Oh I love those, too. I do need to see more from the 1930s that's for sure.Quoting Morris Schæffer (view post)
Oh I love those, too. I do need to see more from the 1930s that's for sure.Quoting Morris Schæffer (view post)
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
If I had to pick a "weakest decade" it would probably be the 2000s or 2010s.
But as time passes we tend to filter out most of the garbage and remember just the good stuff. So in 20 years I could have a very different opinion.
"All right, that's too hot. Anything we can do about that heat?"
"Rick...it's a flamethrower."
I'm 34 but I feel more like a young Gen X-er. I relate more to their movies, music and shows anyways. Saying that someone likes this movie or that movie because of their age bracket is pretty dumb.
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
Im curious to see some of these nudity filled films from the 30s that came out before they started censorship stuff.
Haven't really seen any of these, but I've seen some great movies from the pre-censorship era that are very frank about sex, relationships, etc.Quoting Skitch (view post)
Baby Face with Barbara Stanwyck is a great movie.
"All right, that's too hot. Anything we can do about that heat?"
"Rick...it's a flamethrower."
Taking any recs from that era!
In general, I think one can see a steep decline in the quality of American cinema after 1960, which has accelerated in the last thirty years due to the introduction of digital editing in the early 1990s (and prior to that, digital sound mixing)--a change that Scorsese himself both helped to bring about and has had to respond to (see his oft-quoted line about Goodfellas being his version of MTV cutting). In this downward trajectory, Taxi Driver and other films of the New Hollywood period represent a transitional phase between the classical découpage of Ford, Hawks, Wyler, et al. and the unrelieved awfulness of mainstream filmmaking today. I'm not against fast cutting per se (I like Soviet montage films and the '30s films of Naruse and Ozu); what I dislike about contemporary Hollywood cinema is its monotony and formulaic approach to covering a scene. (I remember seeing The Prestige in theatres and finding it physically painful to watch because of how it was shot and cut.)Quoting Dukefrukem (view post)
As for your ability to enjoy films of the 1950s, that just makes it all the more puzzling to me why you think this scene from Taxi Driver (which would be common in a '50s film) is so beyond the pale.
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
I hear Baby Face with Barbara Stanwyck is really good!Quoting Skitch (view post)
"All right, that's too hot. Anything we can do about that heat?"
"Rick...it's a flamethrower."
It's pretty good, at times great, though it predictably goes soft at the end.Quoting megladon8 (view post)
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
Me too!Quoting megladon8 (view post)
That's what she said.Quoting baby doll (view post)
"All right, that's too hot. Anything we can do about that heat?"
"Rick...it's a flamethrower."
Technology caused the decline of American cinema? Or quantity over quality is making it appear this way because of the abundance of film making technology.Quoting baby doll (view post)
Maybe a bit of both?
I truly miss practical effects.
Yeah, yeah, you still see some interesting makeup and costumes.
But I doubt we will ever again see something like John Carpenter's The Thing, An American Werewolf in London, From Beyond, etc.
CGI can impress for sure, but I personally find we have sidelined (maybe even all out lost) an incredible art form in favour of the ease of computer effects.
I find fake looking practical effects (Terminator eye scene) much more charming than fake looking CGI (the entire Stephen Sommers filmography).
"All right, that's too hot. Anything we can do about that heat?"
"Rick...it's a flamethrower."
I agree with baby doll -- holding to the master is a great artistic choice -- but then Duke coining "cinemetrics" off the cuff while Skitch randomly shouts for movies featuring great-grandma's tits is fucking LEGENDARY
Was there ever something more worthy of the MatchCut banner?Quoting Irish (view post)
"All right, that's too hot. Anything we can do about that heat?"
"Rick...it's a flamethrower."
Hey I resent that, I'm not sexist, I'm fine with dongs getting equal screen timeQuoting Irish (view post)
Ah, I misread. Duke didn't coin it. But "your precious CINEMETRICS" is still pretty legendary tho.
The thing I like about that "Taxi Driver" scene is that Scorsese puts us in the streets, both literally and metaphorically. Anyone who has lived in a big city has witnessed 2 guys about to throw down. The smart thing to do is to walk away. But this is a movie and we can't. Scorsese doesn't move the camera and he doesn't cut. We know what's about to happen and there's great tension in waiting for it to happen.
