Hollywood Movie Reviews......... Options

[simplefable]

Now..Reeth !! Amazing.
I love the meticulous way you go around things. I am sure that it will take you to greatest heights possible. this is not a wish, but a knowledge acquired over years....Somehow, i could never adhere to these ways... How i wish !!

[Reeth]

Now..Reeth !! Amazing.
I love the meticulous way you go around things. I am sure that it will take you to greatest heights possible. this is not a wish, but a knowledge acquired over years....Somehow, i could never adhere to these ways... How i wish !!

Thanks a lot for all those wonderful words sf....I am erratically meticulous,,not consistent at all....
But thanks once again

[Faraaj73]

I start off with an all time favourite film of my entire family....i have lost count of the number of times
i have watched this since the time.....

The Ten Commandments (1956)


Cecil B DeMille?s swan song is a movie for the ages. At 75 the legendary director was at the
peak of his fame, his name a house-hold word and his voice recognized by millions. He probably
knew The Ten Commandments would be his last film it almost killed him. He certainly knew it
would be his most important.

This joke was popular in Hollywood, because of the liberties DeMille was known to take with historical facts:

Cecil B. DeMille
Much against his will
Was persuaded to keep Moses
Out of the War of the Roses....

[Faraaj73]

What an epic film

David O Selznick, the producer of the film was the same guy who Hitchcock really hated, btw. He was also involved in the production of Rebecca(1940) at the same time. He was a dominating personality and the film went through four directors (some say six), George Cukor, Victor Fleming and Sam Wood. (cannot remember the fourth one). George Cukor was fired because he was called a "woman's director" and Clark Gable, then a big star, did not want the movie to tilt in Vivien Leigh's direction.

Another interesting tidbit: The film's famous line by Gable "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn", is slightly different from the book where Rhett Butler says, "My dear, I don't give a damn." How's that for hair-splitting?

David Selznick also happened to be the husband of Louis B. Mayer's beloved daughter, Irene. LB was the head of MGM and really the most powerful, feared and hated figure in Hollywood. The saying goes that so many people turned up at LB's funeral to make sure he was dead!

The Hay's production code (self-imposed censorship) did not permit films to use words like "damn" i.e. use the Lord's name in vain. An exception was made for GWTW. The next mainstream film to break major barriers was Otto Preminger's brilliant Anatomy of a Murder which included words like virgin and rape!

[Faraaj73]

Twelve years later, in 1951 she played the Southern belle again, this time an ageing one, winning great critical acclaim, in Elia Kazan's film version of Tennessee William's A Streetcar Named Desire.

Marlon Brando was the real winner in A Streetcar Named Desire, one of Tennessee William's best works - I like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof more. Actually the role was originally offered to Burt Lancaster. His unspoken regret for the rest of his life was turning it down. When he was at the peak of his career, he left mainstream cinema and moved into art films to prove he was as good an actor as Brando. Films from the art period include Il Gattopardo (one of the greatest films ever - it blows GWTW out of the water) and The Swimmer.

[Faraaj73]

The Great Dictator(1940)

It is one of the rare films that deals with the Nazi regime through the genre of comedy. I can think of only two other films that have done that, To Be or Not to Be(1942) by the great master of genre, Ernst Lubitsch and, maybe, Life is Beautiful (iffy), which is not pure comedy anyway .

My top three favourite Chaplin's are City Lights, Monsieur Verdoux (delicious black comedy) and The Great Dictator. He wore his political beliefs on his sleeve and that's evident in all three films. He returned to the US after several decades of exiles to accept an Honorary Oscar. That scene is recorded is what many remember as the single greatest (and emotional) moment in oscar history.

Amarcord, Fellini's (and one of cinema's) greatest films, also dealt with fascism, this time in a little village in Italy, with considerable humour....Amarcord in fact means remembrance in italian....

[Faraaj73]

Italian master Sergio Leone's "The Good, The Bad & the Ugly" is an epic Western of
mythic proportions. Most directors never come close to making a film this good. The amazing thing
about Leone is that he actually eclipsed this accomplishment two years later with "Once Upon a Time
in the West." "The Good, The Bad & the Ugly" was Leone's final film with Clint Eastwood.

Leone's trilogy of spaghetti westerns (the first two were A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few DollarMore).
In this sweeping film, the characters form treacherous alliances in a ruthless quest for Confederate gold.

After his series of Spaghetti western's, Leone made an epic gangster film - Once Upon a Time in America with DeNiro and James Woods. The first cut was over six hours long. It was finally trimmed to about 4 hours but it was so expensive and advanced for its time that it lost money at the box-office. Leone's next venture was meant to be an epic about Stalingrad, but unfortunately he died of heart-disease....arguably, Once Upon a Time in America is even better than the spaghetti series.

Fistful of Dollars is based on Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest. The novel has been filmed several times, but never under its real title. Some of the versions include Sergio Leone's spaghetti western, the Coen Brothers Miller's Crossing and Bruce Willis's Last Man Standing. However, the best version hands-down, is the japanese Yojimbo directed by Akira Kurosawa, and starring Toshiro Mifune as the epitome of cool.....

