I See Dead People (no. 2)

Aug 01, 2012 16:25

Look, this is really sad. No list of all-time great movies whose top ten includes only movies I've already seen can be credible.* Or if it is credible, this is a sad world. Not to denigrate my own tastes, judgments, and habits, but round '78 I decided that I didn't have the time or money to watch a lot of movies. And in 1999 I made the decision, I ( Read more... )

science fiction, t-ara, westerns, the searchers

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Haven't done one of these in a while. skyecaptain August 2 2012, 22:20:32 UTC
Here's 15 in alphabetical order:

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg, 2001)
The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1966)
Bringing Up Baby (Hawks, 1938)
The Conversation (Coppola, 1974)
Die Hard (McTiernan, 1988)
Election (Payne, 1999)
The Elephant Man (Lynch, 1980)
F for Fake (Welles, 1973)
Fargo (Coen, 1996)
Groundhog Day (Ramis, 1993)
A History of Violence (Cronenberg, 2005)
The Treasure of the Sierre Madre (Huston, 1948)
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Demy, 1964)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Zemeckis, 1988)
Young Frankenstein (Brooks, 1974)

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Re: Haven't done one of these in a while. skyecaptain August 2 2012, 22:23:09 UTC
Ah, forgot one that might belong here, La Cienaga by Lucrecia Martel. And I've kept off short and near-feature films in experimental and documentary modes that I'm not sure how to classify. Those include things like Dennis O'Rourke's Cannibal Tours, Hollis Frampton's Nostalgia, a number of other ones.

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Re: Haven't done one of these in a while. koganbot August 3 2012, 04:01:31 UTC
Have seen eight of your fifteen (the seven I haven't are A.I., Election, Fake, Fargo, Violence, Umbrellas, and Rabbit). What's next in your queue?

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Re: Haven't done one of these in a while. skyecaptain August 3 2012, 16:22:25 UTC
Hm, haven't watched a movie in a while! But will probably go see The Expendables 2 when it comes out. Most recent movie watched was Thor, next in the queue is Griffith's Intolerance, but will probably shift things above it before watching it.

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Re: Haven't done one of these in a while. skyecaptain August 3 2012, 16:24:00 UTC
Would recommend the first five over the last two; Umbrellas is very time/place (when I saw it the first time) and not sure how I feel about it now. Rabbit is etched into my childhood subconscious and the edge over any other children's movie is that it actually holds up as a, like, movie.

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Re: Haven't done one of these in a while. koganbot August 3 2012, 18:53:56 UTC
Ever given thought to westerns? I think an average hack oater from the '40s and '50s has more going on than does even well-scripted and well-acted mega-blooey like Star Wars, Star Trek 2, Iron Man, and ilk. (But then, the only Cameron I've seen is Terminator 2, and the only Spielberg I've bothered with that's remotely sf is Jurassic Park; overall, I haven't given modern superheroes and superspace much of a look.)

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oaters on my dial! dubdobdee August 4 2012, 17:47:57 UTC
haha these 14 westerns are all lined up on my TiVo:

brokeback mountain*
the cowboys
custer of the west
the far country
jesse james
johnny guitar
lone star*
the man from laramie <-- this is the one i'm in the middle of
the man who shot liberty valance
red river
rio bravo
the sheriff of fractured jaw
the warlords
warlock

*both relatively recent

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Re: oaters on my dial! dubdobdee August 4 2012, 21:25:16 UTC
wait the warlords is a hong kong film about the qing dynasty so not strictly speaking a western

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Re: oaters on my dial! dubdobdee August 4 2012, 21:32:21 UTC
watched all of laramie, just started jesse james -- tyrone power and henry fonda, depicting the james gang as noble robin hoods against the robber barons of the railroad

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Re: Haven't done one of these in a while. skyecaptain August 4 2012, 22:04:42 UTC
I've seen a few westerns, but never really "got" the traditional genre and never really clicked with neo- subversions/extensions of it (via spaghetti westerns, Sam Peckinpah, and later ones). I did order and then transfer to American DVD (it was UK) "Two Rode Together" based on a comment you made about it in the last Dead People post, but still haven't watched it.

