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bartist
Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2017 7:49 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6941 Location: Black Hills
I try to help a B movie along when I can. Your speculation that Dracula could take the form of an armadillo is presently being handled by my unconscious mind, which has scheduled a nightmare for around 4 am. The title of the nightmare will be some kind of wordplay on "peccadillo" and "armadillo," but I don't know how that all plays out.

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gromit
Posted: Mon Oct 09, 2017 3:08 am Reply with quote
Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 9005 Location: Shanghai
Syd wrote:
Dracula (1931).
Odd film, in that so many of the crucial scenes take place off-stage. Lugosi's iconic, but this is a B-movie compared to Frankenstein, which is a genuinely great film.


Bela Lugosi was Hungarian, and took his stage name from the town he was born in, what is now Lugoj, Romania (it was the Austro-Hungarian Empire in his day).
If you look at a map of Romania, it looks like a fish with Lugoj making a mighty fine fish eye:



When I mentioned my Romania/fish theory to a Romanian woman, she replied that indeed it looks like a fish, a bottom fish, a flat fish, a fish smashed flat, and that describes Romania -- on the bottom, smashed flat. Romanians really had a sense that they were well behind Western Europeans. For the most part their lifestyle seemed pretty good and modern, though there were horse carts going down the highways semi-regularly and an unusual number of dogs along roads and highways.

In Romania, there are a number of castles touted as Dracula's castle. Bran Castle which is rather famous and over-touristed, has a pretty weak claim, as Vlad the Impaler might have been imprisoned there for a few weeks. One other castle, Vlad Tepes (Impaler in Romanian) actually had rebuilt, another he stayed in/used for a period of time. Though Irish author Bram Stoker apparently really had in mind an isolated mountain pass in Romania without a castle on it.

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bartist
Posted: Mon Oct 09, 2017 11:02 am Reply with quote
Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6941 Location: Black Hills
Some say Sweden looks like a finger, but you only need to look at a map to know that's the cleaned-up version. Especially if you look at Sweden and Finland together - you get the whole "package."

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bartist
Posted: Thu Oct 19, 2017 9:06 am Reply with quote
Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6941 Location: Black Hills
I laughed myself....sick. I did not know Pakistan had so much irrigation pipe.

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Syd
Posted: Sun Dec 24, 2017 10:30 pm Reply with quote
Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12887 Location: Norman, Oklahoma
In Viva Zapata!, Emiliano Zapata! (Marlon Brando) rides what appears to be the only white horse in Mexico, which makes it a lot easier to follow the early battle scene. Anthony Quinn won an Oscar for playing Emiliano's brother Eufemio Zapata!, and Jean Peters is Josepha Zapata!. (Quinn looks a lot like the real Eufemio.)

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bartist
Posted: Mon Dec 25, 2017 12:45 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6941 Location: Black Hills
I could see an Exclamation Film Festival, showing films like Viva Zapata! and Moulin Rouge! and that one with Matt Damon .

Have a splendid Xmas!

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knox
Posted: Tue Jan 09, 2018 11:23 am Reply with quote
Joined: 18 Mar 2010 Posts: 1245 Location: St. Louis
Don't forget Them!, McClintock!, and Girls!Girls!Girls! - the last one has the dubious distinction of having three! Also Berserk! and Oliver! And Oh, God! Airplane! Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! Really, there are quite a few for the festival.

Wait, in the triple exclamation point category, there is also Tora!(x3)

Happy New Year!
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inlareviewer
Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2018 7:45 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 05 Jul 2004 Posts: 1949 Location: Lawrence, KS
The Post

When Steven Spielberg doesn't over-manipulate a project, as in this year-from-conception-to-release account of how the Pentagon Papers came to be published, he remains a Master Storyteller. Playing like a nail-biting thriller and trenchant sociological study at once, the film benefits enormously from its glossy A-List cast. As publisher Katharine Graham, Meryl Streep has not burrowed so far inside a character without dint of technical externals since One True Thing; as editor Ben Bradlee, Tom Hanks hasn't been this unadorned, interactive and direct in years. The entire supporting ensemble registers with distinction; and the cautionary history-forgotten-is-history-repeated narrative couldn't be more vital for Now. National Board of Review got it right.

