Floyd D Barber
AV Clubber ![*](//storage.proboards.com/forum/images/stars/star_skyblue.png)
The Train I used to Drive (not me driving, though)
Posts: 7,597
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Post by Floyd D Barber on Oct 26, 2020 16:34:18 GMT -5
I didn't remember that this had ever been a thing, and had never seen it, but I stumbled upon a 2016 remake of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was all just so.......unnecessary. I guess that was the moment when the gentrification of Rocky Horror was complete. It was sad.
It had a few moments. Very few. It was great to see Tim Curry, but also a bit sad, seeing him struggling with dialog after his stroke. The rest of the cast was adequate, but it suffered from too many of them trying to sound exactly like the original performers. If they had staged a new production, that would have been one thing, but this seemed too much like a community theater lip syncing the original. The tone of the entire thing was all wrong. Rocky Horror was Times Square in 1975, and this was Times Square today. Rocky Horror was a Grimm's Fairy Tale, and this was the Disney remake. It was all way too bright, and clean, and shiny. They made it wholesome. It was the Impossible Burger to Rocky Horror's mostly raw, bloody, 40% fat, greasy mystery meat burger. It was, literally, the network TV version of the midnight movie.
Rocky Horror was never meant to be wholesome family entertainment. It is supposed to be subversive. It was, and is, important to many people, but it was never meant to be comfort viewing. Inspirational, possibly. Hopeful, in it's own demented way, sure. But not a bland "feel good" experience. If you weren't uncomfortable watching it for the first time, you didn't get it. This production scrubbed all the grime, filth, darkness, and sleaziness from it. They de-fanged and declawed it. They painted it, brightly lit it, and brought in ferns. This is why we can't have nice things.
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oppy all along
TI Forumite
Who's been messing up everything? It was oppy all along
Posts: 2,767
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Post by oppy all along on Oct 26, 2020 17:31:14 GMT -5
I didn't remember that this had ever been a thing, and had never seen it, but I stumbled upon a 2016 remake of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was all just so.......unnecessary. I guess that was the moment when the gentrification of Rocky Horror was complete. It was sad.
It had a few moments. Very few. It was great to see Tim Curry, but also a bit sad, seeing him struggling with dialog after his stroke. The rest of the cast was adequate, but it suffered from too many of them trying to sound exactly like the original performers. If they had staged a new production, that would have been one thing, but this seemed too much like a community theater lip syncing the original. The tone of the entire thing was all wrong. Rocky Horror was Times Square in 1975, and this was Times Square today. Rocky Horror was a Grimm's Fairy Tale, and this was the Disney remake. It was all way too bright, and clean, and shiny. They made it wholesome. It was the Impossible Burger to Rocky Horror's mostly raw, bloody, 40% fat, greasy mystery meat burger. It was, literally, the network TV version of the midnight movie.
Rocky Horror was never meant to be wholesome family entertainment. It is supposed to be subversive. It was, and is, important to many people, but it was never meant to be comfort viewing. Inspirational, possibly. Hopeful, in it's own demented way, sure. But not a bland "feel good" experience. If you weren't uncomfortable watching it for the first time, you didn't get it. This production scrubbed all the grime, filth, darkness, and sleaziness from it. They de-fanged and declawed it. They painted it, brightly lit it, and brought in ferns. This is why we can't have nice things.
I never got that Rocky Horror Picture Show was meant to be subversive. When I was a kid I thought it was just a really fun movie. Everyone's wearing funny costumes and singing, there's a space ship and laser guns, and the main character dressed up like my old babysitter. How did something so tame become this transgressive countercultural icon?
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Floyd D Barber
AV Clubber ![*](//storage.proboards.com/forum/images/stars/star_skyblue.png)
The Train I used to Drive (not me driving, though)
Posts: 7,597
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Post by Floyd D Barber on Oct 26, 2020 18:25:44 GMT -5
I didn't remember that this had ever been a thing, and had never seen it, but I stumbled upon a 2016 remake of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was all just so.......unnecessary. I guess that was the moment when the gentrification of Rocky Horror was complete. It was sad.
