TV/Movies Megathread

[Josquius]

On the recommendation of a friend and having enjoyed catching bits of Teen Titans Go on TV I decided to watch an old American cartoon called....Teen Titans.
It has a cool theme tune.
But is just a typical kids cartoon really.
Not much sensibleness.

[Barrister]

On the recommendation of a friend and having enjoyed catching bits of Teen Titans Go on TV I decided to watch an old American cartoon called....Teen Titans.
It has a cool theme tune.
But is just a typical kids cartoon really.
Not much sensibleness.

While I don't know that I would recommend Teen Titans Go to an adult, it is definitely a lot less bad than most kids shows my kids watch.  Kind of funny even.

[Josquius]

On the recommendation of a friend and having enjoyed catching bits of Teen Titans Go on TV I decided to watch an old American cartoon called....Teen Titans.
It has a cool theme tune.
But is just a typical kids cartoon really.
Not much sensibleness.

While I don't know that I would recommend Teen Titans Go to an adult, it is definitely a lot less bad than most kids shows my kids watch.  Kind of funny even.

Its not something I watch religiously but its usually on when I am flicking through the channels so I watch it.

[Malthus]

On the recommendation of a friend and having enjoyed catching bits of Teen Titans Go on TV I decided to watch an old American cartoon called....Teen Titans.
It has a cool theme tune.
But is just a typical kids cartoon really.
Not much sensibleness.

For modern kids cartoons, I strongly recommend Gravity Falls. My kid loves that series, and it is very adult watchable.

[Savonarola]

Legally Blonde (2001)

The premise sounds like it should be truly wicked satire; the hardships faced by young, beautiful, intelligent, affluent people at an ivy league college ( you just don't know what it's like ).  That it's played straight might be funnier than anything actually in the film (except maybe the line about how a "Semester" should be called an "Ovester.")

There's some bad ideas in this film; the dance number in the middle, for instance, or the tacked on happy ending that verges on "Der letzte Mann" territory; but overall it's a thoroughly enjoyable rom-com.  It also teaches us that we shouldn't judge people by appearance, it's what inside that counts; thank you Hollywood, CA, that's a lesson I shall always cherish.   

We also learn that gorgeous blondes aren't necessarily stupid, they're just different. 

[The Brain]

Reminds me, I should rewatch Clueless again.

[Savonarola]

Sins of the Children (1930)

Adolf Wagenkampf is a barber in a town with the opportunity of a lifetime to invest in a savings and loan; but on that day he discovers his son has tuberculosis and he spends his savings sending his son to a dry climate.  The film follows him and his children, whom he sacrifices mightily for.  Though he never becomes successful the way his would-have-been partners become, he is rich in love; which is what matters.  Really.



This might have worked out a little better had Frank Capra directed it (Sam Wood does a passable job).  Still the improvements over the sound films made in 1929 are notable.  The camera can move much more freely now.  It's still dialogue heavy, and seems more like a filmed play than a movie, but nowhere near as bad as the films from the previous year.

[The Brain]

They really hid "Adolf Kampfwagen"... So they knew already in 1930. Interesting.

[MadImmortalMan]

"Black Book"

Yet another story about Jews escaping Nazis, but somehow this one is pretty cool. Starring Melisandre and looks like it's shot in Technicolor. 2006

[Admiral Yi]

"Black Book"

Yet another story about Jews escaping Nazis, but somehow this one is pretty cool. Starring Melisandre and looks like it's shot in Technicolor. 2006

Set in Holland, she shows her boobs?

[MadImmortalMan]

Several times, yep. 

[celedhring]

"Black Book"

Yet another story about Jews escaping Nazis, but somehow this one is pretty cool. Starring Melisandre and looks like it's shot in Technicolor. 2006

Had completely escaped my mind that Melisandre was the Black Book chick! Pretty good film.

[Savonarola]

Liliom (1930)

Frank Borzage dire first talkie version of the play Liliom stars Charles Farrell as the cocky carnival barker, Liliom; who is a well known figure in the public eye in Budapest (there must not have been much in the way of entertainment in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)  The lovely (and bra-less) Rose Hobart is Julie who loves him.  After both Liliom and Julie lose their jobs, Julie ends up pregnant, and Liliom tries to commit a robbery in order to support his family.  The robbery goes horribly wrong and Liliom ends up committing suicide rather than being caught.  He goes to "The fiery place" for ten years, but returns to earth for one day in attempt to make his daughter happy.  That also goes horribly wrong and he ends up slapping her, just the way he used to slap Julie.  The daughter tells her mother about it, and they both share a happy memory about deplorable spousal/child abuse.   

This film is from a different time, when you could depict consequence free spousal abuse, but couldn't say the H-E-double-hockey-sticks word on screen.  It's very obvious that this is a filmed play, and the acting is wooden throughout.  Charles Farrell is badly miscast here; his whole tough guy act is laughable.  The best parts of the film are the modernist trains to heaven and hell; those are pretty cool.

Liliom would be remade by Fritz Lang in 1934 and it was later turned into the musical Carousel. 

[Martinus]

Baby of Mâcon.

Visually arresting family drama.

[Sheilbh]

Jonathan Meades has finally completed his trilogy of documentaries on the architecture of tyrants

'The dictator who failed to dictate': free-range architecture under Mussolini


Jonathan Meades in his film Ben Building: Mussolini, Monuments and Modernism. Photograph: Francis Hanly/BBC

The resulting architectural output, between Mussolini's rise to power in 1922 and the late 1930s, when he began to exert more control, embodies an accidentally healthy pluralism. While Hitler rejoiced in the traditional völkisch kitsch of his imaginary master race, and Stalin revelled in over-iced baroque confections, Mussolini sat back and let historicist revivalism compete with the crisp forms of forward-looking modernism. "His inconsistency was a pathology," says Meades. "Or maybe it was a strategy."

