I’m a service-sector worker bee from North Carolina. Though a dazzling DVD collection is a tad beyond my service-sector budget, I’ve seen thousands of things, and am a lifeling cinephile. I’ve made some (very) sporadic contributions to varied sites, and once helped to co-author a grad level film theory syllabus and film list for a course being taught at a university I can’t get into.
At varied points in life, I’ve been a punk musician, retail stooge, buyer for an indie music distro, small-town newspaper writer, convenience store clerk, and assorted other unimpressive sorts of things.
Fave filmmakers would include lots of familiar names, though I would specifically single out Nagisa Oshima and Satyajit Ray as two particularly revered filmmakers.
This is looking like a great site, and it has already been quite marvelous to explore. Thanks to everyone involved!
He’s been mentioned before, but I’d again say Satyajit Ray: the Apu trilogy, Charulata, The Music Room, Days And Nights In The Forest
Nagisa Oshima: Death By Hanging, Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief, The Ceremony and Boy in particular
Ritwik Ghatak: Cloud-Capped Star and Subarna-Rekha
Hirokazu Kore’eda’s Distance.
In addition, it would be nice to see more exploration of Japanese new wave. Guru Dutt is another Indian filmmaker very much deserving of the Criterion treatment. I also agree with the previous mentions of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Mario Bava.
4 films I saw when I was young: Being There, Annie Hall, The Red Balloon & Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. The first two of those were the first non-kids movies I think I ever saw, and there was a lot that I didn’t get at the time, but enough that I was still very excited by the idea of films that weren’t just passive experiences, but sources of ideas that one could carry around.
The third of those films was the first non-U.S. film I ever saw, and I was eager to see more from that point onward (Kurosawa, Truffaut and Fellini were my next, adolescent forays into international film).
The last of those films I have great affection for. Steve Martin/Carl Reiner comedy, and I saw it with my dad, who was into more serious kinds of films, and I think he expected to hate it. Instead, we got a slapstick deconstruction of film noir, and we went back to see it again, and my dad made a game out of seeing how many older films he could spot in the cut-and-paste of ‘Dead Men Don’t…’ I was instantly curious to see those older films, and began to seek them out when they ran on TV, and this was to become a life-changing discovery.
In my adult life, I would mention Ugetsu, Floating Weeds, and Satyajit Ray’s ‘Apu’ trilogy as very random discoveries that left an unforgettable immediate impact.
Mysterious Object At Noon – Seemed to me that critics were really flustered by what Weerasethakul was doing in this film, and were a bit angry about that. I think it’s a mezmerizing film, and there’s a warmth and intense rootedness under the experimentalism, which is to me very charming.
The King Of Marvin Gardens – Depressing as hell, and the story kinda gets lost, but I love the look of the film, and both Jack Nicholson’s, and Scatman Carothers’ performances are very much worth seeing.
The Last Detail and Shampoo – These aren’t ‘hated’ films, but if there’s a consensus that Harold & Maude and Being There are Hal Ashby at his finest, these two films are (or are very close) to being their equal, and the primary characters in all four films are thematic kin to such a degree that I consider them to be essential Ashby films as well.
Passion Fish – John Sayles seems to fall into the ‘oh yeah…him’ category. I think ‘Passion Fish’ has plunged completely off everyone’s radar, but it has some very sharply drawn characters, and the dialogue is some of Sayles’ best. And he keeps his penchant for digressiveness to an absolute minimum.
Food Of The Gods – Bert Gordon. Greatness. Ida Lupino and Marjoe, in a b-grade nature-on-the-rampage flick with an environmental theme. What’s not to love? You got a turkey attack, a rat seige, and Gordon’s carefully crafted miniatures, which are a marvel. I watched this movie most recently while trying to shake off a nasty head cold, and it was the only thing for 5 days that made me feel good.
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Title: SATORI IN TOBACCO TOWN
Plotline/idea: A mid-20s-to-early-30s Japanese man experiences unexpected reversals of fortune (of a negative variety) in both career and romance. He decides upon a change of scenery – as a time-out within which he can rethink his life, and test/find himself, and decides upon a self-imposed exile, for a specific period of time. He arrives in the US, enough money to live cheap (in ‘middle America’), secures inexpensive accomodations, and sets about surviving and making sense of his new surroundings. He begins to write, which – over the course of his year in the US – evolves into his new direction in life upon his return to Japan.
The idea would be that this would not be a stereotypical tourist/outsider kind of thing, and wouldn’t be a mocking look at either Americans or Japanese, but would rather be an understated slice-of-life trip through relationships that evolve across cultural barriers, and how those relationships and situations will form the foundation of everything this character will subsequently do in life; the idea of feeling ‘at home’ in unfamiliar places (I see this character settling in a very un-pretty, un-trendy sort of place during his time in the US) would be a secondary theme.
