koganbot | I See Dead People (no. 2)

Look, 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):

Watch on YouTube

*Unless the list is entitled Frank's All-Time Top Ten Movies (Restricted To Movies That He's Actually Seen).

Current Music: Nami "Round & Round"

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

dubdobdee.livejournal.com

Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947)
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).

From:

koganbot

Seen four o' yours (Lady, Goodbye, Eraserhead, Police Story). No name recognition on another three (Sir Henry, Communion, Maborisi).

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?

Edited Date: 2012-08-02 06:23 pm (UTC)

From:

dubdobdee.livejournal.com

"get it" = grasp why i might vote for this without me explaining at length (and "everyone" is rhetorical)

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.

From:

skyecaptain.livejournal.com

Here's 15 in alphabetical order:

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)

From:

skyecaptain.livejournal.com

Ah, forgot one that might belong here, La Cienaga by Lucrecia Martel. And I've kept off short and near-feature films in experimental and documentary modes that I'm not sure how to classify. Those include things like Dennis O'Rourke's Cannibal Tours, Hollis Frampton's Nostalgia, a number of other ones.

From:

koganbot

Have seen eight of your fifteen (the seven I haven't are A.I., Election, Fake, Fargo, Violence, Umbrellas, and Rabbit). What's next in your queue?

From:

skyecaptain.livejournal.com

Hm, haven't watched a movie in a while! But will probably go see The Expendables 2 when it comes out. Most recent movie watched was Thor, next in the queue is Griffith's Intolerance, but will probably shift things above it before watching it.

From:

skyecaptain.livejournal.com

Would recommend the first five over the last two; Umbrellas is very time/place (when I saw it the first time) and not sure how I feel about it now. Rabbit is etched into my childhood subconscious and the edge over any other children's movie is that it actually holds up as a, like, movie.

From:

koganbot

Ever given thought to westerns? I think an average hack oater from the '40s and '50s has more going on than does even well-scripted and well-acted mega-blooey like Star Wars, Star Trek 2, Iron Man, and ilk. (But then, the only Cameron I've seen is Terminator 2, and the only Spielberg I've bothered with that's remotely sf is Jurassic Park; overall, I haven't given modern superheroes and superspace much of a look.)

From:

dubdobdee.livejournal.com

haha these 14 westerns are all lined up on my TiVo:

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

From:

dubdobdee.livejournal.com

wait the warlords is a hong kong film about the qing dynasty so not strictly speaking a western

From:

dubdobdee.livejournal.com

watched all of laramie, just started jesse james -- tyrone power and henry fonda, depicting the james gang as noble robin hoods against the robber barons of the railroad

From:

skyecaptain.livejournal.com

I've seen a few westerns, but never really "got" the traditional genre and never really clicked with neo- subversions/extensions of it (via spaghetti westerns, Sam Peckinpah, and later ones). I did order and then transfer to American DVD (it was UK) "Two Rode Together" based on a comment you made about it in the last Dead People post, but still haven't watched it.

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

From:

skyecaptain.livejournal.com

I do recommend Minority Report, but I have a soft spot for the pure weirdness and "this-shouldn't-work-but-does"ness of A.I.. Cameron is severely overrated, pretty sure T2 is the only Cameron I still like enough to own/watch again (except maybe the first Terminator, and maybe Abyss).

From:

skyecaptain.livejournal.com

One I forgot in the first category: Once Upon a Time in the West, one of my favorites, and also good for teaching film analysis. (That would be a separate list.)

From:

koganbot

Here's a list, not a best-of, but rather to back up my contention that there's a lot to even the average hack oater. These for the most part are way better than average, but they're average in the sense that they're bread-and-butter product aimed at the guy, or kid (I assume it was almost always a male), who says to himself, "I want to see a western; what's playing?"

--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.)

From:

dubdobdee.livejournal.com

Aliens?

From:

dubdobdee.livejournal.com

Laramie is a Mann: the overall story is flabby bcz it divides its attention too much without effecting connections between Fonda's character (which is sketchy: he's seeking the man responsible for his brother's death and er that's it)* and the Waggoman family, a blind rancher with two sons, one a sadistic dimwit, the other adopted, seemingly level-headed, but deeply angry about being overlooked and undervalued. This triangle is interesting, and Fonda's arrival sets all the oedipal wasps a-buzzin, but Fonda functions more as catalyst than as interraction. There's also a very underpowered love element -- basically it gets along at a nice clip and has several terrific setpieces, of sudden scrambling unglamorous violence, but no space to do more than dab in the characters. Plus the Apaches, as abstract (not to say racist) cipher of pure lurking evil.

