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| marantzo |
 Posted: Sat Nov 21, 2015 6:26 pm |
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Joined: 30 Oct 2014
Posts: 278
Location: Winnipeg: It's a dry cold.
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Big bang, shmig bang; still doesn't explain how anything starts. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Sat Nov 21, 2015 7:27 pm |
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Joined: 30 Oct 2014
Posts: 278
Location: Winnipeg: It's a dry cold.
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| I hadn't seen Cat Ballou for many years, so I watched it today on TCM and I loved it again. |
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Big bang, shmig bang; still doesn't explain how anything starts. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Sat Nov 21, 2015 7:54 pm |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6967
Location: Black Hills
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The 2-for-1 rental, pairing Pippi Longstocking with The Toolbox Murders....LMAO.
...would be interesting to get 2 digital projectors and run both simultaneously, one overlaying the other. |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Sat Nov 21, 2015 9:02 pm |
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Mr. Turner is a complex portrait of the last twenty years of J. M. W. Turner's life. Since this is a movie about my favorite artist, starring Timothy Spall at his best, and directed by Mike Leigh, whose films I often love, I was very happy and really enjoyed the film. The cinematography is wonderful and evokes Turner's work, to the point where I sometimes thought I was inside one of his paintings. Turner was sometimes callous, particularly to his former lover and his children, not to mention his housekeeper, but the portrait is mostly positive, especially in the scenes with his last love, Sophia Booth (a charming Marion Bailey), and with the pioneer photographer John Mayall (Leo Bill), perhaps my favorite scenes in the movie.
Martin Savage plays the impoverished painter Benjamin Haydon, who at first you feel a little sympathy for until you realize how incredibly self-destructive and obnoxious he is. (I didn't notice whether the movie mentioned his eventual suicide, leaving his family with debts of 3000 pounds, which was huge at the time.)
John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire) comes across as somewhat humorously foppish. The portrait is a bit unfair (not unlike Joseph II in Amadeus), but this is early in Ruskin's career, and he was still finding his voice. He played a major role in communicating what Turner was doing in his later work. One fascinating scene is early on, when Turner is visited by his friend Mary Somerville, a polymath who is a natural philosopher who experiments with light among other things. Did you know that if you demagnetize a compass and expose it to violet light, it will regain its magnetism? I didn't. (If she had moved it slightly to the right, she would have discovered ultraviolet light.)
My main regret with this movie is never getting to see it on the big screen (the bigger the better). But then, I'd need one that provides subtitles to understand some of the accents. |
Last edited by Syd on Tue Aug 22, 2017 11:16 pm; edited 3 times in total
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| bartist |
| Posted: Sun Nov 22, 2015 10:59 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6967
Location: Black Hills
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| I wondered about the violet light experiment; didn't sound like that would work. Pity she didn't shift it to the right and open up the genre of black light posters for Mr. Turner. Nice review, makes me want to see it again and follow up on some of the historical bits. |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Sun Nov 22, 2015 2:35 pm |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9016
Location: Shanghai
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Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962).
I'm surprised I'd never seen this.
I even put it on thinking it might become familiar once I started watching.
A hard film for me to evaluate.
I'm not too keen on filmed plays -- talky, limited setting, monologues, etc. And I don't like to join family arguments or watch a film full of arguments and accusations and yelling. And films where characters in the film are actors ...
Also, it took me a little while to realize that this was set in the early 20th C. Actually I started thinking maybe circa 1930, until the father mentions that as a young actor he performed opposite Edwin Booth in 1873 or somesuch. So I had to mentally drop back two more decades. I also found it distracting that they refer to consumption and I kept trying to remember which disease that was. The coughing and going to a sanitarium got me to settle (correctly) on TB -- but those things distract me.
The rather actory acting is good in a theater way. I liked when the mother starts going a bit off the rails and the camera swirls around her. And the one late part where each of the four gets a very tight close-up in succession.
3 hours of bickering and family arguments, even if significant and telling, kind of wore me out. I just looked at IMDb, and one reviewer wrote that Sam Shepard said that his play (film?) was what initially got him interested in theater. Which didn't surprise me, as his play Buried Child is basically a rewrite/update of LDJIN, and came into my mind a few times while watching this. |
Last edited by gromit on Mon Nov 23, 2015 2:49 am; edited 2 times in total
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Sun Nov 22, 2015 3:08 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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| Eugene O'Neill was an inveterate over-writer, and LDJIN was no exception. I think the film is in some ways very good, but as you said, really really R-E-A-L-L-Y long. |
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| yambu |
| Posted: Sun Nov 22, 2015 4:37 pm |
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Joined: 23 May 2004
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Location: SF Bay Area
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'62 or so was the thirtieth anniversary of O'Neill's death, and so NY theatre was awash in his works, early and late. I suffered through five hours of Strange Interlude - It had a dinner break halfway through.
I would like to know if anyone has seen Lee Marvin's film performance as Hickey in The Iceman Cometh. |
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| inlareviewer |
| Posted: Sun Nov 22, 2015 5:05 pm |
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Joined: 05 Jul 2004
Posts: 1949
Location: Lawrence, KS
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yambu wrote: '62 or so was the thirtieth anniversary of O'Neill's death, and so NY theatre was awash in his works, early and late. I suffered through five hours of Strange Interlude - It had a dinner break halfway through.