[mmuk2004]

In my opinion, Truffaut and Godard are like Tarantino. They've paid homage to other movies all their lives instead of going out and doing their own thing. That's probably why Tarantino admires them so much. They're all the greatest movie buffs and have produced some films of interest, but nothing original.

Will comment more in a couple of days when I get a little more time, besides it has been quite a while since I watched a great deal of the French New Wave in a manic marathon. Not the right way to see it, I know, but I was on a schedule...

Truffaut: I have to think about Godard some more, though I instinctively liked Breathless, but I have always had a soft spot for Truffaut. Yes, their movies are self-concious and often have these in-house jokes/references(Tarantino tends to overdo it as do the Coen brothers sometimes) but for me that is also an intrinsic part of their lived experience that they express in their films. They(Truffaut and G) were directors at a time when Cinema had already taken off and wrought its magic on them, and they needed to record that in their films. The wonder of the initial years of cinema is there is their works, the thrill of this medium that they love comes across. But there is much more than that in their works. (Especially in their early works) Love the comment Ebert made about Jules e Jim:

It's about three people who could not concede that their moment of perfect happiness was over, and pursued it into dark and sad places

Truffaut films don't have characters and stories in the traditional sense (even the Antoine D ones) they are not psycological understudies, they are wonderful expressions of pure moments of cinema where you watch and feel the exhilaration of the moment and yet cannot quite capture it . And Truffaut sometimes makes stories and tragedies out of that! And it is not cerebral, he is talking of human moments of desire, happiness, mediocrity,moments of epiphany, and tragedy in his own way and in his own time.

You can hold me up for details on these gradiose statements later...

This post has been edited by mmuk2004: Apr 14 2009, 12:06 AM

[mmuk2004]

The Great Dictator(1940)

It is one of the rare films that deals with the Nazi regime through the genre of comedy. I can think of only two other films that have done that, To Be or Not to Be(1942) by the great master of genre, Ernst Lubitsch and, maybe, Life is Beautiful (iffy), which is not pure comedy anyway .

My top three favourite Chaplin's are City Lights, Monsieur Verdoux (delicious black comedy) and The Great Dictator. He wore his political beliefs on his sleeve and that's evident in all three films. He returned to the US after several decades of exiles to accept an Honorary Oscar. That scene is recorded is what many remember as the single greatest (and emotional) moment in oscar history.

Amarcord, Fellini's (and one of cinema's) greatest films, also dealt with fascism, this time in a little village in Italy, with considerable humour....Amarcord in fact means remembrance in italian....

Yes, I have heard of that, it is in my long list of films to watch... I think it is one of the less stylized films of Fellini.

[mmuk2004]

I start off with an all time favourite film of my entire family....i have lost count of the number of times
i have watched this since the time.....

The Ten Commandments (1956)


Cecil B DeMille?s swan song is a movie for the ages. At 75 the legendary director was at the
peak of his fame, his name a house-hold word and his voice recognized by millions. He probably
knew The Ten Commandments would be his last film it almost killed him. He certainly knew it
would be his most important.

This joke was popular in Hollywood, because of the liberties DeMille was known to take with historical facts:

Cecil B. DeMille
Much against his will
Was persuaded to keep Moses
Out of the War of the Roses....

[Faraaj73]

Yes, I have heard of that, it is in my long list of films to watch... I think it is one of the less stylized films of Fellini.

Fellini did go off on a tangent in the 60s with films like the painful Juliet of the Spirits. But, when he was good, no one was better. His films were nominated for Best Foreign Pic Oscars four times. And he won each time. Honestly, a La Strada, Notte di Cabiria or an Amarcord will leave you reeling for days. Images from these films, and emotions derived will stay with you years after viewing.

I think I'll watch La Strada again tomorrow!!!

[mmuk2004]

Yes, I have heard of that, it is in my long list of films to watch... I think it is one of the less stylized films of Fellini.

Fellini did go off on a tangent in the 60s with films like the painful Juliet of the Spirits. But, when he was good, no one was better. His films were nominated for Best Foreign Pic Oscars four times. And he won each time. Honestly, a La Strada, Notte di Cabiria or an Amarcord will leave you reeling for days. Images from these films, and emotions derived will stay with you years after viewing.

I think I'll watch La Strada again tomorrow!!!

Good, will wait for an interesting review It has been a while since I saw this one, might watch it this weekend and come back with a review. I like the more pretentious, self obsessed 81/2 and even La Dolce, Fellini is stunning in parts when he is on an over-indulgent spree.

[mmuk2004]

I know Reeth will not mind my posting a French Film Review in his Hollywood thread. Wonder what happened to him...

Les Enfants du Paradis (1945)

One of the movies recommended by Faraaj. Elaborate, complex and very rewarding. It is the kind of movie one has to watch at least one more time, to get all the stuff you are sure you missed the first time around. It is so richly layered, you simply cannot get all of it at one time... the elaborate sets and the amazing details of its production, the dialoges, witty and philosophical, the complex characters and their complex relationships.

