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| tirebiter |
 Posted: Mon Oct 29, 2007 12:41 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 4011
Location: not far away
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| What's it like living with a boneless cat? |
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| Nancy |
| Posted: Mon Oct 29, 2007 1:03 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 4607
Location: Norman, OK
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tirebiter wrote: What's it like living with a boneless cat?
Well, you can pick the cat up by one corner, and it will drip. At least, that's what happened with a cat I once had. He got into a baggie of catnip that I had planned to use to stuff a catnip mouse, and he ate it. when I got home, the cat was draped over the back of the couch, thoroughly stoned. He had definitely reached the drip stage. |
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| Marj |
| Posted: Mon Oct 29, 2007 1:04 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 10497
Location: Manhattan
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tirebiter wrote: What's it like living with a boneless cat?
Rim shot! |
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| carrobin |
| Posted: Mon Oct 29, 2007 1:04 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 7795
Location: NYC
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| Now that is a cool, cool cat. |
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| chillywilly |
| Posted: Mon Oct 29, 2007 2:25 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 8251
Location: Salt Lake City
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| Way cool cat... Love that picture. |
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Chilly
"If you should die before me / Ask if you could bring a friend" |
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| Ghulam |
| Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 12:14 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 4742
Location: Upstate NY
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| James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma is a barely tolerable movie made from a very improbable story. Russel Crowe and Christian Bale however are good. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 4:56 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9016
Location: Shanghai
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As they say, all roads lead to Romanian cinema.
I recently watched two: 12:06 East of Bucharest and The Paper Will Be Blue. Both films deal with the events of the end of communism there, and both wonder how it really happened.
Both films seem to consider the Ceausescu ouster more a sputter of chaos in the wake of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe rather than anything heroic on the part of Romanians. Indeed there seems to be a depressed fatalism that runs through the culture as depicted here, combined with drinking, smoking and a somewhat easy acceptance of failure, errors and impotence.
Both films focus on the micro-level of just a few individuals caught up in larger circumstances. The Paper Will be Blue is the more intriguing film, following an Interior Ministry unit around in their armored car during a tense night as the government is close to disintegrating. It was a little hard to follow the subtitles in terms of who was talking at times. And would surely help to know more about the events in questions.
The film is shot in slate-greys in a gritty style. Things go wrong as one soldier in the unit deserts to go to the action at the TV station. Things are righted as he is found after a chaotic journey in the night, and nothing really has changed ... until the ending (which is also the beginning). A little low-key and morose, but a good interesting film. An updated Romanian Red Badge of Courage ... in a way.
12:08 focuses on a small town east of the capital and concerns a TV program looking at the 15th anniversary of the end of communism. Among the squalor and poor planning and drunkenness it asks if anything has really changed, and whether the town even had a revolutionary act prior to Ceausescu's overthrow. A little slow and sad and low-key, but worthwhile.
One theory is that 15 years after an important national event, a country's cinema flourishes. (Iranian cinema in the 90's being the most often cited example). 12:08 East of Bucharest takes that idea and questions whether cinema, TV, society can flourish if the people don't change after the momentous change. |
Last edited by gromit on Tue Oct 30, 2007 10:37 am; edited 1 time in total
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Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number. |
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| Trish |
| Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 8:39 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 2438
Location: Massachusetts
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bart wrote: 
The Draping of Pelham 123
-- a duplicate of our former cat, Pelham...
LOL cozy armrest |
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| bart |
| Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 9:38 am |
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Joined: 05 Dec 2005
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Location: Lincoln NE
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Pelham was the felix ne plus ultra, le chat ultime, el gatto magnifico, of our lives. He was gregarious, funny, wise, and would become quite emotional (I'm not making this up) when anyone whistled the Marseillaise. As soon as the anthem began ("Allons enfants de la patrie....") he would sit up, perk his ears, and begin to make tremulous meows and warbles, as though he were arriving at the entrance to an aviary. He came into our lives when he was a year old, so we aren't sure what might have happened in that first year to inspire this seeming streak of Francophilia.
Ghulam -- "barely tolerable" ? I thought it was a complex and interesting story of the relationship between the outlaw and the rancher. The only improbable part was the run for the station from the hotel, but the gauntlet of flying bullets is so much a part of the American western genre that to dismiss it would be to dismiss practically every great western ever made.
Such characters have a moral force that is larger than real life, and their ability to dodge flying lead is meant more as a metaphor than a literal recounting of actual firefights. |
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| lady wakasa |
| Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 10:15 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 5911
Location: Beyond the Blue Horizon
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gromit wrote: One theory is that 15 years after an important national event, a country's cinema flourishes. (Iranian cinema in the 90's being the most often cited example).
