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Criminal Minded posted:I'd say I usually get the same response Snak does when I bring up Face/Off. I love it - hell, I like it more than a couple of Woo's canonized Hong Kong classics like the first two A Better Tomorrow movies or Bullet in the Head - but there's definitely a sizable contingent of people who think of it as that wacky stupid Nicolas Cage movie. I mean cool, like whatever films you want, what's influential isn't necessarily what's good, and all that. But Face/Off's a fun film; A Better Tomorrow is a loving monument.
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Jan 19, 2014 11:15
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xcore posted:Face/Off might be a good fun timey action movie, but that was the first time I ever noticed terrible special effects in a movie. I was only a young teenager at that age but the absolutely woeful use of stunt doubles in that movie basically ruined it for me.
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Jan 23, 2014 05:20
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cheerfullydrab posted:In Willow, is Elora Danan a macguffin?
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Feb 18, 2014 13:22
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FreudianSlippers posted:I'm pretty sure Mad Max held the world record for budget to profit ratio until Blair Witch Project came along.
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Mar 7, 2014 05:29
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Skwirl posted:Not to repeat myself, but I'd definitely say The Big Sleep fits your criteria. What makes it even better is during production they actually asked Dashiell Hammett, the author of the book the movie is based on, "who killed the chauffeur?" And he didn't know either. Also, the screenplay was written by William Faulkner, yes that William Faulkner. The screenplay as originally shot (in 1944) was written by Faulkner and Leigh Brackett, not Faulkner alone. According to legend Bogart preferred the stuff Brackett wrote because he thought Faulkner's version of Marlowe was too effete. The film was not immediately released, and in 1946 new material written by Jules Furthman was shot for a substantially different cut of the film, intended to play up the chemistry between Bogart and Bacall---Hawks had a weird paternal thing for Bacall and disapproved of her relationship with Bogart, who in 1944 was married to someone else, but by 1945 Bogart and Bacall were married and had become the Hollywood couple. So most of the suggestive banter between the two in the theatrical version of the film was added in the second cut, and is Furthman's. The UCLA Film Archive has a positive master of the original 1945 cut, which was shown to troops in the Pacific. It was restored in the '90s for a brief arthouse revival. It's slower and somewhat less confusing than the version that got widespread release, but it's not as great a film.
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Jun 24, 2015 18:21
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1 800 J JAMES posted:Naked Gun 2 1/2  here's the scene
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Jul 6, 2015 22:18
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morestuff posted:Still waiting for someone to explain what "Children of Men" could possibly mean Psalm 90:1-3 posted:1 Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.
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Jul 12, 2015 19:46
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morestuff posted:I'm familiar with the passage, but even if the guy in the review wasn't it's not like it's some impenetrable phrase that has nothing to do with the movie HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Every time I read a review like that i just want to spend some time with that person to see what their thought process is like. I'm not really sure what I was originally asking, I think I was misremembering some criticisms I've read online. I guess I'll look at some reviews.   drat Ennio Morricone ripping himself off!
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Jul 12, 2015 20:11
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morestuff posted:That article's by Mike D'Angelo, who's usually one of their better writers. It comes off as maybe a little obnoxious, but I at least get what he's driving at:
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Jul 13, 2015 10:29
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Sebadoh Gigante posted:Why did actors talk faster in older (as in pre-color era) films?
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Jul 22, 2015 01:24
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Jack Gladney posted:On a related note, does anyone still learn that weird pseudo-mid-atlantic accent that was so popular in the 30s-40s among people who wanted to appear serious or cultured? Like if you listen to Franklin Roosevelt's speeches, he affects a totally weird accent that I also sometimes hear in films of the period, but that I've never heard outside of "deliberate" rhetorical contexts like presidential radio broadcasts or fancy-pants films.
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Jul 22, 2015 01:37
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david_a posted:So it seems somewhat plausible that The Legend of Conan will be made, once again starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. This seems like a unique situation - despite a reboot happening in 2011, the next movie will (presumably) go back to the original continuity. Has that ever happened before?
