MOVIES!

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.

quintet
parts: the clonus horror
life and death of colonel blimp (at first there were moments where this seemed almost too sentimental, then I realized it was shot & released before the war had even ended, raising the stakes)

Play Misty for Me <-- eastwood put a lot of jazz footage in this!

plus "gay neighbors"

There's only one gay character in this right -- the blonde's boss? I was wondering if this was an early example of the "gay" speech pattern; don't know any others this early.

"EW SEAFOOD"

hmm, dunno Bogey does a "gay" accent in the bookstore scene in The Big Sleep

King of Kong

very entertaining.

Wicker Man remake ... to what degree was this "on purpose?"

Yo, sD did you get the "extended" version

APPARENTLY THERE'S LIKE 2 MINUTES MORE TORTURE

in the extended version they show the bees stinging his face. in the theatrical version it's overheard as they fade to him caged in the wicker man.

or being taken to the wicker man

KILLING ME WON'T BRING BACK YOUR PRECIOUS HONEY

FOR JOHNNY RAMONE

I guess I saw the extended. LOL

Still haven't seen "Wicker Man" remake. I keep meaning to, but can't bring myself to pay money for it, even when I saw it at 3.99.

naw, I saw it on cable ... they fade away while breaking his legs.

like many films, this would have been better with Bruce Campbell in the lead.

don't know any others this early.

V brief movie portrayal of "swish" gay man, 1931, @ 1.12:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXBb80VAXm0

Oldest example I've seen, there's probably older, though.

DVD (local library borrow): 'Eastern Promises'. Really enjoyed the holes in the plot, the tiny mysteries scattered throughout, when it could've been annoying...the ILE thread is making want to re-watch, but there isn't the time. The fight in the sauna ws fantastic, wish I had caught this at the cinema at the time. Really liked that Naomi Watts was in this, whatever the merits of her performance -- which now heightens my anticipation for 'Funny Games'.

Cinema: 'Signs of Life'. Herzog's first film -- its all in place, execution not quite there, but oh boy didn't we get some of that later..

VHS: picked up a cheap copy of Rivette's 'Secret Defense' and Haneke's 'Time of the Wolf'. Looking fwd to seeing a cpl more of his this week at the Lumiere.

3:10 to yuma - it was "okay"

the end was wack

3:10 to yuma is a great character in search of a better movie. some kind of adventures of ben wade thing would have been way more fun than bogging it down with christian bale proving his manhood.

tonight i watched the phantom of liberty, which was good and weird and funny.

"3:10 To Yuma" was awesome - except for scenery chewing evil-sidekick guy. Damn good western even though it's a remake.

gone baby gone -- no make sense (and I even read the book)

original ending of "I am legend"

^ possibly worse

what is the original ending of "I am legend"?

yeah, Quintet is pretty much a non-movie in a non-good way.
The Prestige was intriguing, though

http://buzzfeed.com/buzz/I_Am_Legend_Alternate_Ending

california split

noizest movie ever

lol i am legend zombie luv alternate ending really makes u think

california split

noizest movie ever

O T M

seven dwarfs scene so classic