| |
| Author |
Message |
|
| marantzo |
 Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 9:41 am |
 |
|
|
Guest
|
billyweeds wrote: The Assassination of Jesse James... is a lovely-to-look-at numbing-to-sit-through Western with pretentions which reminds me why I never liked McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
The photography is stunning and the performances are fine, but everyone looks alike, like one long daguerrotype. Affleck is interesting but I liked him better in Gone Baby Gone. He had the starring role and Pitt's Jesse was the supporting part, making Affleck's supporting nomination a joke.
I never liked McCabe and Mrs. Miller either. I found it rather ugly at its heart. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| jeremy |
| Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 10:25 am |
|
|
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 6794
Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)
|
I'd agree that McCabe and Mrs. Miller offered a bleak portrait of frontier America, but it has to be veiwed in the context of the time. Such revisionist films were a necessary and welcome correction to the many romantiscised and sentimental depictions of the West that preceeded them.
I was thrilled by the radicalsim and freshness of i]McCabe and Mrs. Miller [/i] when I saw for the first time. It should be considered along such films as Taxi Driver and Bonnie & Clyde in this respect. |
_________________
I am angry, I am ill, and I'm as ugly as sin.
My irritability keeps me alive and kicking.
I know the meaning of life, it doesn't help me a bit.
I know beauty and I know a good thing when I see it. |
|
| Back to top |
   
|
| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 1:38 pm |
|
|
Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
|
Marantzo,
Please elaborate. I think McCabe and Mrs. Miller is one of the most beautiful movies I've ever seen. And rather than black at the heart, I found it very compassionate. Particularly, of course, the love between the two lead characters, tough people not used to showing their emotions, used to surviving at all costs.
I love the little things in the movie as well. Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall, for instance, who show up here and there infusing the movie with their own special brand of humanity.
Is it the picture of an America already driven by powerful, immoral people that bothers you? The idea that even in the days of the pioneers the corporation was already firmly in control?
Please, say more. |
Last edited by Joe Vitus on Mon Mar 10, 2008 3:46 pm; edited 1 time in total
_________________
You've got a great brain. You should keep it in your head.
-Topher |
|
| Back to top |
|
| lady wakasa |
| Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 1:54 pm |
|
|
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 5911
Location: Beyond the Blue Horizon
|
Assassination is the movie I saw with Rod. He wrote a very good review of it in December or so at ferdyonfilms.com (I'm guessing on the URL 'cause it's blocked here). I liked it, but wish I'd had an opportunity to see it again - I was sick at the time, and there were a number of things I think I missed.
But this was one film that didn't get the attention it deserved, maybe because Pitt called in favors to make it and the studio had no real interest in it.
Not sure I understand the Oscar issue - the Oscars are full of politics, and it's not the production team's fault what awards the studio pitches it for... |
_________________
===================
http://www.wakasaworld.com |
|
| Back to top |
|
| Rod |
| Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 8:21 pm |
|
|
Joined: 21 Dec 2004
Posts: 2944
Location: Lithgow, Australia
|
lady wakasa wrote: I was sick at the time, and there were a number of things I think I missed.
You were sick and I was hysterical from lack of sleep. A fine pairing.
Butterfield 8...I tried to stick it out, but it's really, really dull. One memorable scene with a stiletto. Perhaps it was risque and adult once, but now it's cream cheese. |
_________________
A long time ago, but somehow in the future...It is a period of civil war and renegade paragraphs floating through space. |
|
| Back to top |
|
| mo_flixx |
| Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 8:32 pm |
|
|
|
Joined: 30 May 2004
Posts: 12533
|
Rod wrote: lady wakasa wrote: I was sick at the time, and there were a number of things I think I missed.
You were sick and I was hysterical from lack of sleep. A fine pairing.
Butterfield 8...I tried to stick it out, but it's really, really dull. One memorable scene with a stiletto. Perhaps it was risque and adult once, but now it's cream cheese.
I agree about B-8, but Liz has never looked as ravishing. Liz in that film was Lorraine Bracco's model for her role in "Good Fellas."
"B-8" - dull with a terrible script. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| lady wakasa |
| Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 10:18 pm |
|
|
|
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 5911
Location: Beyond the Blue Horizon
|
Rod wrote: lady wakasa wrote: I was sick at the time, and there were a number of things I think I missed.
You were sick and I was hysterical from lack of sleep. A fine pairing.
But that was when Kevin Rudd actually won, so it was all good.
