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| marantzo |
 Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 8:43 am |
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Shane, his first movie that got any acclaim was Tales From the Gimili Hospital. It's bizarre and a good introduction to Maddin. I liked it a lot, but as the say, it not for everybody. Careful is one of his best, if not his best. There is also one that takes place on the battlefields of WW1 that I liked but I can't remember the name. And of course The Saddest Music in the World.
How come you aren't asking Marilyn? She's familiar with his stuff. |
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| lady wakasa |
| Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 10:23 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 5911
Location: Beyond the Blue Horizon
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| Dracula's good, but it isn't quite standard Madden. I liked Music a little more than Careful - but I haven't seen Careful on the Big Screen. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 12:48 pm |
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| Oh yeah, I forgot Dracula. |
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| ehle64 |
| Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 1:58 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 7149
Location: NYC; US&A
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For your Home Viewing Toodles pleasure:
Tonight on TCM they are airing 6 Fritz Lang films starting @ 8pm:
Ministry of Fear
Western Union
Fury
You Only Live Once
Moonfleet
Clash By Night
Enjoy! |
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| lady wakasa |
| Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 2:14 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 5911
Location: Beyond the Blue Horizon
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Awww... %^{{{{
(no cable)
I could call the sister unit and see if b-in-law is up to anything tonight (although he was recently busted for excessive pack-ratting). |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 2:48 pm |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9010
Location: Shanghai
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Lorne, I've been asking if it is possible to make an index for the Review Forum, as it is currently hard to navigate and find film reviews. Ideally, such an index would be composed of hyperlinks leading to the reviews. Of course this would take some work, but would be greatly appreciated.
I'm in the middle of watching Faust by Jan Svankmajer. (I got interrupted by the phone and then got on the Net while on the phone). The film is certainly inventive and a definite visual delight. The plot follows a weird nightmare logic. Puppet logic too, I believe.. Good fun, even when it's less than clear what is going on ... or why. Definitely a Kafkaesque surrealism to the proceedings, especially the way that ordinary items and events take on a sinister or bizarre twist.
My intention is to follow up this most strange Faust with Murnau's Faust tomorrow night. As for Jan S___ I also enjoyed Little Otik. Which was also a weird fairy-tale, but with a more traditional plotline. Has anyone seen his Alice from 1988, which is supposed to be his best?
Otherwise, today I read about a German Culture Week coming to Shanghai. My first thought was beer and oompah bands, but then I found out that there is a performance of "Concert of Metropolis from Fritz Lang." performed by the Staatsphilharmonic Rheinland-Pfalz, conducted by Frank Strobel. Doesn't seem to include a viewing of the film, but still pretty cool (at least for Shanghai).
And now, back to puppetry and deviltry ... |
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| Rod |
| Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 6:29 pm |
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Joined: 21 Dec 2004
Posts: 2944
Location: Lithgow, Australia
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Kongo
Man oh man is this one a doozy; made in 1932, a re-make of a Tod Browning/Lon Chaney Snr silent called West of Zanzibar, and like anything by those guys, it's completely off the air. Here Walter Huston essays the old Chaney role of Dead Legs Flint, a crippled trader hanging out, yes, someplace west of Zanzibar, where he has the natives completely suckered by his magic tricks and a small group of serviles - including Lupe Velez as his mistress - trapped under his influence. He bullies, beats, shoots, and generally terrifies anyone who gets in his way. His evil scheme - to gain slow intricate revenge on another white man in the area, Gregg (C. Henry Gordon), who is an even bigger ratbag, as a slave and ivory trader, and who, years before, crippled Flint in fight after Flint found he was having an affair with his wife.
The first part of Flint's revenge is suitably sick; having kept the girl Ann Whitehall (Virginia Bruce) he believes to be the illegitimate daughter of the adulterous couple for the eighteen years of her life in a Capetown convent, he now bring her to his jungle abode where he forces her into a life of prostitution servicing the locals - by heavens sir, is there no end to your depravity?! Around this time a Doctor, Kingsland (Conrad Nagel), arrives flat on his back, hopelessly addicted to a peyote-like root he was brought to Africa to help wipe out. Although off his face sometimes with his drug dependency, Kingsland is still an essentially decent human, and when he finds Ann, herself virtually insane and crippled from fever, he sets about helping her; Velez also makes a play for the good Doc because he still has a working penis. Meanwhile, in his adopted position as witch doctor of the neighboring tribe, Flint assists in the nastiest of quaint local customs, in which if a man dies and he has a daughter of suspect morality they threw her on the funeral pyre with the man's body.
