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| billyweeds |
 Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2011 9:11 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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whiskeypriest wrote: And the last I checked. we had Lemmon and Curtis in drag that year, without a nomination.
Not quite true. Some Like It Hot was denied a "Best Picture" nomination--and I agree that's ridiculous--but Lemmon was nominated as Best Actor and Wilder as Best Director. So it wasn't completely lame. And 1959 was also the year when Simone Signoret was named Best Actress for Room at the Top, which IMO is one of the most deserved Oscars in history. |
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| carrobin |
| Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2011 11:03 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 7795
Location: NYC
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| Shoving its way toward the top of my long wanna-see movie list is "The Way Back," Peter Weir's latest. I have a thing about prison-escape flicks, I guess. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2011 11:36 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: New York City
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carrobin wrote: Shoving its way toward the top of my long wanna-see movie list is "The Way Back," Peter Weir's latest. I have a thing about prison-escape flicks, I guess.
Peter Weir is one of my least favorite directors. There aren't many movies I dislike intensely, but Picnic at Hanging Rock, Dead Poets Society, The Year of Living Dangerously, The Truman Show, and The Last Wave are five of them. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2011 11:49 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6958
Location: Black Hills
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Let me occupy the other end of the Weir(d) spectrum: I liked all those Weir's you listed. And I love escape flicks, so I'll probably see The Way Back.
It's okay, Billy, you can't help being cold and dead inside.  |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2011 11:53 am |
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| I've only seen pieces of The Year of Living Dangerously (on TV) and have only seen The Truman Show of the others. Yes The Truman Show was as dumb as they come. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2011 11:56 am |
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| I liked Master and Commander. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2011 11:57 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6958
Location: Black Hills
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| TTS is a droll take on the shallowness and the inherent paranoia of modern life, where cameras are everywhere recording the dullest bits of our quotidian existence. It's brilliant. |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| carrobin |
| Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2011 11:59 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 7795
Location: NYC
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| Some of Weir's films leave me cold, but they're always at least somewhat interesting. Add Ed Harris and I'm there. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2011 12:08 pm |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
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Location: Black Hills
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| Don't forget Fearless, where Jeff Bridges is superb as a plane crash survivor. Another great movie. In fact, I don't think there is one single film, post-Hanging Rock, that I haven't liked. Even Green Card. |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| whiskeypriest |
| Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2011 12:43 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 6916
Location: "It's a Dry Heat."
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billyweeds wrote: carrobin wrote: Shoving its way toward the top of my long wanna-see movie list is "The Way Back," Peter Weir's latest. I have a thing about prison-escape flicks, I guess.
Peter Weir is one of my least favorite directors. There aren't many movies I dislike intensely, but Picnic at Hanging Rock, Dead Poets Society, The Year of Living Dangerously, The Truman Show, and The Last Wave are five of them. |
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| whiskeypriest |
| Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2011 12:43 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 6916
Location: "It's a Dry Heat."
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billyweeds wrote: whiskeypriest wrote: And the last I checked. we had Lemmon and Curtis in drag that year, without a nomination.
Not quite true. Some Like It Hot was denied a "Best Picture" nomination--and I agree that's ridiculous--but Lemmon was nominated as Best Actor and Wilder as Best Director. So it wasn't completely lame. And 1959 was also the year when Simone Signoret was named Best Actress for Room at the Top, which IMO is one of the most deserved Oscars in history. |
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I ask you, Velvel, as a rational man, which of us is possessed? |
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| jeremy |
| Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2011 1:57 pm |
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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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| Billy, you seem to take against some perfectly servicable films; perhaps this is reaction to the overpraise of others. |
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| Befade |
| Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2011 4:48 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 3784
Location: AZ
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Quote: It's okay, Billy, you can't help being cold and dead inside.
Bart.......that's a little/lot rough I think. Billy is obviously very passionate in his likes and dislikes. Whether you agree with him or not........he is much more engaged than most. |
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Lost in my own private I dunno. |
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| Befade |
| Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2011 5:08 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 3784
Location: AZ
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Quote: My chief downbeat observations are that, for all its careful attention to milieu and regional energies/attitudes, it didn't exactly say or show that much I'd not heard or seen before in an Overcoming Obstacles/Family Dysfunction/True-Life Sports Figures film, nor did it really seem quite as important a story as to merit the sense of Sociological Significance it tended to carry.