Inspired -slightly – by several books (‘The Snow Leopard’ by Peter Mathiessen, ‘The Lady & The Monk’ by Pico Iyer, ‘From Heaven Lake’ by Vikram Seth, ‘Red Dust’ by Ma Jian), and the idea of a character travelling to ‘find himself’
Title: This was mostly improvised. The basic idea is that this guy would find his way to a fairly random place. I settled upon Winston-Salem – it’s a mix of industrial old (tobacco, hence this title) South and sprawly new-South, so there’s the backdrop of a provincial place undergoing sudden changes in demographics and diversity, and the place has enough of a preserved history to offer narrative and visual possibilities. There’s a film school in the city (David Gordon Green is an alum, and some indie films – including ‘George Washington’ – have been shot there), and there’s a bit of an indie film infrastructure in place there, another asset. There are dozens of other potential locales around the country, though someplace fairly unglamorous would work best. Satori would be the arrival at a state of enlightenment, from Japanese Zen…
Cast: I’m at a loss on this one…
Soundtrack: instrumental music by Shugo Tokumaru, Bill Frisell, Antibalas, Nortec Collective
Cinematography: hmmm…? Don’t know, though a look akin to the Hou Hsiao-hsien that I’ve seen would be perfect…
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Stylistically very different, I’d also like to see a dramatic epic, big cast, set against the backdrop of the Harlem renaissance – LOTS of big band, a cast of writers, artists, bandleaders, political agitators and theorists. Black-and-white, lots of period detail, though I haven’t really come up with a story, and something like this would be expensive to do…
Julio Cortazar: Hopscotch, Cronopios & Famas, Blow Up & Other Stories, All Fires The Fire (Blow Up was adapted into the film of the same name; the story ‘The Southern Thruway’ in ‘All Fires The Fire’ was allegedly the inspiration for Godard’s ‘Weekend’)
Jorge Luis Borges: Labyrinths
Vladimir Nabokov: Speak Memory, Pale Fire
Bohumil Hrabal: I Served The King Of England
Peter Matthiessen: The Snow Leopard, In The Spirit Of Crazy Horse
Italo Calvino: Cosmicomics
Junichiro Tanizaki: Seven Japanese Tales
Pu Songling: Strange Tales From A Chinese Studio (King Hu’s ‘A Touch Of Zen’ adapts and interweaves several of these stories)
Han Shaogong: A Dictionary Of Maqiao
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude, The General In His Labyrinth
Apu trilogy
Sansho The Bailiff
Throne Of Blood
Floating Weeds
Annie Hall
Notorious
The Big Heat
Sunset Boulevard
The Apartment
Charulata
Days And Nights In The Forest
Harakiri
Godfather 1-2
The Conversation
L’Avventura
Amarcord
Contempt
Death By Hanging
Silence (Moshen Makhmalbaf)
Goodfellas
after life
Mysterious Object An Noon
Yi Yi
not necessarily ‘the greatest,’ or ‘the most important,’ but definitely noteworthy in some way:
Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail and The King Of Marvin Gardens
Peter Sellers in Being There
Joe Morton in Brother From Another Planet
Steve Martin in Pennies From Heaven
Jack Lemmon in The Apartment
Sharmila Tagore in Nayak
Tatsuya Nakadai in Kwaidan
Issey Ogata, Nianzhen Wu & Jonathan Yang in Yi Yi
The ending of Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces is complex, and subtle, but also morally devastating – due to what you gradually learn about the two primary characters. If the film has twin interpretations – one a Quixotic pursuit of freedom, the other a horrifying avoidance of responsibility, the ending really hammers it home.
The ending of L’Eclisse, simply because it’s so unexpected and visually striking.
The ending of The Conversation. All the many disparate themes of the film lock together; if you’ve seen the film – think about (a) the main theme of the film (the type of work the principal character does for a living), and then (b) think about what the camera is quietly doing, while the character does his thing in that long final scene. As great Coppola, this film may not knock Godfather s, or Apocalypse out of the running as his best, but (that noted) it is still a great, great film, and definitely Coppola’s most underrated. And the things it says about the intrusions of technology into our everyday lives make it a very prescient film indeed.
I first saw the film Being There when I was 10. Much of it went over my head, but I got enough of it, and it’s at the foundation of my film-o-philia. The ending is magical realism (think Gabriel Garcia-Marquez), wonderfully done, and the varied spiritual interpretations of the principal character are nicely underlined there. Beautifully shot.
Antonioni: L’Eclisse and L’Avventura – The first gives you the three acts, but not in the usual order. In the second, you have a mystery in which the real center of the story is a character is developed, in a somewht traditional fashion, and then removed from the literal narrative, only to haunt both the remainder of the film, and the viewer.
Very tough to track down, but well worth the effort:
Nagisa Oshima’s Death By Hanging – I think this film may best embody Oshima’s interest in unconventional storytelling over a commitment to a particular style. The first shape-shifts from faux-documentary to Brechtian farce, with flashbacks, leaps foreward, and numerous re-enactments of multiple situations, interactions with dream-characters and imagined characters, and the sense of perspective is in flux through the entire film. Stylistically it’s deliberately disjointed, and Oshima’s control of the wild shifts in tone and style is very tightly controlled, and a clear story does present itself, though it’s extremely challenging in the presentation.
Oshima’s Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief – from a little while later, nearly abandons narrative, though a consistent allegory and sense of social critique holds the film together. The overall story – which is shot in a textbook-prefect new wave stylishness – is broken up by a number of short commentaries, which are offered by (among others) an outside psychiatrist, a roundtable forum of commentators (Oshima, plus cast members from his previous feature films), and a drag Noh troupe converting their analysis of the two characters’ actions into Japanese folk songs.
