Best Walter Hill Movie

man, i wish i'd represented for Red Heat.

http://www.mezcotoyz.com/store/inventory/Summer%202008%20Exclusives/18010.jpg

is Extreme Prejudice worth a look? I just watched an old Siskel and Ebert rave.

totally entertaining with a nice 'wild bunch' ripoff element to it.

it has powers boothe playing with a scorpion and referring to himself in the third person, nick nolte at his buffest and a totally superfluous team of mercenaries led by michael ironside used as fodder during the bloody climax. in other words, yes.

rip torn as nolte's shotgun-wielding deputy!

Michael Ironside and Rip Torn? In one movie? Sold.

Torn was in it? may need to revisit it myself.

tried to watch red heat but couldn't get past jim belushi.

johnny handsome has its moments

ironside's mercenaries include clancy brown and william forsythe as well

No votes?!

Should rename it It's a B Action, B Action, B Action, B Action World.

tbh i would have voted for extreme prejudice if i'd seen the poll in time

seeing as how "the driver" came in second i can't say i get that poll at all

Though had I seen it beforehand Southern Comfort would have tied.

I enjoyed Southern Comfort more than Deliverance, actually.

Jeff Bridges aside, I thought Wild Bill wasn't worth the time

Southern Comfort had a great Ry Cooder soundtrack...

I thought Undisputed was pretty good, actually.

― The Yellow Kid, Monday, June 25, 2007 3:29 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

^^^^

i liked undisputed. it's pretty bare-bones, but tough in that walter hill way. it's nothing remarkable, but if you think you might like a prison boxing movie with wesley snipes and ving rhames, it's worth a look.

The Driver is playing at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens today.

Undisputed's good, but Undisputed 2 & 3 are a hundred times better.

and The Driver beats the hell out of Michael Mann's LA glitz.

Virtually every Walter Hill movie beats the hell out of Michael Mann's entire oeuvre.

At least up to and including 48 Hours. I'm not going to rep hard for Crossroads or Brewster's Millions.

the driver is the perfect vehicle (get it) for ryan o'neal, even more so than barry lyndon - he just has to take up space in the frame, nothing more

man this poll was hard times for hard times, my favorite of the bunch.

The Driver beats the hell out of Michael Mann's LA glitz.

would love to poll The Driver vs. Thief but the 7 or 8 total votes not worth it.

Undisputed's good, but Undisputed 2 & 3 are a hundred times better.

― ℳℴℯ　❤＼(◕‿◕✿ (Princess TamTam)

hills failure to discover scott adkins will haunt him forever imo.

Ryan O'Neal's character only says 350 words in the entire movie.

it was just on some weird cable channel i get (family net? where you have to bleep out 'god' but ladies getting shot in the face is ok). it's soo economical & hard-boiled, some scenes almost dont work but all in all it's pretty good. isabelle adjani in this time period is just stunning imo (i also watched 'subway' this wkend)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_to_the_Head

whaddya know. first theatrical feature he's directed in ten years. and it's a stallone vehicle.

it seems uncharacteristic in a lot of respects but his first feature, hard times, is pretty great. it's not as peculiar and exciting as the driver or the warriors, but it's extremely absorbing and convincing.

i did not know this (from wikipedia):

Hill read Alex Jacob's screenplay for the Lee Marvin film, Point Blank and considered it a "revelation" in terms of style and format.[2] He decided to tailor his own scripts in that manner, as he described it, "extremely spare, almost Haiku style. Both stage directions and dialogue."

makes a lot of sense though doesn't it?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/edgarwright/6057245137/

the Stallone movie's release has been postponed, not sure exactly what's going on there.

From memory, Southern Comfort. From memory, definitely not Johnny Handsome.

Hard Times playing in Brooklyn in a few weeks, I'll finally see it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/edgarwright/6057245137/

― RudolfHitlerFtw (Hungry4Ass), Tuesday, February 28, 2012 4:53 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

holy shit, that is awesome.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/sylvester-stallone-will-reportedly-recut-bullet-to-the-head-himself-for-a-november-release

great line in Hard Times by James Coburn's fight fixer, to a madam, before grabbing a whore and heading upstairs: "I don't need a sales pitch, mama, I just came to get my hat blocked."

New Orleans locations, art direction look so great in a good widescreen print of HT. Apparently Bronson was pissed how Hill cut down Jill Ireland's part (what's left is utterly disposable -- she and Bronson don't even kiss).

Strother Martin's opium-addict cut man seems entirely gratuitous -- Bronson hardly gets marked -- but he's just there to give Strother cadence to lines like "Some are born to fail, others have it thrust upon them."

if only Walter Hill had directed some SNL shit, this thread wd be getting some attention

48 hours began as an SNL sketch right?

if only Walter Hill had directed some SNL shit, this thread wd be getting some attention

― Literal Facepalms (Dr Morbius), Friday, March 30, 2012 1:43 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if it makes you feel better brewster's millions was like my favourite movie when i was 8

God, I had no idea he ever sank that low.

Good Grief, that p&s Hard Times dvd is horrid. I got it from netflix but missed Morbs warning upthread. A bunch of scenes literaly cut in half image-wise. Why were they still doing this in 2004 (when the disc was issued)?

bc they don't want to invest in a new transfer and use the 1980s one.

the driver should have won this, of course.

he'll be appearing at a NYC screening of Southern Comfort next Monday

http://www.92y.org/Tribeca/Event/Walter-Hill.aspx

Twilight Time have announced limited edition blus of Hard Times and The Driver for release in June.

Stallone film is out

GK likes it, but I don't trust him: http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/bullet-to-the-head/

Re-watching The Long Riders tonight. The casting (real-life brothers playing real-life brothers) works really well, and plot-wise it's basically Justified 150 years earlier, told entirely from Boyd's POV.

