I like the lists in this thread. Also the part where people were freaking out about ruining the thread. Also, one of you guys (King of all Cosmos) posted a list of movies I never would have listed. That was cool.
Some of these classics, like Jaws (7), are like, "Geez, I've seen this a bunch of times, but yeah, it's probably been +10 years since I watched the whole thing. Maybe I need a refresher to get that energy back into my life."
This is what people do right? Maybe I should build my refreshment plan.
I watched this very recently (within the past 2 months) and found it AMAZING. It's wonderful and good, not cheesy at all. Totally fucking brutal and strange and awful and gorgeous and so sad. Great use of the Annoying Malick Voiceover Style that is so unbearable in Tree of Life.
As for Bogie, yeah, he's a weird figure. I think it's partially because it was more acceptable for men to be weird looking in film-noir, although maybe I am just making that up. But in noir the detective is supposed to be haggard and alcoholic and miserable and look like he's been up for four days eating tuna out of the can.
Although I don't know the chronology of his films. What's his first film? It might not have been noir that made him famous. I just looked at imdb and he was in like 34 movies before there's even a single title I recognize ("High Sierra"). Was his first big hit The Maltese Falcon? If so then yes, he made his mark as a noir detective, so maybe once America loved him in that role they were willing to buy him in traditional love-object roles?? I really don't know. He is so weird looking, like a little gremlin. Like somebody's grandpa whose pants are pulled up all the way to their ribcage.
I'm always amazed by how wet and disgusting Bogie's mouth is. It's always shiny and wet and droopy, and to think he smoked, what, 400 cigarettes a day? And 17-year-old Lauran Bacall FRENCH KISSED THAT MOUTH! Astonishing
One of my favorite directors of all time is Nicole Holofcener.
It's amazing how few female directors there are, though, still. Honestly. You know another thing I recently realized? Have you EVER IN YOUR LIFE seen a female commercial airline pilot? Because I haven't
You know it's because there's some piece of paper somewhere that shows that "studies show" passengers feel safer with a man running the show
I must take issue with your characterization of Sofia Coppola. To me (YMMV) she is super NOT legit. Virgin Suicides aside (a whole other kettle of fish) every movie seems like Poor Little Rich Girl's Life is SO HARD, choose yr century edition. I love Lance Accord's work (her DP), but every time I watch one of her movies I get INFURIATED. It's like a giant parade of privilege. "OOOH, I'm so daring and edgy because I put some converse in the frame and licensed this Gang Of Four song". This harsh takedown sums up a lot(though not all) of my feelings: http://www.vice.com/read/the-brutality-report-the-career-of-sofia-coppola
I love Nicole Holofcener, Tamara Davis, Agnes Varda, Maya Deren, Trinh T Minh Ha (SOOOO LEGIT), Melodie McDaniel, Mary Harron (!!! American Psycho is hilarious and amazing), Lisa Cholodenko, Ida Lupino, Mira Nair.
Upthread re:film class week 5-7 clusterfuck, maybe Rashomon and then the movies inspired by/ripping off of it? Or also a classic film noir then Blood Simple?
I just got the two Nolan directed batman movies at my house on BluRay. Gonna watch them Saturday morning in my PJ's while eating cereal and taking breaks to play video games and drink coffee.
I didn't see it until I was "older" and I don't find it to be cheesy. It's so beautiful. I watched it on a laptop ( I know!) and re-played so many scenes and screencapped so many weird things because I was having such a profound reaction to/relationship with it.
I really disagree with this characterization of Coppola, although I respect you deeply and I appreciate a spirited feminist debate so lets have one!!!!!
First of all it's a total double-edged sword--we make art about what we know/are interested in, and Coppola can't help who she is. If she made a film about suffering in Africa everybody would be like "oh yeah what's THIS poor little rich girl know about SUFFERING!" She can't win. Lots of people make films about rich people--why is it SO BAD when Coppola does this? Or like, what else is she supposed to do? Just be a Paris Hilton with her life?