It had a few moments. Very few. It was great to see Tim Curry, but also a bit sad, seeing him struggling with dialog after his stroke. The rest of the cast was adequate, but it suffered from too many of them trying to sound exactly like the original performers. If they had staged a new production, that would have been one thing, but this seemed too much like a community theater lip syncing the original. The tone of the entire thing was all wrong. Rocky Horror was Times Square in 1975, and this was Times Square today. Rocky Horror was a Grimm's Fairy Tale, and this was the Disney remake. It was all way too bright, and clean, and shiny. They made it wholesome. It was the Impossible Burger to Rocky Horror's mostly raw, bloody, 40% fat, greasy mystery meat burger. It was, literally, the network TV version of the midnight movie.
Rocky Horror was never meant to be wholesome family entertainment. It is supposed to be subversive. It was, and is, important to many people, but it was never meant to be comfort viewing. Inspirational, possibly. Hopeful, in it's own demented way, sure. But not a bland "feel good" experience. If you weren't uncomfortable watching it for the first time, you didn't get it. This production scrubbed all the grime, filth, darkness, and sleaziness from it. They de-fanged and declawed it. They painted it, brightly lit it, and brought in ferns. This is why we can't have nice things.
I never got that Rocky Horror Picture Show was meant to be subversive. When I was a kid I thought it was just a really fun movie. Everyone's wearing funny costumes and singing, there's a space ship and laser guns, and the main character dressed up like my old babysitter. How did something so tame become this transgressive countercultural icon? I think it had a lot to do with the time in which it was created. I don't know, Maybe it did it's job, and society caught up and it isn't really transgressive anymore. In that case, good, I guess. But attitudes were so different back then, that it was quite subversive for it's time, at least in the US.
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Post by haysoos on Oct 26, 2020 18:33:49 GMT -5
Saw John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) this weekend. I knew even less about it going in than I did Alien. Man, what a movie. The effects! The tension and suspense! Kurt Russell's beard! I feel no real need to watch the 2011 sequel/prequel/remake. This was great just as it was. The prequel/sequel was just...there. The CGI was definitely inferior to the practical SFX of the original, and story-wise it was just "meh". Apparently they did a bunch of practical effects for the prequel, and then in post-production someone thought they looked cheesy, and scrubbed them all and replaced them with super shitty CGI. I've seen some of the practical effects shots, and they're 1000 times better than the CGI they replaced them with. I almost feel bad for the film-makers until I remember that the rest of the movie around those effects is largely unnecessary and pretty dull.
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Post by haysoos on Oct 26, 2020 18:38:53 GMT -5
This weekend, when I wasn't crippled with a migraine, I managed to watch the original 1932 Boris Karloff version of The Mummy.
I was surprised at how much of the back story was kept for the Brendan Fraser/Rachel Weisz version, although that's where the similarities end. Boris Karloff is pretty excellent, and he looks amazingly dessicated, but the movie itself is drier than a mummy fart.
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Post by pairesta on Oct 27, 2020 6:07:09 GMT -5
We did indeed watch Aliens with my daughter and as predicted she loved it. She was a bit irked that all the "good characters" died right away: Frost, Apone, and Drake, apparently. But she said she liked it more than the first one. My wife enthusiastically agreed; had she not seen this before?
We turned things over to my wife to chose the next one. She's a bit more of a horror freak than either myself or my daughter and so we were both bracing for her to pick Nightmare on Elm Street or something. Oddly, though, and out of nowhere, she picked Night of the Comet. This used to run on HBO all the time back in the day, but I realized going in I'd never seen it all the way through. It's pretty great! So rare to see a movie from that era with two women leads. My daughter also loved it. "I liked how nonchalant they were about the apocalypse." She remarked. This would be a prime candidate for a remake, I'd think.
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ABz B👹anaz
Grandfathered In
This country is (now less of) a shitshow.
Posts: 1,928
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Post by ABz B👹anaz on Oct 28, 2020 15:18:04 GMT -5
The Princess Bride - Finished watching this with my daughter last night. She really enjoyed it! (She actually watched part of it without me.) At the end, when Peter Falk said "As you wish!" she grinned and laughed.
