TV/Movies Megathread

[Queequeg]

I liked 28 Weeks more.  That opening scene was a fucking doozie. 

[Ideologue]

Just listened to David Kalat's great commentary on Things to Come.  UPGRADE: A  Will it climb ever higher in my estimation?  Which shall it be, Passworth?  WHICH SHALL IT BE?  Which shall it be..?

Watching it again, but I probably really need to go to sleep.  Rest enough for the individual man, but too much and too soon and we call it death.

[Ideologue]

It's just so much better than it's competition that it makes me really mad that the 40 minutes missing from Things to Come appears to be lost, perhaps for good, but God saw fit to grant us an even longer Metropolis.

[The Brain]

Doom is on TV!

[Ideologue]

I'm looking for other early, modernist, science fiction films in the same vein as Metropolis, Tunnel, and Things To Come.  The more utopian, the better.  (So Frankenstein and the Bride thereof, more-or-rather-less faithful adaptations of an essentially luddite novel, do not count, nor would Island of Lost Souls, Invisible Man, The Man Who Changed His Mind, etc., although all are interesting.)

So far I've got Aelita (aka A Soviet Socialist Princess of Mars, 1924);

Just Imagine (a 1930 American science fiction... comedy... musical... that iirc, nearly bankrupted its studio);

Fritz Lang's The Woman In the Moon (aka Metropolis 2: Even Duller and Stupider, as it appears to be more like a three hour silent relationship drama that just happens to be set on the moon--where they'll, uh, mine gold --could be okay, but the first half hour is not and, again, it is three fucking hours long);

Master of the World (a German movie about killer robots, not the much later Jules Verne adaptation, although that movie's pretty rad too);

Men Must Fight, a 1933 pro-war, pro-airpower American movie (it involves a war with Eurasia, ha ha, and a combined chemical/HE air raid on NYC, never forget);

Aerograd, a Soviet film called, holy shit, AEROGRAD (hopefully about the VVS building and using heavy bombers).

I'd also like to watch L'Inhumaine, but it doesn't appear to be available anywhere easily.

Mainly directed toward Sav: any other titles of interest I should look into?

[Savonarola]

I'm looking for other early, modernist, science fiction films in the same vein as Metropolis, Tunnel, and Things To Come.  The more utopian, the better.  (So Frankenstein and the Bride thereof, more-or-rather-less faithful adaptations of an essentially luddite novel, do not count, nor would Island of Lost Souls, Invisible Man, The Man Who Changed His Mind, etc., although all are interesting.)

So far I've got Aelita (aka A Soviet Socialist Princess of Mars, 1924);

Just Imagine (a 1930 American science fiction... comedy... musical... that iirc, nearly bankrupted its studio);

Fritz Lang's The Woman In the Moon (aka Metropolis 2: Even Duller and Stupider, as it appears to be more like a three hour silent relationship drama that just happens to be set on the moon--where they'll, uh, mine gold --could be okay, but the first half hour is not and, again, it is three fucking hours long);

Master of the World (a German movie about killer robots, not the much later Jules Verne adaptation, although that movie's pretty rad too);

Men Must Fight, a 1933 pro-war, pro-airpower American movie (it involves a war with Eurasia, ha ha, and a combined chemical/HE air raid on NYC, never forget);

Aerograd, a Soviet film called, holy shit, AEROGRAD (hopefully about the VVS building and using heavy bombers).

I'd also like to watch L'Inhumaine, but it doesn't appear to be available anywhere easily.

Mainly directed toward Sav: any other titles of interest I should look into?

I think you've all the ones I'm familiar with.  The original Buck Rodgers serials are set in a dystopian future where a galactic gangster is the supreme law.  Though it's largely tangential to the action, Jean Renoir's "Sur un air de Charleston" is set in 2028.  It has a scene of futuristic Central Africa (and post apocalyptic Paris.)

[Ideologue]

I said utopias, not dystopias where black men have forgotten how to dance!

Alternative review: WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT FUCKING SHIT?  Well, I liked it. B

[Ideologue]

Also, Jean Renoir's wife was hot.  She's long dead now, of course.

[Sheilbh]

Black Swan. Still effective despite the lack of CINEMA SOUND

[Savonarola]

I said utopias, not dystopias where black men have forgotten how to dance!

Alternative review: WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT FUCKING SHIT?  Well, I liked it. B

There was a lot of experimental film in the 1920s and 1930s.  Netflix has a collection on it called Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and '30s that has a lot of the more famous works from the period.  Some of it is very good; some of it is very avant-garde.

Orson Welles' first film, "The Hearts of Age" is on it.  You'll never feel embarrased about your juvenilia (no matter what your art) after seeing that.