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Jul 27, 2015 11:37
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Timby posted:Probably the only time Bill Pullman was made into an action figure:
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Aug 13, 2015 09:09
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:I've got some Night of the Hunter questions for SubG: So I'm going to start by taking a step back to look at just the visual grammar Charles Laughton and DP Stanley Cortez use to tell the story. We start out with the opening titles, which are superimposed over a star field (all the images are links to larger versions, which might help because the Criterion blu is dark for most monitors):  This gives way to an empty star field:  ...into which is introduced a disembodied Lillian Gish, who we do not yet know as Rachel Cooper, who begins the opening narration.  There are dissolves between Rachel and a group of equally disembodied children:  Rachel is addressing the children. She is also addressing us, the audience. So we're encouraged purely by these visual elements to associate ourselves with the children. Disembodied children floating in space. So probably not literal children. It's worth pointing out that this is what the film dumps on us right up front. It doesn't give us anything else to contextualise any of this, to tell us how we should be interpreting it or whatever. Anyway. Rachel's opening narration shifts to a series of exterior shots. We start out moving over the countryside (moving right to left). We then focus in on a town, still floating above everything (and still moving right to left). We settle on an individual house, where there are children playing. We're still flying and we're still drifting right to left. We finally focus our attention on the interior space of a house.     We've now had our first brush with death. The reason why I call out this sequence is not because I think it's overwhelming important thematically or whatever, but rather because it gives us much of the film's visual grammar right up front. Our first glimpse of the world is structured similarly to the intro to Psycho (1960) five years later. We start out with an omniscient overhead view, indifferent, unfocused, wandering, and arrive almost as if by random selection on the scene in which the narrative proper begins. It suggests that we could look in almost any window (in Psycho) or door (in Night of the Hunter) and find a similar story. It also calls out a deliberate distinction between the phenomenological world---which is just a fancy word from metaphysics that means the everyday world, where we care about poo poo like cause and effect---and a transcendent world---where cause and effect and everyday rules about `realism' might be violated...or, more strongly, where they don't even count. Point being that we're dividing the visual space of the film, right from the start, into a safe place where rules of `realism' don't loving count and a place where everything works like it does in the everyday world, and our introduction to the latter is a corpse. The framing of the shot is one that will be re-used throughout the film---the phenomenological world is a place where you get dead, and you get dead in this tight vertical oubliette in the middle of the screen. Anyway, now that we're knocked out the nuts and bolts of visual storytelling for the entire rest of the film, we can meet some of the characters we're actually going to be spending time with. We pull back from the corpse in the cellar and meet Harry Powell, our villain. He's driving into town. I won't bother to post a bunch of screenshots because we've already been introduced to most of the visual elements. I'll just point out that Harry shows up driving from screen right to screen left---he's coming from the some other place just like we are, and he's heading in the same direction. After we meet him and learn a little about him we helicopter away from the walls of a prison and dissolve to another overhead shot of a town, which in turn dissolves to our other principles:  They're in the open, no human structure encompassing, fencing, or framing them. They're children in a field of flowers. They're near but not quite in the shade of a tree. We should probably pay attention to them, because the film's already told us that we, the audience, are like children. Although we're disembodied and floating in a field of stars instead of flowers. But the film ain't fooling me. I think it counts. Anyway, even though these kids, our protagonists John and Pearl, are floating in a field of grace like the disembodied space kids which we're apparently like, it isn't going to last. I'm going to just skip over the arrival of their father and the setup of the `actual' plot because, again, it doesn't really introduce more of the visual grammar I'm talking about. At any rate it isn't long before our heavy is showing up to blot out the natural state of grace our protagonists are in:  Big man blotting out the tree(s) and looming over a little woman, Willa (John and Pearl's mother). And it isn't long after he's inserted himself into the scene like that that our protagonists are...   ...trapped in those visual oubliettes that are where the film's already told us corpses are. In case we were in any doubt about this, Harry manufactures another corpse for us:  ...crossing from screen right to screen left. Soon (after I handwave through the intervening narrative) the kids are trapped in one of those enclosed screen-spaces with Harry. Underground. In a cellar.  