Originally posted by Gorelick: Both are effective entertainments in spite of gaping flaws.
WarGames does have a nifty story idea but wastes too much time on side trips, traveling down unproductive alleys. Wouldn't this have been so much cooler if the kid never left his Seattle suburb bedroom, or if took place in real time? The expensive war-room set is impressive, but it doesn't ever feel (to me) like a real working space-people don't seem to have assigned tasks, they just plop down at a random desk and start pushing things. Since the resolution is never in doubt, and because there's an overreliance on a countdown clock, the tension never mounts. Broderick is mostly charming, and the decision to have his character be more or less normal (as explained on the commentary track) was a good one; even so, his performance is inconsistent. Sheedy is jsut awesome, but usually reliable character actors like Coleman and Barry Corbin are set adrift.
Yes, the first half is more fun because it is more relatable, but, no, he couldn't stay there because then he'd have no journey. The fun of a teenager as a character is that they don't know as much as they think, so tey wind up with a very unique kind of wake-up call when they get in over their heads, which is the second half of the movie. And realtime wouldn't work, because the story could not be condensed into 90 minutes of time, I often find those movies a bit contrived anyhow.
As for Barry Corbin, I thought this was his best role. "Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that your defense system sucks."
I largely agree dwith your comments on TRADING PLACES, but I don't feel that those faults greatly diminish the movie. If something clicks, they can do a lot wrong, whereas many faultless films wind up with little to no pizzazz.
I appreciate your responses and you're persuasive in both cases. Of the two, WarGames was the disappointment. I really had always imagined it as a kid in his bedroom. My comment about Corbin I think was really a back-of-the-hand slap at John Badham, who I think really has trouble maintaining interest in his actors.
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Originally posted by cassius: 1933--The Invisible Man/King Kong In the modern era of effects, there is little wonder, since we know they could show us absolutely anything with CGI. However, there is a tangible quality that is lost with this process, rendering prior eras of special effects far more exciting to me. These two pictures are two of the most exciting effects movies ever made benefitting from the simple fact that they had not been done before. To this day, King Kong's stop motion animation and the Invisible Man's composite effects remain more exciting than many of our current humdrum effects extravaganzas.
Agreed. I saw Invisible Man back in January and was impressed with it. But King Kong (1933), which I'm seeing now for the first time-it's one of those movies I assume I've seen but I haven't-is in a class by itself. Still. I queued up, watched, and so much enjoyed, the bonus disc, the best of its kind I've ever seen. So informative, it made me respect and admire the people who put together the original King Kong. I admit I knew nothing about them. Now they're my heroes.
Cinema's two primo fat geniuses turned out masterpieces of weird kinky fun this year. Whether it's Charlton Heston straightfacedly playing a Mexican or Jimmy Stewart's Dr. Who-esque dream sequence, both films are terrifically engaging thrillers.
Just watched Touch of Evil again (it's been years). Gosh, it's so creepy and great, I love it. Appropriately, Vertigo and Touch of Evil are, as of now, the only two films from 1958 to have been placed on the National Film Registry. Hindsight.
I saw it when it came out but didn't remember it very well. I think I get it confused with Ferris Bueller. I don't remember its being so cynical, or so adult. So interesting to see how early in his career Cruise had developed some of his patented expressions and gestures. It's a good looking movie, with shimmering night shots of Chicago. On the whole, though, I hate a movie where some a Porshce plunges into Lake Michigan, and where call girl and a john don't discuss dollars beforehand.
Silkwood (1983)
AAN - Meryl Streep, Cher, director (Mike Nichols), screenplay, film edting
I love this movie. Cher acts. And Diana Scarwid gives one of the alltime great cameo performances. Love my Miss Meryl, too. Nichols, even Nora Ephron (screenwriter, with Alice Arlen) at their very best. Outrageously talented supporting cast, top to bottom.
Everytime Dressler appears, I totally wake up from my coma...Harlow & Beery were pretty good too...Come to think of it I remember enjoying Billie Burke and May Robson too.
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Originally posted by Gorelick: Dinner at Eight (1933)
Mandatory viewing for fans of Old Hollywood and its stars, MGM, slick entertainments. What anyone indifferent to these things would make of it, I couldn't say. Contemporary audiences would have eager to see the star-packed cast, which inlcuded three winners of early-year Academy Awards -- Marie Dressler, John and Lionel Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery, Billie Burke -- and to laugh at sophisticated Broadway humor. Still, it is sometimes truly boring. Scene follows scene; every scene has a about one point to make, makes it, and then lingers around about a third longer than necessary. But when it works -- the Beery/Harlow fights, Billie Burke's meltdown, every hammy moment with Marie Dressler -- it's pretty wonderful.