[Savonarola]

Also, Jean Renoir's wife was hot.  She's long dead now, of course.

I think the 1920s would have been your era for starlets.

[Josquius]

I'm rewatching old episodes of ST:TNG.
It really is striking how childish the show is in many places. There are only a few plot lines that are constantly reused (the infected enterprise one is particularly common and annoying),  lots of factual errors and inconsistencies (in one episode the captain calls a ship the Yamato and in the same room with him, a few seconds later, Worf calls it the Yamano....)
Yet nonetheless entertaining.

[Ideologue]

Aerograd (1935).  You can talk about Stalinism all day.  You can talk about the gulags and the famines and the disappeared and the purges and the military aggression.  Yeah, I guess that was pretty bad.  But then you watch a movie like Aerograd, and it all comes into focus: what a terrible time and place to be alive.

As you might expect from the title, Aerograd is a movie about a collective farmer, Stepan, tracking Japanese saboteurs and their Old Ritualist allies through the boreal forest, largely on foot though eventually he is transported to and fro on this other guy's plane.  And even that makes it out to be more exciting than it is.  It's mostly about indistinguishable peasants talking in poorly lit rooms.  Paced like a constipated shit, Aerograd features bad acting, bad cinematography, and a scene where the Japanese guy dances around with his sword that makes the Star Wars Kid look like Toshiro Mifune.

Sure, it's still better than The Hunger Games, but only because it didn't cause me physical pain, and the first five and last fifteen minutes bear some sort of resemblance to competence.  These stretches have the only decent scenes; that is, scenes with stuff happening in them whatsoever, most happily the scene where Stepan executes his friend, a traitor to the People.  The last five minutes also feature some cool stock footage of paratroopers jumping out of Tupolev TB-3s, the only time airpower is actually seen in this shitty movie.

For the record, a city is never seen in this movie.  For fuck's sake.  F

P.S. The subtitles from archive.org are notable for some of the worst translations I've ever seen:

Between Bering Sea where drift ice and squadrons of our whales are walking and the mouth of the Amur super river...

"All the Asia belongs to me!"

"Whose [sic] beaten the collective farm's sword into the patrician apiary?"

"You think you've uprised the Soviet peasantry?"

[Ideologue]

Also, Jean Renoir's wife was hot.  She's long dead now, of course.

I think the 1920s would have been your era for starlets.

Is this a malnutrition joke?

[Ideologue]

In review of films from 30s, I came across what may be the greatest movie of all time...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Over_the_White_House

...Other than the regrettable association brownshirts have with That Other Dictator, anyway:

President Hammond makes "a political U-turn,"[5] purging his entire cabinet of "big-business lackeys." When Congress impeaches him, he responds by dissolving the legislative branch, assuming the "temporary" power to make laws as he "transforms himself into an all-powerful dictator."[10] He orders the formation of a new "Army of Construction" answerable only to him, spends billions on one New Deal–like program after another, and nationalizes the manufacture and sale of alcohol.[6]

The reborn Hammond's policies include "suspension of civil rights and the imposition of martial law by presidential fiat."[11] He "tramples on civil liberties,"[12] "revokes the Constitution, becomes a reigning dictator," and employs "brown-shirted storm troopers"[13] led by the President's top aide, Hartley 'Beek' Beekman (Tone). When he meets with resistance (admittedly, from the organized crime syndicate of ruthless Al Capone analog Nick Diamond), the President "suspends the law to arrest and execute 'enemies of the people' as he sees fit to define them," with Beekman handing "down death sentences in his military star chamber" in a "show trial [that] resembles those designed to please a Stalin, a Hitler or a Chairman Mao,"[11] after which the accused are immediately lined up against a wall behind the courthouse and "executed[6] by firing squad."[14] By threatening world war with America's newest and most deadly secret weapon, Hammond then blackmails the world into disarmament, ushering in global peace.[15]

The film is unique in that, by revoking the Constitution, etc., President Hammond does not become a villain, but a hero who "solves all of the nation's problems,"[13] "bringing peace to the country and the world,"[9] and is universally acclaimed "one of the greatest presidents who ever lived."

Can you imagine a Roosevelt dictatorship?  A Permanent New Deal?  No Congress?  Now that's what I call utopian fiction!

I actually came across it in a brief summary in a review of another movie (Men Must Fight, which I'm also having trouble finding), which made it sound more like the President personally became Batman and fought crime.  Gabriel might be better, but that's also a good idea, and it's mine now.  You can't have it.

Like Men Must Fight, this topical and important film appears to be unrentable.  Netflix's vile pro-Tea Party politics have been noted.  I bet the only reason Battleship Potemkin is on Instant Watch is because all the Odessans get killed by Cossacks.