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carrobin

Posted: Wed Jul 29, 2015 10:19 am

Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 7795 Location: NYC

I saw "Chinatown" recently on TCM, and was impressed by how it fits today's news--i.e., the Southern California water situation and the way people game it. We saw the film for our class back when it opened, and I liked it well enough, but I'd forgotten most of the plot. I liked it better this time around.

whiskeypriest

Posted: Wed Jul 29, 2015 11:20 am

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 6916 Location: "It's a Dry Heat."

gromit wrote:

bartist wrote:

Cuckoo's Nest beating Jaws, Godfather 2 beating Chinatown....lots of travesty picks in the BP category.

Cuckoo's Nest is a Great Film.
I've never really seen the appeal of Chinatown. I just kind of lose interest midway through.

I'm sure there are better examples ...

There are. Cuckoo's Nest beating Nashville, for instamce.

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I ask you, Velvel, as a rational man, which of us is possessed?

gromit

Posted: Wed Jul 29, 2015 11:39 am

Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 9016 Location: Shanghai

I followed up The Greatest Show on Earth with, what else, but its predecessor, The Great Ziegfeld (1936), another very long theatrical film, which is also a somewhat controversial Oscar Winner.

I thought the first half was a bit too light and airy. The second half features many elaborate stage performances, including the famous twirling wedding cake stage number to Irving Berlin's "A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody." The costumes are impressive while you can marvel over the scale of the sets and number of performers -- even though some of the trappings are odd -- such as a dance number using large slender dogs as dividers (I liked it when the well-trained dogs occasionally yawn, usually followed by a quick cut).

William Powell seems to be having fun laying on the charm. Myrna Loy pops in rather late as Billie Burke, and has little to do. Kind of odd since she is the second billed star -- but I guess Powell & Loy were already an established pair, after the huge success of The Thin Man in 1934. I think Ziegfeld was their 4th pairing though they partnered in 2 more films released the same year.

Luise Rainer got an Oscar for her performance, which surprised me. She's bubbly, but also overacts, especially in a late phone call scene, her last in the film. I like that they used some of the real actors from Ziegfeld's 20's successes, so we get glimpses of Fanny Bryce's comedy, Ray Bolger's pre-Scarecrow wacky tap-dancing, etc. Unfortunately Will Rogers died the year before. So while we get a credible Will Rogers impersonation, his role is quite small, no doubt less than what we would have gotten if we had gotten Will Rogers.

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Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number.

carrobin

Posted: Wed Jul 29, 2015 11:45 am

Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 7795 Location: NYC

TCM is showing some William Powell films today, and at 6:15 they've scheduled my favorite--yes, even more than "The Thin Man." It's "I Love You Again," with its highly improbable plot (Powell is a con man with amnesia) and perfect pairing of Powell & Loy (she's the skeptical wife he doesn't remember, but just read the title). I hope to get home in time to see at least the last half.

gromit

Posted: Sat Aug 01, 2015 10:26 am

Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 9016 Location: Shanghai

Watched the original 1937 A Star is Born.
There's a few good scenes, and some good dialogue pops up here and there. But mostly it just seemed to deal with stereotypes and cliches. Janet Gaynor was fairly annoying and I decided it was some combination of her acting and her limited character. Menjou and Andy Devine are similarly given one-note characters, which they handle well enough, but can't make them interesting or seem real. Frederic March has some good scenes and good comic moments, but his role and believability come and go.

The whole thing seemed rather uneven to me. It didn't help that I had a somewhat dodgy "public domain" copy, so that it looked and sounded less than optimal. But I grew up watching films in iffy quality and that usually doesn't bother me much. I don't think I've ever seen the Garland remake. Might dig around to see if I have that.

Last edited by gromit on Sat Aug 01, 2015 11:24 am; edited 1 time in total
_________________
Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number.

Syd

Posted: Sat Aug 01, 2015 10:33 am

Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12944 Location: Norman, Oklahoma

I like that version. That may be one of those movies that seems cliched because it created (or at least reinforced) them. Stagecoach and Wings have something of the same problem, though they're true classics.

