The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => Arts & Entertainment => Topic started by: Gimpson on March 09, 2006, 04:43:21 pm
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My gf and I have had Crash from Netflix for a while. I didn't have a whole lot of desire to see it, but when it won Best Picture I figured I ought to watch it as long as we had it. After having watched it the night before last, I have to ask why the hell it won Best Picture. I haven't seen all the nominees, but both Capote and Munich were more entertaining movies, and I though Munich did a much better job presenting a complicated issue in a way that made the viewer think.
All the scenes of racism in Crash seemed straight out of a corporate diversity training video. My thoughts are summed up well here (http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2006/2/6lloyd.html).
We watched Hustle & Flow last night, and it was enjoyable, but should have had about half an hour cut out of it. Munich we loved, and I basically want to be the pipe-smoking clean up dude.
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Yeah, Crash is definitely one of the weakest Best Picture winners in recent memory. It makes Gladiator look like Braveheart.
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Cowboy Sauce should have won, I tell you.
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Cowboy Sauce wasn't exactly a strong contender either. I mean, even Jarhead was a better depiction of two men in love.
It was a strong year for movies, insomuch as there were a lot of very good, but not spectacular, films released. I don't think anything made last year is really a contender for a "Best Films of the 00s" list though.
Hopefully this year won't suck as badly as it has been so far. The best film I've seen this year was Turkish.
Where's P.T. or Wes Anderson when you need them? Or Fincher? WHERE THE FUCK IS DAVID FINCHER?
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No, I pretty much have to give it up for the graphic description of butt-sex.
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Yeah, Crash is definitely one of the weakest Best Picture winners in recent memory. It makes Gladiator look like Braveheart.
so basically what you are saying is Crash was worse than Gladiator and Gladiator was worse than Braveheart
is that what you are saying Jough
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Yeah, and Braveheart was one that was pretty dang weak as a Best Picture winner back in 1996 when it won.
Of course, I'm still bitter about Forrest Gump beating out Pulp Fiction, so, you know.
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Hopefully this year won't suck as badly as it has been so far. The best film I've seen this year was Turkish.
Where's P.T. or Wes Anderson when you need them? Or Fincher? WHERE THE FUCK IS DAVID FINCHER?
Well, we're almost to the end of the dumping period for studio trash. This year I'm looking forward to Tideland, even though Brothers Grimm was a bit disappointing. X-Men 3 and Spider-Man 3 are this summer too, aren't they? I think I'm most looking forward to The Fountain, though.
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Well, we're almost to the end of the dumping period for studio trash. This year I'm looking forward to Tideland, even though Brothers Grimm was a bit disappointing. X-Men 3 and Spider-Man 3 are this summer too, aren't they? I think I'm most looking forward to The Fountain, though.
X-Men 3 opens a week after Da Vinci Code. I think Spider-Man might be '07 but I'm not sure.
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Superman Lives is also out this year, but without sounding like a snob I will say now that I doubt any of these mentioned are going to be films for the ages. I mean, I enjoy a good action sequel like anyone else - and I'll likely see a bunch of them this year - but I'm not going to reflect on how they've touched my soul or anything.
Great films are exhilerating - and it just seems to me that there used to be one at least every other year. Now the best previous years have to offer (Sideways, Lost in Translation, Munich, Adaptation, Lord of the Rings, etc.) don't stack up so well compared to the best films of the 90s.
We still have four years left in the decade. I'm hoping to see some greatness coming. It just sucks that we have to wait until the Fall for good movies to come out.
At least I get to catch up on foreign films and classics that I've missed or haven't seen yet. This week it's "The Deer Hunter" and a Buster Keaton boxed set to keep me busy in the latter category.
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Funnily, Deer Hunter is a better film than any other referenced in this thread.
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There are some films that I "save" for when nothing else good is coming out in theatres or on DVD. THIS IS SUCH A TIME.
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Funnily, Deer Hunter is a better film than any other referenced in this thread.
That statement will almost always be true.
~Paul
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There are some films that I "save" for when nothing else good is coming out in theatres or on DVD. THIS IS SUCH A TIME.
Honestly, I envy you being able to watch this film for the first time. I don't even know what to compare this to.
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There are some films that I "save" for when nothing else good is coming out in theatres or on DVD. THIS IS SUCH A TIME.
Honestly, I envy you being able to watch this film for the first time. I don't even know what to compare this to.
There are a lot of great movies that I haven't seen, but not because I have purposely saved them, I just haven't gotten around to them yet. There are a lot of great movies.
~Paul
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I really need to see Citizen Kane again. Everybody tells me that it, much like sex, is much better the second time around.
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Everyone is right, at least about Citizen Kane. The sex thing, maybe not as universal.
If you get a chance to watch the original filmed version of Lolita, do. It's kind of painful to watch someone descend into his demons but very well done.
