It's not bad, but it doesn't strike me as one of the Best Pictures that will end up in the collective consciousness.
Michael Collins was on TV the other night and made for great viewing. Definitely takes a lot of historic liberties but the casting was on point.
Gong to watch my favourite Jim Jarmusch film - Stranger Than Paradise. I genuinely feel sorry for anyone who hasn't seen this film.
I finally watched 1917. Now I understand what all the fuss was about. From previous post I recon you are a Jim jarmusch fan. Why Stranger than Paradise is your favorite film? Why this specific film?
I am. A huge fan. Why Stranger Than Paradise specifically? That's a good question. I think it's largely the performances - gloriously underplayed and natural, and despite (or maybe because of) the characters' beatnik lifestyle, I find them all very likeable and decent on the whole. The dialogue, too, is wonderful. There's one scene, where the friend of the main character arrives at his flat. He sits down on his friend's bed while his friend sits in a chair at the nearby table. They both have a can of beer and just sit there, slightly awkward. They have nothing to say, and so don't. The scene goes on for about maybe 90 seconds, which seems like nothing, but with neither of them saying anything for the whole time the tension is palpable. For me it's just the perfect beatnik/bohemian film (even though it was made in the mid 80s). 29:00 mark for the scene in question, if the 'play from here' function doesn't work.
I'll watch the whole movie. I wanted too but forgot about it. I've watched bits and pieces of it in class. There's a bunch of films that I need to see actually but this one caught my attention for different reasons.
I've been watching Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear over and over for a couple days now. Got pretty blitzed on Easter and watched it after not having seen it for a few years and noticed a lot of deep subtext I had missed before so I'm working up notes as if for an analysis (which I'll probably never follow up on). Trying to figure out if DeNiro is playing Satan or is rather the Scourge of God unleashed on the immoral lawyer played by Nick Nolte. There are strong arguments for both, and maybe it is both since he mentions the Book of Job. DeNiro definitely does nods to the characters he played in both Scorcese's Taxi Driver and in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, where he played the creature.
Now you've got me curious as I saw it once, in the theater, when I was an idiot child (twentysomething Marine) and just registered it as a straightforward thriller.
That's what I thought at first, but after seeing it a couple times it struck me it has a very weird artificial look and feel to it, which tipped me off that Scorsese was doing something with it, under the surface. There's a ridiculous amount of religious stuff going on, and I've now discovered color coding. Red seems to indicate blood, as well as hell and the devil. White is used extensively, mostly in the clothing of women, to denote innocence and naivete. I have no idea if the blue means anything. Also there's a lot of symbolism in the scene where Danielle (the daughter, played by Juliette Lewis) meets De Niro in the school theater, believing him to be her new drama teacher, in a gingerbread cottage set-piece, and discuss the author Thomas Wolfe. De Niro is wearing a shirt with a little alligator logo on it. I'm working my way through the featurettes now and finding some interesting things.
Thanks for the tips, I'll give it another run. ETA: I have a horrible track record of misinterpreting the spiritual subtexts. In The Seventh Seal I thought that that scary German guy was the Devil. Didn't know my Book of Revelations very well. Likewise in The Messenger I got Dustin Hoffman's character all wrong. The killer is that I love those sort of things, I just don't have sufficient grounding in the underlying storylines to identify the characters very well.
Pay attention to the opening and closing sequences. Weird things going on with extreme close-ups of Juliette Lewis' eyes in photographic negative and they suddenly turn red. This is what tipped me off to pay attention to color. I believe at the end it means she now lives in a living hell, as does the rest of the family.
Currently watching Batman vs. Why Did I Push Play? Superheroes make the tacticians at the Battle of the Somme look like geniuses.
I've never seen Apocalypse Now - a fact I'm about to turn around over the course of the next couple of hours.
Well that was a long film. Although not as long as the time-stamp on my last post suggests. If I really did start watching it at 15:29, then it was an 8.5 hr film.
If you can you should also try to see the documentary about the making of it. It's from a time when documentaries about movies actually meant something and weren't just corporate advertising where every person says how wonderful it was to work with everyone else. What's it called, I think Heart of Darkness?
It's one of my favorites. Hallucinatory in a good way. In some ways I like the extended version better than the theatrical cut, but the plantation scene does drag on. Walter Murch, who edited it, said some interesting things about it,. Vietnam was known as the helicopter war, they had become the state of the art that defined warfare at the time, and it was largely about that. He also was involved in the sound editing, which was award winning and amazing and they did some incredible things with it.
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. Heart of Darkness (singular) is the Joseph Conrad book it's based on. There's a pretty good film version of that with John Malkovich as Kurtz, IIRC.
If you like Apocalypse Now, I'd recommend reading the book 'easy riders raging bulls' about 70's film culture. It gets really deep into the making of the film. It also talks about the life and careers of all the other 70's guys - Spielberg, Scorsese, Hal Ashby, Bogdonavitch, and of course, George Lucas. George Lucas is presented as the nerdy whipping boy of this crew. That book posits the criticism that Apocalypse Now is amazing up until the ending, which is a little confusing and disappointing. I'd tend to agree with that. Basically, Coppola didn't know how to end the film and what point he exactly wanted to make. It's actually kind of fascinating that all those big name 70's renegades flamed out with the exception of Spielberg and Scorsese. Spielberg was the one who wasn't into all this angsty nihilistic dark film making. He was an entertainer foremost. Lucas created his studio to make the movies he wanted to make. But was so burnt out by Star Wars he never really ended up doing anything after that. Star Wars is the story of a plucky band of rebels going against an evil empire - basically how Lucas saw himself and probably his filmmaker friends in regards to the studio system at the time. Look at Star Wars now...owch.
