WHAT FILMS HAVE YOU SEEN LATELY?

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movieman1957
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Re: WHAT FILMS HAVE YOU SEEN LATELY?

Post by movieman1957 »

Angie Dickinson may be the best thing about "Point Blank." I didn't much care for it. The early part of the story was confusing and stylistically so buried in 1967 that it was a big distraction for me and The Bride. Once Angie comes in the picture settles down and becomes more straightforward for me. Even at that I still felt there needed to be some more background or explanation.

I did think Marvin and O'Connor were also quite good.
Chris

"Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana."
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JackFavell
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Re: WHAT FILMS HAVE YOU SEEN LATELY?

Post by JackFavell »

Point Blank is probably one of those movies that you have to watch twice. The first just to know what the heck is going on! It can be maddening at some points, just when you think you've got it it shifts.

I liked it, but it is extremely dense because of the style. I don't mean stupid dense, just thick with plot and mise en scene. I totally agree about the performances.
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mongoII
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Re: WHAT FILMS HAVE YOU SEEN LATELY?

Post by mongoII »

I recently watched "Gods and Monsters" about the life and torment of director James Whale. It was a very interesting film with an excellent performance by Ian McKellen, who deserved his Oscar nomination. Brendan Fraser and Lynn Redgrave add to the dramatics.
In one scene of note two supporting players do an impressive take off of Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester at a garden party for Princess Margaret. Good stuff.
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Re: WHAT FILMS HAVE YOU SEEN LATELY?

Post by MikeBSG »

I really enjoyed "Gods and Monsters" when I saw it several years ago.

Today I watched "Carry On Screaming" (1966) which I commented on in the Sci-Fi & horror section. I really enjoyed it, my first Carry On movie.
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JackFavell
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Re: WHAT FILMS HAVE YOU SEEN LATELY?

Post by JackFavell »

Ooh, I remember liking Gods and Monsters a lot too. Very well done. Ian MacKellan was excellent.
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Re: WHAT FILMS HAVE YOU SEEN LATELY?

Post by RedRiver »

I haven't seen the earlier BRIGHTON ROCK either. It doesn't seem to cross my path very often. My experience with POINT BLANK was interesting. For years, I heard it was excellent. Maybe even the poster child for that type of movie, in that era. Upon finally seeing it, I was disappointed. It held my interest, but didn't excite me.
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JackFavell
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Re: WHAT FILMS HAVE YOU SEEN LATELY?

Post by JackFavell »

I watched Vera Chytilova's DAISIES today.

These are my impressions, I don't really know if they have anything to do with how someone else would see this movie. DAISIES was so free, so anarchic, it was nothing like any other movie I've seen. It makes fun of everything. I thought the Marx Brothers did that, but the themes here are a little different because of the woman's viewpoint which I don't think has been as fully realized anywhere else. If I were to compare, I can see it being sort of like HELP in style, but that is so limiting, in a way I don't really wish to be. It does a disservice to the film. It goes into waaaay deeper territory and is far more subversive and is far more creative. Someone compared it to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and I can agree with that, except that it gives those characters knives and scissors and an attitude that men are not really important. Spiritually the filmmaker closest to Chytilova might be Cocteau, at least that feels right to me.

It's hard to imagine someone making a movie so free while under repression, though maybe it's because of the repression that Vera Chytilova HAD to make this film. Her mind was free, and that's kind of the whole point here. Her mind was so free it hurts and dazzles and is ugly and is beautiful. It hurts even more when you know that she was banned from making any more movies after 1968, though that doesn't seem to have stopped her. I felt like she was giving the finger to the powers that be, while outwardly criticizing a materialistic society that makes of women a product. The film's scope is immense - it's like a bomb going off in a museum that holds the most beautiful creations and the most repressive stereotypes. The pieces of art scattering and falling around you all meant something deep at one time. It's just that putting them together as they fall in different ways has the effect of alienating you from their natural meaning. Juxtaposing them with the stereotypes and the ugly make them seem meaningful in a totally different way. The conventional roles of women are blown up and scattered among the art only backwards and upside down, and the pieces intermingle and fall together and become something else. And then the women eat them. But that's only scratching the surface... :D

To me, it was about seeing women, and them seeing someone seeing them, and then finally the women taking on the personas inflicted on them in a heightened way, and by doing so, rejecting them, blowing them to kingdom come. Using the personas to feed themselves in the most hedonistic way. Dining is all there is in a world that is empty. There are consumers, and consumees. It's a place where women aren't even allowed to eat at will, or feed themselves in any way except as a standardized model, one dress fits all, at the pleasure of men or the government. But the two girls here mock and use that, breaking the rules. And then there's also their own relationship and power plays with each other. And I'm not even getting to the real 'meat' of the movie. Ha ha ha ha ha ha

The creativity of DAISIES is STAGGERING. Just the collage sections alone must have taken forever to film, and each of these only takes about 10 seconds of film time. There are fast edited spinning, moving, falling collages of butterflies, screws of paper, train wheels, what have you. The girls even cut off their own heads and stick them randomly into a different background. Collage plays an important part in the film, the girl's apartment is even a collage - first the walls have giant green leaves and framed flowers, then phone numbers and addresses of men they have taken for a ride written all the way up to the ceiling.

