Sukhov

Avodah and Chris Marker's Description d'un Combat would be good choices to go along with it.

Untergang

Do you mean George Orwell? Are you referring to Homage to Catalonia?

Watchmen Twin Peaks (TV show)

Looks good. I think the Swedes call this genre of movie the "pilsnerfilm."

It would be really apt to use that term to describe Franzen and Foster Wallace.

I would use it to describe the large amount of spam on the front page.

Z (1969) Synopsis: A political assassination uncovers a hotbed of corruption. Dir: Costa-Gavras Cast: Yves Montand , Jean-Louis Trintignant , Jacques Perrin .

More than likely it was just a schedule change. Sometimes they lose the rights to show a film so they show something else instead.

Merry Widow

Surprised no one mentioned Some Like it Hot yet.

A couple more reviews - The Youth of Maxim Early Soviet sound film with a soundtrack by Shostakovich. This one is alot more propagandistic and doesn't have the humor or light-heartedness of Jolly Fellows. A young worker named Maxim helps hide revolutionaries during the Tsarist days and spreads pamphlets. His cruel boss doesn't care for the torment or death the working class have to go through. This movie has a lot of musical interludes like when the revolutionaries are in prison and start singing an anthem and when they sing after their friend is murdered in the factory through the owner's carelessness. Overall it was technically very good though propaganda. (7/10) Max Ophuls' Divine The plot to this one is kind of dull. It's about an innocent countrygirl who gets corrupted in the music hall venues. What makes this film stand out is the extremely risque content in it like topless dancers and people mentioning drugs by name. This kind of content would definitely not have flown in the US at the time. Worth viewing if you want to see how "loose" with codes the studios in Europe were, in contrast to the US. Overall the technical efforts and plot were pretty average for the day. (5/10)

Probably not. Her most famous "musicals" don't even have any singing. They're more like biopics with occasional ballet excerpts.

Are you thinking of Kiss of Death (1947) ?

Hey, I saw Limelight for the first time yesterday too. What a beautiful film! Seeing Chaplin and Keaton perform together was good and the ending was so beautiful. Ranks up there with Modern Times for me.

Yeah, my post was pruned even though it wasn't particularly mean spirited.

Avodah or labor is a 1935 documentary from Palestine though people who already lived in Palestine were not the intended demographic. It was one of the Zionist documentary/ propaganda films of the time urging Jews to leave racism in the US and Europe for a life in the British Palestine territory. The film documents Jews working on vatious projects. These actions plus the camera shots really bring to mind Vertov, Eisenstein and Reifenstahl's documentaries that focused on joy being brought through labor. The cinematography was clearly influenced by their films. The film overall brings to mind Berlin: Symphony of a City as well - like when the camera shows people having fun in a port city. The music was also composed by Paul Dessau - a frequent collaborator with German playwright Bertolt Brecht. This was the kind of propaganda travelogue they used to show in Yiddish theaters and neighborhoods during this time period. (8/10) Here is a short film clip on the internet courtesy of the Spielberg Jewish film archive. Also this is one of the films my grandpa used to have with his personal projector (he was a composer and also ran a Yiddish theater during that time. He passed away in the early 2000s).

I thought he was kind of funny in Gold Diggers of 1935. The way his clueless character was taken advantage of all the time.

The intros are usually between 3 to 5 minutes. You can't expect him to go into all of that.

My list for 1935 - 1.) Avoda (Labor), Helmar Lerski, British Palestine Mandate 2.) Carnival in Flanders, Jacques Feyder, France 3.) Yunost Maksima, Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, USSR 4.) Happiness, Aleksandr Medvedkin, USSR 5.) La Bandera, Julien Duvivier, France 6.) Divine, Max Ophuls, France 7.) Princesse Tam Tam, Edmond T. Greville, France 8.) Quelle Drole de Gosse, Leo Joannon, France

Don't forget the orange cheeto Benito conman himself was once a guest programmer in Nov. 2007.

My list for 1938 - 1.) The Adventures of Robin Hood 2.) Bringing up Baby 3.) Alexander Nevsky 4.) Volga-Volga 5.) La Femme de Boulanger 6.) You Can't Take it With You 7.) Jezebel 8.) Boy's Town 9.) Block-Heads 10.) Algiers

My review of the Jolly Fellows - The USSR sent Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Alexandrov to the US in order to better improve their fledgling film industry in the early 1930s. The Jolly Fellows is the perfect representation of what came back. Alexandrov's musicals are often called "Soviet Hollywood" due to the high production cost and effects and beautiful cinematography. While in the US Alexandrov saw US movies and befriended Charlie Chaplin - this really shows in his musical Jolly Fellows as it's full of songs and gags in the best Hollywood tradition. This musical film is about a poor farmer (Leonid Utyesov) who is mistaken by an upper class snooty woman for a famous Italian conductor who is vacationing in the area. A lot of gags and mix-ups with Utyesov conducting a concert and we get a zany finish where everything is set right. After seeing this film Stalin said "Anyone brave enough to make a movie as humorous as this has got to be a brave man!" I liked this film very much. The songs are catchy and it is full of humor. You can really feel the influences of Chaplin, Busby Berkeley, Ernst Lubitsch and Keaton in this film. If you like Hollywood comedies of the studio era you will like it. (9/10)

I saw it too and I agree with you. I didn't hate it but it just seemed like an average gangster movie. Nothing about it really stuck out to me as interesting and it had too many music numbers.