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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 6, 2017 19:52:22 GMT
... not surprising, given how age and health issues had forced him to step aside, but still very unfortunate news. Osborne's introductory and concluding comments framed films on Turner Classic Movies beautifully—they were sometimes as worth seeing as the films themselves. On television, at least, his low-key presence epitomized grace, class, and warmth—qualities that are too scarce in today's self-aggrandizing era. And of course, his knowledge was vast.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 6, 2017 10:00:38 GMT
Adding these: The Killing Fields (1984) The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) (maybe; not sure I remember it well enough) Fail-Safe (1964) (not on the ground combat, but definitely realistic about war) Fail-Safe is terrific. I do not believe that the narrative is ultimately "realistic," but I understand what you mean in terms of a sobering view of the Cold War nuclear arms race.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 5, 2017 9:22:48 GMT
There was a needed killing of the '60s-'70s anti-war, gritty, counterculture crap that the nostalgia movement of the '70s starting with American Graffiti was a direct response to Why was that "needed"? Anyway, I would say that the best ten-year period (for American cinema, anyway) came from 1967-1976—I believe that that era constituted the time when movies were the most mature, on average, and when there was the most creative tension, aesthetic liberation, and perhaps diversity of stories and approaches. There are still good-to-great films nowadays, but so much of the market is occupied by CGI and comic books.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 5, 2017 7:18:50 GMT
... hard to say, because Jaws, I would argue, is flawless, whereas The Birds sports the flaw of being a film about the natural world where Alfred Hitchcock occasionally, and lazily, falls back into an obviously artificial studio shot. Plus, Rod Taylor is merely adequate (and unremarkable) as the stock-in-trade male protagonist, whereas the three main male performances in Jaws are all idiosyncratic and impeccable in their authenticity.
But I believe that The Birds is the more fascinating movie. Like Jaws, it reconnects man (or woman) to a scarily primordial past. Unlike Jaws, it features a denouement that is dystopian and absolutely spooky rather than cathartic. Some of the bird attacks are incredibly dynamic, and the film's complex—perhaps contradictory—gender politics are engaging and stimulative. One could argue that Alfred Hitchcock is working out a darkly manipulative and reactionary anti-feminist agenda, but The Birds is all the more fascinating for that prospect, especially given how much autonomy and agency he initially grants his female protagonist. And aside from the occasional retrograde laziness, Hitchcock's compositions are incredible—the attention to color, the movement within the frame of the birds, and the haunting closeups of birds in some cases and the longer shots overflowing with birds in others. He makes great use of both high angles and low angles, his use of montage is classic, and the movie's sound mixing is mind-bending.
Jaws is the more naturalistic film, in large part because it is a New Hollywood movie—the product of a twenty-seven-year old director filming in the mid-1970s. Conversely, The Birds is a product of the early 1960s with a director born in the nineteenth century. But The Birds offers a more ironic interpretation of the natural world—more complex and layered. Both films are great, but if I had to choose one, I would probably go with The Birds.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 4, 2017 4:38:21 GMT
3:10 to Yuma is a haunting, poetic Western with Ford masterfully playing a romantically ambiguous figure. A film professor of mine once stated that Ford proved akin to a "mini-John Wayne." After seeing more of his films, that analogy has never really worked for me ... So, do you consider him to be better than the Duke? I would agree with "mattgarth"—not better, but more versatile. I cannot see Wayne playing, for example, the male lead in Gilda.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 4, 2017 4:22:37 GMT
About Apocalypse, another poster had a similar response to yours. But I believe it's "mythic" or "surrealistic" qualities contributes to its amazing artistic representation of the insanity of war, which, for me, makes it realistic. But I understand the subjective nature of that assessment. And I agree completely with you about the realism of the scene you mention.
As for the newer films you so aptly describe, I regret to say that I haven't seen any of them (I can't abide too much violence these days). But my friends have also sung their praises, and the trailers I've seen certainly indicate that they are everything you say. I've wanted to see them all, except American Sniper - don't think I could handle that one. But I have a DVD screener of Hacksaw Ridge, so I may give that one a try. I'm very interested in that story, so I hope I can get through it.
As for Hell is for Heroes, I saw it when it was first released and though that was a long time ago I still remember its power and McQueen's terrific performance.
