That was some bullshit. These groups are too stringent. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I think after Rodriguez did that the DGA relaxed their rules on co-directors?Quoting Irish (view post)
That was some bullshit. These groups are too stringent. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I think after Rodriguez did that the DGA relaxed their rules on co-directors?
Been trying to do themed weekly double features of "new views."
So this week has been Score!...sese. I watched After Hours (Tuesday) and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (Thursday), and it's just goddamn amazing how even this early into his career, Scorsese was doing such good work. After Hours I expected to be pretty great (and it was, the gravity of circumstance pulling the story from slice of life into slow-burn tragedy), but Alice is probably the bigger surprise. It's a sweet-hearted optimistic story with some magnetic work from Burstyn, and with Scorsese being more careful with his style (letting the "lower reality" story dictate the stylistic terms).
Earlier twofers included:
"Get in the Cage!" - Vampire's Kiss / Color Out of Space
"'Big' Damn Cinema" - Blue Steel / Point Break
"French Kiss" - Umbrellas of Cherbourg / Jules et Jim
Two big shocks along the way.
1) I haven't disliked one yet. Love it.
2) Fuck me, Point Break is genuinely good. Bigelow's run from Near Dark through Strange Days is just goddamn remarkable.
I sent my wife on a 90s trip with me and she had never seen Point Break. She was giddy the whole time.
I'm like..."you grew up in this decade, where have you been?!"
I've never seen Point Break, I always thought it looked embarrassingly bad.
And Near Dark is one that's just...not that good...
Strange Days is indeed great, though.
Well then I guess we got us an old-fashioned disagreement.
Pistols at dawn. By the flagpole after school's over.
Everyone has a right to their own opinion.
Even if it's wrong.
Meg, I think what you fail to understand is that Near Dark is O B J E C T I V E L Y a great film.
I resemble that.
I love Point Break.
I loved the last page. Good stuff guys. I chuckled quite a lot and even learned things!
I had a After Hours avatar for at least a few months so yes I am a fan.
Bigelow rules. I want to view Strange Days again. Near Dark and Point Break are favorites.
Blog!
And it's happened once again
I'll turn to a friend
Someone that understands
And sees through the master plan
But everybody's gone
And I've been here for too long
To face this on my own
Well, I guess this is growing up
Part of the function of film unions is to keep people out of the industry so as to keep wages as high as possible for their members. Incidentally, although it's rarely commented upon, film unions bear a great deal of responsibility for the lack of diversity in the film industry. When I was in film school, we had a sort of class trip to the office of the local ACTRA office (this was before they merged with SAG), and on the walls there were all these posters with the slogan "Cast Diversity" on them. But then the shop stewart comes out and says, in so many words, don't bother writing parts for non-white actors because most of their members are white.
Just because...
The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg, 2022) mild
Petite maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021) mild
The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022) mild
The last book I read was...
The Complete Short Stories by Mark Twain
The (New) World
Not to distract from the industry chatter, but here's the breathtakingly 2000s trailer for Burton's POTA.
Delightful.
"How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home wine-making course and forgot how to drive?"
--Homer
IN A WORLD...
Burton's POTA > old POTA = both are crap anyway
I've never been into ape movies, aside from King Kong.
Never understood the appeal. I know lots of people eat them up. Just not my thing.
Same here Meg. I think Matt Reeves is given way too much credit for those films, which is partially why I'm not really all that excited for the new Batman. His other bodies of work are a shot for shot remake of a critically acclaimed film and Cloverfield?
I had no expectations for the new Batman with Reeves name, but that trailer got me pretty jacked. I'd say its a credit to Reeves that I've never enjoyed an Apes movie and he made one I cared about and actually enjoyed. I still don't really have any feeling for Reeves up or down.
I liked the first Reeves Apes, loved the second, and liked the third. Overall I find them pretty good.
"How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home wine-making course and forgot how to drive?"
--Homer
I gather the Apes films are pretty great, they're just not my thing at all.
Cloverfield is awesome.
Let Me In is pretty lame. Nothing particularly wrong with it, it just...exists. The original is so masterful, the remakes existence at all is puzzling.
Got no problem with the dude or his work, seems competent enough.
But like Skitch said, it wasn't until that trailer that I was like "wow, they may have something here."
Last edited by megladon8; 08-30-2020 at 10:10 PM.
He's a good director of tone, but his stories have been hit-or-miss (War was all over the place esp.). Honestly, my favorite of his flicks is Cloverfield.
Mine is too, but that's not saying much unfortunately.
I shared this excellent article on the problematic depictions of black men in Taxi Driver on another forum today, which is inspiring some great discussion there, so in the interests of continuing that here, I'd like to say that, while the style of the film is, for the most part, clearly immersed in Travis's fucked-up psyche, none of the events are straight-up imagined by him Joker-style, so, whether or not the moment when the stereotypical black pimps stare menacingly at Travis has the camera ominously pushing in to represent his hateful perspective or not, they're still stereotypical black pimps staring at him in a menacing fashion regardless (in the same scene where the black cabbie does nothing but give a hard stare of his own in response to being introduced to him, to boot). To make the film's opposition to Travis's mindset clearer, it didn't necessarily need to have a "friendly" (or at the very least, non-threatening) black/male character in it (although that wouldn't have hurt), as, like the article said, it would've been an incredibly quick fix to have Travis hatefully staring at some black men while they're doing something mundane and non-threatening, like merely talking amongst each other, but the way that Taxi Driver doesn't merely portray them as threats from Travis's sketchy PoV, but also depicts them that way in its objective reality ends up partly, unintentionally "justifying" Travis's racism in the context of the film, IMO.
Last edited by StuSmallz; 08-31-2020 at 07:17 AM.
When I saw Taxi Driver for the first time as a youngster (I think I was 13/14) I very much thought the film painted him as a hero.
Subsequent viewings showed I was very wrong in that regard (too damn young to get it at the time) but I maintain that there are scenes which certainly seem to affirm some of his worldview, and that is troubling.
It's kinda bad?? And over written?? And extremely bougie??
Dude raises one good point, about the way the film breaks POV right after the robbery scene. That's interesting and worth talking about.
Otherwise, blech. The reading is terrible. It's like those baity articles with grave headlines: "Was The Searchers Racist???"
Congratulations, Shley Lark, you've won the filmtwitter triple crown of missing the point.
But I did get a kick out from the description of an all night Times Square cafeteria as a "mid-town cafe." lol, gtfo, kid, please.
Also at the risk of sounding un-PC, the NYC of the 70s is like a different planet than the NYC of today.
A couple of guys hanging on a street corner at night probably ARE pimps or drug dealers, black or not.
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