What classics did you watch this week? (2/6-2/12)
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grantaubin-03404 — 9 years ago(February 12, 2017 11:23 PM)
Hi OldAussie - So happy (for you - I'm actually also a bit envious) you got to see
BICYCLE THIEVES
and
HOME FROM THE HILL- both which, as you know, I haven't seen yet.
SPHERE
is a real stinker isn't it?.
As for
WHAT DREAMS MAY COME
. While I'm hardly surprised - knowing you are a caring and laid back, but also somewhat flinty, somehat cynical old commie from Oz and (I think) an atheist, at your low rating for Vincent Ward's
WHAT DREAMS MAY COME
, I rated it a fair bit higher than you because it contains some of the most glowingly, achingly lovely scenes I have ever seen on the big screen. Surely, even you have to admit it would be glorious if there really is a heaven and it is like the one depicted in this film?
The following image is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in a film, and when I saw the picture on the big screen I burst into tears and clutched this image to my heart for weeks afterwards. It fired up my dreams and gave me hope for a while. Of course, I came back down to earth eventually but, I will hold onto this image forever.
http://www.imdb.com/board/10120889/mediaviewer/rm1902366208
As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I had the most loyal, loving and faithful golden retriever. His name was Jake, he was my soul mate, he was my constant companion for nearly 15 years, I loved him with all my heart, and he loved me unconditionally in return.
I was shattered when this beautiful animal passed away, but I have consoled myself with the fact that while "death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal".
Still, for weeks after seeing
WHAT DREAMS MAY COME
I would go to sleep at night and dream that that when Jake (who was still alive at that time) inevitably passed away, he would go to heaven and be waiting for me when my time came. I mean, imagine dying, waking up in heaven, and as you walk into the most beautiful, peaceful place you have ever encountered you look into the distance and there, with a wet nose, a twinkle in his eye, a huge shaggy canine smile and a tail wagging manically and joyfully, is the dog you loved with all your being, and he is going to be together with you for eternity?
I saw
THE FOUNDER
,
20th CENTURY WOMEN
and
GOLD
on the big screen this week. And I watched
THE NEW CENTURIONS - for the first time since seeing it at the cinema in 1972, and
HELL OR HIGH WATER - which I had already seen at the movies, on Blu Ray.
Not sure if
20TH CENTURY WOMEN - which I loved but the missus didn't much care for, will be to your taste, and the heavily flawed, yet often fascinating and seldom boring
GOLD
is a mixed bag (great performance by McConaughey, though), but
THE FOUNDER
is excellent and thought provoking with an absolutely brilliant performance by Michael Keaton - so look out for it dude, and, if you haven't seen
HELL OR HIGH WATER
yet, I can let on that you have a treat of epic proportions awaiting you.
HELL OR HIGH WATER
is a keeper mate.
- both which, as you know, I haven't seen yet.
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OldAussie — 9 years ago(February 12, 2017 11:55 PM)
My son bought the Blu-ray of
BICYCLE THIEVES
about a year ago and I wish I'd gotten to it sooner. A beautiful depiction of a father/son relationship with 2 great performances by the 2 actors. And there may well have been a tear in my eyes at the end.
HOME FROM THE HILL
is another depiction of father/sons in a much more melodramatic fashion. Vincente Minnelli directed 2 of my absolute favourites of the time in
The Bad and the Beautiful
and
Some Came Running
and this one is possibly just a notch below them. Mitchum and Peppard are excellent. The DVD is labelled Region 1 but plays on my region 4 machine. Unfortunately as a library copy it had several bad scratches and jumped a couple of times.
WHAT DREAMS MAY COME
is one of those movies where I could feel I was being terribly manipulated. And as a communist/atheist, a film with this one's point of view has to be pretty darn good to maintain my suspension of disbelief. It failed on me.
THE FOUNDER
and
HELL OR HIGH WATER
are both on my watch list.
