Hated Peninsula. Loved Train to Busan.
Some quality filmage, @marshmallow. All Quiet on the Western Front is a masterpiece for the ages
Saw the 1978 original Death On The Nile adaptation of Agatha Christie’s book. Peter Ustinov took over as Hercule Poirot for the first time after Albert Finney did Murder on the Orient Express a few years before.
Ustinov’s performance was top class. He really was an incredibly versatile actor. He also had a pretty strong supporting cast. The film featured other big names of the era like David Niven, Bette Davis, Jack Warden as well the still living Maggie Smith, Angela Lansbury and a young Mia Farrow.
The film itself is quite slow-burning. It takes almost the whole of the first hour before really getting underway but once it does the pace of the film in accordance to the story is well performed.
I’m aware there’s a new version coming out soon but I don’t understand why movie makers don’t explore the plethora of other Poirot stories to bring to the screens rather than go back and forth every once in a while with the same two.
I watched Before the Fire (Showtime, I think?) this morning. What a piece of shit! Not much of a story, zero character development. Hell, they didn’t even introduce any characters. They just kind of show up. Anyway. utter waste of time.
Watched Wonder Woman 84 yesterday. Underwhelmed. Ridiculous at times. But it had Gal Gadot, so I am not demanding my money back.
I’m aware there’s a new version coming out soon but I don’t understand why movie makers don’t explore the plethora of other Poirot stories to bring to the screens rather than go back and forth every once in a while with the same two.
There are 70 episodes of Agatha Christie’s Poirot which, I believe, cover virtually all the written Poirot stories. David Suchet played Poirot for all 25 years of production. The early years are crime of the week style renderings of short stories. The later episodes are movie length dramas shot on film.
I pretty much felt the same way. The story made no sense at all, but I really enjoyed the visuals, Gal and otherwise.
My latest five:
From Russia with Love
James Bond must escort a Soviet defector, a beautiful cipher clerk, to safety via the Orient Express. Connery is effortlessly cool, there’s plenty of scenic Istanbul to see, and Robert Shaw is great as a remorseless SPECTRE killing machine on Bond’s tail. One of my favorite 007 films.
The Trial of the Chicago 7
Pretty good courtroom drama, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, about the 1968 Democratic National Convention and its aftermath. A terrific cast (standouts: Sacha Baron Cohen as Abbie Hoffman and Jeremy Strong as Jerry Rubin), a nice mix of courtroom fireworks and rueful laughs, and a timely message about the importance of free speech in a time of national crisis.
The Untouchables
Kevin Costner and Sean Connery as a Treasury agent and an honest Chicago cop who team up to take down Al Capone. Great to look at, but a thin and farfetched plot, especially at the end.
Die Hard
Terrorists - or are they high-tech thieves? - seize an L.A. office tower, and one scrappy, wisecracking New York cop has to stop them from the inside. Just as much fun as ever - although, for the record, still not a Christmas movie.
Elf
Also a lot of fun, and definitely a Christmas movie, but I wanted to smack Will Ferrell’s too-often-annoying character harder than I ever have before.
All the Kings Men (1949)
I didn’t plan it, but it seems… proper, in a way, to finish out 2020 with this film. My biggest beef with it is that, while it’s prophetic in a way, the film falls into (or initiates?) the trope of “man who runs on a platform of social programs funded with tax payer dollars and wins turns out to be the most crooked crook of all the crooks to ever run.” I think the trope is… overly optimistic in a perverse sort of way. Though I fear any further elaboration on that (my personal opinion on contemporary politics) would be out of place in this forum.
So I’ll leave it at that. Appropriate, but misguided and perversely optimistic even in its pessimism.
TCM ran The Birds and Psycho Dec 30.
I’ve seen The Birds at least 5 times. It had been at least ten years since I saw it. This time I focused more on the character dynamics. Suzanne Pleshette (the doomed school teacher) still in love with Rod Taylor. Jessica Tandy does a superb job as the lonely old lady that clings to her son (Taylor). Tippi Hedren is a bit too aloof and cold for my tastes. Her best scenes are at the beginning of the movie. Buying the lovebirds and going to great lengths for a practical joke.
The Birds strong characters makes the film work. The horror aspect could easily seem forced and even silly in the wrong director’s hands. Hitchcock made a masterpiece.
I had never watched Psycho. I thought of it as a slasher movie. Hitchcock is the master of suspense. Not Gore. I was pleasantly surprised that the film had more depth than I expected. I wish the sister (Vera Miles) and boyfriend (John Gavin) search for Janet Leigh had been expanded. There was a potential subplot there that got neglected.
I may not watch Psycho again. Been there, done that. I will watch The Birds again in a few years.
Still haven’t seen Marnie. I just don’t find Tippi’s acting very good.
Were you already aware of the “twist” in Psycho?
I was surprised by that twist. I’d heard Norman had mom issues. The ending was quite interesting.
Norman seems so normal and almost likeable. It makes his violent side even more disturbing.
Me too and I saw it around 1998 or so. Had no idea it was coming. Knew about Janet Leigh getting killed, though.
