TV/Movies Megathread

[Sheilbh]

I was about to post that Hans Gruber was probably the best fit to Sheilbh's preferences 

I'd also accept multiple Bond villains - including recently Bardem even if he had the boring x event in the past and now I'm going to destroy your life story.

[Sheilbh]

What about Raúl Juliá's Bison? It might be the most scenario-chewing per frame captured on film.

Tremendous work - though a useful example that even a powerful performance like that can't necessarily save a film

Also clearly don't have to be a Brit just comfortable with really hamming it up. See: Al Pacino in the Devil's Advocate

Shout out for Gary Oldman's run of villains too: Leon, Dracula, Fifth Element etc.

Edit: And, thinking about it, Richard Dawson's Killian in Running Man is superb.

[celedhring]

I was about to post that Hans Gruber was probably the best fit to Sheilbh's preferences 

I'd also accept multiple Bond villains - including recently Bardem even if he had the boring x event in the past and now I'm going to destroy your life story.

Anton Chirguh was probably a better villain turn for Bardem, imho.

[The Larch]

What about Raúl Juliá's Bison? It might be the most scenario-chewing per frame captured on film.

Tremendous work - though a useful example that even a powerful performance like that can't necessarily save a film

Just like Jeremy Irons' evil magician in the godawful Dungeons & Dragons film. But Juliá's is particulary endearing, and created many GLORIOUS memes, such as the "for me, it was tuesday" one.

Also clearly don't have to be a Brit just comfortable with really hamming it up. See: Al Pacino in the Devil's Advocate

Or many Nicholas Cage performances too.

Shout out for Gary Oldman's run of villains too: Leon, Dracula, Fifth Element etc.

Just mentioning Gary Oldman made me remember the "EVERYONEEEEEEEEEE!!!" scene from Leon. 

[Sheilbh]

Anton Chirguh was probably a better villain turn for Bardem, imho.

Yeah agreed, but I feel like that's in a slightly different family of films (same with Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood - given that year's Oscars those films are always linked in my head) - maybe that's where Silence of the Lambs belongs too.

[celedhring]

God, I just watched a compilation of Rickman's scenes in Robin Hood and it's an absolute treasure  . I remembered "and call off Christmas!", but had completely forgot about the wonderful "why a spoon and not an axe? Because it's dull you twit, it will hurt more" wonderful exchange with his dimwitted henchman.

[Malthus]

Gary Oldman's villain in Leon was damned brilliant! Everyone remembers the "Everyone!" Scene, but my favorite was the scene where he menacingly sniffs that other dude ... plus that wonderful scene where he menaces Matilda "I don't enjoy taking life from someone who doesn't care about it".

Perfect villain.

[The Larch]

God, I just watched a compilation of Rickman's scenes in Robin Hood and it's an absolute treasure  . I remembered "and call off Christmas!", but had completely forgot about the wonderful "why a spoon and not an axe? Because it's dull you twit, it will hurt more" wonderful exchange with his dimwitted henchman.

The one scene I remember the most about Rickman's Sheriff is the "small stitches" one, which is quite subdued in comparison.

[Sheilbh]

Also I watched Robin Hood as a kid in the cinema - it's one of my early cinema memories (also Lion King - another great gay British villain ) - and I was terrified of the Sheriff and the Witch. Which I think is always a sign of a good villainous performance. If you go in at the younger age range of who should be allowed to watch a film (I think it was PG and I was possibly a little young but my sister snuck me in) - are you scared?

If you're not because the villain's too internal or too psychological or too realistic then I think you've done it wrong

[Eddie Teach]

My Spy. Cute.

[celedhring]

Greyhound. Tom Hanks as a destroyer captain protecting a convoy from u-boats during the second happy time. Won't rewrite the book on naval movies, but it's short, intense, and entertaining. Also, it feels pretty realistic (to my very limited knowledge), at least it aims to present a very detailed picture of the goings on at the conn tower during the ASW actions. 7 depth charges out of 10 (yes I'm borrowing Habbaku's schtick).

The movie also indeed follows the "nazis are the best movie villains" rule.

[Savonarola]

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

Ah the 60s University,  this is just like Animal House, but with fewer hi-jinks and a lot more drinking.



Notable in that all credited actor's were nominated Academy Awards (Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Sandy Dennis and George Segal); the last film to win the academy award for Best Cinematography Black and White; and one of the films that drove the stake into the heart of the Production Code (among other things this is the first film since the inception of the production code to contain the phrsae "Goddamn you.")  The movie is obviously a filmed play; even the changes in scenery don't do much to help that, but what a cast.  Liz's performance is riveting; one of the best in her career.

