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Joe Vitus

Posted: Fri Mar 09, 2007 8:40 pm

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 14498 Location: Houston

Rod wrote:

More John Carpenter: Big Trouble in Little China was a favorite film of this errant youth, and it still holds up with Raiders of The Lost Ark

I'd put it on par with Halloween as his best. It's a playful action film, a genre that never seems to do well in the theaters, but lives forever in the video store (I'm thinking of the 1980 Flash Gordon here, too.) I've only seen both The Thing and The Fog once each, a very long time ago. As I recall, The Thing was too interested in being a big budget gross out to be a really good movie, while The Fog was creepy and intereresting.

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Rod

Posted: Fri Mar 09, 2007 8:50 pm

Joined: 21 Dec 2004 Posts: 2944 Location: Lithgow, Australia

No, no, time has proven Carpenter's The Thing ranks as one of the top three or four sci-fi films. Its mood of all-enveloping paranoia curdled with deeply dry black humor is a supreme achievement. Whatever disorientating impact its oozy effects had has long faded.

Not to under-rate the Howard Hawks version, either.

I can't champion Mike Hodges' Flash Gordon though. Dreadful fake Barbarella, and Barbarella wasn't that good to begin with. Even the Queen score sucked. Dino De Laurentiis and sci-fi (see also Dune, King Kong) should never have been allowed to mate.

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Joe Vitus

Posted: Fri Mar 09, 2007 11:03 pm

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 14498 Location: Houston

You're 100% wrong about Flash Gordon, which is a great, very funny, and also very appealing movie. It's got a great sense of humor, but also really connects with upstanding do-gooderism of Alexander Raymond's original strip.

Not even remotely were they going for Barberella. It's a campy, but loving remake, not a satire, and certainly not a pseudo-soft porn satire. Completely different entity. You'd be closer to the mark to compare Barberella to Flesh Gordon.

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You've got a great brain. You should keep it in your head.

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jeremy

Posted: Fri Mar 09, 2007 11:05 pm

Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 6794 Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)

Despite being as messy as teenage boy’s bedroom, Barberella, remains fascinating. Although far from typical, with its superficial naïve optimism and moral confusion, it manages to be a quintessential 60s film. But, at the same time it manages to satirise the very idea of the time, that being young and freeing your mind was enough. It captures the late sixties decade-dance, where knowing that the tattered fig leave of peace, love and understanding could no longer hide the bare hedonism and emptiness underneath, the partying became ever more desperate: pop another pill or pillow another poppet and postpone the mother of all hangovers.

The naïve, but sensible Jane Fonda, the wholesome American girl awash in a sea of Eurotrash provided a metaphor for the end of an era. With her big, wide-eyes and blonde curls, she certainly had all the trappings of a Bardot-esque sex kitten, but even this most playful of films could not soften her inner resolve or hide the hint of the somewhat flat actress and serious woman to come. Perturbed, but never seduced or impressed by the traps and temptations milling around her, she was all seventies steel, a proto-feminist and political agitator who would pick decade that had lost its direction by the scruff of its unwashed neck. In comparison, she made both the bimbo-esque angel and the beautiful David Hemmings (try not to think of Gladiator) become the sex objects. In providing the core of the film she both highlighted and partially excused its unthinking sexism.

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Rod

Posted: Fri Mar 09, 2007 11:17 pm

Joined: 21 Dec 2004 Posts: 2944 Location: Lithgow, Australia

I stand by my opinion, Joe.

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A long time ago, but somehow in the future...It is a period of civil war and renegade paragraphs floating through space.

jeremy

Posted: Fri Mar 09, 2007 11:19 pm

Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 6794 Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)

Flash Gordon was a bore. Flesh Gordon was funnier, though not much sexier. That said, for some reason, the only I can seem to recollect now, is where the black Amazon sat on the blonde heroine's face.

Joe Vitus

Posted: Sat Mar 10, 2007 12:16 am

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 14498 Location: Houston

Flash Gordon is not a bore. It's very funny. How anyone can not love Sydow's Ming is beyond me. The dialogue is consistently good. And Sam J. Jones makes a perfect Flash. Melody Anderson's Dale is a real treat, acting as a cheerleader on the sidelines, or tripping along in very high heels as she blasts villains away. How anyone with a sense of humor can not love this movie is beyond me. Queen's theme song is fantastic.