I also feel like this classic criticism of her as a Poor Little Rich Girl totally sidesteps the issues of aesthetics, etc., i.e. WHAT ARE HER FILMS ACTUALLY LIKE, AS FILMS. Why do we criticize women so much for not making socially conscious movies while we don't hold men to the same standards? Nobody on here that I have seen has ever expressed this same kind of disgust for a, say, Wes Anderson, even though the two are totally comparable in these terms. But with Anderson we talk about aesthetics, and with coppola we just criticize her lack of social conscience, and I think that's unfair. Also Virgin Suicides is not that different--it's still just about privileged girls suffering malaise.
Her movies are beautiful and well made and interesting (to me). They are also characteristic--they aren't derivative. She has her own vision, which is amazing especially coming in her father's crazy footsteps. And yes they're about privilege, but aren't directors allowed to make autobiographical shit? Everybody does this. Directors, writers, whatever. Agnes Varda puts herself in ALL her films to a major degree but because she's cool and french and leftist it's okay, and because Coppola is rich it's not? I also am always going to rep for a woman making movies that are about the internal lives of women, which almost no one does, and which Coppola does extremely well. So they're rich women--it still counts.
Nicole Holofcener only makes movies about rich women too. They are more critical/questioning (although I'd argue that a movie like Lost in Translation is actually subtly pretty questioning of that same sort of privileged malaise) but still it's just people talking about paying $10,000 for a couch. Ultimate White People Problems Movies.
Totally badass list of ladies though Ed!!!!! I love Varda so much.
Gary and I would also add to the lady list:
Claire Denis!!! Kelly Reichardt (except for Old Joy, what a piece of shit) Chantal Akerman Can not second Agnes Varda hard enough Julie Dash Bette Gordon's "Variety" Ulrike Ottinger Lena Vertmüller Shirley Clark Marie Menken Germaine Dulac in the 20's Leni Riefenstahl! WHY NOT?
Here's another one: Catherine Breillat! What a weirdo!
lets stop acting like every time a woman makes a movie it's the first time it's ever happened! I am guilty of this too and I pledge to stop. Women have been making rad movies forever!!!!!!!!
Oh YT! I love a feminist argument! And real talk! I will have to corral my thoughts more distinctly but TRUST ME I have the same issues with Wes Anderson as I do with SC.
And HELLZ YEAH women have been making rad movies forever.
If one has the same problems with W. Anderson as with S. Coppola then I stand aside for that seems fair enough. If you just want rich people to not make movies about rich people, regardless of gender. Or just find it annoying. FAIR ENOUGH!
I love Wes Anderson
I just bought so much stuff at Goodwill, I feel like a freak!
I'm not against rich people making movies about their rich people lives, S. Coppola's feel SO EMPTY though. Like, all surface (aesthetics), little to no substance? As opposed to N Holocfener, which are ladies talking talking talking about their issues.
I know! She's on her way here now. I'm gonna ask her her feelings on S. Coppola, I believe this has never been covered in our correspondence.
I could see the "all surface no depth" criticism and I think that's probably largely a matter of personal taste, like what happens to spark your own deep thoughts, which for me S. Coppola does but I can totally imagine NOT
Holofcener is so good!!!!! I fucking love her and want everyone to watch all of her movies. Please Give is so good!!!!!!!!!!!!
Anyone whose muse is Catherine Keener is obviously doing something right
SCoppola has that Marie Antoinette movie with the Gang of Four playing beneath the opening credits. I have never seen this film in its entirety but I have watched the first 45 minutes or so about 30 times. This is not an exaggeration. I started showing the first half of this movie to Josephine as a bedtime movie when she was about 3.
It seemed perfect. The sets and costumes are amazing. Western Civ. There is a puppy. A girl is the center of attention. Her relationships are complex. Subtle gestures are total, there is almost no dialogue. There is a rich taxonomy of social classes amid the clownish chatter of privileged freaks. I loved watching this with my girl instead of Dora the Explora.
