TV/Movies Megathread

[CountDeMoney]

I know this will make me unamerican or something but......


I don't care for the spaghetti westerns.

Meh, I don't like them very much, either.

[CountDeMoney]

But I didn't feel I'd get the full effect of Unforgiven unless I had some basic grounding in the genre and the Clint Eastwood persona in particular getting deconstructed.

Sometimes a movie is just a movie, Professor Fleeber.

[Savonarola]

an alcoholic has-been (James Dean - duh)

Dean Martin   

[Syt]

an alcoholic has-been (James Dean - duh)

Dean Martin   

Oops, yeah - brainfart.

[Savonarola]

Out of Leone's westerns I like Once Upon A Time In The West the best. While the Dollar trilogy may be more entertaining, OUATITW is beautifully shot and feels epic, showing how the Wild West makes room for civilization. Bronson, Robards and Fonda are at the top of their game here.

After seeing it, I thought that if John Ford had made a Spaghetti Western it would have been "Once Upon a Time in the West."  (If Martin Scorsese had made one it would have been "Once Upon a Time in America."  )  Given that I'm surprised that you picked "Rio Bravo" as your favorite movie rather than "The Searchers."

[Ed Anger]

Like all olds, my favorite western is High Noon. 

[11B4V]

I know this will make me unamerican or something but......


I don't care for the spaghetti westerns.

Meh, I don't like them very much, either.

Though there are some great well known ones and great not so well known ones like "The Great Silence".

The Trinity series is a favorite of mine. Spaghetti western that spoosf spaghetti westerns. They dont take themselves too seriously.

[Ideologue]

So I'm watching Seven Samurai (again? hard to say), got to the intermission and it's way fucking rad so far.

But that "Are you a girl?" part in movies always drives me up a wall.

Yes, she's a fucking girl, you blind Robert Vaughn samurai motherfucker.  She's a mega-hot girl and she's the only girl with a decent haircut in this whole time period.  For fuck's sake.

Also, do you think shaving your head to mimic male pattern baldness will ever come back?

[Savonarola]

Hakws/Wayne also did Rio Lobo and El Dorado together, westerns that are similar in tone, but don't quite reach the same quality (though RObert Mitchum as drunkard sheriff in El Dorado is good fun).

Also, the Hawks/Wayne movie Hatari is highly recommended.

See "Red River" if you haven't yet; it's Mutiny on the Chuck Wagon as directed by Howard Hawks, starring John Wayne and Montgomery Clift.

[Admiral Yi]

Rewatched the last third of 3:10 to Yuma last night.

The first time I watched it I thought it was a travesty. [spoiler]Russell Crowe cooperating with Christian Bale to take himself to prison, gunning down his own crew because he got such a big boner for Bale.[/spoiler]

That stuff still grates [spoiler]particularly the scene in which Crowe stops choking Bale to death because of his heart-wrenching tale of cowardice[/spoiler], but the part that's left succeeds pretty well in the crucible of the Western genre, which is to say heavily armed men negotiating with each other.

[Scipio]

I know this will make me unamerican or something but......


I don't care for the spaghetti westerns.

Meh, I don't like them very much, either.

You guys are not American.  Fucking commie bastards.

[CountDeMoney]

You guys are not American.  Fucking commie bastards.

The editing is usually atrocious.  And the dubbing sucks.

[11B4V]

Rewatched the last third of 3:10 to Yuma last night.

The first time I watched it I thought it was a travesty. [spoiler]Russell Crowe cooperating with Christian Bale to take himself to prison, gunning down his own crew because he got such a big boner for Bale.[/spoiler]

That stuff still grates [spoiler]particularly the scene in which Crowe stops choking Bale to death because of his heart-wrenching tale of cowardice[/spoiler], but the part that's left succeeds pretty well in the crucible of the Western genre, which is to say heavily armed men negotiating with each other.

you hate the original too?

[Ideologue]

Seven Samurai peters out a bit by the time they've picked off so many of the bandits piecemeal that the samurai/peasant force outnumbers them 5:1 and it's become apparent that the bandits are terrible strategists, tacticians, and even individual fighters.  You almost kind of wonder why the peasants needed the samurai in the first place, when they had access to a cache of arms and pikemen are easy enough to train.

Magnificent Seven overcame this difficulty, thanks both to having a bandit as a character in his own right (this movie really needed an Eli Wallach) and also by having truly cringing villagers, changing the plot so that the peasants betrayed their heroes and the Seven had to fight their way back into the town and inspire the villagers' resistance, instead of always having the advantage of the defensive against foolishly headstrong enemies and the unalloyed loyalty of what were in effect their troops.

And, in this case like Mag Seven, it also suffers from content and technological limitations--lack of blood, pikes obviously going behind people to imply impalement, etc.

I was, further, annoyed when Hayashida (the funny one, that's not Toshiro Mifune's Kikuchiyo) died from a musket shot because Kurosawa failed to set up that the bandits were actually armed with muskets (but only three, two of which get taken during the course of the film).  I guess this maybe counts as a twist, but I thought the gunshot noise was part of the burning bandit fort collapsing and for a minute I thought he died because he slipped and hit his head on a rock.

And I was pissed that Samurai Robert Vaughn did not get married to the peasant girl, in another unfavorable comparison to Mag Seven.  I guess it's implied he goes away because of class division or something.  WTF is this shit?  The last shot's on the burial mound.  Fucker didn't even stay around to make sure she wasn't pregnant.  Perhaps he busted on her face in true samurai fashion, but he was young and inexperienced, and we are not privy to this information.

I think this is a legitimate flaw in the film.  An opportunity to skewer the bullshit samurai lifestyle, which they'd done a pretty good job of doing, was wasted, and it kind of made me despise the character.  I dunno, maybe that was the point.

Lack of resolution to Samurai Robert Vaughn aside, I loved everything that was not directly about the battle scenes, all of the daily interactions between the Seven, and indeed how class played out in the Samurai ensconcing themselves in the life of the village and basically acting as their petty nobility (with all its attendant duties, leading to four of their number dying).  Indeed, I even loved a fair amount of stuff in the battle scenes, even if the bandits were ultimately weak and stupid and there's at least one too many attacks for the purposes of efficient drama.

B+

[Barrister]

I know this will make me unamerican or something but......


I don't care for the spaghetti westerns.

Meh, I don't like them very much, either.

You both suck.