The Oshima’s were being offered on a Japanese new wave site, and are available unsubbed in some Japanese Oshima box sets. I don’t know, but you may be able to locate subbed copies through HK DVD or YesAsia.
I’ve played bass and electric guitar for ~20 years, and stumbled around on a few other instruments before that. I’ve been in several bands, primarily locally. I was in an indie/garage/punk band for 5 years in the mid 90s, and we went pretty much nowhere, but it was a lot of fun travelling around the eastern US. We self recorded a single and a disc, and then did an EP that came out as we were splitting up; along the way we opened for Archers of Loaf several times, Cracker several times, and Yo La Tengo and Superdrag once.
I couldn’t settle on too many favorite discs, but there are assorted recordings by Miles Davis, Pere Ubu, The Clash, Stevie Wonder, The Velvet Underground, Steely Dan, My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, Wire, Richard Hell, Talking Heads, Doug Sahm/Sir Douglas Quintet that I never, ever get tired of. Some newer artists I’ve been getting really into would include Shugo Tokumaru, Urichipangoon, Los Amigos Invisbles, some of the stuff that’s been coming out of Monterrey, NL in Mexico…
Thanks Antoine – I agree completely on the outtakes at the end of Being There – a bad decision. Five Easy Pieces is one of a handful of films where I can remember the first viewing – there were about 10 of us crammed into a room, and apart from the friend whose apartment we were at, no one knew the story. And then the ending just … happens, and I can remember several minutes afterwards of no one saying a thing – it just levelled everyone. I think The King Of Marvin Gardens is overall a weaker film, but I agree on the ending, and there are several other things about that film (performances and the design, about which much can be said) that are unforgettable.
Generally I haven’t given it too much thought, though I think sexual extremism as a way of being shocking and extreme is quite often pointless and a dead giveaway that you’re seeing a lazy or unimaginative filmmaker looking for a way of distracting you from that fact.
Definite agreement. Toru Takemitsu – I discovered through (first) Kwaidan, and then the varied other Kobayashi/Kurosawa/Teshigahara/Nakahira films he composed for.
Definite agreement. Toru Takemitsu – I discovered through (first) Kwaidan, and then the varied other Kobayashi/Kurosawa/Teshigahara/Nakahira films he composed for.
1. Vernon, Florida
2. Fata Morgana
3. Distance (Kore’eda)
4. Au Hasard Balthasar
5. Being There
6. Japon
7. Where Is The Friend’s House
8. Groundhog Day
9. Psycho
10.L’Avventura
Oh there’s lots of Scorsese fans out there – the man is revered, and deservedly so in my opinion. Comparisons of his reputation vs. the reputation of Kubrick, Kurosawa, et. al. is apples-to-oranges: they are all remarkable, in their own way. And – definitely like Kubrick and Kurosawa, there are complex and very fascinating thematic linkages (and not violence, for its’ own sake at least) that runs very consistently through all of Scorsese’s work: think (as an example) of how the Biblically-derived narrative and narrative structure at the heart of Casino relates to films like Kundun or The Last Temptation Of Christ.
Well thanks to you for an interesting thread. I couldn’t pick a favorite – there’s at least one of his films (New York, New York) I didn’t much care for, but otherwise my favorites shift around. Apart from the obvious – Taxi Driver and Raging Bull – I personally find his less famous films, or his seemingly atypical films, to be far more interesting in what they reveal of his world view. He has a great, very classical theme – an inner ‘drive,’ which might show up as a quest for redemption, or a detour into the kind of criminal life seen in Goodfellas_, or an attempt at re-inventing a life and re-casting ones’ identity (_Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore), and I think in his view those are all different sides of the same coin.
This is a far from original observation, and I’d been familiar with Scorsese for quite a while, when I recall one night – about 10 years ago – watching Casino with a roommate. He grew up in an extremely religious family, and had become an agnostic as an adult, but growing up, he had read the entire Bible, and could quote from it. And as we were watching the film, he did a more-or-less spontanous deconstruction of Casino – identifying it as a modern-day retelling of the story of Sodom & Gomorrah (with unconventional sexual behavior changed to one of the deadly sins – greed, specifically), and then pinpointing the parallel plot points.
This completely rewired my take on Scorsese, and his Catholicism – specifically how unconventional, and very personally, intellectually thought out it is – a definite departure from mainstream spiritual thought, but very, very deep nontheless. I began trying to see what kinds of things might connect his rather diverse body of work, and there are many running themes, which – at this point – are highly evolved. I have a great repsect for a certain kind of classically defined storytelling, and also for allegory and a sense of morality that transcends the limitations of any specific kind of faith (Goodfellas I think is a great example of this); to me this is indicative of a great filmmaker who has also never lost an awareness of the outside world.
I think – to indulge in some comparisons again – in this Scorsese does profoundly resemble Kurosawa, and the uneven but still interesting Moshen Makhmalbaf (whose highly allegorical and at times Zen-like relationship to Islam is a close mirror of Scorsese’s relationship to Catholicism), and also perhaps Satyajit Ray…
Oh wow – Mott The Hoople. Another fan here; when I was growing up (80s), Bowie could do no wrong, and that led me straight to Mott, The Stooges and The Velvets. Which led straight to punk.
