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Post by spoon on Jan 8, 2015 23:47:59 GMT -5
I watched Dirty Harry tonight. This might be the first time I've seen a whole movie from the Dirty Harry series. I saw a lot of The Deadpool on TV years ago, but I don't remember if I saw the whole thing.
It's like the movie stylistic, and San Francisco is a great place to set a movie. On the other hand, there some hardcore strawman B.S. about the breadth of civil liberties allowing criminals to escape prosecution. I'm guessing a lot of the evidence that the D.A. claims would get suppressed would get in under exigent circumstances. Plus, a D.A. would never just back off like that without putting a big effort to defeat motions to exclude evidence.
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Post by Pharozonk on Jan 8, 2015 23:54:25 GMT -5
A lost relic of 1988 is the movie of choice tonight: Pumpkinhead. Special effects wizard Stan Winston worked on this movie and the influence his time working on Aliens had on him is highly evident here. The creature design of Pumpkinhead is very reminiscent of the xenomorphs from the Alien movies and the dark setting and strobe lights remind me of the dark corridors in Aliens. Lance Henriksen, who is also of Aliens fame, gives a top notch performance in this movie, playing a grieving father who makes tragic choices in the name of vengeance and anger. The final scene is simply perfect and really hits you in the gut.  |
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Post by Prince Hal on Jan 9, 2015 11:44:52 GMT -5
The changeling, from 1980: an excellent haunted house story, one of the best I've seen. it's not gory nor jump- out- of-your-seat scary, but is very spooky because of its deliberate pace and great mood. The ending might have been a little stronger, but the first hour and a half is really good. Yes, indeedy! The use of sound is excellent, as is the appearance of a wet rubber ball... |
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jan 9, 2015 11:58:41 GMT -5
The changeling, from 1980: an excellent haunted house story, one of the best I've seen. it's not gory nor jump- out- of-your-seat scary, but is very spooky because of its deliberate pace and great mood. The ending might have been a little stronger, but the first hour and a half is really good. Yes, indeedy! The use of sound is excellent, as is the appearance of a wet rubber ball… The ball scene is my favourite from the entire movie. So simple, yet so efficient!!! |
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Post by Prince Hal on Jan 9, 2015 14:24:55 GMT -5
Yes, indeedy! The use of sound is excellent, as is the appearance of a wet rubber ball… The ball scene is my favourite from the entire movie. So simple, yet so efficient!!! This will make sense only to those who've seen it. When I sam it back in the theatre in 1980, the ushers, who knew the movie well, chose a particularly suspenseful moment in the film to go outside and bang loudly and rhythmically on the steel fire doors, which made the entire theatre jump and scream. Brought back memories of those old William Castle movies. |
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Post by Hoosier X on Jan 9, 2015 18:04:53 GMT -5
I watched Dirty Harry tonight. This might be the first time I've seen a whole movie from the Dirty Harry series. I saw a lot of The Deadpool on TV years ago, but I don't remember if I saw the whole thing. It's like the movie stylistic, and San Francisco is a great place to set a movie. On the other hand, there some hardcore strawman B.S. about the breadth of civil liberties allowing criminals to escape prosecution. I'm guessing a lot of the evidence that the D.A. claims would get suppressed would get in under exigent circumstances. Plus, a D.A. would never just back off like that without putting a big effort to defeat motions to exclude evidence. The Italians have a Dirty Harry counterpart called Inspector Tanzi. I'm not sure how many Tanzi movies they made but I saw one (on a big screen no less, at the Cinematheque in Los Angeles) that was listed in the program as "Assault with a Deadly Weapon." But the Italian title actually translated to something more like "Rome - Armed to the Teeth."
I could hardly believe my eyes! Tanzi's Rome is so much worse than Dirty Harry's San Francisco. He can't even buy cigarettes without walking out of the store and seeing a mugging or a murder or a beating.
I don't know if it's technically a grindhouse film but it sure reminded me of any of the grindhousiest grindhouse movies I ever saw.
I like the Dirty Harry movies a lot, but when I think of "frustrated cop takes on justice system emasculated by liberals" movies, I think first of "Rome - Armed to the Teeth"!
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Post by Hoosier X on Jan 9, 2015 18:12:58 GMT -5
I just checked IMDB and I corrected the spelling of "Tanzi" in the preceding comment. There are only two Tanzi films. And the title translated as "Rome - Armed to the Teeth" is "Roma a mano armata."
