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Post by Prince Hal on Jan 21, 2020 17:17:13 GMT -5
Maltese Falcon (novel) What more need be said? One of the best ever. The screenplay, the photography, the acting. Bogey's breakthrough, Grennstreet's debut on screen, John Huston's as a director. Poifect!
My only wishes: that they'd have been able to work in the Flitcraft story from the novel, and that they had to cut the scene when Mary Astor, as Brigid, has to strip to prove she hasn't pocketed the thousand bucks.
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (novel) Post-war silliness and satire from Cary Grant, Melvyn Douglas and Myrna Loy. Three pros at the top of their game. I love how the suburbs seem as remote as Neptune's moons.
A Face in the Crowd (short story) Devastating. Andy Griffith is one of the screen's most despicable villains here. Almost Joker-like, to be honest. Cynical, constantly relevant story of a Machiavellian rattlesnake who uses his unctuous cornpone charm to entice his followers into loving him and thinks he can fool all of the people all of the time. You can't watch this without thinking of the Glenn Becks (and worse) of the world.
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Post by berkley on Jan 21, 2020 23:38:10 GMT -5
Blood Alley, based on a novel. Not a great film by any standards, but fun to watch for John Wayne being John Wayne. It also stars Lauren Bacall, and she's good, but it isn't anything to compare to her iconic roles in things like The Big Sleep. I also liked Mike Mazurki as Big Han - he was a big, impressive physical specimen who also worked as a professional wrestler and stood 6'5", according to wiki, which would make him an inch taller than Wayne, but they must have used some creative camerawork because he seemed shorter whenever they appeared in the same shot.
The downside is the awful racial stereotyping of the Chinese characters, even worse than you'd expect - stereotyping is really too mild a word for it. The sexism, by comparison, is bad, but no more than you would have expected for most films of the period, especially an adventure film probably aimed at a younger, male audience.
It was interesting to see this in film of an American fighting "the Reds" in China in the 50s right now because the Steve Canyon newspaper strips I'm reading at the moment is also set in China with a backdrop of heroic Americans fighting the evil Commie regime and its henchmen.
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Post by berkley on Jan 21, 2020 23:49:18 GMT -5
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (novel) Post-war silliness and satire from Cary Grant, Melvyn Douglas and Myrna Loy. Three pros at the top of their game. I love how the suburbs seem as remote as Neptune's moons. I think Myrna Loy and Cary Grant had great on-screen chemistry together - better than Grant and Katherine Hepburn, for example. Too bad they didn't do more films together. Looking at wiki, I see only three listed: this one, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, and an early one I haven't ever seen, called Wings in the Dark. |
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Post by brutalis on Jan 22, 2020 7:36:12 GMT -5
Popped in my DVD of The Man Who Would be King. 1975 ripping Kipling yarn with Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Christopher Plummer being veddy British. Connery and Caine do their criminal best to take advantage of India and Kafiristan for making themselves filthy rich buggers. The 2 ex-military con-men soon find themselves on top of the totem pole being worshiped but their eventual downfall leaves one dead and the other a crippled beggar. This is not a happy ending fairy tale but is a wickedly dark tale of morality deftly told by John Huston.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jan 22, 2020 10:30:40 GMT -5
Popped in my DVD of The Man Who Would be King. 1975 ripping Kipling yarn with Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Christopher Plummer being veddy British. Connery and Caine do their criminal best to take advantage of India and Kafiristan for making themselves filthy rich buggers. The 2 ex-military con-men soon find themselves on top of the totem pole being worshiped but their eventual downfall leaves one dead and the other a crippled beggar. This is not a happy ending fairy tale but is a wickedly dark tale of morality deftly told by John Huston. I love that movie. So much fun. |
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Jan 22, 2020 20:35:05 GMT -5
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Post by shaxper on Jan 22, 2020 20:36:19 GMT -5
Excellent acting by the entire cast, but especially by a favorite character actor of mine, Joseph Schildkraut, who underplayed the resolute and Otto Frank as brilliantly as he had overplayed (correctly) Vadas, the villain of Shop Around the Corner back in 1940. Literally just watched this last week. I never realized it was the same actor! |
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Post by Prince Hal on Jan 22, 2020 21:36:02 GMT -5
Excellent acting by the entire cast, but especially by a favorite character actor of mine, Joseph Schildkraut, who underplayed the resolute and Otto Frank as brilliantly as he had overplayed (correctly) Vadas, the villain of Shop Around the Corner back in 1940. Literally just watched this last week. I never realized it was the same actor! I know. He looked so different. And his acting was of a different style here as well. He was also good in his later years in two particularly good episodes of Twilight Zone, one as an older man who wants to trade in his sick and worn-out body for a younger model, the other as a ghost haunting Dachau. |
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Post by Prince Hal on Jan 22, 2020 23:08:45 GMT -5
Today I watched a 1958 Western called The Bravados, based on a novel by Frank O'Rourke, starring Gregory Peck, and directed by Henry King, who directed Peck in one of my favorite Westerns, The Gunfighter (1950).
