Well I don’t feel too bad now about saying I didn’t care for No Country For Old Men and The Shining, but I can also mention another Coen Brothers film I never liked, Miller’s Crossing. That is one where their film geek roots really show, as they take bits from every 30’s gangster film imaginable and shove them all together. It doesn’t feel real or authentic at all. It also doesn’t help that the plot is simply two Dashell Hammett novels, The Glass Key and Red Harvest, stitched together with a little bit of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye tossed in as well.
I do vaguely remember this film. Barbara Hershey played a pretty, cruel “rich girl” sort of character and Cathy Burns was the plain, plump girl who got humiliated by the others. It was one of those pictures that seemed to spotlight how nasty young people could be to each other. It definitely deserves revival on DVD.
I’ll limit myself to ten in no particular order or else I’ll be here all day:
Celine And Julie Go Boating
Citizen Kane
Duck Soup
Ikiru
Paris, Texas
Raging Bull
The Hustler
The Seven Samurai
The Wild Bunch
Two-Lane Blacktop
Weekend
I totally agree with the mentions of Magnificent Ambersons, Celine and Julie, The Friends Of Eddie Coyle and the UPA cartoons. I’d also love to see Mickey One come out. It was a 1965 Arthur Penn film that starred Warren Beatty as a night club comic on the run from the mob.
I saw Synedoche, New York recently and I wasn’t that impressed. It started out well and as mentioned, the acting is uniformly good, but by the end it all felt just too oppressive and self-pitying. Kaufman’s neuroses work a lot better on screen when he’s got a director like Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry to lighten them up.
A lot of good endings have been mentioned and I particularly agree with with The Long Good Friday, Breaking The Waves (Lars Von Trier is a sick man), Grave Of The Fireflies, The Great Silence and The Marriage Of Maria Braun but I have two recent favorites that haven’t been mentioned yet:
1. Bug – This is a recent William Friedkin film that starred Ashley Judd as a lonely woman living in a highway motel who meets a man who thinks he’s being used for experiments by the Army. She’s so desperate she bonds with this guy even though he acts more and more irrationally and the effects of their collective madness spiral to a brutal climax.
2. Dead Man’s Shoes – This is an Irish film directed by Paddy Considine about a man who is out to take bloody revenge against a group of other men. You slowly see in flashback why he’s out for revenge and by the end, when you’ve learned the entire story the cumluative effect is devastating. Just the simple closing shot of the man walking out of town had me in tears.
I’m going way back for this one. A few months ago I saw the 1947 movie version of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra and I was blown away by Rosalind Russell’s lead performance. I remembered that she had been nominated for Best Actress but didn’t win, so I looked up who had beaten her. It turned out to be Loretta Young for The Farmer’s Daughter. Yeesh!
Also I think it’s pretty well accepted by now that Paul Newman richly deserved an Oscar for playing Fast Eddie Felson but for playing him in The Hustler, not The Color Of Money.
How about Willie Nelson? Among other films, he made an excellent Western back in the 80’s called Barbarosa with Gary Busey and Gilbert Roland. Also if you go way back Fred MacMurray and Alan Ladd were both musicians before they became actors. MacMurray played saxophone and sang back in the 20s’ with dance bands and Alan Ladd began as a big band singer.
I totally agree about Something Weird. They have put an enormous amount of exploitation work back in circulation and exposed a lot of people to films they might otherwise never know about. I’m grateful to them for putting out the burlesque movies like Varitease that featured Bettie Page and two Herschell Gordon Lewis movies that are a couple of the most jaw-droppingly insane things I’ve ever seen, Just For The Hell Of It and She-Devils On Wheels.
I second the mention of Ken Park. A lot of Larry Clark’s earlier films always struck me as sleazy and exploitative but this one, though still sexual and disturbing in a lot of ways, had some real substance to it.
Wow. Some of these posts are amazing. It’s one thing to pan Eastwood’s films for substantive reasons but to just say “He’s old.” or “He’s Republican”, not to mention confusing films he’s simply acted in like Dirty Harry or In The Line Of Fire with ones he’s directed. That is just nuts! Is there supposed to be some kind of age cutoff for film directors now? I’m glad no one told John Huston or Akira Kurosawa they had to stop making films when they reached a certain age.