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Post by chalkdevil 😈 on Oct 28, 2020 16:35:47 GMT -5
The Princess Bride - Finished watching this with my daughter last night. She really enjoyed it! (She actually watched part of it without me.) At the end, when Peter Falk said "As you wish!" she grinned and laughed. I remember being really little when I saw this with my siblings and we all thought that when Falk says "As you wish!" that meant that he was really Wesley all grown up. Feel like maybe we didn't have a great grasp of how time worked, or, you know, how Cary Elwes speaking with an English accent could eventually age into Peter Falk.
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Post by sarapen on Oct 29, 2020 9:46:30 GMT -5
We did indeed watch Aliens with my daughter and as predicted she loved it. She was a bit irked that all the "good characters" died right away: Frost, Apone, and Drake, apparently. But she said she liked it more than the first one. My wife enthusiastically agreed; had she not seen this before? Did you watch the director's cut? There were a few things added, like Ripley discovering that her daughter died of old age, and the scene where I think Hudson and Ripley were testing out the robot sentry guns. Also, I'm almost positive your daughter will hate Alien 3.
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Post by Prole Hole on Oct 30, 2020 11:28:11 GMT -5
Parasite, at long last. It's... fine? Good, sure, but beyond the whole foreign-movie-wins-best-picture thing I'm not 100% sure what all the fuss is about. It was very Wes Anderson-y, which is fine and no bad thing, and it's well made and well acted, and it makes its points in a smart way (if not succinctly, which seems to be common in a lot of Korean stuff I've watched). But I really did go in expecting a modern classic and came out thinking I'd watched a perfectly cromulent film. Misplaced expectations maybe?
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Post by Nudeviking on Oct 30, 2020 20:04:25 GMT -5
Back to the Future (1985) - Back to the Future was on basic cable this morning so I watched it with my kid and now she's walking around the living room bellowing, "Shit!" and laughing hysterically.
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Post by Superb Owl 🦉 on Nov 1, 2020 9:35:02 GMT -5
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
Well, choices were certainly made, weren’t they? I’m not mad, though.
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Post by Nudeviking on Nov 1, 2020 19:34:37 GMT -5
Back to the Future Part II (1989) - My daughter wanted to see part two after watching the first one yesterday. I think it’s fun that they totally whiffed on what the future year of 2015 was going to be like but somehow nail the look and feel of 2020 when they show the alternate year 1985 after Biff uses an almanac to bet on sports and become a millionaire. Anyway my kid wanted to watch the third one as soon as this one was finished but it was nearly lunchtime and she had homework and I had housework to do so we didn’t but I assume we’ll probably watch it sometime this week.
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Post by Superb Owl 🦉 on Nov 1, 2020 21:01:30 GMT -5
Back to the Future Part II (1989) - My daughter wanted to see part two after watching the first one yesterday. I think it’s fun that they totally whiffed on what the future year of 2015 was going to be like but somehow nail the look and feel of 2020 when they show the alternate year 1985 after Biff uses an almanac to bet on sports and become a millionaire. Anyway my kid wanted to watch the third one as soon as this one was finished but it was nearly lunchtime and she had homework and I had housework to do so we didn’t but I assume we’ll probably watch it sometime this week. Yes...fun
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Post by pairesta on Nov 2, 2020 7:26:30 GMT -5
We did indeed watch Aliens with my daughter and as predicted she loved it. She was a bit irked that all the "good characters" died right away: Frost, Apone, and Drake, apparently. But she said she liked it more than the first one. My wife enthusiastically agreed; had she not seen this before? Did you watch the director's cut? There were a few things added, like Ripley discovering that her daughter died of old age, and the scene where I think Hudson and Ripley were testing out the robot sentry guns. Also, I'm almost positive your daughter will hate Alien 3. I love the Aliens Director's Cut, but this was on HBO Max, so they only had Theatrical Release. With alot of the franchise movies we're showing her (BTTF, Jaws, Jurassic Park, Alien), we just stick to the original and maybe the sequel if it's good, but that's it. So we're two and done with the Aliens movies; they get much gorier from here out and I don't think she'd like them. Besides, I hate Alien3 anyways.
