I watched Rock of Ages, and it wasn't good, but there were lots of hot girls in their underwear and Tom Cruise without a shirt. I don't quite get the whole "use already proven hits and make a musical" genre. It's a musical where one line of the lyrics makes sense in the context of the situation, then you're just supposed to ignore the rest of the song and kind of say, "Oh yeah, this was a good song," and not pay attention to what anyone's theoretically saying.
In Bruges on cable last night. Really enjoyed it. My wife has a sore throat and can't speak very well, but she was cackling on the couch throughout the first hour or so. Really enjoyed Colin Farrel's performance.
Transformers, Dark of the Moon. I hate to admit it but I kind of liked it. It just seemed that they were not really taking themselves seriously so much and that it was more silly and they knew it. I am glad I didn't spend any money on it at a theater but I don't feel like I want my 2 hours back. Plus, they really did have some weird casting- John Malkovich? Leonard Nimoy? Eh, mindless fun.
I saw Wreck-it Ralph. It's good. Not great, but good. The story is definitely well structured and paced. It was a little too childish at times for my taste, and I think it could have been funnier, but parts were definitely sweet and I thought the script was pretty tight over all. The movie did suffer somewhat from the "Scott Pilgrim" syndrome of purporting to being about video games, yet dwelling too much on 8-bit arcade nostalgia. I don't know about you, but I'm getting tired of seeing Mario and Pacman references as the single cultural touchstone for our hobby. Wreck-it Ralph was far, far better than Scott Pilgrim was as far as this goes ... it at least had a first-person shooter NPC as one of the B characters, and a mario-kart clone as another. So that's good. But it still took place primarily in an arcade -- do kids these days even know what those are? I fear that gamers in movies are forever going to be portrayed as either 8-bit arcade patrons, or douchebags playing mortal combat in their apartments before heading out to party. None of that is particularly relevant to the quality of Wreck-it Ralph of course, just a tangent.
I just saw The Rescuers Down Under for the first time. I'd only seen bits of the original recently, and the girlfriend was excited to see it on Netflix. It was pretty fun! Makes me wanna see the original in its entirety now. :)
Stuck home sick, so I watched both Safe and In (fucking) Bruges for the first time. Loved them both. Safe was pretty much a perfect Statham action vehicle, while In Bruge made me laugh so hard my throat hurts more now, but it's a good hurt.
Today I watched Take Shelter, which I loved until the final scene, and Barton Fink, which I really liked in spite of being way too stupid to get it. Could be worse, but I've had better film watching days. :)
Just got back from seeing Silver Linings Playbook. If all you've seen is the trailer, which makes the movie look like a bog-standard romance movie topped with a cliched dance contest, don't let that put you off. Even Bradley Cooper leaves his WASPy cold-fishness behind and does a really nice job.
Heh. John Goodman can be one scary motherfucker. While I really don't feel qualified to talk about Barton Fink at all, I'd actually like to talk to someone about Take Shelter. I remember critical reception being great when the movie came out, but I kinda feel really let down by that ending. I don't wanna just turn the thread into SPOILER TAG FEST, but anyone have strong feelings about that movie, pro or con? Am I wrong that the last scene completely invalidates the rest of the movie? I thought I was watching A Beautiful Mind for the Common Man ( Jibble: heh) so I was really bummed out. Also, if the writer wanted to resolve the question of the movie with that answer, the way he chose to do it was... baffling. So, anyone can write or point me to someone making sense of this movie?
apost8 and I are the only people who've watched the film and admitted to it here. I think they can cut the ending and have a much stronger film, myself, but that ending is equally a part of films, isn't it? There's absolutely nothing wrong with having mild fantasy in a film of that sort, and it's actually a mildly decent coda about the line between prophecy and madness being very faint. Personally, I thought it was a cop-out. I have to admit to myself that the majority of films of this type I've seen, such as Beautiful Mind, play it real-world straight, so Take Shelter is unusual in that it doesn't. That's to kind-of be applauded, I think, which is why I don't hate the ending. I do feel that they took the easy route out, and Peter Bradshaw agrees with me. Or maybe it does play it straight; the whole film is from Curtis's perspective, who's to say this isn't? Nick Bradshaw decribed it as 'almost too wilful in its talking-point ambiguity", which is as good a description as you can get. Personally, I don't think it invalidates the film at all. The film does not at any point state that what happens is impossible, it just lets you believe that it is because that's the way things are normally. Which is okay, but a bit of a pull-the-rug moment and it's a great way to make a (non art-house?) audience feel cheated. [Addendum: there's also an alternate reading that says that the ending is not 'real-world', which fits.] Whether or not you let it ruin the film for you is your call, really. I have my own feelings about that and the level of storyline nerdery I'm willing to stand for, and while I disagree with the ending the strength of Shannon and Chastain throughout the rest of the film is enough that it fully stands up for me. I'll see if I can dig up any of my magazines; I'm sure I've got one that wrote a fair bit about the film somewhere. Addendum: the story itself could be seen as a bit incidental to the parallels the film is trying to draw, which is a reasonable way to see it. A lot of films don't meet the criteria to allow this. Your agreement is dependent on how much storyline-specific nerdery you're willing to stand. This isn't a bad review, either.