Thanks for your thoughtful, insightful comments. I viewed Hacksaw Ridge four times in the theater (once on an Oscar pass)—I consider it "very good," definitely one of the five or six best movies from this past year. The film is draining, partly due to the brutally realistic nature of the combat scenes and partly due to the ironic and poignant nature of the story. ... fascinating to learn that you saw Hell Is for Heroes during its release—you are surely one of the very few posters who did so. The film also came at an intriguing stage of McQueen's career, where he was a rising star after The Magnificent Seven two years earlier yet not quite (as I understand matters) the iconic star that he would soon become and still a half-decade away from making the Quigley's Annual Top Ten Money Making Stars Poll (his first appearance coming for 1967). Quigley's Annual through 1970There is something really unmitigated about McQueen's performance in that film, and Don Siegel's lean direction seemed to suit him. And, considering that the American public was not yet focused on Vietnam, Hell Is for Heroes would appear to have been a little ahead of its time in anticipating the ambiguities that would soon accompany representations of war in the popular culture. (Of course, Hell Is for Heroes is about World War II, but it reflected sensibilities that became more commonplace later in the 1960s.)
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 3, 2017 8:42:07 GMT
3:10 to Yuma is a haunting, poetic Western with Ford masterfully playing a romantically ambiguous figure.
A film professor of mine once stated that Ford proved akin to a "mini-John Wayne." After seeing more of his films, that analogy has never really worked for me ...
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 3, 2017 7:43:38 GMT
As a freshman in college, I took a course on Westerns (which, for me, was a heavenly experience). Red River was one of the films that we viewed and studied, and the (male, fifty-five years old) professor mentioned something about the women being "strong." One of the female students stated that she found the women (including Colleen Gray, as Tom Dunson's girlfriend early in the film) to be "sappy" rather than "strong." Either way, I believe that she judged Dru's acting in the same manner as you did. This class took place fifty years after Red River's release, so I wonder how women in the late 1940s viewed the matter (of course, not all women think alike) and whether there would be a strong generational difference from those times to more contemporary times. Ostensibly, Tess Millay (Dru) is "strong" in the sense that she ultimately settles matters, but both actresses are assertive in the "I am a woman, and you need a woman" sense that probably is much less palatable for many female viewers in recent decades. I will say that I find the moment where the arrow penetrates Millay to be quite arousing (not literally, but intellectually)—and it is an example of how the industrial censorship of the era, while perhaps unfortunate overall, sparked greater creativity and metaphorical suggestion in many instances. I have no issues with portrayals of strong women in Westerns. God knows they must have been strong in real life. I specifically have an issue with Dru's performance. I don't find it convincing. Her reaction to being struck in the shoulder by an arrow is comical to me. I do see your point re its suggestive nature... but the arrow came from an Indian, and not Monty !!!! Could be that she was a last minute replacement for the original actress (who ?) set to play Tess, and did not have time to refine her character. I would have loved to have seen Barbara Stanwyck, Ida Lupino, or Joan Blondell in the role instead. I can see what you mean regarding Dru's performance; it is very over-the-top in a melodramatic mold that does not fit the laconic nature of this Western. But in those days, realism was not stressed much for female performers. As for the arrow, she may have been trying to give Clift a clue ...
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 3, 2017 7:25:06 GMT
Okay, this is only addressing a few aspects, because yes, liberties were taken elsewhere, and lots was left out. But I enjoyed Patton. Having read several books about him (as the books that were released by his family have been sanitized and rewritten for the gentle reader), I can appreciate some of the peculiarities of Patton, that actually were adequately portrayed in the movie. Fascinating man, Patton. The movie left out an awful lot of very important things, and I understand it needed to create a cinematic flair and appeal to the audience. But as mentioned, they did accurately portray a few very real aspects of the man and his war.
