Match Cut Director Consensus - Philip Kaufman

[Ezee E]

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Cvo4jwbe8wE/R9uSfB6b3HI/AAAAAAAAAl8/_By2BmeUAKE/s400/pkaufman.bmp

Did you know? Philip Kaufman is credited with the story for Indiana Jones.

FILMOGRAPHY:
Goldstein
Fearless Frank
The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid
White Dawn
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
The Wanderers
The Right Stuff
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Henry & June
Rising Sun
Quills
Twisted

[Ezee E]

Invasion of the Body Snatchers - 9
The Right Stuff - 9
Unbearable Lightness of Being - 6.5
Quills - 9.5

Solid.

[soitgoes...]

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) - 8.5
The Right Stuff (1983) - 9.0
Rising Sun (1993) - 3.0
Quills (2000) - 6.0

[Boner M]

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers - 8.5
Quills - 4.5

[Russ]

I would encourage folks to Netflix Kaufman's The Wanderers -- a great coming of age story set in the NYC gang subculture that depicts a sometimes difficult transition from late 50's sentimentality to the uncertainty of the early 60's. One of my favorites; highly recommended.


http://img82.imageshack.us/img82/5996/wanderbaldpm1.jpg

[dreamdead]

Got The Right Stuff and maybe Body Snatchers on the way. And Russ's suggestion looks interesting enough.

The Right Stuff - 8
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - 8.5
Henry & June - 5
Rising Sun - 3.5
Quills - 4.5

Henry and June tries to repeat the successes of TULoB, but it lacks any true social or political context for its story of affairs and sexual awakening. And, further, Kaufman struggles way too much to add a degree of artsiness to this first NC-17 film, and so the sexual montages often come across as far too grandiose or obvious to work. The film needed to be grittier and harder sexually to actually work. And for a film so concerned about the repercussions of adultery, it'd have been nice to have some repercussions.

Quills, meanwhile, wouldn't be bad if Phoenix's character wasn't there. Get rid of him and the allegory gains in strength because it loses some of its obviousness. I like the concept, but the execution doesn't trust the material enough.

[Mysterious Dude]

Goldstein - 6
Invasion of the Body Snatchers - 10
The Wanderers - 4
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - 7.5
Quills - 8.5

[Russ]

Goldstein - 6
Invasion of the Body Snatchers - 10
The Wanderers - 4
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - 7.5
Quills - 8.5

This thread needs more Sven.


http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/3444/morecowbell.jpg

[StanleyK]

The Right Stuff - 8.5

I also saw the opening credits of Twisted. Ummm... 6?

[Yxklyx]

Invasion of the Body Snatchers - 8
The Right Stuff - 7
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - 6

[Spinal]

The Right Stuff - 8
Henry and June - 4
Quills - 6.5

[Spinal]

Quills, meanwhile, wouldn't be bad if Phoenix's character wasn't there. Get rid of him and the allegory gains in strength because it loses some of its obviousness. I like the concept, but the execution doesn't trust the material enough.

Since that's the character I played in the stage version, I gotta disagree with you. :)

You should read the play. The ending is soooo much better.

[Raiders]

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) 8.0
The Right Stuff (1983) 7.5
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) 6.5
Quills (2000) 6.0

[Sycophant]

I have a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Perhaps I shall watch it soon.

[Grouchy]

Invasion of the Body Snatchers - 9

[Pop Trash]

Invasion of the Body Snatchers -8
Quills -7

I've seen Lightness of Being, Henry and June, and Rising Sun as well, but don't remember them well enough to rate.

[balmakboor]

I've seen a few of his films far too long ago to rate like Rising Sun, Body Snatchers, Henry & June, Unbearable Lightness, and White Dawn. I did like all of them though.

The Wanderers - 10
The Right Stuff - 10

I guess I liked those quite a bit.

[Ezee E]

Unbearable Lightness of Being sure has some masterful moments in the movie. Too bad they're all in the first hour of a three hour movie.

[Pop Trash]

Unbearable Lightness of Being sure has some masterful moments in the movie. Too bad they're all in the first hour of a three hour movie.
It's at least a 3 star movie for me for mega Euro-girl hotness. Oh and DDL.