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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!

billyweeds

Posted: Sat Aug 01, 2015 11:31 am

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City

whiskeypriest wrote:

billyweeds wrote:

You're right about TGSOE being somewhat unfairly maligned as the worst Best Picture ever. It's certainly no more undeserving than Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, Gandhi, Rocky, How Green Was My Valley, and several others, the bottom being The English Patient. It's considered less worthy because it's entertainingly cheesy as well as rather mediocre. Most of the other undeserving winners all had a kind of "prestige" working for them.

TGSOE also gets more dissed than most because it beat out the certifiable classic that is High Noon. This is arguably an all-time travesty and would be almost no matter what film beat HN.

TGSoE remains the only time I did not like James Stewart in a movie. I probably dock it for that. Along with beating out not only High Noon but Singin in the Rain, whixh was not even nominated.

Your list is a fair portion of my bottom rank, which would also include Around the World in Jesus Will this Movie Ever End and Gigi.

Agree about Stewart and Singin' in the Rain. But not about Gigi, which I loved in 1958 and still pretty much do.

billyweeds

Posted: Sat Aug 01, 2015 11:34 am

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City

Syd wrote:

Stagecoach is still better than 95% of the Westerns it preceded. It's a great movie in which John Wayne is actually smokin' hot, something I would never have thought possible.

billyweeds

Posted: Sat Aug 01, 2015 11:36 am

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City

bartist wrote:

Quote:

I've never really seen the appeal of Chinatown. I just kind of lose interest midway through.

You are dead to me.

Smile

And to me.

billyweeds

Posted: Sat Aug 01, 2015 11:40 am

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City

yambu wrote:

billyweeds wrote:

You're right about TGSOE being somewhat unfairly maligned as the worst Best Picture ever. It's certainly no more undeserving than Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, Gandhi.....

Whoah. What is Gandhi doing here? I love Kingsley as the little man who was ten steps ahead of the British Empire.

IMO although Oscarwinning Kingsley gives a fine performance, the movie is a snooze, and furthermore had no business winning over not only [i]E.T. but also Tootsie, for which (again IMO) Dustin Hoffman wuz robbed.

Have no idea why the font is so huge. This is seriously weird.

carrobin

Posted: Sat Aug 01, 2015 11:55 am

Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 7795 Location: NYC

gromit wrote:

Watched the original 1937 A Star is Born.
... I don't think I've ever seen the Garland remake. Might dig around to see if I have that.

I remember getting quite a crush on James Mason when I saw "A Star Is Born" in the '50s. I never saw the Streisand remake, but the Garland is the one I consider classic.

Just saw "The Egyptian"--most of it, anyway--on TCM. I didn't intend to watch it but the cinematography grabbed me, with its color and style. It reminded me of Maxfield Parrish and I've been checking the Internet to see whether he ever did movie work, but can't find any reference to that. Beautiful to watch, and not as religiously ideological as I thought it might be.

gromit

Posted: Mon Aug 03, 2015 9:27 am

Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 9016 Location: Shanghai

Fate of a Man (1959) -- or as my dvd has it Destiny of a Man -- is a very good, perhaps great, Russian film about a Russian war survivor and ex-POW. It's a simple humanistic tale focusing on one man and his fate during the war. This was the debut film by Sergei Bondarchuk, and he also stars in it. He looks a bit like Jean Gabin, but more earthy and everyman. I really liked his reaction shots after he sees some German war atrocity and there's a look of incredulousness and desire to escape, mingled with horror.

The camerawork and scene set ups are at times quite wonderful. There's an early scene where we see our protag drunk before the war starts. You rarely see Soviet heroes drunk on film, but this is in the post-Stalin days, and the scene is clever. We see his wife encouraging her toddler to walk, and he unsteadily tries a few steps. Then Dad comes home drunk and he's equally unsteady on his feet. All of this starts from near ground level, the vantage point of the infant.

Then much later in the film, our heroes drinking ability saves his life, as a capricious German officer decides not to shoot him since he can hold his liquor. The constant presence of death and the arbitrary nature of German cruelty are parts of the fate this honest Russian soldier/worker had to face. The screenplay was based on a story by Mikhail Sholokhov, a Russian Nobel Prize winner. At times, it reminded me of (the later) One Day in the Life of Ivan Denosevich, though this has a broader sweep and is more like One Life of Andre Sokolov (the characters name).