Last night: The beautiful, hypnotic In The Mood For Love. I'm not sure if I think In The Mood For Love is the most beautiful movie I've ever seen (Days Of Heaven, The Red Shoes, Kieślowski's Red are all in the running), but if somebody told me that they thought it was the most beautiful movie ever made, I wouldn't argue with them. Also, not for nothing, but if I could look as great as Tony Leung, I would take up smoking again. There's a shot of him in the rain, hair slicked back, sadly smoking a cigarette in an alley, and you can hear the entire female population of China falling in love with him at the same time.
Yeah, way ahead of you there. I'm wild about In The Mood For Love and Chungking Express, and I'm pretty cold on everything else. (Although to be fair I've never seen Happy Together.) I think in both cases (Chungking and Mood), Wong Kar-Wei does a bit of a cinematic tightrope walk. As meticulous and gorgeous as Mood is visually, with every frame like a small masterpiece of composition and color, that meticulousness does not extend to the scripts. Both Mood and Chungking were essentially improvised in their structure past a certain point, with plots and ideas being dropped in and out and filming taking place over the course of fifteen months. That technique can clearly pay off some handsome dividends, but it also doesn't hit the mark every time. Like Altman, you know? Sometimes you get a Nashville, sometimes you get a Beyond Therapy.
I've been avoiding all Hobbit spoilers (still am!) and so somehow, only now did I discover that it's going to be three movies, not one. Good lord, was that necessary? I guess I'm glad I found out now. Learning I'll have to wait two years to see the rest would have been annoying to learn in the theater.
Tried watching Scorsese's CAPE FEAR but it fell flat for me. Too overtly homage-ish/Hitchcocky (haven't seen the original). It took about a minute to recognize Gary Busey as not old and crazy. I ended up watching CONFESSIONS because I'm on a revenge movie kick right now. I liked it, kinda? The main action happens with jr high kids and the amount of leeway they are given to just do shit was beyond me and kinda ruined any sort of lenience I gave the movie. But I finished, and if the premise (a schoolteacher's daughter is murdered, though ruled an accident, teacher takes revenge on perps [two of her students]), then I'd recommend giving it a shot. ALSO, what are some AWESOME REVENGE MOVIES?!
Love me some Oldboy. I recently watched I Saw The Devil, which is revengey and fucked up but it didn't strike me as brutal for brutality's sake. So I'm down with that style of movie.
Am I missing some history/reference or do you just like bad Scorsese (good Scorsese is real good, I don't think he's a bad director.) I also watched it buzzed, which often makes me more critical of anything I view. But yeah, it took me a moment to connect this with how he looks at the start of Cape Fear.
I don't think this is an alternate reading. It's the only reading that makes sense. Otherwise you have to be willing to accept that the guy who put together the amazing rest of the movie was using that last scene to throw away all of that hard work, write off the movie's themes, and completely change what the movie is about into something far less interesting.
Margin Call. I thought it was excellent. I loved that it was populated by real humans, not mustache twirling villains and crusading heroes. What seemed the most damning about it was not the decisions made by the firm that propelled us towards the financial crisis, but what a waste of incredibly smart people who could have been doing so many other productive things for society (a point the movie makes pretty blatantly, but I still appreciated). Also, I never really thought about why places like Lehman would be paying out bonuses as the ship sank, but I feel like it makes those choices comprehensible. Which is really saying something.
Last night: Cool Hand Luke. I wonder if the French have a word for that slow, dawning realization that you will never be even a fraction as cool as Paul Newman is in Cool Hand Luke. Hell, I'll never even be a fraction as cool as Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke. "What we got heah.... is a failure to communicate." Even the goofier parts are still somehow charming. Cool Hand Luke isn't shy about mashing you over the head with Christ imagery, and there's a reverse-crane shot where you can almost hear Johnny La Rue* cackling in the background. Also, I think Cheers was right: This has got to be the sweatiest movie ever made. * You know, SCTV? Ask your father.** ** OK, grandfather.