But they escape. Because Harry can come down to get them (screen right to screen left) but while they flee (screen left to screen right) Powell becomes actually comically inept when he tries to follow the same way. It's like he's playing a side-scroller and his d-pad sticks in one direction. After slipping on a banana peel (actually a bottle) and getting his fingers slammed in the door (actually getting his fingers slammed in the door) John and Pearl flee to the nearby river. Powell meances them, ineffectually, literally stuck in the muck as John moves the boat off (screen left to screen right):  Powell's not that far away, but unfortunately for him the current is moving left to right. So there's no way for him to catch them.  John apparently knows he's entered a safe place; as soon as Powell is off screen he puts down his paddle and immediately dozes off:  This is obviously a serious transgression against tactical realism, but it also means that the river is one of those places outside the phenomenological world where that poo poo just don't count. Perspectives are all hosed up. I'm not even going to try to cover all of the poo poo in this sequence. I'm sure you can find literally shot by shot analyses online. But I'll point out a couple things. Here's the first place the kids go ashore:  That looks like the real world. That's probably bad news. Let's see:   Yeah. One of those loving vertical spaces. The kids start out in the background, dwarfed by the kids that are already occupying the space. And when John and Pearl move into the foreground there's no room for them. loving phenomenological world. Let's see what the next place they stop looks like:  Sheep. That's good. It's also foreshadowing if you've peeked ahead and know our kindly floating space woman is named Rachel and happen to know that Rachel means `ewe' in Hebrew (I ain't even going to go off on the story of Rachel, Jacob, and Joseph, but totally drop this here to prove I know all about that poo poo). Anyway....  Yeah. Look at all those diagonal lines telling us that's where they go. And it's all negative space. It's not an enclosed internal space, it's an exterior space bounded on either side by interior spaces. And one of them contains something I think might be a metaphor.  That's not where they're going. They're going to the  The kids take to the river again. Those diagonal lines are gone and blackness has swallowed all that negative space. No more room at the  They flee down the river, which has become turbulent. John struggles to steer the boat.  CHAOS REIGNS!  Then in the next set of shots John and Pearl have fallen asleep again. No transition. gently caress you, don't need a transition. The river is not the phenomenological world, remember. Look at all those angles and shadows and poo poo! Anyway, the rowboat goes aground unguided by human hands.  Time passes. We pan up to...wait, where have I seen this before?  Anyway, dawn comes. The sun parts the clouds with  He also misses the kindly old lady who has snuck up on him:  We've got the same shot that we entered the river on, swapping night for day, Powell for Cooper, and we've moved back to give John and Rachel plenty of breathing room in there compared to the claustrophobic framing of John and Harry. Anyway, after the trip down the river, away from the phenomenological world and the looming Harry Powell, the first thing Rachel does is grab a switch and use it to drive John and Pearl to her place. Right to left.  She's not here to take them to paradise or something. Although in order to reach her the kids had to flee the everyday world, she's protecting them in the everyday, phenomenological world.  GET OFF MY PHENOMENOLOGICAL WORLD! I mean just look at this loving shot. She's just looming over him and he's this tiny little dark warty thing in the corner, literally lower than the rear end of the horse he rode in on. Anyway, the film makes sure we know that we're in the not-safe space of the real world. Harry's lurking outside the house. The kids are trapped in a space just like the one Willa died in:  ...but it's not as claustrophobic as Willa's space because:  Rachel is there. There's a bunch of poo poo here where we're encouraged to draw additional parallels between Rachel and Harry (like them singing together) but this poo poo's getting long. Point being that Rachel is more than Harry's equal and so Harry ends up:  Oh no. He doesn't end up committing suicide by cop, which is kinda looks like where that's leading, but John can see the signs as well as we can. Harry's doomed. Anyway. Yeah. So where I'm going with all of this is that the film uses these visual cues to tell us a few things. We the audience are like the children, the children in the story aren't capable of saving themselves (either like Pearl through passive faith or like John through striving). Both Rachel and Harry come from some outer Other Place, but they're also in and of the everyday world (Harry getting wounded and boxed in that barn is like Anton Chigurh getting into a car crash---you might be an avatar of a higher power but everything in the world is subject to the same implacable laws). John gives Rachel two apples. One after he first arrives. He's ritually cleansed (more like deloused) and his flesh is mortified (he gets a spanking from Rachel's stern right hand when he tried to get out of the bath). He's gone on this strange not-entirely-logical journey to get here, but he's still basically the same person he was when he left. Rachel leaves her apple on her lap while John eats his. Later, when Harry is surrounded by those cops and it looks like he's about to be sent sprawling back to whatever dark space he came from John intercedes. He doesn't care about the money anymore, throws it at Harry's prostrate form. He's become a different person. When that different person gives Rachel a second apple, she recognises it for what it is and praises John and by praising him encourages us, also children and therefore also unable to navigate the phenomenological world by ourselves, to do what John has done. Which, if you want to think of it that way, is what the story is about. And now I will say `phenomenological' several more times. Phenomenological , phenomenological, phenomenological. Phenomenological. I may also use the phrase `immanentise the eschaton', even though I'm not sure it has anything to do with answering your question. Which I hope some of the rest of this does. SubG fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Aug 15, 2015 |