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I saw Casablanca for the first time last year, and I can't believe I waited so long to see it. There is absolutely nothing bad about that movie.
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African Queen is awesome too; just basically two actors on a boat exchanging dialogue for much of it....excellent job by both and an interesting story.
Also, there's a good and funny book by Katherine Hepburn about the filming of that movie.
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I really need to see Citizen Kane again. Everybody tells me that it, much like sex, is much better the second time around.
Man, I ought to try sex again.
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Ditto: Just completed the much delayed part two of the Jough Dempsey Film Noir Festival, which consisted of The Third Man. It was something that one ought to have seen, and unlike many of those things, the actual seeing of it was quite tolerable.
But as for Citizen Kane, I have seen it more than once and I still don't get it.
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But as for Citizen Kane, I have seen it more than once and I still don't get it.
This may just be my opinion, but I think that "getting it" is sort of overrated for Kane. The Rosebud thing is touted as this big thing, but it's not really the heart of the film; really, it can be appreciated as just a reasonably straightforward tragedy, the story of a man who had every opportunity in the world and squandered all of them in the pursuit of something he didn't know how to keep. It really isn't about Rosebud.
It is, however, about pterodactyls. About this let us not be confused.
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It's also about the White Stripes, or rather, the White Stripes are about it.
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But what I don't get is what's so great about it. It's supposed to be one of the greatest movies ever made. But it doesn't even seem terribly interesting. It's a total mystery to me.
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Maybe it doesn't have enough car chases or explosions or other shiny things to keep your attention. People seem to like movies that are very loud and where bright things happen on screen a lot these days. Citizen Kane doesn't have much of that.
I love Citizen Kane - it was revolutionary at the time, and is still better than 99% of movies made after it. I love how we're looking at the life of this larger-than-life man, but we're never seeing anything as it actually happened (except when the reporter is interviewing people that knew Kane, I suppose - and even then it's his POV) - the entire movie is told from various points of view.
Technically of course it's a major achievement. It's like the movie equivalent of landing a man on the moon. There are so many firsts in Citizen Kane, and so many shots were new that it redefined filmmaking more than it enthralled audiences at the time it was released. That just about every film post-Kane borrows from it in some way means that you've seen Citizen Kane many many times before - little pieces of it in just about every other film you've ever seen.
I can understand how it may not seem so fresh and exciting after 60+ years of homage.
Rosebud is of course a Macguffin. Sure, we find out who Rosebud is (no spoilers here for the cultural ostriches out there who don't know) but is that really the central part of the story? It sure does explain a lot about Kane, and what he was striving for his entire life.
I've seen Citizen Kane at least a hundred times, at one point going through it in slo-mo with a film group so we could discuss it frame-by-frame if need be. It took us three four-hour nights to finish the film, and then we spent the following week discussing it.
However, if I had to list the most enjoyable "great" film I'd have to go with Casablanca. There is nothing that isn't in Casablanca. Guns, sex, music, dames, intrigue, heartbreak, love, death - it's an encyclopaedia. And it moves really fast so modern (American) audiences who have grown accustomed to bright flashes of light and loud noises can somewhat enjoy it too.
P.S. to Wombat: I am sorry that you did not enjoy the Film Noir film festival. If you've followed my list you've probably seen some of the best the genre has to offer. These films were made in the epoch of the Cold War, as the world was changing, new alliances were being formed, and everyone was suspicious of their neighbours' motives. I think Film Noir translates fairly well to our Patriot Act smoke-the-terrorists-out-of-their-holes era, but again, they're slower-moving movies with less action in them, made for an audience who was expected to pay attention.
EDIT: I know the above sounded like I was calling you "simple" or "slow" if you didn't like some of these "great" films - that isn't the case at all - I was just pointing out how different they are from most of the crap being shoved out lately, and how bad movies train people to watch more bad movies. It's pandemic.
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We have not seen enough of the Festival to pass judgment on the entire genre. I liked The Third Man better than something with car chases and shiny things. I was not bored after 20 minutes. I only got restless for about 5 minutes towards the end. For a movie that was almost two hours, for me, that is a five star review.
But, OK, now you ARE going to say I am slow and stupid but... Often these old movies seem very simplistic to me. Even in The Third Man - things are telegraphed rather obviously before they happen. You see a strange Austrian child watching the hero have a argument with a guy, and since there are no other children anywhere in the movie, it is obvious that later the guy will turn up dead and they will accuse the hero because the child has no other possible function than as a witness to the fight. The lady says that her cat only liked Harry, and you know right away that Harry isn't really dead and the cat will be how we find this out, because there are no other cats anywhere in town and it was totally surprising to see that she had a cat in the first place.
I know, foreshadowing, your sign of quality literature. Minimalism. Whatever. Or you could say, not so much bigger geniuses than moviemakers nowadays. I dunno.
