I watched some silent Chinese films at Lincoln Center (NYC) with live musical accompaniment and I thought the music chosen was terrible in both cases. For one film (I forget the name, but it was part of a 1929 serial with a female martial artist as protagonist—“Red Shadow” or something like that), the “music” was made by a woman sitting alone at a computer and using it to create sounds, most of which sounded like insects buzzing. It was awful and totally ruined the movie for me. I’d rather see it silent. The other film was GODDESS (1934) starring Ruan Ling-yu, and the small orchestra sat IN FRONT OF the screen on stage, which was very distracting. It was evidently some kind of dissonant avant garde music, the gimmick being that it was entirely made using actual instruments from old Chinese orchestras. That didn’t make the music sound any better or any more appropriate for the film. Give me William Perry at the piano any time. (Anyone else here remember him?)
Japanese animation, esp. Miyazaki, has others here have pointed out.
The best films/TV about high school life I’ve seen have all been anime titles:
I CAN HEAR THE OCEAN, aka OCEAN WAVES (UMI GA KIKOERU) (1993) produced by Studio Ghibli. A drama about a two boys in a small Japanese city and what happens when an impetuous, headstrong transfer student from Tokyo enters their lives.
“His and Her Circumstances” (1998) TV series about two high-achieving high schoolers who first compete and then fall in love. Beautiful mix of comedy and drama.
“Initial D” (1998) TV series about mountain road racing in Japan. I’ve never cared about auto racing, but this series offers a set of beautifully developed characters and their relationships. I found it thoroughly engrossing.
AKIRA (1988) Groundbreaking anime film about disaffected youth in a future dystopian Tokyo.
I also highly recommend the Japanese live-action film, BATTLE ROYALE (2000), but it’s quite harrowing and emotionally wrenching. Do some reading about it first.
Ellen Page was the only thing I liked about INCEPTION. She’s beautiful. The camera loves her. There’s no such thing as a bad angle with her. She should get her own movie and not get stuck with such annoying co-stars as she has here. I had a problem with the way her character was written (i.e. the way she goes from being “the Architect” to being “the Therapist” midway through the film), but not with her performance.
There are prints, but I don’t see that you have any choice but to ship it from Prague. Are you with a reputable venue? Are you in the U.S.? If so, you can probably get some help facilitating this through the Polish Cultural Institute in New York. They’ve been very good on this kind of thing for events in New York. I don’t know if they have other offices around the country or not. But if you talk to them, you’ll learn more than you know now.
If you’re not in the U.S., there may or may not be a Polish Cultural Institute office where you are, or a Consulate General of Poland, where an officer there may or may not want to help. I can only speak for my positive experiences in dealing with the office in New York.
The Roaring Twenties
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Only Angels Have Wings
Gone With the Wind
The Wizard of Oz
You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man
Drums Along the Mohawk
Midnight
Jesse James
Young Mr. Lincoln
Son of Frankenstein
Stagecoach
The Rains Came
The Little Princess
Gunga Din
Beau Geste
The Four Feathers
Confessions of a Nazi Spy
Man of Conquest
Saga of Death Valley
JURASSIC PARK? Hell no! I want to see some real dinosaurs, baby. Give me the lizards in KING DINOSAUR any day over JURASSIC PARK. Or Irwin Allen’s THE LOST WORLD. Or JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH.
There are hundreds of Bollywood filmmakers who have been VERY successful without ever intersecting with Hollywood. There are many Hong Kong and Japanese filmmakers who achieved great success while remaining unknown in Hollywood. There are Italian, British, German, and French filmmakers who are world renowned without having worked in Hollywood.
There are many American independent filmmakers who achieved success without ever stepping foot in Hollywood. Y’ ever hear of Frederick Wiseman??? Jon Alpert? Barbara Kopple? Willard Van Dyke? Pare Lorentz? Robert Flaherty? D.A. Pennebaker? Richard Leacock? Albert and David Maysles? Etc., etc., etc.
