Film/Movies Thread
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Kane is at least an odd film.
But then all of Welles’ films are odd.
Without their oddity, they are not compelling.
Welles said his movies are not about what characters say, or the plot.
They are about cinematic experience.
His persisting value is that he set the standard in a couple of his movies for telling the entirety of the story cinematically. No other popular director, except perhaps, Stan Kubrick, or Disney in Fantasia, has ever come close to telling even one film entirely cinematically.
In Citizen Kane there are many scenes where you think you are listening to exposition and conventional plotting but what you are looking at is taking off into the purely cinematic realm of story told through motion, varying depths of focus, modulated lighting in real time, etc.
I believe almost everyone goes through a phase of saying Welles and CK are not quite as important and brilliant as they once appeared to be. But at some point, when one begins to recognize the cinematic lapses and flawed decents into mundane narrative exposition in other great films, one goes back and watches CK and says to one’s self: OH. MY. GOD. He did it for a whole movie? Its insane. It something on the scale of Shakespeare sustaining his language for the entirety of Hamlet, or King Lear.
Alas, Welles was a transitional figure in movies that like Charlie Chaplin got caught straddling two eras and two political periods. When he came to Hollywood, the studio system and the drive to make many films and make some great ones still was functioning and a priority. Uncle Sam and the eastern financial underworld still wanted to fill America and the world with American optimism and values through film. Wholesome propaganda to get us ready for going around the world kicking ass and spreading our empire. By the end of his Hollywood years Uncle Sam and the eastern financial underworld had decided that Hollywood was too powerful and crucial to be left in diversified control. So all the mavericks like Bill Hearst, and Joe Kennedy were forced out by the Lookout Mountain Laboratory crowd and the eastern financial underworld, along with all the New Dealers, Communists and Bellamy clubbing national socialists. It was a huge wake clearing that went way beyond Communist witch hunt. Everyone not directly connected to Uncle and the producer oligopoly was run.The idea was to reduce Hollywood to a producer oligopoly subsidized by Uncle Sam’s propaganda agenda for the post WWII era. Great artists like John Ford were literally forced to make propaganda westerns as brilliantly as they could.
Welles made the mistake of wearing his New Deal Heart on his sleeve; that was why he made CK in my opinion. It was really not his style of story. But he appeared to have been encouraged to take Hearst on for the New Dealers and the New Dealers were supposed to protect him. But instead, Uncle, taken over by the National Security state crowd from Yale decided to clear their wakes of the New Dealers. Thus Welle’s couldn’t work for them and he couldn’t work for either Hearst, or Kennedy, because he was a New Dealer. He tried a couple of post war efforts, but each one was taken from him and butchered. He needed also needed sound stages and sizable budgets to stay cinematic. The big money was weaning Hollywood off sound stages and big budgets. TV took westerns. Noir and Horror took the low budget production monies. Welles went to Europe and made proto indie films. .What happened to Welles as he peaked in talent and early experience is analogous to what has happened to Self in college basketball. By the time he peaked and was ready to dominate, the system began denying him the players one would have to have to compete with elite schools being given the long stacks. Welles and Self made some great products based on their hamstrung resources. But neither guy was ever going to be allowed to fulfill his promise.
Welles was the greatest cinematic genius of talking films, IMHO, until Kubrick and Kubrick may hit a slump in appreciation.also. One shot in The Stranger of Welles playing chess and the clock tower out the window in reflection is incomparably brilliant and almost a throw off. Welles seemed unable NOT to tell stories cinematically. Kubrick kept two movies cinematic start to finish: 2001 and Clockwork. Welles did it with CK, Ambersons, and most of Touch of Evil. Both Welles and Kubrick appear to have made some compromises with Uncle Sam to get their budgets political permission from the National Security complex.
But Welles only matters if you value cinematic story telling as the highest accomplishment of movies.Many others have made far better stories. John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, The Asphalt Jungle, and The African Queen dwarf anything Welles did narratively. But Huston never tried to be particularly cinematic.
Regarding Sword of Doom, I am mightily respectful of samurai and sword movies skill in making, but except for some of Kurosawa’s movies they just don’t stay with me. But oh how I love Toshiro Minfune in anything.
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@BShark I have always been a big fan of Bogart, Casablanca being my favorite. I enjoy some current films but I find excessive CGI a turnoff and a poor substitute for good story telling and writing. I realize I sound like and old fool.
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Barney said:
@BShark I have always been a big fan of Bogart, Casablanca being my favorite. I enjoy some current films but I find excessive CGI a turnoff and a poor substitute for good story telling and writing. I realize I sound like and old fool.
Not at all. So many modern films are style over substance imo. I am also a fan of using practical effects over CG.
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@jaybate-1-0 Thank you for the recommendations. Out of the Past was excellent.
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@Barney “I find excessive CGI a turnoff and a poor substitute for good story telling and writing. I realize I sound like an old fool.”
They also have taken to burying the dialogue in overwhelming music and blaring sound (I wish we had close captioning at the theater sometimes). Ridley Scott did it as an innovative sound technique by making conversations just barely audible against the background ship noises to enhance the anxiety level in Alien, but now they do it because they can’t write worth crap.
I guess there are lots of us old fools around!