Pah – there’s no such thing as guilty pleasures. I have a great love of one-hit wonders – 60s garage, soul, 70s pop, new wave, whatever. There’s something beautiful about well-crafted junk.
The Fog – It has Adrienne Barbeau, Archie Bunker’s niece.
Food Of The Gods – Bert Gordon, Marjoe, Ida Lupino, a rat seige, a chicken attack, and stuff oozing from the ground that looks like ranch dressing
Twister – I love a good nature on the rampage flick.
Nestor, The Long-Eared Christmas Donkey – Roger “King Of The Road” Miller does the music. Roger sounds like he’s had a drink or two, and Nestor looks like he’s in dire need of Zoloft.
The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr. T – This is a great, great film. Dr. Seuss wrote the screenplay; it was a colossal flop upon its’ initial release. If you love movies, you should see it.
Cannibal Women In The Avocado Jungle Of Death – This one is supposed to be bad, but it has Bill Maher and … Adrienne Barbeau in it. Nuff said.
Clash Of The Titans – Harryhausen. I love Harryhausen.
St. Elmo’s Fire – Where to begin with this one? Joel Schumaker is the director everyone loves to hate, and this is a case study in why: phenomenally irrational, illogical behavior at absolutely every moment, from every single character. Those guys were in a fraternity? Rob Lowe gets to ‘jam’ in some jazz-metal group that sounds like Quarterflash (google them, so you too can know how wretched they were). Mare Winningham, who’s a real doormat’s doormat, in a triumph of ‘what if feminism was never invented.’ Demi Moore’s character – in between discreet bumps of coke – who turns out to spookily forecast our current economic … situation. Judd Nelson actually pulls off his role, in spite of being saddled with Ally Sheedy as a GF – and throughout, Ally looks like she’d saw off a limb to get out of this role without losing a decent paycheck in the process. Andie McDowell is a nursing student, just zoned-out enough to perhaps scare even the most hard-living souls into a renewed lifetime of compulsively healthy living. Emilio Estevez smiles a lot, and cheerfully stalks Andie, in a happy-go-lucky kinda way. Andrew McCarthy gets to be the sad sack – a post-grad yuppie Bogart wannabe, who gets to nail the best friend’s girl, cops a ‘tude about it, and is shocked that other people are … somewhat put off by this behavior. Rob Lowe then gets drunk, and screams at his wife (where’d she come from), after hocking a sax to pay a phone bill – the pawn shops in Georgetown are apparently very understanding and generous in dealing with their clients. Mare voluteers at a soup kitchen, and her dad (the guy with the eyebrows from Mitchell) attempts to bribe her into a marriage with a Chrysler. It snows a little. Demi’s place gets repo’d. Eventually, tenderness, and the common bonds of crisis bring these Washington up-and-comers to some sort of wisdom. Sigh.
I’ve always found the film to be great as drama; like the other folks here, I’ve never taken it to be all that accurate. In ways that don’t square with the actual biography of the band, but do reflect any number of underground/grass-roots creative movements (not just punk), I think the film does do a great job of capturing both early phases of excitement and invention, and later phases of decadence and self-destruction.
New to The Auteurs? You Belong Here over 3 years ago
Greets.
I’m a service-sector worker bee from North Carolina. Though a dazzling DVD collection is a tad beyond my service-sector budget, I’ve seen thousands of things, and am a lifeling cinephile. I’ve made some (very) sporadic contributions to varied sites, and once helped to co-author a grad level film theory syllabus and film list for a course being taught at a university I can’t get into.
At varied points in life, I’ve been a punk musician, retail stooge, buyer for an indie music distro, small-town newspaper writer, convenience store clerk, and assorted other unimpressive sorts of things.
Fave filmmakers would include lots of familiar names, though I would specifically single out Nagisa Oshima and Satyajit Ray as two particularly revered filmmakers.
This is looking like a great site, and it has already been quite marvelous to explore. Thanks to everyone involved!
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Movies That Should Be In the Criterion Collection over 3 years ago
He’s been mentioned before, but I’d again say Satyajit Ray: the Apu trilogy, Charulata, The Music Room, Days And Nights In The Forest
Nagisa Oshima: Death By Hanging, Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief, The Ceremony and Boy in particular
Ritwik Ghatak: Cloud-Capped Star and Subarna-Rekha
Hirokazu Kore’eda’s Distance.
In addition, it would be nice to see more exploration of Japanese new wave. Guru Dutt is another Indian filmmaker very much deserving of the Criterion treatment. I also agree with the previous mentions of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Mario Bava.
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Which film has changed your life forever? over 3 years ago
First:
4 films I saw when I was young: Being There, Annie Hall, The Red Balloon & Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. The first two of those were the first non-kids movies I think I ever saw, and there was a lot that I didn’t get at the time, but enough that I was still very excited by the idea of films that weren’t just passive experiences, but sources of ideas that one could carry around.
The third of those films was the first non-U.S. film I ever saw, and I was eager to see more from that point onward (Kurosawa, Truffaut and Fellini were my next, adolescent forays into international film).