I agree that it was a let-down, but only because it was more of a twist than you really expect in these films. I mean, more than it being a film about mental illness, it's a film about the paranoia of the content, about the fear that might drive a small-town man, the fear of loss and, more than that, losing control of himself and his life. That his fears come true doesn't really undermine the base theme of the film, to me. The themes about family and mental illness, it does, true. Changing it to something less interesting I'm ambivalent about. I understand where you're coming from, but I'm not personally convinced that the film is less interesting because of it. I do think that he throws away a chunk of hard work by taking the 'easy' road out with the ending. As I said, there's nothing in the film that says the ending is wrong, we're just led to assume that it is by, I don't know, weight of knowledge. Then the director pulls down the veil and it turns out that the Wizard is, in fact, a Wizard, which is disappointing and probably a step too far. I'm playing Devilled Avocado a bit, by the way.
I think that if his fears don't come true it's very powerful. If his fears do come true and he loses his family to his illness, that's also very powerful. If his fears come true and he loses his family to magic oily rain, that's the opposite of powerful. Fortunately, that's not what happens. ;)
I watched The Divide, a sort of immediately-post-apocalyptic horror movie. Probably the nastiest film I've seen in years. I feel like I need a shower. Don't watch it, it's unremittingly grim and brutal without any kind of emotional payoff.
Kirian extarbags Thanks for the talk. I've spent a bit more time reading about the movie, both reviews and interviews with the director/writer. I'm way more positive on it now. The director says that the movie is not, and isn't supposed to be, about schizophrenia like I thought, rather it's about anxiety and marriage. He says that to him the ending is hopeful because regardless of whether the storm is "real" or not, the important point is that the family is finally on the same page. Reading it through this lens makes the ending a lot more cohesive with the rest. Now I need to go eat, I'll try to write more when I'm back.
I haven't read anything that the director said, but that was my take on it, that the whole thing is a parable or allegory with an interesting dressing. I think that the ideas the story is driving at are consistent and performed well enough that they can override flaws in the story itself (hence my comment about 'storyline nerdery'). I probably didn't put it across very well in my haste to head you off at a storyline level. That's why I feel that the ending was the director taking an easy route a bit. He's still playing very strongly into his underlying themes but at the risk of undermining his overt story (something I generally have few problems with).
Tonight: The fantastic Ball Of Fire, a Howard Hawks joint written by Billy Wilder (no less) and starring Gary Cooper and the awesomely sexalicious Barbara Stanwyck. I was hipped to this by a recent Greg Proops podcast - he's been doing some podcasting of his intros and outros to movies he screens at Cinefamily in Los Angeles - and luckily TCM was showing it. First of all, is there anybody in history with as flat-out phenomenal of a track record as Howard Hawks in the 40s? Check it: His Girl Friday, Sergeant York, Ball Of Fire, Air Force, To Have And Have Not, The Big Sleep, Red River, A Song Is Born and I Was A Male War Bride. That's arguably the best American comedy ever made (His Girl Friday), arguably the best traditional Western ever made (Red River), and inarguably the best noir film ever (The Big Sleep) in the same fucking decade. And that's not even including his other great movies out of that decade, like Bringing Up Baby or Rio Bravo or Monkey Business or (assuming if you believe he actually directed it) The Thing From Another World. Goddamn, Howard Hawks. They don't make 'em like that anymore. Anyway, Ball Of Fire isn't in the insanely high-caliber level of His Girl Friday, but it's pretty close. The setup: Gary Cooper is the youngest of a group of eight professors who have been holed up in a crazy awesome house in Manhattan for eight years compiling an encyclopedia of "all human knowledge". Cooper's the language expert who, after a run-in with a garbageman, realizes his entry on slang is entirely outdated. So he goes off to a nightclub where he meets nightclub singer Stanwyck (described by another character in the movie as "the kind of woman that makes whole civilizations topple"), who coincidentally is looking for a place to hide because the cops are after her to turn a dime on her sleazebag gangster boyfriend Dana Andrews. She ends up weaseling in with the professors and, of course, falls in love with Gary Cooper... And then hijinks ensue. There's so much awesome packed in here that it's hard to know where to start. For one thing, Stanwyck sings at the nightclub in front of Gene Krupa's orchestra, who rip through a number called "Drum Boogie" which Krupa then reprises using a pair of wooden matchsticks for drumsticks. Then there's the insanely awesome slang that is fired at the viewer like a machine gun because it's a Howard Hawks movie - at one point, Stanwyck calls a telephone "an Ameche, on account of he invented it." And that's not even her best line. Complaining of a sore throat, one of the professors checks out her mouth and says there's a slight rosiness. "SLIGHT rosiness? It's as red as The Daily Worker and just as sore!" Oh, and professors? Modeled, hilariously, after the Seven Dwarves in Snow White. I could probably write another ten thousand words on this, so just go watch it. Here's how good it is: Gary Cooper is hilarious. GARY COOPER. Howard Hawks must have been a magician to turn that trick.
