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| Joe Vitus |
 Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2010 4:51 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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| It sound ridiculous, but I have a small HDTV. Kinda a contradition in concepts. Anyway, what I'm really curious about is Depp's performance. The movie has been deemed queue-worthy. LOL |
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| Marj |
| Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2010 11:13 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 10497
Location: Manhattan
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| Not really, Joe. I can only hope Depp's performance will come through for you. I'm not a good judge since I saw both in a theater and on my small TV. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2010 12:46 am |
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Site Admin
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12929
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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Rivers and Tides is a 2001 documentary about Andy Goldsworthy, a British artist now living is Scotland who specializes in art using natural or found materials, such as stone, bracken, moss, ice. For example:
. He does a lot of these cones (cairns); indeed, he seems to get stuck on a lot of themes, such as whirlpools and meandering curves. Some of his art is done on beaches between high tide with the expectation the ocean will destroy it when it comes in. He preserves the evidence of those in photographs. One big project was a stone wall in New York that meanders around trees; the point is that when the farmers who built this kind of wall moved west, the forest reclaimed the land and used the fences. At one point he celebrates the influence of sheep on the landscape of Scotland by covering the top of an enclosing wall with a river of wool.
To tell the truth, I found much of what Goldsworthy does to be repetitious and watching him do it to be pretty dull, as is the man himself. But sometimes, he does do something striking like that wall, or a how-the-hell-did-he-do-that thing like a cone sitting on a limb of a tree. Several times he is in the middle of building something intricate only to have it collapse on him.
The movie is quiet, often boring, but relaxing to watch, and may be more watchable from a lotus position. There's something zennish about all those stone cones dotting the Scottish landscape. |
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| yambu |
| Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2010 3:23 pm |
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Joined: 23 May 2004
Posts: 6441
Location: SF Bay Area
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sMarc and others are right - Revanche is simply powerful. I won't discuss the plot, but its tag line is apt: "What happens when things don't go your way?"
For a diagnosis of all-consuming revenge, this is up there with Hamlet, at least visually. It is yet even more complex, in a way, because this hate force is not always propelled by The Truth, but rather is twisted by false premises and coincidences. "But for this, but for that..." is what I was constantly asking myself.
There are several lingering solitary scenes where the protagonist is using a power saw or is chopping wood, and his inchoate intensity scares the hell out of me. Were this actor ever to play Hamlet, he would run his mom and Claudius right off the stage in Act I. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Sun Mar 14, 2010 1:42 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12929
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown is recommended if you've read any of H. P. Lovecraft's work. It's a film biography with commentary by the likes of Neil Gaiman, Guillermo del Toro and Ramsey Campbell, artwork inspired by Lovecraft, and his contemporary popularity. (I have a Miskatonic University t-shirt supporting the Fighting Cephalopods.) The most thorough biography of Lovecraft is L. Sprague de Camp's long and incredibly detailed book, but this gives you a good overview of an influential writer.
Lovecraft is easy to parody, but, as Neil Gaiman (author of a very funny Lovecraftian story, "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar") says, you don't parody a writer whose work is dead. The best Lovecraft parody I've read is in one of the Samurai Cat anthologies. |
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Rocky Laocoon foretold of Troy's doom, only to find snaky water. They pulled him in and Rocky can't swim. Now Rocky wishes he were an otter! |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Sun Mar 14, 2010 7:25 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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| It's a recommendation for me, certainly. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 5:11 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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I watched Midnight Express tonight, which I’d never seen before. To be honest, I only watched with an eye towards the homorerotic elements (and it’s probably because I never expected much that I’m only seeing the movie now, whereas I saw the other Brad Davis homoerotic flick Querelle back in my twenties…and periodically since then). So that’s what I was watching the movie for, but it doesn’t much matter. What matters is this:
Midnight Express is a damn good movie. Tense, well-directed, and well acted, it’s easily the best prison movie I’ve ever seen. It’s the best movie I’ve seen from just about everyone involved in it. Certainly Davis is amazing and nowhere near as strong anywhere else (last time I caught it, his performance in Roots was prettty weak, and maybe because the post-dubbing robs his line readings of immediacy, Querelle is more a modelling than an acting job). Paul L. Smith and Paolo Bonacelli are effectively repuslive prison guards, without falling into what must have been an ever-present threat of hammy, melodramatic villainy. Randy Quaid is good, as he almost always has been; this performance may not quite come up to the one he gave in The Last Detail, but its very good. Norbert Weisser and Bo Hopkins are good and missed when they disappear (Hopkins' character is never explored as well as he should be) John Hurt is the only weak link for me, but I don't know if anyone else would respond similarly. There’s something about Hurt that I recoil from, in any movie he does. Not sure what that’s about.
