TV/Movies Megathread

[CountDeMoney]

I was reading Matt Zoller Seitz, the enemy of taste, and he did a post about The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and how it's awesome.

Seitz likes a lot of things that are terrible (most recently the new Carrie), but there is still good in him.  I didn't know that The Life Aquatic was met with (a measure of) critical scorn on its release.  It seems impossible now, doesn't it?  It's maybe Wes Anderson's best.

Psellus probably thinks it sucks.

It still doesn't surpass Rushmore, but it is better than TRT--although it takes repeated viewings before you can really appreciate it, which is why it was panned so much when it first came out.

[CountDeMoney]

Doubt he opened the thread and replied to Yi within 12 seconds.

You don't know.  GF could be a big Lakers buff.

[Ideologue]

Huh, not my ranking at all.  But you do love Rushmore.  That's justifiable.

Iirc, you put Moonrise Kingdom below the three, but it's the one I think may be equal or superior to Life Aquatic.  It's also the only Wes Anderson movie I actually own because 1)Life Aquatic isn't on BD, and 2)even if it were, it'd be in some ~$30 Criterion case.

(I'm happy to leave Fantastic Mr. Fox and Bottle Rocket out of this since I haven't seen them yet. )

[CountDeMoney]

Huh, not my ranking at all.  But you do love Rushmore.  That's justifiable.

It's a complete film.  And it doesn't insist upon itself.

Iirc, you put Moonrise Kingdom below the three, but it's the one I think may be equal or superior to Life Aquatic.

Moonrise Kingdom is an incomplete film. 

[frunk]

Got this set of 100 so bad to so middling science fiction movies for my birthday.  I've started going through the more promising sounding ones.

Hands of Steel - What if a huge fan of The Manchurian Candidate and Over the Top decided to make a science fiction movie, and 50% of the actors spoke English as a second language?  I could claim that it was worth the 1 1/2 hours but that would be a lie.

Slipstream - Ben Kingsley!  F. Murray Abraham!  Bill Paxton!  Mark Hammill playing a bad guy!  Other people!  The cast (esp. Bob Peck and Mark Hammill) and some of the dialogue were the only bright spots.  The rest of the movie wasn't that good.  It's not a good idea to make a science fiction movie and then write the story such that the central conceit plays almost no role in what happens.  Yeah, the world is post-apocalyptic but the whole slipstream thing is just an excuse for lots of boring shots of single/double seater kit planes.

[Admiral Yi]

A Dangerous Method.  Carl Jung bangs a patient, he and Sigmund have a spat.

OK. 

Michael Fassbinder seems to be making about 20 movies a year.

[Ideologue]

Huh, not my ranking at all.  But you do love Rushmore.  That's justifiable.

It's a complete film.  And it doesn't insist upon itself.

It's a Wes Anderson movie.  It Goddamned well does.  That's his thing.

Iirc, you put Moonrise Kingdom below the three, but it's the one I think may be equal or superior to Life Aquatic.

Moonrise Kingdom is an incomplete film.

I don't know if I buy this, or if I understand it.  Is it just because it has a basically happy ending for all involved?  Is it because they're children?  You'll have to elaborate. 

[viper37]

Jews & Muslim: the movie (Juifs et Musulmans: si loin, si proche)

Pretty good 4-parter documentary on the relationship between Muslims and Jews since the beginning of Islam.

It has, sometimes, in the narration, a slightly pro-arabic/palestinian bias, but it is mostly well balanced, and very, very instructive.  It talks about early islamic beliefs and how they came to evolve to consider Jerusalem a sacred city; it talks about how Jews went from ennemy to coin source back to ennemy.  How many Jews force-converted to islam to avoid persecution, how arabs felt toward first the creation of Israel, then of the aftermath of they '67 war, how it translated to foreign jewish & arabic communities.
Pretty good.  I don't know if there exists an english version of this, but I recommend it to everyone.

[Grey Fox]

That movie is so awesome.

Life Aquatic or whatever Yi was talking about?

Life Aquatic. Quoting on mobile is just too hard.

[Ideologue]

I dig it.

***

Shame (2011).  A movie about how it's important not to lose sight of the fact that people you care about may still be suffering even though your own life may in fact be, by any metric, basically great.  Beautifully photographed.

B

Saboteur (1942).  A fun potboiler that begins when a Nazi saboteur blows up an American aircraft factory (the worst thing you possibly could blow up) and pins the blame on our innocent hero, who has to escape the mistaken arm of justice and convince the daughter of a blind man that he's an alright dude, so that she'll help him clear his name and grant him sexual access.  As far as I could tell, while it is quite exciting, it ends in such a manner that he cannot prove his innocence and he'll still be put to death for espionage and/or treason and he will not get to have sex.  By the way, that so is not a dreadnought; it's the fucking SS Normandie.  Nice thought, using the footage, but bad execution.  I liked it when that model of a guy burned to death, though, and when Vladimir Putin fell off the Statue of Liberty.  This movie's pretty cool, but I have no idea how the fuck our hero got out of the storeroom he was locked in.  As near as I can tell, it was Shining ghosts.