Personally I don’t think Eastwood is the greatest filmaker who ever lived but I respect the hell out of him and think that Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby were both excellent movies along with a few earlier ones like The Outlaw Josey Wales and High Plains Drifter. He has made a few real stinkers though. If you want to see “boring”, try sitting through Broncho Billy or Firefox sometime.
I am a 53-year-old federal government worker in the Washington, DC area. I reviewed movies for a local paper back in the early 80’s in my spare time but these days I review jazz and improvised music for Cadence Magazine. I am still a huge film buff though with a lot of respect for all kinds of obscure and niche films as well as the more established classics.
Nobody’s mentioned the Marx Brothers yet? That makes me feel old. I have undying love for all their early films up through Duck Soup, Also I dearly love Blazing Saddles and The Producers and W. C. Fields’ work, especially the short, “The Fatal Glass Of Beer”, which is one of the most completely insane things I’ve ever seen in my life.
I’ve been following wrestling for 20 years so I’m really interested to see The Wrestler. It sounds like the kind of movie Mickey Rourke could kill in. I’ve also heard encouraging things about Frost/Nixon, especially Frank Langella’s performance. I saw the trailer for Doubt and I’m sorry but that looks like one I can safely pass on. All it seemed to be was Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep loudly Acting (with a capital “A”) at each other.
The only movie I can ever remember walking out on was the original Dawn Of The Dead. The opening gun battle with the exploding heads was just too much for me. This was as the second half of a double feature and I was still pretty shaken up from watching the first movie which was a little thing called Eraserhead.
I guess I have to be the one to mention the real oldie, “Bette Davis Eyes”. It was written and first performed by Jackie DeShannon but of course Kim Carnes had the hit version.
I want to speak up for the work of Lon Chaney. Everybody knows about Phantom and Hunchback but I recently saw two early films of his from a Turner Classic Movies disc, The Ace Of Hearts and Laugh, Clown, Laugh that reemphasize what an amazing actor he was. Both films were old-fashioned melodramas where he had an unrequited love for the heroine and killed himself at the end as a result, but there was such humanity and grace in his performances that he elevated these pictures into genuine tragedy
No surprise there since Kurosawa seemed to use the same actors over and over again in those days. Watch some of his other films from that period like The Hidden Fortress and Yojimbo and you’ll see the same faces pop up.
I’m so glad someone mentioned Tim Lucas. Since I much prefer to explore out of the way films rather than watch whatever is current, his magazine, Video Watchdog, is a monthly necessity for me. He writes with real passion and love for more obscure films and usually has something interesting to say about newer stuff like Cloverfield. In his latest blog post he discusses a thriller not even legally on DVD called The Name Of The Game Is Kill and goes into a brief tangent about forgotten actress Susan Strasberg. He considers the entire world of cinema and I really admire that sort of all-encompasing view.
If that bothers you, you must not realize they have also released a few old low-budget science fiction movies like Robinson Crusoe On Mars and Equinox over the years. Armageddeon isn’t the kind of movie I’d like to see Criterion release on a regular basis but I can forgive them one or two oddball choices. Anyway that came out years ago.
I’ve gotten bored with Quentin Tarantino lately but in his early films I always loved his use of music, both in the obscure tunes he used on his soundtracks and the way he used them. Dick Dale’s “Misirilou” made a great companion to the Pulp Fiction credits even though I then couldn’t turn around without hearing the song on TV or radio for the next two years. Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street” playing over a closeup of Pam Grier at the end of Jackie Brown was another great moment and I still have a nervous giggle wheneven I hear “Stuck In The Middle With You” because of Michael Masden’s creepy little dance scene in Reservoir Dogs.
But the greatest Tarantino musical moment for me is easily the famous credit Reservoir Dogs credit sequence of the gang walking in slow motion done to the tune of The George Baker Selection’s “Little Green Bag”. I’m still amazed he used that song. I thought I was the only person in North America who remembered it.
I saw both the short version in a theater and the full version later and I didn’t care for it either time. You can get what Cimino was going for in doing some sort of Marxist critique of the Old West but it just didn’t work. Some scenes like the Harvard graduation and the village dance are interminable and John Hurt gives one of the most embarassing performances I’ve ever seen. It certianly isn’t some great lost wonder of American filmaking in my opinion, just a windy, self-indulgent bore.
Once upon a time George Romero made other things besides zombie movies and his Martin would make a good Criterion selection. It’s a terrific, sad little movie about a would be vampire who bares his soul on a radio talk show. It just never got the attention or love of the Living Dead movies.
