Ok thought of a neat movie…black and white…had David Niven, Donald Pleasance, and of all people, the most beautiful Sharon Tate. I believe it was her movie debut. I can’t think of the name though. David Niven is an earl or something he and Deborah Kerr (not sure about her) travel to his ancestrial home on the rugged English coast where he is expected to offer himself up as sacrifice so that his land will begin to flourish again. Has anyone seen this movie? I believe the name is something like “Eye of the…”
What about Fellini films? Anybody seen any of these? They’re pretty weird aren’t they? Satyricon isn’t that one? I can remember trying to talk about movies to some friend of my Dad’s artist girlfriend. The guy was a professor at VCU. She told him I was a “movie goober” and watched a lot. He got all snooty on me and mentioned “Fellini films”. So I told him…Naw but I did like “Smokey and the Bandit”. That shut him up.
I also have to agree with the 2001 thing. I thought it was boring. But then I think Kubrick films are ultra boring, everything but A Clockwork Orange. Who wants to sit there and wait 10 minutes for someone to deliver a line of dialog. I can drug one of my kids and sit around and watch them breathe! So I haven’t even bothered to snore through Eyes Wide Shut yet.
Oh God! I almost forgot…Ken Russel films! Who likes these? Anyone seen The Devils, talk about nasty! Wonder what happened to him anyway. He made that terrible “Lair of the White Snake” or something like that and disappeared. But I believe he directed and won an “Oscar for Women in Love”. (Think that’s the film where Oliver Reed and Alan Bates wrestle naked on the floor in front of this huge fireplace.) Could be wrong about that too though. I do know that Oliver Reed , Alan Bates and Vanessa Redgrave used to appear in a lot of his films.
Damn! I’m gonna have to see if you can still get some of this stuff on video. My memory is slipping.
You do realize that Kubrick did Full Metal Jacket and The Shining, right? If those films are ultra boring, then I’m in the wrong conversation.
And personally and IMHO, I thought Eyes Wide Shut was brilliant.
I love Spinal Tap! Whenever I watch it, I always crank up the volume on the TV to 11. One of my favorite parts (though it’s hard to narrow it down with this movie) is Harry Shearer trying to get through the airport metal detector with a cucumber wrapped in tin foil down his pants.
Are BratMan007 and Falcon the only two who’ve seen Spinal Tap? If so then STOP READING THIS THREAD AND GO RENT IT! It’s hilarious…basically a fake rockumentary. Hey Falcon! You drinkin while watching that movie to avoid spontaneous combustion? (“Happens to dozens of people every year they just don’t get the press.”) Needs2Know
Part of 2001’s brilliance IS the silence. Tell me it isn’t creepy when Dave wants back in the spaceship but HAL has locked the ship and then refuses to speak to him at all. All you here is the breathing of Dave get more labored as things get hairier for him. Absolute genius and MUCH better than any silly incidental music to let us know when we ought to be frightened. It definitely conveys space as a place where “no one can hear you scream” (to borrow from Alien).
I will admit, however, that the very ending got a little overboard with the psychedelia. Can anyone explain the last 10 minutes to me? Star Child is Dave is the Star Child is the old Dave is Star Child is the monolith ad nauseum?
I thought the first half of Full Metal Jacket was amazing. The second half I found lacking however. The Shining is the best horror flick ever made…
Getting back to the OP, there is a movie called (I think) Under a Liquid Sky or something like that. The film made no sense whatsoever. There was rape, drugs, and a flying saucer. It may have tied together in the end but I don’t think I ever made it that far.
As for Mad Max, the ending has one of the coolest scenes in my memory “You can saw through your leg in 2 minutes”. Too cool.
Although I stated earlier that I don’t get 2001, I will admit that I liked his use of silence. It reenforced Dave’s isolation and feelings of helplessness. (Not to mention the realism) My problem with the film however were all the long shots of things floating in space. Rent it again and time how long it takes for the moon lander to actually land, it takes forever after Kubrick does the establishing shots. The whole middle section of them going to study the monolith on the moon wastes time, that could all be sped up and cut back. (Come on, a shot of the guy reading instructions on how to use the toilet? Cute, but nothing to do with anything. And all the time he films the stewardess walking in 0 G. We get the idea, she’s weightless and can walk on the cieling, wow, GET ON WITH IT!)
…that CITIZEN KANE is one of the world’s best movies? its a piece of crap in my opinion-Orson Welles was always overated, as both an actor and director. Also, most French cinema is crap-except for a few standouts (like WEEKEND).
The high point of american film was the decade from 1945-55…after this it is pretty much garbage.
To help break up an otherwise monotonous day every day, I subscribe to a few of those free daily email mailers - science trivia, movie trivia, music trivia, etc.
