Oh I've been working my way through the Alan Ladd filmography ever since seeing Shane for sure. He's one of those actors that I just instantly like no matter the performance.
A well-placed assumption, then
They did Saigon togheter as well, btw.
That one has somehow eluded me.
This Gun for Hire is on my "bloody magnificent" list, which is a ranking just below the elated GOAT minoris and GOAT majoris categories. So yeah I do love it pretty darn much. Veronica's character in that movie is one of my favorite heroines in film history and Alan Ladd is just fantastic as well. I do really wish she had been gifted more roles like that one.
Never seen Blue Dahlia. The Glass Key is very good though. Ladd got beat up pretty badly in that one. Veronica was painfully underused, however, barely a presence at all.
I'd rank them
This Gun for Hire,
The Glass Key, and
The Blue Dahlia, but even though
The Blue Dahlia is third out of three on my list, that doesn't mean it isn't still really cool. The ending might feel a bit rushed (at least that's what I have in my memory) but Ladd gets some clutch help from his supporting cast, especially the always awesome William Bendix.
The Shop Around the Corner is one of the best of it's kind, IMO.
Nah. The scripts aren't bad (most of his hits were written by the same guy and he wasn't bad at putting a story together) but I'm immune to the "Lubitsch Touch." I'll take Cukor, Hawks, Stevens, Capra, or McCarey every day of the week.
Travolta of Serbia? Yeah that's a pretty apt comparison.
I thought
Killing Seasons was at least sort-of watchable but it sure-did fail to achieve what it was going for.
Yes, Travolta of Serbia. I'd agree with the "at least sort of watchable" label but I knew going in that it'd be very low quality shit and it was.
I assume the unveiling of this information puts an end to our acquaintances?
This thinking befuddles me. Why are we to assume that it doesn't mean anything to Laura? It seems pretty clear that it does. She even wants a cowboy hat for Christ sake.
I don't know. I'm pretty far removed from the initial experience now, so it's hard connecting back up with what I was feeling, but I just felt that something wasn't right, that Laura was being used to facilitate a meaningful connection that we were capable of making as viewers but that she wasn't capable of making as a character.
Perhaps I was just looking for someone to tell me I was worrying for nothing.
The Sopranos is SO fucking good. I didn't realize how genius it was the first time I watched it. This second viewing, WOW, I am so impressed with it's cultural and psychological commentary, how relevant it is for understanding the world.
As someone who struggled for a long time (and occasionally still struggles) with anxiety, I have a particularly strong connection to Tony. I identify so much with the "What ever happened to Gary Cooper?" line. It captures perfectly that twin sentiment of, on the one hand, "There must be someone out there who's put together correctly," and, on the other, "I wonder what it'd feel like if
I'd been put together correctly."
Eden was not real correct? Laura got the idea from the X-Men comic books. So the kids made it to the border, but there is no sanctuary waiting for them on the other side, they're just going to die of exposure in the Canadian wilderness right?
Sorry if that's pessimistic.
Eden wasn't real in the sense that she didn't show up and immediately start skipping down the Yellow Brick Road. But it was real in the sense that it fueled not just her but several like-minded people and inspired them to come together for a common cause and commit themselves to making something out of nothing.
It's a testament to romanticism and the perfect answer to skeptics and nihilists (like Logan). It's not "real" in the straw man sense of a fantasy land where all hardship and negativity is magically erased from the human experience but it is real in the profoundly human sense of driving us to be the best versions of ourselves.
@Dragonlordxxxxx Ricky?
europe? What say you?
Alright I lol'd at the "basement business" thing.
I get what the response should be to that, yet I still feel like Jerry in
The Pony Remark: Am I wrong?
Assuming we can define "aesthetic sensibility" as a preference for a certain kind of tone/texture
If this is what we're working from, then I agree with what you're saying, but for me, "aesthetic sensibility" encompasses more than just tone/texture. That'd be more "formal sensibility." Aesthetic sensibility would also encompass elements of plot and character if not going all the way up to and including larger moral/philosophical perspectives.
What I think we're seeing now is people liking the form that feels good. When good content is presented in a certain way, it resonates with them. Great. The problem is their sensibilities are so tethered to that particular style of presentation that even if something is saying fuckall, they leave the cinema thinking, "That wasn't so bad."
The flip side to this coin is when a film is about something "deep" and people go crazy for it even if the experience of the film sucks. It's all about that balance.
This of course leads us to the argument: should a film have something to say? I suppose not.
Your position would seem to be that it
should. People are often wary of saying things like "a film
must have something to say" for fear of being fascists and stifling artistic expression, but people shouldn't be wary of saying things like "a film
should have something to say." That opens the door to conversation and debate since "should" implies reasons, typically of both moral and aesthetic varieties.
(Oh and I've meant to ask a million times: can you recommend me some Cavell please?)
For film theory/philosophy,
The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. It gets a little esoteric, but that's due more to Cavell's style and less to any kind of jargon issues. And, if you're inclined to read this one, try to get your hands on the expanded edition from 1979. The addendum, "More of
The World Viewed," is one of my favorite things Cavell's ever written.
