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gromit

Posted: Tue Oct 13, 2015 4:59 pm

Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 9016 Location: Shanghai

I assumed I had seen Ballad of a Soldier before. But I think I only bought a public domain copy say 8 years back and was hoping to get a better version. Quite a good film. Rather impressive.
Set during WWII, a young Russian soldier stranded from his platoon takes out 2 Nazi tanks in a panic, and is rewarded with a 6 day leave to go home and visit his mother. He's just 19, from a small village and still fairly innocent.

The idea is that he can travel for 2 days, have 2 days home and 2 days to return. But wartime travel is at best chaotic, and he makes do with whatever transport he can find. And meets a lovely young girl also stowing away on a train. He also meets a number of other folks who are suffering from the war in various degrees. It's really a terrific screenplay that keeps putting him into contact with others in a natural manner. He's simply trying to get home to see his mother, but after a convoluted odyssey, he only gets to see her for a few minutes before he has to try to make it back to his regiment at the front.

The young leads are really terrific and have a nice chemistry. There's some clever doubling throughout the film. A few nice symbolic touches. And the emotional moments really work well. Great film.

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

billyweeds

Posted: Wed Oct 14, 2015 4:53 am

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

Befade wrote:

Netflix gave it one star???

Netflix awards stars based on your own personal viewing history and the way you've rated certain films. They gave Glass Chin two-and-a-half stars for me. In that case they were wrong (shoulda been more), but they're more often on the money.

yambu

Posted: Wed Oct 14, 2015 3:44 pm

Joined: 23 May 2004 Posts: 6441 Location: SF Bay Area

Escape from Sobibor, with Alan Arkin, is an ok dramatization of the death camp. Film makers, however, often do not get it quite right. Here, after a punishing day of work, well-fed looking inmates gather in the evening outside the barracks, pull up seats and socialize. This is so to feed information to the viewers, but of course prisoners were never allowed free time, or to communicate at any time, under pain of death. To that degree it is disrespectful of those who suffered there.

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Syd

Posted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 8:35 pm

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

Ballad of a Soldier is a wonderful movie. I love the soldier's dumbfounded look when he kills the tanks.

I finally watched Broken Blossoms, which I mostly love, with Griffith and Gish hitting career peaks with a much more intimate work than Griffith's earlier spectacles. Richard Barthelmess plays Cheng Huan "The Yellow Man" with restraint, a Buddhist who came to England to teach the English a more peaceful way but fails and falls into an opium habit as he runs a curio shop. Gish is Lucy, the abused teenaged daughter of a boxer (Donald Crisp) who she fears may beat her to death. Lucy likes to stop by Cheng's shop to admire his dolls, and, after a particularly brutal beating, staggers away from home and collapses on the floor of Cheng's shop. Cheng has loved Lucy from afar, and, after a brief moment when he thinks she is an opium-induced hallucination, puts her to bed and nurses her back to health, and they fall into love, although Cheng is noble enough not to take advantage of a situation where she couldn't very well say no, despite his desire for her.

This is during World War I (there's one reference to troops dying at the front that reveals this), and this is really powerful stuff considering that these were the days of the Yellow Peril and racist quotas on immigration. Griffith showed incredible guts in making the film. It still retains much of its power, including two scenes of domestic abuse that are really hard to watch.

Lucy's father demands that she smile, and the only way she can do this is to push up the corners of her mouth and hold a half-smile as long as she can. Given the fear in her eyes, it's a terrifying image. Fortunately, she does get to smile genuinely at Cheng. But later, when Lucy is dying, she wants to go out with a smile, but she does not do the smile by remembering her love for Cheng; she does the finger push thing. It rips your heart out.

The title cards wax flowery when Cheng and Lucy are together, but I'll forgive them their half-hour or so of happiness, especially since Griffith does such a good job of showing the seediness of the part of London where they live.

Gish was quite a bit older than the part she plays, but mostly pulls it off. Barthlemess appears to be in yellowface, but he actually isn't; the way that the film is shot sometimes makes him look that way. Crisp is affable with his friends and playmates, but scary in the film's climax. The film is pretty much a three-person show, although there is a minor character who plays a major role in turning the movie into a tragedy.

Not an easy film to watch, but essential. If The Birth of a Nation turned you off Griffith, this film will restore your faith. Griffith also manages what I think is intended as a bit of irony, with characters referring to Cheng as a Chink a couple of times. Even Lucy does this once, which to me is like Huckleberry Finn referring to his noble companion as Nigger Jim. Indeed, the story the screenplay is adapted from is "The Chink and the Child."

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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!

carrobin

Posted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 9:37 pm

Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 7795 Location: NYC

It bothers me that films are held back because of racist and otherwise "politically incorrect" dialogue and/or situations. Such scenes and "nicknames" are educational for those who don't know real history. Fortunately TCM doesn't flinch from much, as so many old comedies and noirs have black characters rolling their eyes and acting dense, which makes a viewer flinch these days, but that's how society saw them. It also makes you appreciate the old films in which minorities were shown as normal people doing normal things.

Which reminds me that I caught "Midnight Run" on IFC last weekend, and I think it belongs on my top five list. IFC had way too many commercials, but it didn't bleep any of the hilariously obscene dialogue. And as good as De Niro is, Grodin is his equal, with his eloquent silences. Love that movie, and still get a bit choked up at the exquisitely happy ending. (Coincidentally, there was a mention of the film on "Castle" Monday night, when Rick called it one of the great buddy movies.)