There are many regional filmmakers who made a good living making genre films in the U.S. that never passed through a major studio. Look up Earl Owensby. Today, we’ve got Tyler Perry, who is the most successful black filmmaker EVER, and has had relatively little contact with mainstream Hollywood.
I hated EYES WIDE SHUT and found it absolute torture to sit through. It took several sittings to get through all of it. None of it is remotely plausible or believable. None of it was remotely interesting to me. I didn’t find the characters or the actors interesting. I didn’t care about anything they did. Tom Cruise plays a doctor. I wanted to see him cure his patients’ ills. That’s his JOB, dammit, not running around with a mask at these peculiarly imagined and staged orgies involving costumed rich people—on work nights when they have to get up the next morning!!! I didn’t care about his sex life with his wife and what was needed to perk it up. That’s not enough of a plot hook for me. To afford that huge apartment, both of them would have to work REAL HARD at what they do for a living. Where would they have time or energy to run around at night like that? If MY doctor showed up for my 9:00 AM appointment with bags under his eyes after a night of running around to orgies, I’d stop going to him.
I need a little bit of basis in—hello?—real life before I can suspend my disbelief. And this is a drama, not a sci-fi fantasy like INCEPTION or a sorcery fantasy like the Harry Potter movies, so it should be easier to do. If you make it completely implausible in the early scenes, what’s to keep me engaged for the rest of it? And it’s a really long movie, too. 2 hrs. and 40 min. Ridiculous.
Clearly the work of a man completely and totally isolated from the people his movie was about—upper middle class workaholic Manhattanites. If he’d made it a period piece set in turn-of-the-20th century Vienna, as the original story was (I think), I might have had fewer problems with it. But as a modern-day New Yorker, I was appalled by it.
I’d go with BREATHLESS, ALPHAVILLE, PIERROT LE FOU and CONTEMPT as your first Godard viewings. Those were pretty much mine, although not in that order (ALPHAVILLE was first and then BREATHLESS.)
If you can’t get past those, skip the rest.
I have thousands of movies on VHS. Most taped off TV, but several hundred VHS pre-records as well. I love ‘em.
I recently watched for the first time a movie I’d taped off a local broadcast station back in 1983. It looked as good as it would have looked back then and played just fine. This is my experience with most VHS. If you store them correctly and treat them well, they’ll last.
I love popping a tape in, stopping where I want, popping it out of the VCR and then starting at the exact point I left off at. Granted, some DVD players actually cue up the point you left off at, but of the four DVD players I have (all code-free), only one does that and only within a day or two of popping it out. But that one, a Phillips, stopped working recently.
Much of what I have on VHS never came out on DVD. Some of my VHS copies are extremely rare, since most VHS is now virtually out of print.
VHS is my preferred format when I teach, because I can pop it in at the start point of a chosen clip and not have to wait for the logos to parade by and the menu to start up. DVD was not designed as a teaching medium. It’s really annoying trying to isolate a chosen clip on a DVD. Sometimes I have to take chapter stops into consideration when I choose clips from DVDs.
Are there classic films and animation titles that absolutely need to be watched in the best format possible? Yes. But not everything needs to be seen in a pristine transfer. I like westerns. Sure, THE SEARCHERS and THE WILD BUNCH need to be seen on DVD, but that doesn’t need to be the case for every Audie Murphy and Roy Rogers western—and I’ve got tons of those on VHS.
I’m a big fan of THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT, but I thought YEAR OF THE DRAGON was atrocious.
I haven’t seen THE DEER HUNTER since it came out. I’ve watched John Woo’s A BULLET IN THE HEAD a lot, but never went back to THE DEER HUNTER for some reason.
B-westerns are the way to go, esp. Roy Rogers westerns like SAGA OF DEATH VALLEY, DAYS OF JESSE JAMES, YOUNG BILL HICKOK, and THE GOLDEN STALLION. And anything with Don “Red” Barry in it.
