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Joe Vitus
Posted: Sun May 16, 2010 3:19 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 14498 Location: Houston
No great Mamet fan, myself, but will check out The Spartan on your recommendation.

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Joe Vitus
Posted: Sun May 16, 2010 3:33 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 14498 Location: Houston
Watched the original A Nightmare on Elm Street tonight, for the first time. Is is a good movie, a bad movie, a good bad movie? Really hard to say. No one gives a good performance, partly because the dialogue is unspeakable, and the whole movie makes little sense (everyone assumes Freddie--here, more often than not, simply "Fred"--Krueger is after the children of the parents who killed him, but only the heroine's mom and dad acknowledge such an even took place...so, denial on the part of the boyfriend's and the other kids' folks, or no? who can say?). The special effects are gross, but does that make them good? Yet the basic idea of being attacked in your dreams is effective, as is the continuous and cheesey 80's synthesizer score. The very crudity of it gives it a kind of authenticity. Horror movies are the only genre where the amateurishness adds a dose of credibility. It got to me.

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Marc
Posted: Sun May 16, 2010 3:53 am Reply with quote
Joined: 19 May 2004 Posts: 8424
Quote:
The special effects are gross, but does that make them good?


What do you mean by gross?
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billyweeds
Posted: Sun May 16, 2010 5:05 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City
Joe Vitus wrote:
No great Mamet fan, myself, but will check out The Spartan on your recommendation.


Just for the record, there's no "The" in the title. And hang in for the first five or ten minutes of rather confusing dramatics. It pays off.

I loooove this quote from Marjorie Baumgarten's review of Spartan in the Austin Chronicle:

"...there is no Rebecca Pidgeon in this movie, a definite plus for many loyal Mamet watchers."

And this one from the Boston Globe's Ty Burr:

"One of the things Spartan does right is local geography, but don't forget Mamet was a Cambridge and Newton resident before moving back to LA to further wife Rebecca Pidgeon's acting career. (Thankfully, this doesn't extend to casting her in this movie.)"

How blissfully I agree. Of all the elements lessening my appreciation for latter-day Mamet, his wife is #1.
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billyweeds
Posted: Sun May 16, 2010 5:29 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City
I realize in retrospect how I shrugged off the expert lead performance by Val Kilmer, an actor I originally admired and later came to be repelled by (Batman Forever? The Doors? Ugh!). In Spartan Kilmer was back to being a real actor and a charismatic movie star. Unfortunately, in the years since '04 he seems to have re-reverted to "affected asshole."
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Joe Vitus
Posted: Sun May 16, 2010 9:00 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 14498 Location: Houston
Marc wrote:
Quote:
The special effects are gross, but does that make them good?


What do you mean by gross?


Freddy's guts spilling out from the incision he makes in his own body. Or his tongue coming out of the telephone. Just his skin is pretty revolting.

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Joe Vitus
Posted: Sun May 16, 2010 9:04 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 14498 Location: Houston
Also watched Peeping Tom for the first time. All kinds of transgressive perversion. Where would David Lynch's Blue Velvet have been without it? Or even Scorsese's Taxi Driver? Some of the best use of color, music, and just sound I can remember. Karlheinz Böhm seems to be preparing the movie world for Udo Kier. Is that a good thing? Anyway, I loved the picture.

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billyweeds
Posted: Sun May 16, 2010 9:20 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City
Joe Vitus wrote:
Also watched Peeping Tom for the first time. All kinds of transgressive perversion. Where would David Lynch's Blue Velvet have been without it? Or even Scorsese's Taxi Driver? Some of the best use of color, music, and just sound I can remember. Karlheinz Böhm seems to be preparing the movie world for Udo Kier. Is that a good thing? Anyway, I loved the picture.


My only problem with Peeping Tom is that Powell treats Moira Shearer, the muse of The Red Shoes, to such a horrid fate.
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Joe Vitus
Posted: Sun May 16, 2010 10:00 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 14498 Location: Houston
You mean what happens to her, or that a leading lady was reduced to playing essentially a walk-on bit?

