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billyweeds

Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:23 pm

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City

One thing Wade and I can definitely agree on: Daniel Craig was a bust as Perry Smith. But he's still got a great batting average. Terrific in Munich, Layer Cake, and Casino Royale.

Joe Vitus

Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:41 pm

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 14498 Location: Houston

It's a good article, and Rafferty's right about The Lady Eve. But he's wrong to lay her character's obviously evil nature in Double Indemnity on the Production Code's insistence that moral standards be spelled out. The character is just as obvious in James M. Cain's novel. Cain just enjoys it a bit more than the Production Code does.

Last edited by Joe Vitus on Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:44 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Befade

Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:44 pm

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ

Does Wade know he was naked in The Mother? Does Trish know this is another movie about older woman/younger man combos?

I liked Infamous alot. Capote was my favorite film of the year. The Infamous' Capote was softer and more involved with Perry.....What's the real truth? Who knows......

Rod, I just watched Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds goes to Town......and before that The Fountain Head. There is something fascinating about his eyes. They look like they are on fire.....and that's in black and white. I like his voice and his slow, deliberate way of talking.

lady wakasa

Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:54 pm

Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 5911 Location: Beyond the Blue Horizon

Befade wrote:

Does Wade know he was naked in The Mother?

I really really read that wrong the first time I saw it...

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Joe Vitus

Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 4:24 pm

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 14498 Location: Houston

LOL

Well, we've all had our Short Bus cameos...

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You've got a great brain. You should keep it in your head.

-Topher

marantzo

Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 5:54 pm

Guest

Quote:

I liked Infamous alot. Capote was my favorite film of the year. The Infamous' Capote was softer and more involved with Perry.....What's the real truth? Who knows......

Betsy, (first of all, was Perry the more sensitive one of the two?) if so and you can believe what Truman actually said, he was very taken by him. I saw him interviewed and he was in tears talking about Perry (if he's the right one) and his ultimate execution.

So you like the way that Cooper has a deliberate way of talking.... Laughing

billyweeds

Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 5:57 pm

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City

Gary--Yes, Perry was the sensitive one.

marantzo

Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 6:02 pm

Guest

Thanks billy. I can sympathize with him then because as you know I'm very sensitive myself.

ehle64

Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 2:38 am

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 7149 Location: NYC; US&A

billyweeds wrote:

One thing Wade and I can definitely agree on: Daniel Craig was a bust as Perry Smith. But he's still got a great batting average. Terrific in Munich, Layer Cake, and Casino Royale.

And hotter than Satan in Love is The Devil.

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gromit

Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 1:00 pm

Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 9010 Location: Shanghai

Border Radio (1987)
For those who like their films b&w, edgy, and scraped together out of sheer resourcefulness, reserve a place for Border Radio alongside Stranger Than Fiction and Clerks. Border Radio was made by a trio of directors over 4 years, using less than $100K, and a lot of borrowed equipment and editing facilities from UCLA film school.
A long way from such humble beginnings all the way to the Criterion Collection.

The film has a funky look, and captures the post-punk scene in LA in the mid-80's. Chris D. from the band Flesh Eaters plays the lead, while John Doe from X is in a supporting role. The resolution of the major plot conflict is just mentioned off-hand, and the interviews with the characters seem like an idea that was added mid-stream. But the film is really more concerned with the time and place (SoCal and the Baja) than it is with its somewhat noirish plot.

I wonder if any of our punk rock contingent has seen this. I'll be disappointed if Marc doesn't have a story to relate about this film, the musician-actors, or their bands.

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Nancy

Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 8:19 pm

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 4607 Location: Norman, OK

lady wakasa wrote:

Befade wrote:

Does Wade know he was naked in The Mother?

I really really read that wrong the first time I saw it...

So did I.

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Isaacism, 2009

Rod

Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 9:27 pm

Joined: 21 Dec 2004 Posts: 2944 Location: Lithgow, Australia

7 Women

Slate Magazine brought this one to my attention, so I kept an eye out for it; John Ford’s final feature film clocks in at barely 85 minutes. These days, when directors’ days shorten, their films tend to get longer. Nice to see it wasn’t always a trend. Despite its length more elements and dramatic tensions bubble under the surface of this film than I would have thought it possible to pack into the running time. It’s set in a far-flung American-run mission in north-west China in 1935, presided over by Margaret Leighton as Agatha Andrews, a crushingly repressed lesbian who covers up by managing her tacky little fortress and maintaining vinegar-taste Christianity. She’s desperately in love with the youngest of her teachers, played by Sue Lyon, who after this and Night of the Iguana must have been fed up with being the lust objects of middle-aged women. Also adding to the hysterical atmosphere is Betty Field as a menopausal, late-married woman who’s pregnant, and Eddie Albert giving one of his patented chicken performances as her giggly gutless husband who’s there because he always wanted to be a preacher. Into this realm strides, imperiously, Anne Bancroft as Dr Cartwright, who’s left the States for lack of job opportunities and a bad love affair. Cartwright drinks, smokes, mutters darkly under her breath when preached to, and saunters around in riding breaches and leather jacket. Holy gender bending Batman! Lyon is course instantly more attracted to her than Leighton, whose default setting is righteous indignation.

