TV/Movies Megathread

[celedhring]

For any curious about the new(ish) Allen project:

Magic in the Moonlight (2014).  The pledge, the turn, the prestige... and 17 more interminable minutes.

A Midsummer Night's Sexless Comedy

B+

Dallas Buyers Club. Not bad.

Yeah, "not bad" is pretty much exactly right.  It's about the boggest fucking standard thing I've ever seen, but truth is duller than fiction, I guess.  Also I'm kind of bummed out that "losing weight" is basically the only prerequisite there is for an Oscar, seeing as how there were literally dozens of better Best and Supporting Actor performances last year.

McConaughey's performance is the only memorable thing in "Dallas Buyers Club" imho. It's a pretty dull affair.

[Eddie Teach]

Well, they couldn't very well give him the Emmy.

[Ideologue]

Oh, yeah, along with like 500 other people in Columbia, I went to go see Gone With the Wind (1939) in the theater.  Turns out I'd never seen the whole thing before.  Kind of an immoral film, but very well-shot and photographed, with gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous production design by one of the greatest PDs of all time, if not the greatest, William Cameron Menzies.  So, this is an early character study of a functional sociopath, right?

Pretty much, yes, I've read that Victor Fleming wanted Vivien Leigh to play Scarlett as a complete and total bitch.  Leigh kept going to George Cukor for advice after he had been fired so she was able to make her character just a sociopath.

That kind of makes it worse, though.  I liked the hard-nosed, proto-feminist aspects of Scarlett, but not the absolute incapacity for empathy.  The narcissistic high note that buttons the movie (worse, it's probably not even delusional narcisssism) just hits you in the face that you've been watching the life story of someone with no soul for FOUR.  HOURS.  I think most fans perceive her as simply a strong character, however.  (It's a much better story in this regard if one were to just walk at the intermission.)

Anyway, golly, she's hot.  Was she really only 18 1/2 inches around?

Yeah, that needed either more time to develop or it needed to glossed over in a Citizen Kane style montage.

Well, the parade of death and loss is so high-pitched that the last thirty minutes almost come off as funny.  Oh, you had a miscarriage?  Oh, did your daughter die?  OH, DID YOUR BEST FRIEND DIE?  OH, DID YOU "TRUE LOVE" REFUSE YOU FOR A FINAL TIME?  OH, DID YOUR REAL TRUE LOVE WALK OUT ON YOU?  Tomorrow is another day.

Indeed, Scarlett's little aside to the audience about how Ashley never really loved her (something along the lines of "why didn't you tell me?" ) did generate laughter, and I'm not sure that was intentional.

Plus, it's been said like a billion times, but Prissy is just the pits, man.  75 years later, she is still like the salt in the cut of American race relations.

It dawns on you very slowly that the gooey paeans to the vanished civilization of the South aren't ironic.  Still, I did enjoy the also-unintentional allegory about Reconstruction's utter failure.

[celedhring]

I have the Selznick book that collects his memos, and there's a funny bit where he crafts a media campaign to fend off Southerners enraged about the fact they had hired a British actress to play a Southern heroine, and one of the plus points is that "Leigh" is pronounced the same as "Lee".

[Syt]

Ok, Don Hertzfeldt's Simpsons couch gag is ... trippy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m78gYyTrG7Y

[LaCroix]

godzilla - awful. though, godzilla himself was adorable as hell (though, as the japs noted, he is very americanized -- i.e., fat)

days of future past - OK. jennifer lawrence wasn't the best fit for mystique. quicksilver was fun, but they rigged him up then forgot about him [spoiler]until the end[/spoiler]. mcavoy and fassbender carried it, just like in first class. [spoiler]how did magneto accidentally kill JFK...[/spoiler]

riddick - really fun movie. reviewers trashed it, but it went back to its pitch black roots.

dallas buyers club - very good acting, but beyond that there wasn't much to say. the whole movie was anti-science. really funny discovering afterward that pretty much everything they said was bullshit. the meds he pushed had a slightly higher effect than placebo.

[Savonarola]

I have the Selznick book that collects his memos, and there's a funny bit where he crafts a media campaign to fend off Southerners enraged about the fact they had hired a British actress to play a Southern heroine, and one of the plus points is that "Leigh" is pronounced the same as "Lee".

Heh, I thought it was strange that none of the principles were southerners.  Vivian Leigh, Olivia de Havilland and Leslie Howard were all British and Clark Gable was from Ohio.

[Ideologue]

Leslie Howard's equation of his British accent with a Southern one doesn't work very well and works even less well once he stops even trying.  I never understood why Scarlett was so enamored with a personality-free geezer, either.  Dude was north of 45 and he's not terribly handsome.  Neither's Clark Gable, but at least he could rape you.

...Seriously, GWTW is fucked up.

[Savonarola]

Leslie Howard's equation of his British accent with a Southern one doesn't work very well and works even less well once he stops even trying.  I never understood why Scarlett was so enamored with a personality-free geezer, either.  Dude was north of 45 and he's not terribly handsome.  Neither's Clark Gable, but at least he could rape you.

...Seriously, GWTW is fucked up.

Heh, he played Romeo when he was 43; (though Juliet, Norma Shearer, was much closer to his age than Vivian Leigh.)

Here's one for you, Ide, Merrie Melodies "She was and Acrobat's Daughter" which features a parody of Bette Davis and Leslie Howard in "The Petrified Forest."  http://fan.tcm.com/video/she-was-an-acrobat-39-s-daughter-1937

[garbon]

This Is Where I Leave You

Meh, neither here nor there.

[celedhring]

I have the Selznick book that collects his memos, and there's a funny bit where he crafts a media campaign to fend off Southerners enraged about the fact they had hired a British actress to play a Southern heroine, and one of the plus points is that "Leigh" is pronounced the same as "Lee".

Heh, I thought it was strange that none of the principles were southerners.  Vivian Leigh, Olivia de Havilland and Leslie Howard were all British and Clark Gable was from Ohio.

Funniest thing is that they hyped up a huge "talent search" campaign across the South to find actors and actresses, and they ended up only putting them in very minor roles.

Even to untrained foreigner ears, most characters sound very un-Southern to me.

[Eddie Teach]

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I liked it.

[mongers]

Is 'Pompeii' worth any of anyone's lifespan?

[garbon]

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I liked it.

[Maladict]

Is 'Pompeii' worth any of anyone's lifespan?

Some people were paid for their time, I suppose.