At a certain point the story turns. There is more about Marie and her buds drinking, eating cake and failing to procreate, and less just floating around Versailles. That's when I would switch it off. Also, I wanted to steer clear of any head chopping.
One of these days, I suppose I'll find out what happens in the second half of that movie.
...
Today Josie and I walked down Sixth Avenue to the 16-plex and plunked down 31 bones for admission to Scorcese's Hugo, a large and a small pair of 3d glasses, and a medium-sized bag of day old buttered popcorn. We were pretty excited having both a splurge and a lark. After a dozen ads and previews (quite the steaming pile of semiotics in itself) we were introduced to a mystical, CGI enhanced, fantasia set on Paris in the twenties that was in fact a richly imagined homage to Georges Melies and the modernist spiritualism of cinematic art. It was schmaltzy as hell, but I'm a soft touch, so I went with it, spilling tears down my cheeks at appropriate intervals. A most Spielberg-ish Scorcese, I'm thinking like AI. In fact, Jude Law makes a brief appearance, seeming to force the comparision.
So yes I had a good time being held in the hands of a master and his team, but no I wouldn't insist that anybody else partake. My objective was to give Josie a special experience with the art form before it disappears. It's not like she had never been to a movie before, but with a current release from one of the great directors intentionally targeting family audiences for a meditation on big themes: I had my hopes up. I trusted Scorcese to do something constructive while he meddled with her mind and he didn't let me down.
I just remembered the real reason why I was so pleased with my discovery of Marie Antionette!
Some day some of y'all might find out, but with the little girls in this modern world there is just no getting past the mincing parasitic gender horror that is the Disney Princess franchise. There is no escaping it. You just have to decide where you can make a truce with it before it destroys you. Coppola's movie seemed to give me a way to 'get it at the source' and complicate it with some rich, articulate, more or less historically-grounded social gestures.
I don't know if it really made any difference but it was also cool to see Josie bop along with Gang of Four.
I think that's a big part of why I love Oscar Micheaux, because he made movies about working & middle class BLACK PEOPLE way back in the 1920s & 30s when they were invisible except for in servant or entertainer roles. He wrote, directed, and produced them, then drove around the country screening them.
Micheaux looks like a treasure, thank you! And, of course I was being kind of hyperbolic. There are quite a number of working-class auteurs that have made their mark. It's an interesting consideration though, dontcha think?
Though I was cheering for Marie's head to get cut off by the end of the film (not shown, don't worry), I loved reading about how you used the movie as a disney princess antidote. This is totally a personal taste thing, when I watched it I was yelling at the screen "Show me the people who make the wigs! All this amazing food that no one eats, take that camera downstairs to show me the people cooking and assembling it!"
...which was surely due to Gangs of New York's swoopy means-of-production approach. I loved GoNY! And Yours Truly hated it, and we think very highly of each other, and that is just one example of why UHX rules.
(ps Oscar Micheaux is deeply awesome but his aesthetics are not great, IMO)
Yesterday I caught a double feature at the Foxy: "Drive" followed by "The Skin I Live In."
DRIVE is a great trash-fest. The star has this Scorpio Rising wardrobe and he lives in a world where the only music is Glass Candy, Chromatics, and Desire. He doesn't speak much, but he talks with his jaw muscles and sapphire gaze. As for the plot... let's just say that my favorite part was when he casually pulled the hammer from his sleeve.
THE SKIN I LIVE IN is a solid Almodovar thriller. My brains were getting my earrings soggy by the time all was said and done (that's a good thing, right???). It's a Frankenstein story, fabulous scientist-surgeon and his flameproof creation. The tale really takes you for a ride in its telling, but somehow the style was very spare and elegant. It's a small cast, the setting is isolated from the city. People speak pretty quietly and the music manipulates you unobtrusively. The palette is quiet, too, charcoal, tan, grays from cool to warm, not a lot of color. The graphic elements that I come to expect from Almodovar were present most of all when illustrating the surgical aspects of the story. The body divided up into sections, but mechanical rather than organic. And you know how the director always has cool meta film making switches, well in this movie it takes the form of lovely grainy surveillance TVs.
