TV/Movies Megathread

[Malthus]

Understandable, though. There weren't any kind of ancillary markets back then so film studios didn't have any reason to keep extensive archives. They kept copies in circulation for rerun theaters, but the advent of talkies rendered most silent films as little more than landfill material. Film preservation and archivism didn't take off until the 50s-60s, when the frenchies convinced the rest of the world that it was art.

Heh, also the fact that until the development of "safety film" films were dangerously flammable - and got more so as they deteriorated with age! Keeping them around was actively bad for your health. 

They were printed on nitrocellulose, which goes by the colloquial name "Guncotton."  In the nineteenth century armies experimented with it as a substitute for black powder, but it was found to be too unstable.

Heh, apropos of nothing, one of my earliest memories is of helping my grandfather blow up stumps with dynamite up at the cottage ("cabin"). He had a whole crate of the stuff he got from somewhere. It was very old, and it leaked some sort of liquid as it decomposed ... another early memory is of my grandmother tipping the crate with dynamite pouring this liquid down the outhouse hole. I asked her "is that safe?" and she replied "I don't know - but I think leaving the liquid around is less safe".

Anyway, it didn't blow up the outhouse ... years later, my dad burned the remains of the dynamite (apparently you can do this and it will not explode). The blasting caps went missing, though. 

[Duque de Bragança]

The burning of the library at Alexandria it isn't ( both times), but it's still sad.

Understandable, though. There weren't any kind of ancillary markets back then so film studios didn't have any reason to keep extensive archives. They kept copies in circulation for rerun theaters, but the advent of talkies rendered most silent films as little more than landfill material. Film preservation and archivism didn't take off until the 50s-60s, when the frenchies convinced the rest of the world that it was art.

Henri Langlois 

[11B4V]

Superman II is on.  Unfortunately, it doesn't rank with Ide as high as Superman III does, what with Richard Pryor's penetrating and career-defining performance.

before his time.

[Sheilbh]

W1A.

A great and brutal satire show of the BBC, on the BBC

Also some outstanding cameos - Salman Rushdie and Alan Yentob arm-wrestling was a particular favourite.

Edit: Should have said, it's by the same people as 2012.

[Queequeg]

Man, The Americans is fucking fantastic.   That was a wonderful episode.

[Eddie Teach]

I can't believe he wiped the guy's ass. 

[Ideologue]

Doing my 2013 in review stuff that should've been finished by the end of January, but wasn't.

I thought of Mihali, and wrote thusly:

80.  CARRIE:  C+  C

No really, what was I thinking?  I am far too Goddamned nice to these pieces of shit.  How dare you try to remake De Palma in his prime?  Just who do you think you are?  Prometheus?

[jimmy olsen]

A "piece of shit" gets a C?

[Ideologue]

Yes.  It's what I got in Torts I.

[Ideologue]

Note also it's the 80th worst movie of the year.

[Eddie Teach]

Note also it's the 80th worst movie of the year.

There were 79 worse pieces of shit that you saw? 

[Ideologue]

I technically recommended 59 of them.

[Ideologue]

And, a quickie pulled from the 2013 in Review, for your delectation and since I just watched it today:

Behind the Candelabra (2013).  The most jarring moment in Liberace and Scott Thorson's stormy pseudo-marriage/semi-permanent prostitution arrangement is undeniably when Liberace cajoles his young concubine into getting plastic surgery to look more like him.  That's why the most bizarre aspect of Behind the Candelabra is that the rest of their relationship is so banally normal.

Not that it is exactly healthy, mind you, but it's entirely what you would expect would happen when a pretty young thing enters into a half-transactional, half-emotional, very long-term relationship with a flamboyant millionaire entertainment star, regardless of each one's gender or sexual preference.  Delete that piece of true life derangement, even if it is too preposterous to ignore, and Candelabra becomes simply the story of a romance that was doomed to fail, and, for that, not devoid of a few sniffles.

But maybe some those sniffles are because this is Soderbergh's exit (though I'll believe that when he's dead), and there's nothing to it really, other than two of the year's better performances and some of its very best production and costume design—which are, of course, no mean things for a film to have, and great production and costume design in a film about Liberace is bound to mean something special indeed.

Still, if the final minutes Soderbergh ever commits to film are to be those of Candelabra's last, best sequence, as Scott Thorson remembers his late lover as he never really was, playing one last show before floating up on invisible wires to stage heaven, there are no regrets.

(Shame, then, that this fantastic, almost metafictional ending is thus followed by a few title cards with superfluous information about Liberace and Thorson that deflate the transcendent moments that just came before, but hey!  That's life.)

B

(It was no. 39 btw.)

[Savonarola]

A Propos de Nice  (1930)

Jean Vigo's first film was co-directed by Boris Kaufman, brother of Soviet film maker Dziga Vertov.  This film is akin to Vertov's masterpiece "The Man with a Movie Camera," in that it shows little vignettes of life in a city.  (This was a common subject in the silent era, Charles Sheeler's "Manhatta," and Rutman's "Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis" have the same sort of structure.)  Vigo's intention is to create a dynamic and revolutionary film.  The film showcases the bored bourgeois vacationers, downtrodden but cheerful proletariat and a carnival (which is a rebellion against society's conventions); but since the film is set in a resort town it's hard not to think of it as more "M. Hulot's Holiday" than agit-prop.  Vacationers of the world unite!

Taris (1931)

Vigo's second film (he only made 4) is an educational short about swimming featuring swimmer Jean Taris.  Vigo puts in a couple surrealist touches on the film, and gives Taris a chance to goof around a bit; but given the subject matter and the primitive nature of sound in 1931 the film could have been fodder for Mystery Science Theater 3000.

[Capetan Mihali]

L'Atalante is wonderful, but I could never find anything else by Vigo.