[Ezee E]

It's at least a 3 star movie for me for mega Euro-girl hotness. Oh and DDL.
Olin's shot with the mirror (which one? har har) is quite possibly the hottest ever.

[Qrazy]

Invasion of the Body Snatchers - 7.5
The Wanderers - 7
The Right Stuff - 8
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - 6.5

Consistently good, never excellent.

[Philosophe_rouge]

The Unbearable Lightness of Being 8
Henry & June 6.5
Quills 8

[Qrazy]

Anyone care to answer my Invasion of the Body Snatchers questions in the film discussion thread from a few weeks back?

[Mysterious Dude]

Anyone care to answer my Invasion of the Body Snatchers questions in the film discussion thread from a few weeks back?
Not if I have to search for them.

[Qrazy]

Not if I have to search for them.

lol damn. That means I have to search for them.

[Qrazy]

Body Snatchers

1. How do the pods absorb the memories and consciousness of people. Sometimes they touch them and other times they don't. Are we to assume they just need to be in a 50 foot proximity or something? Even if they used pheromones to transfer info. it seems like that would only reach the human host and not feedback to the pod to give the pod the info. it needed to duplicate.
2. Why can the Snatchers be fooled sometimes but not other times.
3. If a Snatcher can be fooled why can't pods? How do pods know they are only replicating humans and not already snatched humans.
4. Why can some Snatchers show more emotion when they communicate than others. If that is their defining characteristic why do they not all exhibit it (married woman, Leonard Nemoy).
5. Not really a question but Donald Sutherland is pretty gullible. He's taken in by new Snatchers (taxi cab driver) regularly when he should be on the alert at least after the second time.

[dreamdead]

Unbearable Lightness of Being sure has some masterful moments in the movie. Too bad they're all in the first hour of a three hour movie.

I think the eroticism is largely also primarily in the first hour, if memory serves. Despite that being the key to its still-memorable filmmaking, I thought it blended some of the political urgency together pretty nicely in some of the black and white moments. The personal still takes precedence, but unlike something like Henry and June, this film does have a political consciousness. Plus, there was something strangely poetic about the ending, which circumvents realtime to deliver an emotional payoff that I don't would work any other way.

Also, edited in The Right Stuff rating. I think I'm becoming a fan of Fred Ward's work. And Dennis Quaid here is remarkably magnetic, so young and vibrant. What Kaufman achieves with the balance of storytelling is quite remarkable; though he often seems better paced at dry comedy (the Shearer/Goldblum stuff in the first hour, or the atronauts greeting the press for the first time), the Yeager scenes have a serene quality, though it gets downright scary in the finale, even though my familiarity with the book should have hardened me to the dangers within. And though the women, unlike in Wolfe's text, are still short-shifted here, there are a few scenes that demonstrate their collective strength, even if Kaufman leaves unanswered why so many of them would choose to remain wed to philanderers. Quality third hour, and the strong ending, kept me hooked. Good stuff, though I fear I might not go further into his filmography (sorry Russ)....

[Sven]

I think I'm becoming a fan of Fred Ward's work.

Rep. One of the best supporting actors ever.

[dreamdead]

Rep. One of the best supporting actors ever.

Beyond his feature role in Henry and June, and The Player/Bob Roberts, what else should I check out to see his range...?

[Winston*]

Beyond his feature role in Henry and June, and The Player/Bob Roberts, what else should I check out to see his range...?

Tremors!

[Rowland]

Rep. One of the best supporting actors ever.Not always supporting of course. He's great as the lead in one of the all-time great monster features, Tremors.

[Sven]

Beyond his feature role in Henry and June, and The Player/Bob Roberts, what else should I check out to see his range...?

Well, when I praise him, it is not necessarily for his range. The guy was fairly typecast as the no-nonsense Southern captain characters pretty consistently from what I've seen of his. But that makes him no less impressive in my eyes. I've seen him in Henry and June. He's great. I've seen him in Tremors. He's great. I've seen him in Thunderheart. He's great. I've seen him in The Right Stuff. He's great. He always brings a knowing quality to his roles, a wry sense of performance that I'm sure someone with the right jargon could communicate better than I could. Negative criticism is ineffective against him and those of his ilk (Madeline Kahn, George Kennedy, JK Simmons, Catherine O'Hara, etc) because they are what they so unapologetically are.