Too bad about Butterfield 8 - somebody around here (I forget who) really loves that movie. (I haven't seen it.) |
_________________
===================
http://www.wakasaworld.com |
|
| Back to top |
|
| mo_flixx |
| Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 12:05 am |
|
|
|
Joined: 30 May 2004
Posts: 12533
|
Could Befade be the B-8 fan?
[quote="Befade"]...I do like Butterfield 8.....but maybe that's because Larry Harvey is in it.
I found that doing a search. Gary also had comments on the film, but I don't think he was a fan. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| mo_flixx |
| Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 12:20 am |
|
|
|
Joined: 30 May 2004
Posts: 12533
|
Tonite's Woo-fest continues with A BULLET IN THE HEAD. I'm 2/3's thru it, but realize that I've already seen this movie.
It contains more of the Woo themes: friends in love with the same woman, music and jazz, dancing (Woo was a dance instructor), more Christian symbolism, use of the colors red and white, male friendship & bonding, friendship between the good guy and bad guy because of things in common, explosions and fires, nostalgia for the sixties, etc.
I get the feeling that this is a personal film for Woo as it takes place during the Vietnam War years (the years of his youth). The story is about 3 best friends who have to flee HK to war-torn Vietnam where corruption is rampant.
So far, it is my least favorite of the HK Woo's - extremely bad synthesizer score and sappy, melodramatic romantic scenes. It's still worth watching, tho'. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| Marj |
| Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 12:26 am |
|
|
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 10497
Location: Manhattan
|
marantzo wrote: billyweeds wrote: The Assassination of Jesse James... is a lovely-to-look-at numbing-to-sit-through Western with pretentions which reminds me why I never liked McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
The photography is stunning and the performances are fine, but everyone looks alike, like one long daguerrotype. Affleck is interesting but I liked him better in Gone Baby Gone. He had the starring role and Pitt's Jesse was the supporting part, making Affleck's supporting nomination a joke.
I never liked McCabe and Mrs. Miller either. I found it rather ugly at its heart.
I can't comment on McCabe and Mrs. Miller -- it's been too long. But concerning The Assassination of Jesse James ....
YES! Once more, I am not alone! |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| mo_flixx |
| Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 2:22 am |
|
|
|
Joined: 30 May 2004
Posts: 12533
|
I didn't give A BULLET IN THE HEAD its due. While what I wrote above is true, I think it is a fine movie about the friendship of 3 men who've known each other since childhood. It has a real Scorsese/MEAN STREETS kind of quality to it. Throw in a little WEST SIDE STORY at the beginning, too.
The scenes in Vietnam (Thailand locations) remind me of APOCALYPSE NOW and HEAVEN'S GATE. Also, these locations remind me of all the Corman films shot in the Philippines.
Yes, the movie is waaaay over the top - but I've chalked that up to the genre. No, it's not as good as HARDBOILED but it works as an epic.
The disc I watched has 2 endings and cut scenes. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| jeremy |
| Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 7:45 am |
|
|
|
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 6794
Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)
|
Below is a review of Apocalypto that i wrote about 18 months ago, shortly after arriving in Australia. It has been sitting on my hard-drive ever since in desperate need of editing. Unfortunately for you, realisng I'm never going to get around to do any work on it, I've decided to subject you to the whole sprawling piece.
I watched Apocalypto a few hours ago. I managed to squeeze the film in between having a post-work power nap and watching the football over a few beers at the Grosvenor Hotel on Hay Street.
Be careful what you wish for. How often in the cramped and chaotic house in England I call home did I yearn for some personal space to…well do things like reading a whole page of a book without being interrupted, things that somehow seem important when your time’s not your own. Well I’ve been back in Perth for less than two weeks now and my fifteen foot square hotel room feels as empty as the great interior, so perhaps I did not need that longed for space after all. I already miss my children desperately, including the fourteen-year-old whose life I seemed able to ruin with alarming ease and regularity. Even with the aid of a webcam, MSN Messenger doesn’t quite fill the void. I suppose I could cram more into my days, and evenings, but somehow that would feel like a betrayal. I guess the pain of being apart is part of my penance, the price for this precious self-knowledge.
Never mind a fatted calf, Australia does not seem in the mood to kill so much as a long, daylight-saved evening for its prodigal filmmaker. Apocalypto was not showing at Perth’s small, city centre cinema, the manager obviously feeling that hosting more popular fare to half empty houses was better than screening Mel Gibson’s latest offering in the total absence of paying customers. I had to drive to a large, out of town mall to catch it.
