123 posts tagged “nablopomo”
ah, Brazil
a movie whose tagline should have been (but wasn't): Mistakes?
We don't make mistakes
yet we do. we do make mistakes, as in all bureaucracies, and someone will be found to blame.
Brazil is Terry Gilliam's dystopian vision of a not-too-far-future from a present that took an odd turn around the 1930's. there are many anachronisms and technical hybrids like old typewriters hooked up to tv screens and rotary telephones with amplifiers. the scenery and architecture are similarly affected: the public buildings pay hommage to 1930's German expressionism (think Metropolis), while apartments and other living spaces are oddly futuristic, with large numbers of exposed ducts everywhere.
the story references George Orwell's 1984 and Franz Kafka's The Trial. the unnamed government bureaucracy has made a mistake by eliminating a Mr. Buttle rather than Mr. Tuttle, who's believed to be a terrorist of some kind. a low-level employee of the Ministry of Information, Sam Lowry, is assigned to investigate. in this process, Lowry meets a neighbor of the widow Buttle, who is the same woman Lowry has been seeing in dreams. Lowry meets the renegade Tuttle...
...and things get complicated.
the world of Brazil, while different from ours, is not that different. consider a day at work in the Ministry of Information
back in the olden days of b&w TVs, Friday night was fight night. thus,
Yo, Adrian! It's me, Rocky.
Rocky was a labor of love, the little movie that did, a personal tale that became a multimillion dollar enterprise. it is also the movie that has spanned the most sequels (Rocky II, III, IV, V, VI aka "Rocky Balboa"). what's the name for this? a hexology?
the taglines for the movie are interesting, if a bit confusing.
You have a ringside seat for the bloodiest bicentennial in history! *
A Philadelphia fighter who never made the big time...He showed he could take on a challenge...and won something bigger than a championship bout.
Meet the "Italian Stallion": a small-time guy with big-time guts
who yearns to be a hero...just once!**
He's a has-been battler with one dream left...and one last chance.
His whole life was a million-to-one shot.
* Rocky was released in 1976. references to the American Revolution of 1776 Bicentennial are everywhere.
** a small-time guy with big-time guts. I'm a 12-year-old at heart. I won't tell you what I thought it read.
Silvester Stallone gets mucho credit for writing the movie (in a 3½-day bender as legend has it) and more so for refusing to sell it to several studios that were interested in the story but wanted to cast their own choices (including Robert Redford. Robert fracking Redford. damn), but Stallone stood firm on his demand to himself play the role of Rocky Balboa.
no doubt Stallone was Rocky, but much of the movie's success was due to the fine supporting cast. Mickey, Adrian, Paulie. Apollo Creed
check the patch on Paulie's shoulder on the third pic. Philadelphia represent, yo.
(damn. for the second day in a row I can't embed from YT. is not just me, teh SO had the same problem)
here be the links to watch:
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8DlBN_LLiA
Cut me Mick http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpYosdIQ9JA&feature=related
Gonna fly now (theme from Rocky) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioE_O7Lm0I4
and because is not something I expected to find while searching for Rocky pictures:
oh weels. I found the trailer and a couple more clips from Babe in YT, but VOX won't let me add them or even search for them. something about "life being cruel sometimes". whatevs.
ahem. Babe is a tale of a little orphan pig who looks for and eventually finds his life's role. not as the centerpiece of a holiday dinner, he hopes.
cute. but there's been talking animals in movies before. but not like this one, where each animal lips were synchronized with the audio, even when dubbed in other-than-English languages. that's some serious effort.
another bit of trivia: Babe, the pig himself was played by 58 genuine Staffordshire piglets in various stages of development.
Babe the pig isn't the only one who speaks: everyone speaks, Ferdinand the paranoid duck, Fly, the sheperd dog who becomes a mother-of-sorts to Babe much to the displeasure of her mate Rex, the house cat, the sheep, the barn mice... they all have more lines than the laconic Farmer Hoggett and his wife ("the Boss" to the animals).
...
Horse:
The cat says they call it Christmas
Ferdinand the duck: Christmas!
Christmas dinner, yeah. Dinner means death. Death means carnage! Christmas
means carnage! [
flies away frantically]
Ferdinand the duck:
Christmas means carnage!
Ferdinand has figured out a way to escape such fate by taking over the rooster's role. thus, dawn at the Hoggett farm is greeted with a hearty series of quacks.
but what about Babe? what will he do?
for reference, here be the unpossible-to-embed-at-this-time clips
Trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myyb4FUUMwI
Babe sings http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtA-FpTZOQw
make sure the kids of all your friends watch this movie. give it to them for Christmas. their parents will remember you when their kids refuse to eat bacon/porkchops/ham for at least a month.
it is possible I'd seen stand-up before watching Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip, but if so, Richard made me forget about it. RPLotSS was one of the first shows that incorporated performance into stand-up
Richard covered a lot of ground in 80 minutes. a meditation on love, loss and the difference between men and women:
about his near-death from an explosion while freebasing cocaine. merciless
NOTE: I feel silly even mentioning this, but just in case. This is RICHARD FUCKING PRYOR peoples. offensive language is a given. do not listen at work or at grandma's house.
