C or D: David O. Selznick's 1939 production of "Gone with the Wind"

old movies more or less suck

the acting is so wooden and bad

you were better served on the society is in the gutter thread

srsly who watches these things? and why?

we have watched everything else and are working our way backwards

hav u seen tropic thunder tho

yes

it is also much better than gone with teh wind

do u think morbs has seen tropic thunder and is he a downey jr fan?

Acting in a lot of modern films is wooden and bad, just in a way that modern people are acclimatised to and more willing to accept.

hold on let me consult morbs.xls

Acting in a lot of modern films is "natural" and bad, thx Actors Studio.

downey jr in tropic thunder 1mx better than any pre 1960 performance

I want a copy of morbs.xls!

This thread reminds me of an argument I had with someone who said "I don't have an accent." Everybody has an accent, some people just don't realize it. It's a question of perception, and being able to recognize the relativity in the situation.

There is a similar bias when you watch a modern movie. The impression that Saving Private Ryan or The Usual Suspects or The Road To Perdition are more "realistic" than older films is based on style. When you judge these movies as "better" than older films, you are just responding to the movie's style (and not its content). These films were carefully crafted to aesthetically appeal to today's moviegoing audience. The style is "invisible." You're not hearing the accent.

This careful crafting goes on during the making of all movies. The craft was not poorer in older films, just different. Whether it's All Quiet On The Western Front, Bridge Over The River Kwai, Apocalypse Now, or Saving Private Ryan, they were all designed to appeal to the style preferences of the current generation. I guarantee Saving Private Ryan (at least some aspects of it) will appear hokey in 20 years time.

If you put Saving Private Ryan on the list and take off Bridge Over The River Kwai, in a few years you'll be taking Saving Private Ryan off and swapping out for the latest and greatest. You'll loose your connection to history and to what is truly important: content, not style. As you get older, your sensitivity to style lessens, because you've seen the styles of your childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood come and go. You come to understand that style is fleeting, and that content and humanity in movies is what matters - they are the constant.

You don't have to like these films - everybody has their opinion. But to react negatively to such a disparate set of films as the ones you listed indicates some kind of mental barrier to accepting the stylistic trappings of other time periods. But, just like an accent, those stylistic trappings are present in the recent movies you love so much more - you just don't see them (yet). Even if you never do see them, your children and grandchildren will, and they will be sure to point out how crappy Saving Private Ryan or The Usual Suspects or The Road To Perdition are.

I've seen enough of it, a few minutes at a time, to know that I don't want to sit through the whole thing at once.

wtf no one said anything abt "the road to perdition"

^end to "Morbs hates films he hasn't seen" fucking meme^

xp

it's a quote dingbat

xp

I didn't say I hated it, I said I don't want to sit through the whole thing.

the counter argument is that movies were really new and no one knew how to make them worth shit - creative types labored under a highly restrictive studio system - and actors were all trained for stage and/or silent films

is this the most hyped film ever, pre and post release?

"Titanic" has it beat, I imagine.

rock hardy you must experience the majesty of gone with the wind in its entirety to understand how truly bad it is

cos certainly, when judged against all that, it falls far short. but just as a flick it's pretty dece.

1939 era of hype competing with Batman-as-Hamlet synergy, LOL

Too much of anything, even ice crӕm, can def be a bad thing.

the counter argument is that movies were really new and no one knew how to make them worth shit - creative types labored under a highly restrictive studio system - and actors were all trained for stage and/or silent films

oy vey

let's talk more about the free, enlightened, and supportive environment of today's hollywood. I'm glad that restrictive studio system was done away with.

I think modern audiences have a hard time relating to Casablanca and GWTW as they're about adults.

I read GWTW when I was in . . . 10th? 1th? grade, and it was fine. Saw the movie shortly thereafter and don't see any need to ever see it again. Fuck a Confederacy.

Casablanca I first saw in a film appreciation class in college. I own the DVD and can watch it pretty much anytime. Never gets old.

"1th" = "11th"

Casablanca I have seen all the way through, twice, and I love it. There are just a lot of little things about GWTW that add up to "no thanks."

mostly old movie buffs are pining for a nonexistent time gone by with the wind - these movies are simple and obvious - easy to understand

When did this thread turn to shit? Is ice craem Leslie Howard?

he could be... Nude Spock?

Some Marxist-blogger thoughts on racism in the film and novel:

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2006/08/01/gone-with-the-wind/

he does have a point though, let's get back to the hegelian complexity that is tropic thunder

shouldnt this thread be in ilf lol

Acting in a lot of modern films is "natural" and bad, thx Actors Studio.

so you saw paranoid park?

