I keep telling myself that and then forgetting it when it matters.
Re: Scent of a Woman
I think you’ve got cause and effect mixed up, there. Remember, God’s a funny guy.
Re: The Imitation Game
And yet, I’d wager he wasn’t the one to do it. Scientists (in wartime) have their handlers, don’t you know?
One of the (many) things I did not care for about the movie was just how small-scale and cliquish they made Ultra out to be. As if it was just some high school friends running around breaking codes in their father’s garage, mistaking their pot-induced ramblings for genuine inspiration, as if they were the first ones ever to contemplate the meaning of life or the origins of the universe. Seems to be a common theme in historical films done poorly: no appreciation for the complexity and scale of wartime operations.
The Imitation Game was very inaccurate. It has Alan Turing inventing the way that the cryptanalysis was done, but he didn’t. It has him deciding how the machine doing the cryptanalysis was built, but he didn’t. It has him deciding who gets the information that comes out of the cryptanalysis, but he didn’t. He did some of the work on the cryptanalysis, but so did many other people. This is a typical problem with movies. They think that you have to make a single person the hero who does everything.
I want to watch Enigma 2001 for a different view of the Bletchley Park project.
I watched Moonfall again today. Fifth time all the way through I think. It just gets better every time.
The odd thing about The Imitation Game: Turing is famous for 3 things: (1) his work on Enigma; (2) the tragedy of his personal life and death; and (3) the “Turing Test” to determine if an AI is sentient.
The film goes deeply into (1) and (2) and says nothing about (3)…except that’s where the title comes from.
The terrible thing about The Imitation Game is that it depicts Turing as a traitor, and specifically as a man led into treachery by his sexuality.
As in there is literally a scene where Turing discovers the identity of the Soviet spy and is immediately blackmailed into silence. Which potential blackmail was in real life the reason gay men were barred from serving in sensitive roles.
According to this film, which is meant to be about how great Alan Turing was and how terrible the prejudice he faced was, he was wilfully complicit in the betrayal of state secrets. And the people who barred gays from access to secret intelligence were entirely right to do so.
I mean, fucking hell lads, way to misinterpret the brief.
Watched Hit Man on Netflix.
Some parts of it were gut-bustingly funny. Quite entertaining up until the end, where it took a tonal shift that felt unearned to me. The whole house felt something wasn’t working about that film. Reading Linklater’s commentary on it, he was trying to do both a noir and a screwball comedy, but it’s clear he couldn’t deliver on both, because they each required different endings.
Fits our general assessment that Netflix movies usually turn out to be films that needed one more pass before production.
Also the lead female character was a mess. Really inconsistent behavior, I think just to screw with the audience, not to serve any story purpose. There is no story that explains all of her behavior. I found the writing kinda sexist.
Still well worth the watch, since it was very funny and a lot of fun for most of the run time.
We watched and enjoyed this movie, and I gave it a good review. However, I agree with you about the ending. Here’s my reaction: The main character committed murder and got away with it, scot free, after being portrayed as a decent, ethical, upright guy up until then. I’d have rather he’d found some other way out of his predicament than offing someone.
I right there with both of you. I enjoyed it overall, but it definitely did not stick the landing.
That film’s moral compass took a detour through the Bermuda Triangle in the last 15 minutes.
There is a bit before the final credits about the real life character that basically says, “We’re just kidding.”
Give this one a hard pass. Production is fine as is the action but it’s all jump scares with no direction, expectation or payoff.
In the interview scene which is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOAtsjqwxuA , they say that Turing made a very important mathematical discovery, which makes him the best mathematician in the world.
Another thing I like about Hit Man was its soundtrack. Since it was set in New Orleans there’s some good old school jazz, zydeco, and such. But the clincher was Cast Your Fate to the Wind. Written by the same guy who did the Peanuts theme. Throw in Closet Queen and Bolero and you’d have da Bomb(er).
And the bit at the end referring to the real guy says: “Zero murders.( We made that part up.)” I think Bernie stayed a lot closer to the criminal facts.
We just watched a 1948 Alfred Hitchcock film called Rope on Amazon Prime. Free! I had never seen it before.
Great story. Incredible direction and acting. I would assume film schools make it mandatory for viewing.
It was like a continuous “take”, with no cuts.
I highly recommend it.
The technology of the day made it impossible to truly be a single shot. Something about the limits on reel length. If you watch closely, you’ll see how they approximated it, by (for example) closing in on the back of someone’s dark jacket, then backing away. That’s where the cut is.
Or going around the back of the chair, I seem to remember.
Even recent examples like 1917 have to use tricks like that. I believe the only major feature film to do it in a legit single shot was Russian Ark (2002).
Like with any film camera, you can only shoot until the film runs out. So if the film loaded in a Panasonic movie camera can hold 20 minutes of footage (a number I just made up) there’s a “cut” in the movie every 20 minutes, where they reload.
This must have taken meticulous planning…knowing that in 20 minutes the cameraman needs to zoom in on somebody’s dark jacket.
There’s a number of ones that are longer than that. The one that I’ve seen is Victoria, and I found it to be a reasonably good film. You can see a list of the longest ones in the Wikipedia entry below. Note that you can rank them by length by clicking on the word “length” on top of the list: