Capo
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Post by Capo on Aug 13, 2006 17:22:47 GMT
Éloge de l'amour In Praise of Love Jean-Luc Godard 2001 France/Switzerland/Italy 4th time; TV In Paris, a young man is casting a project about the four stages of love at three different ages in life; two years earlier, he meets the woman who he wants to cast. Fragmented to the point of abstraction, Godard films many scenes so that the people speaking are out of shot, which, combined with random intertitles and cuts to black inbetween scenes, creates a kind of slowly-building emotional undercurrent. Told in two halfs: the first shot in stunning black and white film, the second colour-saturated DV and set two years previous, it is a work of strange power, poignant and reflective.
Rather ineffective Proview, I'm afraid; so devastating was the impact of the film on me.
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Post by Michael on Aug 14, 2006 6:13:34 GMT
Last DaysI was debating whether or not I should give this 5 stars; but due to the fact that I wasn't 100% on it, I decided to keep it at 4. This is, however, one of the best films I have ever seen. The visuals are top-notch, and Van Sant's direction turns something with potential to be mediocre into a masterpiece.
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Boz
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Post by Boz on Aug 14, 2006 6:36:12 GMT
Road Trip 2000/Phillips Solid college comedy. Tom Green is great, and Todd Phillips has to be one of the best comedic directors working today. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story 2004/Thruber Not nearly as good as some of the other comedies of its type. And surprisingly little actual dodgeball action. Vince Vaughn is still the man though.
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Boz
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Post by Boz on Aug 14, 2006 9:14:06 GMT
Network 1976/Lumet My 2nd Lumet after Dog Day Afternoon. Found this one much more impressive. Probably one of the most simply made films I've ever seen, shot with little extravagance, and the entire story is just dialogue, but man, what dialogue it is. Writer Paddy Chayefsky crafts several incredibly defined characters and all are fufilled with amazing performances from nearly the entire cast. Works both as a satirical dark comedy and as a dramatic piece. Never boring or over-sentimental, or too over the top. Lumet sustains graceful balance throughout. I'm interested in seeing more of his work.
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Omar
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Post by Omar on Aug 14, 2006 14:09:35 GMT
Little Miss Sunshine(2006/Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris) [First Viewing] A down on their luck family travels across the American southwest to attend a children's beauty pageant.I laughed a lot, and I thought that the whole cast did an amazing job, but I walked away from it feeling rather underwhelmed. I thought the film did a good job at balancing comedy and drama, and I thought the finale at the pageant was hilarious. But, something was missing.
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Post by bobbyreed on Aug 14, 2006 17:35:59 GMT
I'm interested in seeing more of his work. Go for 12 Angry Men.
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Aug 14, 2006 20:51:33 GMT
Videodrome David Cronenberg 1983 Canada/US 1st time; DVD An operator of a cable TV programme respsonsible for graphic violence and softcore porn happens upon a mysterious show which takes over the mind; then the body… Fast-moving thriller with complex visuals: what we're watching is often somebody watching somebody or something else, and the introduction to Deborah Harry's character is brilliant, with the most simple of pans to a live TV set-up, behind which she sits, and on which she is shown. Halfway through Cronenberg becomes interested in the unconscious desires of his protagonist, and enters a fantasy from which he doesn't return; the last half-hour is dedicated almost entirely to the image, and so the philosophies talked about in the first half of the film are cast aside (as well as the narrative) for something less rational. I don't think he discards his philosophies, they just become visualised later in the film as the depicted world becomes more subjective. They're never coherent philosophical ideas anyway, they're nebulous, visceral and, as you said, irrational, which is befitting a film so deeply postmodern. Coherency is irrelevent, so is reason, so is reality. It's about postmodern existentialism, I suppose, in a nutshell.
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Post by Michael on Aug 14, 2006 20:58:39 GMT
Videodrome David Cronenberg 1983 Canada/US 1st time; DVD An operator of a cable TV programme respsonsible for graphic violence and softcore porn happens upon a mysterious show which takes over the mind; then the body… Fast-moving thriller with complex visuals: what we're watching is often somebody watching somebody or something else, and the introduction to Deborah Harry's character is brilliant, with the most simple of pans to a live TV set-up, behind which she sits, and on which she is shown. Halfway through Cronenberg becomes interested in the unconscious desires of his protagonist, and enters a fantasy from which he doesn't return; the last half-hour is dedicated almost entirely to the image, and so the philosophies talked about in the first half of the film are cast aside (as well as the narrative) for something less rational. I'm very surprised you only gave this 2 stars...I thought you'd be blown away by it.
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Aug 14, 2006 21:02:28 GMT
Yeah, me too - but I learned my lesson with Spider. :/
Capo, you've used 'irrational' as a criticism a few times recently. Why is it you see that as a bad thing? And I'm also surpirsed to see you turn recently to insisting more upon story as the backbone of a film (or at least that's what I'm inferring at this end, maybe I'm wrong).