Things heat up with a cholera epidemic that Cartwight handles with assurance, and then a band of Mongol bandits arrive after the Republican troops abandon the area. They’re led, somewhat hilariously, by Mike Mazurski and Woody Strode, who embody masculine destructiveness at is zenith; they rant, smash, tear, rape, pillage, murder, and give boisterous stage laughs. Albert, for once in his career, grows a backbone and goes gallivanting off to action – getting himself instantly bravely and idiotically. With the missionary ladies – filled out by Flora Robson and Anna Lee from a British mission – confined in a room and Field giving birth, Cartwright makes a deal with drooling Mazurski – yep, she’ll screw him if he’ll give them food and medicine.

So many of Ford’s consistent concerns and themes crash together in the film; the schisms between commitment and obsession, command and dictatorship, heroism and idiocy, civilisation and conformity; the open detestation of prissy religiosity; the portrayal of strained civility on the edge of civilisation. On top of this is the film’s early-Vietnam-era foreboding, feminism, and bleakly stoic edge. Apart from a couple of cheesy moments, the film also entirely avoids some of Ford’s weaknesses; no slapstick Oyrish comedy or overlong observational scenes. It’s strangely appropriate that Ford’s long career of hard-drinking, asocial, highly talented professionals is crystallised in a female figure, Cartwright, who kicks the ass even of Howard Hawks’ tough women; she even meets her greasy blackmailer before fucking him with a cool-eyed, smoke-spouting smile. Ford, who had become increasingly cynical about machismo despite his taste for what could be called historical fratboy hijinks and old-school heroism, follows that part of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in indicting rampant violence, and also, as in Fort Apache, contrasts an increasingly crazed “commander” who is a moral straw dummy with a cooler subordinate whose moral pragmatism can’t save the day. In Ford’s work civilisation was a wire extended into the wilderness, kept together only by decency and toughness cohabiting. Here, at last, the wilderness runs out, and the final scenes show its character being wheeled away from the eternal frontier where men and women are barbarous. Cartwright, alpha female, is the prize macho bull Mazurski wants – the final images of her have her encased in Chinese finery that belonged to his previous mistress, symbolizing his ambition to reduce her to docile doll. But she’s got one of the most blackly funny and wicked ends in store for any movie villain, and herself: her coup-de-grace “Here’s to ya – you bastard!” is one of the cinema’s great lines.

The Agony and the Ecstasy

Goddammit I like this movie although I suspect I shouldn’t. For a film about not much more than painting a ceiling it manages to sustain a dramatic tension, and Carol Reed’s filming is grand but never pompous, lush colours contributing to shots conceived and framed to evoke the Renaissance painting it celebrates. Add a reasonably cerebral script and a true interest in the details of producing such an artwork, makes it one of those more peculiar by-products of the late-‘50s’early ‘60s golden era of the literate epic. It strength and weakness is that it’s practically a two-man show between Chuck Heston’s egotistical, visionary Michelangelo and Rex Harrison – who as in Cleopatra wins the bout by TKO – imperious, cynical but equally visionary Julius II. Struggling in a superfluous love interest role is Diane Cilento, who, in the film’s attempts to squirm out of making a direct statement about Michelangelo’s sexuality, eventually coughs up the line, describing the Sistine Chapel ceiling, “There’s more love here than can ever exist between a man and a woman.” Indeed, the true love story is nagging, baiting, mutually infuriating one between painter and pope, expressed in cosmic-scale homoerotica.

Last edited by Rod on Tue Apr 24, 2007 11:25 pm; edited 1 time in total
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jeremy

Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 9:59 pm

Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 6794 Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)

Rod,

I appreciate your unqualified appreciation of some hoary old Hollywood films like The Agony and The Ecstasy. The values implicit in these films and their paraochialism make it all too easy for a self-procalimed sophisiticate like myself to dismiss them as an aberration. Notwithstanding, the arrogance of the present in veiwing its values being superior, as opposed to just different, from those of the immedite past, this also neglects the craft and talent that went into to the making of these films and the fact that the constraints the filmmakers operated under often generated a tension and interest of its own. Seeing many of these film as a youth or a young man, I also tended to miss a lot of the subtext.

As an aside, I think many have pointed out that the women painted on the roof Sistine Chapel are the some of the least feminine this side of a female body builders' convention.

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I know beauty and I know a good thing when I see it.

yambu

Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 11:39 pm

Joined: 23 May 2004 Posts: 6441 Location: SF Bay Area

Nancy wrote:

lady wakasa wrote:

Befade wrote:

Does Wade know he was naked in The Mother?

I really really read that wrong the first time I saw it...

So did I.

If we were speaking Latin, there would be no confusion. It has an extra set of pronouns for just such a sentence. "Does Wade know he [not Wade, the other guy] was naked in The Mother?" Far as I know, none of the Romance languages retained the concept.

jeremy

Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 11:52 pm

Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 6794 Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)

the result does not always justify the pain you have to inflict on yourself or the sentence to avoid the ambiguity. in most cases the context makes the meaning clear.

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