TV/Movies Megathread

[celedhring]

Red is my favorite movie in the trilogy. Strikes the best balance between drama and romance; Blue is too dramatically over the top and there isn't a single likeable character in White.

[Savonarola]

Three Colors: Red. I liked it.

The lady in it was hot.  I could never figure out why she kept visiting the old guy.  Probably the whole point of the movie there or something

I think it was.  Red the color of fraternité (); a bond forms between the model and the old man.

[Eddie Teach]

Three Colors: Red. I liked it.

The lady in it was hot.  I could never figure out why she kept visiting the old guy.  Probably the whole point of the movie there or something

Probably just lonely cause she seems to be going through a lengthy, drawn-out breakup.

[Valmy]

Red is my favorite movie in the trilogy. Strikes the best balance between drama and romance; Blue is too dramatically over the top and there isn't a single likeable character in White.

You are not kidding about White.  You start out really disliking the hot blonde and then the male lead turns out to be a total douche and waaaay over-reacts in his revenge.  I did like the part where he gets smuggled into Poland in that dude's trunk and the Poles at the airport notice the trunk is heavy and just assume it is valuable so steal it.  Um what were they thinking was in it?  Gold bars?

[Admiral Yi]

Is Red a new movie?  I thought I saw a movie with that title back in the 80s.  A nice looking chick, takes dance class, drinks a lot of water.  No discernable plot.

[Valmy]

Is Red a new movie?  I thought I saw a movie with that title back in the 80s.  A nice looking chick, takes dance class, drinks a lot of water.  No discernable plot.

Yeah it is from 1988 or something.

[Duque de Bragança]

Is Red a new movie?  I thought I saw a movie with that title back in the 80s.  A nice looking chick, takes dance class, drinks a lot of water.  No discernable plot.

Yeah it is from 1988 or something.

More like 1993-1994 for the trilogy.

[Ideologue]

So, I watched Forbidden Planet again the other night and I'm in the middle of writing it up, and I was considering Louis and Bebe Barron's "electronic tonalities."  (TFP's is the first electronic score in film history.)  What I find so interesting is not just how musically weird it is, but formally also: how it bleeds into actual, diagetic sound and becomes unified with it at many points in the movie, from the actual Krell music to the roar of the Id Monster and the sounds of the klystron relays.  Is there anywhere else where a score is used in this or an equally weird fashion?  To define it, I guess I'd call it "are there any other movies where sound effects become music, or vice-versa?  The only one I can think of is The Amazing Spider-Man 2, where Hans Zimmer et al's score becomes a diagetic, visually-represented song that Peter Parker even comments on (he hates it).

I saw an old British horror movie spoof where a team was investigating house that was alleged to be haunted.  At one point, a couple members of the team are moving down a corridor while ominous music plays.  At the end of the hallway, they open a door to find another member of the team sitting there in his underwear playing the ominous music on a cello.  It was a funny scene (and unfortunately, about the best scene in the movie).

That was just a one-off joke, though, and not how the score was used in the rest of the film.

Yeah, there's a fair number of comedies (though none that I can think of offhand, sadly--I assume it happens at least once in the Airplane and Naked Gun movies) where the characters can suddenly hear the music cues.  Rarer in proper movies that aren't breaking but just sort of gliding by the fourth wall like that.

***

Design for Living (1933).  Very likely to be the most adorable romantic comedy possible: two hipster geeks who happen to look like Gary Cooper and Fredric March bang the hottest broad in Paris, Miriam Hopkins, but only serially at first, leading to the dissolution of their threesome into each of its possible constituent parts, until it finally crystallizes into the least appealing one, namely the two hipster geeks without any meat in their man sandwich.  They resolve to overcome their differences and serve as willing drones to their irresistible queen, but unfortunately she has gone off and married a rich, boring man in pursuit of upper class stability, which was so obviously a mistake on both their parts that you don't even get mad at either, you just pity them.

The only bummer is how inhuman, passionless, and entirely ineffective the Upper Class Square antagonist turns out to be, so the romantic drama part of the romantic comedy is actually resolved some twenty minutes ahead of the actual story, so that it can only conclude in extremely inhuman, passionless, and mildly ineffective farce.  But it's still, other than that late-game misstep, entirely wonderful.

Indeed, I have rarely seen a movie so apt to be remade.  Of course, with no or very little dialogue replaced (and if so, from the Noel Coward source material)--but performed with the most literate pornographic actors possible.  Can Hillary Scott do witty Old Hollywood-style dialogue?  If so, hello Oscar!

I'd want to keep that very delightful last shot, but the best part of me knows it really needed to end in a hardcore DP instead.

A

[Ideologue]

Oh, and I forgot if I mentioned watching it but Foreign Correspondent (1940) was fine, I guess.  (It's like forty minutes too long for the plot hatched by its increasingly inept spy ring, yet somehow not long enough to make the love story between the titular character and the daughter of the villain anything but a laughable writer's fiat.  It is saved mainly by the gay comic relief--who is so Oscar Wilde that for the first time ever I caught a coded character in a pre-1970s film--and an admittedly pretty great climactic plane crash.)

B

[Syt]

Look of Superman in the upcoming movie. Yay, it's dark, gritty, colorless and joyless!

[Ideologue]

YES.  Ugh.

Actually, I wish the last one had been at least 1% even more joyless.  That fucking joke in front of the ongoing genocide in Metropolis is, like, just the worst.

[Josquius]

I hope he's just like that when he enters Gotham's airspace and he returns to comic book colours when he flies out.

[Eddie Teach]

I like gritty superheroes.

[jimmy olsen]

Look of Superman in the upcoming movie. Yay, it's dark, gritty, colorless and joyless!

Maybe he's in Gotham there?

In Metropolis the sun is always shinning, but in Gotham it's always rainy or at night.

EDIT: Beaten by Tyr

[Syt]

It's probably Gotham, but I wouldn't really call the previous movie colorful. More like a meandering drab borefest with monologuing, soulless entities filling the screen.