MOVIES!

were you transported back to 1981 Times Square?

Mandingo (not at all bad, and far more honest than GWTW & other antebellum South potboilers)
10 Rillington Place
In Harm's Way (surprisingly anonymous Preminger WW2 Navy epic)
Backstage

Pet Sematary - So unfrightening, so many poor decisions ...

In the Valley of Elah (frustrating)
Be Kind Rewind (meh)
Star Trek IV (awesome)
Star Trek V (terrible)
Golden Compass (terrible)

tried to watch Infernal Affairs 3 (disc scratched)
saw I am Legend

My *mom* likes Star Trek IV

if you actively dislike star trek iv then I can never respect anything you have to say about anything

the Whale one? that launched Nimoy's sterling career as a film director?

yeah 4 is the whale one and it's the best

Nimoy wrote it too

well, shared the "Story" credit

Doesn't Spock put a Vulcan death grip on a "punk" in that one?

yes

YES

On a bus crossing the golden gate bridge. Minutes later, Gracie the whale tells him she is pregnant when he mind melds with her.

I like Spock's attempts at profanity. They are lolsome.

I am watching the films in order, and this theory that the odd ones suck and the even ones are awesome is 100% accurate.

how come hoods don't carry "ghetto blasters" anymore?

for shame!

p.s. http://www.cbs.com/classics/star_trek/video/video.php

I am watching the films in order, and this theory that the odd ones suck and the even ones are awesome is 100% accurate.

-- caek, Tuesday, February 26, 2008 11:29 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

TREKIST!

Shatner is pretty awful in IV and the love interest sucks.

xp, I discovered this theory last night, I've never seen any of the films except IV before this week.

She's not aged well since, that's for sure

http://www.geocities.com/big7thheavenfan/Me2006CH1.jpg

Catherine Hicks on the left, btw

gone baby gone (casey affleck and amy ryan both awesome, good film overall)

:O

"lewis, a man's heart is stonier...he plants what he can..then tends it"

^^perhaps the best thing about pet cemetery (we inherited a copy back in ithaca and ended up watching it all the time, as we had no tv reception). can't quite sort out how they did such a bad job

got gone baby gone at home right now on netflix, looking forward to it

yeah ST IV is way overrated, and none of the others can touch Khan

xx-post

the book is so good and one of King's scariest. the movie is like some retarded cliff's notes version.

otm. I blame the director and dp. Every scene is set up so inefficiently, the focus on all the wrong elements.

IV is the one where one of the old stalwarts, Bones I think? picks up a PC mouse and starts talking into it, trying to address the computer? That was pretty funny. Khan is the best I think, but that's the next best. Most of the others, meh.

Book of "Pet Semetary" was very grim and scary, the morbid atmosphere of the thing lingered for quite a while after I finished the story. The film sucked ass, but most Stephen King films do, don't they? (obvious exceptions, er, excepted)

I got "Singin' in the Rain", after that thread on ILM, we watched it at the weekend. I knew I was in for a rough time when about 15m in, Jill goes "does this get any better?" Watched most of the film through loads of sniping & heckling from dear wife.

Pro:
Colo(u)rs are gorgeous
Songs/routines are great (except for boring long-ass bit in the middle w/cyd charisse dressed as louise brookscolleen moore)
satire on early sound movie scene pretty clever and dead-on a lot of the time
Con:
Acting a bit stagey & hammy, dialog too a lot of the time
Gene Kelly strangely lacking in charisma (though his singing & dancing rulz)

I thought Lina was very hott and wanted her to WIN, but of course she gets fucked over by that scheming sneaky cow Kathy.

It was OK, I suppose, but I wish I'd got "High Society" instead.

great, now i have "high society" in my head...

i just don't really understand what exactly the director or the dp thought they were doing. perhaps hoping to get more viewers by not going wholehog on the creepy factor...the lighting is just all off too. you dont get a spook-filled new england feel at all...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=R5e1vfaST2I

for example: in one of the many "soft focus" flashbacks, dude's brother comes back from the dead and attacks woman hanging clothesline. This is shot from a high angle so we see him heading towards her in the distance. How is this suspense? We've never seen the woman before and never get even a close-up of her--it's an abstraction. It would have been much creepier to shoot the woman facing the camera in medium, so we see the dead guy slowly walking up behind her. Every scene is like that! The simple solution avoided. I guess somebody paid for the crane, so they felt like they had to use it.

Pet Sematary - So unfrightening, so many poor decisions ...

only thing i remember about it (apart from the ramones song, which is good) is walking out of the theater behind these people who had for god-knows-why brought a 5- or 6-year-old girl to the movie. she was clutching onto her father and crying hysterically. great moments in parenting.

Pash, I think that movie is magical. I cannot understand your reasonable criticisms.

Tips, my mother was taken to see Psycho when she was like 12? I think her mother thought it was a credible artsy film by a prestigious director, she was exposing her chilluns to KULCHUR. Alas....

See, this, to me, is magical, Remy. It's like a wonderful message from the past, from pre-depression America. The musical film that this is excerpted from, I am completely obsessed with. If someone were to locate a copy of the full movie, I would be so happy I don't know what I'd do.

