This blog will pay for itself.
Are we happy with the results?
And why did they remake The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo? I watched the first one a while back on netflix, and it couldn’t have been more than a year or two old and was really good as is. Has anyone seen them both? Why did they remake it?
And Rose Byrne. Wow.
Tonight is the Oscars, and I find it amusing that as I get older, I become more and more detached from the mainstream. Of the nominees, the only one I have seen is the only one I was interested in seeing, which was Moneyball. Of the rest of them The Artist, The Descendants, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, The Help, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, The Tree of Life, and War Horse, there are several I have never even heard of, and most of them I have no idea what the plot is about nor do I care.
I’ll probably go to the theater to see the Hobbit when it comes out, but I sort of feel alienated from the whole Hollywood experience. If something is good, I’ll catch it on PPV, or I’ll just wait six months and watch it on Saturday night on HBO. I’m much more excited about the tv show Awake than I have been about any movie in a number of years.
My wife and my kids, 17 and 13 both love the series Weeds on Netflix. They’re really into it. Most people I know are really into it. Everybody loves this show. Critically acclaimed, and very popular when it was on, I just can’t seem to get interested in it. I can’t find it in me to care about these people.
I have watched and enjoyed shows with female protagonists before. I’ve enjoyed watching the lead actress in other things. I particularly liked her in West Wing. This show just doesn’t work for me.
American Idol never worked for me either. I never could get into it long enough to even hate it. Same with ‘Survivor.’ I’ve always been like “who gives a shit?” I remember when Survivor was first on TV. I went to Bosnia, and the task force that we were replacing was really into it. That show was about three weeks behind the US on Armed Forces Network. Most shows were a season or two back, but this one was only about a three or four weeks. The guys there knew it was over with, but they didn’t know the outcome yet, and they were all begging us to not tell them, and I was like “it was the naked gay guy. So what?”
I don’t watch a lot of TV, and most of what I do watch tends to not be on the popular side for the most part, being a bunch of shows on DIY network.. I am a trekkie (trekker if you must) as I’m sure you can all figure out. I LOVED Serenity and Firefly. I liked the NBC series ‘Life’ that had too short a life. Southland is pretty good on TNT. Burn Notice is worth watching, and I love Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, both of which I’ve been watching on Netflix. Mostly I watch shows like This Old House and the History Channel and History 2. The actual History shows, not the ones about space alien autopsies and so forth. Eureka and Warehouse 13 on SciFi (I flat refuse to call it the other name).
What do you guys like to watch, and what do the people around you love that you just can’t find the energy to care about?
Also, too, open thread.
This never gets old, and happens about once a year with always hilarious results. At any rate, the resident wingnut at the Telegraph has compiled the “top ten conservative movies of the modern era.” It’s always fun to see them twist their world view into a movie plot just to call it conservative. And don’t worry, of course the Lord of the Rings made the cut!
Make sure to catch the runner-ups, too. Apparently, all you need to do to be a conservative film is make a war flick. I must sadly report that the Palin biopic, The Undefeated, did not make the list. Neither did Atlas Shrugged.
As long as we’re talking movies…
...I do love Gen I’s year-in-film mash ups:
I hope to have something a little more depressing to post later in the day*—but not till after my (n)th meeting of the week (where “n” is sufficiently large number as to call into question the definition of time as nature’s way of making sure everything doesn’t happen at once).
But for now, enjoy—and consider this yet more thread to open your festering gobs within.
*as in, almost certainly, tomorrow.
Since DougJ started a Christmas music thread yesterday, how about Christmas movies today.
I don’t like any of them much, but I’ll watch It’s a Wonderful Life on occasion just to see the “what if George never existed” scenes. The only reason I like those is Jimmy Stewart. He made a lot of so-so movies, but I’ll be goddamed if anyone can do desperation better than him. When he’s rolling around Potterville getting ready to jump off that bridge, you can see that he dredged up something very scary from some dark place inside, and it adds a touch of reality to the melodrama. It’s all the more interesting because of the transition from an even-keeled regular guy into the suicidal, desperate figure we see in the “what if” segment.
