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Post by berkley on Jul 22, 2021 23:41:09 GMT -5
Saw Lynch's Wild at Heart for the first time since around when it came out in the early 90s and for the first time on the big screen. I remembered very little of the movie from my previous viewing all those years ago - the scene with Nicholas Cage singing Elvis's Love Me and Willem Dafoe's character Bobby Peru were the things that stood out most in my memory, and of course the Chris Isaac hit Wicked Game. I'll be looking for the soundtrack cd, as there were a lot of really great things on there besides the Chris Isaac song. Another thing I didn't remember was that Harry Dean Stanton had a pretty big rôle and that there were a lot of Twin Peaks actors involved, though mostly in smaller parts - Sheryl Lee, Sherilee Fenn, Jack Nance, Grace Zabriskie, ....
All in all, seeing it again after all these years, I'm surprised the film didn't leave a bigger impression in my memory, because it's really good: perhaps not in the very first rank of Lynch's films, but not far off. Possibly the fact that it came out around the same time as Twin Peaks might have something to do with it, as the tv show, uneven as it was, blew me away so completely at the time, it might have effaced everything else I saw around then.
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Post by Hoosier X on Jul 30, 2021 15:57:12 GMT -5
Saw Lynch's Wild at Heart for the first time since around when it came out in the early 90s and for the first time on the big screen. I remembered very little of the movie from my previous viewing all those years ago - the scene with Nicholas Cage singing Elvis's Love Me and Willem Dafoe's character Bobby Peru were the things that stood out most in my memory, and of course the Chris Isaac hit Wicked Game. I'll be looking for the soundtrack cd, as there were a lot of really great things on there besides the Chris Isaac song. Another thing I didn't remember was that Harry Dean Stanton had a pretty big rôle and that there were a lot of Twin Peaks actors involved, though mostly in smaller parts - Sheryl Lee, Sherilee Fenn, Jack Nance, Grace Zabriskie, .... All in all, seeing it again after all these years, I'm surprised the film didn't leave a bigger impression in my memory, because it's really good: perhaps not in the very first rank of Lynch's films, but not far off. Possibly the fact that it came out around the same time as Twin Peaks might have something to do with it, as the tv show, uneven as it was, blew me away so completely at the time, it might have effaced everything else I saw around then. it’s such a great movie. I saw it a bunch of times. But not lately. When I lived in LA there was a revival house that once a year showed a double feature of Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart. It’s a perfect double feature. I saw it three or four times.
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Post by codystarbuck on Jul 30, 2021 18:52:54 GMT -5
Yeah, I just never "got" Lynch, apart from The Elephant Man and, to a certain extent, Dune. I've watched Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart and never cared much for either. I think it boils down to Lynch's idea of "quirky" and mine are at different levels. Had a roommate who loved his stuff, but Twin Peaks bored the p!$# out of me. He also loved Woody Allen's Interiors and watching that film made me want to cut my own throat. So bleak and depressing, until Maureen Stapleton shows up (which is kind of the point, but it was a slog). Similarly, went to Welcome to the Doll House with him and some other mutual friends and I just hated the acting, the darkness of it and just found every single character unlikeable and unredeeming. When I would hear it called a "black comedy," I would respond with, "Where was the comedic part, because I must have missed it." I didn't find anything funny in it.
Elephant Man I liked, though when it was in theaters and the trailers ran on tv, with the crowd chasing the hooded John Merrick, I could not watch as it just gave me nightmares, and I was in my teens. Dune I defended , when Siskel and Ebert were calling it the worst film of the year (not in any year that had releases from Cannon). Sure, some of the acting was way over-the-top (Mostly on the Harkonen side) and some just awful (Lynch's cameo, for instance); but, the bulk of it was good and I was entranced by the story and visuals (and I hadn't read the book yet; the movie got me to read the original trilogy).
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Post by berkley on Jul 30, 2021 22:15:17 GMT -5
Lynch is an automatic must-see for me, whenever he comes out with something new - which isn't nearly often enough,to my mind. Elephant Man and Dune are definitely atypical films for him . The former hit me pretty hard too, when I saw it in the theatre, but more the pathos and tragedy rather than the nightmarish aspect.
Dune I've never really sat down and watched properly, from start to finish, though I've probably seen around 75% of it one way or another over the years. Way more interesting cast than the new one, plus lots of fascinating visual stuff in there. While I don't think it's a success either as a David Lynch or as a Dune movie, it's at the very least an interesting failure.