Patton is a very good film with a truly great performance by George C. Scott, but it does not strike me as especially realistic regarding war itself. Scott's brilliant portrayal of Patton may well have been realistic, and I guess that that is what you are mainly referring to.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 3, 2017 7:21:25 GMT
In other words, films that weren't designed just to uplift the spirits of the country involved. I know that's generally a tall order, so some latitude is allowed, including listing more contemporary films. I'll start with these: All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) Rome, Open City (1945) Apocalypse Now (1979)I understand what you are referring to, but just to make another point, Apocalypse Now strikes me as "mythic" rather than "realistic." Certainly, though, the incident with the Vietnamese civilians on the river is highly realistic. I feel that the current Hacksaw Ridge (2016) portrays battle and the nature of death in war in an extremely realistic manner (at least until the final day of the battle, when the tone or pitch changes slightly). I also feel that that the sense of verisimilitude created by American Sniper (2014) is unmatched by anything that I have seen—you can leave the film feeling as if you are suffering from PTSD yourself for the next few hours. And I viewed the film four times in the theater, and it kept creating that effect in me. Another contemporary war film, Lone Survivor (2013), portrays the carnage and tension of battle (a different kind of battle from, say, that of Hacksaw Ridge) in realistically brutal terms, but as I recall, the ending carries a bit too much ideological uplift. Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima (both from 2006) are very realistic about the tragic, multifaceted nature of war. Also check out Hell Is for Heroes (1962), which features one of Steve McQueen's best and most underrated performances in a very tense, grim film about war.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 3, 2017 6:52:21 GMT
He didn't have the kind of second act I would have hoped. It was going to be some years ( or maybe this is still not happening) before Black actors would be considered for race non specific roles. Don't know how often he was offered the part of a doctor, not a Black doctor, or a lawyer , not a Black lawyer. His first act , raisin in the sun, Lillies if tge field and patch of blue were spectacular. He was good in Guess who's Coming to Dinner but I find it unbearable . It's a creature of its time, and its main flaws were caused by the effort if the writer to isolate race as the cause of discomfort. To do that they had to make the doctor, so perfect, the girl so blind to anything but her interest in this man, the white parents so earnest and the Black Parents so proud. No one had any complex motives so all that was left was polemic. If it weren't Tracy's last film, I wonder if we would ever see it now. Did you (or anyone else) see the Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro, based on the 1979 writings of James Baldwin? It recently received a brief theatrical run, and although Baldwin's writing is centered upon the 1960s assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, he deals with Hollywood movies and Sidney Poitier quite a bit. Baldwin says (in narration by Samuel L. Jackson) that most black folks did not like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner—they felt that the film 'used' Poitier, meaning that it used him as an instrument by which white folks could work out their own racial anxieties and shortcomings. I have not seen the film since 2002, and I believe that I have only viewed it once, so I will look forward to the fiftieth-anniversary theatrical screening later this year. I do believe that people would regard the movie as significant regardless of whether it constituted Tracy's final film, because it broke new ground in representing a different kind of racism—the racism of people who are not "racists," if you will, of people who seem to be totally different from the Southern bigots in Poitier's other iconic 1967 movie, In the Heat of the Night. If you want to see this kind of exploration in a more contemporary film, check out True Crime (Clint Eastwood, 1999), which I feel is subtly one of the best American films ever on race. The movie is not polemical (and certainly not archaic) at all, and in a naturalistic way, the film addresses the sort of prejudice that Guess Who's Coming to Dinner represented. (The stories have nothing in common, though.) ***This last part contains a spoiler about The Defiant Ones.***In I Am Not Your Negro, Baldwin also states that at the end of of The Defiant Ones, black folks wanted the Poitier character to just stay on the train rather than reaching out to the Tony Curtis character. A black man, in their view, had to take his shot at liberation when he had it, rather than reaching back to (in effect) help the white man feel better about his racial progress.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 3, 2017 5:45:20 GMT