And then KING OF THE ZOMBIES with Mantan Moreland. And a few Bela Lugosi movies like SCARED TO DEATH, THE CORPSE VANISHES and ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY. There’s another one I like that has no major stars in it, VALLEY OF THE ZOMBIES, starring Ian Keith as Ormand Murks. (There’s no “valley” in it and there are no “zombies,” but it’s very funny—intentionally so—nonetheless.)
You haven’t seen ANY B-movies until you’ve seen those.
I didn’t know New Zealand had even MADE 50 movies. That must be, like, every film they ever made. So the 50 best are the same as the 50 worst, right? And some of these are American movies that just happened to be shot in New Zealand. Not quite the same thing, is it?
I’ll go with THE SEARCHERS. I’ve seen it multiple times, including on the big screen. It’s a beautiful film, but it also offers multiple layers and a dark edge to it. I get different things out of it every time I see it. And I’ve read the book it’s based on, too.
Other great Ford films: THE GRAPES OF WRATH, THEY WERE EXPENDABLE, MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, FORT APACHE, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE.
I’d like to recommend some titles you may not have seen: PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND, WEE WILLIE WINKIE, DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK.
FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE:
“Go on, light another match!”
“I generally smoke after I eat. Why not come back in about ten minutes?”
He’s in a million Italian westerns. I remember him having a big part in THE RUTHLESS FOUR (1968), which they used to show on TV a lot, but not in about 30 years. There’s a bunch of his Italian stuff on VHS in my closet, most of which I haven’t seen.
He has a great bit part near the end of the WWII spy movie, THE COUNTERFEIT TRAITOR (1962).
You’re watching the wrong films, then. How can you call THE SEARCHERS or WHITE HEAT bland? How can you call LADY FROM SHANGHAI and TOUCH OF EVIL formulaic? How can you call STRANGERS ON A TRAIN or NOTORIOUS trite? Or BORN TO KILL? CRISS CROSS? OUT OF THE PAST? THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE? KISS ME DEADLY? ATTACK? Fuller, Mann, Huston, Aldrich, Karlson, Nick Ray, etc., etc., etc.
Sure, we can argue about GOING MY WAY and PRIDE OF THE YANKEES or FATHER OF THE BRIDE, or even IMITATION OF LIFE, but how can you complain about Billy Wilder in the same way? DOUBLE INDEMNITY, anyone? THE APARTMENT? SUNSET BOULEVARD? Helloooooo?
SILENT ERA FILM WITH A LIVE SOUNDTRACK almost 3 years ago
I watched some silent Chinese films at Lincoln Center (NYC) with live musical accompaniment and I thought the music chosen was terrible in both cases. For one film (I forget the name, but it was part of a 1929 serial with a female martial artist as protagonist—“Red Shadow” or something like that), the “music” was made by a woman sitting alone at a computer and using it to create sounds, most of which sounded like insects buzzing. It was awful and totally ruined the movie for me. I’d rather see it silent. The other film was GODDESS (1934) starring Ruan Ling-yu, and the small orchestra sat IN FRONT OF the screen on stage, which was very distracting. It was evidently some kind of dissonant avant garde music, the gimmick being that it was entirely made using actual instruments from old Chinese orchestras. That didn’t make the music sound any better or any more appropriate for the film. Give me William Perry at the piano any time. (Anyone else here remember him?)
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DIRECTORS’ CUP VOTING, ROUND 1, MATCH 45: TAKESHI KITANO (SONATINE) VS BUDD BOETTICHER (THE TALL T) almost 3 years ago
Takeshi Kitano (Sonatine) —0 vs Budd Boetticher (The Tall T) —1
(How do you make it bold?)
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David Gordon Green's Suspiria Remake almost 3 years ago
Ellen Page should play the lead.
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What are some films that describe and show youth/the feel of youth well? almost 3 years ago
Japanese animation, esp. Miyazaki, has others here have pointed out.
The best films/TV about high school life I’ve seen have all been anime titles:
I CAN HEAR THE OCEAN, aka OCEAN WAVES (UMI GA KIKOERU) (1993) produced by Studio Ghibli. A drama about a two boys in a small Japanese city and what happens when an impetuous, headstrong transfer student from Tokyo enters their lives.
