I watched Cat Ballou again today, and yeah, you can see that it went through a lot of script revisions (the tone's kinda everywhere, the shift from musical to non-musical relegates the songs to accompanying not-in-the-narrative narrators), but hooooheeee, that's still a beautiful picture. Lee Marvin is just killer, pure amazing performance and I'm glad he got acknowledged for it straightaway instead of twenty years later everybody coming around to it, as happens sometimes, in those sort of situations.

It's funny to see Jane Fonda say she was pressed into it, because of contract, because she was great in the role, but I wonder how someone else pursuing the part would've done, Especially Ann-Margret, who didn't get it based on her agent passing it over.

And this is still one of the porniest non-porn movie ads ever:

Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Oskar Werner,Julie Christie,Cyril Cusack
D-Francois Truffaut

Based on the 1951 Ray Bradbury novel of the same name. Guy Montag (Werner) is a firefighter who lives in a society where books have been outlawed by a government fearing an independent-thinking public. It is the duty of firefighters to burn any books on sight or said collections that have been reported by informants. People in this society including Montag's wife Christie) are drugged into compliancy and watch wall-length television screens all day. After Montag falls in love with book-hoarding Clarisse (also Christie), he begins to read confiscated books. It is through this relationship that he begins to question the government's motives behind book-burning. Montag is soon found out,his wife leaves him and he's an enemy of the state

My 2nd favorite cerebral SF film of the 60s behind 2001:A Space Odyssey.I have not read the novel that might explain some of film's logical flaws such as firemen knowing how to read.Also Oskar Werner believed since this was an SF film it was appropriate for him to act like a cold robot. On the positive side,I love the style of the film.Truffaut captures an isolated,complacent future society without the benefits of a large budget and special effects.
Bernard Herrmann's musical score is excellent.Christie and Cusack both are marvelous in their parts (why Christie played both the wife and Clarisse is unknown to me)

This was Truffaut's first color movie and his only english-language release.Truffaut and Werner clashed fiercely over Werner's interpretation of his character and they stopped speaking to each other for the last 2 weeks of shooting.Terence Stamp was the original choice but since he just broke off his relationship with Julie Christie,he decided to pass on the movie

I loved the fact the opening credits for the film are spoken and not printed.I love how one of the books shown burning was a Mad Magazine paperback.And I love the ending.

The DVD comes with an 11 minute Bradbury interview about his novel,a 45 minute making of doc,a 15 minute doc on the musical score,a commentary by Julie Christie,trailer and poster gallery. 9 of 10 stars

I love Fahrenheit 451 until I remember Bradbury's various times explaining it, talking about his motivations, and revealing how ludicrously luddite he could be. I just need to block the author out of it, and I'm good.

Watching Radley Metzger's adaptation of Therese and Isabelle just now, which is such a lovely, tense movie. Metzger by that point had done a lot of work cutting or prepping movies for distribution in foreign markets, he'd seen a lot of movies up close, and it shows in all the homages and lifts he executes, but also on how tightly controlled the movie is, for a relatively new director. The biographical element (it's a fictionalized version of a real romance that got the author, Violette Leduc - whose name I adore - kicked out of a boarding school) gives the whole thing a frisson beyond either the titillation of schoolgirls in love or the melancholy of looking back and pronouncing your youthful mature decisions to have been stupid.

Very much recommended for anyone who wants to see two hours of frustration, exasperation, gorgeous architecture, the occasional nudity, and ingenious use of sound.

I watched the second one last night and it was indeed better, though I didn't think the resolution of the puppets killing Toulon was good since I liked his character. 

Day Of The Dead (1985)



The gore in this film is a huge step up from Dawn of the Dead (1978). Some of Tom Savini and Gregory Nicotero's finest special effect make-ups that hold up incredibly well today. The real star of this movie is Sherman Howard who plays the zombie Bub and is arguably the most endearing movie monster since Boris Karloff in Frankenstein.

Dead like a boss.

Love this movie. So unrelentingly unforgiving and stark. And, there's something with Romero, like John Carpenter and Walter Hill, that puts them beyond their contemporaries for me: They won't let go of social injustice. Most SF/Fantasy/Horror directors from their generation, roughly, will make stabs at social commentary, but it's light, it's usually forgiving of "the masses" or average person. Romero's a dick about it. And deliberately so. The casual sexism, casual racism of the Dead pictures, even to the point where he deliberately ends Diary of the Dead with a response to the Dawn of the Dead remake, and its makers having a laugh about the "celebrity lookalike" game where they kill zombies based on whether they look like movie stars or girls who didn't give them the time of day in high school.

He's also a giant kid about it, too, of course, which is super fun. He's not misanthropic or pessimistic, even when the movie's a downer, which Dead kinda is by the end, in that "it's never going to get much better" sense.