Favorite westerns I can think of:

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Red River
McCabe and Mrs. Miller

Westerns I like but don't love:
High Noon
The Wild Bunch
Hud
No Country for Old Men
The Misfits

"Meh"sterns
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Giant (<--not sure if this counts)
Dances with Wolves
The Robert Rodriguez Mariachi series
3:10 to Yuma (remake)

Would welcome recommendations

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Re: Haven't done one of these in a while. skyecaptain August 5 2012, 02:26:30 UTC
One I forgot in the first category: Once Upon a Time in the West, one of my favorites, and also good for teaching film analysis. (That would be a separate list.)

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Re: Haven't done one of these in a while. koganbot August 5 2012, 05:37:17 UTC
Here's a list, not a best-of, but rather to back up my contention that there's a lot to even the average hack oater. These for the most part are way better than average, but they're average in the sense that they're bread-and-butter product aimed at the guy, or kid (I assume it was almost always a male), who says to himself, "I want to see a western; what's playing?"

--The Tall T, w/ Randolph Scott, dir. Budd Boetticher, story Elmore Leonard, script Burt Kennedy. Taut emotional chess match between Scott and bad-guy Richard Boone.
--Buchanan Rides Alone. First Scott-Boetticher western I saw, strangely light-hearted, more poker than chess, my mouth was half agape all through (Sarris, The American Cinema: "Constructed partly as allegorical Odysseys and partly as floating poker games where every character takes turns about bluffing at his hand until the final showdown, Boetticher's Westerns expressed a weary serenity and moral certitude...").
--Day Of The Outlaw w/ Robert Ryan, dir. Andre De Toth. Screenplay is fairly awful at the start ( ... )

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Re: Haven't done one of these in a while. dubdobdee August 5 2012, 09:54:01 UTC
Laramie is a Mann: the overall story is flabby bcz it divides its attention too much without effecting connections between Fonda's character (which is sketchy: he's seeking the man responsible for his brother's death and er that's it)* and the Waggoman family, a blind rancher with two sons, one a sadistic dimwit, the other adopted, seemingly level-headed, but deeply angry about being overlooked and undervalued. This triangle is interesting, and Fonda's arrival sets all the oedipal wasps a-buzzin, but Fonda functions more as catalyst than as interraction. There's also a very underpowered love element -- basically it gets along at a nice clip and has several terrific setpieces, of sudden scrambling unglamorous violence, but no space to do more than dab in the characters. Plus the Apaches, as abstract (not to say racist) cipher of pure lurking evil ( ... )

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the elvish curse of CGI dubdobdee August 5 2012, 10:02:38 UTC
inc.one very minor scene where my mouth-dropped open and i thought "how the FUCK did these guys set-direct the sky?" -- a sun-and-cloudscape dazzlingly beautiful and dramatic simply for fonda to ride desperately across in front of, along the skyline

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Re: Haven't done one of these in a while. koganbot August 6 2012, 04:18:47 UTC
Laramie is the only Mann western where I actually got bored, though I remember it so poorly that I didn't even recall that Fonda was in it. From your description, I'd imagine that with the right script, and a different conception of the part by the director, this'd be perfect for Fonda. I remember an Andrew Sarris appreciation of Fonda where Sarris stressed the potential for violence that Fonda brought to Tom Joad. Fonda was the wrong age and had the wrong image, but I imagine he could have done a more stressed and taut and truly dangerous Dirty Harry than we got from Eastwood. Also think with a different director and script he'd have done the same for High Noon (I'll confess that I've only seen bits and pieces of that "classic" [derided by many] on TV). Did see - again, only a bit and a piece - a movie where he played a bitter sheriff who did the town's dirty work largely unappreciated by the people he was protecting. I forget the title ( ... )

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Re: Haven't done one of these in a while. dubdobdee August 6 2012, 09:12:32 UTC
Basically I felt that the idea for the characters and the character structure is set out like chesspieces -- and it's not a terrible idea -- but then no game gets started that sets up any tension (= interest). At 100 mins It's actually the shortest Western in my line-up (this is actually why I started with it), and really doesn't dwell on any element or scene for very long at all, but overall it still feels static, without momentum or interesting revelation. (Admittedly I'd spoilered myself on who the actual villain was by reading up in advance, but it was in any case pretty meh, and they did next to nothing with it. I agree about Fonda -- perfect for the role if they'd thought it through and written it out -- but we just don't get enough of him.

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