To take some of the megaposting stress off of
europe...
So apperently the Universe conspired to make me watch Streetcar Named Desire.
There are worse things that the universe could've conspired to make you watch.
I've never loved that one. It's decent, but literally every other big Brando movie from that period (
Julius Caesar,
The Wild One,
On the Waterfront) is better IMO.
Then I saw Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
Such an amazing movie, and Tracy rules. I actually did a compare-and-contrast a couple of weeks ago in my film class where I showed the students the opening scene from
Up and then Tracy's ending speech ("And if it's
half of what we felt...that's everything") and I was pleasantly surprised that most people thought the latter was the more moving and emotional.
The Killing...didn't really improve.
It hasn't for me, either. I'll take
Fear and Desire and
Killer's Kiss every time.
A very well executed heist-film with a spring of vitality to it.
See, this is why I've never really loved that film: Because that spring and that vitality is precisely what I feel it
lacks. The narrative structure is brilliant, the cinematography and editing are on point, the script is tight as hell, but it just feels so clinical and lifeless, like Kubrick has created a blueprint rather than a real building you can walk into and live in the way you can his other films, even his other early work.
I saw The Killers, Asphalt Jungle and This Gun For Hire. I considered all 3 to be superb!
The Killers is amazing, one of the very best films noir.
The Asphalt Jungle is in the same boat for me as
The Killing, though lacking Kubrick's craftsmanship, it's a step down. And
This Gun for Hire isn't exactly off the beaten path, but it's a bit underrated and very good.
Burt Lancaster - whom I previously mostly knew from his adventure films
You've got to watch
The Rainmaker. And not just because it's Hepburn. Lancaster fucking
kills it in that movie. It also sort of set the stage for his big turn in
Elmer Gantry, which I also recommend but only after you watch
The Rainmaker.
You should also check out his many pairings with Kirk Douglas. They were great friends and worked extremely well together. Whether they're on the same side or mortal enemies, they're a great onscreen duo.
I watched Champions with Ken Shamrock.
I fucking love that movie so much. Softcore porn director makes a B-martial arts movie that not only has some softcore porn in it (because why not?) but also has some martial arts madness revolving around Ken Shamrock in his roided up prime (quite possibly the most impressive physique I'v ever seen relative to the balance between looks and function) fucking dudes up in a UFC knockoff called Terminal Combat run by sort-of-young-but-still-grizzled-and-nasty-as-fuck Danny Trejo? How can you not love it
I like how the movie initially focuses on the main character and mid-way through pretty much does a switchero and places Ken Shamrock in the driving-seat instead.
Not only that, it's so ambitious that they set-up the cliche revenge angle and then say fuck that, let's make them buddies and have them take down Trejo. That movie was so ambitious and so ahead-of-its-time, and sadly, MMA movies still haven't made good on all it has to offer.
I think I saw FMJ like close to fifteen years ago ... I have trouble conceptualizing it as a narrative whole.
I think these two statements might be related
I didn't totally hate BvsS.
I wouldn't say I totally hated
Man of Steel, but I'm totally expecting to totally hate that movie.
Someone needs to get this thread poppin again.
I need a new anime to watch.
You needed to be more specific,
Flemmy
Should i watch Stalker or some shit?
I've pretty much loved every Fritz Lang film I've seen. Even commonly reviled stuff like the two Indian Tomb movies I through were splendidly crafted adventure yarns. That said... I honestly just couldn't get into Dr. Mabuse - The Gambler.
You want to talk about some Martian shit, you're on a silent movie kick, you come up on one of the absolute top-of-the-line GOAT silent movies, and you "couldn't get into" it? That's seriously the coolest fucking silent movie ever made. The
Heat-esque opening sequence, the crazy
Hannibal-esque puppetmastery of Mabuse, Lang's incredible pacing. That fucker is like 5 hours long and it
flew by. I watched it three times in a week and then wrote an essay on it for one of my Master's classes a few years ago. I totally fell under the spell of that movie.
Metropolis is the big one in Lang's silent career, but
Destiny and
Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler are the ones I endlessly return to.
Out of curiosity, how much Lang have you seen in general?
Faust was absolutely dream-inspiringly awesome.
I didn't love that one, but given how meh I've found a lot of Murnau (other than
Nosferatu, which rules), I was surprised it was as cool as it was. Have you seen
Phantom? It's not as good, but it's a lot more compelling than
Sunrise IMO and it's got some comparable imagery.
When it comes to silent ghost stories, though,
The Phantom Carriage is where it's at
I rewatched Dr Caligari. Honestly, as far as Robert Weine's filmography goes, Genuine > Caligari.
Haven't seen
Genuine, but a few years ago (during the same kick where I first discovered
Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, in fact) I did see the 1920 version of
The Golem. That was a bad ass movie.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari gets the press, but there's a lot of cool German Expressionist shit out there.