Another atypical Lynch movie non-fans might consider trying is The Straight Story. Very much what the title says, no post-modern irony or playing around, and like Elephant Man, though in a completely different way, one of the most moving films Ive ever seen.
And as for the more characteristic Lynch films, Lost Highway and especially Mulholland Drive are the ones I'd recommend most, in that he really distills his style down to its essence in those. Both pretty dark and intesne, in a neo-noir kind of way, not much comedy black or otherwise. Even though you don't like Lynch, I thnk you might find them worth watching, if only in a clinical, analytical way, as a film fan.
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Post by Batflunkie on Aug 6, 2021 12:57:56 GMT -5
Watching "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" for the first time in ages. When I was a kid, I loved it for the Roger Williams animation that still blows me away even today, but I think as an adult, I enjoy the overall story more. Bob Hoskins is amazing as Eddie Valiant. Still find it weird how well he intimates a new york accent
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Post by tartanphantom on Aug 6, 2021 13:57:35 GMT -5
Watching "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" for the first time in ages. When I was a kid, I loved it for the Roger Williams animation that still blows me away even today, but I think as an adult, I enjoy the overall story more. Bob Hoskins is amazing as Eddie Valiant. Still find it weird how well he intimates a new york accent
Hopefully you didn't spend 10 minutes rewinding the car crash scene to figure out whether Jessica was "going commando".
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Post by Batflunkie on Aug 6, 2021 14:03:13 GMT -5
Watching "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" for the first time in ages. When I was a kid, I loved it for the Roger Williams animation that still blows me away even today, but I think as an adult, I enjoy the overall story more. Bob Hoskins is amazing as Eddie Valiant. Still find it weird how well he intimates a new york accent Hopefully you didn't spend 10 minutes rewinding the car crash scene to figure out whether Jessica was "going commando". Knowing Disney, it probably was the edited version (watching on Disney+). Anyway, I'm not that much of a pervert
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Post by Deleted on Aug 8, 2021 13:52:58 GMT -5
I've been re-watching the Bomba the Jungle Boy movies starring Johnny Sheffield, I've got the DVD release below as well as the second volume that contain all 12 movies he starred in from 1949-1955. After playing "Boy" in several Tarzan films the decade before, I think he does a great job in the leading role in these. They are light-hearted jungle adventure of course, and the movies all kind of run together for me, but in a good way. Sheffield's onscreen presence just projected this real niceness for lack of a better term along with his overall charisma, and is always enjoyable to watch. He was definitely the perfect Bomba in my mind!
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Post by berkley on Aug 30, 2021 21:36:59 GMT -5
They showed the Sergio Leone + Clint Eastwood "Man with No Name" trilogy at the theatre here over the past three weeks, so that's been my classic movie watching lately. I'd seen them all on tv as a kid but never on the big screen. If anything, they're even better than I remembered - I was really pretty blown away, especially with the last two, For a few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The first one, A Fistful of Dollars, is really good, but not quite up to the level of those other two, for me - understandably so as Leone was obviously trying things out and practically inventing a new genre or sub-genre.
Also, the first one doesn't have Lee Van Cleef,, and I cannot overstate how amazing he is in these two films. I'm a pretty big Clint Eastwood fan - well, at least of his film-work: his politics, not so much - but seeing these movies now again after so many years, it was Van Cleef who really stood out for me - perhaps in part because I've seen tons of Eastwood over the intervening years and not a whole lot of Van Cleef: I suppose I'd forgotten how impressive he was, or maybe it comes out better on the big screen, or maybe it's just that I'm older, but his screen-presence is incredible - and Eastwood has one of the most powerful screen-presnces in movies himself, so for Van Cleef to outshine him (as it seemed to me on this vewing) really says something.
But in the end it's the movies themselves rather than any individual performances that make them masterpieces. Film at its best is about the combination of moving images and sound to create an overall effect and Leone was as masterful at achieving that effect as anyone in the history of films. Morricone's scores pbviously have a lot to do with it too, but it's how Leone used them that makes the films work. Reading up on him a little afterwards, apparently he would often shoot scenes with Morricone's music playing - because the dialogue in Italian films was habitually dubbed in later on - and do things like decide when to cut based on what was happening in the music. But regardless of how it was done, the results speak for themselves.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 2, 2021 23:48:35 GMT -5
Scanners (1981) is 40 years old....for some reason the exploding head scene popped into my mind and I had to go dig it up. Has one of my faves in it as well, Patrick McGoohan....which reminds me, I'm due for an annual viewing of The Prisoner soon....