"He was a poet, a scholar and a mighty warrior." -
TrevorAclea — 9 years ago(February 12, 2017 07:25 PM)
In honor of the thread's estimable host's sig, a Hitler double-header:
Dani Levy's
My Führer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler
is set in the dark days well, for the Germans at least of late 1944 when the Nazis are losing the war, which isn't surprising since they can't even deliver a prisoner from one room to another without the proper paperwork, even when bombs are falling all around, and Hitler has fallen into deep depressions. To rally the German people and inspire their leader anew, Goebbels plans a grand rally of a million people in an unblemished Berlin (courtesy of movie sets to hide the massive bomb damage) where he will deliver the greatest speech of his career, but to do it he'll need to be coached by Adolf Gruenbaum (the great Ulrich Mühe in his penultimate feature before his untimely death), once Germany's greatest actor but now a concentration camp inmate. Of course, not everything is quite as it seems. While Goebbels is all conciliatory charm and everyone tells Gruenbaum not to take the Final Solution personally, he wants the Jewish actor not to inspire Hitler but to reawaken his hatred as he gets inside his head and that's just one of his ulterior motives
So far so The Fuhrer's Speech, but this black comedy is not without historical precedent: before the Night of Long Knives that violently purged the SA, Hitler fell into one of his periodic clinical depressions that offered Ernst Roem an opportunity to snatch the Party leadership and was allegedly talked out of it by the stage psychic, conman, Bela Lugosi lookalike and closet Jew Erik Jan Hanussen, who may also have given him some tips on showmanship along the way. And this is very much a film about staged reality and the way that people can become wrapped up in the lies they are telling: even with Berlin in ruins Goebbels and Bormann think they can still win the war with just a few changes of key personnel, Hitler constantly convinces himself of whatever lie or fantasy he's spinning even after he knows the truth and it even mocks Gruenbaum's humanist principles that not only prevent him from taking action but also make him stop his wife smothering Hitler to death when he's in their bed: in part caught up in his project, in part making excuses to justify his actions because he needs something to believe in even a lie
It's a film that went through a fairly major overhaul in post-production, where the focus shifted from Hitler's perspective to seeing the story through Gruenbaum's eyes, which makes more sense not just because the film ends on a note about the enduring fascination with Hitler being in part our desire to explain what can never be explained but because Helge Schneider is absolutely awful as the führer. It doesn't help that he's under some very obvious prosthetic makeup that makes him look more like Monty Python's Mr Creosote after a few months in a health farm, but he's clearly in a completely different film to Mühe, who is never less than completely believable even when the script struggles to make its big idea work. But it's Sylvester Groth's excellent award winning turn as Goebbels (a role he reprised in Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds) that is the film's real star turn, and it's when he's sharing the screen with Mühe lying with charming finesse that the film catches fire. That doesn't happen often enough to make the film more than an ambitious and occasionally intriguing failure, but it is enough to make it worth a look if it crosses your path.
Yesterday I was moving the 12th army. Today it's a newspaper rack.
A man suddenly wakes up in the street to find himself 69 years in the future. His friends are nowhere to be found, the city he knew in ruins has been rebuilt, its people gone mad, no-one salutes him anymore and those that do recognise him either think he's an impersonator or want a selfie. Such is the fate of Adolf Hitler in
Er Ist Wieder Da
aka
Look Who's Back
, thrown into the Germany of 2014 to find it run by a clumsy woman with the charisma of a wet noodle and with a right wing opposition that can't even build an Ikea shelf let alone a Fourth Reich. Worse, people think he's a comedian staying scrupulously in character worse for us, as it turns out
Discovered by Fabian Busch's down on his luck TV freelancer in desperate need of a scoop, Hitler hits the road, part funded by the former führer doing caricatured sketches of the tourists in Bayreuth (
Hang the picture at home. Hang yourself next to it
) en route to becoming a Youtube and TV superstar finding a frighteningly receptive audience for his beliefs, and one that barely needs prompting: as he notes,
It sufficed to put out a few keywords as bait and soon I had them wriggling on the line.
And those keywords are worryingly familiar at times word for word for anyone following Trump's presidential campaign rhetoric. Even more worrying, director David Wnendt takes a Borat approach to Timur Verme's bestselling novel and includes many scenes where Hitler in -
MikeF-6 — 9 years ago(February 12, 2017 08:31 PM)
Gone with the Wind (1939)
/ Victor Fleming
. The Moviest Movie Of Them All. Just about everything that can be said about GWTW has been said, I think, but it showed up on TCM's 31 Days Of Oscar festival so I DVR'd it. I hadn't seen it for decades. Thinking back, it must have been 40 or more years ago that I last watched it all the way through. This time I focused as best I could on the Good Parts it's picture of slavery and of the Old South as a world of gentility filled with dashing Cavaliers and delicate damsels has been chewed over extensively. I wanted to look at it as an example of movie storytelling. From that aspect, this is indeed a deathless classic. The main ingredient is the audacious casting of an English stage and film actress as the (for the late 1930s) beloved heroine, Scarlett O'Hara. Vivien Leigh carries this huge film with her astonishing performance. Clark Gable may not have thought himself to have been right for Rhett Butler, but he lights up the screen whenever he is on it, even, at times, overshadowing Leigh. Most of us can recite the rest of the cast by heart. Music, cinematography, Technicolor everything goes toward making this the classic it is. Yet, in the back of all our minds, no matter how we try to ignore it and think of other things, we know, as Pres. Lincoln wrote in a letter to a Kentucky newspaper editor, If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. This is a sentiment found nowhere in Gone With The Wind.
