Movies Serious Movie Discussion

[Uncommon Valor]

Barring his debut movie, has Steve Buscemi ever had the lead role in a movie?

 

[Bullitt68]

Just finished

Mary, Queen of Scots (2018)

I haven't been in here for a while but I saw this and I can't pass up an opportunity to recommend Mary of Scotland if you haven't already seen it. It's on Youtube but I'd recommend trying to get a higher-quality version, as the B&W studio aesthetic is particularly cool and crisp in this one. I have no idea what you'd think of it from the historical angle, but I just love Hepburn in it, I love her arc with Frederic March, I love John Carradine's supporting role, it's just a well-made and well-acted film that deserves way more love than it's gotten.

Ayyy congrats man, don't forget to post that syllabus when it's ready

I've got another week or two of crap to clear off my plate and then I'm going deep and rewatching a ton of shit to pick what goes where in the syllabus

Barring his debut movie, has Steve Buscemi ever had the lead role in a movie?

I recently saw him in The Death of Stalin. It has sort of an ensemble thing going, but I'd say that he was the main character.

 

[europe1]

Zorba The Greek (1964)

I've been looking for a person to quote "What kind of man are you, don't you even like dolphins?" at for so long now...

Despite some tragic elements - in fact it would be probably be better to say because of, or in the face of those tragic moments - it is a fundamentally life-affirming film.

Well... calling Zorba life-affirming is both the best and the worst way of describing the movie at the same time.

I mean, Zorba's mannerisms and ticks (the music, dancing, lust-greedy and hard-living attitude) is basically coping-mechanism for the horrors of life. His son dies, so the only way he has of dealing with it is to dance, since at least the rush of that physical activity bloats out his sadness.

Basically, it seems that if you want to be an individual of any kind, then you need to adopt Zorba's devil-may-care attitude just to emotionally survive. That is if you're a man. If you're a woman, then you're going to be honour-killed long before reaching that stage for shaming the collective.

Anthony Quinn is particularly fantastic as Zorba

Dude is a constant powerhouse.

Anthony Quinn has played as many ethnicities as Zorba has had jobs!

an almost Nietzschean character

I was thinking one of those Holy Fools from the Byzantine period but alright.

but more than a little mad.

Let's be fair now. It's the villagers who are mad. Zorba is the only sane man among them.

 

[HUNTERMANIA]

I don't think I've even watched any movies since my last post ITT. I downloaded that Deadwood movie and I haven't watched it yet. I need to do that, but there's just been so many sports events on lately I haven't had time to watch anything else.

 

[Rimbaud82]

Arabian Nights (1974)

Another great film from Pasolini! Watching The Canterbury Tales and liking it so much, made me decide to give this a go next. And it is definitely a similar film. Of course the source text in both cases plays a part in this, but the film has a similarly fluid narrative structure, flowing from scene-to-scene, and story to story freely. Very dreamlike. And even more so than in The Canterbury Tales, this is a film bursting with sex and eroticism. The tales which Pasolini chooses to include (or the things which he decides to add) all emphasise sex (whether homo and hetero-sexual). Of course, the Arabian Nights is not set in Medieval Europe either, and so the indeterminate time-frame and exotic settings of this film also add to the vibrant feeling of the film (not to say all the stories are happy). There is perhaps a slight element of Orientalism, but I feel it is a very positive, joyful film and the various locations across North Africa, the Middle East and India add a lot to this. Incredible set design and shooting locations in this one. Whereas the Canterbury Tales is confined within time and space, here the tales move freely across time and space. As the film puts it - “truth lies not in one dream but in many.”

I think I will watch Pasoloni's The Decameron next, kind of watching his so-called Trilogy of Life a weird way round but I am enjoying the style and general themes of these two.

 

[Yotsuya]

I've re-watched There Will Be Blood and The Master this month.

It was very much a narrow-focused character study of course, nothing on the scale of The Master or There Will Be Blood, which have impressive characters in them but are grander in scope. Or at least the world those characters inhabit is grander, but I suppose you could say the focus is on the world of fashion as well as Reynolds Woodcock the same way that There Will Be Blood is as much about the oil rush of that period as much as it is about Plainview in particular...that world is more feminine yes, but I don't know if that's inherently a criticism. Of course it does lend itself to little rooms and small subjects as you say, rather than immense oil fields or massive scientology parties.