This one doesn't come close to the quality of The Gunfighter, though. It's a movie with some interesting parts, but which never makes a whole of them. Peck doesn't have much to do except look serious as a man on the trail of four bandits who raped and killed his wife and ransacked his home. He admitted that he couldn't quite get inside the character of a hateful man. He's right; he never makes Jim Douglas seem either hateful or bitter, as he's apparently meant to be.
This is a great example of how not to write a story. Can't go into much detail without revealing too much, but the story rambles all over the place. For instance, Douglas has been on the outlaws' trail for six months and wanders into a town where he's apparently a stranger, and where four bad guys are going to be hanged. Later, though, we find out that his ranch isn't too far from town, that he knows the local priest very well, and that the townspeople, including his former near-fiancee (Joan Collins... Whaa?) apparently do know him.
Too many unanswered questions in the screenplay; we never get to know Douglas well enough to know whether he is truly vengeful, a la Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. He never seems so, and when he has his showdowns with the badmen, none of them seems to be the type you'd have to hunt down for six months. And we never get to see the moral struggle he apparently undergoes when he is about to complete his mission. Lots of muddled morality in the ending.
If the story's order had been reversed, so that we could watch Douglas having to live with the painful results of his quest, it would have been a far better picture.
I wish this had been better.
But at least I got to see Joe DeRita in a non-Stooge role.
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Post by Rob Allen on Jan 23, 2020 12:39:05 GMT -5
Today I watched a 1958 Western called The Bravados, based on a novle by Frank O'Rourke My guess is that this is unrelated to the movie and the novel:  |
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Post by berkley on Jan 23, 2020 13:17:15 GMT -5
Popped in my DVD of The Man Who Would be King. 1975 ripping Kipling yarn with Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Christopher Plummer being veddy British. Connery and Caine do their criminal best to take advantage of India and Kafiristan for making themselves filthy rich buggers. The 2 ex-military con-men soon find themselves on top of the totem pole being worshiped but their eventual downfall leaves one dead and the other a crippled beggar. This is not a happy ending fairy tale but is a wickedly dark tale of morality deftly told by John Huston. I love that movie. So much fun. Great movie and if I remember, I thnk it was seeing it back in the late 70s or early 80s that first made me wonder if short stories weren't a more suitable source than novels for adaptations to film - even though I never read the Kipling story until decades later. |
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Post by thwhtguardian on Jan 25, 2020 9:22:06 GMT -5
An Unexpected Journey (2012), The Desolation of Smaug (2013), and The Battle of the Five Armies(2014)
Over the last few days I sat down and rewatched the Hobbit Trilogy for the first time since they came out...and my opinion hasn't changed, in fact my disappointment has only worsened. The great tragedy of these films is that when you watch all three it's very easy to see that there was a great film shot here, it's just that there was a bunch of other stuff shot as well and Peter Jackson had become so big and the studio so greedy for cash that there wasn't anyone around to rein him in and make him do just one film right.
More over, it's not as if the extraneous material is bad per-say, it's impossible to fault Jackson overly much as watching the scenes with Gandalf and Radagast you can see that the creation of those scenes came from a place of love...it's just that they don't forward the story of Bilbo and the Dwarves at all.
I've seen phantom edits of Star Wars, I wonder if someone has ever done the same with the Hobbit.
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Post by shaxper on Jan 25, 2020 16:34:38 GMT -5
Revisited 1933's Isle of Lost Souls today, which is a decent adaptation of The Island of Doctor Moreau, albeit with a panther woman. Reviewed it in my Bela Lugosi thread, as per usual. I did intend to watch non-Bela Lugosi films this month, but I've gotten completely swept up in this project and am having far too much fun. |
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Post by brutalis on Jan 27, 2020 7:57:16 GMT -5
Another weekend so a few more movies watched.
Friday night: The Other Boleyn Girl from 2008 adapting Phillippa Gregory's book on Mary (and Anne Boleyn) sexual/political exploits with Henry the VIII. It is said that much of the book's plot elements are eliminated but the movie itself is a star studded affair that is enjoyable.
Sunday morning: 2004's Shakespeare adaption of The Merchant of Venice starring Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Joseph Fiennes and Lynn Collins provides an interesting version for viewing. Pacino providing a subdued (for him) and dark realistic interpretation but I can't help but watch this as and see it as an Italian mob movie.
Follow up Shakespeare double header by watching the Michael Fassbender/Marion Cotillard Macbeth from 2013. Very visualized and stylish adaptation that is hauntingly gorgeous and evocative. I don't recall even seeing that this was released for large theater viewing and found the DVD used at a thrift store. Splendid addition for my growing Shakespeare movie collection.
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Post by thwhtguardian on Jan 27, 2020 8:26:06 GMT -5
Went further down the rabbit hole(or should I say Hobbit hole?) and watched the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. The difference is night and day, these were Jackson's first real successes and I think the editorial oversight might just be what makes them better films as they include only what is really needed. I mean, I would have loved to see Frodo and company meet Tom and Goldenberry and get lost in the barrows ... but you don't really need those scenes per say.
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