“His and Her Circumstances” (1998) TV series about two high-achieving high schoolers who first compete and then fall in love. Beautiful mix of comedy and drama.
“Initial D” (1998) TV series about mountain road racing in Japan. I’ve never cared about auto racing, but this series offers a set of beautifully developed characters and their relationships. I found it thoroughly engrossing.
AKIRA (1988) Groundbreaking anime film about disaffected youth in a future dystopian Tokyo.
I also highly recommend the Japanese live-action film, BATTLE ROYALE (2000), but it’s quite harrowing and emotionally wrenching. Do some reading about it first.
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Inception: a truly great film? almost 3 years ago
Ellen Page was the only thing I liked about INCEPTION. She’s beautiful. The camera loves her. There’s no such thing as a bad angle with her. She should get her own movie and not get stuck with such annoying co-stars as she has here. I had a problem with the way her character was written (i.e. the way she goes from being “the Architect” to being “the Therapist” midway through the film), but not with her performance.
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Film Booking Agents almost 3 years ago
There are prints, but I don’t see that you have any choice but to ship it from Prague. Are you with a reputable venue? Are you in the U.S.? If so, you can probably get some help facilitating this through the Polish Cultural Institute in New York. They’ve been very good on this kind of thing for events in New York. I don’t know if they have other offices around the country or not. But if you talk to them, you’ll learn more than you know now.
If you’re not in the U.S., there may or may not be a Polish Cultural Institute office where you are, or a Consulate General of Poland, where an officer there may or may not want to help. I can only speak for my positive experiences in dealing with the office in New York.
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1939 POLL almost 3 years ago
The Roaring Twenties
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Only Angels Have Wings
Gone With the Wind
The Wizard of Oz
You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man
Drums Along the Mohawk
Midnight
Jesse James
Young Mr. Lincoln
Son of Frankenstein
Stagecoach
The Rains Came
The Little Princess
Gunga Din
Beau Geste
The Four Feathers
Confessions of a Nazi Spy
Man of Conquest
Saga of Death Valley
Go to Comment
I really wanna watch Jurassic Park. almost 3 years ago
JURASSIC PARK? Hell no! I want to see some real dinosaurs, baby. Give me the lizards in KING DINOSAUR any day over JURASSIC PARK. Or Irwin Allen’s THE LOST WORLD. Or JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH.
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DREAM FILMS almost 3 years ago
I want to see ON THE TOWN remade entirely with female Japanese pop stars and sung in Japanese. And filmed on location!
Something like this:
(Wish the video quality was better, but I picked the version that has the most readable subtitles.)
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Movies you hated that everyone else loves almost 3 years ago
Movies I hate that everyone else seems to love:
THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION
THE DARK KNIGHT
UP
AVATAR
INCEPTION
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The Bugs Bunny Birthday Thread!!!! almost 3 years ago
The best way to celebrate is to watch some Bugs Bunny cartoons.
And shame on those members here who don’t have any Bugs in their library.
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favorite films of 2009 almost 3 years ago
If I remember correctly, I only really liked four films last year:
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS
RED CLIFF (North American cut)
CHANDNI CHOWK TO CHINA (a Bollywood kung fu film)
CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE
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Movies you hated that everyone else loves almost 3 years ago
TITANIC
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truly great films with happy endings? almost 3 years ago
It’s a Wonderful Life
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Film Booking Agents almost 3 years ago
All those former Commie countries in Eastern Europe look alike to me. So it must have been the Czech Institute. But they were very helpful.
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do you need to make into the hollywood system? almost 3 years ago
There are hundreds of Bollywood filmmakers who have been VERY successful without ever intersecting with Hollywood. There are many Hong Kong and Japanese filmmakers who achieved great success while remaining unknown in Hollywood. There are Italian, British, German, and French filmmakers who are world renowned without having worked in Hollywood.