And it has, at the very end, that tiny bit with Dressler and Harlow (there only scene together), in which Dressler delivers one of the cinema's most memorable moments, and possibly its alltime most famous and best reaction shot.
His Double Life (1933)
Got an hour? This terrfic comedy of mistaken identity runs about 63 minutes. Maybe that's all some plots need, or deserve. Roland ("Topper") Young stars as the famous, and famously reclusive artist Priam Farrel, who assumes the identity (only part willingly) of his own recently deceased valet, Leek, allowing (only part willingly) the world to think that he himself has died. Young is hugely funny reading his own obituary and attending his own funeral. He falls in love with Alice (Lillian Gish), who thinks Farrel is Leek and doesn't seem to mind when Leek is Farrel. Gish nearly underplays a role that could easily have descended into daffiness (Gracie Fields played the role in a 1943 version (Holy Matrimony), which sounds frightening.)
I love the play, the film overall is tired. Newman & Ives do good work I find...Anderson was robbed of an oscar nomination for sure. Taylor is ok, but wouldn't have been so much better with another actress??? I can't really think of anyone right for the role who was around at the time and was a star as well...but I sure wish they had found someone else. Barbara bel Geddes orginated the role on stage.
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Originally posted by Gorelick: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)
AAN -- Picture (Lawrence Weingarten), Director (Richard Brooks), Actor (Paul Newman), Actress (Elizabeth Taylor), Adapted Screenplay (Brooks and James Poe), Cinematography (William Daniels)
I loved exactly one scene -- Big Mama sadly carrying that big cake away from Big Daddy -- "you never believed I loved you, but I did."
I listened to some of Daniel Spoto's exciteable commentary track and he almost had me convinced that Richard Brooks was doing a good job with this material. I'm not so sure. The movie loses a lot of momentum in the revised final act -- it's never a good idea to send your characters down into the basement.
But Taylor is actually very effective, doing that thing she does. And Newman is just awful pretty.
Often derided, this movie is not the travesty some say it is but it doesn't demand rediscovery either.
Newman -- First of eight lead acting nominations. He won on his seventh try. He has one additional supporting nomination, a Hersholt, an Honorary award, and a nomination for Best Picture (Rachel, Rachel)
Taylor -- Second of five lead acting nominations; she won her fourth and fifth tries. She also has a Hersholt.
Weingarten -- his only producing nomination. He has a Thalberg (presented memorably by Katharine Hepburn)
Brooks -- First of three directing nominations. Second of five writing nominations -- he won on his third try (for Elmer Gantry)
Poe -- Second of four writing nominations; he won on his first try (for Around the World in Eighty Days)
Daniels -- Third of four nominations (the first one, dating back to the third ceremony, comes with an asterisk). His win was for The Naked City.
The movie culminates with three Busby Berkeley production numbers, all very entertaining, and the water ballet especially insane. John Waters expresses the proper awe on a DVD featurette. This is the one with James Cagney, and he, along with Joan Blondell and company, help make all of the business leading up to the spectacle much more entertaining than the stuff in 42nd Street and Golddiggers of 1933, the two Warner Bros. musicals that preceded this one. I really loved it.
Mae West's first starring role. 65 minutes, five men (one of them Cary Grant), three songs, "why don't you come up sometime and see me?" Racy. I'd never seen it, now I'm glad I did. Queue it up.
Carmen (1983) AAN-Foreign Language Film
The middle jewel of Carlos Saura's "Flamenco Trilogy," is set in the most beautiful rehearsal hall in the history of cinema, where Antonio, an aging flamenco star is rehearsing a flamenco version of Carmen. The highlight, for me, was the 8-minute "cigar factory" sequence, in which we see what Antonio's production might look like. Stunning. But he blurring of rehearsal/performance/real lives were more annoying than baffling to me--for the role of Carmen, Antonio hires a young, tempestutuous, insolent woman named Carmen, with whom he becomes obsessed. The great Antonio Gades, as Antonio, is not as sexy as the movie insists he is. Laura del Sol, as Carmen, is very sexy.