[The Brain]

Journey's End. Young British officer arrives in the trenches in March 1918, when a great German offensive is in the air. Pretty good, if not very original. Paul Bettany is always nice to watch.

[Razgovory]

Saw Midway on my Kindle.  Skip it.

[Sheilbh]

RIP Alan Parker

Alan Parker: a maker of glorious films with a gift for connecting with audiences
Peter Bradshaw


Alan Parker on the set of Evita in 1996. Photograph: AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo
Published on Fri 31 Jul 2020 18.22 BST

Alan Parker was a great storyteller of the movies, a muscular film-maker who cared about what the public wanted, cared about how to get the public into the cinema to see movies they would really enjoy. He believed that enjoyment was what they deserved. And he made superbly crafted pictures in any and every style that gave them that pleasure.

Like Hugh Hudson, the Scott brothers Ridley and Tony, and David Puttnam, Parker made his bones in TV commercials – socking over fiercely effective images and emotions and stories. Commercials were a no-nonsense world where there was no navel-gazing about art: if the product didn't sell then your ideas were lacking, your craftsmanship was at fault and you hadn't done your job. He made no apologies for carrying over that spirit into his films, which were made for moviegoers, not critics. At the Cannes film festival, where I would sometimes see him, Parker would playfully berate me about failing to join him in condemning the wishy-washy artiness of the Brit establishment and the hoity-toity world of the British Film Institute, which he saw as committed as handing over public money to film-makers with no idea of surviving in a commercial marketplace.


Brad Davis in Midnight Express. Photograph: Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

Parker himself was no fashionable auteur and yet made a series of films which are lasered into the memories of all of us who saw them: in the 1970s, he made the searingly explicit Midnight Express, with Brad Davis and John Hurt, a true-life movie about escaping from a grim Turkish jail which was in those days often presented in a double-bill in British cinemas with Scorsese's Taxi Driver, and is now, perhaps, awaiting reinvention as an exploitation classic. Before that, there was the unique classic Bugsy Malone, a tongue-in-cheek 30s mob musical-drama played entirely by kids, wielding custard pie guns. That was a movie which really couldn't be made now; people are understandably chary of presenting children in such adult and rather sexualised situations. Startlingly, the film featured Jodie Foster as a nightclub singer, and she really did seem like the only adult among all these naïve kids her own age, and of course appeared in Taxi Driver at about the same time.

In the 1980s, Parker changed tack again for the potent and forthright teen musical Fame, about New York's High School of Performing Arts, which would later spawn a long-running TV show. The film celebrated the energy of young people, with a diverse cast which wasn't to be found everywhere at the time, and Parker hit all the buttons with gusto, and also included a bold, hard-hitting scene about how young women could be tricked into auditioning for sleazeballs and porn-merchants.


Pink Floyd – The Wall. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Parker had a gift for music in his movies: in 1982 he made the musical Pink Floyd: The Wall whose Scarfe-cartoon images, like the marching hammers, and rebellious ideas about teaching and schools as conformity-pipelines and unhappiness-factories hit a nerve with young filmgoers. Later, in 1991, he hit the same joyfully rebellious note with The Commitments, based on the novel by Roddy Doyle, about some young people in Dublin who set out to form a soul band. Later in the 90s, he found another commercially potent project in his adaptation of Evita, by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd-Webber, with Madonna belting out the arias of passion and scorn – again, to the joy of the cinemagoing public.

And yet Parker also had a touch for serious projects: his Angel Heart was a mysterious noir horror fantasy with Robert De Niro as the shadowy prince of darkness and Mickey Rourke as the private investigator who has to do business with him. Around the same time, Parker took on Mississippi Burning, about racist murders in the Deep South in the 1960s, and Parker's direction of its two leads, Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, elicited great performances from them.


Madonna as Eva Peron in Evita. Photograph: Bill Kaye/Cinergi/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

In the latter phase of his career, Parker always had an idea for a good story, something to grab the attention: he made Angela's Ashes in 1999, based on the Frank McCourt memoir of a tough life in the west of Ireland, and Parker's potent movie helped drive the mania of that time for "misery lit" in the world of publishing. His final film, the flawed noir drama The Life of David Gale, offered audiences a spin on Fritz Lang which some appreciated, some didn't.

But for me, his greatest film is the gloriously powerful, forthright, operatically emotional marital drama Shoot the Moon in 1982, with Albert Finney and Diane Keaton as the unhappy couple. That is the film with the raw power of a sumo wrestling bout: big emotions, big performances, big scenes all smacking sweatily into each other. The last time I met Parker, it wasin London, and I always reproach myself for not telling him how much I loved Shoot the Moon and so many more of his movies besides. He was a powerful force in cinema, and the business seems a bit more meagre without him.