My favorite part of the movie was how he would send to his prisoner art books along with her breakfasts.
A movie coming out in November 2012 that I am super excited about........ THE CLASSIC TALE OF THE 47 RONIN STARRING TED FROM BILL AND TED'S BOGUS JOURNEY!!!!
HE is going to look so damned dignified and heroic while committing seppuku! I hope they show it in its full glory, unlike Marie Antoinette's movie. Surely cherry blossoms will rain on him as he draws the blade with a purposive grunt, close-up to his face with his mouth in a hard line of pure satisfaction.
Oh, and the screenplay is by Hossein Amini, who made the screenplay for Drive! This makes me think that 47 Ronin will be somewhat understated. I read an interview with Amini where he said he strives to write so that actors have to communicate through the subtext and nonverbally, with their bodies and being. That sounds like Keanu, all right, who we all know to be a deep, sensitive genius without having any words to prove it by.
Saw this great movie on Hulu: The Babysitter, 1969. Black and white, Los Angeles. Respectable man starts affair with hippie babysitter. We're on his side cuz his wife's a harridan. The babysitter's name is Candy and is she ever sweet. Then excitement comes in the form of a motorcycle gang and some blackmail. The blackmail regards specifically some scenes involving the gentleman's daughter and her female darling, which are shot on the tasteful side of exploitation. There are also some great funky pop songs that seem like they were original to the movie. So anyways, back to the story, the guy spends a couple weeks of bliss with Candy before the jig is up. All the while, these scenes are intercut with his memories of happy days spent with his wife. It's weirdly way more complex regarding infidelity than it needs to be. Then he acts heroically by successfully prosecuting one of the bikers even though it will mean the end of his personal and professional life. There is a great scene where Candy shows up at the biker lady's house to get the blackmail negatives (not of the daughter, but of her and the married guy canoodling in Malibu). But everything is going to turn out just fine. The guy's boss gets the blackmail pictures and he's like "you're not fired, just let me keep this one, heh heh" and then he goes home and his wife received her set of the blackmail pictures in the mail. Then she's like "oh you poor man, I won't make you go to Bridge anymore." I guess it about an old square guy getting a bit of redemption via the hippies. This is a movie that Marcus will like... you should watch it!
Comments
Some of these classics, like Jaws (7), are like, "Geez, I've seen this a bunch of times, but yeah, it's probably been +10 years since I watched the whole thing. Maybe I need a refresher to get that energy back into my life."
This is what people do right? Maybe I should build my refreshment plan.
The Thin Red Line. I don't think I've seen it.
Watch it again! It's really good!
Although I don't know the chronology of his films. What's his first film? It might not have been noir that made him famous. I just looked at imdb and he was in like 34 movies before there's even a single title I recognize ("High Sierra"). Was his first big hit The Maltese Falcon? If so then yes, he made his mark as a noir detective, so maybe once America loved him in that role they were willing to buy him in traditional love-object roles?? I really don't know. He is so weird looking, like a little gremlin. Like somebody's grandpa whose pants are pulled up all the way to their ribcage.
I'm always amazed by how wet and disgusting Bogie's mouth is. It's always shiny and wet and droopy, and to think he smoked, what, 400 cigarettes a day? And 17-year-old Lauran Bacall FRENCH KISSED THAT MOUTH! Astonishing
But I just wanted to say Kathryn Bigelow is a lady that has made some classic movies. I like when it's not just some dude running the show.
Bigelow is legit.
Sofia Coppola is also incredibly legit.
One of my favorite directors of all time is Nicole Holofcener.
