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"Splurge post"!? This is obviously a copyright violation of my well-beloved and highly popular Mega-Posts.
Your mega posts?
All About Eve was very well done [...] The dialogue was entertaining though still had nothing on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Careful young grasshopper, the All About Eve cult is prosperous and powerful. You'll find many-a-cultists who will proclaim that it's the greatest script ever written.
I'm one of those cultists to which europe is referring. All About Eve is nothing less than a masterclass in screenwriting, and one that dwarfs Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
The problem with people who make criticisms like you are is that a) it being boring is subjective. Go watch Marvel movies where you're force fed simple humor and get your action fix through generic as fuck plot outlines.
I know you and Flemmy are cool, and I don't mean to open up old wounds, but I'm always curious why, if art is inherently subjective, the arthouse crowd always asserts as an objective fact that "Marvel movies" are "simple" and "generic as fuck." In these types of "mainstream vs arthouse" debates, the arthouse crowd always hides behind the subjectivity of interpretation while at the same time using as ammunition the objectivity of the (simple/generic/stupid/awful) mainstream.
Additionally:
Fool, this is art, and it's art at its most subjective.
An amazing video that shares all my viewpoints
These two posts are contradictory. Art "at its most subjective" means that there's no way two people could share any let alone all of their viewpoints.
Besides - and this is open to all of you - how much do you really buy the "art is subjective" thing? Honestly, in my own research, I've been toying with the idea of going full steam ahead and arguing that art is not subjective, neither in terms of interpretation (determining what a film means) nor evaluation (determining whether or not a film is good).
Existentialism is one of my philosophical jams (*ahem* Beauvoir > Rand *ahem*)
Seriously, though, if you want the best combination of dialogue-heavy and existentialism, you've got to check out the films of Ingmar Bergman. I think you'd especially dig stuff like To Joy, Wild Strawberries, Shame, The Passion of Anna, and most of all the miniseries Scenes from a Marriage (don't watch the chopped up "movie" version, the miniseries is where it's at).
this may sound a little weird but I'm hyped. I'm finally getting to watch Last of the Mohicans.
I also came to that one late. And I was similarly underwhelmed. The ending was 10/10 balls to the wall craziness, but everything prior was like a 4 or 5 out of 10 at best. That ending, though, and with the Morricone music, to boot? Fuck.
What the hell was Hail, Caesar?
You tell me. The trailers made it seem like my kind of Coen brothers movie. Was it similar to Fargo and offbeat or was it more Burn After Reading absurd? Or something else entirely?
Was forced to watch this movie called The Boy Next Door a while ago.
I remember seeing the tv spots and it just looked like melodramatic drivel.
You guys can hate all you want, but this is exactly why Lifetime movies exist. Lifetime has this type of movie locked the fuck down. They do this shit better than anybody. You want to see this movie done right? Watch shit like Video Voyeur with Angie Harmon, or A Teacher's Crime with Ashley Jones, or Kept Woman with Courtney Ford, or Her Infidelity with Rachel Hunter, or Stalked by my Doctor with Eric Roberts playing a psycho as only Eric Roberts can, or especially the Dina Meyer (schwing) movies like Web of Desire or Lethal Seduction.
Lifetime does melodrama like nobody else's motherfucking business.
There are good HK KF movies from before the 80's, but none of them (imo) can hold a candle to Police Story or the Project A movies that came out in the 80's. Jackie took kung-fu films to a whole new level with his big stunts, extremely creative fight choreography, and his use of everyday objects in his fights... and the car chases.
Just want to point out here that you're talking specifically about the action sequences. While stuff like the mall finale in Police Story or the Jackie vs Benny fights in Wheels on Meals and Dragons Forever outshine early Shaw Brothers stuff, there's not a single Jackie Chan or Sammo Hung film in existence that can even compete on an aesthetic or dramatic level with some of the stuff Chang Cheh or Chor Yuen were putting out like The One-Armed Swordsman, The Assassin, Golden Swallow, Duel for Gold, The Lizard, Killer Clans, etc.
I knocked three other Hitchcock films off the list. Topaz, Spellbound and Shadow of a Doubt.
I liked Spellbound a lot more than you did and Shadow of a Doubt a bit less. Spellbound is interesting because Hitchcock really sort of gave up trying to fend off Selznick, and you can see it in the fact that it's a movie of two parts because it's a movie from two authors. However, Hitchcock's genius can be seen in the way his movie completely undercuts Selznick's. I wrote this in a Hitchcock essay I published a few years ago and I still think it's accurate (ignore the psychoanalytic jargon, it was written by an undergrad eager to impress ):
https://www.academia.edu/7145254/The_Sublime_Stupidity_of_Alfred_Hitchcock
With its unambiguous appropriation of psychoanalysis as its narrative axis, the treatment of its subject matter causes Spellbound to function as a paradigm case of classical Hollywood distortion. The prologue that introduces the film reads as follows:
Our story deals with psychoanalysis, the method by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane. The analyst seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his hidden problems, to open the locked doors of his mind. Once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are uncovered and interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear…and the devils of unreason are driven from the human soul.
This sanitized view of the psychoanalytic process combined with the rosy conception of an ultimately untroubled subjectivity speak less to Hitchcock’s moral ambivalence and more to the classical Hollywood project of constructing a “cinema of integration.” As conceived by Todd McGowan, the cinema of integration is constituted by an “intermixing of desire and fantasy” wherein the cinema “works hand in hand with the functioning of [the dominant] ideology" so as to support its structure by obscuring the cracks in the universal, the irreducible antagonisms of subjectivity. The clash between Hitchcock and his producers, however, inadvertently created (in films ostensibly “integrated” and with the requisite “distortion”) films that “lay bare the ideological function” of the relationship between the cinema and the dominant ideology. The infamous battle over the ending of Suspicion virtually exposes the workings of fantasy, makes transparent the attempt to shield the film from the Real. The alterations made for the film version of Rebecca, wherein the protagonist did not really kill his first wife, thus allowing (an albeit ambiguous) reconciliation between him and his current wife, work similarly.
