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So, I feel like this is my award. :)
Yes, I know, it's not perfect. It makes too much drama out of the streak, which (from a pure saber perspective) wasn't meaningful. Maybe a bit too much truck driving. But...goddammit, it's a movie about Billy Bean! Bill James! All of that stuff! And it was very, very entertaining IMO.
My guess is it won't win any of the big awards, but if it did I'd be pleased as punch.
You can only really compare the top 5 to other years, though.
Moneyball is the best of these that I've seen, but I haven't seen Tree of Life or The Artist and those are supposed to be the best.
I understand if folks don't think it's worthy of Best Picture but if people are going to state it's a poor movie or a dumb story or some such that is a reflection of the person versus the story. Because War Horse is a well known children's story and been a resounding success on stage. And rightly so.
I think Slumdog Millionaire is even worse.
Absurd.
The Oscars are what they are. And that isn't much.
Absurd! Why is Bill Dahlen not in the Hall of Fame yet? What are these people smoking?
What surprises me about Moneyball is how much chicks dig it.
Also 46 out of 100 at Metacritic, which is the same rating as "Red Tails"... and lower than "Contraband" with a 52...
The female audience in the Wallbanger household all enjoyed Moneyball.
FTFY
Every woman I know who has seen it has gushed about it. I think they enjoyed it more than I did. What exactly is the appeal? It can't just be Brad Pitt.
That a film based on baseball statistics has garnered such a strong reaction from women is a miracle of sorts.
Apparently, not that well known-at least not to me. It was a play, as well?
Is this a result of greater media awareness (and access to it electronically) than in prior days? I get the feeling that nominations for the "The Help"s and "Extremely Loud"s of the world would have been widely considered gimmes 20 or 30 years ago (but maybe I'm just projecting my own experiences outward).
The more I think of it, I wouldn't be surprised if the group of '70s best pictures holds up better today than the 2009-2012 nominations do.
Has "The Artist" been generally panned? I thought it was getting good reviews, and it strikes me as the sort of movie that critics would praise just to appear like they know what they're talking about but would not be entertaining at all to sit through. Anyone seen it?
It was/is a very successful play, and more than a few people say that the magic from the theater was not/could not be replicated to the big screen. The horse in the play is an elaborate puppet.
Holy crap, now that you mention it, I can totally see him in my mind. He's the guy that just got married that Phil gives him and his wife wrestling tickets.
I still haven't seen it, but how did "Girl with a Dragon Tattoo" not get nominated? It seems like the kinda of movie Oscar loves - based on a popular book, great acting performance from a breakthrough star, clever autuer director, fairly popular, but not a blockbuster, and by most accounts that I heard, a good movie. Seems like it could have made a top ten list.
This was inexplicable, though I didn't find Albert Brooks to be at all interesting in that role. Should have gotten some sort of nod-maybe Director or Score.
Tree of Life was a pretty underwhelming effort.
And I'll reserve judgment I haven't seen it, but from what I can tell ELIC is the most panned Best picture nominee since The Reader, which was incidentally directed by the same guy: Stephen Daldry. AMPAS loves that guy.
And here's a list of great films from the 1970s that was nominated but didn't win: Five Easy Pieces, M*A*S*H, The Last Picture Show, Cabaret, The Exorcist, Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, All the President's Men, Network, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, Coming Home, Apocalypse Now. Nomines that didn't age well: The Towering Inferno, Love Story
I don't REALLY think of 50/50, which was the best movie I saw this year, as a comedy. I do think Bridesmaids was phenomenal though. Cried from laughter several times.
Absurd.
Michael Shannon was great in Take Shelter. I loved Brooks** in Drive, such pure evil with a hint of a conscience (maybe).
I loved The Artist. It's a paean to movies, especially silent movies. It went for something completely different, went all in on it and succeeded in a big, big way. It's tied with Midnight in Paris for my fave of the year. MiP was similar in going for something different and it had Marion Cotillard at her most alluring.
Moneyball, Take Shelter, and the Descendants were all close behind. I really wanted to see Melancolia and Hugo but didn't. My film degree son panned Tree of Life so badly to us that we lost interest in seeing it***. I'd be curious if anyone was knocked out about it.
** I confess to a career long love of Albert Brooks.
*** Hey, I want to get something out of the ~$175,000 invested in that kid. Good thing he graduated a semester early!
It was funnier than "My Week with Marilyn"!
The book won a lot of awards.
