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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 21, 2017 10:03:46 GMT
When you get to a certain age and have seen a lifetime of films, it's hard to choose only ten for a decade. I could probably do ten for each year. Maybe I'll try that, for now doing just 1940. I'm interested to see how it turns out. The Grapes of Wrath Rebecca His Girl Friday The Philadelphia Story The Shop Around the Corner The Great McGinty Foreign Correspondent Fantasia Pinocchio Our Town Not bad, for one year. Thanks for indulging me. I should have mentioned The Grapes of Wrath; I was thinking of it as a 1939 release, but of course, John Ford filmed it in 1939 and then it came out in 1940. The movie is at once filled with austerity and humanity, and it takes an unflinching look at some uglier attitudes in America. In that sense, it is definitely one of John Ford's most honest and objective films, keeping sentimentality on a short leash. And the technical aspects (visual and audio) are just superior.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 21, 2017 9:56:29 GMT
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, too, love Red River - see my List above. But I do wish they had cast someone other than the talent-less Joanne Dru! She had no chemistry with Monty, and her overacting in the climax was just awful! 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.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 21, 2017 9:34:08 GMT
I will just go back through 2012:
2012: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino). An honorable mention goes to Life of Pi (Ang Lee).
2013: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)
2014: American Sniper (Clint Eastwood). Honorable mentions go to Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller), Fury (David Ayer), and Joe (David Gordon Green). Joe is technically a 2013 release, I guess, but it did not play outside of film festivals until April 2014, so I am counting it as a 2014 release.
2015: Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg) or The Walk (Robert Zemeckis). I could really go with either one, as opposed to making a false choice.
2016: Sully (Clint Eastwood)
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 20, 2017 23:34:45 GMT
No mention of The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)? Granted, Wood does not have much to do in that film.
I would have to have Rebel Without a Cause up there. The film is way ahead of its time—shockingly so—and Nicholas Ray's direction is so visually and technically inventive, sometimes breaking taboos.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 20, 2017 22:44:03 GMT
At no point in "Lion" does it show the Australian couple visiting the orphanage and coming across Saroo. The same is true of his adopted brother. With Saroo, we just hear a woman tell him one day at the orphanage that an Australian couple wants to adopt him. Is this how events really unfolded with Saroo and his adopted brother – with the Australian couple at no point visiting the orphanage? As depicted on screen, it comes across as arbitrary and not all that believable. I am going to read the book on which the film is based, but the situation does not seem implausible to me. Thirty years ago, I do not envision Australian or Western couples actually visiting some wretched orphanage in India to pick out their children—and I doubt that the Indian authorities would have wanted or allowed them to do so. Indeed, the notion that some sort of agency would have handled the filtering makes total sense to me.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 20, 2017 22:29:18 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.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 20, 2017 22:06:49 GMT
They shut down by around 8:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, February 19, 2017 ... so much for shutting down on "February 20." I was hoping that they would go by Pacific Standard Time, as I was trying to save and archive some material, and they never even waited for February 20 on the East Coast, instead closing down at least four hours early. What? I was involved in a running thread with spiderwort on the Classic Film Board about when the boards would close. I figured they would use U.S. pacific time, the time stamp on all our threads, but no-one knew for sure. I jokingly posted a minute after midnight Australian eastern daylight saving time, proclaiming "we're still here, so they're not using Australian time." I got some sleep and resumed posting seven hours later. The next major timezone up for grabs was Greenwich Mean Time, just four hours away. At a minute past midnight GMT, I posted "still here, so they're not using GMT. Next stop U.S. eastern standard time." Fourteen minutes later, the message boards were wiped out. They had used GMT as their time reference. Had they used U.S. pacific time, the boards would have been up for another eight hours. Thanks for the details and clarification. One would have hoped that IMDb could have been clear itself, especially since the majority of its message board members are almost certainly in the US. So much for "customer service" ... shows the type of operation that they were running there.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 20, 2017 8:25:46 GMT
To Kill a Mockingbird, which I have seen twice in the theater since September 2013, is a great film, a haunting film. It does not compromise—it just lays reality out there. Indeed, the film's combination of nostalgia and brutal frankness may be unmatched.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 20, 2017 6:20:28 GMT
Who over 50 is tired to hear "you can load down our app" all the time anywhere??? We have just figured out what a PC is and now the talk about apps ... or under fifty ...