Looking for this ^ clip, I found, in the same guy's account, the strangest of things - I think the weirdest thing I've ever seen on youtube, a fancy German musical routine, very sub Fred & Ginger, colour, er, from 1944:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh5MUbMJG-U

That's something you don't see everyday, is it. The tune is pretty catchy, I must admit. Wau. 0_o

To be fair, if I hadn't had my dear wife sitting beside me loudly complaining about how annoying Don O'Connor was and so on, then "Singin' in the Rain" might have worked it's magic on me. The bit where Gene gets into the car with Debbie to escape from the fans, and she's all snarky because he's a movie actor was very cute & good.

that is an excellent clip, huh?

That nazi musical clip has done my fucking head in. I think it's the contrast between the number taken on its own merits - it's charming and likeable, the tune is good, and the woman is a graceful dancer - and knowledge of the times & circumstances under which it was made. The little documentary that's an extra on the DVD of "Gold Diggers of 1933" does a pretty good job of explaining how that film was escapist entertainment from a really bad time that we today would find hard to imagine living through. I guess the clip of aryan maiden hoofing it is like that but much, much moreso never mind the fact that in that case, the people responsible for making the film were employed by the very people who were directly responsible for the mess that the film's audience would have been in in 1944. Faustian, eh.

I know shit about nazi-era cinema, apart from the usual stuff everyone knows about propaganda, leni riefenstahl etc. I think the Fritz Lang Mabuse talkie was made for nazi-controlled ufa just before he came to the states, and I know Pola Negri made a run of films, one of which, "mazurka", is supposed to be very good, before she bailed and returned to america. I did a quick trawl on imdb and wikipedia, and read about a high-budget napoleonic-era war film, "kolberg", which came out in 1945, it sounds like some pretty heavy shit, all round. I noticed that in the cast was Gustav Diessl, who played jack the ripper in "Pandora's Box"! WTF. It's all kind of very grimly fascinating, but I don't know if I want to know any more about it or not.

Pash, you know all those songs in SitR are from the '20s or '30s (except one, maybe), right? It was a nostalgic piece in its time. Its Greatest Musical Ever partisans are totally daft, but a lot of the songs are funny and the numbers exuberant, especially when O'Connor is involved.

Nazi control of studios didn't necessarily mean that the moviemakers were Nazis; by 1944, NSDAP fuckers had a lot more on their mind than micromanaging films that appeared to have no political content. There were plenty of classic German films made during WWII that are not even close to propaganda and still get shown on Saturday morning tv. Heinz Rühmann, for example, (really old guy who drove the Mercedes in "Wings of Desire") was personally anti-Nazi, but Goebbels and Hitler loved his acting, so he got to keep making movies.

Yeah, I see that (for example) G.W.Pabst kept making films in Germany, and it's hard to imagine him having any sympathy with the regime, in fact I think one of his films was banned? Also, I get the impression with Negri that she basically went where the work was, and where she'd get some kind of star billing/treatment after her hollywood career bombed and she lost her fortune in the stock market crash.
You read/hear a lot about the talented creative individuals who bailed in the '30's - Walter Gropius, George Grosz, Fritz Lang, Marta Eggerth off the top of my head - but very little about the ones who stayed, and I guess the ones who stayed outnumbered the ones who left, and many of them must have stayed for perfectly valid reasons, a stable regular job w/income no doubt having more meaning to someone from the '30's than it would to you and me in 2008.
I did a little bit of looking around online about the films from this era, the only ones that were vaguely familiar were the "Munchausen" spectacular, and the Titanic film, the latter of which does appear to have a deal of propaganda in it. Nothing else was remotely familiar to me. The pages I looked at on Wikipedia were surprisingly informative and well-written, as an aside. One striking thing I read was the director of "Titanic" getting pulled off the picture by Goebbels, executed, and replaced with someone else! Holy fuck...

I'm kind of tempted to try and get a copy of that film the musical routine is from, the synopsis I read sounds just as off the wall as a Hollywood '40's musical.

Pash, you know all those songs in SitR are from the '20s or '30s (except one, maybe), right?

No, I didn't know that. I did notice that they had the kind of correct-period feel about them, like the little sequence where the 2 guys are doing the vaudeville number with the violins sounds just like the vaudeville shorts I have on one of the busby berkeley DVDs, I guess I figured they were clever pastiche, just like the disastrous talkie film they're making with Lina Lamont. I suppose when the film came out plenty of people back then will have remembered seeing or hearing about "du barry, woman of passion", and got the reference straightaway, also Jack Gilbert and his "I love you" x 3 thing that they take off as well. It is really cleverly done. I'll watch it again on my own in a month or two.

gone baby gone was good

gone baby gone (casey affleck and amy ryan both awesome, good film overall)

-- omar little, Tuesday, February 26, 2008 4:45 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

omar little was in it! I didn't know that dude's scar is real o_0

MKW got it in a fight!

we own the night - preposturous. well-directed i guess, well-acted yeah, but some really shitty dialogue and lousy plotting and pacing.

saw that last night. i really appreciated the understated direction.