The last of those films I have great affection for. Steve Martin/Carl Reiner comedy, and I saw it with my dad, who was into more serious kinds of films, and I think he expected to hate it. Instead, we got a slapstick deconstruction of film noir, and we went back to see it again, and my dad made a game out of seeing how many older films he could spot in the cut-and-paste of ‘Dead Men Don’t…’ I was instantly curious to see those older films, and began to seek them out when they ran on TV, and this was to become a life-changing discovery.
In my adult life, I would mention Ugetsu, Floating Weeds, and Satyajit Ray’s ‘Apu’ trilogy as very random discoveries that left an unforgettable immediate impact.
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Films you love but most people hate. over 3 years ago
Mysterious Object At Noon – Seemed to me that critics were really flustered by what Weerasethakul was doing in this film, and were a bit angry about that. I think it’s a mezmerizing film, and there’s a warmth and intense rootedness under the experimentalism, which is to me very charming.
The King Of Marvin Gardens – Depressing as hell, and the story kinda gets lost, but I love the look of the film, and both Jack Nicholson’s, and Scatman Carothers’ performances are very much worth seeing.
The Last Detail and Shampoo – These aren’t ‘hated’ films, but if there’s a consensus that Harold & Maude and Being There are Hal Ashby at his finest, these two films are (or are very close) to being their equal, and the primary characters in all four films are thematic kin to such a degree that I consider them to be essential Ashby films as well.
Passion Fish – John Sayles seems to fall into the ‘oh yeah…him’ category. I think ‘Passion Fish’ has plunged completely off everyone’s radar, but it has some very sharply drawn characters, and the dialogue is some of Sayles’ best. And he keeps his penchant for digressiveness to an absolute minimum.
Food Of The Gods – Bert Gordon. Greatness. Ida Lupino and Marjoe, in a b-grade nature-on-the-rampage flick with an environmental theme. What’s not to love? You got a turkey attack, a rat seige, and Gordon’s carefully crafted miniatures, which are a marvel. I watched this movie most recently while trying to shake off a nasty head cold, and it was the only thing for 5 days that made me feel good.
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D.I.Y. IDEAS FOR A FILM over 3 years ago
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Title: SATORI IN TOBACCO TOWN
Plotline/idea: A mid-20s-to-early-30s Japanese man experiences unexpected reversals of fortune (of a negative variety) in both career and romance. He decides upon a change of scenery – as a time-out within which he can rethink his life, and test/find himself, and decides upon a self-imposed exile, for a specific period of time. He arrives in the US, enough money to live cheap (in ‘middle America’), secures inexpensive accomodations, and sets about surviving and making sense of his new surroundings. He begins to write, which – over the course of his year in the US – evolves into his new direction in life upon his return to Japan.
The idea would be that this would not be a stereotypical tourist/outsider kind of thing, and wouldn’t be a mocking look at either Americans or Japanese, but would rather be an understated slice-of-life trip through relationships that evolve across cultural barriers, and how those relationships and situations will form the foundation of everything this character will subsequently do in life; the idea of feeling ‘at home’ in unfamiliar places (I see this character settling in a very un-pretty, un-trendy sort of place during his time in the US) would be a secondary theme.
Inspired -slightly – by several books (‘The Snow Leopard’ by Peter Mathiessen, ‘The Lady & The Monk’ by Pico Iyer, ‘From Heaven Lake’ by Vikram Seth, ‘Red Dust’ by Ma Jian), and the idea of a character travelling to ‘find himself’
Title: This was mostly improvised. The basic idea is that this guy would find his way to a fairly random place. I settled upon Winston-Salem – it’s a mix of industrial old (tobacco, hence this title) South and sprawly new-South, so there’s the backdrop of a provincial place undergoing sudden changes in demographics and diversity, and the place has enough of a preserved history to offer narrative and visual possibilities. There’s a film school in the city (David Gordon Green is an alum, and some indie films – including ‘George Washington’ – have been shot there), and there’s a bit of an indie film infrastructure in place there, another asset. There are dozens of other potential locales around the country, though someplace fairly unglamorous would work best. Satori would be the arrival at a state of enlightenment, from Japanese Zen…
Cast: I’m at a loss on this one…
Soundtrack: instrumental music by Shugo Tokumaru, Bill Frisell, Antibalas, Nortec Collective
Cinematography: hmmm…? Don’t know, though a look akin to the Hou Hsiao-hsien that I’ve seen would be perfect…
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Stylistically very different, I’d also like to see a dramatic epic, big cast, set against the backdrop of the Harlem renaissance – LOTS of big band, a cast of writers, artists, bandleaders, political agitators and theorists. Black-and-white, lots of period detail, though I haven’t really come up with a story, and something like this would be expensive to do…
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D.I.Y. IDEAS FOR A FILM over 3 years ago
(edited to remove doubel post)
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Who do you read? over 3 years ago
Paul Auster: Moon Palace
Don DeLillo: White Noise, Libra