What fascinated me was the myriad forms of theatre and mime shown in the film and how they reflected upon the characters. At the heart of the story is Garance, who is loved by at least four important characters in the movie. The setting is the Boulevard of Crime, in early 19th Century Paris. It is a place of entertainment, all forms of entertainment, where the rich and the poor might rub shoulders, it is brimming with life, crime, passion, art and the struggle for survival. Two actors, each excelling in their own field fall in love with Garance, a young mime named Baptiste(Jean Louis Barrault) who is shy and a young actor named Lemaitre( Pierre Brasseur) who is charming and brash.

The production details of the film are as fantastic as the film. It was made during the Nazi occupation of Paris, and the cast has people from the resistance as well as the collaborators, amongst the extras. On the edge of starvation, many times they stole the food off the sets, even before they were filmed. One can go on and on about the almost impossible constraints under which the film was made. These have been documented in various commentaries.

The title of the film, refers to the high balcony seats (colloquially called paradis), which seated the "commoners" the poor folk, who came in hordes, (there are many shots of the audience hanging from the balconies), appreciated or booed the actors enthusiastically and were the the makers and breakers of "star" actors. It is to this "rude"(in the Shakespearean sense) audience that the actors perform, not just the gentry sitting in their boxed seats.

The characters are wonderfully tailored to their roles... Baptiste, the silent lover, is a mime... he comes alive on the stage powerfully emoting tender love, comedy, cruelty... and all somehow seem linked to his muse...Garance. Barrrault, who loves Shakespeare, moves away from mime and becomes a famous star in the theatre...one of the scenes is incredible where tired of the inflated and banal tragedies he is required to play, he intervenes in the action and turns it into a witty, self-reflexive farce... But he feels he cannot really reach the heights of his profession as he cannot enact jealousy...he has achieved fame on a smooth track because of his flair and passion for acting, but the high point of his career comes when Garance, who he has loved and who left him, comes back and he realises that she loves Baptiste. Then he plays Othello, with passion and jealousy...once again the performance is linked to Garance... And then there is the ruthless and bitter criminal (cannot remember his name) who loves Garance (the only woman, according to him who he does not despise), who believes that all tragedy could easily turn to farce...except that he writes failed farces but it is his action that brings about the climax in the film...And in the middle of it all Garance, enigmatic, beautiful, their muse and audience and the central actor... Just wonderful, I thouroughly enjoyed the self-reflexiveness of it all... very exhilarating...

This post has been edited by mmuk2004: Jun 6 2009, 12:22 AM

[Faraaj73]

I know Reeth will not mind my posting a French Film Review in his Hollywood thread. Wonder what happened to him...

Les Enfants du Paradis (1945)

One of the movies recommended by Faraaj. Elaborate, complex and very rewarding. It is the kind of movie one has to watch at least one more time, to get all the stuff you are sure you missed the first time around. It is so richly layered, you simply cannot get all of it at one time... the elaborate sets and the amazing details of its production, the dialoges, witty and philosophical, the complex characters and their complex relationships.

Madhavi

Love your review....as I do everything about this film! Trust me, each viewing will enhance your appreciation of this rich film and be that much more enjoyable. An important point to note is that the four main influences on noir were: American pulp novels (Chandler, Hammett, Cain etc.); Italian neorealism; German Expressionism; and French romantic fatalism. This film is probably the greatest example - written or filmed of french romantic realism/fatalism....which brings to mind the famous line (and countless others from the noir genre):

I killed him for money - and a woman - and I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. Pretty, isn't it?

[Faraaj73]

Elia Kazan's America America
Only in the last 5 minutes of America, America is there any action actually filmed in America. The prelude to that - a good 2 hrs 40 minutes - is about one young man's struggle against the odds to reach America: the land of opportunity. This, director Elia Kazan's most personal project and favorite film, is partly biographical based as it is on the experiences of his eldest uncle Stavros.

Elia Kazan's name generates mixed feelings. According to some e.g. Stanley Kubrick, he was the greatest American director. Most others are unable to get past his "naming names" to the HUAC in the 50's. Be that as it may, his works need to be judged on their professional merit, and certainly no other film captures the immigrant experience in the early part of the 20th century like America, America.

The only negative to the film is the lengthy running time and the slow pace for the first hour. Some have criticized the acting of the central character who occupies center stage for virtually the entire film. He's certainly no Brando, Clift, Dean or DeNiro. However, his accent and looks are much more Greek and that adds to the documentary like feel of the film.

Instead of filming in Hollywood studio sets, Kazan and DP Haskell Wexler (who won a well-deserved Oscar) opted for locations in Turkey and Greece - the action being set in Central Anatolia and Constantinople. This gives the film a rougher, more realistic look absent from other Kazan films of the late 50s-60s. The tragedies and injustices meted out to minorities under Ottoman rule and the harshness of life are what really stays with you after the film is over. There are several emotional moments such as when Stavros gets engaged and his fiancée pleads to him, or when he finally lands in America and sends a letter home.