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| bartist |
 Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 8:29 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6958
Location: Black Hills
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| LAOD sounds more interesting than I would have thought, Syd -- remembering the trailers which suggested another romcom off the assembly line. That trailer, plus the title, had inclined me to pass by. Might check it out now. |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 8:37 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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| I couldn't get past the first ten minutes of LAOD, but will give it the old college try a second time. It seemed overcaffeinated to the max and I was immediately turned off by the affected performances of both Gyllenhaal and Hathaway, two actors I often like a lot. |
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| Ghulam |
| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 12:13 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: Upstate NY
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Dogtooth (2009), a bizarre Greek black comedy that won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes, shows us a well-off but incestuous family which is kept cut off from the rest of society by a powerful though idiosyncratic father. Original and engaging.
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 2:25 pm |
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Ghulam wrote: Gary, for a moment I thought you took Ellsberg to JFK!
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Not as far as I can remember. 
A couple of years later when I was back in Winnipeg, I heard Noam Chomsky interviewed on CBC radio. He was castigating American media and especially the NYT, claiming that they always promoted the Vietnam war and always wrote favourable articles about that war. I'd never heard him interviewed before. What an asshole. I guess he didn't know that the NYT was the paper that published the Pentagon Papers and defeated the government's attempt to stop them, in the courts. It seems he never read any of their editorials about the war either. Of course when you are extreme right or extreme left, you bullshit all the time. |
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| Ghulam |
| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 12:06 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 4742
Location: Upstate NY
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| But Chomsky was a supporter and admirer of Ellsberg. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 5:34 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
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Location: Shanghai
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Chomsky always is well-prepared.
He's an academic and the opposite of a bullshitter.
You might not like his perspective or interpretation, but I've find him one of the most trenchant critics of capitalism.
Ghulam, I'm very interested in Dogtooth.
But it hasn't turned up yet. |
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Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 8:38 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6958
Location: Black Hills
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| LAOD -- better than I expected, with the Gyll and Hathaway bringing chemistry and heart to what could have been very standard rom/com roles. Somewhere, amidst all the sex and games and luscious nudity, is Parkinson's-as-metaphor for the temporal nature of romance and what genuine connection may lie beneath. A few weak spots -- Gyll's brother is such a deep contrast (Swedish hunk v. rotund Jew) as to suggest a DNA test might be in order. And, as Syd noted, Hath seems awfully young for Parkinson's. Bawdy jokes aplenty, including those concerning the introduction of Pfizer's famous vasodilator -- that famous cautionary note that comes with the blue pill figures in one painfully funny scene. (in one shot, Gyll is sitting in a bathtub, had to wonder if that was a little visual joke on the famous ad where two lovers are sitting in two separate bathtubs, side by side...) |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 7:52 pm |
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| Just saw Kiss Me Deadly for the first time. Hokey at times, well done at other times. Actually a B movie film noir. Many things were hard to believe or didn't make sense and others were intriguing. I liked it. It was a lot of fun to watch. I've always enjoyed Ralph Meeker and I was surprised to see Cloris Leachman. It took a while before I realized it was her. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 8:27 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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| I liked that movie a lot. |
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| grace |
| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 9:21 pm |
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marantzo wrote: Just saw Kiss Me Deadly for the first time. Hokey at times, well done at other times.
Agree, it's highly watchable but super cheesy in parts. I reveled in the cheese, the hubby not so much; but he stuck out the flick anyway. |
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| carrobin |
| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 10:30 pm |
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Posts: 7795
Location: NYC
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| TCM showed an Efrem Zimbalist Jr. movie tonight--one of his more-or-less decent ones, starring Jean Simmons: "Home Before Dark." Sounds like a horror movie but it was a fifties melodrama about her unhappy marriage and nervous breakdown. I saw it on TV back when I had a crush on him (which lasted ten years), and tonight I still thought he was very good, as well as being almost the only likeable character in sight. (He was one of the two alternatives to her nasty husband.) He could have had a James Garner style career if he'd had the breaks, and the determination. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 11:46 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12921
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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| Love and Other Drugs itself mentions that 27 is young to be developing Parkinson's--in fact, Maggie's doctor is incredulous when he first reads her chart and Maggie later describes all the misdiagnoses she had to go through before the culprit was discovered (including syphilis!). Something like 90% of cases strike people over 50, but a small percentage strikes people in their twenties. |
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I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 3:23 am |
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Location: Shanghai
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Kiss Me Deadly is a pretty iconic late noir.
Especially the Great Whatsit, which is economically conveyed with a lamp in a box and a menacing hissing sound. I like the way the series of characters are introduced. And the casting is terrific. Almost every one of the smaller parts has an interesting actor, whether it's the grubby little pathologist, the old Italian man moving possessions, Pat the Detective, and of course Chloris Leachman. There's also some fantastic dialogue.
And there's that neat twist with the roommate which I suspect no one sees coming. Which also explains why one of the women throws herself at Hammer. And Velda is his regular thwarted girl Friday. Which only leaves the blonde sister of the bossman, who seems to have escaped from the nypho ward.
There is a certain movie hokeyness to some of the proceedings. Nobody seems to lock their door. Mike's escapes from danger/death are awfully breezy. The key poetry clue could have been scripted tighter, etc. But it's all very entertaining. The only real criticism I have is that the sound and some post-production dubbing is poorly handled, which distracts at times. |
Last edited by gromit on Wed Jun 29, 2011 7:55 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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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 5:22 am |
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Location: New York City
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Kiss Me Deadly is one of those movies that works despite all the reasons why it shouldn't. Robert Aldrich directed, and that seems to have made the difference. The flick redefines cheesy, it's hammily acted and sometimes absolutely totally completely ridiculous, the production values are shoddy beyond belief, but somehow it's amazing. I own it.
Another movie like this is Detour, which had a budget of approximately two cents and shows it all the way, but it's a stunning film.
The "no one locks their door" phenomenon is even more laughable in D.O.A., which is perhaps my favorite sort-of-film-noir of them all. In D.O.A., If people locked their doors and inquired "who's there?" when someone knocked, there would literally be no movie. It's the equivalent of "no cell phones." Cell phones have totally changed the way film stories have to be told. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 7:34 am |
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Speaking of phones I loved Hammer's big tape recorder attached to the wall that was his answering machine. I assume it was what they used in those days or maybe just an invention of the film makers.
This was LA of course, but in the days when KMD and DOA were made no one in Winnipeg ever locked there doors or even locked their cars. In the later part of the 50's that changed because robbery and car thefts started to take place. |
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