This is certainly the best screenplay Oliver Stone ever wrote, though in the courtroom monologue, the prison breakout attempts, rage against cruel experience and the insane violence one can see the seeds for pivotal moments in JFK, Natural Born Killers, Platoon and De Palma's Scarface. Stone is best when he’s not directing the script, ratcheting it up into an amphetamine rant.
It’s the best directing I’ve seen from Alan Parker, and I’ve watched a fair amount of his work (but not Shoot the Moon, a major omission on my part, so I may be making the wrong call here). I’m really amazed at how well the tension holds up throughout, despite the entire plot being known in advance. Editor Gerry Hambling must have played a role in that. The movie manages a difficult visual feat: despite being set almost entirely in filth and ugliness, Parker and cinematographer Michael Seresin make a beautifully shot movie that isn’t a pretty-looking or stylized (the homoerotic encounters excepted, and to be honest, a flaw).
When Davis' character Billy Hayes is locked up in the insane asylum, the movie seems to go crazy, too, in the worst way. There’s a scene with an English speaking Turk babbling about how they all just don't know, but they are broken machines, then a scene with Hayes’ girlfriend that would bring howls of laughter if screened with an audience today. And when it seems it can’t get worse, Hayes walks in the opposite direction of the crazies, who can't tolerate it, and they all start to look like extras from Carnival of Souls. And did I imagine it, or does Quaid show up again at this point for one shot in makeup that resembles a hag from a Hammer horror movie (Ingrid Pitt at the climax of Countess Dracula, to be precise)?
Fortunately the filmmakers get a grip when Hayes does, and the movie gets back on track.
Much has been made, a little at the time of its release, and much more in the years since, about the over-zealousness of the anti-Turkey messege, that the brutishness of the Turkish prison is made to seem a natural outgrowth of the Turkish people. The real Hayes himself has spoken against this aspect of the movie. No question that that sentiment is expressed. And it seriously detracts from the movie as history. As does the totally false method of escape. These do not detract from the movie as a movie. I think this is a strong, compelling drama, and it's worth noting that the Turkish judge is presented as a man who doesn't want to incarcerate Hayes and is pushed into every decision by political machinations on both the U.S. and Turkey's part that he cannot control.
Probably everyone else here has seen it already, but if anyone hasn't, see Midnight Express. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 7:15 am |
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| Saw it at a screening and it was very good, but I wouldn't see it again. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Tue Mar 16, 2010 7:46 am |
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| I saw My Super Ex-Girlfriend at the $2 cineplex about four years ago. I wrote a review about it because it was so much better than I was expecting. I couldn't figure out why it seemed to be completely overlooked. It was clever and twisted and really fun to watch. An outre screwball comedy with Uma Thurman playing the super hero nutball. Anyway I recommended it highly and unless I missed it no one took me up on my recommendation. Yesterday I found out that Billy saw it and really liked it, so at least one person benefited from my advice. It would be better on the big screen, because some of the action scenes are quite impressive, but it shouldn't suffer much. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Tue Mar 16, 2010 10:49 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12929
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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| Nancy saw it and liked it too. |
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Rocky Laocoon foretold of Troy's doom, only to find snaky water. They pulled him in and Rocky can't swim. Now Rocky wishes he were an otter! |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Tue Mar 16, 2010 12:10 pm |
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| Like everyone else on here, I sure miss Nancy. |
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| yambu |
| Posted: Tue Mar 16, 2010 3:13 pm |
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Joined: 23 May 2004
Posts: 6441
Location: SF Bay Area
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Hunger (2008) is about the last six weeks of Bobby Sands' life. He was a member of the Provisional IRA (the most militant branch) in 1981, when he was arrested and sent to the infamous Long Kesh Prison in Belfast.