It's amazing how few female directors there are, though, still. Honestly. You know another thing I recently realized? Have you EVER IN YOUR LIFE seen a female commercial airline pilot? Because I haven't
You know it's because there's some piece of paper somewhere that shows that "studies show" passengers feel safer with a man running the show
2) Shopping vid
3) Car vids
4) Latest Vids (comp)
5) ?
I never thought about the female pilot thing before. Honestly, I don't think I've seen that many non-white pilots either. Weird.
RJ, watch Thin Red Line. A poetic soul like yours will like it.
I must take issue with your characterization of Sofia Coppola. To me (YMMV) she is super NOT legit. Virgin Suicides aside (a whole other kettle of fish) every movie seems like Poor Little Rich Girl's Life is SO HARD, choose yr century edition. I love Lance Accord's work (her DP), but every time I watch one of her movies I get INFURIATED. It's like a giant parade of privilege. "OOOH, I'm so daring and edgy because I put some converse in the frame and licensed this Gang Of Four song". This harsh takedown sums up a lot(though not all) of my feelings: http://www.vice.com/read/the-brutality-report-the-career-of-sofia-coppola
I love Nicole Holofcener, Tamara Davis, Agnes Varda, Maya Deren, Trinh T Minh Ha (SOOOO LEGIT), Melodie McDaniel, Mary Harron (!!! American Psycho is hilarious and amazing), Lisa Cholodenko, Ida Lupino, Mira Nair.
Upthread re:film class week 5-7 clusterfuck, maybe Rashomon and then the movies inspired by/ripping off of it? Or also a classic film noir then Blood Simple?
Here's a pretty good one.
I didn't see it until I was "older" and I don't find it to be cheesy. It's so beautiful.
I watched it on a laptop ( I know!) and re-played so many scenes and screencapped so many weird things because I was having such a profound reaction to/relationship with it.
<3
First of all it's a total double-edged sword--we make art about what we know/are interested in, and Coppola can't help who she is. If she made a film about suffering in Africa everybody would be like "oh yeah what's THIS poor little rich girl know about SUFFERING!" She can't win. Lots of people make films about rich people--why is it SO BAD when Coppola does this? Or like, what else is she supposed to do? Just be a Paris Hilton with her life?
I also feel like this classic criticism of her as a Poor Little Rich Girl totally sidesteps the issues of aesthetics, etc., i.e. WHAT ARE HER FILMS ACTUALLY LIKE, AS FILMS. Why do we criticize women so much for not making socially conscious movies while we don't hold men to the same standards? Nobody on here that I have seen has ever expressed this same kind of disgust for a, say, Wes Anderson, even though the two are totally comparable in these terms. But with Anderson we talk about aesthetics, and with coppola we just criticize her lack of social conscience, and I think that's unfair. Also Virgin Suicides is not that different--it's still just about privileged girls suffering malaise.
Her movies are beautiful and well made and interesting (to me). They are also characteristic--they aren't derivative. She has her own vision, which is amazing especially coming in her father's crazy footsteps. And yes they're about privilege, but aren't directors allowed to make autobiographical shit? Everybody does this. Directors, writers, whatever. Agnes Varda puts herself in ALL her films to a major degree but because she's cool and french and leftist it's okay, and because Coppola is rich it's not? I also am always going to rep for a woman making movies that are about the internal lives of women, which almost no one does, and which Coppola does extremely well. So they're rich women--it still counts.
Nicole Holofcener only makes movies about rich women too. They are more critical/questioning (although I'd argue that a movie like Lost in Translation is actually subtly pretty questioning of that same sort of privileged malaise) but still it's just people talking about paying $10,000 for a couch. Ultimate White People Problems Movies.
Totally badass list of ladies though Ed!!!!! I love Varda so much.
Gary and I would also add to the lady list:
Claire Denis!!!
Kelly Reichardt (except for Old Joy, what a piece of shit)
Chantal Akerman
Can not second Agnes Varda hard enough
Julie Dash
Bette Gordon's "Variety"
Ulrike Ottinger
Lena Vertmüller
Shirley Clark
Marie Menken
Germaine Dulac in the 20's
Leni Riefenstahl! WHY NOT?