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Post by haysoos on Nov 2, 2020 10:37:44 GMT -5
Did you watch the director's cut? There were a few things added, like Ripley discovering that her daughter died of old age, and the scene where I think Hudson and Ripley were testing out the robot sentry guns. Also, I'm almost positive your daughter will hate Alien 3. I love the Aliens Director's Cut, but this was on HBO Max, so they only had Theatrical Release. With alot of the franchise movies we're showing her (BTTF, Jaws, Jurassic Park, Alien), we just stick to the original and maybe the sequel if it's good, but that's it. So we're two and done with the Aliens movies; they get much gorier from here out and I don't think she'd like them. Besides, I hate Alien3 anyways. The theatrical cut of Aliens is great. The scene where we find out that Ripley had a daughter adds so much, and I can't imagine why they removed it all. It basically explains her entire character arc, from despondent traumatized victim to bad-ass mother protector goddess. The scene with the sentry guns is also great. It's the first we see the enormity of the infestation facing the marines. This isn't going to be a single entity picking off stragglers one by one like the original, or the Thing. This is a maelstrom, a force of nature. They are facing overwhelming odds. The tension as we helplessly watch the ammo counts dwindling on the guns is palpable, and when they call off the attack the relief is then quickly followed by the dreadful question of why they stopped the attack. It also sets up the next encounter as showing the xenomorphs figuring out and circumventing their defenses. They're not just clever, they're downright smart! It is a little long though, and obviously the movie still works without it, so to keep the run time under 3 hours, you can kind of see why it was cut. The scene where the LV-426 colonists are sent to the alien ship is wholly unnecessary though, is waaaaay too long, and undercuts the mystery of what happened to the colonists, and who sent them. Even just for delaying the reveal of what a weasel rat-fuck Burke is, it has to go. Alien 3 is just unforgiveable from the very beginning where Newt and Hicks are killed off screen. That we're back to a single entity picking off stragglers just makes it worse. That the people the entity is picking off are generally terrible or boring makes it worse yet. That those characters are generally played by excellent actors, and it's directed by David Fincher, so it should theoretically be good just makes the whole exercise that much more depressing. The dog form xenomorph is mildly interesting, but little else of the movie is worthwhile. I've heard the "Assembly Cut" is better, but given those terrible building blocks, I can't imagine it being worthwhile and have never seen it. Alien Resurrection, aka Alien vs Serenity is just so tonally confused, and has so much crap thrown in a blender that it just comes out a molecular-acid-tinged cocktail of interesting scenes that are barely connected by anything resembling a coherent narrative. Prometheus is an attempt to make "At the Mountains of Madness" with the Lovecraft serial numbers scraped off and "Alien" clumsily pasted over with gaffer tape and Sharpie. Most of the character's actions are so incredibly stupid that you're actually glad when they're killed off. Covenant is slightly better than Prometheus.
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Post by chalkdevil 😈 on Nov 2, 2020 11:02:15 GMT -5
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) Well, choices were certainly made, weren’t they? I’m not mad, though. Coppola was swinging for the fences on that one and I love it. Even when it's terrible it's terrible in the best ways.
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Post by chalkdevil 😈 on Nov 2, 2020 11:49:08 GMT -5
Spooky Halloween weekend views:
Hocus Pocus I saw this in theaters and I don't think I'd seen it since, but thought I should see what all the kids these days are into. It was pretty okay. The dude main character is fine. Thora Birch is kind of great as his annoying little sister, except when she has to act sad. There is a girl love interest for the dude but does basically nothing. I'm not even sure she has any real lines in the second half. I do I remember having a crush on Sarah Jessica Parker in this as a twelve year old and I stand by that crush.
Anyway, I can see this being a Halloween staple for people who watched this a lot as a kid. It's not actively bad. I mean the plot barely makes any sense and there are some weird edits where it feels like they just chopped out whole bits without much care to get the run time down, but, you know, kids movie. There's definitely some campy fun here. Probably won't be on my normal Halloween rotation but I wouldn't begrudge anyone who was into it.