I suppose it's a matter of preference. I find There Will Be Blood to be weaker than The Master and Phantom Thread because of the grander setting and themes as the characters and the story seems to be more vague and abstract because of them.

I guess the end message was that such anally retentive people can only be happy when their controllative artistic safezone is forcefully taken away from them. They may produce masterworks within their bubbles, but the rush of living is something that can only overcome them due to drastic and involuntary actions. And because how frigid and controlled their lives are, such rushes can be very intoxicating and addictive.

Wasn't that the main dynamic in The Master too from Dodd's point of view?

 

[Yotsuya]

^Still processing There Will Be Blood. The climax was so grotesque that it seems almost like some old newspaper caricature of materialism vs. religion and it was really hard to see it from the characters' point of view at first.

Spoiler

vs.

PTA desrcibes the movie as an epic Oilman vs. Preacher boxing match, so he viewed the characters also somewhat as archetypes.

Still, what I find refreshing about TWBB is, that it completely lacks a leftist point of view, which would have been the most obvious nemesis for someone like Plainview (and which I must admit I had automatically read into the movie the first time saw it.)

 

[HUNTERMANIA]

I went and saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ehhhhhh IDK how I rate it. It was mildly amusing, pretty good stuff from Leo and Pitt, but I felt like it was a meandering journey to nowhere.

I also saw The Lion King the other day and I have to say it was SHOCKING to me to see a movie where the gender types are traditional. I was stunned Simba didn't get pegged and replaced as leader by Nala.

 

[Bullitt68]

I went and saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ehhhhhh IDK how I rate it. It was mildly amusing, pretty good stuff from Leo and Pitt, but I felt like it was a meandering journey to nowhere.

Succinct and apt. If people are interested, here's my write-up from Dragon's official thread (and, to be clear, I'm not putting it in spoiler tags to save space, I'm putting it in spoiler tags because it's full of spoilers):

Spoiler

For the record, four months ago ITT I said the following:

I have loved Tarantino more than words can adequately convey for so long but this looks fucking atrocious. I'm legitimately terrified that when I see this in theaters - and I will see this in theaters - I'm going to walk out having watched the worst film that Tarantino's ever made. Until August, I'm going to praying to the movie gods to please let this movie not suck as much as it looks like it does.

I am happy to be able to report that not only did this movie not suck as much as I was afraid it would, it really didn't suck that much at all. The Bruce Lee scene was atrocious garbage, shoving in Steve McQueen for no reason and getting the Homeland guy for the role was stupid, and the set-up was WAY too long and drawn-out and filled with WAY too much fake movies-and-shows-within-the-movie footage, but the overall experience was pretty damn fun - and when I say "fun," I have in mind the tone and the vibe of Inglourious Basterds more than anything else in the Tarantino canon - and I left the theater knowing that I'd just watched a damn good movie.

The chief strength of the movie is inarguably Brad Pitt. During my time in the Berry, I've had no shortage of critical things to say of Pitt's acting, but NOBODY can direct him like Tarantino. His two best performances BY FAR are his two performances for Tarantino, and his performance in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is IMO his career best. He was a better bad ass here than he's ever been and he was funnier than he's ever been. He didn't miss on a single swing: Every line, every expression, every action, it was just home run after home run. In fact, he was so awesome that I think that he should've been the main character. Everything in the film should've been filtered through his eyes/voice - having Kurt Russell narrate was one of the dumbest fucking decisions on Tarantino's part when he should've OBVIOUSLY had Pitt narrate and tell shit as he was seeing it.

Right on Pitt's heels, though, was DiCaprio. I don't think that Tarantino really integrated things all that well - I don't say this lightly about one of the GOAT screenwriters, but this might be the weakest script that he's ever written (not counting the dogshit abomination that is Death Proof, which is just terrible on absolutely every level) - so there was a lot of DiCaprio stuff that I think could've/should've been streamlined or cut entirely, most notably the extended fake movie/show stuff. That said, he played the fuck out of Rick Dalton, especially when he went on his sad actor tear in his trailer.