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You've got a great brain. You should keep it in your head.

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billyweeds

Posted: Sat Mar 10, 2007 1:07 am

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City

It's Barbarella, not that other spelling, which makes it look like the story of a female hair cutter.

jeremy

Posted: Sat Mar 10, 2007 1:37 am

Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 6794 Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)

Thank you Billy. Where would we be without you.

Marc

Posted: Sat Mar 10, 2007 1:50 am

Joined: 19 May 2004 Posts: 8424

Quote:

Thank you Billy. Where would we be without you.

In the weeds.

Joe Vitus

Posted: Sat Mar 10, 2007 4:15 am

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 14498 Location: Houston

However it's spelled, it's a monotonous failure of a movie. It tries to hit various sixties strains: free love, pop art, kitsch. It's unfunny and unoriginal. And uneroritc. It isn't remotely clever. I'm always surpised the movie has garnered as many fans as it has.

_________________
You've got a great brain. You should keep it in your head.

-Topher

jeremy

Posted: Sat Mar 10, 2007 7:51 am

Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 6794 Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)

I first saw Barbarbar-Barbarbarellaas a young teenager and was perhaps more in love with the Ms Fonda's cheerleader looks and physique and more fascinated by the film's depiction of decadence and perversion than my older, more discerning self would have allowed. So I'll concede that my memory and judgement of the film might not have been entirely sound...but it is all I have to go on. However, even viewed through the prism of my adolescent gaze, I can also accept that the film was beyond flawed, it was risible and incoherent. That conceded, what I am not willing to let stand is the contention that it is without merit, especially when compared with Flash Gordon.

Unless my memory is playing tricks with me again, Flash Gordon was made in the wake of the phenomenal commerical and critical success of Superman when Hollywood was desparate for super heroes to whom they could play homage. Coupled with the success of the likes Alien, Star Wars, Blade Runner and other sci-fi film,l Flash Gordon may have semed an ideal, best-of-all worlds choice, but he did not really warrant the man of steel treatment.

Superman, a icon of the the perceived to be trusting, patriotic fifties was a perfect antidote to the cynicism of the late seventies. Superman the film was pitch perfect: it pretended to mock his hick-from-the-sticks naivette, but really was yearning the certainty and simplicity of that earlier age. America really was looking out for a hero.

Flash Gordon a ridiculous relic of the thirties had no such resonance. As a result, the gentle parody of the film seemed tame and undertaken for its own sake. The film needed to be braver and less reverential; what Flash Gordon needed was the Mel Brooks treatment - fromage rather than homage; something that Flesh Gordon actually came closer to achieving.

jeremy

Posted: Sat Mar 10, 2007 8:21 am

Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 6794 Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)

Quote:

...And uneroritc...

Joe,

I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but though we may be able to share an aesthetic appreciation of both male and female beauty, are we ever likely to agree on what is pay-by-the-hour, down in the sand, internet cruising erotic.

marantzo

Posted: Sat Mar 10, 2007 11:40 am

Guest

Joe Vitus wrote:

That's about it. Roger Vadim was not capable of making a successful, intentional satire.

Befade

Posted: Sat Mar 10, 2007 12:44 pm

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ

I just watched Down to the Bone with Vera Farmiga. She is a screen presence.......her profile, her eye, nose, lips A follow-up to Sherrybaby with the wonderful Maggie Gyllenhaal. I really don't like druggie movies, though. They may give a glance at the reality of the user.....but I'm not sure there's been a film that really takes on what addiction is all about.

I just heard that people who have stomach stapling done......and thus have a stomach the size of a walnut and cannot continue a food addiction.....often switch addictions.......to alcohol....which acts really fast with a small stomach. What about pedephilia. It sounds like an addiction from the viewpoint of the predator.

I thought I had no interest in gambling.......then I discovered online soltaire....and hours would go by.......

Down to the Bone is set in upstate NY with snow everywhere......not the pretty snow scenes with trees but the brownish snow banks at the edge of strip malls and inadequate housing.

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