*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.

From:

dubdobdee.livejournal.com

inc.one very minor scene where my mouth-dropped open and i thought "how the FUCK did these guys set-direct the sky?" -- a sun-and-cloudscape dazzlingly beautiful and dramatic simply for fonda to ride desperately across in front of, along the skyline

From:

skyecaptain.livejournal.com

I like Aliens, but have never been a big fan of the series overall.

From:

skyecaptain.livejournal.com

(Basically, whenever I want to watch an Alien film, I'm more likely to watch John Carpenter.)

From:

skyecaptain.livejournal.com

Thanks! Will see if I can get my hands on these.

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.

From:

dubdobdee.livejournal.com

Sure: was just wondrin if Aliens counts as a non-overrated Cameron. (Alien3 is my favourite of the actual series.)

From:

skyecaptain.livejournal.com

I think Aliens is overrated within the Alien series (I often here it cited as the best one), but it's certainly good. Haven't seen it in ages, but as I recall Alien3 was the most "appropriate" alien movie, in the sense that its bizarreness/OTT-ness matches some of the absurdity/borderline-camp of the premise (apparently Prometheus does this pretty well, from someone who saw it -- he told me it's pretty hardcore body horror stuff!) I still kind of want to see the flop by Jeunet (Resurrection). Aliens is like the Nolan Batman -- takes itself a little too seriously, difference being Cameron is a better action director. (Carpenter is a lot better at taking his material seriously without making it straight-up humorless. I'm relatively new to classic Carpenter, but it seems like The Thing makes the whole Alien series redundant.)

From:

dubdobdee.livejournal.com

Key (but I feel significant) diff is that The Thing has no GURLZ! Carpenter is never humourless, tho he can be pretty boring...

From:

koganbot

Laramie is the only Mann western where I actually got bored, though I remember it so poorly that I didn't even recall that Fonda was in it. From your description, I'd imagine that with the right script, and a different conception of the part by the director, this'd be perfect for Fonda. I remember an Andrew Sarris appreciation of Fonda where Sarris stressed the potential for violence that Fonda brought to Tom Joad. Fonda was the wrong age and had the wrong image, but I imagine he could have done a more stressed and taut and truly dangerous Dirty Harry than we got from Eastwood. Also think with a different director and script he'd have done the same for High Noon (I'll confess that I've only seen bits and pieces of that "classic" [derided by many] on TV). Did see — again, only a bit and a piece — a movie where he played a bitter sheriff who did the town's dirty work largely unappreciated by the people he was protecting. I forget the title.

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.

From:

dubdobdee.livejournal.com

Basically I felt that the idea for the characters and the character structure is set out like chesspieces -- and it's not a terrible idea -- but then no game gets started that sets up any tension (= interest). At 100 mins It's actually the shortest Western in my line-up (this is actually why I started with it), and really doesn't dwell on any element or scene for very long at all, but overall it still feels static, without momentum or interesting revelation. (Admittedly I'd spoilered myself on who the actual villain was by reading up in advance, but it was in any case pretty meh, and they did next to nothing with it. I agree about Fonda -- perfect for the role if they'd thought it through and written it out -- but we just don't get enough of him.

From:

christophe andersen (from livejournal.com)

As a librarian that used to work in a public library at the reference desk, I can confirm that the focus is on newer films with very little interest in the classics. The exceptions were classic holiday films, classic children's films (Parent Trap), the major American Hitchcock films, and some of other classics through the years (The Godfather films, Cary Grant films, James Stewart films, Wizard of Oz, etc.).

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".

From:

dubdobdee.livejournal.com

the reason frank doesn't remember henry fonda being in "the man from laramie" is that he isn't: it's james stewart OF COURSE but for some reason i have a persistant mental glitch abt these two rather dissimilar people

From:

skyecaptain.livejournal.com

"Night of the Hunter" has the distinction of being a film that I saw once, didn't really like, and then perpetually grew in fondness in memory that I don't really want to see it again, although I probably should. Ditto Daniel Reeves's Obsessive Becoming, an uneven experimental film about childhood abuse and about a hundred other topics. (The latter was the first film that I "argued" myself into liking -- i.e. I wrote a paper about it that was better than I remembered the movie being, and my new "liking" of how I remembered it seemed to trump the actual experience of watching it. This rarely happens with music because it's too easy to re-listen.)