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Aug 15, 2015 04:28
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Snapchat A Titty posted:I haven't seen the movie but if those caps are representative, that is a very well-shot movie. But it's worth pointing out that it isn't a film that's photographed entirely in eye-catching shots. There's a lot of completely by-the-books composition and editing---shot reverse shot, two shots, that kind of poo poo. Which is part of the schtick. The whole thing doesn't look like an Expressionist fantasia because the parts that do look like an Expressionist fantasia look that way to draw our attention to something, to make a narrative distinction. Those stylistic flourishes don't encompass the entire visual aesthetic the way the unrelenting beauty or rectilinear desolation of Miyagawa's photography in Ozu's Floating Weeds (1959) and Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961), respectively, do with absolute, frame-by-frame consistency, or the way Tarr Béla's camera builds relentless, seamless visual involutions. Because Laughton and Cortez are not creating a single diegetic world, they are---intentionally, overtly---creating several distinct worlds.
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Aug 15, 2015 08:26
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88h88 posted:I've just watched the trailer for the new Matt Damon flick The Martian. When did it become commonplace for trailers to give away the entire story from start to finish? It seemed like the trailer was just a super-condensed version of the film for people with attention spans of 2 minutes 35.
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Aug 19, 2015 17:51
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Timby posted:Coppola's last gasps of greatness were The Godfather Part III and Bram Stoker's Dracula. I don't know what the gently caress happened to him after that.
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Sep 5, 2015 22:32
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cheerfullydrab posted:The Greatest Generation fought WW2 and didn't like to talk about it. The Boomers were raised in its aftermath and it took on almost mythical proportions to them. There's a very specific way that they, not the generation that actually fought the war, shaped the narrative about WW2. A narrative that we, their children, also actively buy into. Saving Private Ryan is part of that. If you want a contemporary war film that's `about' Boomer sensibilities about WWII-as-narrative then you want Inglourious Basterds (2009), not Saving Private Ryan.
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Sep 11, 2015 23:14
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syscall girl posted:So Inglourious Basterds is conceptually a boomer film but not palatable to actual boomers who don't like Tarantino for the cursing and gore? Anyway, the Greatest Generation grew up in the shadow of the First World War and the moral ambivalence that followed it. So when they wrote the narratives about their war, the Second World War, they're morality plays. Off the battlefield John Wayne punches guys because they're rude and rude people deserve to be punched, and on the battlefield when he shoots generic Japanese popup targets screaming aieeeeeee it's an extension of this basic programme of civic hygiene. The war, to the Greatest Generation, makes sense. It's an anvil upon which both individual character and the character of the nation is shaped. Saving Private Ryan's war is this kind of war, explicitly. But when we look at the kindly old Ryan (Harrison Young) we wouldn't necessarily expect him to be into the undercranked, hyperkinetic, gigantic blood-squib version of his history. More distinctly, if we look at Band of Brothers (which followed and emulated Saving Private Ryan) the fictional narrative dovetails with firsthand accounts from the people the characters are based upon. So in a very literal way it's a Greatest Generation narrative, but that's not to say we'd expect the kindly octogenarians to be into all of the grittily realistic explosions and dismemberments depicted onscreen. In the same way, boomers were born after VE and VJ day, and so their childhood held Korea (or the recent memory of it) and their adolescence held Vietnam. To them the war narrative is one of rudderless chaos into which unready individuals are indiscriminately flung to succeed or fail by luck or their wits but not by civic virtue. Inglourious Basterds is very much in this mold, and directly quotes Boomer war films (e.g. borrowing Lalo Schifrin's score to Kelly's Heroes (1970), more or less the apotheosis of that subgenre). But that's not to say that it's targetted at the same demographic the filched source material was.
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Sep 12, 2015 02:21
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cheerfullydrab posted:See now I believe that it's backwards, that the Greatest Generation felt a little more moral ambivalence about WWII than the Boomers did/do, having lived through it and all. However, I'm definitely going to think about it more after reading this post.