There, he and others protested by rubbing excrement on their cell walls. The ostensible point was to be granted POW status, but the result was to garner worldwide publicity. As the ranking prisoner, Sands called for a staggered hunger strike, and he went first. The film is mainly about his progress toward death.
This is an unvarnished, close examination of what happens to the body in that process. There are dramatic moments, the climax being a conversation between Sands and a priest friend. The camera has them in backlighted profile for about ten minutes, without cutting away. We can't see their faces, so we are forced to focus on their powerful exchange. Terrorism or legitimate war? Suicide or martyrdom? Is this a moral act? What about your young son?
Sands is treated sympathetically. The world's reaction at the time was mixed. I remember NY longshoremen refused to unload British cargo for awhile. At the time, I agreed with Thatcher, who condemned him as a base criminal. The film does make me wonder if it wasn't more complicated than that. |
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| jeremy |
| Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2010 4:36 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 6794
Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)
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joe,
Midnight Express is a very good film, and just as significantly, it is one of those films that manged to enter the popular conciousness. In doing so, it may be even one of that rarer beasts, a film that had a real political nd social impact.
I like John Hurt as an actor, but I would agree that sometimes he can be just too distinctive.
I don't agree that the masturbation scene was ridiculous. Jarring, theatrical, false, a stunt; maybe, but I thinkit was dramtically valid. It was meant to be a hard watch, a shocking realisation of what prison had done to Hayes. It was tragic for both him and his dutiful girlfriend. I'd admit that I was of more tender sensibilities when I first saw Midnight Express, but even now, I think I would be far from howling from laughter. |
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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. |
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| jeremy |
| Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2010 4:54 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 6794
Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)
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Yambu,
As you say, the film is sympathetic to Bobby Sands; it almost turns his self-destruction into a poem of defiance, the ultimate work of art. Terrorist of war hero? From whatever place history looks back, it tends to see the llikes of Sands in a more favourable light. As the sense and bitterness of the politics fade and the innocent become the anonymous, we are left with a record of singular will and courage, it stands out from the stoicism, nuance and compromise of others, but arguably it was the latter that ultimately brought peace. |
_________________
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. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2010 6:17 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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Jeremy,
You're right on target about the political and social impact. After the movie's release, Turkey and the US began talks to release American prisoners.
I'm glad to hear that you and Gary like the movie, especially since I never hear it referenced around here, and I worried that it wasn't well-regarded.
About the masturbation scene, I just can't agree. There are a couple of reasons. One, the issue of him missing women isn't really brought up in the movie, so his compulsion in that scene seems to come out of nowhere. Secondly, between his mumbled/incoherant speech and his actions, it comes across more as something you'd see in a Cheech and Chong movie than in a drama. I get what they were going for, I just don't think the scene holds up.
But then, I don't think the homoerotic sequence holds up well, either. It feels like a prelude to 80's montage sequences (it hovers somewhere between Flashdance and Top Gun), and is stylistically removed from the rest of the movie. Davis' last minute demure refusal in the shower also feels false, considering what we've just watched. I wasn't surprised to find out there was a big conflict between the studio and the director about the sequence. It seems to be constructed so that, if removed by the studio, the continuity of the film would make perfect sense sense without it.
Maybe both these moments say something about Parker's inablility to capture intimacy effectively? Or, at least, effectively for me.
Having said this, I loved the movie enough that I've already bought a copy. I consider it a classic. |
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