I saw M a while ago; absolutely ground-breaking and chilling. I didn’t have anybody to talk about it with, though. The friends I usually watch old movies with had just had a son, and that is not a movie to show to new parents.
Sampiro, I’ll have to give 2001 a read and check out the sequels too. I understood everything up until the end. I’m lost as to what the old men represent. And were they supposed to be Frank and Dave? I couldn’t quite tell. I noticed when one of them knocked that glass over and looked at the shards that he gave it a questioning look, like he had just discovered something. I thought it was akin to the ape discovering that he could kill things with the bone, and I expected the guy to go in the other room and kill the other guy in the bed.
There were two old men right? My memory is a tad fuzzy on that. That wasn’t just the same guy was it? I need to watch the end again.
Just one old guy. He is being rapidly stepped through the remaining stages of his life before being confronted with the monolith, reaching toward it, and being moved to the next step in evolution.
I’d have to watch it again to get the exact details, but I remember the way that sequence was staged and shot was extremely precise. I’m pretty sure you never see two versions of Dave at the same time, or in the same camera shot, but it’s very strongly implied. In the bathroom, the camera is a hand-held, POV shot (implying that it’s Dave’s point-of-view as he looks around the doorjam and into the main room. There, an older Dave is eating dinner. He looks toward the doorway, But when the camera shows us what old Dave sees, there’s no one there.
I don’t believe Kubrick did anything like that by accident. Without shooting it the way he did, viewers might think that Dave just lived out his natural lifespan in those rooms, and we were seeing only a few moments of that. The way its done sets up the pattern of him being transformed quickly through various stages of development, leading to the final leap to something beyond us.
Edited to add: Just found it on youtube. I wasn’t quite right. There is one shot where we can see two Daves. The camera is looking over the shoulder of the Dave eating dinner, to the very old and frail Dave in the bed. Just a staggering piece of work.
I saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s last month and I quite enjoyed it.
I accidentally ran into The Secret Life of Walter Mitty about a month back. That was awesome.
What was your reaction to Mickey Rooney?
My girlfriend, who’s more of a film buff) took me to see The Bicycle Thieves on the big(ish) screen on Hogmanay. Fascinating film, and a classic, but such a downer at the end. The guy ends up in despair, crying in front of his young son, not knowing how he can go on.
Not really the sort of film I wanted to watch on New Year’s Eve! I wanted something happy!!
Winchester '73 - Although it certainly had been on enough times over the years, somehow I’d managed to never catch more than a few seconds of it so that when I finally did sit down to view it in its entirety I had no preconceived ideas as to either plot or quality.
What a completely enjoyable show. I love watching Stewart when he plays a ‘darker’ character and in this he’s immediately thrust into a vengeful role. There are plenty of plot elements to keep you interested, from how the gun manages to stay just out of reach to the manifestations of the system of values necessary on the frontier to the twists that develop over the course of the story.
The roles Shelly Winters was chosen for over the years has always amazed me. This is no exception. Will Geer is a welcome inclusion anytime. It’s a great tale, ranking equally I think with other Western classics like 3:10 to Yuma.
I hope you take the opportunity to read the book; there are several long cons that the movie doesn’t touch, first showing how Mose and Addie went on a cotton-mill scam, with Mose and Addie meeting a phony “Colonel” and joining him for a bogus paper-mill operation and then Addie masquerading as the long-lost granddaughter of aristocratic Southerners. Well worth the read.
I’ve watched a ton of old movies recently. Two of the more critically acclaimed ones that I recall are from Orson Welles.
“A Touch of Evil” was really good. Strangely I barely noted the opening long shot but then immediately afterwards saw mention of it everywhere. It even had Janet Leigh stuck in a remote motel run by a creepy guy which you gotta love.
“The Third Man” was good but not great. It didn’t help that I figured out right away who the third man was, etc. I kept wanting the film to “get on with it.”
We Netflixed My Man Godfrey a few weeks ago. Delightful.
I watched “2001: A Space Odyssey” for the first time about two months ago…
And felt it was probably one of the LONGEST, most over-hyped, BORING movies I’ve ever seen!
They could have edited an hour of that shit (including the last 30 minutes) and we wouldn’t have missed it.
No, I’ve not read the book.
Contrary to what seems to be the consensus at the IMDB, I shouldn’t have to read the book to understand the movie! :mad:
I’ve also tried watching “Citizen Kane” on at least 3 different occasions…
…I can’t get through the first 30 minutes!
The last two movies I watched were Persona, a 1966 movie directed by Ingmar Bergman and Bringing Up Baby, starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. I am not sure I understand Persona, but I enjoyed the ride. I love Arsenic and Old Lace and thoroughly enjoyed The Philadelphia Story, but I found Bringing Up Baby paled compared to those two.
I recently watched Streetcar named Desire. I really enjoyed Brando’s acting but also the social aspects that the movie displayed - the money issues, the double sexual standards, etc. I also really like it when a movie succeeds in bringing across some dominating aspect of the weather - for instance when the story takes place during a hot spell. This is also something I liked about Twister, for instance.
I saw **Taxi Driver ** and was thoroughly underwhelmed.
Recently saw The Misfits – fan-f-ing-tastic. Marylin Monroe, Montgomery Clift, unbelievably good.
Mutiny on the Bounty - 1962 version with Brando. Loved it, although I thought that for a three-hour movie, it seemed to end rather abruptly.
I just got Rashomon (Criterion collection) for my birthday after wanting to see it for years.
Boring.
Soooo disapointed. I will watch it a few more times with the various commentaries to see what I’m missing.
I think the case with a lot of ‘groundbreaking’ material is that this was the song/show/book/movie that did it first and everyone was blown away. With the passage of time and imitators who did it better, the original product just isn’t as impressive.
Bummer. That’s coming up soon on my Netflix queue.
I recently watched the Laurence Olivier version of Henry V. It was very …colorful. I liked it, but the frame of the stage production, and the somewhat stilted acting style of the time was a bit jaring to me.