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Sep 12, 2015 05:35
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Mister Kingdom posted:What about :
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Sep 14, 2015 01:53
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This is a little different than talking about year of release, but I remember not being able to watch anything for a while then driving to Houston and my choices being Goodfellas, White Hunter, Black Heart (Eastwood directing a non-genre drama was a novelty at the time), Kurosawa's Dreams, that film the brand-new NC-17 rating had been created for Henry & June (Fred Ward is cool, but who the gently caress is Uma Thurman?), and Miller's Crossing (that new movie by those brothers who did Blood Simple (1984) and Raising Arizona (1987)). I wouldn't argue that 1990 was a particularly magic year for film (I don't think any year ever is) but that's a lot of really solid cinema in original theatrical release at the same moment.
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Sep 14, 2015 23:18
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CharlieFoxtrot posted:That's a lot of burlesque.
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Sep 15, 2015 21:25
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Yeah, I feel like we're all afraid to post what we think female power fantasy movies are like. While not a film, it feels like the approach (narratively) taken by Bioshock Infinite deserves a mention---the central conceit being that both the `good' male power fantasy (the avenging good guy protagonist) and the `bad' male power fantasy (the creepy, controlling, stuff-women-in-cages bad guy) are both inextricably part of the same narrative and as long as either continues they'll end up victimising other people one way or another. And so the only solution is to remove them entirely from the equation. I can't off the top of my head think of a film that takes the same approach. It's worth noting that it's all still framed explicitly from the male perspective for a presumptively predominantly male audience, relying on the fact that the `avenging good guy' will implicitly be accepted as the `right' course of action and interpretation of the events in the (entirely unnecessarily complicated) plot. So I'm not sure that you can entirely get away from that, the same way I think e.g. Sucker Punch can't get away from still being a by-the-numbers women in chains film---with the camera at a carefully calibrated PG-13 stocking top level---while objecting strenuously to the sensibilities of women in chains films; Truffaut said that you can't make an anti-war film, and to the extent that that's true you can't make an anti-exploitation exploitation film. Which is a long leisurely walk toward the point: if we accept that narrative is (or can be) gendered---and I'm not at all convinced that we must---then if we're being serious here I think we have to take a step back to ask where the locus of the `gendering' is. If we accept, and I think we have to, that it isn't in the person of the principle character, then I don't think we're forced to accept that it's in the message (or however you want to say it) rather than in the thing itself.
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Sep 17, 2015 22:56
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Snak posted:The power fantasy is essentially escapist in nature and people like it because it's based around the idea of vindicating their masculine identity rather than telling them they need to fix themselves to be happy. There's this bit from I think Louis CK where he says when he's on the subway and an old lady is standing he thinks about giving her his seat and never does it but feels better about himself because he thought about it. And I think that kind of easy self-validation is at the heart of a lot of power fantasy narratives. If you look at the classic era of Shaw Brothers kung fu films, for example, they're fairly explicitly empowerment myths---oppressed hero rises above to seek justice for the weaker wronged, usually expressly trodden under the heels of the corrupt government. The big breakout hit was Chang Cheh's One-Armed Swordsman (1967) which came at a historical moment when the film was generally read by contemporary audiences as an anti-establishment empowerment story and it's all about having to rebuild yourself from scratch to overcome your problems. And that's a central conceit in the canonical kung fu story---the guy who can't beat the bad guy at first but then spends the second act training and so can punch Pai Mei right the gently caress off the temple steps in the dramatic freeze frame at the end of the last reel. The fact that the narrative goes out of its way to emphasize that the hero isn't strong enough at first is part of the way it works as a power fantasy for the audience. To paraphrase Neal Stephenson: most guys harbour in their heart of hearts the belief that if they really had to they could become a martial arts badass to avenge the death of their father/family/girlfriend, and that's absofuckinglutely part of the way power fantasies often work on film.
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Sep 18, 2015 00:33
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Rabbit Hill posted:It doesn't -- it's a power fantasy for the viewer (if she's a woman). Alfred P. Pseudonym posted:One Armed Swordsman is sitting on my DVR. Gonna watch it this weekend probably.