From:

christophe andersen (from livejournal.com)

I know what you mean, skyecaptain. Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and Fellini's "La Strada" are the same for me. I even wrote a paper about "La Strada" and "8 1/2" in film school but I have no desire to ever see either film again. "Vertigo", like "Citizen Kane", has always struck me as a great film to study but not a film to love.

On the other hand, I have watched "Night of the Hunter" probably 10-12 times since first seeing it in the early 1990's.

From:

christophe andersen (from livejournal.com)

In any event, what's the next movie you're gonna see?

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.

From:

koganbot

Well, they're both most famous for roles in which they're nice guys taking on evil that seems to be beyond them — which of course doesn't nearly capture their range as actors. Anthony Mann was a director who got Jimmy Stewart to ramp up the bitterness and ruthlessness, in movies like Thunder Bay, The Far Country, and maybe Bend In The River, as well ("maybe" because I barely remember it, except that I remember liking it); other characters need to draw him back to his better self. In The Naked Spur, his goodness and self-righteousness are twisted into something almost ugly, and again he needs drawing back (Robert Ryan is an excellent antagonist, the way he needles Stewart).

Mann directed Fonda in The Tin Star, but I never saw it.

From:

koganbot

My friend Rob saw Vertigo on my instigation and thought it was extraordinarily great but he knew he'd never want to see it again, the way it captured the latent pathology in his own romanticism.

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.

From:

koganbot

Fwiw, I was made very unhappy and uncomfortable by The Searchers when I first saw it, age 17 or so — not just by the main character's disturbing social attitudes, but by Vera Miles' teasingly aggressive nice girl. Incredibly, I thought the movie's emotions were overdrawn and hammy.

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.)

Edited Date: 2012-08-09 05:22 am (UTC)

From:

skyecaptain.livejournal.com

A professor I had (for an experimental cinema class) had us watch Vertigo at the stroke of midnight on a Friday night in winter. He was big on framing experiential viewing carefully. And I'll tell ya, I've seen Vertigo five to ten times and this was the one that had the strongest impression on me. It's one that I actually think gets stronger with re-viewing, and I agree that it's also really really good for film analysis. I don't count it as a personal favorite, per se, but it's an incredible film. Glad it's #1 if the top ten is going to be so conservative anyway.

From: (Anonymous)

Hey Frank -- No idea what I'll watch next, and I'm pretty much incapable of listing favorites when it comes to movies (weird how that works, huh?), but here are the 26 movies I've Netflixed since start of 2011, in reverse order of renting: Amreeka, Mrs. Henderson Presents, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Bang The Drum Slowly, The Sandlot, The Hangover, Take Shelter, The Myth Of The American Sleepover, More American Graffiti, Moneyball, Bridesmaids, Everything Must Go, Super 8, Outsourced, Red Dawn, The Town, Another Year, The Wanderers, Goodbye Solo, The Lords Of Flatbush, The Terminal, Greenberg, The Blind Side, Sugar, The Social Network, The Kids Are All Right. (Liked some way more than others. Mostly we get TV shows. Don't care about super heroes or lots of other heavy metal things.)

From:

koganbot

I think you threw a perfect game with this. I haven't seen a single one of these, unless you accidentally misspelled The Kids Are Alright. (Possibly saw a couple scenes from Red Dawn while channel surfing. And I saw the coming attraction for Super 8.)

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From:

talrose.livejournal.com

At work, which means I really don't have time to be doing this, but this thread is too good. I really hope to revisit this. In chronological order:

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."

From:

koganbot

You pass the test, in that I haven't seen some of these — in particular, have yet to look at La Dolce Vita, Bad Timing, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Dead Ringers, and Carlos (and I honestly don't remember if I ever saw The Kid; if so, it was when I was a teenager or perhaps even when I was a kid).

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.]

Edited Date: 2012-08-14 04:42 pm (UTC)

From:

koganbot

Found an episode of Maverick up on YouTube today. It was rather satisfying, with its twists and its emotions. And in the closing credits the director was listed as Budd Boetticher.

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.)

Edited Date: 2014-07-21 01:44 am (UTC)