I am not sure about a top-ten list, but It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946) is easily one of my favorite films of all time. Jimmy Stewart relates to George Bailey on such an intimate and instinctive level, and Capra forces his protagonist and his viewer to confront the darkness in a way that most movies do not. He shows how the margin between triumph and tragedy is paper-thin, and every scene—every moment—is memorable. Few, if any films, are that uplifting and yet that shuddering— It's a Wonderful Life may epitomize cinematic catharsis. (By the way, I have seen the film in the theater six times since December 2013.) Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) epitomizes, and perhaps defines, film noir's imperative to transgress, to behave immorally and criminally simply because you can. Sure, there is a practical (if licentious) motivation behind the behaviors of the leading characters, but clearly there is something more at play. Two other films noir from the 1940s that really stand out to me are The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), the first commonly acknowledged noir classic (if not the first commonly acknowledged noir in general), and Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947). When I viewed The Maltese Falcon in the theater a year ago, I was amazed by how coldly and relentlessly dark the film's tone and vision happen to be—it almost seems animated by the spirit of a German silent horror movie such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920). Out of the Past, meanwhile, memorably uses both rural and urban landscapes to invoke the nature of fatalism. I also have to mention Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948), perhaps the greatest Western of the forties and one of the movies that still, to this day, sets the standard for exploring the nature and meaning of masculinity. In retrospect, one almost could not imagine John Wayne and Montgomery Clift being in the same movie together, let alone the same Western, but their combination here is sublime. I can't make up my mind for this topic, but I just want to let you know, Joe, that this is an excellent list and analysis. I agree with every choice, particularly It's a Wonderful Life (so continually underrated by critics--certainly not by audiences--in this cynical age!) and Red River. Thanks, and you make a smart point about It's a Wonderful Life: it is underrated by critics, but not by audiences—every Christmas season, it still draws people to theaters for re-releases. Part of that draw may be sentiment and nostalgia, but those factors alone do not account for the film's appeal. Its emotional intensity and power, the evident skill of the writing, directing, and acting (especially Jimmy Stewart's), and the way that the film challenges its protagonist (and thus the viewer) turn It's a Wonderful Life into an experience that is at once draining, joyous, and deeply meaningful.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 3, 2017 5:30:10 GMT
I wouldn't begrudge Kane, it's a blazing, bravura work, epic and mythic. The only thing is that this title bestowed on it seems to make the film seem sepia-toned and remote. It's almost more famous for being the Greatest Film Ever than for the film itself. It doesn't seem like it's a living, ever-changing thing like say a Vertigo where people are transfixed by it, bewitched by it, pulled into it. ... good point. Citizen Kane does not seem to move people in the manner of Vertigo or, say, The Graduate. Rather, folks appear to admire and respect Citizen Kane, as opposed to loving it. It is a remarkable film, though, daring and shuddering—a brilliantly dark parable on the American Dream that may be more relevant now than ever before.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 3, 2017 5:22:31 GMT
Shall I start a thread on Sabrina? Your comments seem too insightful to be buried in this post! I could always link back here too, might be nice. If you would like to, sure. I could then copy-and-paste my comments from this thread, and we could dig into the details further.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 1, 2017 4:12:45 GMT
So, without any spoilers, would you guys consider the film meaningful and significant on any level (social, emotional, thematic), or is it basically just genre shtick (which may be more or less entertaining depending upon one's perspective and affinity for horror)?
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 21, 2017 10:53:31 GMT
... one of the ten best, I would say.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 21, 2017 10:51:10 GMT
Recently watched this film but I'm not so sure it's a real musical like many produced in the 1950s. Not as many songs as I expected, which I personally preferred since too many can slow the story down. Yes, I would call it a musical. However, La La Land tries to braid a musical with a soulful romantic comedy, and I feel that each element interferes with the other. The musical interrupts and detracts from a soulful romantic comedy that could have been quite compelling, while the soulful romantic comedy prevents the musical from building the energy and dynamism that it needs to be captivating. Personally, I feel that the film should have just focused on the romantic comedy and dropped the musical aspect.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 21, 2017 10:46:54 GMT
90 years old today on February 20! Thank you for your activism and your art, and for these, among my favorites of all your memorable performances: In the Heat of the Night The Defiant Ones The Man Who Came to Dinner Patch of Blue Lilies of the Field A Raisin in the Sun I love The Defiant Ones—not exactly subtle, but the metaphor is so powerful and it certainly works. The film is also very atmospheric. A Patch of Blue is also terrific. And I feel that Poitier brought something to genre movies such as The Bedford Incident, Duel at Diablo, and The Organization. These films are not great, but Poitier elevated them somehow. Does anyone know why he left movies for a decade after he turned fifty?
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 21, 2017 10:28:40 GMT
Poitier has to be considered one of the most important cultural figures in American history, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner will be showing in theaters, as part of the Fathom Events TCM Big Screen Classics series, next December. link
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 21, 2017 10:25:14 GMT
It is a perfect American Novel, and a nearly perfect film of a novel. It doesn't surrrender any of the subtlety of the book, or throw away any plot point. ... precisely.
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