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| whiskeypriest |
 Posted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 12:13 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 6916
Location: "It's a Dry Heat."
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I liked Cage in Adaptation, Leaving Las Vegas and Adaptation. That's about it.
Hated him in Raising Az. But then that is one of my few Coen sti kers. |
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I ask you, Velvel, as a rational man, which of us is possessed? |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 12:22 pm |
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Bart, when you mentioned Capt. Corelli's Mandolin. I was sure you were kidding. I liked Windtalkers, but he wasn't all that good in it.
Billy, you are right about Caruso, but you are one of the millions. I don't remember where I read it or heard it but I heard or read an interview with Caruso in the last year and he admitted that he had acted like a jerk, which completely destroyed his career until he was given the role of Horatio in CSI Miami. I thought a lot better of him when he critiqued himself. |
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| Befade |
| Posted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 12:42 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 3784
Location: AZ
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| I used to love David Caruso. The worlds only hot red haired male. |
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Lost in my own private I dunno. |
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| daffy |
| Posted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 2:55 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 1939
Location: Wall Street
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Wiindtalkers = EPIC FAIL
Ok, you've got an incredible story that virtually no one knows anything about: A small group of people who help us win WWII because literally no one else in the world speaks their language so they can transmit secret messages without worrying about interception. Obviously, they are of primal importance and must be protected fiercely. Throw in the fact that they are Navajos, serving a country that tried to exterminate Native Americans as a matter of policy and you've got the Japanese internment camps and the Tuskegee Airmen rolled into one. This is cinematic gold.
And you make the movie about the fucker who is supposed to guard them?!?!?! |
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"I have been known, on occasion, to howl at the moon."
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| gromit |
| Posted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 4:04 pm |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9010
Location: Shanghai
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Cage is great in Raising Arizona ( a top tier Coen film).
He's like a human version of Wiley Coyote.
I liked Cage in Matchstick Men. Kind of.
Thought that Bad Lt. was a terrible film with awful acting.
Thought it was odd when Cage turned into an action hero for a while. |
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Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 4:15 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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| Keep forgetting those great Cage performances in Raising Arizona and Matchstick Men (no "sort of" there for me). His forays into "action hero" are mostly horrible, except in The Rock, which is more comic than heroic. |
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| whiskeypriest |
| Posted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 4:59 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 6916
Location: "It's a Dry Heat."
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daffy wrote: Wiindtalkers = EPIC FAIL
Ok, you've got an incredible story that virtually no one knows anything about: A small group of people who help us win WWII because literally no one else in the world speaks their language so they can transmit secret messages without worrying about interception. Obviously, they are of primal importance and must be protected fiercely. Throw in the fact that they are Navajos, serving a country that tried to exterminate Native Americans as a matter of policy and you've got the Japanese internment camps and the Tuskegee Airmen rolled into one. This is cinematic gold.
And you make the movie about the fucker who is supposed to guard them?!?!?! |
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I ask you, Velvel, as a rational man, which of us is possessed? |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 5:39 pm |
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| The two Navajos (one, a Winnipegger), are the best characters in the movie. A very touching scene at the end of the film. which is a paean to the American natives. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 10:18 pm |
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Site Admin
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12921
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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One of the advantages of having a sieve in my memory bank is watching an old favorite like The Music Man and noticing all the nice details I'd forgotten. I'd also forgotten that the songs are recitatives (including "Ya Got Trouble") until you get to "Goodnight My Someone."
We all know what happened to Winthrop, but what happened to Amaryllis (Monique Vermont, whose entire film career was 1962), and Susan Luckey, who made exactly one film between 1956 and 1966? (She's the mayor's daughter, whose fantasy begins the reprise of "96 Trombones." I love that scene.) |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 11:56 pm |
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Location: Shanghai
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whiskeypriest wrote: daffy wrote: Wiindtalkers
And you make the movie about the fucker who is supposed to guard them?!?!?! Exactly. It is the Native American corollary to the Glory syndrome. It is why we have a movie about the white kid getting Hurricane Carter out of prison and another about a white woman who writes a book about African American service workers.
This is common in movies about Africa.
Films like Cry Freedom in which Steve Biko is dead within half an hour and the film is all about the heroic white journalist trying to get the message out about Biko's message and death. |
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Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Sat Aug 24, 2013 2:16 am |
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Site Admin
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12921
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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gromit wrote: whiskeypriest wrote: daffy wrote: Wiindtalkers
And you make the movie about the fucker who is supposed to guard them?!?!?! Exactly. It is the Native American corollary to the Glory syndrome. It is why we have a movie about the white kid getting Hurricane Carter out of prison and another about a white woman who writes a book about African American service workers.