Maron interviews:

http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episode-805-walter-hill

i really need to get on that Japanese region 1 blu ray of Extreme Prejudice mentioned upthread.

I've hardly seen any of this guy's films but Streets Of Fire is a really mixed bag, the hero is surrounded by better acting than he's delivering, he's excessively reckless even for the character and passes up an early opportunity to shut down the villain.
Liked the Cooder tracks, loved the Jim Steinman end song.

Had another look at The Driver... really a deadpan existential comedy when it works (80% of the time). Bruce Dern never better. Apparently Isabelle Adjani felt she made a bad choice in doingf a genre film for her first Hollywood project, and got offered only crap in the USA after it flopped.

where can you even watch The Driver?

at the Metrograph yesterday!

also the Blu released in 2013, which i've never seen. I think the Alamo video store might have it.

it's kind of shameful that Extreme Prejudice remains unaccounted for on blu-ray stateside. Shout! Factory should get on that.

XP...and the DVD is still in print and cheap (The domestic Blu is one of those OOP Twilight Time limited editions meaning $$$$)

I watched it on Blu-Ray in 2013 and the print was good.

or maybe it was the DVD; my library had it.

the TRANSFER

it is INSANE that the two songs on the Streets of Fire soundtrack by "Fire Inc." are 6 and 7 minutes long respectively

i mean i love "Nowhere Fast" as much as the next guy but it's 6 minutes with no changes in dynamics or tempo or anything, just relentless uptempo '80s hard pop

How is it that there's no Streets of Fire thread and very little discussion itt? I would've thought it was right up ILX's alley.

Just saw it for the first time. Yes, it's dumb as a brick and all style/no substance. But oh what style! I guess yr enjoyment will depend on how you feel about the notion of Hill making a spiritual sequel to The Warriors which also functions as a film adaptation of 'Holding Out for a Hero', with all of the depth and narrative complexity of the latter.

I'll acknowledge that it isn't actually good but I could probably make a quick list of fifty things I loved about it.

I saw The Warriors in a theater during its first release. I was probably one of the only people who ever deliberately chose to see this because it was said to be based on Xenophon's Anabasis. I left the theater a bit disappointed that the Xenophon angle had been so muted, but on the whole I was a satisfied customer. It had panache.

Well this looks promising

https://mzsworldstore.com/products/pre-order-a-walter-hill-film-hardcover-signed

Should be awesome; Chaw is great. His segment on 48 Hours in last year's Netflix series Voir is worth a watch too.

Pre-ordered. Hill has deserved serious analysis for a long fuckin' time. (I'm very curious how Chaw will deal with Extreme Prejudice, a movie I love unreservedly.)

He really had one of the greatest streaks of any director ever... Hard Times, The Driver, The Warriors, The Long Riders, Southern Comfort and 48 Hrs. in less than a decade? Jesus.

For some reason, the release of "Extreme Prejudice" made a big impression on me. I remember the print ad in the paper, I vaguely remember the Siskel & Ebert review. That was back in 1987, when I would scour listings and magazines and make spreadsheets of upcoming movies I wanted to see, mostly Hollywood and genre stuff, because I was 12. And yet, I never got around to actually seeing the movie ... until tonight. It's got a heck of a pedigree, not just Walter Hill or some lingering John Milius madness but a cast of all sorts of familiar faces: Nick Nolte, Powers Boothe, Rip Torn, Michael Ironside, María Conchita Alonso, Rip Torn, William Forsythe, Clancy Brown, Larry B. Scott (from "Revenge of the Nerds"), "Tiny" Lister, a bunch of other background randos I recognized.

And you know what? Despite its pedigree, it's just not that good. It's like 30 minutes of movie stretched out to just over 90, and while it aims for "The Wild Bunch" it's got a lot more in common with an episode of "The A*Team." The score, too; Ry Cooder gets a credit for handling the traditional Mexican music that sometimes gets a spotlight, but most of the music is a totally incongruous synthed-out score from Jerry Goldsmith, which does the grimy, sweaty locations no favors. Kind of a bummer, imo. Feels rushed and incomplete, less an unpolished gem and more just kind of a dull rock.

New Bluray of Southern Comfort happening:

https://vinegarsyndrome.com/collections/frontpage/products/southern-comfort

2-disc Set: 4K Ultra HD / Region Free Blu-ray
4K UHD presented in High-Dynamic-Range
Newly scanned & restored in 4K from its 35mm interpositive
Commentary track with Walter Chaw, author of A Walter Hill Film: Tragedy and Masculinity in the Films of Walter Hill
"Battle in the Bayou" (17 min) - brand new interview with co-writer / director Walter Hill
"Behind Enemy Lines" (26 min) - brand new featurette with editor Freeman A. Davies and assistant editor Lisa Zeno Churgin
"Soldiers, Not Mailmen" (17 min) - brand new interview with costumer Dan Moore
"Into the Unknown" (15 min) - brand new interview with film historian Wayne Byrne on Southern Comfort and the legacy of Walter Hill
Archival featurette featuring interviews with: co-writer / director Walter Hill and co-writer / producer David Giler, along with actors Powers Boothe, Keith Carradine, Peter Coyote and Lewis Smith (27 min)

I watched it on Blu-Ray in 2013 and the print was good.

― The Silky Veils of Alfred (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, September 4, 2018 2:35 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

or maybe it was the DVD; my library had it.

― The Silky Veils of Alfred (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, September 4, 2018 2:35 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

the TRANSFER

― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, September 4, 2018 2:36 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Trespass is a really fun movie