The Addams Family (1991) Still great. I fell asleep at the Mamushka though and didn't wake up until the end. In my defense, it was 9pm, I'd had one beer, and I am a middle-aged man.
Interview with the Vampire I don't think I'd ever really seen this all the way through or not edited for TV. Maybe once many years ago. Anyway, I don't know if y'all are aware, but there is a lot of gay subtext in this movie. I mean, it's probably barely even subtext. I guess I'd be curious if the culture at large was picking up on it in 1994 when such things would have felt a good bit more scandalous.
I do like this movie. It is still pretty sexy in a way that movies don't seem to be anymore. The performances are great. Excepting maybe Pitt. He certainly has some rough moments but occasionally pulls off some nice affecting bits of acting, which I think is pretty much how I always feel about him. He is so, so pretty though.
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Post by Superb Owl 🦉 on Nov 2, 2020 11:53:27 GMT -5
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) Well, choices were certainly made, weren’t they? I’m not mad, though. Coppola was swinging for the fences on that one and I love it. Even when it's terrible it's terrible in the best ways. Yea I’d never seen it, but I just got done reading the book so it seemed appropriate. The absolute cranking up to 11 of damn near everything compared to the book had me grinning the whole time even when it wasn’t objectively “good”. And for as questionable as other casting may have been, I did love Hopkins’ Van Helsing.
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Post by Jimmy James on Nov 4, 2020 7:55:02 GMT -5
Memorial viewing of The Hunt For Red October with my wife. This was a couple days ago, I started a free trial of Showtime specifically for this, which they were appropriately enough removing from their library on the last day of October. Overall, I like Connery and Baldwin's performances as they get the best lines, though even as a kid I recognized chief engineer Melehkin and sonar guru Jones as the real cool ones. National security dude Richard Jordan gets some good moments ("You've lost another one, Andrei?") but his whole introduction of himself as a sleazy politician seems too self aware. The nationalistic / militaristic overtones struck me more this time, I don't know if I was too young or just didn't think about it the last time I watched this.
Also forgot that the quickly dispatched political officer's name is Putin, as I don't think the real-world Putin had name recognition the last time I saw this. But the most amusing detail I don't think I picked up on before was Dr. Tim Curry complaining about the food in the wardroom, which makes perfect sense if the cook isn't on board for his culinary skill.
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Nov 5, 2020 2:31:32 GMT -5
Here's the horror movies I watched last month in honor of the popular holiday Halloween. Rated in terms of how many ghosts I had rather have seen, which, after reading the bad old-timey gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (in which a character utters the amazing sentence "I had rather have seen ten whole ghosts," after looking at a giant's leg), is my new metric for rating horror films.
Night of the Living Dead (1968) dir. George Romero - Pretty great. I'm not a huge fan of zombie movies, but this is an effective movie, that does a really good job of ratcheting up the tension on a shoestring budget. It really is like the best example of what a B-movie can be. Even the gory stuff, while not tremendously realistic, was pretty unnerving to me. Local law enforcement just going around shooting everything that moved the day after without checking to see if they were a zombie first, and the media's entirely credulous coverage of what is essentially vigilante death squad makes for pretty decent social commentary without being too on the nose. Rating: I had rather have seen 👻👻👻👻👻👻👻👻+1/2
Season of the Witch (1972), dir. George Romero - I watched this before Night of the Living Dead, and was kind of surprised at how little action there is in it, given Romero's reputation as the zombie movie guy. It doesn't manage to get over a tiny budget as successfully as Night of the Living Dead, but it's still a decent movie. The basic premise is "middle aged housewife in the 1970s gets into witchcraft. There's a lot of jarringly edited dream sequences which I thought mostly worked, a sexual relationship between the lead and a college student who looks like he's about 45 of our Earth years old, and a lot of reminders of what a horrible, horrible time in human history the 1970s must have been to live through, culturally speaking. It's also both a surprisingly radical embrace of feminism while at the same time a somewhat reactionary critique of the movement, depending on how one interprets the end of the film. Rating: I had rather have seen 👻👻👻👻👻👻+1/2