B

Rope (1948).  Two college kids kill a classmate for kicks, then invite all his friends and family to a dinner party centered around the box they've stuffed his corpse in, shrugging their shoulders when he never shows up.  But Rupert Cadell, Ph.D., (James Stewart) once their teacher and mentor, is on the case, and the boys discover that there is no such thing as the perfect crime.  Ultimately, Cadell learns that it's his own will-to-power homilies that have inspired his former students to murder.

This is not only best film by Hitchcock I've yet seen, but also--while my viewing of the cinema of the 1940s is by no means exhaustive--the best movie from the decade that I've so far seen as well.  It may well get a near-future second viewing and a full write-up.  But my initial thoughts:

While the edits are only elegant about half the time--almost half of the rest are unbelievably clumsy zooms into people's coats, which only worked about once, and the three edits that remain are just straight-up hard cuts--I found the experiment in long takes to nonetheless be a roaring success.  Ultimately, it's a superb-looking film, particularly as it ends, in the flashing red and green lights of a neon sign outside the apartment's window while the principals wait for the cops to come and them away.

Rope is, perhaps, better viewed today than it was in 1948, because a modern watcher (i.e., me) hasn't internalized the archaic production code in force at the time that kept movies featuring killers from depicting them getting away with it.  Thus, showing the murder at the outset (which the screenwriter says, in the BD featurette, he believed to be a mistake) didn't make any difference to me in terms of suspense.  As far as I knew, the original Party Monsters would make out scot free.

Apparently, I was supposed to understand also that they just wanted to make out, period.  But as a product of the enlightened 21st century, I'm used to homo stuff being a bit more flamboyant (see Shame, supra), so it sort of slipped by me till it was explicitly mentioned in the BD's accompanying featurette.  "Yes," I said.  "I suppose those murderous gentlemen were a bit gay.  Except one of them was also mentioned to have screwed the brunette girl whose fiancee they just strangled.  So that's kind of ambiguous."

Apparently Cary Grant turned down the role of Rupert Cadell because it was also gay--in the play on which this is based, Rope's End, he was implied to have fucked one of the kids when they were his students.  Thank God he did, because I feel as if Grant in the role would have been terrible.  Stewart, who was said to simply be as unaware as I was that his role was gay-coded, was perfect.  Cary Grant doesn't strike me as an intellectualizing nancy of any orientation, whereas James Stewart, with his wee vestigial body and tall skull--the body of a true airman--does.  (James Mason was also considered, and I would've been okay with that.  Amusingly, both are mentioned in smalltalk during the party--if you turn the clock way back to my Lolita review, you'll recall I found it bogus that anyone, let alone everyone, would actually want to fuck James Mason, but apparently it was a real thing in the late 40s and perhaps the fad did indeed persist all the way into early 1962.)

But ultimately the greatest thing about Rope, besides its technical bona fides, John Dall as the sanguinary lead killer, and James Stewart, is the ending.  Though it took a student's corpse to bring him finally to the truth, in the end, a liberal arts professor acknowledges the damage he's done to society and the hollow, sucking lie that exists at the center of his professional and ideological existence.  His field, I gathered, was in "critical thinking."

A+

[CountDeMoney]

Moonrise Kingdom is an incomplete film.

I don't know if I buy this, or if I understand it.  Is it just because it has a basically happy ending for all involved?  Is it because they're children?  You'll have to elaborate.

The love triangle plot line between Willis, McDormand and Murray could've gotten 15 minutes more screen time throughout the film, and the calamities of the third act went on too long.

And you don't have to buy it.  You gave The French Connection a B, dickhead, so I already know you're broke.

[Darth Wagtaros]

You shoudl watch the Topper movies Ide. Those and Harvey.

[Ed Anger]

A Dangerous Method.  Carl Jung bangs a patient, he and Sigmund have a spat.

OK. 

Michael Fassbinder seems to be making about 20 movies a year.

Was that the one with the chick patient spanking?

[lustindarkness]

We finished season 1 of the Walking Dead, great stuff.

Not sure if I can get The Wife to watch 'em more often to catch up before the end of this season.

Considering the show will go on mid winter break and season won't be over till end of March you should be okay :p

I would have done a marathon viewing and watched them all by now. 

I may have to take an evening to catch up on the hundreds of spoiler tags and posts I skipped on this thread regarding The Walking Dead the last 2 years.

[The Brain]

James Mason. Did such a great Jew with funny hat.