REAL TALK
FEMINIST ARGUMENTS
Here's another one: Catherine Breillat! What a weirdo!
lets stop acting like every time a woman makes a movie it's the first time it's ever happened! I am guilty of this too and I pledge to stop. Women have been making rad movies forever!!!!!!!!
And HELLZ YEAH women have been making rad movies forever.
I love Wes Anderson
I just bought so much stuff at Goodwill, I feel like a freak!
Penny Marshall
I'm gonna ask her her feelings on S. Coppola, I believe this has never been covered in our correspondence.
I could see the "all surface no depth" criticism and I think that's probably largely a matter of personal taste, like what happens to spark your own deep thoughts, which for me S. Coppola does but I can totally imagine NOT
Holofcener is so good!!!!! I fucking love her and want everyone to watch all of her movies. Please Give is so good!!!!!!!!!!!!
Anyone whose muse is Catherine Keener is obviously doing something right
I think a lot of people have slept on this movie, but every shot in it is perfect, every line is perfect, "THE CHEMICALS."
"How do you tell an eight year old that he can't go to Chunk E Cheese? He can't go to Showbiz?"
It could be like Mystery Science Theater but probably not sci-fi and just two really funny ladies!!!!!!
*i'd watch that
SCoppola has that Marie Antoinette movie with the Gang of Four playing beneath the opening credits. I have never seen this film in its entirety but I have watched the first 45 minutes or so about 30 times. This is not an exaggeration. I started showing the first half of this movie to Josephine as a bedtime movie when she was about 3.
It seemed perfect. The sets and costumes are amazing. Western Civ. There is a puppy. A girl is the center of attention. Her relationships are complex. Subtle gestures are total, there is almost no dialogue. There is a rich taxonomy of social classes amid the clownish chatter of privileged freaks. I loved watching this with my girl instead of Dora the Explora.
At a certain point the story turns. There is more about Marie and her buds drinking, eating cake and failing to procreate, and less just floating around Versailles. That's when I would switch it off. Also, I wanted to steer clear of any head chopping.
One of these days, I suppose I'll find out what happens in the second half of that movie.
...
Today Josie and I walked down Sixth Avenue to the 16-plex and plunked down 31 bones for admission to Scorcese's Hugo, a large and a small pair of 3d glasses, and a medium-sized bag of day old buttered popcorn. We were pretty excited having both a splurge and a lark. After a dozen ads and previews (quite the steaming pile of semiotics in itself) we were introduced to a mystical, CGI enhanced, fantasia set on Paris in the twenties that was in fact a richly imagined homage to Georges Melies and the modernist spiritualism of cinematic art. It was schmaltzy as hell, but I'm a soft touch, so I went with it, spilling tears down my cheeks at appropriate intervals. A most Spielberg-ish Scorcese, I'm thinking like AI. In fact, Jude Law makes a brief appearance, seeming to force the comparision.
So yes I had a good time being held in the hands of a master and his team, but no I wouldn't insist that anybody else partake. My objective was to give Josie a special experience with the art form before it disappears. It's not like she had never been to a movie before, but with a current release from one of the great directors intentionally targeting family audiences for a meditation on big themes: I had my hopes up. I trusted Scorcese to do something constructive while he meddled with her mind and he didn't let me down.
(Also there is no choppity-chop in Marie Antoinette, for the record, it ends on the way to Paris after the mob kidnaps them)
Some day some of y'all might find out, but with the little girls in this modern world there is just no getting past the mincing parasitic gender horror that is the Disney Princess franchise. There is no escaping it. You just have to decide where you can make a truce with it before it destroys you. Coppola's movie seemed to give me a way to 'get it at the source' and complicate it with some rich, articulate, more or less historically-grounded social gestures.
I don't know if it really made any difference but it was also cool to see Josie bop along with Gang of Four.
