use the Captain Marvel name, and instead simply use Shazam.
Actually, the maturated version of Mr. Batson has been "Shazam!" in the comics for a while now, because of said confusion long predating the movie. (Since that was what most of us thought his name was from the 70's Saturday-morning series anyway.)
Marvel's Captain inherited her powers from alien captain Mar-Vell (get it?)
before becoming "Ms. Marvel" throughout the 80's and 90's. Now she's Captain, and the "Ms." title has since passed down to a sweetly nerdy Arabic teenager in New Jersey:
1 hour ago, hamradio said:Doesn't end, now movie trailers are FAKE!
I deleted my post.
Just the ones for long-delayed overhyped superhero or Star Wars movies that haven't shown a real trailer yet, like the Captain Marvel one--
I don't know exactly WHY fans do that, it's sort of the same reason studios announce release dates and title logos for movies before writing and directing them: They psychologically feel as if if some piece of the movie actually existed yet, it would be spiritually the same as the movie actually existing yet...
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5 hours ago, hamradio said:
"The Justice League" (2017), the plots are getting ridiculous. Is this a superhero or "Clash of The Titans" movie?
Yes, Warner/DC makes you appreciate how much Disney/Marvel is trying to court the audience who doesn't read comics, and needs someone patient and willing enough to explain who Black Panther is to them--
Warner, OTOH, thought they could leap into the loving arms of print-comic fanboys, who demand utter print-comic faithfulness in transcribing the Big Epic Storylines, and let the rest of the outside world confuse themselves and go hang. (And then still go into big rages that Zack Snyder ruined it anyway.)
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On 3/13/2018 at 11:07 AM, speedracer5 said:
Warner Brothers was known for their grittier, more realistic locales and costumes. The gangster movies with Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney are representative of this. Paramount films seem to have an air of sophistication and elegance about them.
Even the Warner precode Busby Berkeley musicals were considered "street-grittier" than RKO's or MGM's, since they were more about the pavement-pounding jobs of producers and cheap-apartment showgirls just trying to get by with keeping variety-show gigs going during the Depression (Gold Diggers, 42nd St., Footlight Parade), and didn't bring in champagne and hotel suites and until after the Hays set in.
So, apart from Fred Astaire, Orson Welles, King Kong and Walt Disney, what was RKO's image? Seemed like they also aimed for an artsier upscale audience.
Universal had Lon Chaney, the Monsters, and comedy series like Abbott & Costello and Ma & Pa Kettle almost straight out of the gate, and they've prided themselves on cheap-thrills ever since.
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(Show of hands, anyone else check IMDB to see if Ted was still alive?...
)
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14 hours ago, Bogie56 said:
Thursday, March 15/16
12:15 a.m. The Taming of the Shrew (1967). I always thought this Dick and Liz film was pretty good. The writing isn’t too bad either.
Also, leave it to Franco Zeffirelli to interpret period Shakespeare correctly:
Every time I hear some feminist or PC theater director whine about "How are we going to re-interpret Kate's 'loyal wife' speech for an enlightened modern audience??", I want to sit them down and show them Liz shooting a knowing partner-in-crime look to Dick before she makes the speech to help him win the wager. As art, as in life, these two deserve each other.-
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13 hours ago, Bethluvsfilms said:
Never was a big TARZAN fan, I avoid those films like the plague.
Not even "Tarzan's New York Adventure"??
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33 minutes ago, Hibi said:
He was in Into the Wild not too long ago.
Although he probably won't be nominated for enforcing the Sokovia Accords in "Captain America: Civil War".
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3 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
https://jezebel.com/hubert-de-givenchy-father-of-the-house-of-givenchy-di-1823699061
KINDA surprised no one has brought this up.
Since most of us don't really get that psychologically caught up in What Audrey Wore, ARE you, really?
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On 3/7/2018 at 12:16 PM, Dargo said:
Yep, this whole waning of interest in the Oscar thing does seem to come about as we age, doesn't it. Somehow the "magic" in and of it seems to dissipate as we get older.
Not so much that, as in the obscure Globe-alization of the Oscars turns the selection more and more to minor arthouse indies, the films and performances don't stand out in the memory as much, and the 8-nomination selection makes the choices seem more arbitrary than "iconic".
So even by the end of the week, the year's Oscars already seem like old news, and the winners and losers have to take work wherever they can get it:
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3 hours ago, JamesStewartFan95 said:
By the way, sorry for highjacking this A Wrinkle in Time thread. I just had a few things to get off of my chest concerning Lilo and Stitch.