There are many American independent filmmakers who achieved success without ever stepping foot in Hollywood. Y’ ever hear of Frederick Wiseman??? Jon Alpert? Barbara Kopple? Willard Van Dyke? Pare Lorentz? Robert Flaherty? D.A. Pennebaker? Richard Leacock? Albert and David Maysles? Etc., etc., etc.
There are many regional filmmakers who made a good living making genre films in the U.S. that never passed through a major studio. Look up Earl Owensby. Today, we’ve got Tyler Perry, who is the most successful black filmmaker EVER, and has had relatively little contact with mainstream Hollywood.
My point is…it can be done.
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Why is eyes wide shut so hated? almost 3 years ago
I hated EYES WIDE SHUT and found it absolute torture to sit through. It took several sittings to get through all of it. None of it is remotely plausible or believable. None of it was remotely interesting to me. I didn’t find the characters or the actors interesting. I didn’t care about anything they did. Tom Cruise plays a doctor. I wanted to see him cure his patients’ ills. That’s his JOB, dammit, not running around with a mask at these peculiarly imagined and staged orgies involving costumed rich people—on work nights when they have to get up the next morning!!! I didn’t care about his sex life with his wife and what was needed to perk it up. That’s not enough of a plot hook for me. To afford that huge apartment, both of them would have to work REAL HARD at what they do for a living. Where would they have time or energy to run around at night like that? If MY doctor showed up for my 9:00 AM appointment with bags under his eyes after a night of running around to orgies, I’d stop going to him.
I need a little bit of basis in—hello?—real life before I can suspend my disbelief. And this is a drama, not a sci-fi fantasy like INCEPTION or a sorcery fantasy like the Harry Potter movies, so it should be easier to do. If you make it completely implausible in the early scenes, what’s to keep me engaged for the rest of it? And it’s a really long movie, too. 2 hrs. and 40 min. Ridiculous.
Clearly the work of a man completely and totally isolated from the people his movie was about—upper middle class workaholic Manhattanites. If he’d made it a period piece set in turn-of-the-20th century Vienna, as the original story was (I think), I might have had fewer problems with it. But as a modern-day New Yorker, I was appalled by it.
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First Godard? almost 3 years ago
I’d go with BREATHLESS, ALPHAVILLE, PIERROT LE FOU and CONTEMPT as your first Godard viewings. Those were pretty much mine, although not in that order (ALPHAVILLE was first and then BREATHLESS.)
If you can’t get past those, skip the rest.
Go to Comment
VHS! almost 3 years ago
I have thousands of movies on VHS. Most taped off TV, but several hundred VHS pre-records as well. I love ‘em.
I recently watched for the first time a movie I’d taped off a local broadcast station back in 1983. It looked as good as it would have looked back then and played just fine. This is my experience with most VHS. If you store them correctly and treat them well, they’ll last.
I love popping a tape in, stopping where I want, popping it out of the VCR and then starting at the exact point I left off at. Granted, some DVD players actually cue up the point you left off at, but of the four DVD players I have (all code-free), only one does that and only within a day or two of popping it out. But that one, a Phillips, stopped working recently.
Much of what I have on VHS never came out on DVD. Some of my VHS copies are extremely rare, since most VHS is now virtually out of print.
VHS is my preferred format when I teach, because I can pop it in at the start point of a chosen clip and not have to wait for the logos to parade by and the menu to start up. DVD was not designed as a teaching medium. It’s really annoying trying to isolate a chosen clip on a DVD. Sometimes I have to take chapter stops into consideration when I choose clips from DVDs.
Are there classic films and animation titles that absolutely need to be watched in the best format possible? Yes. But not everything needs to be seen in a pristine transfer. I like westerns. Sure, THE SEARCHERS and THE WILD BUNCH need to be seen on DVD, but that doesn’t need to be the case for every Audie Murphy and Roy Rogers western—and I’ve got tons of those on VHS.
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Why is eyes wide shut so hated? almost 3 years ago
I have plenty of nightmares of my own. I don’t need Kubrick’s.
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Michael Cimino almost 3 years ago
I’m a big fan of THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT, but I thought YEAR OF THE DRAGON was atrocious.