The Crazies (1973) dir. George Romero - The military accidentally releases a bioweapon into the water system of a small town in America. Chaos ensues as the military rounds up the populace and murders anyone who refuses to be rounded up. None of the authorities have any idea what they're doing. It's a scathing critique of the militarization of American society. But it didn't really work for me, because it's all a lot of scenes of various military officers, scientists, and other authorities yelling at each other about how they're going to stop the spread of the bioweapon interspersed with pretty uninteresting action sequences which all play out pretty much the same. It's an interesting concept for a horror film, and, as with the previous two Romero films I've reviewed, clearly didn't have much of a budget, but it still kind of fails in execution for me. Rating: I had rather have seen 👻👻👻👻+1/2
The Wicker Man (1973) dir. Robin Hardy - Great movie. Edward Woodward is extremely good as a cop constantly infuriated at having his authority undercut and as a religious zealot, and Christopher Lee is fucking great in this movie. It's mostly just kind of creepy rather than scary, per se, until the end, which is really fantastic. Woodward's character is not especially sympathetic, but there is something kind of tragic in his attempt to be a good martyr or whatever when it's completely clear that he can't get out of being sacrificed and he doesn't really prove to be up to the task. Rating: 👻👻👻👻👻👻👻👻👻
Dracula (1958) dir. Terence Fisher - Peter Cushing is very good as Van Helsing, but unlike in The Wicker Man, I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about Christopher Lee's performance in this movie (the first of the Hammer Draculas). It's very much an old-timey horror movie, and I have a fondness for old-timey horror movies, so I still enjoyed it well enough, but for the most part it was merely competent. A couple of things that I thought worked pretty well: having Harker turn out to be visiting Castle Dracula because he knows he's a vampire and he already knows how to kill him, which I think is a good twist on what would have already been a well-known story to viewers. Also, Dracula's body rapidly stop-motion decaying at the end, which was reasonably effective for something filmed in the 1950s. Rating: 👻👻👻👻👻👻
Videodrome (1983) dir. David Cronenberg - Fuck yes! This movie kicks ass! Hell yeah! To be clear, obviously James Wood is a huge piece of shit, but also this movie is extremely good. Who ever could have known that Cronenberg was extremely good at making movies? It manages to be both very of its time, in its focus on VHS tapes as a good example of a new cutting edge technology, but it also feels very prescient in that its commentary on technology feels extremely applicable to modern times, so in that case it's only really "dated" in the superficial sense that it failed to predict the Internet. I like the way that it eludes any simple causal explanations for violence in American society; I guess it could be read as a facile commentary on how violent entertainment makes people violent, but I think that would be a pretty bad interpretation of the film, given that this is a movie where a character absurdly explains that his hallucinations about Videodrome were the cause of brain tumor rather than the other way around. I also like the way that all the violence that Wood's character may be hallucinating is all fairly fake looking 80s action movie violence, demonstrating his disconnect from reality, as compared to the genuinely disturbingly realistic violence on the actual videodrome tapes. Anyway, death to videodrome, long live the new flesh. Rating: 👻👻👻👻👻👻👻👻👻👻
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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Nov 5, 2020 16:54:15 GMT -5
Halloween watches sitting on in a .txt file now to be posted: The Witches of Eastwick, as is customary (my sister was subjected to the terrible nineties nostalgia kids’ witch movies and also used this as a counterpoint/palate cleanser) Re-Animator has been on my list of Halloween things to watch for literal years and now, with no parties of WeHo Halloween to distract me, I finally got around to it. Did I mainly watch this for young Jeffrey Combs (in another role that touches on scientific search for immortality)? Yes, but he’s both at the core of the film and his performance really makes West work in a way that makes that others wouldn’t necessarily be able to put off: he’s just mad enough to be more than a little off-putting at first, but as we get to know him we find himself rooting for him more and more, and there’s a pluckiness that makes it hard not