| |
| Author |
Message |
|
| yambu |
 Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2015 2:57 pm |
 |
|
Joined: 23 May 2004
Posts: 6441
Location: SF Bay Area
|
I'm so glad I finally saw Angels in America, and can now say I will never see it again. I was exhausted.
Pacino is in his late career element as Roy Cohen, one-time counsel to Joseph McCarthy, now a brilliant scuzball power monger with aids, and who is slipping into dementia, but not without a fight.
Emma Thompson hovers as the most giant, breathtaking angel, but not after she starts talking. She has all the powers normal for a Seraph, but she cannot quite use them properly. She's like the seagull in Watership Down.
Mary-Louise Parker plays a wife who is tearing her husband's guts out. Her grating voice comes back from West Wing. I wanted her gone, but she was great and would not leave.
Jeffrey Wright is a boa-wearing nurse, and in the end my favorite. He is one of a few who survives intact. Nichols gives him a huge share of great lines. |
_________________
That was great for you. How was it for me? |
|
| Back to top |
  
|
| carrobin |
| Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2015 12:09 am |
|
|
|
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 7795
Location: NYC
|
Tonight TCM showed "The Heartbreak Kid," the original, which I hadn't seen since it first came out and we had a screening for the film class. It's a remarkable film, in that it's reportedly a comedy, but with no laughs and a few winces--the screenplay was by Neil Simon, before he was famous, and Elaine May directed. It's a good movie with a great performance by Charles Grodin, but I remember the ending well from the screening, and this version was different. The screening ended on the morning after the wedding, whereas this ended at the wedding reception. It was similar but didn't really work as well. It seems like this situation was mentioned on the forum some time ago--does anyone else recall what I'm talking about, or know why the ending changed?
Incidentally, in the wee hours tonight TCM is showing "Sol Madrid," a flick I saw a couple of times because I had a serious thing for David McCallum for years. (Okay, I watch "NCIS" just because of him.) It's not a very good movie but it has its moments, and at one point, McCallum confronts villain Ricardo Montalban on the beach and threatens him, but lets him go. That was in the movie when I first saw it. When I saw it on TV a few years later, that scene ended with McCallum shooting Montalban dead. It seemed rather odd that the televised version would be more violent than the movie released to theaters. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| Syd |
| Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2015 1:30 am |
|
|
Site Admin
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12921
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
|
I enjoyed The Monuments Men, but I wished they'd tightened the story and tried a lot harder for historical accuracy. It's an inherently dramatic story, so you can just play it straight.
The story has impact at the University of Oklahoma, where we recently discovered that our best Impressionist painting was one of the ones looted. The situation is more complicated than that sounds, and it's not clear at all that OU did anything wrong. |
_________________
I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament |
|
| Back to top |
|
| yambu |
| Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2015 3:49 pm |
|
|
|
Joined: 23 May 2004
Posts: 6441
Location: SF Bay Area
|
I made the mistake of watching the 1977 version of Our Town, with Robby Benson as the young George Gibbs. He enters the play tossing a baseball in the air, and I'm saying, "uh-oh". In the whole play there isn't a line or a move or a sigh of his that is credible. Better stick with the Paul Newman version, which, in every way, is up to the historic Thornton Wilder script.
One on One is a basketball yarn "starring" Benson and the ever lovable G.D. Spradlin. Two extremely annoying performances, deserving of each other. |
_________________
That was great for you. How was it for me? |
|
| Back to top |
|
| carrobin |
| Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2015 4:51 pm |
|
|
|
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 7795
Location: NYC
|
I wonder whatever happened to Robby Benson. I rather liked him as the young priest in "The End," which had one of the funniest scenes I ever saw in a film, before they had to change the word "Polish" to "foolish." That shouldn't have spoiled the hilarity of it, but it did hurt. (It was, admittedly, extremely non-PC and no doubt offensive to Poles. But it was so funny.)
