TV/Movies Megathread

[Ed Anger]

Analized. Heh.

[celedhring]

Analized. Heh.

Yeah, his listings of montage types and elements are extremely anal-retentive

[The Minsky Moment]

I mean, everyone jumps on my ass for insufficiently positive reviews of The French Connection and The Conversation. 

Good for everyone.

[Savonarola]

Trilby (1915)

Poor Trilby 
Poor Billie 
Poor print 

George du Maurier novel is brought to life in this stagey British film.  It works about as well as you'd expect from a silent film about an opera singer to work.  The film doesn't do much to develop the relationship between Billie, Taffy and the Laird; the latter two just seem to hover about Billie.  There's a much happier ending to the film than there is to the novel.

It's interesting that the term "Svengali" has entered our language even if the source of the term has been largely forgotten.

[celedhring]

Habemus cast:

http://starwars.com/news/star-wars-episode-7-cast-announced.html

Most of the new guys are complete unknowns. Max Von Sydow as a predictably evil dude should at least provide some fun scenery-chewing.

[Scipio]

Arrow got dark. Real dark. I continue to really like its direction. There's still enough humor to make it enjoyable.

[Darth Wagtaros]

I'm liking Arrow too.  Deathstroke is a wacko, but is at least a somewhat tortured and sympathetic wacko.  Doctor Light will make an appearance too I hope.

[Viking]

Arrow got dark. Real dark. I continue to really like its direction. There's still enough humor to make it enjoyable.

I really didn't see that death coming, I didn't see it coming so soon...

I think we'll see Dr Light in The Flash, not Arrow.

[FunkMonk]

Habemus cast:

http://starwars.com/news/star-wars-episode-7-cast-announced.html

Most of the new guys are complete unknowns. Max Von Sydow as a predictably evil dude should at least provide some fun scenery-chewing.

Dark Lord von Sydow. Cool.

[The Brain]

What is Max von Sydow's favorite drink?

[Liep]

What is Max von Sydow's favorite drink?

Urge?

[celedhring]

After the glowing reviews in this thread I decided to give Arrow a second chance and I'm enjoying it more this time around.

[Sheilbh]

Habemus cast:

http://starwars.com/news/star-wars-episode-7-cast-announced.html

Most of the new guys are complete unknowns. Max Von Sydow as a predictably evil dude should at least provide some fun scenery-chewing.

I loved John Boyega in Attack the Block. Also I saw this list earlier. It looks like they got Brendan Gleeson and Domhnal Gleeson mixed up

[Ideologue]

Morning For the Osone Family (1946).  Since I wanted to watch one or two of Masaki Kobayashi's mentor's films to get a feel for what he was about, I selected my first based upon the highly ethical criterion that it was the shortest.  I may not have gotten a representative work.  The word on the street is that Keisuke Kinoshita is all about bourgeois melodrama and wasn't political.  "Morning" pretty resolutely is.

Our story begins in 1943.  The Osones number a mother, a couple of uncles, one of their wives, and four children, aged from their mid-teens to mid-twenties.  The father has passed, and leadership of the family has passed de facto and de jure to his brother, a colonel in the IJA.  The years pass and each of the children meets the Pacific War in their own way: the oldest son is drafted and dies; the middle son is imprisoned for an essay written with insufficient enthusiasm for the war; the youngest son, not yet graduated from high school, joins the Special Attack Service, and dutifully crashes his plane into the ocean on the last day of the war; finally, the daughter waits and hopes for the safe return of her fiance/not fiance (they love each other very much, but her uncle called off their engagement--it is implied so that he can use her in an arrangement with the son of a major materiel supplier).  Finally, after Japan surrenders, the Osone matriarch tells the uncle what she wanted to say years ago: that he's an asshole, and that he and his kind are the ones who killed her sons and brought Japan to ruin.

Ultimately, it adds up to the kind of cathartic chamber drama you'd want to see right after half your country was destroyed and the other half impoverished: it wasn't your fault, moviegoer.  One supposes it played better in '46.

Still, although unnecessarily dry in terms of both narrative and filmmaking, neither is it the garbage you might expect from a country crawling out from underneath the rubble of a world war (cough ITALY cough).  It's an effective piece, and it did indeed occasionally made me sad.  Finally, I really do appreciate that, as soon as they were allowed to register their opposition to the war, the good Japanese (that we didn't incinerate) did so.

B

[celedhring]

Wait! Do I detect a dig at Italian Neorrealism in your last paragraph?

Also, the American occupation forces had a big control over Japanese film at the time, so I wouldn't consider all the deluge of antiwar films or those ridiculous Rashamen movies about Japanese-American friendship a completely spontaneous reaction (which doesn't mean Kinoshita is being insincere here).

Godzilla is probably a better witness of Japanese reaction to WWII, imho. I'm not an expert in Japanese culture, not by any means, but all the great Japanese anti-WWII films I know are highly metaphorical and never tackle the issue directly or overtly. Which dunno if it's some kind of cultural trait to deal with collective trauma.