I’m lifting this idea from http://www.criteriondvd.com, but I think this could be a lot of fun. Or maybe it will crash and burn
The fine people at criteriondvd.com have started a dvd discussion club. Every two weeks they view a criterion dvd and discuss, deconstruct, critique, and generally have a good old time talking about great films.
Would anybody be interested in doing something similiar here? At criteriondvd, they limit themselves to dvds released by criterion, but we now have 100 years of great films released in a variety of formats under different labels, and I think it’d be fun to have a twice a month viewing and discussion.
My proposal:
I will propose the first film, and open a thread next sunday for discussion of the film. Everyone is invited to rent/buy/otherwise view the film, and we can enjoy each others’ commentary.
Other dopers can suggest films for the next bi-monthly viewing, and I will choose which one will be viewed.
The person whose film is chosen will get to choose the next film from the following batch of submissions, and so on, and so on, and so on…
Or, maybe all interested can sign up to choose a film and we can make our way down the list.
Anyway, if anyone is actually interested in doing this, and has any ideas as to how the logistics can be handled, please respond.
Count me in! :0) I love critiquing movies, and this will be yet one more way for me to get more email. Yea!!!
I have two suggestions for logistics. Perhaps one way to do the selection process for movies is to say that we should move from genre one to another, so that we don’t wind up watching the same style or period of movies back to back. For example, say the first flick we critiqued is “The Matrix,” late 20th Century sci-fi, then we should move to another genre like “High Noon,” mid-20th Century western, and then move onto Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran,” late 20th Century Japanese re-visioning of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Something like that.
Also I think that in the discussion what would help make it more meaningful is looking at the socio-cultural similarities and points of differences between the movies discussed.
Actually, there’s already a discussion forum here, covering the (rather atrocious) AFI 100 list that came out a couple years ago. So, here’s a couple proposals for this thread:
The Chicago Reader’s own Jonathan Rosenbaum (considered one of the best critics in the country) and his Alternate list to the AFI 100. This will be an opportunity to delve into more obscure, but still very worthwhile, films that the AFI overlooked for more canonical (and in some cases, very tired) titles.
Or, taking celestina’s idea one step further, Movieline’s 100 Greatest Foreign Films, yet another alternative to the aforementioned thread (since that one has already gotten started, it seems a little dumb to get too redundant, what with 100+ years and all…).
In both cases, I do like the Criterion Collection as a starting point, since it is still difficult to get a lot of movies in their appropriate aspect ratio (not even all DVDs are widescreen after all), and evaluating a film by Sirk or Antonioni is really impossible if the film’s “formatted” for our screens.