Ah! Something I've thought about in the past but never really talked about with anyone before...
I would actually give it a wider range than 15 years; look at the crop of WWI films in the late 1920s, the crop of WWII films / tv shows in the 1960s, the crop of Vietnam War films in the 1970s. (I'd say we're about due for some Iraq War I films, although there's been a lot of jumping the gun on 9/11 and Iraq War II.)
French Nouvelle Vague: ~15 years after WWII.
The rise of democracy in South Korea with the 1988 elections: the start of the Korean Wave around the Millenium.
You can even extend this generally to the British Invasion in the 1960s.
I would even argue that Japan and Italy prove the theory; Italian Neorealism and many of the Japanese directors recognized in the 1950s and 1960s got their start in movements that began before the war. They were carrying on a somewhat established tradition, although in changed circumstances. They weren't the kids who "grew up" during social upheaval.
(This is all to cover the fact that I haven't seen either film so can't really comment on them.) |
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| ehle64 |
| Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 10:30 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 7149
Location: NYC; US&A
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| Not quite current, but, Children of Men is on MaxHD and I just can't stop watching it. Utter genius. |
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It truly disappoints me when people do something for you via no prompt of your own and then use it as some kind of weapon against you at a later time and place. It is what it is. |
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| carrobin |
| Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 10:31 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
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Location: NYC
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| Obviously there's a serious need for the definitive film about how Ronald Reagan single-handedly crushed the USSR. |
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| carrobin |
| Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 10:32 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 7795
Location: NYC
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| (Maybe I should have put an emoticon with that...) |
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| lady wakasa |
| Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 10:52 am |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 11:06 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
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Location: Shanghai
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lady wakasa wrote: gromit wrote: One theory is that 15 years after an important national event, a country's cinema flourishes. (Iranian cinema in the 90's being the most often cited example).
Ah! Something I've thought about in the past but never really talked about with anyone before...
I would actually give it a wider range than 15 years; look at the crop of WWI films in the late 1920s, the crop of WWII films / tv shows in the 1960s, the crop of Vietnam War films in the 1970s. (I'd say we're about due for some Iraq War I films, although there's been a lot of jumping the gun on 9/11 and Iraq War II.)
French Nouvelle Vague: ~15 years after WWII.
The rise of democracy in South Korea with the 1988 elections: the start of the Korean Wave around the Millennium.
You can even extend this generally to the British Invasion in the 1960s.
I would even argue that Japan and Italy prove the theory; Italian Neo-realism and many of the Japanese directors recognized in the 1950s and 1960s got their start in movements that began before the war. They were carrying on a somewhat established tradition, although in changed circumstances. They weren't the kids who "grew up" during social upheaval.
(This is all to cover the fact that I haven't seen either film so can't really comment on them.)
Lady W, thanks. I was going to expand on that theme and offer more examples but I had to get out the door. The overthrow of an authoritarian regime offers freedoms and possibilities that will move thru society and eventually get into film.
I think you are right that Italian neo-realism could be seen as reacting to the fascist and military takeover by Mussolini, and the Italian New Wave reacting to the end of the war. And of course, both reacting to earlier trends (after the horror of WWII, making fluffy escapist comedies no longer seemed appropriate).
I think Korean cinema certainly fits the bill.
Another example is Chinese cinema of the 90's -- both Taiwanese and Chinese cinema, aided by the late 70's lifting of martial law and opening to the West, respectively.
I think the idea is that it takes 5+ years for events to play out and for new ways of thinking to develop and creative types to write about them convincingly. And cinema is a conservative force fairly resistant to sudden change, because of the quantities of money involved (and the conservative nature of money), and the need for mass acceptance of the art to recoup the costs. If newspapers are the first draft of history and books are the second draft, then screenplays are third drafts, much edited.
But the theory is not really about how soon events become the subject of films, but rather how the new zeitgeist offers a break with the past and a creative boost that pulses through society and slowly squeezes its way into cinema, around the 15 year mark. And of course, there is nothing magical about 15 years, and the first beginnings of a "new wave" of film-making might be seen 10 years after an event, until coalescing into a movement and a cinematic renaissance around the decade-and-a-half mark.
Also, I think this theory is usually invoked more about when and how national cinemas flourish, and not necessarily how genres go in and out of fashion within a flourishing national cinema (i.e. the US).
One counter-example is how little has come from Russia, nearing twenty years after the USSR collapse. I have seen a few recent Russian films, but I think the economic problems and maybe even the creeping re-establishment of authoritarianism. |
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