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billyweeds
Posted: Sun May 16, 2010 10:41 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City
Joe Vitus wrote:
You mean what happens to her, or that a leading lady was reduced to playing essentially a walk-on bit?


What happens to her. Stars play cameos a lot, but Shearer didn't have the Oscar fodder that Janet Leigh did when she played victim in Psycho.
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Earl
Posted: Sun May 16, 2010 7:32 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 09 Jun 2004 Posts: 2621 Location: Houston
Just wanted to say how much I agree with Billy about the movie Spartan. I was lucky enough to see it during its very brief run in theaters.

I remember Siskel and Ebert both liking it enthusiastically. They complained that the studio (I forget which) had a valuable property on their hands and, by showing it on so few screens, were treating it as if they couldn't wait to be rid of it. They were right.

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Joe Vitus
Posted: Sun May 16, 2010 7:52 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 14498 Location: Houston
billyweeds wrote:
Joe Vitus wrote:
You mean what happens to her, or that a leading lady was reduced to playing essentially a walk-on bit?


What happens to her. Stars play cameos a lot, but Shearer didn't have the Oscar fodder that Janet Leigh did when she played victim in Psycho.


Well, working in the British film industry, she was unlikely to. But the two instances are absolutely comparable. And British audiences the movie was made for would certainly have known who she was.

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gromit
Posted: Mon May 17, 2010 2:56 am Reply with quote
Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 9016 Location: Shanghai
The Wilby Conspiracy (1975) exceeded my low/lack of expectations. It's a mismatched buddy/escape picture, with Michael Caine playing a British businessman who reluctantly finds himself helping Sydney Poitier's political prisoner in apartheid South Africa. It's something of The Defiant Ones set in South Africa, as they go on the lam and need to flee the country. There's some good wit, clever dialogue and enough plot twists and intrigue.

At times the production values look a TV-ish, and the final twist leading to the ending isn't that great, but overall it's a pretty entertaining film. The female lead Prunella Gee is a weak spot, though she is good in one bathtub scene. Persis Khambatta looks great in a rather unbelievable side role. Just googled her, and she was Miss India in 1965, which I can believe (also Ilia in the first Star Trek movie). The love scene between her and Poitier is weirdly tacked into the film.

I liked how the South African police authorities were jaded and more complex than in their evil than I would have expected. Nicol Williamson gives a creepy performance as the lead investigator/baddie. I also liked the African location filming, even if I caught the natives speaking Swahili (common in Kenya where this was filmed, but not extending anywhere near as far south as South Africa). I give credit tot he scriptwriters for knowing the territory and the humor they add in (though the Indian doctor's nervousness is overplayed for laughs -- it's interesting that they decide to add in Indian characters involved in the struggle against the gov't).

But the film belongs to Caine and Poitier. I'm not always a fan of Caine or Poitier or 70's films, but here they they both are interesting, funny, tough. A young Rutger Hauer even pops in towards the end of the film.
Have people seen this?
Makes for a pretty good rental I'd think.

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bartist
Posted: Tue May 18, 2010 11:40 am Reply with quote
Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6963 Location: Black Hills
Watched Rashomon again, for the first time in 20 years -- man, the Criterion DVD is just a beautiful remastering, the clarity of the B/W does so much justice to what Kurosawa was after, especially his shots in the woods with all the sun-and-leaf-shadow dappling. Truly visual art, to the degree that you can shut off the English subtitles and still have a complete experience.
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Joe Vitus
Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 7:53 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 14498 Location: Houston
Disappointed with Netflix. Wanted to rent Carnival of Souls, but despite showing the cover for the Criterion release, which is a two-disc set--and the director's cut is on the second--they only list one disc, and it's the first without the director's cut (which I know because of the running time listed). Does Netflix regularly do this with two-disc releases?

Wanted to complain in the review section, but interestingly the site will not accept a reveiw with the word "Netflix" in it.

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