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| billyweeds |
 Posted: Fri Jul 05, 2013 11:49 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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Syd wrote: I'm watching Gene Kelly talking to "Lola" on the phone and keep expecting him to break into "Chantilly Lace."
What movie are you talking about? |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2013 12:35 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12895
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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billyweeds wrote: Syd wrote: I'm watching Gene Kelly talking to "Lola" on the phone and keep expecting him to break into "Chantilly Lace."
What movie are you talking about?
Anchors Aweigh. He's trying to get together with Lola through most of the movie but the most he gets to do is come on to her on the phone. Oddly enough, Frank Sinatra is the shy one who doesn't know how to meet girls.
The famous scene where Kelly dances with Jerry the Mouse is part of a story Kelly tells a group of school kids, and the whole thing functions like the ballet numbers in later Gene Kelly movies but works better for me. There's also a charming scene where he does the Mexican hat dance with a little girl. However, I like On the Town better. |
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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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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2013 2:58 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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| How can you like On the Town better than anything? A great show was turned into a travesty of a movie musical, and most of a great score was replaced by crap. Man, that's a classic show/score totally eviscerated by Hollywood. All because Louis B. Mayer saw the show on Broadway and the fact that a black dancer danced with a white dancer in the chorus made him think it was Communist. So to film it they had to take out almost everything that made it good. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2013 5:40 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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Joe Vitus wrote: How can you like On the Town better than anything? A great show was turned into a travesty of a movie musical, and most of a great score was replaced by crap. Man, that's a classic show/score totally eviscerated by Hollywood. All because Louis B. Mayer saw the show on Broadway and the fact that a black dancer danced with a white dancer in the chorus made him think it was Communist. So to film it they had to take out almost everything that made it good.
Word, word, word, word, word. I loathe the movie version of On the Town. The very definition of "show ruined by movie version." Not as horrible a movie as Carousel, but even more loathesome in the way it took a great score and made it thuddingly mediocre at best and unlistenable at worst.
It's fairly well directed and performed, but oh that score! Horrendous, egregious, abominable. I could come up with synonyms all day. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2013 10:21 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
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Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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| I obviously need to get the Broadway soundtrack. I haven't heard a good Communist musical in a long time. |
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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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| knox |
| Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2013 10:37 am |
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Joined: 18 Mar 2010
Posts: 1245
Location: St. Louis
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| Syd |
| Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2013 10:53 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
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knox wrote: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119040/
Everything you need to know about Communist musicals.
I've seen it. Some of them look pretty good. Others have guys singing while riding tractors.
Anchors Aweigh ends with the terrifying promise by Jose Iturbi that he is going to subject the crew of the Knoxville to Kathryn Grayson in full operatic mode. |
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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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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Sun Jul 07, 2013 7:35 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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| Saw Keane for the second time in a week, sharing it with someone who'd never seen it before. Astonishing how a movie so painfully non-entertaining can rivet you to your seat with more power than most "entertaining" movies you could name. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Mon Jul 08, 2013 2:15 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9008
Location: Shanghai
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Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame is an odd and endearing film. In a village of cave dwellers around the ruins of the demolished Bimayan Buddha statues, a 6 year old Afghan girl desperately wants to go to school. But she is continually thwarted -- by the need for money for school supplies, the difficulty of finding the newly opened girls school, indifference and hostility from most of the villagers, and especially the unschooled neighborhood boys who play Taliban all day and harass girls.
There's a fair amount of amateurism, along with a few striking images. Directed by an Iranian woman, Hana Makhmalbaf, of the filmmaking Makhmalbaf family (both parents and her sister are directors). She made her first short film -- which was shown at an int'l film festival in Switzerland -- when she was just 8 years old. She was a grizzled vet of 19 when she made BCOoS. |
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| yambu |
| Posted: Tue Jul 09, 2013 1:50 pm |
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Joined: 23 May 2004
Posts: 6441
Location: SF Bay Area
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Throne of Blood, as I think most of us know, is Kurosawa's homage to Macbeth. The lead character is compelling, yet falls short of his namesake. Unlike this cold blooded aspirant from Kyoto, 17th Century MacBeth is all introspection, making us think in ways we've never done before.
Kurosawa's Lady MacBeth is the most interesting. No talk of her husband not being a man, or dashing out an infant's brains, she comes at him with relentless logic. Sitting motionless on the floor in her billowy white kimono, she is the throne of blood, Part 1. |
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That was great for you. How was it for me? |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2013 11:35 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
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Location: Black Hills
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Makes me want to see ToB again. Makes sense a Japanese wife would tone down the emasculating talk.
"The Call" is 2/3 of a reasonably gripping suspense movie, sadly tacked to an ending of unfathomable idiocy. Only watched it because I think Halle Berry has a pretty mouth and the trailer promised lots of call center CU shots of said mouth. |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2013 12:32 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: New York City
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bartist wrote: Makes me want to see ToB again. Makes sense a Japanese wife would tone down the emasculating talk.
"The Call" is 2/3 of a reasonably gripping suspense movie, sadly tacked to an ending of unfathomable idiocy. Only watched it because I think Halle Berry has a pretty mouth and the trailer promised lots of call center CU shots of said mouth.
How is Abigail Breslin? |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Thu Jul 11, 2013 8:35 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
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Location: Black Hills
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The role didn't really bring out her talent, IMO. Lots of DID (damsel in distress) emoting, screaming and weeping and whimpering, when she's trapped in a car trunk. Then she gets plucky.  |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Fri Jul 12, 2013 1:03 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
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Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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I watched Gold Diggers of 1935 and 1937. Of these 1933>1935>>1937. 1935 has the amazing production number of "Lullaby of Broadway," and "The Words are in My Heart," which is that supposedly has 56 white grand pianos, but I think I counted 64. Maybe eight of them were props. It also has Gloria Stuart when she was an ingenue. 1937 has only one big production number, "All Is Fair in Love and War," which is also a great song, and had Dick Powell and Joan Blondell playing lovers, which was probably easy since they'd just gotten married or were about to.
1935 has a good cast that includes Adolphe Menjou, Alice Brady, Hugh Herbert and Glenda Farrell, and has a lot of fun with people caging money out of tightwad dowager Brady, who's the widow of the Flypaper King. 1937 also had Farrell (she's terrific) and a hypochondriac Broadway producer Victor Moore, whose crooked partners have squandered his money in the stock market and now suggest (at Farrell's suggestion) that they take out a $1 million insurance policy and wait for Moore to die. They hire Dick Powell, playing about the most incompetent life insurance agent imaginable, and they have pretty much to lead Moore and Powell by the nose, to both's bewilderment. Moore and Powell, and later Moore and Farrell play off each other pretty well. There's a very nice scene toward the end between Moore and Farrell where they show how good they could be. Blondell's good as usual, and Powell's in fine voice.
There was also a 1929 one called "Gold Diggers of Broadway", which is now mostly lost, but is notable as the musical that gave us "Tiptoe Through the Tulips," and is a remake of a silent film which in turn was based on a play. One of the surviving reels contains the "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" production number and is on the disc of "Gold Diggers of 1937." There's also a 1938 one, "Gold Diggers in Paris." |
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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: Fri Jul 12, 2013 6:11 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
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Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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| State of the art, 1929: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZ_4Xy7xXI. Seriously. Given the challenge of adjusting to sound technology, this is pretty impressive, and a decided advance over "The Broadway Melody." |
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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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