before he became a caricature in Meet the parents and Meet the parents II, Robert DeNiro was actually very funny in the 'comedic thriller' Midnight Run. (NOTE: how do you know you are old? old old? when a movie you watched when first released is touted as a classic. teh ouch. if Midnight Run were a college students it'd be finally drinking legally)
whatever a 'comedic thriller' is supposed to be, this movie was it. cant' think of any other movie that qualifies.
and to think it almost became a-for-sure-train-wreck. check it
"one of the studio (Paramount) proposals for the role of Jonathan Mardukas was Robin Williams*, who agreed to audition <shudders> meanwhile, the director, Martin Brest, had auditioned and cast Charles Grodin in the role, which lead Paramount to drop out of the production and sell the rights to Universal."
* Robin Williams! ack, ack, ack.
besides being a 'comedic thriller' Midnight Run is also a 'buddy movie', a 'road movie', and others. it is also hilarious.
trailer
did you catch the bit about "fistophobia"? here's the entire exchange:
Jack Walsh: I can't keep you cuffed on a
commercial flight, and I gotta check my gun with my luggage, but you fuck with
me once and I'm gonna break your neck.
Jonathan Mardukas: I can't fly.
Jack Walsh: What?
Jonathan Mardukas: You heard me, I can't fly.
Jack Walsh: No, no, no. You're going to have
to do better than that, pal.
Jonathan Mardukas: No, I don't have to do better than
that, because it's the truth, I can't fly: I suffer from aviaphobia.
Jack Walsh: What does that mean?
Jonathan Mardukas: It means I can't fly. I also
suffer from acrophobia and claustrophobia.
Jack Walsh: I'll tell you what: if you don't
cooperate, you're gonna suffer from "fistophobia".
Mardukas must be faking, right? good thing Walsh saw right through that.
a lot can go down between thursday and saturday..
the first time I saw Friday, one of the reasons it made me laugh is because Ice Cube's character, Craig, looked and had expressions exactly like my brother. by now neither mr. Cube nor more brother look much like each other or their younger selves.
set in one of the same neighborhoods that three years earlier had been the site of riots made this light coming-of-age comedy feel hopeful.
the characters of Friday :Craig, Smokey, Deebo, Debbie, are the best thing about it. as memorable, as, say,those of Fast Times at...
the time frame of the movie is the "Friday" of the title. Craig, who still lives at home (much to the dismay of his parents), has just lost his job. as he figures what comes next he becomes involved with his friend Smokey's schemes and troubles. most of the action takes place in and about the front porch of Craig's home
trailer
"you are fuckin' the rotation!" Smokey schools Craig on the etiquette of joint-sharing
Friday's soundtrack feature the biggest hip-hop starts of the mid-1990s. the 'theme' song by Ice Cube
the outstanding track, Dr Dre's Keep their heads ringin
'
there are two movies follow up to Friday: Next Friday, with most of the same actors and crew, and Friday After Next, without. I haven't seen either, but I've heard that Friday After Next is worth watching.
English title: Grand Illusion
part two of a doubleheader. part one was yesterday, and today is Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion: a war movie with no battle scenes, where friendships go across enemy sides, where the futility of war (any war) is noted, and the coming social changes in all of Europe are presaged.
is going to sound awfully familiar if you've been following this series-of-movies-I-like, but whatevs. 'tis all true
“
For many years, the original nitrate film negative was thought to have been lost in an Allied air raid in 1942 that destroyed a leading laboratory outside Paris. Prints of the film were rediscovered in 1958 and restored and re-released during the early 1960s. Then, it was revealed that the original negative had been shipped back to Berlin by Dr. Frank Hensel to be stored in the Reichsfilmarchiv vaults. In the Allied occupation of Berlin in 1945, the Reichsfilmarchiv by chance was in the Russian zone and consequently shipped along with many other films back to be the basis of the Soviet Gosfilmofond film archive in Moscow. The negative was returned to France in the 1960s, but sat unidentified in storage in Toulouse Cinémathèque for over 30 years, as no one suspected it had survived. It was rediscovered in the early 1990s as the Cinémathèque's nitrate collection was slowly being transferred to the French Film Archives at Bois d'Arcy. It was restored and released as the inaugural DVD of the Criterion Collection.
“
from the always helpful wiki , full of details, linkage, synopsa, and I hope you already knew, *spoilers*. so be careful
I can talk about the movie, but rather do so after y'all watch it. I am unable to discuss a plot without giving the movie away; the secret of being a good writer-about-films. but I will mention some movies you may have watched that are very influenced by La Grande Illusion:
- The Great Escape
- Casablanca
- Stalag Seven
clipparinos:
this first one is Renoir himself introducing the Criterion Collection DVD.