This stylistic tension is introduced at the beginning of the programme in the form of two monumental memorial ossuaries designed by architect Giovanni Greppi and sculptor Giannino Castiglione, built just a few years apart to celebrate the Italian dead of the first world war. The Sacrario di Monte Grappa, completed in 1935, channels the form of prehistoric burial mounds in a circular mountain of stepped terraces, punctuated by arched openings. It feels ancient and archaic, "boastfully retrospective" in Meades' words, exuding a permanence rooted deep in Italian soil.

A hundred kilometres away, the Sacrario di Redipuglia, finished in 1938, is another gargantuan stepped ossuary, designed as an endless flight of steps that taper and narrow as they rise to emphasise the perspectival effect. But this time the composition is stripped of historical reference and wrought with a more minimal hand that makes it feel "cautiously futuristic".

This dichotomy gets fleshed out over the hour as Meades meanders from Genoa to Milan to the new town of Sabaudia, south of Rome, each tableaux filmed in his trademark surrealist manner. Sometimes he is the omniscient narrator looming above the horizon with a booming voice; other times he appears miniaturised, standing among toy models, as if mocking the fascist worldview as a flimsy stage set.


'Boastfully retrospective' ... Sacrario di Monte Grappa. Photograph: Nico Piotto/Flickr Vision

In Genoa we find the work of Gino Coppedè, "the undisputed master of more is more", whose buildings groan under the weight of rustication and "frozen menageries of malevolent animals which belong to no known bestiary". His architecture sampled styles from across the ages, giving the timeless impression of having been around forever. It is a kind of revivalism that finds its way into Garbatella, a garden city in Rome, in watered-down form. Stripped of excessive ornament, but retaining traditional motifs, the style seems to be attempting to define a national identity – a "romantic peasant unifying glue".

Next comes the "mass-market modernism" of art deco, as embodied in the Italian pavilion at the 1925 Paris exhibition by Armando Brasini, an architect Mussolini could identify with, says Meades, "because his megalomania matched his own". He is swiftly followed by the futurists, who rejoiced in power of machines and the glamour of war. They are brilliantly and bluntly dismissed as a bunch of charlatans, proponents of an art movement that "happened at the far end of the intestinal tract". "Manifesto," he scoffs, "is an anagram of 'I'm a no-hoper dork who knows a curator or two, but can't write and can't paint.'"



'Mass-market modernism' ... Armando Brasini's Paris exhibition of 1925. Photograph: Kachelhoffer Clement/Corbis via Getty Images

It is an engaging survey, if sometimes dense and muddled, but one which strangely ignores some of the more prominent fascist architects, such as Giuseppe Terragni, whose Casa del Fascio in Como features on the syllabus of every architecture student. There's not much on Mussolini's grand infrastructure projects either, although the landmark Fiat factory in Turin (as featured in The Italian Job) gets a look-in – for embodying doctrines of Taylorism and Fordism, which started in the United States, but which only flourished under authoritarian regimes.

The picture Meades paints is of a battle of styles with no real winner, nor an interested audience. Each faction, we are told, pleaded that their architecture best represented nationalism, sacrifice and moral fervour, yet they were competing for an endorsement Mussolini was unwilling to bestow. Instead, Il Duce tolerated it all. He was "the tyrant who neglected to tyrannise," a "dictator who failed to dictate," a man who styled himself as a living god, yet was forever "stalled on the lower slopes of Olympus". "Was he," Meades asks with a knowing look, "a demonic seed short of the full satanic sack?"


The 1916 Fiat factory, extended in 80s by Renzo Piano. Photograph: Interfoto/Alamy

We end up at EUR on the edge of Rome, the intended site of an international exposition planned for the 20th anniversary of the Italian fascist government, which was never to be. Its crowning monument is the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, a stripped back stack of arched colonnades that stands at the end of a grand axis like a cubic colosseum. It has the air of yet another ossuary, each framed opening waiting for a martyr of the regime, but like much of the stripped classicism that thrived under Mussolini, it is newly fashionable. Meades strangely fails to mention the twist: this fascist beacon was recently acquired by Fendi as a new headquarters for the luxury fashion brand.


It is an interesting afterlife, if only because it reveals how far architecture of the fascist era remains untainted by political association. While Germany and the USSR quickly abandoned the buildings favoured by their respective tyrants, in Italy every style was equally blessed and damned by Mussolini's eclectic pluralism.

So much so that Meades has no qualms about concluding with the work of David Chipperfield and his ilk of austere neo-modernists. He doesn't quite accuse them of being fascists, but notes that their buildings exude the same "inkling of mortality", standing as cold temples of "ethically sourced spa rub and enforcement grade nuclear butter pamper, which assure a calm ride to the other side".

• Ben Building: Monuments, Modernism and Marble is on at 9pm on 1 June on BBC4.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b07d7nj9/ad/ben-building-mussolini-monuments-and-modernism

Incidentally if Marti ever wanted a intelligent provocateur to follow, he could do worse than look up Meades. In this documentary alone he just threw in mentions of 'Islamofascism' and talking about the grand mosque in Cordoba (and how its purpose will be forgotten) he rather beautifully described the Reconquista as 'bringing civilisation'