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Sep 18, 2015 01:01
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Alfred P. Pseudonym posted:Master of the Flying Guillotine takes gimmicks to the extreme and it rules. Like if you want to talk about non-exploitative action film power fantasies involving female rear end-kickers, wuxia as a genre is way more progressive (if you want to think of it that way) than most people would assume. In most people's heads they probably imagine poo poo like women getting raped and then going on a scantily-clad revenge tear. And there are a lot of films out there that aren't wuxia that are pretty much exactly like that---like most pinky violence films, a lot of giallo, and a fuckton of Spanish horror/Spanish gaillo films. So poo poo like Fujita's Lady Snowblood (1973) and Jesús Franco's She Killed in Ecstasy (1971). But in wuxia films the stereotypical female hero is empowered in all of the same ways that a male hero is, and she's not likely to be threatened with sexual violence, and if anything she's going to be more sensibly dressed than her bare-chested male counterparts. So in a film like Come Drink with Me (1966) Cheng Pei-Pei's Golden Swallow is definitely an rear end-kicker and she's absolutely feminine but there's none of the other male-gazey poo poo you'd normally expect in the typical exploitation action film treatment of the subject. And perhaps even more to the point, there's a kind of normalisation of rear end-kicking women implicit in the handling of the material. Like not only is Golden Swallow a woman who happens to kick rear end, but the framing story treats this as something that isn't any more remarkable or exceptional than anyone being an rear end-kicking revenge machine. Like there's this scene in John Waters' Multiple Maniacs (1970) where Mink Stole shoves a rosary up Divine's rear end in the pew in a church and Divine has a vision and then they leave and while they're walking down the street a cop stops them and harasses them for being lesbians. I mean we've just seen all this transgressive poo poo that's probably squicked out even a lot of the people who are watching an early Waters film specifically to get squicked out and then that's the thing that gets called out by a stand-in for The Establishment, and the stand-in for The Establishment implicitly accepts Lady Divine is a woman. This isn't played as a Big loving Thing in the film, but it strikes me as way the gently caress more progressive than a lot of `very special episode' films about tragic minorities/margninalised people. Because it's all about normalisation rather than exceptionalism. And I think that under the hood of a lot of golden age wuxia is the same sort of normalisation that comes across as being more `real progressive' than a lot of the films mentioned here (like Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)) where it's a Big loving Deal that there are women kicking rear end. If that all makes sense.
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Sep 18, 2015 02:37
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Snak posted:Modern Wuxia (is that an accurate term?) is kinda iffy. Magic Hate Ball posted:I mean, the locus is definitely on us as viewers. A woman taking control and aggressively winning scans as "masculine" only because we think of dominance as being masculine. You look at a stone from the river and deem it "masculine" for having this or that feature, and the onus certainly isn't on the stone - the stone doesn't want a huge penis, you do. Really, the only reason it's a "big deal" that the women kick rear end in Mad Max is because it's a big film and we treat it as a transgression against the cultural violence against women that is the norm. John Waters can buy a six dollar camera and a ten cent rosary and shove it up Divine's rear end and nobody cares because it won't be on TV (thanks, Marshall McLuhan!). emoticon posted:Regardless I suspect all subtext re: male power fantasy in Bioshock Infinite is almost certainly accidental, the combined result of market forces (shooty game needs a brown haired man with a gun on the cover), the constraints of the medium itself (the player automatically has agency while all NPCs automatically do not), and the desire for a mind-blowing twist at the end that echoes the twist in the first Bioshock, while also conveniently allows for either infinite sequels or no sequels. But that's why mort de l'auteur exists and in that respect Bioshock Infinite is a really interesting game. But that all aside it's pretty clear that what I'm talking about isn't just a tacked-on thing any more than any FPS plot point necessarily is---all of the over-elaborate nonsense involving multiple timelines and poo poo is there to make the point that it isn't that this person is inherently good and that person inherently bad, but rather that the power of violence in and of itself is inherently corrupting. In one universe the Founders are an oppressive theocracy with racial purity laws and the Vox Populi are the noble opposition. In another the Vox Populi are a fanatical junta hunting and exterminating the Founders. And so on. I mean we even get a musical number asking the question `Will the Circle Be Unbroken?' I mean it's not exactly Dostoyevsky or anything but it's thematically consistent.