Stewart is also great in Vertigo, of course, but in that movie his character is motivated by a fear of something most of us can tolerate (heights). For my money, the best desperate Stewart performance is in The Man Who Knew Too Much. Overall, kind of a corny movie, but there are a few minutes after his son is kidnapped where his whole world is falling apart, his wife is hysterical, and he’s essentially alone in the middle of Marrakesh. You can see that he’s barely holding it together. I have a hard time watching that movie because I find the mixture of Day’s hysteria, the loss of a child, and Stewart’s desperation a little too real. This still shot shows a bit of the flavor of that movie.
So I guess I like Wonderful Life because it reminds me of better performances in better movies. Maybe all Christmas movies are like that. Or are there some gems none of us know about?
Just watched a bit of Rounders, and it reminded me of back when I thought Ed Norton was just great. I still do, but h has not distinguished himself lately. Then I started to think, who are the greatest actors of the last ten years, and while there are a ton of people I like, I would have to say that Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Daniel Day Lewis are probably the two best. I asked DougJ, and without me mentioning Hoffman or Lewis, he mentioned Johnny Depp.
There are lots who I think are fun- I love almost everything Damon does, and I think probably one of the better performances from someone ever was Clooney in O Brother, but I think Hoffman and Lewis have chops the others do not.
You?
I really enjoyed our last movie thread, so I thought we’d try another. It comes to mind because there’s a documentary about Woody Allen on PBS tonight and because I read a great review of “Breathless” on Can’t Explain last night.
I know he’s an asshole but I loves me some Woodman. I grew up obsessively reading Pauline Kael and two of the first Pauline Kael-type movies I ever saw (I grew up in a town with one movie theater that only showed “Back to the Future” and stuff like that) were “Annie Hall” and “Broadway Danny Rose”. I loved them! I wanted to move to the Upper West Side and shop at Zabar’s and eat at the Carnegie Deli and talk to Diane Keaton-type women about literature. Of course, when I lived in New York, I learned that the Upper West Side was overrun with frat boy douches just like everywhere else and that Woody had never lived there at all anyway.
What are your favorite Woody Allen movies? I’ll go with Manhattan, then Crimes and Misdemeanors, then Take the Money and Run. Diane Keaton’s singing ruined Annie Hall a little bit for me in the end.
There are those who say we shouldn’t like Woody Allen because he married his step-daughter, so I’ll add some other topics into the mix. Apropos of “Breathless”, has any of you ever actually enjoyed a Godard movie? I have not. And finally: have you ever seen a truly obscure, only-in-a-film-festival type movie that you liked a lot but that most people here might not have heard of? I used to see a lot of those types of movies, and mostly I wasn’t that keen on them, but I once saw a Korean movie called “Murmur of Youth” that is one of my favorite movies ever.
The lost footage of Blue Velvet, including a scene with flaming nipples, has been found. Fifty minutes of outtakes assembled by David Lynch will be released with the 25th anniversary DVD of the film. Blue Velvet is exactly 120 minutes long because Lynch’s contract with producer Dino De Laurentiis specified that the movie couldn’t run longer than two hours. Lynch’s original cut ran around four hours, so a lot of material was left on the cutting room floor.
Blue Velvet is one of my all-time favorite movies, and I’m eager to see the outtakes, not because I think they would have made a better movie, but instead to confirm one of my prejudices about Lynch and editing in general. My take is that, without the two hour limit, Lynch would have indulged himself in the style of the later episodes of Twin Peaks or the second part of Mulholland Drive. The discipline imposed by De Laurentiis forced Lynch to concentrate on the less fun but arguably more important task of finding the essential core of the narrative and characters portrayed in Blue Velvet.