I haven’t seen THE DEER HUNTER since it came out. I’ve watched John Woo’s A BULLET IN THE HEAD a lot, but never went back to THE DEER HUNTER for some reason.
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WORDS THAT CRITICS USE (ALLLLL THEEEE TIMEEEE) almost 3 years ago
One word they use a lot that drives me nuts is “twee.” I asked people on another forum to explain it to me and I’ve clean forgotten what they said.
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B-MOVIE B MOVIE - I WANT TO KNOW! ALL!! almost 3 years ago
B-westerns are the way to go, esp. Roy Rogers westerns like SAGA OF DEATH VALLEY, DAYS OF JESSE JAMES, YOUNG BILL HICKOK, and THE GOLDEN STALLION. And anything with Don “Red” Barry in it.
And then KING OF THE ZOMBIES with Mantan Moreland. And a few Bela Lugosi movies like SCARED TO DEATH, THE CORPSE VANISHES and ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY. There’s another one I like that has no major stars in it, VALLEY OF THE ZOMBIES, starring Ian Keith as Ormand Murks. (There’s no “valley” in it and there are no “zombies,” but it’s very funny—intentionally so—nonetheless.)
You haven’t seen ANY B-movies until you’ve seen those.
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TOP 50 BEST KIWI FILMS POLL VOTED BY OVER 10,000 NEW ZEALANDERS almost 3 years ago
I didn’t know New Zealand had even MADE 50 movies. That must be, like, every film they ever made. So the 50 best are the same as the 50 worst, right? And some of these are American movies that just happened to be shot in New Zealand. Not quite the same thing, is it?
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Favorite John Ford Film almost 3 years ago
I’ll go with THE SEARCHERS. I’ve seen it multiple times, including on the big screen. It’s a beautiful film, but it also offers multiple layers and a dark edge to it. I get different things out of it every time I see it. And I’ve read the book it’s based on, too.
Other great Ford films: THE GRAPES OF WRATH, THEY WERE EXPENDABLE, MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, FORT APACHE, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE.
I’d like to recommend some titles you may not have seen: PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND, WEE WILLIE WINKIE, DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK.
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The other Klaus Kinski films almost 3 years ago
FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE:
“Go on, light another match!”
“I generally smoke after I eat. Why not come back in about ten minutes?”
He’s in a million Italian westerns. I remember him having a big part in THE RUTHLESS FOUR (1968), which they used to show on TV a lot, but not in about 30 years. There’s a bunch of his Italian stuff on VHS in my closet, most of which I haven’t seen.
He has a great bit part near the end of the WWII spy movie, THE COUNTERFEIT TRAITOR (1962).
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Does anyone know where one can find good books on film in nyc (Manhattan/Queens preferably) almost 3 years ago
Wait, are you IN New York and looking for good books on film, or are you looking for books on films set in or shot in New York?
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Am I the only one who finds Old Hollywood films relatively bland... almost 3 years ago
You’re watching the wrong films, then. How can you call THE SEARCHERS or WHITE HEAT bland? How can you call LADY FROM SHANGHAI and TOUCH OF EVIL formulaic? How can you call STRANGERS ON A TRAIN or NOTORIOUS trite? Or BORN TO KILL? CRISS CROSS? OUT OF THE PAST? THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE? KISS ME DEADLY? ATTACK? Fuller, Mann, Huston, Aldrich, Karlson, Nick Ray, etc., etc., etc.
Sure, we can argue about GOING MY WAY and PRIDE OF THE YANKEES or FATHER OF THE BRIDE, or even IMITATION OF LIFE, but how can you complain about Billy Wilder in the same way? DOUBLE INDEMNITY, anyone? THE APARTMENT? SUNSET BOULEVARD? Helloooooo?
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The best American films set in other countries. almost 3 years ago
THE WILD BUNCH (1969)
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imaginary replacement actors almost 3 years ago
I would see ALL these movies!
Just put ANYBODY in place of DiCaprio in everything he’s done from TITANIC (1997) to INCEPTION (2010) and I’ll be happy.
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