I can see me developing a thing about Australian cinemas. For some reason the multiplex had chosen to start all its big films within about ten minutes of each other. Predictably, to me anyway, the queue for tickets wound its way several times around the foyer and out into the main concourse. When I eventually made it to the desk, the young Asian man serving me, perhaps not wishing to cause embarrassment, bent forward conspiratorially and asked me in a whisper whether I realised that the film was being shown with subtitles. I assured him that it would be alright.
The handful of customers who opted for Apocalypto saw a remarkable film. When Mel Gibson made The Passion Of The Christ, I assumed that decision to have all the dialogue spoken in Latin and Aramaic was largely driven by a religious impulse, a desire to be true to scripture. However, whatever his motive, Mel Gibson has forever changed the way historical films are made and viewed.
Centurion John Wayne admitting in his best get-off-of-your-horse drawl that Jesus truly was the son of God has entered cinematic folklore? Yet why should his pronunciation have been deemed to be any more incongruous than that RADA-fashioned elocution of a Claude Rains. It is not an issue of authenticity, American accents seem incongruous in historical films because they are perceived to be accents; not only of place, but more importantly of time; American accents are associated with the modern world. On hearing John Wayne’s voice, it takes a considerable effort on behalf of an audience not to be immediately transported to a familiar patch of Southern Californian desert standing-in for the Wild West. Perhaps, just as difficult for an audience, is placing an American accent within a social hierarchy. America’s class structure is much less well-defined than England’s, or at least it is not so easily discerned by language. To quote Bernard Shaw, “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.” quote It was not just for the sake of uniformity that the American and Australian actors had to shed their ‘regional’ accents in Lord Of The Rings? And the reason the orcs and goblins sounded like extras in a Guy Ritchie film was not just a question of differentiation. English, as spoken by the English, with all its class signifiers, subtle and unsubtle, lends itself to depictions of hierarchical societies. Or at least it did BM (before Mel) Who or what group got to speak in received English pronunciation and who has to speak with a ‘lower class’ or foreign accent has always been a loaded decision in historical films, but perhaps filmmaking has now been freed of that innate distortion.
In making Apocalypto in something approximating to pre-Colombian Mayan and, by setting the film in a context that does not reference our own society (as was not the case in the The Last Samurai, say) it has given the peoples depicted in the film a hitherto unrealised dignity and independence.
By not speaking in accented English, we no longer see them as a subjugated people; as natives at bay in the rainforest needing white interlocutors to plead their case; or as wetbacks eager pick our food, tend our lawns, look after our children...steal our jobs. We see them on their own terms rather than through the prism of our culture. Such an approach possibly also frees us from some semantic pitfalls. For instance, I would guess that the word slave in English, and even more so in American English, has a different weight and meaning to the same word in Mayan. Courtesy of Mel Gibson, it is now inconceivable that a film such as Apocalypto could be made any other way.
But what of the film itself? When I first heard that Mel was making a picture called Apocalypto set in pre-Colombian Central America, I assumed that it would be about the destruction of the Aztec or Mayan civilisations at the arms of the Conquistadors. Though a worthy subject, I feared that it carries so much guilt and other baggage that it could not be made or even watched in a way that remained true to the subject; especially, when considered in the light of the historical distortions of Mel’s Braveheart. Fortunately, the villains of the piece in Apocalypto were not the English or the Spanish, but the Mayans themselves, waging war on the surrounding peoples and using them for slaves or sacrificial victims.
Many have pointed out errors in inconsistencies in the portrayal of Mayan culture in Apocalypto. My knowledge of pre-Colombian history is too sketchy to be able to discern the truths of the matter, but I am aware that much historicising about this period is speculative. Apocalypto depicts Mayan culture as red in tooth and claw. This approach may not sit easily with those who, for various reasons, prefer to believe in a golden age before the advent of the Europeans, but it does not invalidate it.
Regardless, there is some Indian pride to be salvaged from the idea underpinning this film, the view that it was not any inherent superiority in the technology or purpose of the Conquistadors that saw them vanquish the Mayans with such ease, but rather that Mayan civilisation like that of the Aztecs, was for various reasons, a hollowed out husk on the verge of collapse. Almost comically, Mel Gibson nods to several of the theories of what led the Mayan hegemony to end so abruptly. He shows the ravages of disease, withered crops, a decadent, unsustainable social order dependent on the spoils of conquest, a poisoned water supply and hints at systemic ecological collapse.
