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Marc
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 12:52 am Reply with quote
Joined: 19 May 2004 Posts: 8424
WANTED directed by Timur Bekmambetov (Nightwatch, Daywatch) is a terrific over-the-top action flick starring Angelina Jolie (though not front and center) and James McAvoy. There are some thrilling action set pieces in this nifty flick. Ultra-violent, funny and sexy.
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Marc
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 12:54 am Reply with quote
Joined: 19 May 2004 Posts: 8424
and speaking of Jolie, I watched CHANGELING tonight. Its a bleak film that tries to evoke the noir moodiness of L.A. CONFIDENTIAL and CHINATOWN with limited success. Overlong and unsatisfying.
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mo_flixx
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 12:59 am Reply with quote
Joined: 30 May 2004 Posts: 12533
Marc wrote:
and speaking of Jolie, I watched CHANGELING tonight. Its a bleak film that tries to evoke the noir moodiness of L.A. CONFIDENTIAL and CHINATOWN with limited success. Overlong and unsatisfying.


Given that it was shot in Canada, it did not evoke the moodiness of 1920's L.A. for me.
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Marj
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 12:59 am Reply with quote
Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 10497 Location: Manhattan
Disagree, totally! Many of us have read or studied the McCarthy hearings without being old enough to have seen them when they first took place. And Good Night and Good Luck gave us an insider's view of the fight at CBS to cover them, to say nothing of the fight for journalism with integrity. It was a wonderful piece of filmmaking that had me riveted.

I'm a slow typist but this is in response to Billy and Marc's post on GN&GL.
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Marc
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 1:07 am Reply with quote
Joined: 19 May 2004 Posts: 8424
Quote:
Many of us have read or studied the McCarthy hearings


and many have not. Good luck to those viewers. GOOD LUCK AND GOOD NIGHT doesn't provide enough context for any viewer who is not well read on the subject of the McCarthy hearings. Which is a shame. A movie should stand on its own. You shouldn't have to fill in the blanks based on prior knowledge of the events depicted in the film. I watched the movie with some young folks who knew nothing of the McCarthy era and Murrow. They didn't learn much from the film.
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Marc
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 1:09 am Reply with quote
Joined: 19 May 2004 Posts: 8424
Quote:
Given that it was shot in Canada, it did not evoke the moodiness of 1920's L.A. for me.


It doesn't matter where it was shot. It could have been shot on a sound stage. BLACK NARCISSUS was shot in a studio not in the Himalayas. It didn't matter. We're talking about a film maker's ability to create an atmosphere, a feeling. Noir is not about location, its about evoking a mood.
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mo_flixx
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 1:51 am Reply with quote
Joined: 30 May 2004 Posts: 12533
Marc wrote:
Quote:
Given that it was shot in Canada, it did not evoke the moodiness of 1920's L.A. for me.


It doesn't matter where it was shot. It could have been shot on a sound stage. BLACK NARCISSUS was shot in a studio not in the Himalayas. It didn't matter. We're talking about a film maker's ability to create an atmosphere, a feeling. Noir is not about location, its about evoking a mood.


Well put. The director, production designer, et al. failed to create the proper atmosphere.

I was presuming that it would be unlikely that any U.S. filmmaker would shoot a movie like this entirely on a sound stage today because of the cost.
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whiskeypriest
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 8:59 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 6916 Location: "It's a Dry Heat."
Marc wrote:
GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK was more or less incomprehensible if you didn't have a pretty thorough knowledge of the McCarthy hearings and Edward R. Murrow's legacy. It presumed a lot. If you were under the age of 50 and knew little of McCarthy and Murrow you were shit out of luck.
I would disagree, except having decent knowledge of the time I couldn't say for sure about how people without that knowledge would view it. I do know that had GD&GL stopped to give much more context than it did, my reaction would have been something like, Jesus Clooney I'm not an idiot.

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lissa
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 9:02 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 2148 Location: my computer
I agree that one should not have to study before going to a movie. Any film should be a stand-alone - even sequels - so that viewers don't feel they're missing out on something.

Same for movies from books. I went to see Memoirs of a Geisha with a friend who had not read the book. I am intimately familiar with the entire book, and while it isn't a great film at all (for all the potential it had), I still understood what was going on in many places, whereas she was lost.