It sounds like most of you just started watching television in the last ten years. Of course the medium has been full of schlock over its history but there have also been a lot of high quality shows in that time, an increasing number of which keep showing up on DVD. If you don’t know them try sampling shows like Route 66, Have Gun Will Travel, Hill Street Blues and Gunsmoke or the work of Ernie Kovacs.
As to the idea that the best comedies and dramas in television history are from the last decade, I will mention only two titles: The Prisoner and Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
If this was any other director, I wouldn’t care a bit but Herzog? He’s just insane enough to make something out of this. Also it’s easy to forget but Nicolas Cage has been in a few decent movies in his life though none lately.
Movie's you just don't like. over 3 years ago
Well I don’t feel too bad now about saying I didn’t care for No Country For Old Men and The Shining, but I can also mention another Coen Brothers film I never liked, Miller’s Crossing. That is one where their film geek roots really show, as they take bits from every 30’s gangster film imaginable and shove them all together. It doesn’t feel real or authentic at all. It also doesn’t help that the plot is simply two Dashell Hammett novels, The Glass Key and Red Harvest, stitched together with a little bit of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye tossed in as well.
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DOE'S ANYONE REMEMBER "LAST SUMMER" (1969) WITH BARBARA HERSHEY? over 3 years ago
I do vaguely remember this film. Barbara Hershey played a pretty, cruel “rich girl” sort of character and Cathy Burns was the plain, plump girl who got humiliated by the others. It was one of those pictures that seemed to spotlight how nasty young people could be to each other. It definitely deserves revival on DVD.
Go to Comment
favorite films? over 3 years ago
I’ll limit myself to ten in no particular order or else I’ll be here all day:
Celine And Julie Go Boating
Citizen Kane
Duck Soup
Ikiru
Paris, Texas
Raging Bull
The Hustler
The Seven Samurai
The Wild Bunch
Two-Lane Blacktop
Weekend
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Classic movies you can't get on d.v.d. over 3 years ago
I totally agree with the mentions of Magnificent Ambersons, Celine and Julie, The Friends Of Eddie Coyle and the UPA cartoons. I’d also love to see Mickey One come out. It was a 1965 Arthur Penn film that starred Warren Beatty as a night club comic on the run from the mob.
Go to Comment
now playing in a theatre near you over 3 years ago
I saw Synedoche, New York recently and I wasn’t that impressed. It started out well and as mentioned, the acting is uniformly good, but by the end it all felt just too oppressive and self-pitying. Kaufman’s neuroses work a lot better on screen when he’s got a director like Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry to lighten them up.
Go to Comment
Most Traumatic or Dramatic Film Endings over 3 years ago
A lot of good endings have been mentioned and I particularly agree with with The Long Good Friday, Breaking The Waves (Lars Von Trier is a sick man), Grave Of The Fireflies, The Great Silence and The Marriage Of Maria Braun but I have two recent favorites that haven’t been mentioned yet:
1. Bug – This is a recent William Friedkin film that starred Ashley Judd as a lonely woman living in a highway motel who meets a man who thinks he’s being used for experiments by the Army. She’s so desperate she bonds with this guy even though he acts more and more irrationally and the effects of their collective madness spiral to a brutal climax.
2. Dead Man’s Shoes – This is an Irish film directed by Paddy Considine about a man who is out to take bloody revenge against a group of other men. You slowly see in flashback why he’s out for revenge and by the end, when you’ve learned the entire story the cumluative effect is devastating. Just the simple closing shot of the man walking out of town had me in tears.
Go to Comment
most overrated oscar performances or robberies over 3 years ago
I’m going way back for this one. A few months ago I saw the 1947 movie version of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra and I was blown away by Rosalind Russell’s lead performance. I remembered that she had been nominated for Best Actress but didn’t win, so I looked up who had beaten her. It turned out to be Loretta Young for The Farmer’s Daughter. Yeesh!
Also I think it’s pretty well accepted by now that Paul Newman richly deserved an Oscar for playing Fast Eddie Felson but for playing him in The Hustler, not The Color Of Money.