Renoir is adorable, self-effacing, and I want to hug him. he also reminds me of someone...
in this scene, POWs of several nationalities come together during a talent show in a German camp
English title: The Rules of the Game, though a literal translation would be The rule of the game
I love this movie so much I don't even know how to begin to talk about it. is it a comedy? yep. a drama? indeed. a 'dramedy'? thankfully not. a comedy of manners? absolutely. an allegory, an analysis, a critique? yes. yes. yes.
a perfect snapshot of a moment in time? very much so. set between the wars at a time when an aristocracy on its way down was meeting a bourgeoisie on it way up; when the servant class was morphing into the working class.
that we even have La règle du jeu to watch is little short of a miracle. its remarkable story, lifted straight from imdb:
"
Despite now being considered one of the best films made by many historians, the picture almost became a lost art. Claiming that it was bad for the morale of the country (due to impending war), the French government banned the film about a month after its original release. When Germany took over France the following year, it was banned by the Nazi party as well, who also burnt many of the prints. Allied planes then accidentally destroyed the original negatives. It was thought to be a lost picture. In 1956, some followers of director Jean Renoir found enough pieces of the film scattered throughout France to reconstitute it with Renoir's help. Renoir claimed only one minor scene was missing from the original cut.
trailer
...Everyone has their reasons
NOTE: many think, me amongst them, that the scene below is crucial, a moment where several themes of the movie come together. it is also EXTREMELY DISTURBING. excruciating to watch.
it is a "country hunt" of the kind the guests at a chateau or a country manor of the time would participate in. it features the slaughter of woodland animals, including <gulp> bunnies.
the 'hunt'
it thrills me that this movie, who could have so easily being lost forever, is available to us. it is a gift. Jean Renoir was a great director, a great filmmaker, and a great humanist. we are lucky to have his work.
I'm a complete scaredity-cat when it comes to horror books and movies. I wasn't born that way; I was made to be that way. and I know who to blame: Stephen King. directly to blame in the case of horror literature (a story for another day) and indirectly in the case of horror movies.
In the case of movies, while not a bigbig fan of horror movies, I went to my fair share of them - The Amityville Horror, The Omen, others. and then I watched The Shining. and that was the end of all that. I can't even watch horror movie trailers. even right now, as I was searching for clips in YT I could barely watch each for a few seconds. they kinda look legit, but don't blame me if you get rickrolled in the middle of watching a clip. blame Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick, who I just noticed, have the same initials. conspiracy anyone?
there are still very contentious arguments as to whether Kubrick messed up/was faithful to/improved upon King's novel. I have no opinion as I havent' read the novel. or plan to, but here be teh movie wiki.
but why am I writing about a movie I can't bear to watch even a few minutes of? well, because of that same fact. I have to respect a movie that affected me so profoundly. and I wasn't the only one. The Shining has endured, and is shown in a form of hommage emblematic of this XXI century: parodies,mashups, recuts. there are a cubic assload of selfsame all over teh internets; won't take you long to find them.
begin the clippage:
trailer
and because it showed up on the first page of results when I googled The Shining
The Shining reenacted by bunnies
one of my favorites: a movie written and directed by Orson Welles, who also played the main character...(no, is not this movie, smartypants. you didn't even read the title. be quiet)
but unlike that other movie, which all of y'all who taken Film 101 will remember 'was written/directed/acted produced by Orson Welles' it also was the only one in Welles's brilliant, contentious, and much-studied career where he was able to maintain control, i.e. deciding what was to be 'the final cut'. in no other movie he directed did Welles have that control.
yaddayaddayadda. why all this? because Touch of Evil, the movie I'm talking about, was originally released after being edited and cut by the studio. Welles's hated it. years after his death, with much fanfare, Touch of Evil was released in 1998 touted as being 'Welles's Original Vision".
this release was possible because all the footage Welles's had shot still existed, alongside his extensive notes. here be teh wiki for much more detail and linkage if interested
this 1998 release is the only one I've seen. on DVD. not on the theater, though I hold out hope to do so someday.
I cannot bloviate on 1958 vs 1998, studio vs. Welles etc. but I suspect the studio must have been embarrassed about overriding Welles's vision, because I can't find a clip from the 1958 release. not even the trailer.
ok, time for the clip show. trailer for the 1998 release:
the opening scene, famous for cinematic reasons. guess why if you like
my favorite exchange between Welles's character, Quinlan, and Marlena Dietrich's, Tanya. can't find a clip, so read on:
Tanya: We're closed.
Quinlan: You've been cookin' at this hour?
Tanya: Just cleanin' up.
Quinlan: Have you forgotten your old friend, hmm?
Tanya: I told you we were closed.
Quinlan: I'm Hank Quinlan.
Tanya: I didn't recognize you. You should lay off those candy bars.
Quinlan: It's either the candy or the hooch. I must say, I wish it was your chili I was gettin' fat on. Anyway, you're sure lookin' good.
Tanya: You're a mess, honey.
you the reader have to imagine the voice tones, looks, camera back-and-forths, etc. that make the above exchange bitter/eerie/wistful and able to give you Quinlan' and Tanya's story in those few lines. is one of those scenes used in classrooms to demonstrate why film is an art form, not just moving pictures.
a later scene with the same characters:
a film noir, that schooled any other movie calling itself a film noir before and after it.
being a film noir is impossible to discuss the plot without giving it away.
you didn't hear it from me, but rumor has that 'round teh YT someone has uploaded the whole damn movie in parts. can't think of a better way to spend a rainy fall afternoon