So... who are the great poor film directors that have made iconic films about their class?
Kind of a non-starter, isn't it? Cinema has always been a big capital enterprise (at least until the arrival of desktop video).
I s'pose a case can be made about some products of exploitation genres: Horror, etc. That's part of the charm of NOTLD, isn't it?
"We are all zombies now."
O.G. D.I.Y.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Micheaux
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Micheaux looks like a treasure, thank you! And, of course I was being kind of hyperbolic. There are quite a number of working-class auteurs that have made their mark. It's an interesting consideration though, dontcha think?
xxxooo!
Though I was cheering for Marie's head to get cut off by the end of the film (not shown, don't worry), I loved reading about how you used the movie as a disney princess antidote. This is totally a personal taste thing, when I watched it I was yelling at the screen "Show me the people who make the wigs! All this amazing food that no one eats, take that camera downstairs to show me the people cooking and assembling it!"
...which was surely due to Gangs of New York's swoopy means-of-production approach. I loved GoNY! And Yours Truly hated it, and we think very highly of each other, and that is just one example of why UHX rules.
(ps Oscar Micheaux is deeply awesome but his aesthetics are not great, IMO)
+ My favorite part (besides the logic of Burton's Gotham City) was when the Joker had an entertainment empire with logos/swag.
*(Well, OK then.... West.)
What happened yesterday?
My dad said I had a surprise. And I didn't know what it was. And it was a movie called Hugo. And we had popcorn and a molasses cookie. The end.
Did you like the movie?
Yes.
Why?
I'm not telling you.
What was your favorite part?
When the stationmaster was working on his smile.
Did you like any other parts?
Yes.
Like what?
When he met Isabelle.
Would you recommend this movie to your friends?
Yes.
Did it make you think about anything special?
No.
Did you learn anything about anything?
No. Bye.
Just one more thing. Do you want to live in a tower with clocks?
Yes.
DRIVE is a great trash-fest. The star has this Scorpio Rising wardrobe and he lives in a world where the only music is Glass Candy, Chromatics, and Desire. He doesn't speak much, but he talks with his jaw muscles and sapphire gaze. As for the plot... let's just say that my favorite part was when he casually pulled the hammer from his sleeve.
THE SKIN I LIVE IN is a solid Almodovar thriller. My brains were getting my earrings soggy by the time all was said and done (that's a good thing, right???). It's a Frankenstein story, fabulous scientist-surgeon and his flameproof creation. The tale really takes you for a ride in its telling, but somehow the style was very spare and elegant. It's a small cast, the setting is isolated from the city. People speak pretty quietly and the music manipulates you unobtrusively. The palette is quiet, too, charcoal, tan, grays from cool to warm, not a lot of color. The graphic elements that I come to expect from Almodovar were present most of all when illustrating the surgical aspects of the story. The body divided up into sections, but mechanical rather than organic. And you know how the director always has cool meta film making switches, well in this movie it takes the form of lovely grainy surveillance TVs.
My favorite part of the movie was how he would send to his prisoner art books along with her breakfasts.
LooseThread, this sounds like a dream date- can we crash some movies soon?
I couldn't be more in love with the movies than if they were real life.
THE CLASSIC TALE OF THE 47 RONIN STARRING TED FROM BILL AND TED'S BOGUS JOURNEY!!!!
HE is going to look so damned dignified and heroic while committing seppuku! I hope they show it in its full glory, unlike Marie Antoinette's movie. Surely cherry blossoms will rain on him as he draws the blade with a purposive grunt, close-up to his face with his mouth in a hard line of pure satisfaction.
Oh, and the screenplay is by Hossein Amini, who made the screenplay for Drive! This makes me think that 47 Ronin will be somewhat understated. I read an interview with Amini where he said he strives to write so that actors have to communicate through the subtext and nonverbally, with their bodies and being. That sounds like Keanu, all right, who we all know to be a deep, sensitive genius without having any words to prove it by.