Arcadia, Eden, Merry England, the noble savage; the universality of golden ages suggests that they are more of a psychological construct. Is the idea of the noble savage anymore than a transplanted yearning for the innocence of a fondly remembered childhood. At the start of Apocalypto, Indian village life is portrayed as something as an idyll, but in the brutal slaying of a wild pig and the cruel teasing of an impotent warrior, the film manages to both temper this vision and to foreshadow the violence to come. Does Mel Gibson revel in screen violence? Do I like bacon sandwiches? The answer is an emphatic yes to both those questions. However, in Apocalypto, we are well served by the violence. Informing the film throughout is the notion that this was a brutal time and that fighting and killing a man with crude stone tools was an intense, smell his last breath affair. For all its slaughter, more than any film I can remember, this film conveyed a real sense of what it took and what it meant to end a life.
Essentially a chase movie, Apocalypto did not have much in the way of plot. However, the film primal tone is so tangible and the realisation of the Mayan world so rich that they almost become the theme in their own right. To complicate the story more would have been a detraction. The simple, but involving, overlying story of a man in a desperate race to save his family while being hunted was all the layering the film required.
Mel Gibson does not conform to our comfortable view of the artist as a free-thinking, liberal iconoclast. He is an ultra-conservative Catholic with some difficult to accommodate views on the feminism, abortion and eternal damnation; a well-heeled boor who likes a good joke almost as much as he likes a good drink. For many, the incident where he was stopped whilst driving under the influence and was recorded giving vent to some unsavoury, racist ranting put him beyond the pale. Unfortunately, for Mel Gibson this immediately proceeded and largely overshadowed the release of Apocalypto. Whereas we may admire id-illic directors such as Werner Herzog or Ken Russell whose turbulent personalities spill out into their films, we’d rather Mel Gibson kept his inner demons on a leash. In the past, Mel Gibson’s lens has been distorted by class, racial, nationalistic and religious concerns; aberrations which blurred his vision and revealed his prejudices and intellectual limitations. In Apocalypto, by transplanting himself to a different place, like a latter day Gauguin, Mel Gibson was able to paint with abandon, indulge in an orgy of Jungian self-realisation, let his feral animus run free. Mel Gibson’s naked soul is not a thing of beauty, but in baring it he has produced a remarkable film. Marred by scandal, Apocalypto has not received its due recognition, but I believe it will come to be recognised as a master work from a singular director. One perhaps, with all his baggage, that in returning to the complexities and of the modern world, Mel Gibson will never replicate. |
Last edited by jeremy on Thu Nov 20, 2008 1:13 pm; edited 1 time in total
_________________
I am angry, I am ill, and I'm as ugly as sin.
My irritability keeps me alive and kicking.
I know the meaning of life, it doesn't help me a bit.
I know beauty and I know a good thing when I see it. |
|
| Back to top |
|
| jeremy |
| Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 7:45 am |
|
|
|
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 6794
Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)
|
| ... |
_________________
I am angry, I am ill, and I'm as ugly as sin.
My irritability keeps me alive and kicking.
I know the meaning of life, it doesn't help me a bit.
I know beauty and I know a good thing when I see it. |
|
| Back to top |
|
| marantzo |
| Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 8:08 am |
|
|
|
Guest
|
[quote="mo_flixx"]Could Befade be the B-8 fan?
Befade wrote: ...I do like Butterfield 8.....but maybe that's because Larry Harvey is in it.
I found that doing a search. Gary also had comments on the film, but I don't think he was a fan.
Surely not a fan. It was a dreadful movie in almost every way one can think of, And it wasn't considered racy etc. by anyone I knew at the time. The only ones who were pushing that aspect of the film was the publicity department. Just a silly dull waste of time. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| tirebiter |
| Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 8:19 am |
|
|
|
Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 4011
Location: not far away
|
Jeremy: Thanks for the review-- it's a film I hadn't thought of in awhile. I'm glad I saw it one the big screen. I saw The New World at about the same time and I found Apocalypto a vital, vulgar counterpoint to Malick's perfect aestheticism.
I love reading about Aztec and Maya and Inca culture. It was good fun to see Gibson's well-appointed take on the noble savage, and I give him props for not using English and not prettying up the actors-- "and featuring Jessica Alba as Tarina the Jungle Girl!" |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
All times are GMT - 5 Hours
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
|
|