Syd

Posted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 10:27 pm

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

The Birth of a Nation does deserve its reputation as a racist film, but it seems like an aberration considering the other Griffith films I've seen. Well, The Avenging Conscience does have a sinister Italian, but he's really a sideshow to the plot. Griffith was sympathetic to the point of being cloying in his short films about Native Americans.

Fred Astaire's blackface routine in Swing Time gets cut sometimes because he's in blackface (and I have some trouble with the beginning of the scene), but it was a tribute to Bill Robinson, and turns into one of the greatest dance routines of all time. I'd hate to see it any part of it cut out even if it makes me queasy at the start.

_________________
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!

Syd

Posted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 10:38 pm

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

You have to consider what you lose. If you make Song of the South unavailable, you lose James Baskett's wonderful performance as Uncle Remus (not to mention a subtle critique of post-Bellum Southern culture.) If you censor the censored Eleven, you lost Tin Pan Alley Cats with its affectionate caricatures of famous jazz musicians of the 1940s. (You also lose Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs, which is more highly regarded but which I don't like as much.) I can see why you may not want seven-year-olds watching these, but it would be a crime to lose them altogether.

_________________
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 Oct 17, 2015 5:52 am

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

Carol--I agree with everything you said. IMO Grodin is even better than De Niro in the great Midnight Run, but in any case, it's De Niro's one and only successful foray into comedy. (I loathe Meet the Parents, widely accepted as De Niro's "comedy breakthrough").

Syd--The Birth of a Nation is a great film, racism notwithstanding. (So is Triumph of the Will, btw.)

What are (is) "the censored Eleven"?

Last edited by billyweeds on Sat Oct 17, 2015 10:52 am; edited 1 time in total

bartist

Posted: Sat Oct 17, 2015 9:11 am

Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6967 Location: Black Hills

Carro, have never seen Midnight Run, so thanks for reminding of the serious gap to be filled. Grodin always a favorite comedic actor, so how I missed it is...self-administered dope slap.

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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days.

yambu

Posted: Sat Oct 17, 2015 11:57 am

Joined: 23 May 2004 Posts: 6441 Location: SF Bay Area

bartist wrote:

Carro, have never seen Midnight Run, so thanks for reminding of the serious gap to be filled. Grodin always a favorite comedic actor, so how I missed it is...self-administered dope slap.

I was enjoying every moment when Grodin suddenly poses as a Federal agent. I died.

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That was great for you. How was it for me?

yambu

Posted: Sat Oct 17, 2015 12:56 pm

Joined: 23 May 2004 Posts: 6441 Location: SF Bay Area

My wife is out of town, so this was my chance to view Aliens. When it got to my little boy imagination - especially the giant spider crabs tap toeing around - I would laugh out loud, and that would take me out of the picture for a moment.

it's the scariest movie since the original The Thing, although it's rather a one trick shtick. But another great fearless role for Sigourney Weaver.

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That was great for you. How was it for me?

bartist

Posted: Tue Oct 20, 2015 10:41 am

Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6967 Location: Black Hills

Big Eyes (POSSIBLE SPOILERS)

Amy Adams is so good in this, and delivers a memorable portrait of the struggles of women in the Mad Men era. Improbably, she grows her pair of girl-balls with the help of Hawaiian Jehovah's Witnesses. Truth is stranger, as they say, and no film illustrates this better than Big Eyes. So I have to acquit Chris Waltz, as her Lying Domineering Turd of a Husband, of ruining a film, but agree with Gromit that his performance hammed it up excessively and was often distracting. Also, his complete annihilation of a German accent through good diction somehow fell on my ear as false, and in moments of emotion the Vaderland would peek through in clipped Germanic consonants. Too bad the original casting with Thomas Hayden Church fell through, because he sounded perfect.

The film pushed some emotional buttons for me, as I'm sure it did for many who have a strong ethos about artistic integrity and the fraudulent appropriation of another's work. There's a scene in which Ms. Keane (Adams) discovers that her husband was a fraud long before she met him - which is just gut-wrenching to watch - and insures that the concluding courtroom drama will send you off satisfied that karma has caught up with the vile Walter Keane. I don't think these comments are spoilers, as it seems likely that most viewers will know the basic story, but I've put a spoiler alert up just in case. The DVD extra is worth watching, if only to meet the real Margaret Keane, still painting every day.

_________________
He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days.

billyweeds

Posted: Sat Oct 24, 2015 5:08 am

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

Another under-the-radar gem on Netflix is Unexpected, in which an inner-city school teacher and her star pupil both get pregnant at the same time. The plot turns are as unexpected as the pregnancies, and Cobie Smulders, an actress heretofore completely unknown to me (but apparently not to fans of The Avengers or TV's How I Met Your Mother), is wonderful as the teacher.

bartist

Posted: Sat Oct 24, 2015 8:59 am

Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6967 Location: Black Hills

Not usually one to judge names, but Ms. Smulders is 10 times prettier than her name.

Finally saw Midnight Run. Certainly goes in the top 10 of buddy movies. One teeny plot question - does the Mob usually call the police, and press charges, when embezzled from?

_________________
He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days.

billyweeds

Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2015 7:16 am

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

bartist wrote:

Not usually one to judge names, but Ms. Smulders is 10 times prettier than her name.

Word. What is with that name? But I give her credit for not changing it. As for her looks, OMG.

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