TV/Movies Megathread

[garbon]

Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie

About what you would expect from a movie off an old tv show. Most of the laughs are on nostalgic call backs.

[celedhring]

Incidentally, after watching the Spiderman flick I realized that with the new reboot we'll have had 3 different versions of the character in 10 years. Seems a bit too much.

Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie

About what you would expect from a movie off an old tv show. Most of the laughs are on nostalgic call backs.

I have a particular hate-love relationship with that show. In that I loved the show itself, but in my first ever TV writing gig (which didn't go too well) the director was obsessed with it. So obsessed that she started behaving like Edina herself.

[Sheilbh]

God I love Ab Fab.

I was away for Pride so I missed Edina and Patsy opening the march with hundreds of Ab Fab drag queens

[celedhring]

Incidentally, today's the 25th anniversary of T-2's release 

I remember how my parents didn't want me to watch it (my parents were really anal about what stuff I could watch when I was a kid), so I had to lie to them and tell them I was out playing football while I went to the movie with some friends.

[CountDeMoney]

Incidentally, today's the 25th anniversary of T-2's release 

Jesus H Christ.

[Josquius]

I've been watching the Flash TV show.
It is rather fun. Much more watchable than Arrow which got way too bogged down with its stupid island story.
Very much puts me in mind of Smallville.
Interesting how they have the Flash's identity be so open amongst so many people.

Though "MY NAME IS BARRY ALLAN AND I'M THE FASTEST MAN ALIVE"- bloody hell is that the worst opening credits ever.

[Admiral Yi]

Checked out the first episode of Parade's End (based on the Ford Maddox Ford trilogy).  Nothing like I'd imagined it after reading the books.  I'd imagined Tientjiens as a Gary Cooper type stoic: Cumberbund plays him as a weenie and a bore.

BTW, is there a reason Cumberbund's lips always look chapped?

[mongers]

Checked out the first episode of Parade's End (based on the Ford Maddox Ford trilogy).  Nothing like I'd imagined it after reading the books.  I'd imagined Tientjiens as a Gary Cooper type stoic: Cumberbund plays him as a weenie and a bore.

BTW, is there a reason Cumberbund's lips always look chapped?

Pursing, too much pursing. 

[Ed Anger]

July 4th weekend viewing:

Hunt for Red October. ONE PING ONLY.

The Enemy Below. Curt Jurgens.

Dirty Grandpa. DeNiro is a hack.

[CountDeMoney]

July 4th weekend viewing:

Hunt for Red October. ONE PING ONLY.

The Enemy Below. Curt Jurgens.

Dirty Grandpa. DeNiro is a hack.

Amistad, West Side Story, Die Hard, The Road Warrior.  It was all about embracing diversity this holiday.

[mongers]

'Tess', worth if for half of one scene.

[jimmy olsen]

The whole muscle cars and girls in short outfits exploitation element was fine, including the way he subverts it when the girls get her revenge. But 90% of that film was just people sitting and talking about random crap. I'm all for Tarantino dialogue, but that was way too much.

"20 minutes of perhaps the greatest vehicle stunt ever" is enough to make it amazing, but, truly, I love the first act too--the sustained tension of Tarantino's direction, and the looming menace of Mike, as well the grindhouse style keeps it interesting, even when it is mainly just 20-somethings yammering about whatever.  (I don't understand Frunk's objection at all.  Mike is hovering in the background the whole time even before he makes the ladies' acquaintance.)  The Bell/Thoms/Dawson/Winstead act is awesome, too, and while they pretty much immediately slide into "how Quentin Tarantino wishes women talked, and not how any woman has ever talked in the history of time," it's in service of some progressive goals, it's not uninteresting (the circling long take conversation at the diner is just wonderful as a pure cinematic exercise), the formal shift in the filmstock works well, and, as noted, it offers 20 minutes of perhaps the greatest vehicle stunt ever.

N.B.: I also don't take any points off for how the discussion of Vanishing Point makes it appear as if QT has never actually seen Vanishing Point, which is practically the opposite of a fun car action movie and vastly more in line with all the sad alienated white man movies they were making at that point in time, e.g. The Graduate, Cool Hand Luke, Seconds, The Swimmer, etc.

Ide!

[CountDeMoney]

Michael Cimino, Director Of 'The Deer Hunter,' Dies At 77
NPR

Michael Cimino, the Academy-award winning director of The Deer Hunter, has died at the age of 77 in Los Angeles.

Cimino received broad critical acclaim for the 1978 Vietnam War epic The Deer Hunter, which was nominated for nine Oscars and won five. He then followed it up with Heaven's Gate, one of the most famous flops in film history.

The Los Angeles County Coroner confirmed Cimino's death, but said the cause is not yet known.

The Deer Hunter, starring Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep, tells the haunting story of the impact of the war on a group of friends from Pennsylvania. It's "perhaps best remembered for a nail-biting sequence in which Mr. De Niro and Mr. Walken's characters, having been taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese, are forced to play Russian roulette with one another," as The New York Times reports.

The Los Angeles Times says the Russian Roulette scenes "became instantly iconic, symbolic of the maddening pressures that set upon men at war." The film as a whole is viewed as "an authentic American tragedy and essential anti-war document," as The Guardian reports.

Cimino was riding high from the triumph of The Deer Hunter. Next for him was Heaven's Gate, the revisionist Western that Fresh Air's critic-at-large John Powers recently called "the most famous cinematic disaster of my lifetime" and "the nail in the coffin of Hollywood's auteur filmmaking of the 1970s."

The film was a financial disaster with a budget that ended up tripling during production. It lost about $114 million, adjusted for inflation, according to Time.

John said the film is "a vainglorious folly in love with its own beauty and supposed profundity." And yet, he added that the film does have its defenders, particularly in Europe. In summary:

    "Cimino has a great sense of space, a marvelous eye for landscape and a taste for epic storytelling. He was trying to make a masterpiece, and though he wound up with a critical and box-office drubbing, the failure to pull off a masterpiece is hardly the worst crime an artist can commit."

After Heaven's Gate, Cimino released several others but largely went into seclusion. He "declined all interviews with American journalists for 10 years," as Vanity Fair reported.

In a 2010 interview with the magazine, he defended his legacy: "Nobody lives without making mistakes," he said. "I never second-guess myself. You can't look back. I don't believe in defeat. Everybody has bumps, but as Count Basie said, 'It's not how you handle the hills, it's how you handle the valleys.'"

Michael Cimino's career and his relationship with Hollywood reminds me of a quote from Nicky near the end of Casino: "But in the end, we fucked it all up. It should have been so sweet, too. But it turned out to be the last time that street guys like us were ever given anything that fuckin' valuable again."

[Admiral Yi]

So I'm watching The Martian on HBO GO.  Fun movie, like the world's coolest high school science project.

Still, it's an hour 18.  If I'd seen it in a theater I would have felt totally gypped.

[FunkMonk]

July 4th weekend viewing:

Hunt for Red October. ONE PING ONLY.

It was this and Ghostbusters for me yesterday.

God bless America