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[dejavroom]

We should have a thread only for "old movies" recommendations. I finally got around renting movies on a regular basis, and am watching so much old stuff, it practically changed my tastes for what a movie should be (basically, it should be in B&W and have no soundtrack - and some hiss and crackle in the audio department wouldn't hurt, too). And, since I'm already here: I just finished watching Jean Renoir's "The Great Illusion", and it is really beautiful, touching and funny. Erich von Stroheim is in it, playing a character that is even more delightful to watch than his butler in "Sunset Boulevard".

[theinevitable]

I really like Renoirs "Rules of the Game." And Brief Encounter is great.

[jough]

Oh, I'm glad to hear someone mention Brief Encounter.  Man, I love that film. Maybe that's because of my penchant for unrealistic romances that never fully materialize.

[pmcd9]

We're hyping old romance movies now?  I'm in!  Who here absolutely loves The Apartment with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine?

The Apartment is one of my favorite movies.  I highly recommend it.  Jack Lemmon is one of my favorite actors.  In fact, Prisoner of Second Avenue just arrived from Netflix.  Yay!

[Death Ray]

The Abyss! You are bound to come across someone screaming "You've never given up on anything in your life! FIGHT!" sooner or later.

[AugustWest]

The Apartment is one of my favorite movies.  I highly recommend it.  Jack Lemmon is one of my favorite actors.  In fact, Prisoner of Second Avenue just arrived from Netflix.  Yay!

Seconded.  The Apartment is hell of good.  Shirley McLaine can act.

[jough]

Plus, she was really cute in it.

[AlohaDawg]

So, a good friend of mine turned me on to some old movies while I was still in Hawaii.

"The Sweet Smell of Success" with Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster. Unbelievably good New York piece about about blind ambition. Highly recommended. Clifford Odets screenplay. The writing is excellent.


"The Lady in the Window" with Edward G Robinson. Fritz Lang directs (watch the camera angles and shots, he works like a photographer and they are superb) and this one is a suspense thriller that was fun to watch.

not old, but awesome:

"Les Miserables" (1995) Written/ Directed by Paul LeLouche with, of course, big nods to Victor Hugo. This is a tremendous film about redemption that takes place during WWII in France. French with English Subtitles. Great music, beautiful film, occasional harsh subject matter. This is one I would like to own.

[dejavroom]

Saw "Inglourious Basterds". It's the usual Tarantino: the successful achievement of something very small. Brad Pitt should win the Oscar for Best Standard "I am Staring Directly Into The Sun"^TM Squinty Look. Also, he was very funny in this.

Saw "District 9". The social bits were cool, but any attempt at bridging the gap between the action/social commentary bits and the humanity of the characters met risible results (the actress playing the wife seemed almost embarrassed of appearing in this). The "anthropoids on a mission" stretch lost me, although if pressed I might concede that the armored suit battle was "pretty awesome".

[alreadyinuse]

Bullworth

The Seventh Seal

[dejavroom]

The Hour of The Wolf, Ingmar Bergman, 1968

Le freaky. Certains aspects of it look quaint today (the tortured artist), but in terms of technical achievement and atmosphere, it's an amazing movie. It's also very interesting from the viewpoint of having a so-called auteur dabbling in horror, playing with the conventions of the genre (it has some psychotic outbursts of humor, too - there's a scene where an imp creeps behind the protagonist, getting real close to his back while an ominous music starts pounding. It's so loud and in your face it's almost unbearable, you know shit will hit the fan, Bergman milks the scene for a long time, and thennn... the music halts, the imp moves away from the protagonist just like that and nothing happens. Cheeky bastard...)

Earlier in the film the artist shows his sketchbook to his wife, where he has drawn a host of abominations that have been plaguing him. We don't get to see the drawings, we only hear his descriptions and see the face of his wife looking at the drawings, slowly realizing that her husband's sanity is going titwards. Very effective - it reminded me of some of G. Morrison's alien descriptions, actually. Later in the film we get to sse some of those characters - and really, they were more effective as mere descriptions. The lady didn't need to remove her face along with the hat, it's what I'm saying.

[dejavroom]

Avatar

Banal, boring, bloated. Visually tacky as all hell.

[wombat]

District 9 is on the way from Netflix, so I am about to catch up to, what, October?

We just finished watching a TV series called The Middleman which amused us very much. It was cancelled after a season and while on the one hand that is sad, on the other, it was probably just enough.

[dejavroom]

Caravaggio (1986, Derek Jarman)

Strange little movie. Most of the time too much in love with its own artiness, but I'd say the result is more watchable than not. It will certainly offer a "cleansing of the palate" for those accostumed to more standard fare.

The text is very good (excesses notwithstanding), albeit strictly "literary", declamatory (I'm referring to Caravaggio's voice-over, which forms a good part of the text; the dialogues are properly colloquial).

I really like how Jarman made the palpable scarcity of resources a strength (no exteriors, bare backgrounds, which makes the movie at times feel like a play - it's also a nice nod to Caravaggio's paintings, where human figures are always at the center, surrounded either by darkness or undefined backgrounds).

I also liked how the movie progressively gets more unhinged in respect to chronology (when one of the characters started making sums in his pocket calculator I actually laughed out loud). It only gets better from there.

Photography is spectacular, given its aim: to reproduce the feel of a Caravaggio painting. Flawless execution in that department. Watch out for Tilda Swinton's first appearance in the movies (Sean Bean, of LoTR fame, is also in this, as one of Caravaggio's love interests).

This is not a biopic; it feels more like a meditation or essay, using startling visuals and a loose sequence of events. In the end, I think I like this type of take more than your run of the mill biopic a la "Walk The Line" or "Ray". But it's not the type of movie with iconic sequences which bear repeated viewings. Lovely, lovely compositions, though.

[greenkoolayd]

do you write for a living?