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Skeesix posted:I'm not that crazy about most black and white movies I know it's out of turn, but you and TheBigBudgetSequel can see Night of the Hunter. That should fix the your concern about black and white. TheBigBudgetSequel: its available in netflix and almost any video store will have a dvd of it. Apparently I have traveled widely in films (I liked the 1928 Passion of Joan of Arc) and remakes generally piss me off (did we need to remake Mutiny on the Bounty?). I have a few glaring issues: 1-3. The God Father 1, 2 and 3 I have never seen any of them. I suspect living in New York the last thing I want to look at are faux mafioso. 4. Schindler's List No interest. Everyone thinks I lost my mind not to see it but I just couldn't get worked up enough to even see it on cable. 3. Annie Hall I tried. Just couldn't make it past 15 minutes. 4. Some Like It Hot This is supposedly a great film. I have never been a fan of Monroe and every time I see her I feel bad for her. 5. Singin' In the Rain Seen the Gene Kelly dance number and feel like I saw all I needed to. 6. ET I honestly think it's a generational film. I suspect in 20 more years no one will care. 7. Blue Velvet more of an oversight. I fully intend to see it one day. 8-10. Amelie, Snatch, Transformers, etc. These qualify as "great" films? More importantly there are a few films which are considered great that I would like to UNsee...I am looking at you Titanic and Braveheart. Fixed because the list grew too fast Bedevere fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Jun 1, 2010 |
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Jun 1, 2010 22:32
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Peaceful Anarchy posted:These films have nothing in common. Amelie is legitimately great and miles above Snatch, which in turn is really good and miles above Transformers. I haven't seen any of them. I suspect your ranking is right. I can't imagine Guy Ritchie producing anything but turds.
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Jun 1, 2010 22:39
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Skeet Skeet I recommend Oldboy. I would also choose Lawrence of Arabia but it isn't always everyone's thing. OneThousandMonkeys posted:Schindler's List. How much can I add to the pile already devoted to this film? I am impressed by the enormous quality and depth of vision Spielberg brought to the film and on purely on technical merit the film is an overwhelming achievement. I am not alone in feeling that Spielberg just didn't know when to stop and had to do an epilogue which certainly was well timed emotionally but in afterthought produces a bit of a groan. I would have been much more interested to see Schindler's post war decline that follows most stories of heroes; Once their moment is gone many of them fall apart. Schindler himself is a flawed character, and his wife for all her bickering later in life did seem to go along with the womanizing and such as long as the cash was rolling in. My issue is that while Neelson did an excellent job, he was almost too easy to identify with, almost too much an "American" style film noir hero, tailor made for Hollywood. Goethe struck me as too over the top, reminding me of the Captain from Pan's Labyrinth. I don't know the historical details around him so I cannot judge if this was done to create a singular antagonist or was just a way of encapsulating the real person. The whole relationship with the Jewish maid is a fairly complex interaction which could also serve as a window into the historical interaction between slave owners in American and other countries where one is taught that the slaves are not human but somehow the dominant group finds itself trying to come to grips with the very nature of the relationship. It seemed rushed in order to fit within the film and I almost wish that relationship had been its own film. Many of the other Nazi's (with some glaring exceptions) are portrayed (rightfully) as a complex group motivated by many factors and occasionally caught in the moment by forces they have no control over (read the Stanford Prison Experiment for more on that). I feel Spielberg portrayed the Jews as overly idealistic or even worse, as eternally innocent (I almost expected the Na'vi to show up and free them). The scene where Itzhak Stern finds himself crammed into a ghetto and all the other Jews give him the "Shalom!" is utterly unrealistic. Judaism is fractured like any other religion with its internal quibbles that cause conflict between many cultures, income groups and any other fraction line. Imagine if some other group decided to eradicate Christians from Europe, and forced English Protestants, Irish Catholics and some Calvinists into the same apartment like that. As for my major concern with the film, the use of the "docudrama" for the historical contrasted by the intense focus with some of the main characters leaves me feeling a little lost. The main character's rarely seem to actually interact with the historical around them outside of the trappings of uniforms. Even Goethe shooting the resting workers with his sniper rifle seems to almost glorify him the way Robert Duval's character in Apocalypse Now is, instead of dealing with the suffering such actions place on the families of the victims and trauma to those who are potential targets. All this doesn't mean I feel the film failed. I think it succeeded despite the fact that it was a big budget Hollywood film and that is a huge achievement. Any real issues I have with it are primarily due to the restrictions of the medium and the mechanism that funded it, and really are pretty minor compared to the overwhelming things it did right. Some things just had to be in order for this film to happen. Cleaned up the list a little... Bedevere posted:1-2. The God Father 1 and 2 I have never seen any of them. I suspect living in New York the last thing I want to look at are faux Mafioso. - I have the trilogy box set on order.... Bedevere fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Jun 10, 2010 |
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Jun 10, 2010 16:43
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I do agree that a segment was portrayed as something of turncoats but there was definitely an attempt to make them more clearly victims of external forces and possibly over simplifying (or outright ignoring) the conflicts leading to time of the film. Maybe it didn't need to be there, I am unsure. The problem here is I cannot imagine a better way to achieve the film beyond the epilogue, and that says a lot for it.
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Jun 10, 2010 17:44
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