I See Dead People (no. 2)
Aug. 1st, 2012 04:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotLook, this is really sad. No list of all-time great movies whose top ten includes only movies I've already seen can be credible.* Or if it is credible, this is a sad world. Not to denigrate my own tastes, judgments, and habits, but round '78 I decided that I didn't have the time or money to watch a lot of movies. And in 1999 I made the decision, I can either be a writer or someone who owns a TV set, but I don't have time for both. So not a lot of movies made in the last 35 years have unfolded (or unspooled or whatever) in front of my eyes.
Not that I've seen nothing in that time. Likely any movie with Steven Seagal that appeared on cable in the late '80s got viewed by me. But in general I no longer have my explorer's hat on.
I'm sure the Sight And Sound poll included gobs of people excited by right now, but obviously there was no consensus in it, no "Here's a movie that's changed the game" or "Here's the flick that called out to everyone."
Strange: visit a local lending library and you'll see just the opposite, the past a bare flickering shadow, westerns all but nonexistent, everybody relaxing into the here and now.
In any event, what's the next movie you're gonna see? Here's mine, if I can find it streaming somewhere for free (was taken down from mysoju):
*Unless the list is entitled Frank's All-Time Top Ten Movies (Restricted To Movies That He's Actually Seen).
Not that I've seen nothing in that time. Likely any movie with Steven Seagal that appeared on cable in the late '80s got viewed by me. But in general I no longer have my explorer's hat on.
I'm sure the Sight And Sound poll included gobs of people excited by right now, but obviously there was no consensus in it, no "Here's a movie that's changed the game" or "Here's the flick that called out to everyone."
Strange: visit a local lending library and you'll see just the opposite, the past a bare flickering shadow, westerns all but nonexistent, everybody relaxing into the here and now.
In any event, what's the next movie you're gonna see? Here's mine, if I can find it streaming somewhere for free (was taken down from mysoju):
*Unless the list is entitled Frank's All-Time Top Ten Movies (Restricted To Movies That He's Actually Seen).
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my vote
Date: 2012-08-02 10:57 am (UTC)The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)
Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977)
Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (Steve Robert, 1980)
The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)
Police Story (Jackie Chan, 1985)
Communion (Philippe Mora, 1989)
Maborosi (Hirokazu Koreeda, 1995)
The Messenger: the Story of Joan of Arc (Luc Besson, 1999)
Pirates of the Caribbean III: At World's End (Gore Verbinski, 2007)
There are films that matter historically. There are films which mark what all the world agrees is greatness. And there are films which do something you hadn't seen before, that catch at you and divert you and teach you something you didn't know. A performance, a move, a feel, a sound, a view, a device: it might be small (it may not); perhaps it eats through expectation at an odd angle, in a film you anticipated nothing from. Glenn Anders, giggly, perverse and sweaty in Shanghai. The vast grindingly gorgeous whole-cloth mythology in Pirates III, with the franchise figurines chirruping like ghosts in front of it. Milla Jovovich's breakneck teenage martyrdom in Messenger, and why the hard-bitten French army is captivated by it. In Rawlinson the treacle-black surreal concentrate of the history of British comic writing and performance. Walken cracking up in Communion, jerkily hallucinating a silly-weird story of alien abduction that his family prefers to the notion of his being badly mad (as in fact do we). The anti-noir daylight ambience of modern evil in Goodbye, and the innocent, incorruptible drift of Elliott Gould's honesty, his near-passive soft-shoe refusal. Sometimes other people get it (Police Story; Maborosi); sometimes everyone does (Eraserhead; The Thing).
Re: my vote
Date: 2012-08-02 06:22 pm (UTC)What do you mean by "get it" when you say, "Sometimes other people get it (Police Story; Maborosi); sometimes everyone does (Eraserhead; The Thing)"?
I do recommend this one, if you've not seen it (but is more about human dynamics than about alien strangeness):
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What's the next flick on your queue?
Re: my vote
Date: 2012-08-02 06:30 pm (UTC)My LoveFilm queue is clogged with old Doctor Whos I haven't written up for FT. I have about 25 films recorded on my TiVo ready to watch, but to be honest recording something is generally more a recognition of anxious duty -- I ought to watch this -- than desire. It's deferred homework.