For philosophy/film criticism,
Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage and
Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. He gets pretty far out on some pretty flimsy limbs in analyzing the films he does, but whether he says something that makes you wonder if he even watched the right movie or whether he hits the nail so perfectly on the head that it makes you wonder how you could've missed the nail by so much, every page will have you thinking.
And then, if you're feeling bored and like you have an endless amount of free time and tons of unused brain cells,
Must We Mean What We Say? is a great compilation of philosophical essays, many of which touch on issues in aesthetics, while
The Claim of Reason is simply my favorite philosophical text.
I can respond to this, but would you be able to explain to me what's in bold? In the context of talking about a film? An example, perhaps?
Sure. The emotion-to-reason route is a matter of introspection: "I feel x, but I don't know why or what it means." The reason-to-emotion route isn't quite as linear. The best example I can think of is
Inception. From that first viewing through the many subsequent times I watched it in theaters (not to mention the dozens of times I've watched my Blu-ray), I could just straight-up
feel what an important movie it was to me. Everything about it just resonated with me, and even though I couldn't articulate the depths of its profundity very well (and I tried to do it on here a lot at the time), I at least knew,
emotionally, that it was profound.
For some people, that's enough ("Don't think,
feel..."). For me, that's never enough. I want to know
why I feel what I feel, what it means (about the film, about the filmmaker, and about myself). Over the years, particularly through reading Cavell and his discussion of the "problem" of skepticism (in both of its variants, namely skepticism of the external world and skepticism of other minds), I started to get better at articulating the philosophical perspective on existence that seemed to make the most sense, the way of being in the world (to invoke Heidegger, a favorite of Cavell's though not of mine) or the form of life (to invoke Wittgenstein, another favorite of Cavell's and also a favorite of mine) that seemed the most conducive to a happy and fulfilling experience on earth.
Then I went back to
Inception. Through no introspective efforts, without even considering
Inception alongside Cavell, I started to see in
Inception what I saw in Cavell (and Wittgenstein), that same perspective on existence and living. I finally understood why I was so drawn to
Inception, what it was about it that I found so moving, and when I was able to articulate that, the feeling of watching
Inception morphed and became something I'd call transcendent. Just sticking with introspection, I might never have been able to access those emotions and articulate those feelings, but in the realm of "pure reason," I found another route to my emotions.
Either way, the fact of the matter is that any separation of reason and the emotions has to be metaphorical or purely for heuristic purposes, because in our actual lived experience, there is no separation.
(Then again,
Caveat can speak more to the psychological aspects of this shit, so if my philosophy-speak is leading me to trample on psychological tenets that contradict my claims, please let me know.)
Mine is a weird thing. At some point I worked out that I was better at understanding what a movie was saying and whether it was any good when I figured out how it was working me. I've described this before to people when they're confused about my approach: A few years ago I just started questioning every single thing I felt while I was watching something. As in, I'd try and work out what happened on the screen that made me feel a certain way. Even with films that had no hold on me, that I was bored watching. I'd question why I was bored. That was especially interesting.
Trust me when I tell you that you would love the work of David Bordwell. His book
Narration in the Fiction Film will have you hard for all 357 pages
He explains his perspective - which sounds like your perspective - in a later book entitled
Making Meaning:
"Most broadly and basically, I suggest that the questions of composition, function, and effect that interpretive criticism sets out to answer are most directly addressed and best answered by a self-conscious historical poetics of cinema. I conceive this as the study of how, in determinate circumstances, films are put together, serve specific functions, and achieve specific effects [...] Most textual effects are the result of deliberate and founding choices, and these affect form, style, and different sorts of meaning. Just as a poet's use of iambic pentameter or sonnet form is unlikely to be involuntary, so the filmmaker's decisions about camera placement, performance, or editing constitute relatively stable creative acts whose situational logic can be investigated [...] As a historian of forms, genres, and styles, the poetician starts from the concrete assumptions embedded in the filmmaker's craft. Sometimes these are articulated by practitioners; sometimes they must be inferred from the product and the mode of production. The poetician aims to analyze the conceptual and empirical factors - norms, traditions, habits - that govern a practice and its products. Poetics thus offers explanations, of an intentionalist, functionalist, or causal sort."
Fair enough. LOL. But you see what I mean right? Why it's so effective that people just know it as "the pencil scene"?
To borrow from Bordwell, I understand the "situational logic" of that particular "creative act." I'm just not a fan of Nolan's PG-style violence. I took my dad to see both
The Dark Knight and
Inception in theaters, and after
Inception, he commented on how he liked Nolan's style of action, how when people get shot in his films they just drop and the action moves on rather than having their brains get blown out or them fall down in a pool of blood. That's the part I
don't like. That's not to say that I
need buckets of blood for a movie to be enjoyable, but when I can feel how tame a certain filmmaker is, it can bother me, and in this respect (virtually the only respect, which says a lot for him), Nolan bothers me.
On the flip side, there wasn't anything tame about
Logan, yet at the same time, it wasn't over-the-top. It was simply, straightforwardly, unabashedly "This is what it looks like when a dude with claws stabs somebody in the face."