Julio Cortazar: Hopscotch, Cronopios & Famas, Blow Up & Other Stories, All Fires The Fire (Blow Up was adapted into the film of the same name; the story ‘The Southern Thruway’ in ‘All Fires The Fire’ was allegedly the inspiration for Godard’s ‘Weekend’)
Jorge Luis Borges: Labyrinths
Vladimir Nabokov: Speak Memory, Pale Fire
Bohumil Hrabal: I Served The King Of England
Peter Matthiessen: The Snow Leopard, In The Spirit Of Crazy Horse
Italo Calvino: Cosmicomics
Junichiro Tanizaki: Seven Japanese Tales
Pu Songling: Strange Tales From A Chinese Studio (King Hu’s ‘A Touch Of Zen’ adapts and interweaves several of these stories)
Han Shaogong: A Dictionary Of Maqiao
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude, The General In His Labyrinth
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favorite films? over 3 years ago
not ranking ’em; off the top of my head:
Apu trilogy
Sansho The Bailiff
Throne Of Blood
Floating Weeds
Annie Hall
Notorious
The Big Heat
Sunset Boulevard
The Apartment
Charulata
Days And Nights In The Forest
Harakiri
Godfather 1-2
The Conversation
L’Avventura
Amarcord
Contempt
Death By Hanging
Silence (Moshen Makhmalbaf)
Goodfellas
after life
Mysterious Object An Noon
Yi Yi
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My Top 25 Performances of All Time over 3 years ago
not necessarily ‘the greatest,’ or ‘the most important,’ but definitely noteworthy in some way:
Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail and The King Of Marvin Gardens
Peter Sellers in Being There
Joe Morton in Brother From Another Planet
Steve Martin in Pennies From Heaven
Jack Lemmon in The Apartment
Sharmila Tagore in Nayak
Tatsuya Nakadai in Kwaidan
Issey Ogata, Nianzhen Wu & Jonathan Yang in Yi Yi
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Most Traumatic or Dramatic Film Endings over 3 years ago
The ending of Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces is complex, and subtle, but also morally devastating – due to what you gradually learn about the two primary characters. If the film has twin interpretations – one a Quixotic pursuit of freedom, the other a horrifying avoidance of responsibility, the ending really hammers it home.
The ending of L’Eclisse, simply because it’s so unexpected and visually striking.
The ending of The Conversation. All the many disparate themes of the film lock together; if you’ve seen the film – think about (a) the main theme of the film (the type of work the principal character does for a living), and then (b) think about what the camera is quietly doing, while the character does his thing in that long final scene. As great Coppola, this film may not knock Godfather s, or Apocalypse out of the running as his best, but (that noted) it is still a great, great film, and definitely Coppola’s most underrated. And the things it says about the intrusions of technology into our everyday lives make it a very prescient film indeed.
I first saw the film Being There when I was 10. Much of it went over my head, but I got enough of it, and it’s at the foundation of my film-o-philia. The ending is magical realism (think Gabriel Garcia-Marquez), wonderfully done, and the varied spiritual interpretations of the principal character are nicely underlined there. Beautifully shot.
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Inventive Narrative Structures over 3 years ago
Antonioni: L’Eclisse and L’Avventura – The first gives you the three acts, but not in the usual order. In the second, you have a mystery in which the real center of the story is a character is developed, in a somewht traditional fashion, and then removed from the literal narrative, only to haunt both the remainder of the film, and the viewer.
Very tough to track down, but well worth the effort:
Nagisa Oshima’s Death By Hanging – I think this film may best embody Oshima’s interest in unconventional storytelling over a commitment to a particular style. The first shape-shifts from faux-documentary to Brechtian farce, with flashbacks, leaps foreward, and numerous re-enactments of multiple situations, interactions with dream-characters and imagined characters, and the sense of perspective is in flux through the entire film. Stylistically it’s deliberately disjointed, and Oshima’s control of the wild shifts in tone and style is very tightly controlled, and a clear story does present itself, though it’s extremely challenging in the presentation.
Oshima’s Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief – from a little while later, nearly abandons narrative, though a consistent allegory and sense of social critique holds the film together. The overall story – which is shot in a textbook-prefect new wave stylishness – is broken up by a number of short commentaries, which are offered by (among others) an outside psychiatrist, a roundtable forum of commentators (Oshima, plus cast members from his previous feature films), and a drag Noh troupe converting their analysis of the two characters’ actions into Japanese folk songs.
The Oshima’s were being offered on a Japanese new wave site, and are available unsubbed in some Japanese Oshima box sets. I don’t know, but you may be able to locate subbed copies through HK DVD or YesAsia.
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thread where we talk about music over 3 years ago
I’ve played bass and electric guitar for ~20 years, and stumbled around on a few other instruments before that. I’ve been in several bands, primarily locally. I was in an indie/garage/punk band for 5 years in the mid 90s, and we went pretty much nowhere, but it was a lot of fun travelling around the eastern US. We self recorded a single and a disc, and then did an EP that came out as we were splitting up; along the way we opened for Archers of Loaf several times, Cracker several times, and Yo La Tengo and Superdrag once.