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Oh heck and as long as I've already stepped in it... Telling me that a movie was a technical achievement is like telling me that my car was a technical achievement. It only matters to specialists and as someone who can barely sit still through a whole movie, I am clearly not a specialist. I don't care how you did it, I only care about the finished product. I think that it would be more accurate to say that Citizen Kane was an important event in the history of film, rather than telling people it is a great movie, which raises a different sort of expectation.
But what do I know. I'm gonna go read some comics, now.
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Well, it's a great film that is also a technical achievement - but you can't really invent cinematic language without it being on screen. So there's no distinguishing its technical merits from its artistic. It's not like I'm saying that they used some fancy new camera or something - I'm talking about cinematic syntax - how shots are framed, edited, camera movement, lens choices - pretty much ALL of its achievements are on the screen.
And it's funny that you think older movies are more simplistic, because all I can think of when I watch classics is how sophisticated they are in comparison with many movies (at least all ten of last year's top 10 grossing films) made today.
Film Noir of course is a genre, and as such has a more limited vocabulary than a number of other films - they're formula pictures, and the incredible thing is how there are a great number of films that follow the same formula yet they're all different.
Most genre films are like that, of course. I could probably show you shots from "El Dorado" and "Rio Bravo" re-cut into a single film and you would never know that they weren't both from the same film.
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And it's funny that you think older movies are more simplistic, because all I can think of when I watch classics is how sophisticated they are in comparison with many movies (at least all ten of last year's top 10 grossing films) made today.
Well, see, I wouldn't know - I doubt I've seen any of those ten movies to make the comparison. I think the only movie I saw last year was Wallace and Gromit.
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Is it possible to know you will like a movie in the first frame? In the absolutely first second of the first frame? It is. That was "Capote" to me; as soon as I saw those wheat stalks swaying in the wind I braced myself and thought: "I'm gonna really enjoy this one", and I was right, I loved it, loved it, loved it. It should have won Best Picture if the Oscars weren't dumb.
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Is it possible to know you will like a movie in the first frame? In the absolutely first second of the first frame? It is. That was "Capote" to me; as soon as I saw those wheat stalks swaying in the wind I braced myself and thought: "I'm gonna really enjoy this one", and I was right, I loved it, loved it, loved it. It should have won Best Picture if the Oscars weren't dumb.
I haven't seen it yet, but i'm thinking that I know i'll like it already based on the subject matter, the lead actor, the reviews by critics I trust. But sometimes you get a feeling from the first frame that you are in for a good movie viewing experience.
~Paul
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Capote was shot right here in Winnipeg (and out lying areas) last year. All the courtroom exteriors are actually on the outside of the Manitoba Legislature building. Many of my coworkers and actors I directed had bit parts in it that were left on the cutting room floor. One of my coworkers had a scene between herself and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and several other scenes - she played the mother of the girl who finds the murder victims. It makes sense that it was cut, but I'm hoping the DVD will have the scene on it. One of the actors I worked with recently is still in it in a non-speaking role during the bar/party scenes.
I actually found it pretty boring, which is surprising, since I love Phillip Seymour Hoffman so much.
Crash was like Magnolia with racism.
I do want to see Walk the Line when I get the chance.
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I've had two separate and different people tell me I look like Phillip Seymour Hoffman. I'm almost certain that I'm flattered.
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I do want to see Walk the Line when I get the chance.
I am sort of ambivalent about that, and I figured I would really enjoy it. It was interesting, but just not as satisfactory as I expected. I liked the sangin'.
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I dunno Auggie.
When you see Philip Seymour Hoffman in interviews he is a fairly attractive man, but in his films, he is mostly unnattractive and not at all likable. I mean Happiness? Boogie Nights? He played two of the most unnattractive characters to grace the screen in my opinon, and I just want him to take a shower so bad.
But yes, I have seen photos of you, and you do sort of look like Phillip Seymour Hoffman - the actor.
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I've had two separate and different people tell me I look like Phillip Seymour Hoffman. I'm almost certain that I'm flattered.
Paticularly if they are talking about "Boogie Nights". Do you actually <own> shorts like that, Aug?
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Paticularly if they are talking about "Boogie Nights". Do you actually <own> shorts like that, Aug?
Oh man, I am all about imagining all the guys on this board wearing tiny ill fitting shorts like those, (http://www.funkytrunks.com/RM-55749.html) and possibly sipping from tiny cans of Dr. Pepper.
(fixed link - w)
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I wish that had turned out differently, S_S.
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Paticularly if they are talking about "Boogie Nights". Do you actually <own> shorts like that, Aug?
I haven't seen the film, so I don't know. Although probably not.
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I have been searching for a photo of PSH as Scotty in Boogie Nights in the tiny shorts, to no avail! To no avail! You'd think if someone wins a Best Actor Oscar that there'd be some pretty comprehensive fan sites out there, but from what I see there's only a couple out-dated ones.