Movies shouldn't be parts of a whole; they should be entertainment which stands on its own, speaks for itself, and offers all a viewer needs in order to be in the loop.

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marantzo
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 11:39 am Reply with quote
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Quote:
Jesus Clooney I'm not an idiot.


I agree with whiskey's comment above, and if younger members of the audience are shit out of luck because they have no or little knowledge of the McCarthy hearing or Murrow, they deserve to be shit out of luck.

This has been a criticism of mine for years now. These later generations do have a lot of good things about them that earlier generations may have lacked, but their cluelessness of anything before 1980 is appalling. Are they not taught about these things in schools (is history not a subject on the curriculum anymore?) . Don't their parents tell them things about the past. Don't they read anything besides text messages or whatever was the equivalent when they were growing up. If these aren't the quintessential "ME (and my time)" generations I hate to think what one would be like.
lissa
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 12:05 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 2148 Location: my computer
Quote:
Are they not taught about these things in schools (is history not a subject on the curriculum anymore?)


Not in the same way it used to be. Now, besides the current history they learn, it's "personal" history, to make it more relevant to the child and the curriculum of self-awareness. I can remember history in high school - not recent but not THAT far back, and all we got was Canadian History, and a survey course of world history in the last year of HS. It's not great; I wish my kids were getting more world history, but that's not being covered.

As for parents - how much do you really think kids these days want to learn, pedagogically, from their parents that isn't on-the-fly knowledge? Parents who homeschool can choose the topics within the curriculum dictated by province or state, but most parents are just trying to keep up with jobs, child-rearing, extracurricular, and self-preservation. No kid would sit still for a lesson-at-the-kitchen-table by mom or dad. This isn't Leave it to Beaver anymore. And while I've personally tried to invoke history into conversation from time to time with my kids - and sometimes I can - it's never a lesson per se, it's more of a factoid. More often than not, it's current events we discuss, or one of my kids will come home with some new knowledge they wish to talk about (always a pleasant surprise!). Rare is the history lesson around the table.

But I don't think anyone can assume that filmgoers appear in the seats with prior knowledge. I knew about Harvey Milk but I knew very little about the political times of his day, the man himself, and the key players. It was the 70's. I was a kid. But the movie took nothing for granted and educated as well as intrigued.

I knew much about the Holocaust before seeing Schindler's List but I think you'd be shocked at the number of non-Jews (and those who have little access to Jewish culture or people - i.e. small-town mid-America) who know nothing about the Holocaust except that it happened. Or not - depending on their teachers.

This may be why moviegoers who see films like the above mentioned, or Good Night and Good Luck are already somewhat familiar with the subject matter. Either that, or those who were not will be the ones giving negative reviews.

I don't believe any filmmaker should take for granted that kids are taught history these days, or that adults are armed with prior knowledge. It just isn't the case.

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lissa
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 12:06 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 2148 Location: my computer
I should add that I would like to see a happy medium in films between lecturing the lesson and avoiding it altogether while jumping to conclusions about one's target audience.

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Syd
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 3:13 pm Reply with quote
Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12887 Location: Norman, Oklahoma
I knew very little about anything that happened between 1865 and 1939 growing up (except World War I, maybe), and I'm sure people would have said the same thing about me. McCarthy would be to them like Teapot Dome would have been to me. I doubt my mother knew just about nothing about the Pullman Strike when she was growing up. Those whippersnappers don't know anything about the Panic of 1893!

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Marc
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 3:47 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 19 May 2004 Posts: 8424
Gary,

I think that GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK could have been a great introduction
to Edward R. Murrow and McCarthyism for a young audience. It would have been better as a several hour mini-series. It bit off a lot for a relatively short film (93 minutes, including the romantic interlude). I know a fair amount about McCarthy and Murrow and I even had a hard time filling in some of the blanks.
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Syd
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 3:49 pm Reply with quote
Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12887 Location: Norman, Oklahoma
I take that back, Irving Stone mentioned Teapot Dome in They Also Ran, which I read in my sophomore year in high school. (He preferred Cox to Harding.) I don't remember how much detail he went into.

He also like Horace Greeley better than U. S. Grant, but I think Greeley would have been just as bad if not worse. Actually, he would have been dead since he died before the Electoral College met.

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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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