[Sven]

Oh, and word to both of you for your Tremors hollas. That movie is so good.

[Mysterious Dude]

5. Not really a question but Donald Sutherland is pretty gullible. He's taken in by new Snatchers (taxi cab driver) regularly when he should be on the alert at least after the second time.
I can't answer your first four questions, but I think I can explore this one.

Sutherland's character wants to trust people. I think it's most apparent in one line. After Kevin McCarthy gets hit by a car, a police officer arrives on the scene, and Sutherland says, "The policeman will help." But the policeman doesn't help. The film takes a post-Watergate attitude that one should not trust authority figures, and illustrates its point through Sutherland, who wants to trust people and is consistently betrayed.

[Russ]

Ward is a lot of fun in Remo Williams.

[Sven]

Ward is a lot of fun in Remo Williams.

Oh yeah, and this. So awesome.

[Rowland]

Body Snatchers

1. How do the pods absorb the memories and consciousness of people. Sometimes they touch them and other times they don't. Are we to assume they just need to be in a 50 foot proximity or something? Even if they used pheromones to transfer info. it seems like that would only reach the human host and not feedback to the pod to give the pod the info. it needed to duplicate.
2. Why can the Snatchers be fooled sometimes but not other times.
3. If a Snatcher can be fooled why can't pods? How do pods know they are only replicating humans and not already snatched humans.
4. Why can some Snatchers show more emotion when they communicate than others. If that is their defining characteristic why do they not all exhibit it (married woman, Leonard Nemoy).
5. Not really a question but Donald Sutherland is pretty gullible. He's taken in by new Snatchers (taxi cab driver) regularly when he should be on the alert at least after the second time.The disparity in how long it takes for the pods to birth a Snatcher is terribly inconsistent as well. Just consider how long it takes a certain female character to be replicated late in the film as compared to various scenarios earlier in the picture.

Also, I wonder if Mike D'Angelo didn't bring up a halfway-decent point on his twitter page recently, asking if the paranoia is so plausible or effective when the film is directed like an LSD-infused freakout from the very beginning, suggesting that the original approaches this angle in a superior fashion by sustaining the possibility that the invasion isn't actually occurring for a considerable stretch.

Nevertheless, I prefer Kaufman's nightmarish vision of baroque expressionism and apocalyptic hopelessness to the original. In a way, it's almost like a sequel to the original, beginning where that one left off with the invasion already beginning to grip the city. My biggest gripe is that it drags unnecessarily during the middle act, so credit to the original for its economic storytelling.

[Melville]

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - 8.5
Quills - 5

[Rowland]

Invasion of the Body Snatchers - 8.5
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - 7.0

[Qrazy]

I can't answer your first four questions, but I think I can explore this one.

Sutherland's character wants to trust people. I think it's most apparent in one line. After Kevin McCarthy gets hit by a car, a police officer arrives on the scene, and Sutherland says, "The policeman will help." But the policeman doesn't help. The film takes a post-Watergate attitude that one should not trust authority figures, and illustrates its point through Sutherland, who wants to trust people and is consistently betrayed.

I didn't really like his performance in the film in general. When he sees the pods being loaded into the boat he's just like... oh, bummer. I preferred Miles Bennell's gradual descent into total paranoia and terror.

[Ezee E]

RESULTS:
1. Invasion of the Body Snatchers - 8.5 (10)
2. The Right Stuff - 8.33 (9)
3. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - 7.22 ((9)
4. Quills - 6.55 (10)

DID NOT QUALIFY:
Goldstein - 6 (1)
The Wanderers - 7 (3)
Henry & June - 5.16 (3)
Rising Sun - 3.25 (2)

= 7.64

[StanleyK]

The Right Stuff - 8.5

I also saw the opening credits of Twisted. Ummm... 6?

Invasion of the Body Snatchers - 8.5
The Wanderers - 7
The Right Stuff - 8.5
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - 5.5
Henry & June - 4
Rising Sun - 4
Quills - 5.5



I have zero memory of ever having watched the opening credits of Twisted or why I would do such a thing. I think I'll skip it anyway.

RIP Fred Ward. He was great in The Right Stuff.

[DFA1979]

Man I miss Rowland posting here. Now there was a guy.

PS: I only ever saw the Body Snatchers flick. Oh well it's great and I own it.