In general, I think the world is in need of many fewer sprawling epics, and many more works of art where the creator has spent time trimming, pruning and refining. My guess is that the outtakes will show that Blue Velvet is the best David Lynch film because of the two hour limit, not in spite of it.
Can’t Explain has review of one of my favorite movies of all-time, Sunset Boulevard. I saw it at the Castro in San Francisco in the 90s in a double feature with “In A Lonely Place”. That was the most fun I’ve ever had at the movies, partly because I like the movies so much (“In A Lonely Place” I only like in a campy way), partly because it was such a great audience. I wouldn’t have understood half the things they applauded (like Buster Keaton’s cameo) had my hard-core film friend not explained it all to me.
What’s your best movie-going experience ever?
I feel like someone has mentioned this before in the comments or front page, but this movie sounds very interesting (though what doesn’t when James Wolcott is writing about it?):
Some have said that Margin Call is the movie Wall Streeters need to see to understand why the Occupy Wall Street movement has taken hold, to understand the damage they’ve done. It’s a noble sentiment, but pointless. Wall Streeters at the apex understand what’s happened since 2008, even if they haven’t personally suffered; it’s not that they can’t see, but that they don’t care. And it’s quixotic to expect them to. It’s like expecting those at a high-stakes poker game to care about the poor schmuck losing everything at roulette or the one-armed bandits somewhere else in the casino. Guys (and occasionally gals) like these only care about the others at the table; those are the stakes and the opponents that matter to them. The Average Person doesn’t register. That’s why reform has to come through rules, regulation, and reform rather than appeals to conscience, civic duty, economic justice. Crash after crash after avaricious crash is built into the binge-and-purge organism of investment capitalism, as Jeremy Irons points out while having a lordly breakfast at his little table with the panoramic skyline view of morning Manhattan lying before him. He isn’t engaging in Gordon Gekko grandstanding. The mood of Margin Call is too melancholy for that. From its opening frame, it has the gravity of a funeral for a death that hasn’t yet happened, the suspended pause before the long drop down.
Also too, open thread.
I suppose one way to keep yourself occupied instead of doing actual reporting is to spend all of your time discussing the people who aren’t running for President:
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has decided not to seek the presidency, according to two associates.Mr. Christie is scheduled to announce his decision at a news conference in the state capital at 1 p.m. But one adviser to the governor and another person who spoke to him directly said Tuesday morning that the governor would not pursue the Republican nomination.
The decision ends a late flurry of indecision on the part of Mr. Christie, who had been encouraged by a growing number of Republican donors and activists who had hoped he would add his name to the field of candidates vying to challenge President Obama.
But Mr. Christie, who was elected governor in 2009, had long said that he did not feel ready to pursue the presidency. At one point, he joked that he would have to commit suicide to convince people he was not running.
I guess this means we will go back to the Palin infatuation, who, as we know, is also not running.
Speaking of Palin, I had insomnia last night so I watched a movie called Confidence
So after our movie thread last night, I broke down and got Bridesmaids on PPV. It was mildly amusing, and I guess I never noticed that Kristen Wiig has a killer set of legs. At any rate, there was one scene where she was caught driving like an idiot and forced to do a dui test. If you’ve seen the movie, you know what I am talking about. At any rate, the moment I saw it, I recognized it as a direct rip-off of this:
And I’m sure that was stolen from someone else. Tonight’s movie fun- name two movie scenes that you think the second is a direct rip-off of the former. Just to keep things honest, we’ll just ignore Quentin Tarantino’s entire body of work.
I was thinking today what my favorite comedic movie scene of all time is. I’m sure I am forgetting a lot of them, but right now, these two are at the top of my list. The first made me think of the second:
Prolly the Nicholson.
There is also this classic scene from the Wire (not really a movie, though):
I still think Bunk has the greatest voice of all time. Better than James Earl Jones, even.
What scenes do you all love?