It was the second half of a double feature and I was actually a lot more interested in the first feature. I wasn't really sure I wanted to stay for "Assault with a Deadly Weapon." But as soon as I heard it was also called "Rome - Armed to the Teeth," for some reason I suddenly wanted to see it.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jan 9, 2015 18:51:30 GMT -5
I watched Dirty Harry tonight. This might be the first time I've seen a whole movie from the Dirty Harry series. I saw a lot of The Deadpool on TV years ago, but I don't remember if I saw the whole thing. It's like the movie stylistic, and San Francisco is a great place to set a movie. On the other hand, there some hardcore strawman B.S. about the breadth of civil liberties allowing criminals to escape prosecution. I'm guessing a lot of the evidence that the D.A. claims would get suppressed would get in under exigent circumstances. Plus, a D.A. would never just back off like that without putting a big effort to defeat motions to exclude evidence. Dirty Harry is very much a product of its time. It is a reaction to the Warren Court and a long series of rulings that strengthened the Constitutional rights of criminal defendants. Particularly with regards to Fourth Amendment rights. A lot of Americans saw this as coddling clearly guilty criminals by tying the hands of police. It's been a while since I've seen the movie so I can't speak to any specific items that are wrong from a legal viewpoint. However, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. One is that Hollywood is not very good about understanding the law. The other is that Prosecutors have an ethical duty not to pursue cases that are clearly unconstitutional. Now that doesn't stop a lot of them...but they do. |
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Post by spoon on Jan 9, 2015 19:37:19 GMT -5
I watched Dirty Harry tonight. This might be the first time I've seen a whole movie from the Dirty Harry series. I saw a lot of The Deadpool on TV years ago, but I don't remember if I saw the whole thing. It's like the movie stylistic, and San Francisco is a great place to set a movie. On the other hand, there some hardcore strawman B.S. about the breadth of civil liberties allowing criminals to escape prosecution. I'm guessing a lot of the evidence that the D.A. claims would get suppressed would get in under exigent circumstances. Plus, a D.A. would never just back off like that without putting a big effort to defeat motions to exclude evidence. Dirty Harry is very much a product of its time. It is a reaction to the Warren Court and a long series of rulings that strengthened the Constitutional rights of criminal defendants. Particularly with regards to Fourth Amendment rights. A lot of Americans saw this as coddling clearly guilty criminals by tying the hands of police. It's been a while since I've seen the movie so I can't speak to any specific items that are wrong from a legal viewpoint. However, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. One is that Hollywood is not very good about understanding the law. The other is that Prosecutors have an ethical duty not to pursue cases that are clearly unconstitutional. Now that doesn't stop a lot of them...but they do. Yeah, I know that was the era of Nixon riding the wave of standing up for "law and order". I think this is really a case of Hollywood not understanding the law (or misrepresenting the law as more of ass than it actually is to push an ideological point). Basically, the D.A. tells Harry they can't pursue any charges whatsoever against Scorpio because the girl's body was found due to information Harry got from (A) questioning Scorpio without letting him have a lawyer and (B) torturing Scorpio by stepping on his wounded leg. But I think the State would have a pretty good exigent circumstances. Harry was questioning Scorpio to find the location of kidnapping girl who Scorpio claimed was suffocating to death buried alive at that moment. But even if a Court were to knock that out, there's got to be lots of other evidence: fingerprints they can match to Scorpio, phone records of the calls Scorpio made, his sighting by a police helicopter earlier in the movie, the opportunity to match his handwriting against the Scorpio records, etc. They could even charge Scorpio with trying to kill Harry. |
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Post by Phil Maurice on Jan 9, 2015 21:56:37 GMT -5
Dirty Harry is one of my favorite movies. I've seen it easily 50 times, no exaggeration. The legal analysis in the context of the time period is very interesting to me, but being a layman, I leave it to those far wiser than me (Slam Bradley and Spoon, for example) to evaluate it on those grounds.
As a fan of the True Crime genre, I see Dirty Harry also as Clint Eastwood vs. Zodiac, an infamous killer who terrorized the San Francisco area for a brief period in the late 60s/early 70s and who was never identified. Like Scorpio in the film, Zodiac killed random strangers with a firearm, sent taunting letters to the press and law enforcement, and threatened to put bombs on school buses.
Now here is where I get to share what I think is the greatest piece of movie trivia in all of cinema. The character of Harry Calahan was loosely based on a real-life San Francisco police Inspector named Dave Toschi, who also happened to be the lead investigator on the Zodiac case. Toschi was no stranger to Hollywood, having consulted on the Steve McQueen feature Bullitt a couple of years earlier. Toschi attended an early screening of Dirty Harry, courtesy of the producers.
Fast forward to 2007. Toschi is again consulting on a Hollywood film. This time, it is David Fincher's Zodiac, an adaptation of Robert Graysmith's book about the Zodiac investigation. Toschi in the film is played by actor Mark Ruffalo and Toschi is invited to attend the film's premiere. A scene in Zodiac shows Ruffalo's Toschi viewing Dirty Harry in the theatre.
So Dave Toschi went to a movie and watched a character based on him go to a movie and watch a character based on him!