Re: my vote
Date: 2022-08-09 07:24 pm (UTC)Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2012-08-02 10:20 pm (UTC)A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg, 2001)
The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1966)
Bringing Up Baby (Hawks, 1938)
The Conversation (Coppola, 1974)
Die Hard (McTiernan, 1988)
Election (Payne, 1999)
The Elephant Man (Lynch, 1980)
F for Fake (Welles, 1973)
Fargo (Coen, 1996)
Groundhog Day (Ramis, 1993)
A History of Violence (Cronenberg, 2005)
The Treasure of the Sierre Madre (Huston, 1948)
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Demy, 1964)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Zemeckis, 1988)
Young Frankenstein (Brooks, 1974)
Re: Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2012-08-02 10:23 pm (UTC)Re: Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2012-08-03 04:01 am (UTC)Re: Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2012-08-03 04:22 pm (UTC)Re: Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2012-08-03 04:24 pm (UTC)Re: Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2012-08-03 06:53 pm (UTC)oaters on my dial!
Date: 2012-08-04 05:47 pm (UTC)brokeback mountain*
the cowboys
custer of the west
the far country
jesse james
johnny guitar
lone star*
the man from laramie <-- this is the one i'm in the middle of
the man who shot liberty valance
red river
rio bravo
the sheriff of fractured jaw
the warlords
warlock
*both relatively recent
Re: oaters on my dial!
Date: 2012-08-04 09:25 pm (UTC)Re: oaters on my dial!
Date: 2012-08-04 09:32 pm (UTC)Re: Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2012-08-04 10:04 pm (UTC)Favorite westerns I can think of:
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Red River
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Westerns I like but don't love:
High Noon
The Wild Bunch
Hud
No Country for Old Men
The Misfits
"Meh"sterns
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Giant (<--not sure if this counts)
Dances with Wolves
The Robert Rodriguez Mariachi series
3:10 to Yuma (remake)
Would welcome recommendations
Re: Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2012-08-05 02:26 am (UTC)Re: Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2012-08-05 05:37 am (UTC)--The Tall T, w/ Randolph Scott, dir. Budd Boetticher, story Elmore Leonard, script Burt Kennedy. Taut emotional chess match between Scott and bad-guy Richard Boone.
--Buchanan Rides Alone. First Scott-Boetticher western I saw, strangely light-hearted, more poker than chess, my mouth was half agape all through (Sarris, The American Cinema: "Constructed partly as allegorical Odysseys and partly as floating poker games where every character takes turns about bluffing at his hand until the final showdown, Boetticher's Westerns expressed a weary serenity and moral certitude...").
--Day Of The Outlaw w/ Robert Ryan, dir. Andre De Toth. Screenplay is fairly awful at the start, characters telling us and each other several times over what Ryan's issues are and what the plot's going to be. Then the outlaws show up and the story becomes something else, still with some comically bad overacting on the part of a set of horny meanies, but then the film goes out into the elements and becomes a pulverizingly stunning struggle, evil feeling terribly evil, one of the great things I've seen. Wouldn't be surprised if this was hovering around in Altman's mind as he created the climax to McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
--Ride The High Country, w/ Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott. Early Peckinpah, as if he saw Day Of The Outlaw and thought, "I can take those scummy bad guys and make them credible."
--Man Of The West, w/ Gary Cooper, dir. Anthony Mann. My favorite Mann western is probably The Far Country. This one, in contrast, I saw early and barely remember — but what I do recall is how exhaustingly physical the conflicts and shootouts are.
--Ride Clear Of Diablo, w/ Audie Murphy, Dan Duryea. This movie actually is grade b, but it's what inspired the comment in my Dan Duryea essay that there's rarely a boring western, 'cause the genre demands "there be some confusion between good and evil, that the good-guy hero must be hardened and twisted a bit by the violence he has to commit." (I did eventually see the whole thing, though in the essay I only commented on my initial partial viewing.)
Re: Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2012-08-05 09:54 am (UTC)*Fonda is always interesting, because -- as Manny Farber semi-said -- he's so concave of body and bearing, but this is a bit too much "Fonda being loveably Fonda": you don't quite believe his revenge-fueled drivenness, which is sentimentalised when it's actually psychotic.
the elvish curse of CGI
Date: 2012-08-05 10:02 am (UTC)Re: Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2012-08-06 04:18 am (UTC)An actor where whole hunks of what he actually did onscreen don't match his image. Of course he was an excellent bad guy in Once Upon A Time In The West; but a coiled, distressed, possibly out-of-whack good guy might have been the best vehicle for his talent for feeling and causing pain.
Re: Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2012-08-06 09:12 am (UTC)Re: Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2012-08-05 01:08 pm (UTC)One reason I don't watch many films lately is that I suspect that TV has finally (definitively) taken over the role of "oaters" -- there are so many excellent, dependable shows of no great import (not just the "quality" stuff, which I tend not to like as much) that I rarely take a chance with an OK-seeming movie. But at the same time, I'm far more likely to enjoy a movie with low expectations and good execution than with high expectations that's overly pretentious or precious or bloated etc. etc.