I couldn’t settle on too many favorite discs, but there are assorted recordings by Miles Davis, Pere Ubu, The Clash, Stevie Wonder, The Velvet Underground, Steely Dan, My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, Wire, Richard Hell, Talking Heads, Doug Sahm/Sir Douglas Quintet that I never, ever get tired of. Some newer artists I’ve been getting really into would include Shugo Tokumaru, Urichipangoon, Los Amigos Invisbles, some of the stuff that’s been coming out of Monterrey, NL in Mexico…
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Most Traumatic or Dramatic Film Endings over 3 years ago
Thanks Antoine – I agree completely on the outtakes at the end of Being There – a bad decision. Five Easy Pieces is one of a handful of films where I can remember the first viewing – there were about 10 of us crammed into a room, and apart from the friend whose apartment we were at, no one knew the story. And then the ending just … happens, and I can remember several minutes afterwards of no one saying a thing – it just levelled everyone. I think The King Of Marvin Gardens is overall a weaker film, but I agree on the ending, and there are several other things about that film (performances and the design, about which much can be said) that are unforgettable.
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Sex in the movies: Disturbing? over 3 years ago
Generally I haven’t given it too much thought, though I think sexual extremism as a way of being shocking and extreme is quite often pointless and a dead giveaway that you’re seeing a lazy or unimaginative filmmaker looking for a way of distracting you from that fact.
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thread where we talk about music over 3 years ago
To Silla:
Definite agreement. Toru Takemitsu – I discovered through (first) Kwaidan, and then the varied other Kobayashi/Kurosawa/Teshigahara/Nakahira films he composed for.
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thread where we talk about music over 3 years ago
To Silla:
Definite agreement. Toru Takemitsu – I discovered through (first) Kwaidan, and then the varied other Kobayashi/Kurosawa/Teshigahara/Nakahira films he composed for.
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D.I.Y. Film Playlist over 3 years ago
Theme: Found A Job
1. The Bad Sleep Well
2. Goodfellas
3. Glengarry Glen Ross
4. Blue Collar
5. Killer Of Sheep
6. after life
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D.I.Y. Film Playlist over 3 years ago
Theme: Intelligence Reports
1. The Conversation
2. Peeping Tom
3. All The President’s Men
4. Blow Up
5. Rear Window
6. M Butterfly
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D.I.Y. Film Playlist over 3 years ago
Theme: Being, And Non-Being
1. Vernon, Florida
2. Fata Morgana
3. Distance (Kore’eda)
4. Au Hasard Balthasar
5. Being There
6. Japon
7. Where Is The Friend’s House
8. Groundhog Day
9. Psycho
10.L’Avventura
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Scorsese fans out there, it's time to unite! over 3 years ago
Oh there’s lots of Scorsese fans out there – the man is revered, and deservedly so in my opinion. Comparisons of his reputation vs. the reputation of Kubrick, Kurosawa, et. al. is apples-to-oranges: they are all remarkable, in their own way. And – definitely like Kubrick and Kurosawa, there are complex and very fascinating thematic linkages (and not violence, for its’ own sake at least) that runs very consistently through all of Scorsese’s work: think (as an example) of how the Biblically-derived narrative and narrative structure at the heart of Casino relates to films like Kundun or The Last Temptation Of Christ.
Tarantino I find far less interesting – he has been entertaining, but I haven’t yet spotted (someone is free to enlighten me) much of a worldview beyond (a) stereotypcal ghetto dialogue is cool, perhaps even cooler than Spike Lee, who isn’t as black as I am, (b) French new wave is cool, especially when they dance, © kung fu and HK action flicks are cool, and (d) feet are cool, especially if they are big and connected to Uma. Which is all … cool … – the man definitely knows how to put a rip-roaring flick together – but, once we’ve established that, then what?
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Scorsese fans out there, it's time to unite! over 3 years ago
oops – silly double post…
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Scorsese fans out there, it's time to unite! over 3 years ago
Well thanks to you for an interesting thread. I couldn’t pick a favorite – there’s at least one of his films (New York, New York) I didn’t much care for, but otherwise my favorites shift around. Apart from the obvious – Taxi Driver and Raging Bull – I personally find his less famous films, or his seemingly atypical films, to be far more interesting in what they reveal of his world view. He has a great, very classical theme – an inner ‘drive,’ which might show up as a quest for redemption, or a detour into the kind of criminal life seen in Goodfellas_, or an attempt at re-inventing a life and re-casting ones’ identity (_Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore), and I think in his view those are all different sides of the same coin.
This is a far from original observation, and I’d been familiar with Scorsese for quite a while, when I recall one night – about 10 years ago – watching Casino with a roommate. He grew up in an extremely religious family, and had become an agnostic as an adult, but growing up, he had read the entire Bible, and could quote from it. And as we were watching the film, he did a more-or-less spontanous deconstruction of Casino – identifying it as a modern-day retelling of the story of Sodom & Gomorrah (with unconventional sexual behavior changed to one of the deadly sins – greed, specifically), and then pinpointing the parallel plot points.
This completely rewired my take on Scorsese, and his Catholicism – specifically how unconventional, and very personally, intellectually thought out it is – a definite departure from mainstream spiritual thought, but very, very deep nontheless. I began trying to see what kinds of things might connect his rather diverse body of work, and there are many running themes, which – at this point – are highly evolved. I have a great repsect for a certain kind of classically defined storytelling, and also for allegory and a sense of morality that transcends the limitations of any specific kind of faith (Goodfellas I think is a great example of this); to me this is indicative of a great filmmaker who has also never lost an awareness of the outside world.