Speaking of old movies, John Wayne/John Ford aren't really my favorites, but I ended up sitting and watching "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" Saturday afternoon just because it was gorgeous. I figured its Oscar must have been for cinematography, and I was right. I stayed put for "Cheyenne Autumn," also a beauty. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| marantzo |
| Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2015 6:44 pm |
|
|
|
Joined: 30 Oct 2014
Posts: 278
Location: Winnipeg: It's a dry cold.
|
I saw She Wore A Yellow Ribbon in the theatre when it was current. I liked it, but I never bothered to see it again. I guess I didn't like it enough.  |
_________________
Big bang, shmig bang; still doesn't explain how anything starts. |
|
| Back to top |
|
| bartist |
| Posted: Sat Feb 14, 2015 12:30 pm |
|
|
|
Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6958
Location: Black Hills
|
Didn't Benson have some kind of heart problem? had to go off and find some fairly low-stress pastime?
It's pretty cheesy, but enjoyed watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the 1978 remake with Brooke Adams, a very young Jeff Goldblum, and Donald Sutherland. It seemed to be a way to talk about the alienation of urban life and regimented corporate culture...and it gave us the idiom "pod people." And I was surprised at the romantic chemistry - Sutherland radiates charm and and a doggy sexiness in several of his 70's pics, this one especially (see also Don't Look Now). |
_________________
He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
|
| Back to top |
|
| Ghulam |
| Posted: Sat Feb 14, 2015 4:17 pm |
|
|
Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 4742
Location: Upstate NY
|
.
The Chilean movie Gloria is about a divorced older woman and her ill-fated affair with a retired naval officer. It got 17 international awards. I was less than thrilled. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| marantzo |
| Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2015 4:57 pm |
|
|
|
Joined: 30 Oct 2014
Posts: 278
Location: Winnipeg: It's a dry cold.
|
| I liked it a lot! |
_________________
Big bang, shmig bang; still doesn't explain how anything starts. |
|
| Back to top |
|
| whiskeypriest |
| Posted: Sun Feb 22, 2015 7:53 pm |
|
|
Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 6916
Location: "It's a Dry Heat."
|
A few quick ones:
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - Well acted but slow and.... Look, when you want to maintain suspense about who your villain is, you cannot make the most famous actor outside of your star it. Especially if he is otherwise really kept peripheral.
Ida - The Oscar frontrunner, I hear, for foreign language. Also nominated for cinematography, based, I take it, on being in black and white and shooting as much of the action as possible at the very bottom edge of the screen. Prospective nun is sent out to learn the world before her vows. Finds out secrets about her family. Meets an eventually self-defenestrating aunt. Has sex. Goes back. Does not scream Oscar to me.
Barefoot - Stretches my application of the M. Emmitt Walsh Rule to J K Simmons: there is no movie so bad that it cannot be made palatable by his inclusion. Really bad attempt to - I suspect - make a Silver Linings Playbook sort of thing, right down to trying to make the lead actor look like Bradley Cooper. Anyway, my wife enjoyed it. And it does have Simmons in it, even though in a remarkably stupid role.
Beckett - Rewatch, last saw it 30 years ago. It was what I remembered: dull for long stretches, and leaping to life every time Peter O'Toole decides it is time to eat a little scenery. There are few things in movies I enjoyed more than watching Peter O'Toole go over the top.
Shining Through - Melanie Griffith as a completely incompetent half-Jewish secretary who convinces her boss/lover Michael Douglas to allow her to go under cover in Nazi Germany. Limp and implausible, given the framing device mostly bereft of tension. Wastes Liam Neeson. Wastes John Gielgud. Wastes Joely Richardson. Come to think of it, wastes Griffith and Douglas. And my time.
In a World... - I smiled pretty much all the way through it. Didn't make me burst into laughter, turn cart-wheels or anything. But it made me very happy all the way through. Lake Bell plays a woman voice coach trying to break into the male dominated world of movie trailer voice over art. Her father, the reigning king of movie voice over, is played by Fred Melamed, which made me happy, and who might well wind up in a version of the M. Emmitt Walsh Rule. Former Daily Show correspondents Rob Corddray and Dimitri Martin provide a menschy counterpart to the sexist and dismissive world of the father and his protege. Just... very nicely done. Funny, sweet, nicely observed. Nice to see that the father's new young girl friend is not a stereotype, or a villain, but human. Anyway, worth catching.