Re: Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2014-07-21 01:24 am (UTC)I wouldn't bet on it staying up long, but here's the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ig3f0k2EP2c
According to Wikipedia, Boetticher directed the first three episodes of the series. Don't know who scripted this episode ("Point Blank"), but it fits well Sarris's description: "Constructed partly as allegorical Odysseys and partly as floating poker games where every character takes turns about bluffing at his hand until the final showdown, Boetticher's Westerns expressed a weary serenity and moral certitude..." Pretty good description of Bret Maverick and Jim Rockford, too.
(Also making this its own post.)
Re: Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2012-08-04 10:06 pm (UTC)Re: Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2012-08-05 09:43 am (UTC)Re: Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2012-08-05 01:05 pm (UTC)Re: Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2012-08-05 01:06 pm (UTC)Re: Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2012-08-05 01:32 pm (UTC)Re: Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2012-08-05 02:13 pm (UTC)Re: Haven't done one of these in a while.
Date: 2012-08-05 02:32 pm (UTC)Library
Date: 2012-08-08 05:05 pm (UTC)For me no list is complete without "The Night of the Hunter". The rest changes all the time but would likely include a Hitchcock or two, a bunch of film noir, and maybe my favorite guilty pleasure, "The Brady Bunch Movie".
Re: Library
Date: 2012-08-08 08:58 pm (UTC)Re: Library
Date: 2012-08-08 09:49 pm (UTC)On the other hand, I have watched "Night of the Hunter" probably 10-12 times since first seeing it in the early 1990's.
Re: Library
Date: 2012-08-09 04:57 am (UTC)Impossible to talk about that movie without creating spoilers; watching it, I was thinking to myself "This is hooey" for the first two-thirds of the movie — albeit eerily gripping hooey — but then of course the last third makes you rethink everything. I imagined doing a remake set in the '70s punk rock/no wave Lower East Side, with the lead characters regularly dropping in at a bar so that they can play "Hunter Gets Captured By The Game" on a jukebox full of new punk, reggae, and old soul. They joke that it's their song, the male lead taking the song one way, having no awareness that the female lead is taking it differently.
Re: Library
Date: 2012-08-10 08:51 pm (UTC)Re: Library
Date: 2012-08-09 05:16 am (UTC)Then, with my reading up on film over the next couple of years, the movie was opened up for me by the analyses I read of it. So much of it had gone by in the subtext, two characters near the start having been deeply in love with each other, and my not even noticing it. Next time through it was like watching a different movie. Still not sure what are my insights on it and what's from stuff I read.
(The movie's social attitudes are still problematic, but when I first saw it I wasn't distinguishing between the main character's attitudes and the movie's attitudes. It works as a regular oater (high-budget for a western, but still a western, for the popcorn eaters, not a message film or an art film), since it leaves its profundities to the subtext. In fact, they wouldn't have been profundities had they been spelled-out for us.)
professional fact-checker checks in
Date: 2012-08-08 06:31 pm (UTC)Re: professional fact-checker checks in
Date: 2012-08-09 04:39 am (UTC)Mann directed Fonda in The Tin Star, but I never saw it.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-08 09:52 pm (UTC)I'll hopefully make it to the theater to see "The Queen of Versailles" but will most likely see it once it's available as a download at home.
Chuck Eddy's horrible taste in movies
Date: 2012-08-12 03:22 am (UTC)Re: Chuck Eddy's horrible taste in movies
Date: 2012-08-12 06:03 am (UTC)[Error: unknown template video]
My top 10
Date: 2012-08-14 04:12 pm (UTC)1. The Kid (Chaplin, 1919)
2. Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock, 1942)
3. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
4. Touch of Evil (Welles, 1958)
5. La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 196)
6. 3 Women (Altman, 1977)
7. Bad Timing (Roeg, 1980)
8. Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder, 1980)
9. Dead Ringers (Cronenberg, 1988)
10. Carlos (Assayas, 2010)
Tomorrow night I'm seeing Ozu's "A Hen in the Wind," which is playing at a moribund local theater called the Portage. Last contemporary movie I saw was "Dark Knight Rises," which wasn't very good. Last really good movie I saw was Richard Linklater's "Bernie."
Re: My top 10
Date: 2012-08-14 04:37 pm (UTC)What's next up in your viewer? [EDIT: Oops, you already told me. Keeping track of something longer than two sentences is obviously beyond me this morning.]