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Post by junkmonkey on Jan 11, 2015 21:00:01 GMT -5
Ironing clothes for our family of four, I usually put an old movie on... and yesterday's The day Mars invaded Earth, from 1963, did not disappoint: it was a surprisingly mature and spooky film. The tense relationship between the main character and his wife is amazingly accurate; instead of theatrical histrionics about how his job keeps him from playing his proper role as a father, we get excellent, quiet dialogs between two people who try to make their marriage work, but are apparently failing despite their obvious caring for each other. "Where do the martians come in?" may you ask. Oh, they're there. In typical 1960s fashion, when the red scare-inspired "they are among us" theme proved so fertile a soil, our neighbours from the red planet take on human shape. The interesting twist here is that despite the film's title, the Martians aren't here to conquer Earth: they are here to defend Mars from our own invasion, since that is how they view our sending robotic probes to their world. They don't mean to hurt us, really, but are ready to do what it takes for us to leave them alone. The ending is a real shocker. Honest. I remember having a huge sense of deja-vu while watching this one. Not sure I liked it as much as you but the ending is a shocker and almost makes the rest worth it. - turns out a lot (if not all) of the film was shot at the much used Greystone Park & Mansion which, amongst other things, was the location used for a lot of Lynch's funniest film: Eraserhead.
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Post by crazyoldhermit on Jan 11, 2015 23:41:38 GMT -5
Ah, Dirty Harry... How I love thee. One of my favorite "feel good" movies. Reminds me of my Dad.
Anyways, the movie says that the physical evidence relating to the girl is inadmissable because it was obtained through police torture while evidence relating to the weapon was inadmissable because it had been retrieved during an illegal search of Scorpio's residency. Fruit from the poisoned tree and what not.
Where the movie goes daffy is how broadly the law is being applied. Scorpio's confession would be thrown out but everything else linking him to the kidnapping would still apply. Scorpio could be identified from the money exchange and could be charged with assaulting an officer, and Harry's partner was a witness to the money exchange and was assaulted by Scorpio so he could press charges as well. What would really sink him is the gun. Scorpio was living in the stadium with the groundskeeper's permission. But the groundskeeper wouldn't have the authority to grant that permission so Scorpio would be a squatter and the rifle wouldn't be protected by the Fourth Amendment so Harry's seizure of it would have been legal.
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Post by Jasoomian on Jan 24, 2015 19:50:51 GMT -5
I'm seriously tempted to check out the following movie, filmed in 1964 and shelved as unwatchable until 4 years later when its 2 stars hit the big time. It was released as a TV movie and I believe available on YouTube as well as cheap public domain DVDs. Please share your opinions if you have already viewed it Alexander The Great
Starring: William Shatner, Adam West, John Cassavettes, Joseph Cotten, Simon Oakland
Shatner actually plays 2 roles- a cowboy and his peyote lovin' twin Indian brother. My god, with a cast like this, I'd watch them sitting around a table burping for an hour. It was made as a proposed TV pilot. Get on your knees and thank your nerdy gods that Alexander The Great didn't make the grade leaving Shatner and West free to audition for other shows This sounds a lot like that other great Shatner film, White Comanche (1967). |
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Post by Jasoomian on Jan 24, 2015 21:18:04 GMT -5
Haven't updated in quite a while. This is bound to be a partial list. Thumbs up: The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Godfather III - the last perhaps underrated, I think. To Kill a MockingbirdBladeThumbs up on rewatch: 12 Monkeys, It's a Wonderful LifeMSTed: Cinematic Titanic takes on Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks with John Carradine -- www.hulu.com/watch/375255Cinematic Titanic's Legacy of Blood |
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jan 25, 2015 9:25:58 GMT -5
I didn't expect to enjoy Solomon Kane as much as I did. Just as with every movie yet made on Robert E. Howard's characters, it takes great liberties with the source material, and a true Kane fan would doubtless be extremely annoyed at how the hero's core motivation (his faith in the Christian god) is here replaced by a more generic desire for redemption.
Still, it turns out to be a very decent B movie. The character might not be the Kane we know, but at least he shows some depth (thanks in part to James Purefoy's interpretation; I always like the man's work). This Solomon Kane starts as a headstrong boy who leaves home after a bad fight with his father, who meant him to join the clergy, and after he mistakenly believes to have caused the death of his brute of an elder brother. We assume that to make ends meet, the lad found work as a ship's boy; a sailor for all of his young adult's life, he later became a pirate (and apparently quite a ruthless one too). Still, as we can deduce from the film, his descent into mindless violence was the result of circumstances and not of a flaw in his character. Yes, he is scared unto the straight and narrow by a brush with the devil, but we can see how his turning his back on evil agrees with his natural proclivity. In one of the few rare moments where he lets his guard down, he confesses that violence is natural to him, that fighting is what he does best; but he clearly struggles to reconcile that trait with his innate nobility. He wants to do good, but as all he knows is how to kill people, he doesn't see how.
The film is heavy on the supernatural elements, with a few nice visuals. The Transformer Balrog at the end was silly rather than scary, but a few magic mirrors were used to good effect.
Max Von Sydow is in this one also. After playing a king in an unfaithful Conan movie, he plays an English lord in an unfaithful Solomon Kane one. The seventh seal was a long tome ago, wasn't it?
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