I watched Late Night with the Devil last night and really enjoyed it… except…
-spoilers for the ending-
They abandoned the premise of this being found footage in the last 5 minutes to do a very drawn out ‘tv is hell’ sequence.
I’ve come back around to agreeing generally - the theatrical cut is probably the better, certainly tighter edit. However as I’ve mentioned here before the one thing the director’s does add which I thought was lost in the theatrical is why Constanze so despises Salieri. When I first watched the film I found her strong hostility towards him in the final act kind of out-of-left-field. I mean they had hardly interacted before, where was this coming from? Just the job thing? It was only after seeing the director’s cut that I was like “ohhhh, I get it now.” It’s useful, but not essential character development lost in the tighter cut.
Regarding the film (and play) Amadeus, I remember someone posted here that it’s historically inaccurate. I get that, but I still like the story; the idea that Salieri is devout and wants to honor God through his music but the vulgar and childish Mozart was given much bigger gifts for creating music. There’s that one scene in which Salieri presents a simple melody that he composed, but then Mozart effortlessly improves it.
That’s a good point, I agree.
Magnum Force 1973 Clint Eastwood
My favorite in the Dirty Harry series. It had several actors that went on to stardom David Soul, Tim Matheson, Robert Urich, and Hal Holbrook. What a cast!
Sundance channel ran the first three Dirty Harry films this afternoon. I recommend all of them.
Tank Girl
Not recommended.
I don’t know why, but I had always heard this movie was fairly cute and was pretty much overlooked. No, it’s mostly boring and really feels incomplete. It has some kind of cool animated inserts, but I actually read those were inserted because the movie was unfinished, multiple scenes/shots not being filmed.
Really just kind of lame and boring. Perhaps they should remake movies like this. The effort/attempt was there, but it didn’t work.
Skip it.
Lori Petty is fun and the soundtrack is great. But the rest is pretty disappointing.
Yeah that was the one problem I had with it. Other than those last five minutes I loved it!
The comic book it is based on had little in the way of coherent narrative and they really didn’t succeed well in trying to graft one on for the film.
I watched a few old ones this weekend. I’d seen both before (long before).
Bad New Bears. This is almost a perfect movie. Funny, sad, dramatic, with a great soundtrack. Good acting from the kids and the adults. It also had a real nostalgic feeling for me now, too. I can barely remember when the Valley had so much open land. It brought back memories hard. I only just found out that they’d originally filmed two endings: one with the Bears winning; one with them losing. The screenings with the winning ending was hated by the preview crowds. I agree it was much better that they lost. Should I have spoilered a 50 year old film?
“Portrait of Jennie.” This is one that not everyone will like but it’s one I love. Just a lovely spooky romantic wallow. Great work by Joseph Cotton, Jennifer Jones, and Ethel Barrymore. Nice small part with Lillian Gish. The dramatic climax was almost too much, even for me, but I did like the “special effects.”
I agree re: The Bad News Bears. Terrific movie with outstanding performances and social commentary. I hadn’t heard the two endings story. I’m glad they went with the one they did.
Hmm. I haven’t seen the director’s cut. Why is she so hostile to him? Spoiler it, if you wish.
In the scene where she tries to get Salieri to recommend Amadeus for a teaching post, Salieri doesn’t just request some of Mozart’s works to inspect. He also broadly hints she’ll have to prostitute herself to him. Which she is hesitantly willing to acquiesce to for her husband’s sake. So when she brings him the operas, while Salieri is obsessing over them she is stripping topless and offering herself up. Overwrought by the visible evidence Amadeus’ undeserved genius, Salieri contemptuously dismisses her, humiliating her for nothing (as Amadeus never gets those plum paying jobs that would have kept him out of debt and alive).
In case anyone cares, in the real world, Mozart made between $100k-$500k per year equivalent in his Vienna years, according to Maynard Solomon’s Mozart: A Life, with his peak earnings year being his last (Magic Flute and Cosi Fan Tutti helped to fill that till). He was just bad with money.
Imho, I agree with @ShadowFacts - the theatrical cut was the better cut.
I don’t care for the Constanze nude scene, as… in a weird way… it debases Salieri.
Se7en
Highly recommended.
I haven’t seen this movie in a long time and let me tell you, it holds up completely. Just a terrific movie all the way through and edited masterfully. I actually don’t think Morgan Freeman is excellent in every single performance he gives, but he is great in this. Brad Pitt? Yes, he does a fine job, but he has been better in other movies. Overall, though, this movie is just top notch.
A very intense movie and I believe it is far and away the best David Fincher movie I’ve seen.
You could release it today without changing a thing and this movie turns, get this, 30 years old next year.
Reminds me a bit of I Saw The Devil, though I’ll give the edge to I Saw The Devil if forced to pick.
From what I’ve heard, it should definitely not be taken as an accurate depiction of the real-life Mozart nor of the real-life Salieri.
My wife and I watched a film called The Luckiest Girl Alive on Netflix. The way it was shot, it felt very much like it wanted to be a David Fincher or Steven Soderbergh film. Mila Kunis stars as this ambitious writer for some magazine on the eve of her wedding to some rich banker dealing with this huge trauma from when she was younger. Mostly it just sort of felt like horrible things happening to horrible people and the flashbacks were a bit weird because we know that “high school Mila Kunis” looks like Jackie from That 70s Show, but the character in the movie did not.
How many of you have noticed that a movie affects you differently after repeated viewings? On TCM I have been watching How the West Was Won for about the fourth time.
I was a kid when I watched it for the first time. I thought it was a grand adventure film. I watched it a couple more times as the years went by, and got some idea of how history works, the gains and the losses.
But tonight I have been kind of depressed. In the scene where Zeb Rawlings(George Peppard) comes back to the family farm, and finds the family cemetery plot now has him mother and father, the graves are reminding me of the style of places I saw recently when my sister and I went to see the eclipse. One timy place out in the country, abandoned, the stones tumbled mostly and it’s all but forgotten. I have a four greats grandfather and grandmother there. And in all likelihood I will never be back.
That’s what is going to happen to me eventually. I have no children, so I never even accomplished sending my genes on, little though they may be worth. If I am remembered fifty years after I die I’ll be surprised. What was the point of my even arranging for a stone, nobody will visit.
But it’s still a good movie, even better than I recall.
It should not. And the timeline is materially wrong (I mean, Mozart wrote a whole other opera after The Magic Flute). But he was a foul-mouthed and immature jerk (as Peter Shaffer famously revealed to Margaret Thatcher to her horror).
Atomic Cafe is just newsreel footage of life in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s and involves many tests. It’s dry as a desert so it’s hard to tell, but it’s intent is wall to wall black humor for just the stuff you point out.
It’s pretty good, maybe not right now, but in the future I think it’s worth your while.