AAW -- Best Foreign Language Film NYFCC -- Best Foreign Language Film
This is one of my favorite movies, and I loved watching it again on a crisp Criterion DVD (which, sadly, had no commentary track--I'd love to know how some of the more intricate gags were executed.)
As a prop/symbol/indictment/running gag, the fish fountain might never be improved upon.
AAW -- Best Actress, Susan Hawyard AAN (5)-- Director, Robert Wise; adapted screenplay, Nelson Gidding and Don Mankiewicz; Cinematography, B+W, Lionel London; Film Editing, William Hornbeck; Sound, Gordon Sawyer
By the end, I was ready to see Barbara go, only to get Susan Hayward to knock it off. I think maybe the Academy felt the same way--please let's just give it to her so she'll stop suffering so much. Are there Hayward fans out there? Is there ever a moment when she does something like have a thought she doesn't express, or when she really appears to be listening to another actor. Still, what she does she does well. The movie succeeds somewhat as a mid-century melodrama for adults. Jazzy.
Rembember this one? Pretty much just Jane and her kids (Roxana Zal, Lukas Haas, Rossie Harris) trying to hold themselves together in nuclear winter. Awkward, or just dated, in its early, pre-explosion scenes, the movie builds very slowly, you think they're all going to be okay. The horror is quiet, and kept in the background, which makes it v. effective. Some pretty powerful scenes. The DVD includes a 2003 piece, "Testament: 20 Years Later," which I enjoyed.
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Crazily satisfying as melodrama, war indictment, and cinematic art. With compelling performances and dozens of gorgeously assembled sequences. Clocks in at just over 90 minutes and available in a sterling Criterion print (are there extras? not on the primary dvd) Check it out.
Ballad of Naramaya (1983)
Cannes -- Golden Palm, 1983 (to Shohei Imamura)
Glad I saw it, but, boy, a lot of it's hard to watch. "Logan's Run" comparisons are obvious -- in this hunger-stricken village, old folks turning 70 are taken up to mountain, carried there by their eldest child left there to die. Low humor, along with rape, self-mutilation, mass murder, and bestiality. In the end, all worth it. The closing sequences, especially the last shots of Ken Ogata, are brilliant.
AAN -- Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (Alec Guinness)
NBR -- Supporting Actress, Kay Walsh
A great comic performance by Guinness as the scoundrel painter Gulley Jimson. The movie plays mostly like an Ealing Studios comedy but its quieter, more reflective moments are what make it worthwhile. Based on a novel by Joyce Cary, who I've just looked up on Wikipedia and now want to read. Available on a crisp Criterion DVD, with a D.A. Pennebaker short that showed with The Horse's Mouth on its U.S.A. release at New York's famed Paris theater. Worthwhile.
Originally posted by Gorelick: The Cranes are Flying (1957)
Cannes - Golden Palm, 1958 (to Mikhail Kalatozov)
Crazily satisfying as melodrama, war indictment, and cinematic art. With compelling performances and dozens of gorgeously assembled sequences. Clocks in at just over 90 minutes and available in a sterling Criterion print (are there extras? not on the primary dvd) Check it out.
Ballad of Naramaya (1983)
Cannes -- Golden Palm, 1983 (to Shohei Imamura)
Glad I saw it, but, boy, a lot of it's hard to watch. "Logan's Run" comparisons are obvious -- in this hunger-stricken village, old folks turning 70 are taken up to mountain, carried there by their eldest child left there to die. Low humor, along with rape, self-mutilation, mass murder, and bestiality. In the end, all worth it. The closing sequences, especially the last shots of Ken Ogata, are brilliant.
I'd read what this film was about before having seen it so murder and seeing a little old lady roll down a mountain, while shocking, was expected. The scene of the fella trying to screw the dog... just didn't see that coming.
Posts: 17850 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Originally posted by Gorelick: The Cranes are Flying (1957)
Cannes - Golden Palm, 1958 (to Mikhail Kalatozov)
Crazily satisfying as melodrama, war indictment, and cinematic art. With compelling performances and dozens of gorgeously assembled sequences. Clocks in at just over 90 minutes and available in a sterling Criterion print (are there extras? not on the primary dvd) Check it out.
Ballad of Naramaya (1983)
Cannes -- Golden Palm, 1983 (to Shohei Imamura)
Glad I saw it, but, boy, a lot of it's hard to watch. "Logan's Run" comparisons are obvious -- in this hunger-stricken village, old folks turning 70 are taken up to mountain, carried there by their eldest child left there to die. Low humor, along with rape, self-mutilation, mass murder, and bestiality. In the end, all worth it. The closing sequences, especially the last shots of Ken Ogata, are brilliant.