Watched On Her Majesty’s Secret Service yesterday and Rear Window
I hadn’t noticed the stereotyping of Lt. Doyle’s babysitter before. You only hear her voice on the telephone, but she’s clearly intended to be black – she has a Southern accent and uses “Black English” syntax.
I was thinking about the film because I was recently reading about Sara Berner, who played the woman whose dog is murdered. She had quite a career in film, radio, and TV. She was one of the rare female female voice imitators, and did versions of celebrity voices on radio and for both Disney and Warner Brothers, and had her own radio show, briefly.
(Of course, the film features Jimmy Stewart, the pre-Monaco Grace Kelly, the frequently Oscar-nominated Thelma Ritter, a pre-Perry Mason (and even pre-Godzilla) Raymond Burr, and a pre-Alvin and the Chipmunks Ross Bagdasarian.
I never quite understood why Stewart didn’t have a walking cast. But being confined to a wheelchair certainly made his scene with Burr more dramatic.
It’s interesting that Anthony Mann used Stewart as a tough and even vengeful character in Westerns.
Hitchcock made Stewart vulnerable and uncertain in his thrillers. Stewart played a everyday, common man in unusual circumstances.
Watched Without A Clue to start off 2021
Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley star as Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson. Except in this Sherlock Holmes movie there is a big twist. Watson is the real master detective and Holmes is just a character he created to write his stories (the Conan Doyle stories are written through Watson’s character after the event after all). In the film the literary creation of Holmes grew so popular that public demand forced Watson to hire an obscure actor to bring the character to life. Their relationship is one of convenience but ‘Holmes’ despite really being an imbecile gets all the adulation leading Watson to eventually want to kill the character off. Then things take a big turn.
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I really enjoyed this film. Both men had won academy awards before this movie so for a movie of this kind which is essentially a parody to star them was cool. Also having watched Caine star as a serious nihilistic spy in the Harry Palmer films set in the heart of the Cold War as a younger man, now seeing him play a bumbling Sherlock Holmes set in 19th century London is quite amusing.
Hunt for the Wilderpeople. A charming little indie comedy-drama from Waika Taititi (before JoJo Rabbit, before Thor: Ragnarok). Starring Sam Neill, barely recognizable behind a beard. Recommended.
Tenet yesterday. Quite a mess. The physics seem to be wildly inconsistent and only used when is furthered the “plot.”
I re-watched the almost-complete restoration of Metropolis last night and this morning. You ca tell which scenes were finally added from the Buenos Aires copy because they all look “scratchy”. I still love seeing how the added scenes make the story much more complete and comprehensible. Even the best previous restoration had some scenes out of order, until this almost-complete version straightened it out. Every time I watch it, I catch something I missed before. This time it was the fact that the Thin Man (Fredersen’s Evil Agent) , who plays the part of the Preaching Monk in Freder’s fevered dream (and might have also played the real Preaching Monk in the Cathedral in some of the few scenes still lost) assumes the same gestures and style when he tells Fredersen at the end that many families would be asking where there sons were that night.
I’m amazed at how this film has been rehabilitated in a relatively few years. When I first saw it in the 1960s and 1970s, it was from a badly butchered, washed-out copy. Then, starting with Giorgiou Moroder’s rock restoration, I first saw a pristine copy of most of it, with some added scenes. Then the Kino version, then the re=photographed and restored version released about 2000, then the version with the scenes found in 2008. Te film is practically complete. Fritz Lang, interviewed in the 1960s, said that he didn’t understand why people would want to see a butchered film with most of the scenes irretrievably lost (as was thought at the time). Too bad he couldn’t have lived to se it restored.
Willis O’Brien’s The Lost World has followed a similar path. It, too, has been restored to better than 95% of its original length, having been cut down to about 2/3 of its length when I first saw it. In fact, there are two different restorations out there on DVD.
It occurred to me, while watching Rear Window, that this is a film filled with cultural assumptions that make it fit for the “cultural dustbin” thread. Kids today wouldn’t know what some of the things that were obvious to a viewer at the time – or even to me decades later
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The hero is a photographer for Life magazine. They never state this, but he has stacks of a magazine (with a cover photo he has the negative of), the cover bearing that characteristic red stripe across the bottom that “Life” used to have (athough it was gone by the time I was around).
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The very idea of a photo magazine, with its photographers practically celebrities themselves
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Why don’t all those hot, sweltering people simply turn on their air conditioners? (This is a question that strikes at the heart of The Seven Year Itch, too. Have the kids read Alistair Cooke’s essay The Summer Bachelor". If you can find a copy, and get the kids to read.)
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Did people actually like the kind of music Ross Bagdasarian’s character created? (Yep. His Come On-a My House was a hit for Rosemary Cloomey that essentially made her career. And Hey, Brother, Pour the Wine was a hit for Dean Martin. Musical styles changes in the 1950s.)
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What’s a phone book?
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What’s a flash bulb?
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What are those things they get out of a box and put in a viewer? And what’s a “viewer”?
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Did “21” have Grubhub or Doordash in the 1950s?
*Why was Jimmy Stewart’s character put in that huge plaster cast? Didn’t they have Air Casts or Walking Casts?