(Same here, but the feelings of Treasure Planet defenders are shared pretty highly, by those both for and against its '02 competition.
Besides, it's looking like Wrinkle won't be doing much for March box office yet, so at this point we can only HOPE for general Disney thread-drift.)
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16 minutes ago, JamesStewartFan95 said:
Wow! You didn’t get the point of Lilo and Stitch, did you?
I got the point of the series, that it was about the two characters, and their being just perfectly weird enough for each other.
Unfortunately, Sanders seemed to think we moviegoers were already Getting the Point and on their side the very minute and second we walked into the theater. He'd been too close to his misunderstood-oddball material and working on his lil' pet project so long, he forgot that this was not a Classic Story, we had no ideas who these two characters were in our lives, and that as audiences we would instinctively follow the one character who has some actual dream-goal to pursue early on--In the movie's case, that would be the big sister, and her determination to find a job and be independent, despite being sabotaged by a psychotic little drama queen and a slobbery hellbeast.
I think, in Sanders' mind, we were supposed to find it a running funny comic element to see Nani "punished" as the one frustrated-Normie in the middle of all the free-spirited creative chaos, but instead making her the butt of the joke trying to keep the family together came off as gratingly mean-spirited. When we're supposed to shed a tear as Lilo might be taken away, all I dry-eyed thought was, "Now, y'see?...If you'd just OPENED THE DOOR when you were supposed to, you wouldn't be in this mess in the first place--Whose freakin' fault was THAT??"
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4 hours ago, JamesStewartFan95 said:
There certainly was a lot of rambling and buzzwords in that post EricJ. It seems like you have a lot of misplaced anger toward Disney, or more specifically, towards Lilo and Stitch.
Think I'm overreacting? All I say is, ohh, friend, you SHOULDA BEEN THERE from the summer of '02 to the summer of '03, back during the darkest boiling-point days of SaveDisney.com, when a growing majority of anger-issued animation fans wanted Michael "Not Our Disney" Eisner out, and didn't care how they got it or what would replace him. Your walls would have large head-sized holes in them from repeated pounding. Leaving aside that this was fresh during the mania for "Shrek" in '01, back when every single anti-fairytale joke was politically spun into a "Long-awaited attack on Disney!", and all Jeffrey Katzenberg had to do to get the female demographic on his side was throw out a few more princess-bashing jokes--Simply put, a lot of fans had ISSUES.
First, you had L&S teaser trailers, where Disney was unsure whether audiences would accept lil'-hellraiser Stitch as an official "Disney character", and did funny teasers where Stitch interrupts Disney classics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv90Sp71mfQ The marketing wasn't quite ready to tell us who Lilo was at the end of the trailer, so Shrek-manic fans literally--literally--thought the entire movie would be gags about Stitch coming to Earth to interrupt Disney classics for 90 minutes. I quote: "Disney's finally gotten the message from the success of Shrek, they're ready to meet the audience's new realization that their classics are outdated and are taking a step to parody them!" No, I did not make that up...Welcome to the crazy pipe-bomb-throwing war zone of 2002 animation fandom.
Then we found out the real plot--Okay, so there's a little Hawaiian girl in it, and Stitch doesn't spend the whole movie dogpiling gags on Little Mermaid and Beauty & the Beast. In fact, when the movie came out, it was SO strange, undisciplined and disorganized in pursuing Chris Sanders' "In praise of the Weird" theme of the two misunderstood characters, fans saw it as some kind of--you guessed it--"attack" on the "conventional Disney fairytale stories". SaveDisney.com only wanted Eisner out, but didn't go into specifics about who they wanted to replace him...Guess who a majority of formerly Shrek-manic, now Stitch-manic, animation fans decided would be perfect to run the company, and make, quote, "more weird films for a new audience!" Even though most animators at the studio freely admitted that Chris Sanders couldn't direct fish into a bucket without collaborator Dean DeBlois, Sanders was now put up on a pedestal by fans as THE reason to kick Eisner out...Never mind John Lasseter's Pixar movies, think about that for a moment the next time you watch Dreamworks' "The Croods".
Treasure Planet may have failed its weekend because of its bad timing and competition, it may have not found audience awareness because it couldn't escape L&S's good word-of-mouth shadow from summer, and it may have been hobbled after Eisner pulled it out of wide release before Christmas vacation...But, like Home on the Range, it was PUNISHED by fans for being "Too normal!" a Disney movie, and was tarred, feathered, drawn, quartered and burned at the stake for such a crime. Do I seem like I bear Stitch fans a bit of a grudge*?--Welcome to 2002. Those days are long ago by now, but animation fans are still suffering its legacy.