Go to Comment
Best Musicians Turned "Actors" over 3 years ago
How about Willie Nelson? Among other films, he made an excellent Western back in the 80’s called Barbarosa with Gary Busey and Gilbert Roland. Also if you go way back Fred MacMurray and Alan Ladd were both musicians before they became actors. MacMurray played saxophone and sang back in the 20s’ with dance bands and Alan Ladd began as a big band singer.
Go to Comment
Something Weird Video over 3 years ago
I totally agree about Something Weird. They have put an enormous amount of exploitation work back in circulation and exposed a lot of people to films they might otherwise never know about. I’m grateful to them for putting out the burlesque movies like Varitease that featured Bettie Page and two Herschell Gordon Lewis movies that are a couple of the most jaw-droppingly insane things I’ve ever seen, Just For The Hell Of It and She-Devils On Wheels.
Go to Comment
Films you love but most people hate. over 3 years ago
I second the mention of Ken Park. A lot of Larry Clark’s earlier films always struck me as sleazy and exploitative but this one, though still sexual and disturbing in a lot of ways, had some real substance to it.
Go to Comment
Rate The Last Film You Watched over 3 years ago
Prince Of The City – 8/10. One of Sidney Lumet’s most overlooked movies.
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Anyone Else Sick of Clint Eastwood over 3 years ago
Wow. Some of these posts are amazing. It’s one thing to pan Eastwood’s films for substantive reasons but to just say “He’s old.” or “He’s Republican”, not to mention confusing films he’s simply acted in like Dirty Harry or In The Line Of Fire with ones he’s directed. That is just nuts! Is there supposed to be some kind of age cutoff for film directors now? I’m glad no one told John Huston or Akira Kurosawa they had to stop making films when they reached a certain age.
Personally I don’t think Eastwood is the greatest filmaker who ever lived but I respect the hell out of him and think that Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby were both excellent movies along with a few earlier ones like The Outlaw Josey Wales and High Plains Drifter. He has made a few real stinkers though. If you want to see “boring”, try sitting through Broncho Billy or Firefox sometime.
Go to Comment
New to The Auteurs? You Belong Here over 3 years ago
I am a 53-year-old federal government worker in the Washington, DC area. I reviewed movies for a local paper back in the early 80’s in my spare time but these days I review jazz and improvised music for Cadence Magazine. I am still a huge film buff though with a lot of respect for all kinds of obscure and niche films as well as the more established classics.
Go to Comment
favorite funniest movie over 3 years ago
Nobody’s mentioned the Marx Brothers yet? That makes me feel old. I have undying love for all their early films up through Duck Soup, Also I dearly love Blazing Saddles and The Producers and W. C. Fields’ work, especially the short, “The Fatal Glass Of Beer”, which is one of the most completely insane things I’ve ever seen in my life.
Go to Comment
December Films (poll) over 3 years ago
I’ve been following wrestling for 20 years so I’m really interested to see The Wrestler. It sounds like the kind of movie Mickey Rourke could kill in. I’ve also heard encouraging things about Frost/Nixon, especially Frank Langella’s performance. I saw the trailer for Doubt and I’m sorry but that looks like one I can safely pass on. All it seemed to be was Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep loudly Acting (with a capital “A”) at each other.
Go to Comment
Which Movies Have You Walked Out On? over 3 years ago
The only movie I can ever remember walking out on was the original Dawn Of The Dead. The opening gun battle with the exploding heads was just too much for me. This was as the second half of a double feature and I was still pretty shaken up from watching the first movie which was a little thing called Eraserhead.
Go to Comment
CONFESSIONS--FILMS YOU ARE ASHAMED TO SAY YOU HAVE NOT SEEN (YET) over 3 years ago
Jaws
American Beauty
2001
Magnolia
Saving Private Ryan
Henry V (both Branagh’s and Olivier’s)
The Shawshank Redemption
La Strada
Those are just a few off the top of my head. There’s so much out there you can’t get to everything right away.
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SONGS (MUSIC ) ABOUT ACTORS OR FILMMAKERS over 3 years ago
I guess I have to be the one to mention the real oldie, “Bette Davis Eyes”. It was written and first performed by Jackie DeShannon but of course Kim Carnes had the hit version.