The Gambler - Old movie, maybe 74, starring James Caan as a compulsive gambler/lit professor. Not much to recommend it, but I did notice that in the movie's world African Americans are either basketball players or dress like Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch. And James Caan tells his girlfriend, a completely uninteresting Lauren Hutton, a story about the time he tried to commit suicide by jumping off.... the George Washington Bridge. Who does that? You throw yourself off the Brooklyn Bridge. Traditionally. Which leads me to...
Inside Llewyn Davis - I am now a member of the Coen Brothers Clean Plate Club! ILD is the story of a cat who runs away from his owner, and has adventures, an odyssey that takes him (?) all the way to Chicago, and then makes him take a fantastic journey back. I liked it a lot. Will comment more after another viewing and letting it sink in to me. If I can find the proper forum for it. Anyway, loved the music, Oscar Isaac, as a man who shepherds the cat to Chicago and nearly kills him on the way back, was excellent. Loved Kelly MacDonald's naked aggression as a cover for real, and really frustrated, fondness. Added Adam Driver's Al Cody and Garrett Hedlund's Johnny Five to my pantheon of Coen bit players. Was distracted during the scene where Davis tries to get a copy of his pilot's license by trying to focus on the out of focus merchant marines at a table in the background. Did I miss anything? |
_________________
I ask you, Velvel, as a rational man, which of us is possessed? |
|
| Back to top |
|
| yambu |
| Posted: Sun Feb 22, 2015 11:04 pm |
|
|
|
Joined: 23 May 2004
Posts: 6441
Location: SF Bay Area
|
Calvary stars Brendan Gleeson as an Irish priest who is being hunted solely because he's a good man. That's tough to parry, but he knows he's an admixture of many virtues, many faults, and we get to see all through the best playing of a priest I've ever seen. He listens, he gives advice, he says I don't know, and he walks away from a sociopath when he knows he can't help him. Pedophilia is a main vein, as it should be.
We've come a long way since Fr. Duffy. |
_________________
That was great for you. How was it for me? |
|
| Back to top |
|
| bartist |
| Posted: Wed Feb 25, 2015 3:49 pm |
|
|
|
Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6958
Location: Black Hills
|
| WP, felicitations on joining the clean plate club. Went down your list and mostly applied checks, except for ILD which somehow left me feeling, hey, where is the character arc? Maybe I just missed it. I should see it again, but that's too depressing to contemplate in February. |
_________________
He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
|
| Back to top |
|
| bartist |
| Posted: Wed Feb 25, 2015 4:16 pm |
|
|
|
Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6958
Location: Black Hills
|
| Finally saw Swingers. Men being vulnerable, men being assholes, men being emotionally retarded...all the proper ingredients for comedy that plumbs the shallow depths of the male psyche. Why is Vince Vaughn's tallness funny and why does he look like he should be holding a chihuahua? I'm not sure what I mean by that, but it's a hilarious film. Be a good double feature with that bowling movie where a man's rug is peed on. |
_________________
He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
|
| Back to top |
|
| carrobin |
| Posted: Wed Feb 25, 2015 4:49 pm |
|
|
|
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 7795
Location: NYC
|
| Last Saturday, TCM was showing old sci-fi flicks, and one of them was "One Million B.C." (Not the one with Raquel Welch in the fur bikini--this 1940 version had Carole Landis and a hunky young Victor Mature.) Ludicrous is too weak a word for it. Guys in loincloths, girls being sacrificed to the sun, and of course large lizards that flopped around and roared (making more sense than the actors, with their limited caveman dialect). No wonder there are people who believe that humans and dinosaurs coexisted, although they'd have to be pretty dense to take anything seriously about this total waste of film. Still, I watched--it was so awful I couldn't look away. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| billyweeds |
| Posted: Wed Feb 25, 2015 8:07 pm |
|
|
Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
|
bartist wrote: Finally saw Swingers. Men being vulnerable, men being assholes, men being emotionally retarded...all the proper ingredients for comedy that plumbs the shallow depths of the male psyche. Why is Vince Vaughn's tallness funny and why does he look like he should be holding a chihuahua? I'm not sure what I mean by that, but it's a hilarious film. Be a good double feature with that bowling movie where a man's rug is peed on.
Do you mean Kingpin?
I know what you mean about Vaughn's tallness, and he's great, but the best scene in the movie, and one which I've watched countless times and howled every single time, is Favreau leaving telephone messages. |
|
|
| 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
|
|
|