I would like to know if anyone has seen Lee Marvin's film performance as Hickey in The Iceman Cometh.
Yes, never missed an "American Film Theatre" presentation back in the day. He was quite creditable, as were Fredric March, Robert Ryan, Jeff Bridges, Bradford Dillman, and on, and on. It's hardly my favorite O'Neill, but it's a pretty representative rendering under Mr. Frankenheimer's direction. |
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| inlareviewer |
| Posted: Sun Nov 22, 2015 5:11 pm |
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Joined: 05 Jul 2004
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Location: Lawrence, KS
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billyweeds wrote: Eugene O'Neill was an inveterate over-writer, and LDJIN was no exception. I think the film is in some ways very good, but as you said, really really R-E-A-L-L-Y long.
True enough, that, and we'll never know what it would have been like had Spencer not turned down James Tyrone, Sr. On the other hand, it was -- as never happens -- filmed in sequence, Sir Ralph, The Robards and Mr. Stockwell are very much on form, and The Hepburn IS exceptional, playing vastly against type. It's not an easy movie -- heck, it's not an easy PLAY -- but it's not without merit, either, as these things go. Still, it's one we only return to every decade or so, at best. |
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"And take extra care with strangers/Even flowers have their dangers/And though scary is exciting/Nice is different than good." --Stephen Sondheim |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Sun Nov 22, 2015 5:42 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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yambu wrote: '62 or so was the thirtieth anniversary of O'Neill's death, and so NY theatre was awash in his works, early and late. I suffered through five hours of Strange Interlude - It had a dinner break halfway through.
I would like to know if anyone has seen Lee Marvin's film performance as Hickey in The Iceman Cometh.
Haven't seen the Marvin Iceman, but like you I suffered through the five hours of SI. The dinner break was, as I remember, the high point of the evening. Noticed just last week that TCM was running the movie version as part of a Norma Shearer festival. Watched enough of the two-hour film (co-starring Clark Gable) to realize anew how little I really like O'Neill. Of course, Shearer and Gable are hardly the ideal EO'N practitioners. |
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| inlareviewer |
| Posted: Sun Nov 22, 2015 10:09 pm |
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Joined: 05 Jul 2004
Posts: 1949
Location: Lawrence, KS
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LDJIN notwithstanding, the only O'Neill on film I've ever been able to seriously tolerate is the movie of Mourning Becomes Electra (which, thankfully, was heavily trimmed), mainly because the acting is quite Old School Grand, particularly Roz, Ms. Paxinou and Sir Michael. (Although, the Great Performances version with Joan Hackett and the great Roberta Maxwell did have its pluses, but then, that was TV).
Full Disclosure Dept.:
Back in NYC in '85, one made it through 2 acts of Jason Robards' Iceman Cometh before realizing that that damned iceman wasn't going to cometh anytime before St. Swithin's Day, and was having serious trouble breathing. Fled at the second intermission (with two more to go), and raced to Joe Allen's and the soothing salve of several martinis. Just saying. |
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"And take extra care with strangers/Even flowers have their dangers/And though scary is exciting/Nice is different than good." --Stephen Sondheim |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2015 2:28 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9016
Location: Shanghai
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yambu wrote: '62 or so was the thirtieth anniversary of O'Neill's death, and so NY theatre was awash in his works, early and late.[/i]
Er, EO'N died in '53. '63 would have been the tenth anniversary of his passing.
His titles are pretty terrific.
Long Day's Journey was highly autobiographical. His father was an alcoholic actor and no doubt tight with money. Mom had mental illness. Older brother drank himself to death at 45. And Eugene went to sea for a few years where he drank too much, got TB and went off to a sanitarium. O'Neill left instructions with his 3rd wife that Long Day's Journey wasn't to be released until 25 years after his death, (which would have been 1978), but the play was published in 1956, just a few years after he died.
Interesting because LDJIN probably would have had a rather different reception had it been first performed in the late 70's rather than late 50's. I guess O'Neill was a little old-fashioned and revealing family secrets in public was still somewhat taboo or at least considered improper. Of course these days everyone can't wait to go on TV to reveal their sordid lives ... But I just can't imagine Long Day having nearly as much effect in 1978. And who would be cast in the 1982 film version? (the play was first published in 1956 and the film was from 1962). |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2015 7:07 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: New York City
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gromit wrote: And who would be cast in the 1982 film version?
Well, as it happens there were two (television) film versions in the 1980s, one (starring Ruby Dee as Mary Tyrone) in 1982, and another in 1987. The latter starred Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey, Peter Gallagher, and the lesser-known but estimable Bethel Leslie. I've never seen either one, sharing with inlareviewer a basic disaffection with O'Neill.
Your mini-history of the O'Neill clan tends to brush aside the fact of EO'N's own raging alcoholism, which as a dimestore philosopher I suspect was the cause of his logorrhea. IMO O'Neill desperately needed a strong, talented editor. But, hey, he's considered a great playwright, so WTFDIK? |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2015 8:11 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9016
Location: Shanghai
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| Not only was O'Neill an alkie (and he does shows himself as a steady imbiber in LDJIN), but he also was a pretty poor family man, having affairs, abandoning wives (he had 3), almost never seeing or dealing with most of his children. In some ways that makes his autobiographical writing more poignant, as he turned out to be more successful but a worse human being than his father. |
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