Interestingly, I found that the English dubbing was quite good and ended up watching the film dubbed. It's odd how the US relies almost exclusively on subtitling for foreign language films -- except for animation -- while plenty of other countries such as Italy rely on dubbing. For this film, the English voices were quite believable, the synchronization with speech handled well, and the spoken words matched the subtitles fairly well, even had a slightly more informal/slangy approach that fit the characters and wasn't awkward.

Anyway, this is a terrific war film. It has an impressive 8.1 rating /10 on IMDb, but only 1,440 votes. I'd highly rec seeking it out. And has me eager to tackle Bondarchuk's long War & Peace.

_________________
Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number.

Syd

Posted: Mon Aug 03, 2015 10:51 pm

Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12944 Location: Norman, Oklahoma

I'm pleasantly surprised that I like Contempt, (Breathless never connected with me), including the scene between Bardot and Piccoli that forms the middle third of the movie and shows their marriage falling apart. And actually for no reason, when you think of it, except, perhaps, they're over the heat of passion and having trouble finding other ways making their marriage work. (I call this the five-year crisis, because I've known a lot of marriages to break up at that point.) And Bardot walks under a ladder, despite my pleading. And I warned her not to get in the car with Jack Palance. But did she listen to me? Non!

I do wish Godard (or the captioners ) had translated more of the dialogue. The film is in four languages, and I'm not always sure if I'm hard of hearing or somebody's speaking Italian.

The thread to the plot is that an uncouth director has hired famed director Fritz Lang (played by Fritz Lang) to direct a version of The Odyssey. Something I'd actually like to see more than Contempt, which is nonetheless quite good. (You would need another producer than Palance. *shiver*.)

There's one scene where Piccoli and Bardot are on the opposite sides of a lamp, and the camera pans back and forth between them with the lamp turning off and on and off and on. I know it's supposed to be symbolic of something or other, but all I could think is that they'd better call an electrician. It gets ludicrous after a while, which is too bad because it's distracting from quite a good scene.

_________________
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!

gromit

Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2015 9:21 am

Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 9016 Location: Shanghai

Watched the first 2 hours of Bondarchuk's 1966 War & Peace.
It's variously listed as 6, 7 and 8 hours, so let's just agree that it's long. The strategy seems to be to shift between domestic relationships and the Napoleanic Wars. We meet a number of folks, then they get thrown into large balls and other celebrations. The military scenes follow the same pattern with one small unit and the general's office and then on to the large war set pieces.

There seems to be too many characters, and so everyone gets a brief time, and the result is we don't really care about any of them. It doesn't help that almost everyone is an upper class twit -- privileged counts and princes and such. Bondarchuk plays the illegitimate son of a dying count. He alternates between polite society and hanging out with drunken rowdies. He's also real shy with women -- ultimately reluctantly marrying a good match he doesn't care much about. And she's cheating on him from the start. His character is rather dull.

It's often done on an epic scale with huge numbers of attendees at a ball or celebration, enormous numbers of soldiers and horses and cannons on the battlefield. IMDb states that the film cost $100M to make (in 1966!), and had over 100K extras. The multitudes and costuming kind of wows due to its scale. Bondarchuk tries to employ some arty camera work and angles, but they kind of get lost in the scale, become perfunctory, or mismatch the mood of the film.

Who knows, maybe 2 hours is still the set up and things will kick into a higher gear, but so far it's mainly spectacle and not that engaging.
W&P won the Oscar for best foreign film.

_________________
Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number.

marantzo

Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2015 9:22 am

Joined: 30 Oct 2014 Posts: 278 Location: Winnipeg: It's a dry cold.

I saw Breathless in New York. I loved it, and saw it again when I was in Paris. Also when I was still living in Paris I went to see Contempt. I found it very disappointing. But I did like the ending. When I saw Breathless in New York, I went in when the movie was halfway through it, so I stayed till it ran again and watched the whole thing. When I went to see it, I had no idea what it was about. I left the theatre very happy.

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