I'd read what this film was about before having seen it so murder and seeing a little old lady roll down a mountain, while shocking, was expected. The scene of the fella trying to screw the dog... just didn't see that coming.
Neither did the dog.
Thank you, pacinofan, for that set-up. Very Steve Nash of you.
Early Louis Malle + Early Jeanne Moreau + new Criterion release (#429) + subject of US Supreme Court ruling on indecency = interest. Actual result: a tedious non-story about a bored provincial housewife who discovers herself after a night of romance (a truly gorgeous moonlit romp) and sex (cunnilingus, maybe). Moreau is not at her best. Boring and annoying. Not satisfying. In the interviews attached to the DVD, even Louis Malle doesn't seem to like this movie much. For cineastes only.
The Hidden Fortress (1958)
Best known today as the acknowledged source material for the orgininal Star Wars. Altough, in a made-for-Criterion interview, Lucas seems to suggest that this connection has been overplayed. I think I don't love Kurosawa unless there's a commentary track telling me why his cinema language is so influential. This movie, like his other historical films, is so often (for me), repetitive and annoying. Is it a given that peasants have to blubber so much. Apparently, this movie was Kurosawa's deliberate attempt at a commerical and accessible movie, but I don't find it to be consistently funny or exciting or compelling or rousing. If it was made for me, I don't want it.
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Just out on DVD this week. I thought maybe I'd be able to report here a discovery, a find. This Sidney Lumet movie, based on the Doctorow novelization of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, wasn't very well received when it came out (I didn't bother with it), and it's just not very good. It has the veneer of a GOOD MOVIE, but it's fundamentally unsound. I just read Roger Ebert's review of it, and he nails down the movie's biggest problem, which has to do with point of view. The movie purports to take the point of view of the activists' son (Timothy Hutton, laboring valiantly), but it doesn't, and it should. Even Hutton's basic "journey of discovery," in which he visits the people who knew his parents best, is sloppily handled -- there's no sense of how long this journey is, and what it might be costing him.
The movie's shifts between Then and Now are handled clumsily, almost randomly.
Cesars -- Best Film, Most promising actress (Sandrine Bonnaire)
A hard watch but I found it rewarding. It accumulates details about a life in an elliptical fashion (the movie delibrately jumps ahead in time, and you're not sure whether weeks, months, or years have passed) but it packs a wallop. Bonnaire makes an amazing debut as an unhappy teenager, saddled with a majorly dysfunctional family, who uses promiscuousness as a relief. She's doesn't seem particularly bright, and she's not always likeable, but I don't she's ever not believable. This movie made me want to see more of director Maurice Pialat's work. It's on Criterion but the extras are on a separate disk.
Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
Early Malle, pre-400 Blows + earlyish Jeanne Moreau catatonically wandering the night streets of Paris with her mouth slightly open + Miles Davis soundtrack + crisp Criterion print = good entertainment.
A trapped elevator messes up the plans of Moreau and her boyfriend to kill her husband/his boss. A parallel plot concerns the misadventures of a young couple that steal the boyfriend's car. It resolves itself satisfyingly. Most reviews these days, though, do focus on Moreau and her nighttime walk, and watching it today, it does feel iconic, and worth the place on the queue.
Cronenberg is going to win an Oscar someday, or at least get a nomination. I'm happy to catch up on his early films. This movie's blend of philosophy, social commentary, and gore mostly work. The logic of the "Videodrome" increasingly becomes hard to access but never entirely arbitrary. Rick Baker is the movie's MVP, but I enjoyed the performances by James Woods, Debbie Harry (a shining example of effective B-movie acting), and Canadian actors, whose relative obscurity lends much to the movie's unsettling quatities. I'm glad it was only 84 minutes.
The Dead Zone
A rare instance of Cronenberg's working with someone else's material. The movie is restrained, true to King's wintry Maine landscapes and feelings. Maybe it's too restrained? And maybe because we didn't know then that Christopher Walken would evolve into one of cinema's alltime weirdos, his early scenes -- when he's supposed to seem normal -- would have been more effective. I think the movie has a big flaw, a scene with lunatic senatorial candidate Martin Sheen that reveals information to us that Walken
