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Post by lola on Apr 11, 2012 17:40:26 GMT
I really wish I could see this on the big screen in original Tohoscope:
Hidden Fortress, by Kurosawa. He's surely on my top five favorite directors, if I'd ever take the time to make a list.
Don't know how I missed this one. It has a goofy trailer on YouTube, so don't judge it by that.
Also I recently saw In Bruges. Bloody and excellent. Fookin Bruges.
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Post by lola on Jun 3, 2012 14:32:01 GMT
We watched the second half of Match Point last night, having only made it to the halfway mark a couple of years ago. Before, I didn't want to sit through the inevitable crime. Seeing the second half made me want to go back and watch it all. I love how Allen uses music in his movies -- opera in this case.
Recently we watched a Macedonian film from 1994, Before the Rain. The Netflix genie had predicted we'd like it, and we did. Another comment on the futility of war.
Also a couple of weeks ago we enjoyed Ecoute le Temps. Somewhat, but not too much, horror/mystery film.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 12, 2012 10:44:23 GMT
A most recent viewing of The Third Man with Orson Welles deserves more than a nod in this thread.
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Post by bjd on Jul 12, 2012 17:08:10 GMT
A new copy of The Third Man was made a couple of years ago and we saw it at the movies -- it deserves more than a small screen.
And if I may hijack this thread -- there is a writer called Philip Kerr who writes detective stories set mainly in pre-war Berlin and Austria, Argentina etc just after the war. In one of his books set in immediate post-war Vienna, the hero sees a film being made in the city's ruins.
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Post by lola on Jul 13, 2012 1:14:16 GMT
Oh, please do hijack away. Sounds fun, bjd.
Every once in awhile I bring the old Welles Third Man home from the library, and it sits at the bottom of the stack until I return it. I'll make a point to watch the old and the new versions.
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Post by bjd on Jul 13, 2012 6:32:00 GMT
Lola, it's not a new version -- I think they just cleaned up and digitized the old tapes so that it appears new. It would be heresy to change anything.
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Post by lola on Nov 22, 2012 18:51:12 GMT
We watched Kontroll on DVD the other night. The opposite of a chick flick, hard to take all at once but sticks with you, and fascinating in a subterranean way. The protagonist and the bear girl have great faces.
After a few false starts on library DVDs my husband gave 15 min before rejecting, we settled on A Night at the Opera, which inspired a Marx Bros festival for his long holiday weekend.
Also the Sanity Clause and crowded cabin scenes.
Last night, sticking with MGM productions, it was A Day at the Races.
This one is full of excesses but has some great parts. Another good thing about the DVDs is the special features, with biographical bits and Kitty Carlisle and Maureen O'Sullivan, respectively, interviewed. I knew Chico was quite the ladies' man, but it was fun to hear that Groucho was envious of that. He seemed to have tried his luck with Maureen O'S, who says she finally told him she did not care for funny men and just wanted to be friends.
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Post by lola on Dec 3, 2012 19:26:20 GMT
Recently:
Last Days of Disco , for those of us who never got around to going to one.
and Zift, a Bulgarian film with an eye for visuals. Strange and beautiful
and A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints. As the cover blurb said: Intense and Fresh.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Dec 4, 2012 9:06:37 GMT
When I was ill recently my sister lent me several DVDs to watch...including It's A Wonderful Life which I'd never seen all the way through before, and several that I have seen before but really enjoyed revisiting...including Harvey, The Titfield Thunderbolt, To Serve Them All My Days and The Importance of Being Ernest.
Excellent.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 4, 2012 18:58:40 GMT
The Last Days of Disco was a great howler, the way it made the period look like the 1950's. While one might think that director Whit Stillman (Damsels in Distress, Metropolitan) might be the kiss of death for actors seeking a mainstream career, the cast neverthless includes Kate Beckinsale and Jennifer Beals.
Okay, Chloë Sevigny, after her famous scene in The Brown Bunny and most of her other work, she is definitely Whit Stillman alternate universe material.
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Post by lola on Nov 13, 2013 23:30:11 GMT
We watched Night Train to Munich (1940, British) the other night, and that was fun. Criterion release. The entire film also seems to be available on YouTube. Margaret Lockwood and Rex Harrison vs the Nazis.