I've read that book, and it was a revelation! I always wondered why suddenly the movies got so damn good around the late 70's (around Star Wars especially) and through the 80's and then sort of died out again into nothing but blockbusters, all corporate driven (well, for the most part). Even the directors who made some of the best movies of the era, like Spielberg etc seem to have sold out for the most part after a certain point. Now I understand. The old Hollywood studios were dying, all going broke somewhere in the late 60's if I remember right. They were still doing things the way they knew how from the classic Hollywood studio era, from the 30's through the 50's, and by the 60's it was an old boy's club, all aging producers, directors and actors and they didn't understand how to connect with the younger generation, the hippies. In desperation one studio decided to hire one from the first graduating class of the first film school, and give him free reign to do whatever he wanted. It was Dennis Hopper, and he made Easy Rider. The top brass at the studio didn't even drop in to see what he was doing—they couldn't stand him. They were all cigar-chomping, hard-drinking old-school tycoons, and here was this pot-smoking addle-headed hippie riding around on a motorcycle and shooting what to them looked like totally amateur home movie footage, with no discernible system to hold it all together. But they let him do it his way, the kids lined up around the block to see it, and the studio was saved. Then all the studios had to do it or perish. This is why suddenly the New Hollywood took over, including Spielberg, Scorsese. Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and on and on. It was a golden age that lasted about 2 decades, and then the studios had gotten so rich they decided to take over again and reign in these showoff directors all doing things their own way. Computers had taken over from humans as far as doing surveys, focus groups, demographic studies, and they all put their money in computers to predict what was going to be the next big blockbuster. No more letting the director be an actual artist and do what he wanted, no sir!!
The number two most popular series on Netflix is Outer Banks. Don't. It's an episode of Scooby-doo with slightly older kids and no dog.
Movies I've watched in quarantine: The Matrix - Great movie. Holds up really well. I actually took a philosophy class where they made us watch the matrix...reloaded. Something very amusing to me about choosing the much stupider sequel to watch in class. LOTR Trilogy (SPOILER alert)- I found myself not enjoying the second one as much as I had in the past. That was once my favourite. It seemed like not much really happened to Frodo in that movie. First one is probably still my favourite but it's tough between that and ROTK. I really like how Golum is essential to destroying the ring. Frodo ultimately couldn't do it. You needed the chaos of that ring addiction to destroy it. The invisible Guest - Twisty and very entertaining Spanish thriller. Platform - For me, an incredibly tedious high concept metaphorical thriller. Jigsaw - A very stupid movie as always but damn I love the Saw franchise. I never liked the torture so much as the convoluted twists. Good Time - The one thing I would say is this feels very of the current moment in terms of mood and the characters. I actually preferred this to Uncut Gems Contempt - Only my second Godard. Damn, this was good. Has a particularly intense relationship scene in the middle. Lots of naked Bardot to make a comment, I suppose, on the Hollyood demand for such things. Subtext: Hollywood interference will ruin your work and life. Not exactly original but done in a very original way. The Big Knife - This would make a great double bill with 'Contempt.' It's a film noir with artistic integrity as a driving force for the plot. It's kind of high art mixed with the low, always a thrilling combo. Watership Down - This was interesting to watch in these times for sure. I couldn't help but see some parallels as we are basically all rabbits banned from leaving our wrens right now. Arrival - A great movie to watch in quarantine since it's kind of slow and doesn't ask too much of you as a viewer. But the ending didn't strike me as something the movie had been building towards. I know I was supposed to feel heartbroken, but I just felt kind of empty. It didn't feel like the message of that plot choice at the end were what the rest of the movie was about. Mother- The Bong Joon ho movie. Really plays with your expectations and is full of surprises. Not only a great director but a masterful storyteller. I Vitelloni - When I was a teenager, I was obsessed with Woody Allen. And then I started getting into the directors Woody also references, first Bergman and then Fellini. But I struggled with those guys. I appreciated them as artists, and felt good about myself after seeing their works. But the actual act of watching them felt like a slog. I sat through 8 and a half and La Dolce Vita, but I can't remember them at all. I remember having this movie 'I Vitelloni' on my hard drive and never watching it. I think I would have enjoyed this movie a lot than ones I actually watched back then. It's basically about a bunch of guys living in a small town who refuse to grow up. This is one of my favourite themes in all of movies and storytelling. I love films like 'The Last Picture Show' and 'American Graffiti.' I really relate to this desperate desire to get out mixed with low self-esteem or ambition to actually do so. I guess because I grew up in a boring city and had to get out. But even so you sometimes get out in body but not in mind. I think this idea of men who are still boys is very true today as well, so it's crazy that Fellini observed this back in the 40's. I loved the atmosphere of this movie and how true to life it felt. But it was a bit meandering and I felt the story could have been tighter.
Have you ever gone into a movie with low expectations and still managed to find it so unremittingly awful from start to finish that you wish bad things not only on the writer(s), director, and actors but find yourself actively hoping for bad things to happen to the catering staff and very nearly want to look up theaters and screening dates (and this is a seven year old movie) and old employee rosters so that you can find the current names and addresses of no-longer kids who may have sold popcorn when it was playing and catch an international flight during time of quarantine just to smack them out of revenge for their complicity? Welcome to Scary Movie 5. ETA: Fuck, it wasn't even Scary Movie 5. That's what Netflix Japan claimed it was, but it seems it was really Fear Inc. Can't even get away with slandering the right film, although Wikipedia seems to indicate that I wasn't far off anyway.
And yup, I just went back and confirmed that that was the image I clicked on but it now links correctly to Scary Movie 5. Very odd.