The major con IMO is that Charles Manson isn't even a character in the film.* I'm indifferent to hippies, so this isn't some kind of "hippy defense," but I thought that it was stupid and (needlessly if not irresponsibly) historically inaccurate the way that, based on Tarantino's storytelling, you could very easily come to the conclusion that the only reason that any of those knucklehead hippie kids wanted to do what they did was because they were knucklehead hippie kids...not, you know, that they were preyed on and brainwashed by a homicidal psychopath. Following from this, the ending was disappointingly anti-climactic and shockingly small-scale. In Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino went so fucking big that he actually had Hitler and the Nazi party exterminated, yet, in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it's just three dorks? I didn't need a Django-style cartoonish Woo-inspired shootout-to-end-all-shootouts at the Spahn Ranch, but I would've at least liked a confrontation with some of the higher-ups in the family if not Charlie himself. For one option, Tarantino could've/should've integrated that one hippie chick who caught Pitt's eye better, maybe have Pitt take a more protective stance towards her and have him try to save her from the family (thereby motivating that confrontation with the family that I wanted). Instead, we just had Pitt punch a dude on the ranch, leave, then fuck up three dorks a few months later, and then The End. For a movie that was damn near three hours, I didn't like how long and at times slow the set-up was compared to how quick and almost perfunctory the climax was.

(*I also have to say that I was surprised that Sharon Tate wasn't even really a character in the film. Yeah, Tarantino cast Margot Robbie, but she didn't even need to be in the movie. She was utterly superfluous. Her entire narrative existence was to dance to '60s songs. It would've been better and more economical had Tarantino just done the one scene with DiCaprio and Pitt seeing Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate pulling up in the driveway next door, establishing their presence and DiCaprio's little fantasy of getting to know them, and then gone on with the film.)

Those are the major points that I'd want to hit in a write-up like this. As a Bruce Lee guy, though, while I know it's a minor point, I do have to bitch about that silly scene. I get what Tarantino was doing - using Bruce Lee to establish just how much of a bad ass Pitt's character was supposed to be - but, as a Bruce Lee fan, I didn't like that he did that at Bruce's expense, setting him up as an ignorant cocky jackass always itching for a fight only to then get shown up by some nobody stuntman (who seemed inexplicably to be an expert boxer and Wing Chun practitioner). That's pretty much casting Bruce in the worst light imaginable, and it only adds insult to injury that the Bruce Lee in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is on the same level as the Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator. It's too easy for filmmakers to be lazy and just go with broad caricatures of either an actor's public persona or of their most memorable movie character(s) rather than bother with capturing the real people. Sadly, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood makes for another frustrating example of this. The Bruce Lee "character" was a retarded caricature of a persona. The real Bruce Lee - the one who Gene LeBell joked around with on the set of The Green Hornet, the one who utterly adored Muhammad Ali to the point where he'd screen film of his fights backwards to turn Ali into a southpaw whose movements he could practice and model his own style after, etc. - was nowhere to be found. Granted, this is history à la Tarantino, but still.

For some real history that a lot of people don't know: Not only was Bruce Lee Roman Polanski's personal martial arts instructor, not only did Bruce choreograph that fight scene of Sharon Tate's in The Wrecking Crew, and not only was it Jay Sebring who got Bruce in for the screen test for William Dozier which got him his first break with The Green Hornet, Bruce also very easily could've been at the Tate house the night the Manson Family showed up. As if that's not crazy enough, Steve McQueen also knew that whole clique very well, as evidenced by Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and he was another one of Bruce's martial arts students. McQueen was also a very paranoid guy and he rarely went out in public without a gun on him. McQueen, too, very easily could've been at the Tate house that night. Imagine that: The Manson Family kids show up to a house with Bruce Lee and an armed Steve McQueen. But for fate, real life could've ended up looking like the end of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Anyway, to sum up, if you're even remotely a Tarantino fan then there will be PLENTY of awesome shit in here for you that you'll love, and even if you're not a Tarantino fan, there will be enough awesome shit in here for you that unless you're a square you won't regret spending the time in Tarantinoland.

 

[HUNTERMANIA]

@Bullitt68 what do you think of this list of 100 best movies from the 2010s?

https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/best-movies-of-2010s-decade/the-great-gatsby-4/

 

[essie]

i finally got to see white noise by antoine d'agata and it crushed me. best film of the year without question.

 

[Deleted member 110072]

@Bullitt68 what do you think of this list of 100 best movies from the 2010s?

https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/best-movies-of-2010s-decade/the-great-gatsby-4/

Mixture of some good stuff and some quite clumsy pandering IMHO.