In light of a few recent posts on this thread, and in the spirit of further hijacking my own thread, I’d like to post the trivia question I just received. BTW, interestingly enough, this question was received from my music trivia mailer, not the movie one:
Yes, I forgot about Full Metal Jacket but it never even came close to Apocalypse Now. The Shining what a load of crap! That was pretty much the last Steven King novel that I actually enjoyed so that horribly directed and miserably overacted movie was a huge disappointment to me when it finally came out. Sorry just don’t like Kubrick, I know it isn’t very fashionable of me but who cares? I will more than likely finally get around to seeing his last film. I resist more than anything because I absolutely despise Nicole Kidman and resist spending good money on her. Although I did enjoy that nice little thriller she made at the start of her career, what was it…you know the one on the boat with Sam Neil. God! I need some Ginko Biloba or something my memory is like a sieve!
OOPs forgot one…“Vanishing Point”…that is one of my classic “drive-in” flicks. Was it supposed to mean anything? I thought it was meant to be cool cause the guy drove fast and died at the end. Must we attach some deep meaning to these B movies? I thought movies like that and Mad Max and many of the others we mentioned were designed to entertain, not to be some exercise in social comentary or have some hidden meaning. Figured that movie was made so guys could watch another guy drive fast and die doing it. I thought it was a macho thing or something. Typical drive-in fare.
And “Billy Jack” was any movie ever more badly acted than that one, but people loved it. Girls cried their eyes out at the end of that thing. Boy, that one is a classic piece of junk. Saturday Night Live did a skit on that one with Paul Simon as Billy Jack, now that was a classic.
Yes, of course the bottom line is to entertain. But good movies, the movies that stand the test of time, usually do so because the speak on many different levels at the same time. Mad max is just one of those movies that I’ve heard spoken very highly of (did that make sense?), and I was just wondering why. It was entertaining, but I was asking for insight into how exactly it became a cult classic. Cult classics rarely become so simply because they’re entertaining.
Well damned if I know then. I have no idea why Mad Max is a classic but many consider it to be one. I’d say like I said before, because it’s cheap and poorly edited but has that certain something (maybe Mel Gibson) that makes it entertaining and unforgetable dispite it’s terrible plot, bad dialog and crappy editing.
I think it was just Liquid Sky but I may be wrong. Basically the aliens suck the energy from humans that only exists at the time of orgasm. That’s about all I remember anyway.
If You Could See What I Hear is a good movie. Kinda cutesy but alright.
As to the OP I didn’t get something about Terminator 2. No need to get into time paradoxes here (plenty of threads around for that) but if they successfully blew-up the research lab working on what would become the robots that nearly destroy humankind wouldn’t Arnold have disappeared on the spot? I mean, if the robots were never made then how could Arnold come back from the future? He should have winked out of existence when the lab blew-up.
I’m mainly asking because I’m hoping for a Terminator III. Those movies were a LOT of fun! T2 was good but Terminator was classic.
Speaking of Russell Meyers, didn’t he do Tommy? Is that a cult film? The first time I saw it, it was paired with Heavy Metal. That was an interesting double feature Sometime I’d like to watch them like that again and see if I can recapture the experience.
Speaking of Ralph Bakshi (or were we?), I rather like his American Pop. I don’t know if it has inspired any kind of a cult following, though.
A-ha! There’s the set up for the sequel! Obviously, they didn’t blow up all the bits of the first Terminator, or the lab had already made copies that were stashed away somewhere. Hmm??
But did anyone notice that the two Terminator movies totally contradicted each other? The way I see it, the “message” of Terminator was “you can’t change the future.” And, indeed, everything they did set up the future events they were trying to prevent. The Terminator came back to kill Sarah (was that her name? sorry, I’m bad with character names) to keep her from giving birth to the leader of the future rebellion (John), but if he hadn’t, the other guy wouldn’t have come back from the future to save her and father John. And so on. Meanwhile, T2 ends with Sarah (?) feeling good about the future because they think they have finally changed it. Maybe we should have expected a T3 all along because, if we’ve learned anything from T, it’s that the future can’t be changed. So it all still has to go to hell somehow, doesn’t it?
I also like Rock-n-Roll High School with the Ramones, and Amazon Women on the Moon.
I love *Buckaroo Bonzai *. Filled with a ton of great one liners. It did take me a couple of viewings to loosen up and get it though.
One movie and it’s not a cult classic, but I just watched it and went huh?
**The English Patient **
She cheats on her husband with a guy who has the facial characteristics of a stroke victim while both of them where the Ralph Lauren Safari collection. I saw no love or chemistry between them and easily give it a “WTF AWARD”