I think – to indulge in some comparisons again – in this Scorsese does profoundly resemble Kurosawa, and the uneven but still interesting Moshen Makhmalbaf (whose highly allegorical and at times Zen-like relationship to Islam is a close mirror of Scorsese’s relationship to Catholicism), and also perhaps Satyajit Ray…
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thread where we talk about music over 3 years ago
Oh wow – Mott The Hoople. Another fan here; when I was growing up (80s), Bowie could do no wrong, and that led me straight to Mott, The Stooges and The Velvets. Which led straight to punk.
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thread where we talk about music over 3 years ago
Pah – there’s no such thing as guilty pleasures. I have a great love of one-hit wonders – 60s garage, soul, 70s pop, new wave, whatever. There’s something beautiful about well-crafted junk.
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Good Bad Films over 3 years ago
The Fog – It has Adrienne Barbeau, Archie Bunker’s niece.
Food Of The Gods – Bert Gordon, Marjoe, Ida Lupino, a rat seige, a chicken attack, and stuff oozing from the ground that looks like ranch dressing
Twister – I love a good nature on the rampage flick.
Nestor, The Long-Eared Christmas Donkey – Roger “King Of The Road” Miller does the music. Roger sounds like he’s had a drink or two, and Nestor looks like he’s in dire need of Zoloft.
The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr. T – This is a great, great film. Dr. Seuss wrote the screenplay; it was a colossal flop upon its’ initial release. If you love movies, you should see it.
Cannibal Women In The Avocado Jungle Of Death – This one is supposed to be bad, but it has Bill Maher and … Adrienne Barbeau in it. Nuff said.
Clash Of The Titans – Harryhausen. I love Harryhausen.
St. Elmo’s Fire – Where to begin with this one? Joel Schumaker is the director everyone loves to hate, and this is a case study in why: phenomenally irrational, illogical behavior at absolutely every moment, from every single character. Those guys were in a fraternity? Rob Lowe gets to ‘jam’ in some jazz-metal group that sounds like Quarterflash (google them, so you too can know how wretched they were). Mare Winningham, who’s a real doormat’s doormat, in a triumph of ‘what if feminism was never invented.’ Demi Moore’s character – in between discreet bumps of coke – who turns out to spookily forecast our current economic … situation. Judd Nelson actually pulls off his role, in spite of being saddled with Ally Sheedy as a GF – and throughout, Ally looks like she’d saw off a limb to get out of this role without losing a decent paycheck in the process. Andie McDowell is a nursing student, just zoned-out enough to perhaps scare even the most hard-living souls into a renewed lifetime of compulsively healthy living. Emilio Estevez smiles a lot, and cheerfully stalks Andie, in a happy-go-lucky kinda way. Andrew McCarthy gets to be the sad sack – a post-grad yuppie Bogart wannabe, who gets to nail the best friend’s girl, cops a ‘tude about it, and is shocked that other people are … somewhat put off by this behavior. Rob Lowe then gets drunk, and screams at his wife (where’d she come from), after hocking a sax to pay a phone bill – the pawn shops in Georgetown are apparently very understanding and generous in dealing with their clients. Mare voluteers at a soup kitchen, and her dad (the guy with the eyebrows from Mitchell) attempts to bribe her into a marriage with a Chrysler. It snows a little. Demi’s place gets repo’d. Eventually, tenderness, and the common bonds of crisis bring these Washington up-and-comers to some sort of wisdom. Sigh.
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Whats your favourite actor,and what actor is so bad you cant look at him over 3 years ago
Note necessarily all-time faves, but greats:
Katherine Hepburn
Humphrey Bogart
Cary Grant
—I couldn’t give a smarter reason why, but I’m pretty star-struck by their best stuff
Jack Nicholson
—For Five Easy Pieces, The King Of Marvin Gardens, The Last Detail in particular
Jack Lemmon
—For The Apartment and Glengarry Glen Ross
Tatsuya Nakadai
—For Sword Of Doom, Human Condition, Kwaidan, Yojimbo, The Inn Of Evil, When A Woman Ascends The Stairs and many others: what range!
Diane Keaton
—Annie Hall and The Godfather(s)
Peter Sellers
—Dr Strangelove, and Being There
Soumitra Chatterjee
—mainly for his many diverse roles in varies Satyajit Ray films, Charulata and Days & Nights In The Forest in particular
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Best of Coming-Of-Age Cinema over 3 years ago
Agreement with most of the previously mentioned films.
Gotta add in Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy: (Pather Panchali, Aparajito, The World Of Apu).
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What do Sex Pistols fans think of this? over 3 years ago
double post
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What do Sex Pistols fans think of this? over 3 years ago
I’ve always found the film to be great as drama; like the other folks here, I’ve never taken it to be all that accurate. In ways that don’t square with the actual biography of the band, but do reflect any number of underground/grass-roots creative movements (not just punk), I think the film does do a great job of capturing both early phases of excitement and invention, and later phases of decadence and self-destruction.
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What do Sex Pistols fans think of this? over 3 years ago
triple post :(
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