For American cultural disasters, my top 6 are:
1. The steadicam
2. The introduction of the federal highway system in the 1950s
3. The deregulation of the American airline industry in the 1970s
4. The popularity of primetime soaps in the 1980s
5. Increased globalization starting in the late 1990s
6. The creation of Bittorrent, circa the early 2000s
#1 and #4 had a huge effect on how movies are made and how people interpret them
#2 and #3 changed production logistics and allowed audiences to experience places they previously only saw in the movies.
Last edited by Irish; 10-29-2020 at 11:41 PM.
Curious about why steadicam was a bad thing?
"All right, that's too hot. Anything we can do about that heat?"
"Rick...it's a flamethrower."
Steadicams are the great homogenizer, the photoshop brush of the film industry, the artistic equivalent of Instagram and Tik Tok.Quoting megladon8 (view post)
The tool itself is value neutral, but it's overused because it's cheap. It obviates the edit, cinema's one unique attribute, and increasingly makes blocking a lost art. With digital, it's too easy to overshoot your coverage and "fix" everything in post.
I don't want to make a technological determinist argument that technology caused the decline of Hollywood filmmaking; rather, I would contend that digital technology has simply accelerated an already marked decline in quality. The root cause for this, I would argue, is that after the 1950s, television is increasingly seen within the industry as the ultimate destination for films and a training ground for young directors with the consequence that most commercial movies now are staged, shot, edited, and mixed like TV shows. This can already been seen at least as far back as Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark: The plots of these films are merely pretexts for a series of set pieces of roughly equal importance. In other words, every scene is hyped as a climax. The results can be diverting for a while, but at feature length, the films reach a point of diminishing returns pretty fast. (It doesn't help matters that films are longer now than in the classical era.) Moreover, there's a widespread attitude in the industry now of "We'll find it in post." That is, rather than cutting films in their heads before they shoot (as Ford did), directors now cover a scene from a multitude of angles and cross their figures. In particular, it should be obvious to anyone with eyes in their head that, as a director, Christopher Nolan has no idea what he's doing. Even in the simplest scenes, his choices about where to place the camera and when to move it are essentially arbitrary. His films lack the unity of action, meaning, and technique that distinguished the best films of the classical period (The Reckless Moment, Johnny Guitar, Rio Bravo, Wild River, etc.) because he hasn't put the slightest thought into his stylistic choices. If there's an epidemic of people looking at their cell phones in theatres (or rather, if there was before COVID), that's in part because the style of the films themselves encourages the sort of distracted viewership characteristic of watching television, where we're not supposed to attend closely to what's happening on the screen at every moment.Quoting Dukefrukem (view post)
Last edited by baby doll; 10-30-2020 at 03:17 AM.
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
I donno guys to me a good movie is a good movie regardless of when it was made or how it was made.
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
As Roger Ebert used to say, "A film is not what it is about, but how it is about it." The how is everything.Quoting DFA1979 (view post)
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
I think I remember him saying that. Anyways good quote, and very true.Quoting baby doll (view post)
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
Haha Ebert, too bad he's not around anymore. What the heck! Shall I regale y'all with a random Ebert quote?
This one from Freddy Got Fingered:
[+] closer to next rating / [-] closer to previous rating
- Dark (S3) ✦✦✦½ [-]
- Fall (Mann, 2022) ✦✦✦½ [-]
- Ms. Marvel (S1) ✦½ [+]
- Dark (S2) ✦✦✦✦
- Moon Knight (S1) ✦✦½ [-]
- Get Carter (Hodges, 1971) ✦✦✦½ [+]
- Prey (Trachtenberg, 2022) ✦✦✦ [-]
- Black Bird (S1) ✦✦✦✦
- Better Call Saul (S6) ✦✦✦½ [+]
- Halo (S1) ✦✦✦ [-]
- Slow Horses (S1) ✦✦✦½ [+]
- H4Z4RD (Govaerts, 2022/BE) ✦✦½ [-]
- Gangs of London (S1) ✦✦✦½ [+]
- We Own This City (S1) ✦✦✦½ [+]
- Thor: Love and Thunder (Waititi, 2022) ✦✦ [+]
Pffft. Entertainment first. How it achieves Entertainment second.Quoting baby doll (view post)
Or what I like to say: "leave your film school bs in film school"