Not having seen The King's Speech yet.......I can't be sure it rises above The Fighter in validity. Both are true stories (the best kind I think). What made The Fighter interesting to me was the unique family composition: Strong/tough mother, warm stepfather, was it 5 opinionated sisters?, one brother: talented, troubled, demanding, and another brother by a different father: stable, ambitious, and torn by the family dynamics. Enter in the Amy Adams character.........What will happen? This drama was so atypical and riveting...........of course the great acting and cast helped. It was more than one man's story.
RUTH SHEEN.......the happy, if homely wife in Another Year: By coincidence I saw her twice last night. In PBS' Doc Martin she was a pregnant 50 year old homely would-be singer. In another Mike Leigh, All or Nothing she is a cheery grocery clerk with short brown hair and an out-of-control teenage daughter. It's delightful to see an actress in so many different transformations. And the other actress from Another Year, Leslie Manville (?) this time in All or Nothing she plays a mousy mother of 2 fat teenagers.
I'm just going to have to credit the British for allowing their actors to transform to their hearts content. |
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| inlareviewer |
| Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2011 5:20 pm |
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Joined: 05 Jul 2004
Posts: 1949
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Past Current Films Dept.:
Finally saw Howl. James Franco is about three times too pretty to make me completely forget him as Allen Ginsberg, yet he mesmerizes with his vocal delivery and shifting subtleties of attitude, in a daunting variety of stylistic arenas. Hugely admired the film's general intention: to avoid a conventional biopic or polemic, instead giving Mr. Ginsberg's epochal work, and the events it generated, an Impressionistic spin, aiming thereby to bring the property and its Beat milieu to evocative life. Hence, the multitudinous cinematographic shifts -- saturated color for Ginsberg's tape-recorded interview, smoke-laden B&W for the coffee-house readings, ethereal monochrome for the various recalled encounters, naturalistic color for the obscenity trial -- which in another context might come off as showy display, here seem exactly right. Another intriguing aspect: those tireless gay documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman cull the script entirely from the historical record, whether the poem itself, trial transcripts or Ginsberg's own comments, swirling them into gradual, cumulative impact. The supporting cast is wholly proficient, with David Straithairn's prosecutor and Jon Hamm's defense attorney especially choice (kept giggling to think of Edward R. Murrow taking the pro-censorship side against Don Draper, tee-hee). This is particularly gratifying given that the trial segments maintain a tenuous line between near-farcical stylization and pert cultural comment. Speaking of which, Jeff Daniels almost steals the movie, hilarious as a pedantically clueless witness on "Howl's" literary merit; Mary-Louise Parker has an amusing early appearance as another (and is nearly unrecognizable in her cat-glasses). The art direction, set decoration and costumes are consistently, elegantly dead-on throughout. True, devotees might rather hear from Todd Rotondi's Jack Kerouac, Jon Prescott's Neal Cassady and Aaron Tveit's (amazingly like) Peter Orlovsky, but their visual participation in the flashbacks is quietly effective. The same could not quite be said for the animation sequences by Eric Drooker, wildly imaginative, expertly done (almost a mini-compendium of post-Dada/late 50s aesthetics), but overly literal and often precociously irrelevant in trying to pictorialize Ginsberg's unshakably metaphoric free verse. Eventually, I got used to them, and in any case they certainly represent an inventive response to the challenge the filmmakers set for themselves. Finally, though, it's all about Ginsberg, i.e., Franco, who commands an insidiously impressive range of nuance. So much so, in fact, that his achievement might not register on first viewing, which nonetheless makes it no less acute. So too is the other real achievement of the film: to dispel the notion that "Howl," and its progeny, are strictly homoerotic works, and only the willfully ignorant/idiotic could assert as much after seeing this idiosyncratic, imperfect, yet fascinating art-house natural, a one-of-a-kind specialty film that I found quite special, by Moloch. |
Last edited by inlareviewer on Wed Jan 26, 2011 5:46 pm; edited 2 times in total
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