Here is a snippet of the theatre recognition:
War Horse transferred to the West End's New London Theatre, beginning performances on 28 March 2009, prior to an official opening on 3 April.[6][7] The original cast featured Kit Harington as Albert, who had also played the role in the South Bank production in 2008.[8][9][10] The production also includes an original score composed by Adrian Sutton, with John Tams as Songmaker.
The production met with critical acclaim for its life-size horse puppets from the Handspring Puppet Company, winning an Olivier Award, Evening Standard Theatre Award and London Critics' Circle Theatre Award.[11] On 12 October 2009 the performance was seen by HM Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip, marking their first private theatre visit in four years.[12] War Horse has been popular with audiences, playing to 97% capacity in 2010, subsequently breaking the record for the highest weekly gross for a play in the West End. In December 2010, War Horse was dubbed "the theatrical event of the decade" by The Times.[13] In 2011 it welcomed its millionth audience member.[14]
The category was comedy/musical.
The Tree of Life- 75
The Artist- 43
The Descendants- 43
Hugo- 40
Moneyball- 35
Midnight in Paris- 17
War Horse- 13
The Help- 7
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close- 3
There is something VERY strange about Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close getting nominated.
Hey now I thought that was actually a pretty good movie - certainly it accomplished what it was trying to do. It is not high art, I grant you that. Besides the previous two years are ever so much worse (though you did qualify since). Titanic and the English Patient. Pleh. I mean I thought Titanic was OK, but Best Picture? The English Patient was, as all right thinking people know, an abomination. Just utter crap disguised as a movie.
And yes, Slumdog Millionaire, was fun, but not the best in any meaningful way (except, well, it did win the award and all).
Is it a Weinstein movie?
I mentor an 12 year old kid. I took him to see a movie that had a trailer for War Horse before it. I was watching the trailer, knowing nothing about the book or anything, thinking that it looked like a pretty one dimensional movie, when the kid leans over to me and says "this looks so dumb. It's just about a horse and a war." Right on cue, the voiceover chimes in, "WARHORSE!"
It was one of the funniest moments I have ever experienced.
As did Awesome GF. She doesn't care much about Brad Pitt OR Jonah Hill... if anything, this movie made her a Ron Washington fan.
Me, I was mostly shifting and muttering through the opening scenes (2001 ALDS), but was mostly fine until I yelled at "Jeremy Giambi" for not sliding. Sorry 'bout that.
I enjoyed The Artist. Not a Great Film (Tree of Life is a Great Film), but was very charming & entertaining. I hadn't seen the leads in anything before, and I enjoy the newness of that. I'd definitely like to hear Berenice Bejo give an acceptance speech...
... IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN
I don't think I'll ever see it, though. Like The Lovely Bones, the book disgusted me so much I have no desire to see the film.
Incidentally, what was wrong with Shakespeare in Love? The film gets all kinds of hate, but I thought it was very clever. Of the films from that year that I saw (I still haven't seen the two big war films that everyone thought were robbed, Private Ryan and Thin Red Line), I do think that Gods & Monsters and Pleasantville were very memorable films. Lock, Stock & 2 Smoking Barrels was that year, and Rushmore, and I liked Out of Sight as well as S in Love, but S in Love was great fun. I confess to liking all those throwaway young-author movies, though: Moliere, Goethe, Becoming Jane ...
Second, while I liked Moneyball a lot, I think the only movie from this year that is likely to be regarded as a classic in 25 years is Hugo. In fact, I think it is my favorite Scorsese movie ever. It's the first movie that actually uses 3D in a perfectly integrated way, neither dominating the visual experience nor being superfluous to it. It is thoughtful and interesting, and fun -- and how rare is that combination in a Hollywood movie? I can't think of a single way in which Hugo is not a complete success.
Moneyball, good as it was, necessarily compromised on a lot of things in the translation from book to movie. But that was also a strength, because they did a pretty amazing job of managing those necessary trade-offs and still capturing the essence of the story and the conflicts that made it compelling.
You ain't kiddin'-Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock and 9/11? That's a trifecta!
FWIW-the two biggest snubs via Metacritic's top-ten aggregator were Drive and Melancholia.
I loved it, would see it again in a heartbeat.
I also loved Moneyball, Hugo, and Tree of Life. Liked The Descendents and Midnight in Paris pretty well. Haven't seen the rest. Sorry I missed Take Shelter, wanted to see it but it wasn't here that long and I didn't get to it.
Was he "That about sums it up for me"?
No, he was "WRESTLEMANIA!!!!!!!"