This is common in movies about Africa.
Films like Cry Freedom in which Steve Biko is dead within half an hour and the film is all about the heroic white journalist trying to get the message out about Biko's message and death.
I think of it as The Last Samurai syndrome. Glory was based largely on Robert Gould Shaw's letters, and he was the commanding officer so of course he's a central figure. But The Last Samurai really has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise character, it's all about Ken Watanabe. Clint Eastwood figured this out in Letters from Iwo Jima and made one his best films as a result. |
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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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| jeremy |
| Posted: Sat Aug 24, 2013 4:28 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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Windtalkers was iawful. One reason is related to the Steve Biko problem as articulated by Syd, i.e. the fact that filmmakers feel the need portray someone from an alien culture through the the eyes of someone with whom the audience can relate to more readiliy - a guide or an interpreter. In the case of Biko, we experience his story at one remove, i.e. by how it impacts on the life of a white journalist. The related issue, is that in not giving 'alien' characters their own voice, directors tend to compensate by treating them as ciphers, loading them with our liberal guilt or a surfeit of understanding. It is not the job of films to try and correct more negative steretypes or general wrongs. The result; call it 'the black police captain syndrome, if you will, does nobody any favours. A positive stereotype is still a stereotype.
Fortunately, with films like Letters from Iwo Jima and Babel, it appears that Hollywood is learning to trust its audiences to experience 'the other' directly. We can be trusted with their story. |
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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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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Sat Aug 24, 2013 4:55 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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| Don't forget Avatar, which is essentially about how white men make better black men than black men. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Sat Aug 24, 2013 10:59 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
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Location: Black Hills
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Joe - It was my impression, based on my one viewing of Avatar, that the oppressed group was of a bluish hue. You are making some subtle point that I seem to have crushed underfoot while trying to remember any details of that ridiculous Pocahontas remake.
To be fair to some of the "Biko Effect" films, some of them have a white person's POV because the historical moment being rendered is in some way ABOUT how white people are interpreting and spinning a black experience, as in "The Help." The black housekeepers are not going to write their own book because the social machinery is not yet in place for that to happen. So the "surfeit of understanding" which Jeremy speaks of is reflecting what someone like Emma Stone's character would bring to the story - IOW it's entirely consistent with her youthful idealism and naivete. That said, such a film can still be faulted for its blandness and contrivances. |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Sat Aug 24, 2013 6:25 pm |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9010
Location: Shanghai
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Three Outlaw Samurai is pretty entertaining.
I'm usually not too big on samurai films.
But this one is pretty amped up right from the start, as three peasants are holding the local magistrate's daughter hostage in an old mill, in a desperate attempt to get their grievances heard. A wandering unaffiliated samurai happens by and decides it'll be amusing to watch how all this plays out.
But soon enough he's on the peasants side.
Meanwhile the magistrate, who is the local potentate, tries a number of fairly ruthless and dirty tactics, after his men are routed by the lone samurai. He empties his prison of rogue killers and robbers and enlists them to kill the samurai and three peasants. One of them is a samurai, merely imprisoned for not having papers, and when he hears what the situation is, he defects to the peasants' side.
We get plenty of brief sword battles in which one trained samurai can easily kill off dozens of indistinguishable minions, and one slash of a sword kills instantly, etc. At least three women get slain in the process. And finally the magistrates own mercenary samurai joins with the other two, which proves useful since one samurai is off rescuing his new peasant girlfriend, and now they need to kill off 50 or 60 anonymous guys with swords.
Characters are fleshed out -- the three samurai all have different motives and perspectives -- but mainly the action flows. The pace is really rapid, leading to what appears to be a few gaps, where characters have knowledge but it's unclear how. So the peasant samurai knows that the samurai who turned himself in is being tortured. The magistrate's men somehow know the in-house samurai killed one of them and aided the escape of the imprisoned samurai, etc. Seems they edited past any explanation how these things became known.
Still it's a good film, which zooms by with hardly a dull moment. There's a sustained intensity to almost the whole film. The compositions and staging of the action is quite well done, fluid and inventive. this is an early Hideo Gosha film, and he went on to make a number of other classics. |
Last edited by gromit on Sat Aug 24, 2013 6:35 pm; edited 1 time in total
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