*****


Last edited by inlareviewer on Thu Feb 08, 2018 7:59 pm; edited 2 times in total

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inlareviewer
Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2018 11:01 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 05 Jul 2004 Posts: 1949 Location: Lawrence, KS
Get Out

By setting his acerbic, near-poetic treatise on racial realities in post-millennial America as a quasi-Stepford Wives horror story, writer-director Jordan Poole makes more pertinent points than a score of protests or screeds could do, and manages to be gripping, macabre, hilarious and cogent in the bargain. Daniel Kaluuya is revelatory as the protagonist, around whom Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener and Caleb Landry Jones deftly, ominously spin. Genre-bending, representative indie film-making, and a multivalent watershed.

*****

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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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bartist
Posted: Sun Feb 11, 2018 11:51 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6941 Location: Black Hills
I loved I Tonya so far beyond what I expected. Tragedy, comedy, and mockumentary all woven perfectly into a transcendent piece of film that goes far beyond the sum of its parts. Held me utterly spellbound, and often helpless with laughter at the dysfunctions of our frail human egos. I cast Oscar votes for Robbie, Janney, Stan, and a director I had never heard of*. This movie hurts so good. And the music soundtrack was a marvel, a triple Axel that landed on the right mood every time.

Honestly, I had thought of Robbie as a kind of minor talent. How wrong I was.

* he also directed Lars and the Real Girl, so two for two, in my book.

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Syd
Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2018 9:17 pm Reply with quote
Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12887 Location: Norman, Oklahoma
"I'm a young virgin in Italy. I want my sexual awakening and I want it now."--Emily in "Stiff Upper Lips".

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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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bartist
Posted: Wed Feb 14, 2018 11:21 am Reply with quote
Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6941 Location: Black Hills
Her last name is Ivory and she lives with her aunt at Ivory's End, which gives a clue as to where the spoofing will go.

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inlareviewer
Posted: Fri Mar 09, 2018 12:46 am Reply with quote
Joined: 05 Jul 2004 Posts: 1949 Location: Lawrence, KS
Call Me By Your Name

Skillfully truncating without diminishing André Aciman's acclaimed coming-of-age novel into cinematic-analogous terms, director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter James Ivory capture the evanescent qualities that make this tale of a prodigious 17-year-old and his father's 24-year-old intern so universal in its specificity, gorgeously appointed and shot. Timothée Chalamet's protagonist may be the most embodied Absolute we can recall since Montgomery Clift; Armie Hammer reveals hitherto unsuspected depths of feeling and response; and Michael Stuhllbarg almost steals it as the hero's father. The final shot is as powerful as anything since the glory days of Bergman or Reed. A Film for The Ages.

*****


Last edited by inlareviewer on Fri Apr 13, 2018 8:18 pm; edited 1 time in total

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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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Syd
Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2018 1:37 pm Reply with quote
Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12887 Location: Norman, Oklahoma
Annihilation is a first encounter movie for those who thought Arrival moved too fast. Oddly, it's also a haunted house movie.

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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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Syd
Posted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 8:41 pm Reply with quote
Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12887 Location: Norman, Oklahoma
Titus must have more WTF moments than any other Shakespearean productions, including the one by Baz Luhrman. I guess the lesson is don't piss off Gothic Queens.

Edit: I'm now at the scene where Aaron the Moor has relayed a request that one of the Andronici should cut off their own hand as a test of loyalty--and they're debating who should cut off their own hand* without checking whether the emperor actually ordered this. Which would blow half the plot of the play.

*Lavinia is excluded for unfortunate and bloody reasons.

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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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