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Post by oh oooh on Mar 6, 2024 12:55:24 GMT
Yeah, I think so.
He must have dropped the music pretty soon after this, I reckon. My heart dropped when he pulled out his banjo.
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Sneelock
god
Better than Washington...
Posts: 8,564
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Post by Sneelock on Mar 6, 2024 18:07:13 GMT
I watched Star Trek: The Motion Picture yesterday for the first time in over 40 years. I guess it must've been quite the experience seeing it on the big screen back in '79, but it could easily have been reduced to a one hour episode of the tv show with absolutely no change to the story. Almost half the film is taken up by long, drawn out scenic shots set to soaring orchestral music cut with the actors' faces reacting to what they're seeing with almost no dialogue. The scene where Kirk and Scotty are approaching the Enterprise in a shuttle for the first time is at least five minutes (possibly more) of different camera angles, dramatic music, and the awe-struck faces of Shatner and Doohan. I was sitting there most of the time wondering when something that moved the story along was going to happen. I'm a big fan of the original show and of the director Robert Wise. (Sneelock Sings Eidelweiss!) there's an interview where he says that sub-plots were cut for time so they had a lot of dialogue that didn't make sense so they removed it. that's one theory.
my theory is that "Close Encounters" had recently made a lot of money. people spent a lot of screen time gaping in THAT one. why bother with a plot that makes sense when people can just gape? the projectionist where it was showing was my Dad's buddy. He told me he could get me in so we walked across the street. the auditorium was PACKED. He told a guy with a flashlight to find me a seat. we found a seat that wasn't saved & didn't have an ass in it. I was surrounded by Star Trek Fans. I was a Star Trek fan! I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing.
okay, I'll admit I liked seeing a starship that looked like a starship. nowadays they've gussied up the opticals on the old shows and they look pretty good. As a Star Trek fan I enjoyed seeing familiar faces but I also enjoyed seeing a Star Ship enterprise that was not dangling on a piece of fish wire. In fact, this was really the highlight of the movie for me.
later on Mr. Spock is in a space suit. He is investigating a big life-form floating in space. He announces that he is going to give this huge lifeform floating in space the Vulcan Mind meld! this seemed pretty preposterous to me so I involuntarily snorted through my nose. phhh! I was suddenly faced with several rows of Star Trek fans with fingers to their lips going "SHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!" I no longer felt I was among fellow Star Trek fans but brainwashed dumb-asses. to be fair, they'd probably stood in line and all that sort of thing.( years later,I almost got the living shit kicked out of me when people had my tickets in line for Star Trek 3. "oh no! oh no you don't!" as three of us cut in line. the other two assured me it was okay since we were only outnumbered by like 100 to one) Maybe "dumbasses" is harsh but I certainly no longer felt good about the whole thing.
I think the Wrath of Khan one is the only one I saw in the theater more than once. once was plenty for the others. I did enjoy seeing how nice the ship looked, Shatner's new rug and how FAT Scotty got.
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Post by harrylemon on Mar 10, 2024 22:32:35 GMT
I watched The Zone of Interest tonight. Its a very well made, deliberate piece of cinema. Yet the distancing way of filming with static cameras made it very uninvolving.
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Post by oh oooh on Mar 11, 2024 23:03:05 GMT
I started to watch 20 Days in Mariupol. I didn't expect anything LIGHT, of course, but had to stop watching. It's unflinching and upsetting.
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Post by oh oooh on Mar 16, 2024 18:58:36 GMT
just out of OPPY. The last 40 minutes were a chore. Otherwise, very good. Apart from the hammy bits. Cillian Murphy was great. Oh and the incidental music - give it a fucking rest
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Post by Stacy Heydon on Mar 17, 2024 5:34:22 GMT
Green Book last night. It's very polished Hollywood product and it honestly left me feeling nothing at all. Viggo was good, I suppose, tho' his performance was bordering on caricature. Watched this the other day and enjoyed it thoroughly. I found it touching and funny. Sure it's dealing with its themes in a pretty broad brushed way and the film does skirt around cliche. But it's performed with conviction and has a pleasingly old-fashioned Hollywood warmth about it.
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Post by harrylemon on Mar 17, 2024 10:48:44 GMT
Over the weekend we watched
I Know Where I'm Going
Powell/Pressburger from 1945, a slight romance but well worth a watch. Mostly set in Scotland. One of the scenes was filmed a mile or so away from my hone.
The Holdovers.
I liked this a lot, thought it captured the 70's well without drawing attention to itself. Giamatti was excellent as usual.
American Fiction.
Thought it was great fantastic cast and a great script. Wright was tremendous as Monk, could've easily won the Oscar.
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Post by DarknessFish on Mar 17, 2024 14:06:10 GMT
I watched American Fiction a couple of nights ago. The cast is genuinely superb, but it's all a bit bland and polite. I was surprised to see Everett's name in the credits, it doesn't have the anger or the lurid scurrilousness of the book.