It looks like this isn't available to stream anywhere, and only Netflix has it on their DVD service. :-(
The TCM page for it says they'll be playing it next on Wednesday, February 27 at 08:15am Eastern. You can setup an e-mail reminder so that you don't miss it, but I'd just set your DVR to record it and go, go, go! (No idea if it's an HD print or not.) It's completely worth the wait, madkevin isn't selling it or Hawks short in the least. Alternatively, I hear people like uploading full movies to Youtube these days. Not that I'm advocating you watch it there, or even that I know it is there, just that I know that vile, despicable, unscrupulous people do such things - especially when the film's copyright has changed hands multiple times, doubly so when it is due to a succession of studio bankruptcies, triply so when future release is in doubt.
Bryce: Those are all great, but they ain't The Big Sleep. Also, I totally call foul on A Better Tomorrow Part 2*. John Woo's touchstone for that one isn't noir but rather the movies of Sam Peckinpah - the blood-drenched shootout at the end was his attempt at doing his own Wild Bunch. * Which has the greatest plot contrivance maybe in movie history. See, the first A Better Tomorrow is what made Chow Yun Fat a megastar in Hong Kong, so of course a sequel needed to happen. Minor problem: they killed off Chow Yun Fat at the end of the first movie. So in A Better Tomorrow 2 he appears as his character's previously unmentioned twin brother.
Man, Out of the Past is such an underappreciated classic. I should really watch that again. So good! I think you're just going to have to defend this position, because while The Big Sleep is indeed awesome, there are lots of other contenders for "best film noir." In addition to the ones Bryce named, what about The Maltese Falcon? The Third Man? The Lady From Shanghai? There are just tons and tons of great ones, and in fact just doing a simple Google search for "best film noirs" to see if there was a consensus best one, not only is there not one, but I haven't found a single list of the best film noirs that has The Big Sleep at the top of it. So inarguably the best it definitely isn't. But what makes it the best, in your opinion?
It's a category with a lot of competition, for sure. In addition to The Maltese Falcon, The Third Man, Out Of The Past and The Lady From Shanghai (all of which you could make a good argument for) the deep soul-tearing darkness of Touch Of Evil ("Your future's all used up"), or the biting, vicious misanthropy of Kiss Me Deadly, or the clockwork tension of The Killing, or the pure nastiness of Sunset Boulevard. And if you want to push the definition of noir to include the neo-noir run of the 70s, you could throw in cold-water-in-the-face shock of Chinatown, or the deceptively laconic The Long Goodbye, or the gauzy downward spiral of Night Moves. And if you want to open it up to foreign countries, you have to contend with Kurosawa's Stray Dogs, or the hyper-cool cinema of Jean-Pierre Melville. But with The Big Sleep, we're talking all-time favourites here. Like Casablanca, it's Venn diagram of so many people that I absolutely adore all coming together perfectly - Raymond Chandler, Howard Hawks, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall. Unlike Casablanca, it's not by accident - Howard Hawks might be an unfussy director as far as auteurs go, but the movie is unmistakably his. Greg Proops in that podcast I mentioned above notes that, famously, The Big Sleep makes almost no sense from a plot perspective - there's an unsolved murder, characters come and go seemingly at random, and the main character keeps most of his revelations to himself. But Hawks, like myself, doesn't really care about plot so much as individual scenes; he worked from the idea that if each scene in a movie works, then the movie works. And The Big Sleep is like a Pandora's Box of unbelievable scenes, strung together like perfect jewels on a necklace. I gots to run to work right now, so consider this an introduction. More to come.
I'll leave the rest until you've said all you have to say, but I'll respond to this part now because it's why I actually think it's pretty much impossible to just name a "best" film noir rather than personal favorites. Even ignoring all of the great noir films made after 1960 or so (which we shouldn't), noir really went through a golden age that probably no other genre did to the same extent, during which all of the best filmmakers--including plenty who would go on to be considered among the all-time best--were making them. So you can't really take the same view of it that you do with other genres, which usually have a handful of titans known primarily or exclusively for their work in that genre. Rather, you're talking about trying to pick the best film in a genre that includes notable works by Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock and Akira Kurosawa, not to mention lesser masters like Howard Hawks and Carol Reed and John Huston. It's an embarrassment of riches, and making the case for any one film being the absolute, empirical best seems impossible to me. But I do look forward to seeing you try. :)