Go to Comment
Silent Films over 3 years ago
I want to speak up for the work of Lon Chaney. Everybody knows about Phantom and Hunchback but I recently saw two early films of his from a Turner Classic Movies disc, The Ace Of Hearts and Laugh, Clown, Laugh that reemphasize what an amazing actor he was. Both films were old-fashioned melodramas where he had an unrequited love for the heroine and killed himself at the end as a result, but there was such humanity and grace in his performances that he elevated these pictures into genuine tragedy
Go to Comment
Seven Samurai in Ikiru over 3 years ago
No surprise there since Kurosawa seemed to use the same actors over and over again in those days. Watch some of his other films from that period like The Hidden Fortress and Yojimbo and you’ll see the same faces pop up.
Go to Comment
Underrated movies/actors over 3 years ago
I remember “Vampire’s Kiss”. It’s one of the few times where Nicholas Cage’s scenery chewing actually made sense in the context of the movie.
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Which Film Critics Do You Read? over 3 years ago
I’m so glad someone mentioned Tim Lucas. Since I much prefer to explore out of the way films rather than watch whatever is current, his magazine, Video Watchdog, is a monthly necessity for me. He writes with real passion and love for more obscure films and usually has something interesting to say about newer stuff like Cloverfield. In his latest blog post he discusses a thriller not even legally on DVD called The Name Of The Game Is Kill and goes into a brief tangent about forgotten actress Susan Strasberg. He considers the entire world of cinema and I really admire that sort of all-encompasing view.
Go to Comment
Best title over 3 years ago
Nobody’s mentioned this one yet?
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies
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WHY!!! over 3 years ago
If that bothers you, you must not realize they have also released a few old low-budget science fiction movies like Robinson Crusoe On Mars and Equinox over the years. Armageddeon isn’t the kind of movie I’d like to see Criterion release on a regular basis but I can forgive them one or two oddball choices. Anyway that came out years ago.
Go to Comment
GREAT USE OF MUSIC IN FILMS over 3 years ago
I’ve gotten bored with Quentin Tarantino lately but in his early films I always loved his use of music, both in the obscure tunes he used on his soundtracks and the way he used them. Dick Dale’s “Misirilou” made a great companion to the Pulp Fiction credits even though I then couldn’t turn around without hearing the song on TV or radio for the next two years. Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street” playing over a closeup of Pam Grier at the end of Jackie Brown was another great moment and I still have a nervous giggle wheneven I hear “Stuck In The Middle With You” because of Michael Masden’s creepy little dance scene in Reservoir Dogs.
But the greatest Tarantino musical moment for me is easily the famous credit Reservoir Dogs credit sequence of the gang walking in slow motion done to the tune of The George Baker Selection’s “Little Green Bag”. I’m still amazed he used that song. I thought I was the only person in North America who remembered it.
Go to Comment
HEAVEN'S GATE over 3 years ago
I saw both the short version in a theater and the full version later and I didn’t care for it either time. You can get what Cimino was going for in doing some sort of Marxist critique of the Old West but it just didn’t work. Some scenes like the Harvard graduation and the village dance are interminable and John Hurt gives one of the most embarassing performances I’ve ever seen. It certianly isn’t some great lost wonder of American filmaking in my opinion, just a windy, self-indulgent bore.
Go to Comment
WHAT MODERN...AMERICAN...HORROR FILMS SHOULD BE ADDED TO THE CRITERION COLLECTION? over 3 years ago
Once upon a time George Romero made other things besides zombie movies and his Martin would make a good Criterion selection. It’s a terrific, sad little movie about a would be vampire who bares his soul on a radio talk show. It just never got the attention or love of the Living Dead movies.
Go to Comment
Television... a query. over 3 years ago
It sounds like most of you just started watching television in the last ten years. Of course the medium has been full of schlock over its history but there have also been a lot of high quality shows in that time, an increasing number of which keep showing up on DVD. If you don’t know them try sampling shows like Route 66, Have Gun Will Travel, Hill Street Blues and Gunsmoke or the work of Ernie Kovacs.
As to the idea that the best comedies and dramas in television history are from the last decade, I will mention only two titles: The Prisoner and Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
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Bad Lieutenant Remake over 3 years ago
If this was any other director, I wouldn’t care a bit but Herzog? He’s just insane enough to make something out of this. Also it’s easy to forget but Nicolas Cage has been in a few decent movies in his life though none lately.
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America Classic Movies over 3 years ago
There’s also: Stagecoach, A Night At The Opera, 42nd Street, Swing Time, SInging In The Rain, and An American In Paris among others.
But how do two films by David Lean, a British director, with mostly foreign casts, qualify as American?
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