Having already made and fought battles over Rebecca and Suspicion, Spellbound comes at a point in Hitchcock’s career where his vision has matured to a point where it is literally impossible, even with Selznick insisting on the paradigmatic distortion of the field of subjectivity, for the cracks in the ontological stability of classical Hollywood narration to remain hidden. Spellbound progresses towards the inevitable “happy ending” marriage between the previously disturbed protagonist and his unwaveringly loving and devoted psychoanalyst, but due to Hitchcock’s presence, the phantasmatic cathexis of this denouement is negated in favor of an ambivalence that borders on pessimism. Early in the film, Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) is discussing the duplicity of love with (the man she believes to be) Dr. Anthony Edwardes (Gregory Peck). Juxtaposed with the opening prologue, Dr. Petersen’s views on love are nothing short of radical perversity, identifying love’s winsome splendor as the collective cancer plaguing society. She feels the problem with love is that people conceptualize it as one thing but experience it as another, the very definition of an antinomy in the Kantian sense. “Love” as such is “Gedankending,” an “object-of-thought,” something that is conceptually possible but experientially impossible. Dr. Petersen contends in this early segment that it is all too easy to imagine love and far too difficult to locate it empirically; the fact that the romantic coupling at the film’s end is in marked contrast to its previously asserted contention that such a harmonious union is sensu stricto impossible is far from a hypocritical compromise of Hitchcock’s position, however. Hitchcock achieves the limit of his success by introducing the crack in the universal, by exposing the workings of fantasy while Selznick, meanwhile, was impotently attempting to use it as a means of seduction.
The exponentially greater subversiveness of [his later films] is due to Hitchcock’s ability, as producer and director, to foreground his project of exposing the workings of fantasy as the main narrative concern rather than being forced to surreptitiously insert it as narratological subterfuge.
Shadow of a Doubt, meanwhile, just never popped for me. Maybe it's still too British. I don't know. It's almost like it's too restrained, like Hitchcock meant to have a simmering thriller with some black humor sprinkled in, but he turned the flame down too low and the fire was gone. I do love Joseph Cotten's performance, though. Such an underrated actor.
Taking an illegal turn into boring-land, maaaan did Kramer vs Kramer suck until the final act.
You prefer the Streep garbage to the Hoffman stuff? I remember, when I was watching Hoffman shit all the time, I'd always stop Kramer vs Kramer on rewatches at the last act. I didn't need to see Streep anymore than absolutely necessary.
Grapes of Wrath hit me right in the feels though.
I love Henry Fonda and I love John Carradine, but yuck. You know, speaking of Ford, I'd be interested to get your reactions on the two films that I have always found to be his best (other than The Searchers, which, with my apologies to Flemmy, I do consider to be a great film): Mary of Scotland, with Katharine Hepburn and Frederic March turning in splendid performances, and The Last Hurrah, with Spencer Tracy leading an extraordinary ensemble. Mary of Scotland has maybe the greatest close-up in the history of cinema (you'll know it when you see it) and The Last Hurrah has one of the greatest final shots in the history of cinema.
Oi! Bullitt68! Is The Last Man on Earth Vincet Price's best or worst performance? I can't decide. The entire movie left me feeling rather flabbergasted. I can't make head nor tail of it. It does any a certain something, that primal take on what would eventually evolve into zombies. And the ending where Price finally starts engaging with the evolved-vampires is rather intresting. But overall my impression was a cockeyed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I wouldn't say it's his best or his worst. It's just a movie that falls a bit flat even though it could've/should've been a horror classic.
Mangold's The Wolverine (2013) was a pleasant surprise.
QFT. Although the ending sucked.
I saw Sigh's post recommending The Wolverine, so I looked up how it fit within the chronology and decided it'd be a good idea to check it out. It was a fantastic movie all the way up until the ending. I didn't expect to, but I fucking loved just following Wolverine without the rest of the X-Men. He was always the most compelling character with his healing abilities coming with the price of eternal mental and physical pain and suffering, and all of that was amplified here as he grappled with his bizarre past and, over the course of the film, came to terms with Jean's death (which would've still been a good conflict had the third movie never been made). It was annoying to see him weakened for so much of the movie, but it was still awesome seeing him fuck up the Yakuza the whole time. By the end, though, with that ridiculous Iron Man monster thing somehow keeping old man Yashida alive, it just got too stupid.
There's a certain kind of director that no longer works today, that is true genius in the wrong era - the Wachowskis are the best example. The utter tonal insanity just doesn't cut it now despite basic function being met and then some. The criticisms are always about the over-the-top cheese but that they make classic Campbellian myths is never noted. Tarantino and the Coens are the only ones still able to keep butts in seats, but even they struggle (OH NOES TUPAC SONG), and are running on reputation. It's the Fincher and Nolan era, really. And it's a pity because in my not-so-humble opinion, they don't come close to those guys because of this.
Two questions. First: Are you saying you support Tupac in Django? Second - and your answer will determine whether or not we will still be friends moving forward - do you support this scene?
I'm also going to have to object, as a fellow Campbellian, to your contention that merely having a Campbellian story structure is equivalent to having a Get Out of Jail Free Card when it comes to criticisms of other stupid ass choices made within a Campbellian framework.
Lastly: How dare you imply that Christopher Nolan doesn't come close to the Wachowskis (unless what you are implying is that he doesn't come close to sucking as much ass).