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* - I have softened my stance on the characters somewhat since, after a few funny encounters with L&S at Disneyland, and the Disney Channel cartoon series did a much better job than the movie of putting the characters front and center of the story--But I maintain that the Movie could have used at least two or three more script drafts to finally persuade itself what it was actually about. I'm starting to agree with the animators about Chris Sanders and that bucket.
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5 hours ago, Fedya said:
I thought it was a game of Twister.
And Clue:
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6 hours ago, NickAndNora34 said:
I remember this one. I tried watching it for the first time about a year ago, and couldn't get all the way through it. I don't see its appeal, although I know it has a fanbase
Basically, when any child-of-the-80's rhapsodizes in its defense, pretty much all--ALL--they ever show of it is the Horn-y King, or the scenes of skeletons on the march...As you can see.
That's because their whole sentimental appeal was "Oo, it was a Disney movie and scary back then!", which is probably the only earthly reason a sentimental fanbase exists for "Return to Oz". (Except for when some Disney-fan smartypants asks "Why isn't Eilonwy a Disney Princess?", just to show off he remembered his childhood.)I was a book fan who watched it in theaters with another book-fan family member, and the words that sprang to both our minds was "What a waste of time..." Little did we realize this was the short Disney career of Richard Rich, who later went on to plague us for years with sequels to his "The Swan Princess" and "Alpha & Omega"--And yes, this does look like a Cheap 90's Disney-Wannabe, even if it wasn't the 90's, and was the actual Disney.
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31 minutes ago, sewhite2000 said:
I talked about John Carter in another thread. I saw it in the theater, and I liked it well enough. But I said in that thread there probably hadn't been any new John Carter material in any form since the Marvel comic adaptation was canceled in 1978 or so. Since there' probably wasn't any name recognition or "Q-factor" among any viewer under 50, I don't even know why they thought they should revive the franchise, other than they just had the ERB rights, so what the hell? I noticed they also did a new Tarzan not long after. But they might as well have just created a new science fiction hero.
At the time, most of the complaints about Disney's John Carter joked about Rich Ross's mishandling of the marketing:
Originally, they were planning to go with classic-book credit and use Burroughs' "A Princess of Mars" title--But then certain bad CGI movies for the studio had just made "Mars" a bad-luck word to put in the title (which is why "John Carter of Mars" doesn't appear until the end-credit title), and then analysts scrambling to look for an explanation why "Princess & the Frog" hadn't done well hit on the idea that the icky P-word must have scared boys away. Prompting jokes that Disney was forced to title their scifi epic "A ____ of ____"Then, you had the ugly eye-grating poster, and two bad trailers, one of which made viewers think it was "Prince of Persia", and the other that made them think it was "Attack of the Clones". When YouTubers took to their Final Cut software and had to create "The Trailer We Should Have Gotten" that put the scenes in story-chronological order to make sense, you know something's wrong.
(And while there were just as many other Rich Ross mistakes, like the infamous premiering of "Winnie the Pooh" against Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows Pt. 2, John Carter is considered to be the movie that finally executed Ross's career for the public good.)
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51 minutes ago, LawrenceA said:
Yeah, I should have mentioned that there was some real consideration that Beauty and the Beast would win Best Picture. I remember reading an article or two making the case for it.
Of course, that was the early 90's when Broadway was suffering a drought, and a lot of those same "I'm not a pedophile, I'm not a pedophile!" first early 90's-Renaissance grownup Disney fans were using "Animated musicals are the New Broadway!" as their important "artistic" excuse for praising, quote-fingers, "kiddy" films.
Which is why we got, yes, Beauty & the Beast: the Broadway Musical a year or two later.
44 minutes ago, Bethluvsfilms said:If the Best Animated Film Category had existed back then, I have no doubt it would have been nominated in that category and won. But then it seems to me that Disney at that time was the only studio making animated films, and no animated competition to go up against.
We got the BAF literally BECAUSE those same insecure grownups kept wanting to validate their love of the New Good Disney films, and pestered the Academy endlessly to make history repeat itself as many times in succession as they could. It didn't help that the next two films were Aladdin and Lion King.