Destination Tokyo (1943)
/ Delmer Daves
. Suspenseful but padded WWII submarine adventure. Ace U.S. submarine commander Capt. Cassidy (Cary Grant) is given a dangerous secret mission to sneak his ship into heavily mined Tokyo harbor to prepare the way for Doolittle's Raid on that city, the first American bombs to fall on Japan. If you are thinking that Cary Grant is an unlikely candidate as a navy captain of a submarine, you would be misled. He gives one of his best dramatic performances. Consider also, that Grant had turned down the role, eventually given to Humphry Bogart, as a desert tank commander in Sahara to take the Tokyo assignment which had been turned down by Clark Gable. He is given some good support from some up-and-coming young actors. John Garfield is the most prominent of the names at the time of the film. Dane Clark, John Forsythe, Warner Anderson, and William Prince make the most of their chances in very early movie appearances. In the naïve, gee-whiz, country boy from Kansas role is Robert Hutton in his first credited movie. Instead of the usual stereotype, Hutton finds a real character to play and transcends the script he has been handed. More gossip: Cary Grant and Hutton's cousin, heiress Barbara Hutton, were practically newlyweds when the film was shot. Whether that influenced Hutton's casting is unknown. However he got on board, he came through impressively. The padding I mentioned earlier takes the form of way too much male bonding, joking around, and crew members pranking each other. It was, I guess, supposed to be heartwarming and funny, but I wanted them to just get on with the story which is a terrific one and keeps one biting one's nails.
Anthropoid (2016)
/ Sean Ellis
. On the Eastern European front of the Big War, some Czech ex-pats led by Josef Gabcík (Cillian Murphy) parachute into Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia with a very serious mission: assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi architect of the Holocaust who is currently in Prague to direct the pacification of the population. While remaining undetected they must find a way to get close to Heydrich and to convince the Resistance fighters to help them which they are reluctant to do, knowing the horrific reprisals that will result. In spite of some good scenes and some serious acting, this film is something of a lost opportunity. There is a lack of urgency at the center of the script and direction plus some pretty routine staging of the war action and resulting gun battles. I expected to be moved by the sacrifices of these dedicated people, but watched most of the movie feeling uninvolved. Too bad.
Neruda (2016)
/ Pablo Larrain
. I am happy that for my last review on the last weekly thread is of one of the best movies I have seen in a long, long time. While grounded in the life and history of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), this is a poetic fantasy (a poem in movie form about a poet) that counters Neruda's flight from Chile in the late 1940s when his country's fascist government outlawed the Communist Party with a young police inspector who pursues him. Inspector Peluchonneau (Gael García Bernal), who narrates, is given the job of finding Neruda and arresting him. Neruda, himself (Luis Gnecco), doesn't want to be caught but enjoys the thrill of the chase. As the cat-and-mouse game goes on, the events, the thoughts, the motivations get more dreamlike. Music (as in Larrain's Jackie) plays an enormous part in setting the mood. To repeat my previous metaphor, I felt like I was experienc -
TrevorAclea — 9 years ago(February 12, 2017 08:47 PM)
Despite having a great and ultimately tragic true story the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and the Nazis monstrous revenge on the Czechs that has already inspired four previous films that's attracted talents as diverse as Fritz Lang, Bertolt Brecht, Douglas Sirk, Jiri Sequens and Lewis Gilbert,
Anthropoid
is one of those solid films that isn't exactly bad but really should be a lot better. While in some ways it may be the most accurate, it never translates that into a compelling human drama despite decent performances from Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan as the two assassins.
