TV/Movies Megathread

[Ideologue]

Claude Rains.

I just don't see it.

Well not now! Obviously. But in his day.

I was trying to play off the Invisible Man gig.

Fair enough. I haven't seen it (non-jokical).

Third or fourth best movie made before I was born.

Ingrid Bergman, daughter of a German-American traitor and slightly miscast as a human woman with sexual organs,

What?

Beautiful, sure, but I've never seen her be really sexy.  Not even in Gaslight!

[Ed Anger]

You people are all adults, for fuck's sake.  Stop reading teenybopper sci-fi like you're on the school bus, all jacked up for AD&D Club that afternoon.  Berg's new bio on Woodrow Wilson is out.  Go read that.

Spoiler: Woodrow Wilson is a weak-tea, socialist racist motherfucker.

ALT-HIST TIME! How would  the inter-war years have developed without that KKK loving sack of shit and his impotent League of Nations?

Raistlin becomes a god faster.

[frunk]

You people are all adults, for fuck's sake.  Stop reading teenybopper sci-fi like you're on the school bus, all jacked up for AD&D Club that afternoon.  Berg's new bio on Woodrow Wilson is out.  Go read that.

It isn't teenybopper sci-fi, it's just been categorized like that because it deals with kids.

[frunk]

Also saw Ender's Game tonight.  It was good, and I think the comment attributed to Card about it "being the best good people could do with a story they care about" is pretty close.

Graff and Rackham were slightly disappointing: [spoiler]In the book, their own clearer struggles with their methods really helped the reader actually consider whether the ends did in fact justify the means.  In the movie, they're both aggressive blowhards who don't even seem to see that there might be a problem until Ender screams at them after realizing that he's just committed genocide.[/spoiler]

All of the characters except perhaps Ender come out a bit flat compared to the book.  [spoiler]Peter and Valentine are pale imitations as well.  Peter is just a bully, not nearly as duplicitous or sadistic as in the book, and Valentine is nothing more than an object of brotherly affection.[/spoiler]

[garbon]

You people are all adults, for fuck's sake.  Stop reading teenybopper sci-fi like you're on the school bus, all jacked up for AD&D Club that afternoon.  Berg's new bio on Woodrow Wilson is out.  Go read that.

Why would I want to read about that despicable president?

[viper37]

I hope it's the last year of Revenge.  I want to see how it ends, but I can't stand it anymore.

[Eddie Teach]

I hope it's the last year of Revenge.  I want to see how it ends, but I can't stand it anymore.

I could only stand half a season.

[Sophie Scholl]

Caught The Goddess on TCM Silent Movie Sundays.  1934 Silent Chinese flick about a woman who goes into prostitution to make money to keep her son alive and aiming for a better life.  I found it quite a good watch.  Have you seen it yet, Sav?  I'd definitely recommend it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goddess_%281934_film%29

[Habbaku]

You people are all adults, for fuck's sake.  Stop reading teenybopper sci-fi like you're on the school bus, all jacked up for AD&D Club that afternoon.  Berg's new bio on Woodrow Wilson is out.  Go read that.

Why would I want to read about that despicable president?

I don't know, I find reading about despicable political figures to be pretty entertaining.  I've read biographies of Mussolini, for instance, and those were very good.

[The Brain]

You people are all adults, for fuck's sake.  Stop reading teenybopper sci-fi like you're on the school bus, all jacked up for AD&D Club that afternoon.  Berg's new bio on Woodrow Wilson is out.  Go read that.

Why would I want to read about that despicable president?

I don't know, I find reading about despicable political figures to be pretty entertaining. 

The Audacity Of Hoops.

[Barrister]

You people are all adults, for fuck's sake.  Stop reading teenybopper sci-fi like you're on the school bus, all jacked up for AD&D Club that afternoon.  Berg's new bio on Woodrow Wilson is out.  Go read that.

Why would I want to read about that despicable president?

I don't know, I find reading about despicable political figures to be pretty entertaining. 

The Audacity Of Hoops.

lulz

[Eddie Teach]

[spoiler]So Carol is out of the band. [/spoiler]

[HVC]

[spoiler]So Carol is out of the band. [/spoiler]

[spoiler]I kept waiting for her to try and make a move on rick. [/spoiler]

[Sheilbh]

Claude Rains.

Yes

[Ideologue]

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).  Delightful as always.  Way better than, say, The French Connection, or The Conversation.

A

Le Mans (1971).  Originally titled Man With a Movie Camera Goes to Le Mans, this was considered too wordy by distributors and theater chains.

It's hard to believe, with the benefit of hindsight, that Steve McQueen's personality was such that he could not get along with a producer for as long as an hour, and thus wasted his opportunity to be in a bona fide American classic in 1966, but was readily available only a few years later to "star" in--or, with fewer minced words, be photographed in--a role amounting to actor ego death, as the lead humanoid object in a strange experiment in film editing.  That's life, I guess, and he's totally in this movie for at least fifteen minutes, even though his character in Le Mans, like every character in Le Mans, could have basically been performed by anybody, including you or I.  That it turned out to be a successful experiment is sort of beside the point in regards McQueen.

But successful it really was.  Artistically, obviously; Le Mans is a well-known flop.

Halfway through, Le Mans features two amazing crash sequences, one after the other, that no doubt rank amongst the flashiest pieces of editing of all time--playing with space and especially time as they do in incredibly bizarre ways--but if they're flashy, they're also spectacular.

Indeed, even at its most conventional, Le Mans' editing and cinematography present the most complete, most coherent, and best racing montages I've ever seen, superior to John Frankenheimer's crisis on infinite screens, Tony Scott's reel of NASCAR bloopers, Ron Howard's sophisticated if occasionally prosaic CGI constructions, or Renny Harlin's ludicrous but entertainingly bonkers ones.  But unwed to a story with greater emotional depth and character breadth, as even the least of those directors saw fit to marry their racing films to, Le Mans suffers--not so much because it avoids story, but because it still feels compelled to try to tell one even though it's clear everyone involved is entirely disinterested in the idea.

If there had to be a story, you might as well not sweat the details: it revolves around the standard race movie trope of guilt about a fallen racer and friend.  This story involves fewer than a hundred words, and about a dozen regretful glances, that really don't advance character or action, insofar as there is any to advance.  The result is a film that is either seriously truncated (Grand Prix is three hours long and all the better for it, as a direct point of comparison) or severely overlong (comparing it to an entirely different sort of film, Hitchcock's Notorious has approximately twenty to thirty times the plot but is five minutes shorter).

The verdict: Le Mans is a film very much worth watching--especially on its technical merits--but only has the strength to demand that you watch it from about, oh, the forty-five minute mark.

B