to (I think Combs’s physical presence—strong but small, link a punctuation mark, does a lot of work too, making him seem even more like an underdog). Given that every post-undergrad department I’ve studied/taught/researched in has been absolutely dysfunctional I also liked the academic skullduggery plot. I’m not really a “gore” person in that I don’t seek it out, but this was unquestionably the bloodiest movie I’ve ever seen and it didn’t phase me (integral to the underlying dark humor, too). Seconds featured actual rhinoplasty and plastic surgery, and even though that’s literally daytime tv fodder it was a bit more discomforting. Maybe it’s because you hear that little chink sound as they hit the nasal bone, which somehow puts your hairs on end the way a bone saw doesn’t. A lot of it’s the lighting, too, high-contrast black-and-white where there’s no visible background to speak of. When Seconds premiered at Cannes this scene actually sent people to the restroom to vomit. Anyway this is an awesome movie, and the lighting and camera work (James Wong Howe and Frankenheimer really learning from his TV days, importing techniques used there as well as thinking on his feet) play a big role in that, being disorienting without calling too much attention to itself. But it’s the way this film crosses pretty much every swatch of (college-educated) American life in the sixties that’s fascinating. On the East Coast we have the public face of the Eastern Establishment, the more shadowy underworld of the truly wealthy (the sets here could, if filmed in color, easily be the in some awesome Bondian spy-fi movie—or hell even one of the SCDP offices—but are extremely ominous here). On the West Coast we have both the casual-but-sophisticated liberal professionals and the incipient proto-hippieism (overlapping, of course—we’re at the beginning of the California Ideology). And the film has something to say to all of them, and I think is pretty prophetic in how it treats the “just be” Californian stuff. I’m not really familiar with the sort of old movie musicals Rock Hudson starred in, so I mainly know him from here and the plaid wonder of Avalanche, so my impression of him as an actor is mostly from this and it’s good. He is great with the simultaneous subtle unease (his costuming choices in CA—in line with his new environment but still hints of east coast Ivy—sew this in) and slow embrace of his new environment. We also have another big DS9 crossover with an unrecognizable Salome Jens in her big film debut (the female shapeshifter, and like Combs there’s some thematic resonance here too), who’s very good and sort of an incarnation of a lot of the thematic stuff with the move. A bigger whoah is that Leonard Nimoy was also in this in as a socially-conscious doctor but his scenes were cut. Anyway I’d seen Seconds years ago in college in Chicago (thanks Doc Films!) and while I kind of got it on a lark at a Criterion sale (maybe to boost a # of discs for an additional discount, which is dumb but works), but being a native of the East Coast who moved to CA myself it really resonated to some degree, beyond just being a cool arty film. Also if you have the Criterion Channel I really recommend the featurette with Evans Frankenheimer (who provides a lot of the technical background if you really want to get into the cinematography and dollies and ƒ-stops) and Jens, who has a lot of fun acting stories.
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Floyd D Barber
AV Clubber ![*](//storage.proboards.com/forum/images/stars/star_skyblue.png)
The Train I used to Drive (not me driving, though)
Posts: 7,597
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Post by Floyd D Barber on Nov 6, 2020 20:58:48 GMT -5
Just watched Poltergeist, I hadn't seen it in years. Some of the effects look a little cheesy now, but for 1982 they were first rate. The entire movie holds up really well, really hits some nerves. I had either forgotten or hadn't picked up that the dog's name in the movie is E. Buzz.
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Post by Desert Dweller on Nov 7, 2020 23:06:23 GMT -5
Just watched Poltergeist, I hadn't seen it in years. Some of the effects look a little cheesy now, but for 1982 they were first rate. The entire movie holds up really well, really hits some nerves. I had either forgotten or hadn't picked up that the dog's name in the movie is E. Buzz.
When I was a kid, I had a friend who lived down the street who was a couple years older than I was. When I was 8 she made me watch Poltergeist and it scared the shit out of me. I had nightmares. I've never watched it again.
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Post by MrsLangdonAlger on Nov 9, 2020 11:32:39 GMT -5
Possessor
Extremely violent, but love that it's basically an anti-corporate horror movie.
