White Heat, 1949, with James Cagney. An oldie which I am compelled to watch every time it’s on TCM. Not only does James Cagney kill it with his performance, but it shows early technology, namely, an early GPS system stuck on the bottom of the bad guys’ car, being tracked by the police. The first time I saw this, my palms were sweating! Not to mention the Oedipus complex, Virginia Mayo as a grasping floozy, and dear old Mom supporting her sonny boy.
Also, Sunset Boulevard, William Holden and Gloria Swanson. So much to take in, so much to look at! You watch it, mesmerized, wondering how this relationship is going to come to its sorry end.
The Pianist
The Girl…Nobody’s probably heard of it. It had it’s sorrowful moments while making you feel good.
The Warrior…I never thought I would enjoy a movie about MMA fighting but this was just as good as Rocky I. Nick Nolte was pretty good in this too.
I’m just going off what I’ve seen on Netflix recently.
That’s what I was coming in to post. I didn’t know anything about the story, other than that Capt. Phillips survived the ordeal, and I think they did an excellent job of portraying a story where things could have gone any way at all at any moment.
The ending action sequence of Saving Private Ryan I found off-the-charts gripping. I remember noticing that I had my hands clasped together as tight as I could. Ergo, literally, gripping. But yeah, middle of it, not so much.
For a comedic “grip,” if you’ve seen Quick Change with Bill Murray, the ending I found pretty gripping.
“Charley Varrick” is one of my all-time favorites, but Matthau was already a “star.” He won an Oscar in '66 for “The Fortune Cookie” (with Jack Lemmon), and then was paired again with Lemmon in '68 in “The Odd Couple.” So he was a bona fide “star” when “Charley Varrick” came out in '73.
Silence of the Lambs is the yardstick I measure this by. Gripping, suspenseful story, intense plot twists, gruesome-but-largely-understated visuals, fantastic performances of well-realized characters, and a story that unfolds and resolves masterfully. Absolutely a gem. I still see it as one of the best-realized films I’ve ever seen in a hard-to-articulate manner…part of my brain will always be convinced that everything in that movie is slightly more real than reality.
Pee-Wee Herman saw a really a really gripping movie at some theatre off the main drag. Don’t know the title, though. I heard Justice Clarence Thomas was a fan of “Long Dong Silver”. I managed to miss that. I’m sure it was pretty cerebral, tense, and had a happy ending.
I began to watch “All is Lost” and before I began watching through the entire movie, I FF’d a few times to check the language, picture quality and sound volume.
I noticed that no matter how far I FF’d, there didn’t appear to be any more than one char and one location involved in this movie and I really didn’t want to spend 2 hours watching a film like that. So, I FF’d thru the entire film and it ended in the way I figured it would and I was happy that I FF’d thru it all and didn’t bother to watch it.
But then, I looked it up in Wikipedia because that is the only place I know where I can get a good summary of the plot. I was shocked to learn that the movie ended in exactly the **opposite **way that I figured it would end.
As a result, I now wonder about the wisdom of FF’ing through an entire movie unless you are prepared to accept that it might end in a way very different from the way you assumed it would.
If you like war movies and intense battle scenes I suggest We Were Soldiers, with Mel Gibson as Lt. Col Hal (Hap) Moore in the true story of the battle of the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam, from the also very good book, We Were Soldiers Once, and Young.
Madeleine Stowe, Greg Kinnear and a great Sam Elliot. It was a hell of a battle and the story leading up to it, and the story of the wives at home is very well done.
If your rent or buy the DVD check out the deleted scene in the church at home. There is an older couple sitting in the pews, surrounded by adults and children, who are the real Col. Hal Moore, his wife, children and grandchildren. It is a pity the scene wasn’t used in the movie but there was just no place to fit it in once the battle was in progress.
High Tension
12 Angry Men
Flowers of War
Crash
Deep Impact
Devil
P2
The Villiage
Cloverfield
The Game
Die Hard
Apollo 13
Keepers Creepers
Seven
Rampage
Burried
ATM
and the first scene of Scream
A tiny nitpick for one of my favorite films: Colonel Nicholson says, just before being mortally wounded, “What have I done?”
That and of course his conversation with Colonel Saito atop the completed bridge on the final evening:
“I’ve been thinking. Tomorrow it will be twenty-eight years to the day that I’ve been in the service. Twenty-eight years in peace and war. I don’t suppose I’ve been at home more than ten months in all that time. Still, it’s been a good life. I loved India. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But there are times when suddenly you realize you’re nearer the end than the beginning. And you wonder, you ask yourself, what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything. Hardly made any difference at all, really, particularly in comparison with other men’s careers. I don’t know whether that kind of thinking’s very healthy; but I must admit I’ve had some thoughts on those lines from time to time. But tonight… tonight!”
And as my own submission I would have to say* Ronin*. Once the pace gets going John Frankenheimer doesn’t let up. And the best thing of is that all of that action was done for real, in-camera. Just a wild, well written ride all the way to end.
Thanks…long time since I’ve seen it, but you’re right. The scene you describe on the bridge was moving. Was Colonel Nicholson the British Commander of the bridge project ? I thought Alec Guinness played him and spoke the “My God, what have I done”, line ? Bill Holden running through the river screaming “Kill him…Kill him !” to the reluctant young comrade was a brutally vivid portrayal of war’s horror.