Chytilova uses colored filters randomly, camera techniques of all kinds, different types of film. Her use of sound is just as inventive and collaged. No wonder they felt they had to stop her. The film incites one to be spirited, liberated from rules and regulations. To tear things apart and put them back together. There are certain parts that are zany funny. The cake fight was wonderful, ending with the girls swinging from a grandiose chandelier in a banquet room. At the end, realizing they might be caught, they try to put together the pieces of the giant banquet which they have gobbled up and demolished, making small collages of of the broken plates and mashed food. They declare that they'll be good from now on.... and end up mummified, rolled up in tablecloths and what looks like barbed wire for wrapping. Did Chytilova know what was going to happen to her? That her flowering would be stifled just as it was blooming?
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Re: WHAT FILMS HAVE YOU SEEN LATELY?

Post by JackFavell »

Hahahaha! I bet it did. :wink:

I think you are right on target when you say that whatever a person brings to the movie is what they will see there. Somehow that reminds me of those Kuleshov experiments with editing where they showed a face and then cut to a baby, then showed the same face and then cut to a pile of garbage. It was the same shot of the face each time, no different expression...but each time, audiences thought the person in the shot was reacting to what they thought the face saw. Chytilova seems to be doing something similar here, with her free, open to interpretation story.

I did notice how they seemed to pick the most innocent of things to do as their idea of 'being bad'. It lent a charm to a movie that might have been bombastic without that innocence. There was simply too much going through my mind though to remember that that was my first reaction to their eating binges and playfulness.

I feel bad that I read a short description that called it 'a feminist treatise' before I watched. I'm quite sure it influenced my thinking while watching, and I usually like to go into a movie without knowing anything about it. It would have been much better that way.

I did feel the film got rather slow and harder to watch as the girls got bored with their game of picking up men, but I think it was supposed to be that way.

Gosh. I can't believe those jerks at the TCM website didn't go all crazy on this film, didn't even watch it! That's worse than picking it apart. I read one article online (not at TCM) by someone named Dennis Schwartz after I watched the film. He said it was tiresome and unfunny, that their 'dumb pranks' made the heroines unsympathetic and the director was trying too hard to be outrageous. Maybe these are qualities he himself exhibits and so he saw them in the movie? :D

Can you tell me a little of what you see in the movie, what about it makes it meaningful to you?
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JackFavell
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Re: WHAT FILMS HAVE YOU SEEN LATELY?

Post by JackFavell »

Thanks, Masha! I'm so glad you opened up about this movie, because I now feel we have something in common. I have a very similar background, at least school wise. My parents didn't have a lot of money, and I didn't get a lot of things, but we weren't badly off. But our education at home was terribly strong, and I always felt I had the advantage over my friends and other kids because of my innate intelligence, which I got from my parents, not because I worked at it. I had a kind of entitlement over other kids, because I was smart. Not a very good trait, but one which I think my father also passed down to me, and which my mother tried to curb. At the same time I was not very gifted at anything, did poorly at sports thanks to an eye problem early on, and was very shy and felt unpopular. I only realize this dichotomy now. It's an odd combination, to feel smarter than everyone and also inferior.

I did very well in grade school, but as time went on I became lackadaisical and found I didn't have to work very hard to get my grades. I talked so well that my teachers let me slide. As I joined the work force, I continued to be an average worker, doing what was required but not excelling because I didn't really care for my jobs and had nothing invested in them. I had no career, thanks to a foolish choice on my father's part, and to my own fear. If I hadn't found theatre and drama, at which I excelled, I would have been a fairly unhappy person. Because I worked so hard at acting and directing over the years, and found a theatre of people who had the same down to earth feelings about it that I had grown to have, I know that I have achieved something. Perhaps even something beautiful, or thoughtful...and that I might have helped someone through art, because that is what I believe art is for. As ephemeral as entertainment is, I think it does have a lasting effect sometimes.

Like you said, it gave me an identity. It's really helped me become a more balanced person, not on one side or the other, not looking down on others, nor feeling like an inferior either. And that's what I find in this movie and these characters, not surprisingly.
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JackFavell
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Re: WHAT FILMS HAVE YOU SEEN LATELY?

Post by JackFavell »

That's really interesting, kingrat. You are right - even though it's got a somewhat psychedelic style it certainly doesn't feel at all trendy or dated to me, anyway. I think that the stylistic choices are all there for a reason, not to just seem hip.
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Re: WHAT FILMS HAVE YOU SEEN LATELY?

Post by RedRiver »

Rather than go into a lot of detail, I'll do a brief nod toward the movies I've watched this week. I liked Woody Allen's film, TO ROME, WITH LOVE. Funny, theatrical, kind of poetic. Not one of his best, but fun. SORRY, WRONG NUMBER shows Barbara Stanwyck in rare form. Her "invalid in peril" scenes are exciting; other parts feel more like filler. It's based on a radio play. I have a feeling it was more on track in its original form. CHAMPION is my second favorite boxing film (next to Robert Wise's superb THE SET-UP). Dark and grim; exciting and provocative. Mark Robson directs a great Ring Lardner story. Young Kirk Douglas at his most intense. And our old friend MAN OF A THOUSAND FACES. One of the best bio-pics I've seen. Fascinating and ironic: raised by deaf parents, on to a career in silent movies. Could a classic movie fan NOT like this story?

That's all for now. Thank you for joining us!
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