 

[Rimbaud82]

HYPED TO FUCK

 

[Aegon Spengler]

Just saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Thought it was DiCaprio's best performance. Tarantino squeezed more than "fish eating" out of ole Leo, and it was lovely to see.

The movie itself was.. in some ways... Q's best. Triple meta can be really fun. I'm not sure if that's the right word for an actor playing an actor, acting...

In some ways he made his worst kind of "writing oversights" in this one. I enjoyed the Lee fight but Pitt was written as just a little too superhuman for this kind of movie IMO. Bruce Lee was no joke.

Overall I really enjoyed it. Would recommend.

 

[Huhla]

HYPED TO FUCK

never heard of it

 

[Aegon Spengler]

I wonder if the only way to get Lee in the movie without having to go through his estate was to have him as a parody version of himself...

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

@Bullitt68 were you there?

The Last of the Ayn Rand Acolytes

 

[ufcfan4]

Watched a couple of Paul Newman films from the 80s recently.

The Verdict-

Solid courtroom drama (though only a small portion of the running time is actually in the courtroom), I really liked Newman's character and performance in this and he had a great supporting cast backing him up (Jack Warden, Charlotte Rampling, James Mason, Lindsay Crouse). I really enjoyed Mason's performance too. For much of the film, he seems to be an antagonist only by default, but, occasionally, you get some glimpses into how his win at all costs mentality can lead to some really disconcerting behavior and tactics. I also loved the buildup to the pivotal scene with Crouse.

Absence of Malice-

From the year before The Verdict, this one focuses on the way that the media can bring undue and damaging scrutiny into the lives of citizens. For those not familiar with it, Newman plays a liquor wholesaler who finds himself in the paper, depicted as a person of interest in the disappearance of a longshoreman's union rep. But the reality is that the federal agents involved in the investigation are manipulating a newspaper into characterizing Newman, whose uncle and deceased father had mob ties, as a suspect so that they can pressure him into cooperating to gather information on what happened to the union rep. It's a briskly paced, interesting movie with strong performances from Newman, Sally Field, Bob Balaban, Melinda Dillon, and Wilford Brimley. One hilarious aspect of this for me is that WIlford Brimley's appearance on Seinfeld as the Postmaster general on the episode where Kramer no longer wants to receive mail, is clearly a parody of his cameo in this film.

 

[Bullitt68]

@Bullitt68 were you there?

The Last of the Ayn Rand Acolytes

Ha, no, I wasn't there. By the time I stumbled upon the existence of that conference it was already pretty close to happening, so it would've been impossible for me to have gotten a paper accepted, and I don't have the time, money, or inclination to go to conferences at which I'm not speaking/presenting. As for that article, the author's an ignorant douche, but then, in his defense, I find kind of pathetic and a little creepy in principle all groups/societies/chapters, Rand ones included.



That's not to say that I'd never go to a Rand conference (though it's more likely that I'd organize one myself so that I could pick the creeps who got an invite ). But "joining" a group like the ARI makes me super skeptical. I've actually considered applying to be an ARI fellow, as I've read a lot of the work from a lot of the people involved and a lot of it's pretty damn good, but everything that I've heard about that group and the way that it's run seems antithetical to everything that Objectivism was/is supposed to be. Plus, I was recently contacted by The Atlas Society and asked to contribute "Objectivist film criticism," and while that's appealing to me, The Atlas Society was originally formed by people who broke away from the ARI, so I have a feeling that writing for The Atlas Society would mean that I'd never be able to get a fellowship with the ARI - it's pretty much like having to pick which parent you want to live with after a divorce

Oh, and BTW (this also serves as a response to your SMC post about me being coy about my recent Japanese movie binge, @europe1): I'm very close to finalizing my syllabi for the two film classes that I'm going to be teaching this Fall term. Not only will I post those in the very near future, I'll also have a mega post on all the shit that I've watched and rewatched in preparation. I basically got back in touch with my old film school self and went deep in the arthouse archives.

You hear that @Rimbaud82, @moreorless87, @chickenluver, and @HenryFlower? Got a big post full of Ozu, Mizoguchi, Ichikawa, Fellini, Godard, Bergman, and Lynch incoming

 

[chickenluver]

Got a big post full of Ozu... incoming

I'll brace myself