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Post by Half Machine Lipschitz on Mar 17, 2024 19:22:21 GMT
I don't often watch classic Hollywood films, but this one is mentioned several times in a Paul Auster book I'm reading (Sunset Park) and I was curious to see it. I wasn't prepared for it to be almost three hours long, so I had to split it in half while I did some chores around the house, but I'm glad I stuck with it. It's a story about three WWII vets from three separate backgrounds returning home after the war, and their attempts to reintegrate into society. It's schmaltzy, but it doesn't really hold back in confronting the realities of PTSD and injuries (in a Hollywood manner, of course) and the acting is surprisingly good. One thing I learned about it is the fellow who plays Homer, the young man who lost both hands in a fire on his Navy ship, was not an actor but was hired for the role because of his proficiency with the mechanical hooks that replaced his hands, and the Academy had a special honorary award created for him at the Oscars, but much to everyone's surprise he won Best Supporting Actor and is apparently the only person who has won two Academy awards for the same role.
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Post by DarknessFish on Mar 17, 2024 22:05:44 GMT
Interstellar
First time I've seen it, my son reckons it's some kind of masterpiece. Pretty disappointing as it happens, it clearly wants to be a cinematic space epic in the vein of 2001, but it falls well short. Some of the dialogue is sub-Forrest Gump nonsense about love transcending space and time, and the entire black hole/5th dimension banging on bookcases is a director trying to be clever and failing badly. It just felt like a patchwork of other films ideas stitched together with a bigger budget.
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Post by DayoRemix on Mar 18, 2024 0:57:42 GMT
While we disagree on American Fiction (The anger wouldn't translate on screen very well), we are in sync on Interstellar. It was Nolan trying to attach the Inception logic to a space epic. Didn't work. The script was also fairly weak. The film isn't without merit, though. It is shot well, so it looks the part. So, there's that..
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Post by davey on Mar 18, 2024 6:14:48 GMT
I don't often watch classic Hollywood films, but this one is mentioned several times in a Paul Auster book I'm reading (Sunset Park) and I was curious to see it. I wasn't prepared for it to be almost three hours long, so I had to split it in half while I did some chores around the house, but I'm glad I stuck with it. It's a story about three WWII vets from three separate backgrounds returning home after the war, and their attempts to reintegrate into society. It's schmaltzy, but it doesn't really hold back in confronting the realities of PTSD and injuries (in a Hollywood manner, of course) and the acting is surprisingly good. One thing I learned about it is the fellow who plays Homer, the young man who lost both hands in a fire on his Navy ship, was not an actor but was hired for the role because of his proficiency with the mechanical hooks that replaced his hands, and the Academy had a special honorary award created for him at the Oscars, but much to everyone's surprise he won Best Supporting Actor and is apparently the only person who has won two Academy awards for the same role. I’m not seeing the image, but you’re clearly talking about The Best Years of Our Lives. It’s a marvel of a film. One of my very favorites. I can never resist getting sucked into into it. One of the things folks probably don’t know about it anymore, was that it reigned supreme for DECADES as THE consensus greatest-Hollywood-film in most film conversations and articles. Pretty much until the generations changed over (only rivaled by Gone With the Wind and Citizen Kane). Now it’s virtually forgotten. I guess there’s some schmaltz along the way. But not much. It’s a pretty tough-minded film in a lot of ways. The performances are uniformly wonderful. Least surprising is Fredric March, who was ALWAYS great. And yeah, Harold Russell is a revelation, absolutely natural and fully deserving of as many awards as he could possibly get. But the one I think makes the film is Dana Andrews (a truly undervalued film actor in my estimation). I think he’s the center of the film. It’s worth noting that Hoagy Carmichael is in it, and that Myrna Loy (jeez she was beautiful) and Theresa Wright are both wonderful. There’s also great smaller turns by Steve Cochran (one of the noir greats), Virginia Mayo, and Cathy O’Donnell (famous at my house for her strangely incredible performance in They Live By Night). Anyhow…the things I really want to say about it are that Greg Toland’s cinematography (he also did Cirizen Kane) is an absolute wonder. This was the film that made me first care about cinematography. There are one or two shots (usually involving airplanes) that have never left me. Also - the scene where Homer shows his fiancé his bedtime ritual remains among the most moving scenes in the history of cinema in my mind. Here it is out of context. Watch it and see if you can keep from getting just a little worked up:
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Post by Half Machine Lipschitz on Mar 18, 2024 10:50:22 GMT
There’s also great smaller turns by Steve Cochran (one of the noir greats) One of the references in the Paul Auster book I mentioned above is about Steve Cochran and the story of his death while on a sailing trip from Acapulco to Costa Rica with three young women. He fell ill and died while on the open ocean and none of the three girls knew anything about sailing so they drifted for ten days with his corpse before being rescued.
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Post by harrylemon on Mar 18, 2024 23:14:45 GMT
I went to see One From The Heart Reprise today. FFC has made some changes to the order of scenes. Which doesn't work as Terri Garr's hairstyle changes, she niw has permed hair before she gets her perm.
But it was brilliant to see it on a big screen. In the same cinema I saw it 40 years or so ago.
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Post by DarknessFish on Mar 19, 2024 9:16:40 GMT
1951 noir-ish fare. Really good as it happens, largely on the strength of Van Heflin's convincingly underhand performance. He really does come across as a properly unpleasant manipulative controlling presence in a way that really gets under your skin, it jars with the polite feel of the dialogue.
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