Reminscent of Hitchcock, probably because they used the same screenwriters, British twit pair and leading lady as The Lady Vanishes. Witty repartee. Michael Redgrave was doing a play then, so they got Harrison, who's fascinating in the part.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 14, 2013 0:08:14 GMT
Whenever I see movies like that and the way the actors spoke their lines in those days, I always wonder which film is considered to be the first 'modern' movie where people actually talked the way they talk in real life. Even in the 1960's there were some holdovers to the old style dialogue delivery -- for example just about anything that Elizabeth Taylor ever did.
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Post by questa on Nov 14, 2013 3:11:46 GMT
Wasn't it the era of James Dean and Marlon Brando that brought in more realistic delivery of lines?
I've forgotten who is supposed to have said "When ah itches, ah scratches" when the director wanted to re-shoot a scene where the actor scratched his neck a bit during the take.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 14, 2013 3:30:06 GMT
I think you're right in a general sense, questa, that it was the Actors' Studio and the advent of Method Acting that spelled the end of stagey performances. Lee Strasberg had a huge influence on what came out of Hollywood in the 50s and 60s. However, I remember seeing Greta Garbo in, I believe, Queen Christina, and I couldn't take my eyes off of her. Everyone was acting their tits off (yes, a phrase we use frequently ;D) and there she was, a quiet, authentic presence in the midst of all the schmacting.
However, the pendulum has swung the other way and film has had way too much influence on modern live theatre. Performances are often small, self-indulgent and so quiet that audience member frequently complain that they can't hear what's going on. They are two completely different disciplines and there are very few actors who can find the balance between the two.
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Post by bjd on Nov 14, 2013 7:29:42 GMT
Some of the old Hitchcock movies don't sound so theatrical, even though they didn't mumble.
Our local movie theatre shows "classic" films once a week. This week they showed Quai des Brumes, a 1930s movie with Jean Gabin. I watched the trailer and the voices are strange. I wonder whether it was also a question of sound technology.
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Post by patricklondon on Nov 14, 2013 11:37:38 GMT
It's acquired a resonance as though the sound was recorded in a movie theatre, at a distance - or at least, it's the resonance conventionally used in films when there's a scene in a cinema. But whether that was some deliberate sort of distancing device for the original trailer, or some sort of effect of modern restoration work, I don't know (though I notice all the visuals are also as though scene through a frame or on a screen). I did have a DVD of this recently, and I don't think the sound on the movie itself was like that, though obviously within the technical limitations of the time. I suppose the acting would be considered a bit hammy nowadays, but it's an iconic movie. Michèle Morgan did wonders for the plastic-mac-and-beret look.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 14, 2013 11:54:28 GMT
The most famous scene of the movie hasn't aged all that badly.
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Post by lola on Nov 14, 2013 14:49:50 GMT
I've never heard of Quai des Brumes; will have to see if I can find it. Looks great.
The other interesting piece of casting in Night Train to Munich was Paul von Hernried as Lockwood's dashing fellow concentration camp detainee, later found to be not all he seems. He left England for Hollywood soon after this movie was made, to narrowly escape internment for real as an enemy alien. He then showed up as Victor Lazslo in Casablanca, stage named Paul Henreid.
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Post by lola on Nov 19, 2013 2:18:36 GMT
We watched The Thin Red Line (1998), directed by Terrence Malick, over a couple of evenings because the battle scene got too intense to take all at once. But it's a powerful and beautiful war movie with great acting, music and scenery, not to mention philosophy.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 19, 2013 6:26:11 GMT
That was really an excellent movie, but the distributors had no idea how to market it.
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Post by lola on Nov 19, 2013 19:03:54 GMT
I can see that. You can't exactly call it a rousing feel-good adventure starring Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, John Cusak, John Travolta and George Clooney, (not to mention Tim Blake Nelson and John C. Reilly) though that would be partly true.
Reminding me of when my mother went to Tree of Life expecting it to be "the latest Brad Pitt flick."
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Post by lola on Nov 25, 2013 23:54:09 GMT
Not old or all that notable, but:
The Sorcerer and The White Snake (2012), with Jet Li as a demon-fighting monk.
Some gorgeoud images, lots of animation, and sexy female demons, as is their habit, trying to tempt the monks away from their meditations.
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