Although the film literally hits the ground running with them landing in occupied territory and almost immediately inadvertently falling into the hands of Czechs who will sell them out, the biggest problem is the absence of the very real threat the real assassins faced in a country ruled by terror where betrayal was always moments away. People talk about the Nazis and we see them in the background, but the heavy yoke is never really seen or felt until after the assassination so that the fears of reprisals that turned out to be horrendously underestimated carry no weight. Worse, the massacre and destruction of the entire town of Lidice feels almost glossed over in a brief line or two of dialogue that understates the scale of and arbitrary rationale for the atrocity. There's one striking torture scene played on the face of a bespectacled bureaucrat checking a statement from an offscreen informer as he's being beaten to jog his memory that shows that director Sean Ellis can do this without going overboard, but it happens so late in the film that Heydrich's assassination becomes more of an abstract practical problem than a dangerous necessity. And just as Heydrich is reduced to a name and a brief bit of archive footage, it never manages to make you really care about the characters despite giving them moments of human fallibility so their fate never hurts the way it should, something Lewis Gilbert's Operation Daybreak did surprisingly powerfully despite the questionable accuracy of its source novel.
It raises intriguing questions was the mission just a suicidal gesture by the marginalized Czech government in exile to prove their countrymen could still fight? Was it worth wiping out what was left of the Czech resistance to carry out? Were thousands of lives simply being sacrificed to impress the very allies who had willingly and contemptuously given Czechoslovakia, that far away country of whom we know nothing, to the Nazis without a fight for a few months of peace (and who would sell it out again after the war)? What happens when platitudes about true patriots being willing to die for their country are tested by the reality? and then ignores them beyond the odd line about regretting nothing or the whole nation being behind them that feel like the price of co-operation from a Czech government who are still working from the old propaganda movie playbook.
It's at its best in its two most visceral scenes, the horribly botched assassination Heydrich died of sepsis rather than his wounds because his doctor decided not to treat him with antibiotics and the German assault on the cathedral where the seven men were hiding. Yet it botches the horrifying epilogue as the Nazis gassed and then flooded the crypt where the last few men were hiding (the most genuinely moving part of Lewis Gilbert's film by far), opting for a stylised approach that adds a hideously misjudged spiritual reunion moment for one character that simply doesn't ring true and takes you out of the film. It's not the only old war movie moment the film throws in (Murphy's the hard-bitten one who really cares deeply while Dornan's the idealist whose nerve threatens to fail while both men inevitably fall in doomed love with the women they use as cover for their surveillance trips), but it's the most wildly misjudged in a film that at once honours the real people involved while never bringing them to life again on the screen.
"Security - release the badgers." -
Antonius Block — 9 years ago(February 12, 2017 09:02 PM)
Dinner at Eight
(1933, George Cukor) is a fitting final film to review for the soon-to-be-departed Classic Film Board: a bona fide classic comedy whose actual subjects are aging and the imminence of death. It's about a number of bourgeois New Yorkers who've harbored themselves in self-delusional bubbles on the verge of being punctured by the encroaching, merciless reality of the Great Depression. Underneath all the witty repartee, the country club niceties, and the inflated egos are sad stories of the death of giants and the the dissolution of fortunes. Each character is lost in their crumbling vanity, exemplified by Billie Burke as she struggles hysterically to orchestrate a dinner party emblematic of a gratuitous lifestyle that will soon be made inaccessible, if not by bankruptcy then by mortality. I can't help but see a parallel with the pre-code era itself, with its knives about to be dulled by the sanitizing forces of the Hays Code. In any event, despite the gloom hovering in the background and which, occasionally, overtakes the screen (quite literally in the case of John Barrymore), the lightness generally prevails through the farcical set-ups and the egotistical barbs the characters spit at one another. Cukor displays his own visual wit, too, in his blocking and his editing (best moment: the cut from a couple on a couch to a close-up of a wiggly, gelatinous dinner). The origins are clearly theatrical, with long, dialogue-rich scenes that play out leisurely, letting the hypocrisies and vanities of its pathetic yet sympathetic ensemble take shape, and it's adapted well, with fluid camerawork that feels neither showy nor stagy. It's sophisticated and bittersweet. (
35mm
,
http://www.imdb.com/board/10023948/
) (Second Viewing) -
redskydown-1 — 9 years ago(February 12, 2017 10:10 PM)
-OUR TOWN 1940 7.8
William Holden, Martha Scott
-RISEN 2016 7.5
Joseph fiennes
Documentary
-HISTORY: INVASION IM MORGENGRAUEN DIE LANDUNG IN DER NORMANDIE/BATTLE
OF NORMANDY
Every man's death diminishes mebecause I am involved in mankind -
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OldAussie — 9 years ago(February 13, 2017 12:04 AM)
And a big thank you to you for so many great recs - especially westerns.
When I retired some 6 years ago I'd seen one Mann western [Winchester '73] and now I'm at 8. I'd seen one Boetticher [Man From The Alamo] and now it's 7.
And the list goes on
"He was a poet, a scholar and a mighty warrior."