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Sep 19, 2015 00:06
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Magic Hate Ball posted:I mean, that's kind of what I mean - viewer as part of culture, part of audience making mass judgement. That the studio would spend a bunch of money on this movie and allow it to happen is almost an act of politics. Multiple Maniacs is probably not going to be seen by a bunch of boat-shoe-wearing randos in some flyover swing state, but those same people are much more likely to see Fury Road, whether by choice or because it happens to be playing. Multiple Maniacs might still be more "legitimately" progressive for being unrestricted but it's still nifty that people are seeing a film that's putting women front and center, even if it is heavily self-conscious about it. Clumsy but meaningful, I guess. I mean yeah I'll take a better film over a worse film instead of insisting we wait for a perfect film. So all appropriate props to filmmakers for doing what they can. But I also think that big-budget halfassed progressivism has a real negative effect in that it normalises being halfassed about it.
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Sep 19, 2015 03:16
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Wachter posted:What's the name of that old movie with the famous "jump scare" caused by nothing so much as a car suddenly passing a woman on a quiet street? I think it even has a trope named after it, but I can't remember either.
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Oct 22, 2015 00:05
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Omi no Kami posted:This has been bugging me for ages- what's the name of that technique you see TV directors use to show two people talking, where you repeatedly loop between closeup of speaker A, closeup of speaker B, wide shot to establish both people in context, repeat?
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Nov 17, 2015 08:06
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:ehh, apart from Kill Bill i've liked everything he's done, but i still don't think anything he's made since his first three films has been as good, and for me Django was a notch down from Basterds. still excited for Hateful Eight though. I also kinda think I'd like his films better at around 90 minutes instead of around 150 minutes.
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Dec 28, 2015 23:19
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Criminal Minded posted:I think Inglourious Basterds is not only his best film but one of the best films ever and essentially perfect. I mean I guess all appropriate props to a director for surrounding himself with the right talent. And I'm not saying that dismissively---I think it totally `counts' and is one of the things that makes a good director a good director. But when I think about the things I like about Inglourious Basterds (2009) the first thing I think of is the photography, followed by the performances of all of the principles and most of the supporting cast. And Tarantino is good about getting loving slam-dunk performances out of his cast, and at casting actors who aren't necessarily considered top-shelf at when they appear in his films. But at the same time if I list all of the things that I like least about the film, all of those are the quintessentially Tarantino parts---the uneven tone, the length, the incessant re-use of poo poo I already know from other films, and so on. Tarantino's right up there with M. Night Shyamalan as a director whose technical proficiency I much admire but who never seems to produce films equal to their apparent promise as a filmmaker.
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Dec 30, 2015 00:24
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DeimosRising posted:Not to say it'd change your mind (it won't) but did you see The Visit? Timby posted:Basically, Keitel did a poo poo-ton of schmoozing on Tarantino's behalf after he read the script.
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Dec 31, 2015 08:01
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computer parts posted:Hamlet (1996) and Gettysburg (1993) both featured intermissions.
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Jan 2, 2016 22:10
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:The Bird With the Crystal Plumage A big part of this is Morricone's score. People tend to think of his work in terms of his scores for the Leone Westerns, but he's a much more stylistically diverse composer than that, and a lot of it is on display here.
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Jan 3, 2016 07:02
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david_a posted:TV edits usually only alter dialog to remove swearing or cut gore as you mention; very rarely they may add some filmed scenes that were cut out of the movie for whatever reason.
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Jan 14, 2016 06:12
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tenniseveryone posted:Plus there's The Godfather Saga, or whatever it was called, which not only put in cut scenes but also re-ordered the whole thing to be in chronological order. That aired on TV but never got a home video release, I think. As morestuff says, HBO has apparently made the 7 1/2 hour version with the additional content available. I don't recommend it unless you've really got a completionist itch you need scratched.
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Jan 18, 2016 23:34
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Human Tornada posted:Should I watch the Lord of the Rings movies? It took me two tries to get through 30 minutes of the first one because I was insanely bored and had to turn it off. Is this a common complaint or are these movies just not for me?
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Jan 19, 2016 06:05
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Edit: Dragonslayer is right at the tail-end of 70s-inspired fantasy (check out the poster at Wikipedia, which owns) and really deserves more of an audience. It's really gritty and nasty and horrible and makes an excellent double-feature with Conan the Barbarian. We tend to think of the '80s as the era of the one-liner hero action film, but there was a metric shitload of broadsword-and-labia fantasy in there too.
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Jan 19, 2016 23:09
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