Before the Devil Knows Albert Finney Asphyxiated P.S. Hoffman is what I was thinking of, first.

shouldnt this thread be in ilf lol

would you stop posting in it then?

i will if you all agree to stay in ilf

and take all the alexs w/u

what do you mean by "you people"?

he means, he's the foreman at Tara.

Dud because Olivia de Havilland just *won't die* and is ruining the success of my ILX Dead Pool '08, damnit!

ODH's only good film was The Heiress.

truth juice all over this thread thanks to ice cream

it must've run out of his ear.

just what this thread needed, truth juice

It's antioxidant.

It tastes like ham croquettes.

Great, now I'm wondering what GWTW viral marketing would have been like.

franklymydear.org

ts: gone with the wind vs birth of a nation vs song of the south

It knocked "Gold Diggers of Broadway" off the top of then "highest-grossing movie ever" pile IIRC, which it had held since 1929.

This is more often said of The Singing Fool, Al Jolson's 1928 part-talkie follow-up to The Jazz Singer. And it seems as if it beat out Gold Diggers of Broadway just slightly. But according to MGM records, Ben-Hur and The Big Parade (both 1925) outgrossed them both.

That "GDoBW" (which sounds like it was a total blast) only exists in fragmentary form, while you can buy a lavish restored DVD of "GwtW" seems like some kind of cosmic injustice to me.

You can see some of those fragments on the three-disc DVD box of The Jazz Singer released last year which is quite possibly the best DVD set I've ever encountered. Pretty lavish too.

KJB necessitates revival of ILF

I actually watched "Ben Hur" the other night, by coincidence.

I'd held off getting the "Jazz Singer" set, because they screwed up the Gold Diggers..." excerpts, and included a reel from something like "Show of Shows" instead of the "Tiptoe through the Tulips" section (also held off b/c I think "The Jazz Singer" is a bit of a bloater, and Al Jolson gets on my nerves something rotten). I'll eventually pick it up for the disc with all the vitaphone sound shorts on it. The GDoBW remnants are also going to be on the "Gold Diggers of 1937" disc in the forthcoming second Busby Berkely set apparently.

I'd read in a couple of places that GDoBW was the biggest drawing film of its day, that people would go and see it multiple times etc. I have the horrible feeling that one of the places I read that was Wikipedia, so, er.... In any case, given that it was a massive hit, and and that it was the first in a popular series, it just amazes me that it's mainly lost. Reading the story of how the various surviving bits washed up is pretty far out too, like last year or the year before last someone bought a vintage toy projector off ebay and one of the strips of film included with it was about a minute's worth from one of the earlier reels. Eh, maybe some more of it will be found over the next few years. It would be great.

OMG! I was wondering why I didn't hear "Tiptoe through the Tulips" in, well, the "Tiptoe through the Tulips" section. Still, amaaaaazing box set if only for the Vitaphone shorts. Spat into the wind here:

If you dig American vaudeville, get thee to the 3-DVD Deluxe Edition of THE JAZZ SINGER (1927)!

Morbs, you're sweet. I'll start posting on ILF.

I watched this recently on AMC. I haven't watched it since college, where it was campy entertainment for us.

Scarlett O'Hara's curtain couture wasn't THAT different or less ridiculous from Carol Burnett's send-up. I never noticed before how ridiculous Scarlett is. The South is portrayed as some exotic place.

Worth watching for the sets. Surely since this was after the depression, the excess would have invited scorn? Hard to know.

My mother was a teenager when this came out and she thought Clark Gable was a dreamboat. When GWTW was rereleased to theaters in the mid-60s she took all of her four children to the Music Box theater downtown (something unprecedented) so we could soak in the glory, just as she had when young. She talked it up a lot before we went.

As a 10 year old (approx.) I thought the first half was fairly snappy but the second half after the intermission was pretty damned boring. Clark's big line of "frankly, my dear..." just wasn't worth all the tedium that swathed it. I expect the movie was true to the book, but I never bothered to read the book.

Scorn from whom? Surely the masses enjoyed their escape into lavish mansions being burned and looted.

I saw some of it on AMC too, like when Scarlett shoots the rape-intent Yank in the face. I suppose there was a 75th anniv screening in Atlanta, as the premiere was in early December.

de Havilland interview in Garden & Gun:

http://gardenandgun.com/article/interview-olivia-de-havilland

I remember seeing this as a little girl and could not figure out Clark Gable's appeal. I remember talking about it with my mom - "women liked THAT?? That slick hair and stuff?" Burt Reynolds was the hottie in those days - that I understood.