Also, if you love expressionist mindfuckery, then you can't do better than From Morn to Midnight by Georg Kaiser, released the same year as these two films. It's expressionism cranked up to eleven.
That's definitely one hell of a crazy movie.
I saw a bunch of other silent films. Mostly westerns and Italian historical epics. John Fords Straight Shooting had some really cool visuals during the gunfighting -- that would herald his later films like Stagecoach. Hell Hinges was the surprising gem though. It's about an amoral gunfighter that arrives to a seedy town, where the only decent community is a small congregation living amidst all the debauchery. William Hart gives an great, physical performance with a lot of magnetism to it. The action is very well done -- with the whole city being burned down. And lastly the religious conversion that the main character undergoes is communicated through some great visuals that really makes it feel like an existential, emotional conversion rather than a simple plotpoint.
Ok, this is honestly creepy. Just a couple of months ago I finished this big essay on the origins of the action movie, and in the final section, I talk about early crime movies and Westerns and my two examples for the latter are
Straight Shooting and
Hell's Hinges.
Since I know you're one of the few people in here as nerdy as me, this is the relevant portion if you're interested (I also mention
Shane, which I know you'll appreciate):
Bullitt68 said:
In the history of the Western, the lone hero was initially represented in accordance with a Manichean “white hat/black hat” logic where the hero was righteous and pure and the villain was evil and corrupt. Important early Westerns that sought to deconstruct this logic included such films as Hell’s Hinges (1916), in which William S. Hart plays a conflicted hero who upholds the law but seeks moral/spiritual guidance, and Straight Shooting (1917), in which Harry Carey is hired by an evil rancher to run a family off of a farm but changes his ways upon falling in love with the farmer’s daughter. Over time, these anomalous characterizations of the Western hero, which stood in marked contradistinction to the cowboy archetype promulgated by Tom Mix, became the norm; just as the gangster film underwent transformative ideological and thus generic shifts, so, too, did the Western.
In his nuanced assessment of the post-World War II Western, André Bazin (2005 [1955]) argues that what emerged in place of the classical, Manichean Western film was what he called the “superwestern” (150). To Bazin’s mind, High Noon (1952) and Shane (1953) are the two Westerns that “best illustrate the mutation in the Western genre as an effect of the awareness it [had] gained of itself” (151–152). Shane, in particular, is singled out by Bazin as “the ultimate in ‘superwesternization’” (152), for it not only subjects the myth of the Western to sustained interrogation over the course of its narrative, but also enriches the myth by virtue of its originality on the level of characterization, its “psychological flavor” providing a taste of “individuality” (155) generically distinct from, but historically related to, the individuality of the gangster-as-cop.
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson (2008) note a similar trajectory in the Western genre. Although they do not use Bazin’s terminology, they discuss The Searchers (1956) in light of what Bazin refers to as superwesternization, and they do so by way of a comparison between it and the early Ford film Straight Shooting vis-à-vis the enduring automatism of “the conflict between civilized order and the lawless frontier” represented by the hero’s position between the two (328–329). The five-reel Straight Shooting devotes nearly an entire reel to the hero’s deliberation at the end of the film as he struggles to decide whether to stay with the farmers in civilization or to go back out and brave the frontier. Significantly, this automatism reemerges in the post-World War II superwestern, only it is tinged with a greater sense of melancholy and moroseness, for the hero is no longer in a position to make decisions. In such superwesterns as Shane and The Searchers, the heroes—in the former, an outlaw who has given up on the idea of reform, and in the latter, a violent racist who has never even entertained the idea—learned long ago that they do not belong in civilization, and while they can be of help to the civilized, they know that they belong to a different world. Contemporary action films have built off of this template, first with what O’Brien calls the “urban westerns” of the 1970s such as Billy Jack (1971) and Death Wish (1974), subsequently in what King calls the “cop action” films of the 1980s and 1990s, and even into the present era of the superhero wherein, as Todd McGowan observes, superheroes are forced to struggle over the same issues as their cowboy, gangster, and cop antecedents, namely “the problem of exceptional violence that resides outside the legal order and yet is necessary for the existence of that order” (McGowan 2012, 128).
The action film in particular has traded on both the ambiguity of the gangster-as-cop formula and the melancholy of the superwestern. With/in titles such as Lone Wolf McQuade (1983), The Last Boy Scout (1991), and The Expendables (2010), action films frequently foreground heroes whose positions of exemplarity preclude their integration in society yet whose commitment to honor and duty require them to risk everything, up to and sometimes including their lives, to protect that very society.
The Running Man is my new favorite 80s flick.
I don't think it's much of a revelation for me to say that I love Arnold movies, but this one has always been near the bottom for me. Not because it isn't awesome (because, come on, it's Arnold) but because nearly all of Arnold's other movies are so much
more awesome.
Like
europe, I'm surprised you've only just recently seen this one. Are there other Arnold movies you've never seen?
Going to go ahead and just say this - Europe1 is the bomb.