(In fact, according to some insiders, one of the factors that created the separate category was Disney and the fans' own incessant nonstop attention-struck showboating over "We got a nomination, we got a nomination!" for ten years that pretty much soured the committee against the "commercial" popularity of animated films. If you think the category was created to Shut Them Up, you're not far off.)
Until 1999, of course, when Toy Story 2 opened, and a lot of grownups wanted to apologize for sniffling over Jessie's song, beginning a long nine-year quest to see a Pixar movie nominated for Best Picture. And when '00 also had Aardman fans jumping on the Disney train and insisting that "Chicken Run" be FYC'ed--and one year after Japanese-anime fans blitzed the Best Foreign Film committee once they heard that "Princess Mononoke" had made the cut--the Academy decided someone needed a nice Time-Out Corner.
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1 hour ago, LawrenceA said:
I seem to recall that Bugsy and JFK were the two most likely contenders, going by Oscar history.
Bugsy had old Hollywood glamour, a major movie star acting opposite his real-life romantic partner and the one that would finally make Hollywood's most notorious ladies man settle down, it was a period piece, and it featured movie-making as a plot point, and Hollywood loves itself.
JFK was epic-length, stuffed with recognizable stars and character actors stretching their range, flashy and "modern" in its style, and Oliver Stone was still regarded as one of the best directors working.
Silence of the Lambs came out as a dark horse. It was a gruesome thriller that many labeled as straight-up horror. It made no pretensions to high art or saying something profound. It simply was what it was, and did what it wanted to do very well. It also had the Oscar handicap of having come out early in the year (all the way back in February of '91), which is usually an awards-season death sentence.
Cape Fear got pretty mixed reviews, with a lot critics saying it was "beneath" both Scorsese and De Niro. Despite his eventual Oscar nomination, this was the beginning of De Niro's critical decline, with many singling him out as one of the movie's weak points. I like the movie, and De Niro in it, but I like the original more.
Cape Fear wasn't nominated for BP, though, since that was the year that Bugsy & JFK were still buried in December NY/LA releases, Barbara Streisand's Prince of Tides was still also considered a dark horse (with only female/gay industry support for Director Barbara and the daddy-issues story), and voters, of course, "wouldn't remember" Silence from spring...
So what were the big fantasy-baseball picks in November '91, when we didn't have Dec./Jan. movies to pick from yet? That was when a lot of grownup analysts and critics who wanted serious grownup validation of their love for Beauty & the Beast's big critically-acclaimed NY Film Festival "Work in Progress" showing (it's a good movie, we're not creepy pedophiles!) said "Great, without Silence, what the heck have we got to nominate for Picture this year?...A Disney animated musical?"
...FAMOUS. LAST. WORDS.
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I Just Watched...
in General Discussions
Posted
TCM shows Eraserhead occasionally, and while it's not perfectly the film it wants to be, if you catch on to What He's Trying to Do, it's a key for understanding all his movies up to and including Blue Velvet. (Not after: Basically, we watched Lynch fall apart during the second season of Twin Peaks, and we never got him back.
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Eraserhead was Lynch trying to film an actual REM-state dream, as when you wake up and remember your own dreams, they don't look exactly like movie dream sequences, do they? The whole idea of the character wandering through a black-and-white world of non-plotted isolated scenes, odd/muffled sound, things suddenly going disturbing, and other characters hysterically saying things that don't 100% make sense, is good for a technical exercise--But when they had to hitch Lynch up to the harness of a straightforward narrative movie like "The Elephant Man", "Dune" or the classic first-season of Twin Peaks, we still get the story seen as if in a dream. (Elephant Man basically cribs the initial abstract-image opening of Eraserhead, and when it jarringly cuts to a sudden Anthony Hopkins "where am I??" turning around and he's in the London side show, that's exactly the "Middle of the story" dream plot we've had every night once we're past the abstract-image stage and our plot-filling subconscious kicks in.)
And then after Wild At Heart and Twin Peaks S2, he turned nutty and stylized, and thought everything would be "artistic" if they started shouting and primal-screaming for no apparent reason.
"Sweet" Uma Thurman??
Maybe it's that my vision of Thurman will forever be corrupted by "Batman & Robin", but seemed like she always went out of her way to play the self-consciously weirdo-edgy roles--Tarantino is a given, and I'll throw in the "Adventures of Baron Munchhausen" gig she did for Terry Gilliam. And yes, her Mrs. Peel for the '99 "The Avengers" movie could have been so much better, or at least as good as it should have been when we heard her cast.
Btw, has she worked since "My Super Ex-Girlfriend"? I'm too lazy to check IMDb.