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My top 5 favorite movies:
- Pulp Fiction
- Fight Club
- Shawshank Redemption
- Princess Bride
- Matrix (inspite of Keanu) bullet time is still pretty darn cool
Next five:
- Patton
- Deadpool
- A Christmas Story
- Back to the Future (I’ll watch this anytime it’s on)
- Ghostbusters
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Yeah the first Matrix movie is a really good flick.
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My top 5 superhero movies:
- Batman (with Keaton)
- The Dark Knight
- Iron Man
- Captain America: The Winter Soldier
- Avengers
Deadpool would be #1 for me but was on my top movies list.
Top 5 Vampire movies:
- From Dusk till Dawn
- Interview with a Vampire
- Nosferatu
- Daybreakers
That’s all I’ve got. I was tricked into reading the first Twilight on a fligh. Worst written book I’ve ever spent more than 10 minutes with…so Twilight not so much. Glitter vampires, ‘nuff said.
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You don’t like the terrible Dracula movie from the 90s?
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Sharing that movie with anyone is a privilege. Glad you liked it. It inspired Roger Ebert to write a famous criticism of it in which he said the characters dueled by smoking at each other, or something vaguely like that!!
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@jaybate-1.0 That’s funny.
I have some others you recommended that I haven’t seen yet on my short list.
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Idk if I could come up a top 10, lol I’ll try.
- The Green Mile
- Good Will Hunting
- Shawshank Redemption
- Blue Chips
- Baseketball
- Uncle Buck
- Planes, Trains and Automobiles
- The Dark Knight
- Wyatt Earp
- Man on Fire
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kjayhawks said:
Idk if I could come up a top 10, lol I’ll try. 5. Baseketball
I’m dyyyyying.
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@BShark I know it wasn’t popular but I love it, I think it’s one of the funniest movies I’ve seen.
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@kjayhawks It’s one of those movies that critics are going to hate but yeah it’s funny and just a good time.
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Top 5 basketball movies (not including Blue Chips)
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Hoosiers
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He Got Game
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White Men Can’t Jump
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Coach Carter
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Love and Basketball
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@kjayhawks I love The Green Mile and Goodwill Hunting also! Fantastic movies; can’t believe I omitted them.
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The Hitman’s Body Guard is pretty darn funny if you haven’t seen it yet.
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@dylans It’s hard to come with just 10, I probably omitted several that aren’t on my mind. I haven’t seen that, maybe I’ll get a chance. Most of my movies these days are Disney with my little guy, I seldom get to sit and watch a movie. I’m lucky to watch the hawk games lol.
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10 is basically impossible. There are more old Japanese films I’ve watched THIS YEAR that I love than that. Lol.
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@kjayhawks I’ve seen enough of Curious George this week for a lifetime.
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@BShark Yeah, I’ve got 1474 movies on VUDU. I’m not claiming they’re all good though. Like @kjayhawks kids and work have been very intrusive on the ol movie time.
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Like paintings, movies need a person to be at the right time of one’s life to receive their emotional truths, not just kinetic impacts.
I watched Sam Fuller’s THE BIG RED ONE when it came out in my late 20s/early 30s and disliked it and Mark Hamill.
But when I watched at 60, I decided it was one of the best war movies ever made. Every scene drips with the emotional truth of a man looking back on the major formative drama of his life.
Until I knew the feeling of looking back to youth and trying to make sense of what I had experienced, I could not get the full impact of the truth Fuller had wrung from himself and expressed on strips of film.
He knew he was the end of that wwii generation, and of those movies to have been made by those that really knew what it felt like, and of the medium of analog celluloid cinema. He knew TV was just the start of a new era.
The Big Red One is a good war movie, but it is a monument to the end of the analog age. It is like a modern Beowulf marking the end of one age, and the start of another unknown age he knew he, Fuller, would not be a part of.
It was one of those rarities that happens.
But as a war movie, only, I had seen others I found better when I was 30. At 30, war movies greatness were about new levels of reality in kinetic action and understanding my father’s war experience; that was what I could make mine then. And THE BIG RED ONE did not satisfy me on those levels.
But at 60, it hit me between the eyes, as a man trying to make sense of what I had lived through; this I could make mine, and on that level the movie came for me to have greatness.
I put this out there not to help you see in the Big Red One what I see, but rather to encourage you to give yourself and all supposedly great films you find not so great, a second chance later, sometimes 30 years later. It only takes an hour, or two, and once in a while you are moved to your core, not because you missed it the first time, but because you are now aware of what it explores.
My idea of a great death would be to appreciate one last great movie for the first time, because I’m on the cusp of dying and can finally know what the movie explored. Maybe THE SHOOTIST by John Wayne will work that way for me some day.
Rock Chalk!
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@jaybate-1.0 I will have to re-watch Big Red 1 again, as you say a different point in life.
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@kjayhawks What about the Fish that Saved Pittsburg and Fast Break???
“Trade Me!!!”
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If you want a decent college basketball movie, try One on One with Robie Benson and Annette O’Toole.
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Probably this is influenced by my Chicago roots, but I think the best basketball movie of all time is Hoop Dreams.
Favorite baseball movie Pride of the Yankees
Favorite War movie To End All Wars (Dunkirk honorable mention)
Favorite Comedy The Blues Brothers (Chicago connection) (Bernie-Honorable Mention)
Favorite quirky movie Napoleon Dynamite
Favorite Western “Shane”
Favorite musical Singin in the rain
Favorite stupid movie What about Bob
Favorite Football movie When the Game Stands Tall
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Blues Brothers is a great film. The sequel not so much lol.