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 20, 2017 5:13:04 GMT
I ended up watching Sabrina on Valentine's Day, and I loved it. It was funny and entertaining, and totally took me away from all my problems while I was watching, which is the point of watching a movie if you ask me. I thought it was cool that William Holden was in this movie after having worked with Billy Wilder on Sunset Blvd too. (which I loved, btw..I think why I picked this list to watch a movie from first I can't believe I hadn't already watched Sabrina, but I can somewhat remember the remake. I feel like I caught it on TV once or something. Just wanted to thank you again for your recommendations. Only one I had seen previously was Double Indemnity. ... I am not sure if anyone wants to start a discussion on Sabrina, but I will share some thoughts since I recently viewed the film twice in the theater as part of the Cinemark Classics Series. I first viewed Sabrina eleven years ago , in February 2006 on Turner Classic Movies, and I loved it—I thought that it was delightful and charmingly romantic. When I saw the movie in the theater earlier this month, my view both times proved more ambivalent. Overall, I still liked Sabrina—I deemed it "pretty good," meaning above-average yet not quite an unqualified "good" (let alone "very good" or "great"). For both screenings, I thought that the film proved terrific in its first half before weakening significantly in the second half. The first half represents scintillating romantic comedy, as humor mixes easily with Sabrina's (Audrey Hepburn's) romantic sadness and then her glorious transformation. But in the second half, as the focus shifts toward Sabrina's relationship with Linus (Humphrey Bogart) rather than his younger brother, David (William Holden), I feel that the film becomes too slow, especially in a certain scene with Sabrina and Linus. The movie largely loses its humor (and rhythm), but the seriousness is unsatisfying because I do not feel that any of the relationships are convincingly worked out—to accept what unfolds, I have to sort of rationalize matters and engage in some intellectual wrangling, because I do not really "feel" it. (I know that the changes of heart and relationship developments do work for others, though.) The performances from Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and William Holden are strong, though—even if Bogart is too old for Hepburn (even Holden looks quite a bit older than he did in Sunset Blvd. just four years earlier) and even if Hepburn's natural aristocratic accent makes no sense for a working-glass girl from the New York area (even if her character grew up around wealthy folks and with an English father, she surely attended public schools among other working-class kids). But in that era, Hollywood did not bother with such pesky details. Hepburn always possessed the ability to combine comedy with soulfulness, and she looks glorious in this film. And director Billy Wilder provides some nice visual touches, especially in the second scene where Sabrina arrives at and the departs from Linus' office. Overall, though, I would not consider Sabrina one of Wilder's best films by any stretch. I believe that a much better Wilder comedy–and a truly great comedy–is his next film, The Seven-Year Itch (1955), which receives a sort of preadvertising mention in Sabrina. The Seven-Year Itch is wittier, riskier, consistently humorous, and downright hilarious at times. It also offers much more in the way of contemporary social relevance, exploring very real anxieties (then and now, but especially then, with the fifties emphasis on monogamous marriage and the nuclear family),yet doing so in an entirely comedic manner. Sabrina has its charms, but The Seven-Year Itch is at once more dynamic and more meaningful. It presents the protagonist–and, by inference, the audience–with some very real choices.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 20, 2017 3:57:15 GMT
I feel that the performances by Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins elevate The Shawshank Redemption and turn it into a truly memorable film. Of course, I would not call it the greatest film of all time, or the greatest film of the 1990s, or the greatest prison movie in history. It is an excellent example of a certain kind of prison movie, though.
Anyway, the notion that there is any single "greatest film of all time" is a ridiculous construct in my view (as Mr. Kimble sort of indicated). The most that one can do, I feel, is cite a certain group of movies from a certain genre or a certain era—and even then, the points will always be debatable.
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 20, 2017 3:43:25 GMT
They should have waited until at least after midnight pacific time to close the message boards. I always assumed that they were based in California. I live in Texas. The time zone listed in posts on IMDB was pacific time. For example a post from 2:00 AM central time would say it was from 12:00 AM pacific time. I left the Little House On The Prairie message board a little bit after 6:00 PM central time. I went to the IMDB page for Gone With The Wind. I noticed the button at the button of the page that goes to the message board was missing. I turned my computer off and logged back on. I thought that the page just needed to be refreshed. I got back on the IMDB page for Gone With The Wind and the button at the bottom of the page that goes to the message board was still gone. I realized at that point that they had closed the message boards earlier. At least I checked the message boards that I wanted to read one more time earlier today. I was going to check them one more time this evening. I wish that they were specific about what time they planned on closing the message boards. See my previous post; they did not even wait until February 20 on the East Coast! What a joke ...
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 20, 2017 3:42:06 GMT
They shut down by around 8:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, February 19, 2017 ... so much for shutting down on "February 20." I was hoping that they would go by Pacific Standard Time, as I was trying to save and archive some material, and they never even waited for February 20 on the East Coast, instead closing down at least four hours early.
What?
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Post by joekiddlouischama on Feb 20, 2017 3:38:07 GMT
Schickel was an exceptional writer and he understood how to decipher the essence of movies. For instance, no matter what one makes of his Clint Eastwood: A Biography (1996) as an overall work, his ability to assess the value and nature of each of Eastwood's movies, and to identify the meaning of each one to Eastwood's career, is virtually unerring.
He also wrote and directed several documentaries, in addition to producing.
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