At this point the film goes stylishly stark mad as Ann, crazed with fear, runs about the jungle compound dodging Flint's drunken compatriots, rioting Africans, and even Kingsland a giggling wretch having just taken his dose for the day; the sense of weirdness drips from the walls. Not all of the film is as well-directed as this bit - as an early talky, it keeps lurching from stagy scene to stagy scene, although the dialogue, with some notable lapses espeically in romantic bits, is for the most part surprisingly literate. Meanwhile, Kingsland is cured of his addiction by Flint so he can operate to relieve Flint's recurring pains by a most novel method - Flint has Kingsland tied up in the swamp to be sucked sober by leeches; Kingsland wrestles now with the conflict between his medicinal duty to heal Flint and desire to bring down his twisted ego empire. Of course Flint plans the "fire ritual" as the brutal coup-de-grace of his revenge on Gregg and Ann, only to find out that - gasp! - Ann is and always has been his own daughter, whom he must now save from his own grotesque creation! This film goes to show Apocalypse Now isn't the only Heart of Darkness-on-acid. The cringe-worthy racism becomes bearable when one realises it's all a psychological prop for enacting the sickest impulses of Flint's mind. Walter Huston is no Lon Chaney in physicality of performance, but he inhabits the role with maniacal grace and drives the work along with sheer force. Nagel is also good as the Doctor, alternately kindly and gritty and punch-drunk useless. |
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A long time ago, but somehow in the future...It is a period of civil war and renegade paragraphs floating through space. |
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| Melody |
| Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 6:56 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 2242
Location: TX
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| Wowza, Rod, this one sounds like a winner! Did you find it on video? Inquiring minds West of the Mississippi want to know! |
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My heart told my head: This time, no. |
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| Rod |
| Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 6:58 pm |
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Joined: 21 Dec 2004
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Location: Lithgow, Australia
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| 'Twas on our TCM last night, m'dear Melody. |
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A long time ago, but somehow in the future...It is a period of civil war and renegade paragraphs floating through space. |
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| merlot |
| Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 7:51 pm |
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Joined: 23 Nov 2004
Posts: 210
Location: Cinci
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gromit - I've seen Svankmajer's Alice. I get creeped out by dolls in general and this Alice is a doll that moves, doubly creepy-outy (for me). My favorite of his is Darkness/Light/Darkness which was on the same dvd as Alice. It is stop motion using clay and is on of the best things I've ever seen. Loved it , can't say enough good things about it. Here's the link to it in imdb.com:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098481/
Another short stop motion film that I found quite by accident is The Mascot. It was on the dvd of Dreyer's Vampyr that I got from the library (it might have been Criterion but I'm just guessing). It is about a toy dog that goes in search of an orange for a little girl. It is from 1934 and is amazing. Here's the link :
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0025477/
M. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 8:27 pm |
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| lshap |
| Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 8:49 pm |
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Joined: 12 May 2004
Posts: 4248
Location: Montreal
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Gromit,
Great idea, though you're right, it would take a little work. Giving this some thought as I write this, maybe I could make the review forum's first post a kind of listing of all reviewed films in the forum, each with its own link taking you to the review. Each time you wanted to search, all you'd have to do is go to page 1 and click on any of the listed films in post #1.
Pretty time-consuming considering I'd have to copy-and-paste each review link, one by one, then alphabetize them, and then update the list for each new review. Worth the time, though.
It would be much faster if each reviewer emailed me the titles to each of their reviews, along with the links. I'll get to work on it ASAP regardless. |
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| censored-03 |
| Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 10:12 pm |
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Joined: 24 May 2004
Posts: 3058
Location: Gotham, Big Apple, The Naked City
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marantzo wrote: I love TCM. |
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"Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel."
-- Horace Walpole |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 10:46 pm |
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| When I check into a motel on the road the first thing I do is check if they get TCM or TVLAND. |
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| Rod |
| Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 10:59 pm |
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Joined: 21 Dec 2004
Posts: 2944
Location: Lithgow, Australia
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| I have a problem with TCM, and it's not a small one: oftentimes the prints they show of films are woefully fuzzy, lacking in sharpness and proper contrast, consequently their films are often a serious eye-sore. Doubly irritating seems to be that the less well-known the film, the better the print. |
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A long time ago, but somehow in the future...It is a period of civil war and renegade paragraphs floating through space. |
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