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Post by Michael on Aug 14, 2006 21:07:40 GMT
And I'm also surpirsed to see you turn recently to insisting more upon story as the backbone of a film. I've noticed this too. Also, I find it rather strange that Capo is dismissing this as "irrational," when he endlessly praises Eraserhead, a film that oozes with irrationalness.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Aug 14, 2006 21:22:55 GMT
Actually, my Proviews recently have been less critical than 'analytical'. There's a difference, I think. A while back you thought I'd used "self-indulgent mess" as a criticism, but it was more an adjective applicable to the film. Because of this, I've been considering doing away with stars altogether. I loved Videodrome, I really did. I think it's his best film so far that I've seen, along with Crash. Because of it, I have considered bringing A History of Violence down to two stars from three, but want to rewatch it before I do. There was a dilemma between two and three stars, and so I went with two, the reason being that I don't think Cronenberg drained the film of all he could; the duration was succinct, but I felt the script was half-baked, in that the first half was fantastic, about a man slowly becoming obsessed with the obscene, but then it kind of threw that away in favour of, as you said, visualised philosophies. I enjoyed this turn into a more visual work, but I also felt that the most powerful images in the film were those that had a context inside of a narrative. I loved the recording of his fantasies, and would have had no problem with it lasting as long as it did, had the film not ended where it did. I knew it was only 84 minutes, and so when it got to an hour and fifteen, I thought, "Is this it? He's turned the film into an extended fantasy?" I would have loved to have seen it carry on. But I also found merit in the way, ultimately, the film itself had become the very thing Videodrome was, a film without story at all. I don't see a "turn" on my part into placing a predominant value on story at all; if anything, I've been especially receptive of, and sensitive to, the visual impact of Cinema, of late. But I think Cinema is a weaving together of images, not just images; to produce and sustain rationality from otherwise isolated irrationality. The opening ten minutes or so of Renn's fantasy were brilliant, but thereafter I felt the scenes connected less and less with each other, and while they held self-contained beauty, I don't think it sustained that clever, powerful "narrative" that it did have, in the beginning. In this respect, I've always thought Cronenberg was more suited to painting than filmmaking. It was as if Cronenberg began a script he was too excited about, and as a result wanted to get to the end before writing a middle. If a filmmaker sets out to tell a story, I'm not going to pretend there isn't one, and to me, Videodrome found itself somewhere inbetween, begging a longer, stretched-out script. But keep in mind, as ever, that two stars is a good, recommended film, from me. And I was actually getting excited about revisiting Spider, as well as Crash; but now I feel as if I have to continue to be underwhelmed by the former, for if I bump my rating up it will have only been to keep in popularity.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Aug 14, 2006 21:31:56 GMT
By the way, where have I been spotted to have placed more value on story recently? The past few days I've done nothing but drown myself in Godard, and confirmed him as my favourite filmmaker.
From a filmwatching level, my preoccupations of late have been with cinematic form; the weaving together of images (and sounds).
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Aug 14, 2006 22:07:39 GMT
There actually was no script beyond the point where Max assassinates his two partners, the rest Cronenberg revised and made up as he went along from outlines and sketchy ideas.
He didn't really set out to tell a story in any of his films until The Dead Zone (and seldom since). The stories are just convenient narrative frameworks for ideas and images, and in Shivers, Rabid, Scanners and Videodrome, those purely incidental stories eventually collapse (generally around the same time sanity and/or civilization does). In Shivers, Rabid, The Brood, Scanners and Videodrome the stories he's chosen are pure genre tales that he pays very little attention to in terms of development or coherency.
And in Videodrome, one of the central self-referential ideas is that Max is a purveyor and consumer of 'sick' films. Ever insightful and never the moralist, Cronenberg realised that you can't use the mass media to talk about mass media without acknowledging and exploring the fact that you're doing just that, or you become redundant by default. So those 'sick' (ie; diseased) meta-films come to 'infect' his own film, which itself becomes sicker and sicker, until, in its final moments, Max breaks the fourth wall, and infects us.
Anyway, there is narrative continuity between the various set-pieces in the latter half of the film, he goes from place to place and various things happen as he interacts with the people who played key roles in the first half. And it's not simply that he turned the film into a 'fantasy', like an irrelevent flight of fancy. It's the way the film had to go. The camera is always Max's eye, there's no 'objective reality' to return to 'after the fantasy'. It was only ever what he saw as reality. But, Barry Convex? Brian O'Blivion? We're in the fractured, nebulous, channel-surfing universe from the very beginning - remember the film opens and closes with TVs in TVs.
It's funny that you say you feel he's more suited to painting than filmmaking, because he's always playing down his visual side, he's always emphasising the fact that he started out as a writer and that he doesn't see his cinema as highly visual, but as more of a writer's cinema (or course his favourite writer was Burroughs, so, no prizes for controlled storytelling there). But I've always thought his films held immense visual power. It's a strange inferiority complex he has.
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Aug 14, 2006 22:24:05 GMT
By the way, where have I been spotted to have placed more value on story recently? I'm not really sure... it's just a vibe I got from some of your comments on the Quays and De Palma, and now Cronenberg. There might have been some others.
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Post by Vercetti on Aug 14, 2006 22:57:57 GMT
I really wanna get into Cronenberg. All I've seen so far is A History of the Vilence.
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Aug 15, 2006 1:09:48 GMT
All I've seen so far is A History of the World. ...Violence.
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Post by Vercetti on Aug 15, 2006 1:14:21 GMT
Bah, what's on my mind. Throw in a little Brooks with that.
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Post by Michael on Aug 15, 2006 1:41:19 GMT
StalkerI'm really struggling to find the right words to describe the effect this film had on me. I am utterly speechless right now. This will surely become 5 stars after I watch it again tomorrow.
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Boz
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Post by Boz on Aug 15, 2006 10:50:55 GMT
Whatever It Takes 2000/Raynr Guilty pleasure teen comedy. God I miss high school already.
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