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Post by Rob Allen on Sept 5, 2021 2:35:30 GMT -5
My wife got interested in Ossie Davis for some reason, and wanted to see a movie with him in it. I suggested The Scalphunters, which I saw a few years ago while visiting my mother. Mom has a couple of all-Western channels she watches and this movie showed up one day. There's a lot of star power in it - Burt Lancaster, Shelley Winters, Telly Savalas and Dabney Coleman are all there, but Ossie Davis absolutely steals the movie from all of them. He's the one you root for thru most of the movie; he's the one you remember when it's over.
Davis's character is escaping from slavery, still wearing the remnants of his butler's uniform. He's tying to make his way to Mexico because Mexico abolished slavery in 1829. A lot of people today don't know that the Underground Railroad ran south to Mexico as well as north to Canada. There's no Railroad here; Davis starts the movie as a captive of a Kiowa band. They dump him with a fur trapper (Lancaster) and they all run afoul of an outlaw gang led by a husband-and-wife team (Savalas and Winters). The climactic scene is a huge fistfight between Davis and Lancaster, after which they ride off together, still after the film's McGuffin, a load of furs.
So she got the DVD from the library and watched it the other night. She found the plot thin, the violence excessive, and the racist behavior ugly. But she agreed that Ossie Davis was really good.
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Post by codystarbuck on Sept 6, 2021 0:03:30 GMT -5
I think the first thing I ever saw Ossie Davis in was Sam Whiskey, with Burt Reynolds. It played on a Saturday afternoon movie, on local tv. It's a caper film, so I was drawn into it. The film is slight, but he is good, as usual.
By the time I was in high school, and we had cable, I watched him in Let's Do It Again and The Hill, both on Cinemax. The former is one of the trio of movies by Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier, with Jimmy Walker as the world's most unlikely heavyweight boxing contender. The latter is Sidney Lumet's film, starring Sean Connery, about a punishment detail, in North Africa, in the British Army. Davis plays a colonial soldier, who eventually rebels against the warders, tearing off his uniform and berating the guards for their racism, while Connery is a sergeant major, who defied the orders of a bad officer, who is singled out for brutal punishment, by Ian Hendry, with Harry Andrews tacit approval. Great dramatic film and one of Connery's best early dramatic roles.
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Post by codystarbuck on Sept 6, 2021 12:29:35 GMT -5
Want to really appreciate a classic even more? Watch a remake that just drops a turd on the whole thing. I watched the Dino De Laurentis King Kong (dirt cheap at Walmart) Hard to believe the two leads were going to be future Oscar winners, based on what they do here (more Lange than Bridges, but he has some bad moments). Even Charles Grodon is off. I've read that the director was a shouter and got into it with De Laurentis' son, and the producer nearly fired him off the picture. Lange was in her first major acting role and can be forgiven how stiff she is, in some scenes.
It really made me appreciate the original Cooper one all the more. Far more successful in capturing a compelling story, with more primitive technology. Peter Jackson's is better than the De Laurentis, but I find it a bit bloated and it drags in sections. The original may be a bit broader and stagey in the acting, but it captures the wonder and spectacle far better.
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Post by tartanphantom on Sept 6, 2021 12:37:19 GMT -5
Want to really appreciate a classic even more? Watch a remake that just drops a turd on the whole thing. I watched the Dino De Laurentis King Kong (dirt cheap at Walmart) Hard to believe the two leads were going to be future Oscar winners, based on what they do here (more Lange than Bridges, but he has some bad moments). Even Charles Grodon is off. I've read that the director was a shouter and got into it with De Laurentis' son, and the producer nearly fired him off the picture. Lange was in her first major acting role and can be forgiven how stiff she is, in some scenes. It really made me appreciate the original Cooper one all the more. Far more successful in capturing a compelling story, with more primitive technology. Peter Jackson's is better than the De Laurentis, but I find it a bit bloated and it drags in sections. The original may be a bit broader and stagey in the acting, but it captures the wonder and spectacle far better.
I don't think that "bad" even begins to describe this film. I was unlucky enough to see it in the theatre during its initial run.
I still want my $2.00 back.
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Post by berkley on Sept 6, 2021 14:30:23 GMT -5
I've never seen any of the King Kong remakes but I remember the di Laurentis one getting a lot of hype when I was a kid in the 70s - and also Jessica Lange being criticised for being a model rather than an actress. In the things I've seen her in from later in her career I think she's been really good, so either the criticism was unfair or she must have put in a lot of work subsequently to improve herself.
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