Residue
Absolutely beautiful, unique, heartbreaking film about gentrification.
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Post by Prole Hole on Nov 9, 2020 11:35:11 GMT -5
The Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3 (1974) - It's amazing how easy it is to forget what a great movie this is. It's easy to quibble with some of the logic of the bad guys, and hearing ONE MILLION DOLLARS as a ransom is difficult to take seriously post-Austin Powers (though the response - "New York doesn't have a million dollars!" - does a better job of grounding the time of this move than the flares, sideburns and jive talk). But for the most part this is a sleek, effective thriller grounded in bucketloads of realism - what today would be called "gritty" but it's just so refreshing to watch a movie that does it unselfconsciously rather than straining to make things "dark". The accents alone are a joy to behold, Matthau is fantastic (as ever) and the whole thing is just incredibly enjoyable. And it's short - just a smidge over an hour and a half. I cannot emphasise enough how much I appreciate movies with the discipline to just stop. Fantastic all round.
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repulsionist
TI Forumite
actively disinterested
Posts: 3,624
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Post by repulsionist on Nov 9, 2020 15:41:43 GMT -5
Prole Hole, please consider a watch of D'Antoni's The Seven-Ups (1973) if you're ever feeling the need to watch something similar to The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.
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Post by Prole Hole on Nov 10, 2020 3:03:25 GMT -5
Prole Hole , please consider a watch of D'Antoni's The Seven-Ups (1973) if you're ever feeling the need to watch something similar to The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Thanks for the recommendation, in fact I don't think I have ever seen it though I'm aware of it. It'll be The French Connection next, but that'll be after.
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Post by MyNameIsNoneOfYourGoddamnBusin on Nov 10, 2020 18:05:38 GMT -5
Psycho—not my first time seeing it but this film always weirds me out, beyond the obvious stuff. I think it’s because, apart from the music, some of the suspense/pacing, and the blonde, it really doesn’t feel entirely like a Hitchcock film (I think he made North by Northwest right before this). It’s partly like his b-movie. So much of it—bland California location, dark view of sympathetic protagonist, bland “good” characters (Marion’s sister has no personality besides concerned sister, Martin Balsam’s good but the private dick isn’t anything more than a private dick either), kind of off story structure, the ending (pseudo-)psychological explanation or the viewer—would, if done poorly, be like one of those misanthropic exploitation films that were mocked on MST3K. But it’s done well here, and there’s legit, visible artistry in the black-and-white photography, even as it conveys a “cheap” feel. High-low brow, I guess. It was originally meant to be made-for-TV before Hitchcock figured out a way to pad out the running time. I'm not sure whether or not he even intended to direct it himself, as he very rarely directed any of the episodes of his television shows.
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Post by Prole Hole on Nov 11, 2020 6:58:56 GMT -5
As expected, The French Connection (1971) - Yeah, it's The French Connection so it's hard to know what else to say about it. I enjoyed it, though a bit less than The Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3, which I think overall is a better paced movie and one which ends a bit stronger. The performances are really what makes The French Connection, far more than the fairly rote bad-cops-a-bit-better-than-actual-bad-guys-but-not-by-much plot. Indeed, story-wise I don't think the movie does an especially great job of establishing the stakes (something else Pelham is better at) and some bits of it read as forehead-slappingly stupid by today's standards, especially the drugs hidden in the car. "Hey I tore this car apart, except for the really obvious cavity where the drugs might be stored!" just looks dumb now (and I'm having a hard time thinking it read better in the early 70's). But a never-better Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider make up for almost everything, and of course there's that fantastic car/train chase, free of the blaring over-the-top incidental music that would doubtless drown it out were it being done these days. When it's good its excellent but there's a few stretches where it's a bit... well, dull really. The business on the subway train, with Cloudy (Scheider) tailing Frog One (an also-excellent Fernando Rey) is absolutely fantastic, but there's a lot of wandering about/sitting in cars to get through as well. That might add to the realism (maybe...) but it can get a touch repetative. Still, overall great, and I'll get to The Seven Up's at the weekend.
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