Don't remember the male lead's name, but apparently he's quite popular in France (cue Jerry Lewis jokes) and doesn't speak much English. He was the star in OSS 117: Nest of Spies, a Bond spoof set in the 60s that was pretty funny. I believe Bejo was in it too -- she's from Argentina, so I'm not sure if you'll get an acceptance speech, not in English anyway.
Also, I loved Hugo, but as (likely) the resident Scorsese fanboy, dude: this guy made GoodFellas. The most exciting, possibly funniest, and overall best movie of the 1990s. Though, obviously these two films are miles apart. But Hugo, great as it was, wouldn’t crack my top five, maybe top ten, Scorseses. Let’s see: GoodFellas, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, The Departed, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Last Waltz, Mean Streets, After Hours, Casino…Hugo might be the tenth, actually, depending on how I feel about The Age of Innocence, which I really need to revisit. (That one and Casino have a bit of a critical cult, with some critics like David Ehrenstein championing them as Scorsese’s two best films, which I find really interesting.)
This. It is a really great modern fable and should be seen as such. 1998 was a good year for film.
Melancholia probably requires too much analysis after conclusion to attract a lot of eyeballs. I would estimate that 1/2 or more of all people walking out of that movie have no idea what happened. While watching it, I wasn't as worried about the plot and just appreciated the wonderful acting and direction. Later, I settled on my version of the plot that made sense to me (ver minor spoiler- that Dunst's character knew all along and was going through a sort of acceptance process), and that made me appreciate the movie even more.
I liked Hugo a lot- I thought it was outstanding, particularly if you love films, and Scorsese's passion for film history and preservation was so obviously reflected on screen that it was endearing. My biggest issue with it was structural. The movie starts out like a kid's movie- resourceful urchin lives in the train station, survives on his wits, etc., complete with all the quirky characters whose lives are centered on the train station. Somewhere in the middle, it becomes a much more "adult" movie, and the focus really switches to the history (prehistory really) of cinema. It's not really a complaint about the movie- but it was odd, and I think it explains why the film has had so much difficulty finding an audience.
I would think so, yes. The cinematography is downright majestic. Sometimes seeing a Terrence Malick film is like watching someone else's dream.
Then again, the first time I saw Days of Heaven was on a 10" television and I was knocked out visually just the same.
chris h.: I was relatively lukewarm on Casino the first time (though, as it was Scorsese, I still greatly enjoyed it), but I revisited it recently and it really shot up for me. It suffers in comparison to GoodFellas, but that’s such an unfair standard that nobody but FFC could hope to meet it, and it’s distinct enough to view on its own. I’m partial to GoodFellas for a few reasons – namely, that Henry Hill is a more empathetic and relatable character than anybody in Casino, as the relative rags-to-riches outsider of the group (and damn, that narration is amazing) – but if GoodFellas is a very black comedy, Casino is absolutely outrageous mobster soap opera, tongue firmly in-cheek. Both are exhilarating to watch, but for subtly different reasons. And James Woods is always a plus.
If The Tree of Life and Hugo will be classics down the road, Drive is destined to be a cult classic. Spartan, highly-stylized and hip, and very violent, crime drama, with a killer electro-pop soundtrack and Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman and Christina Hendricks in indelible supporting roles? That’s a formula for midnight-movie greatness right there. (As an aside, based on Breaking Bad alone, if there’s a better actor alive right now than Cranston, I haven’t come across him. They should come up with some exception to get him a Best Actor award, because jeez.)
Well said. I have always maintained that Casino would have a much greater reputation if Goodfellas didn't exist. I even like Deniro's Rothstein character a lot because I have a pet interest in mob history and have read a couple of books about the real life character, and he does a good job making him reasonably sympathetic.
The voiceover stuff from GF is also true. I can't hear the piano part of Layla without those lines automatically going through my head. Indelible.
All of the buzz would have to be about bit players- say Royce Clayton, Brent Jennings, and Chad Pratt, while ignoring the three most important contributors- Pitt, Hill, Sorkin. Then it would have to have a marvelous regular season, maybe even winning a Golden Globe or SAG award, before coming up totally empty at the Oscars.
1) Can somebody who enjoyed the Tree of Life please explain to me why it was good (seriously - I'm not trying to be an ass), because it was the most painful movie-going experience of my life. There probably wasn't 30 seconds of continuous dialogue in any scene in the entire movie (and the movie was over two hours). I understand that Malick is basically beyond reproach and the movie was visually appealing, but the whole project strikes me as both pretentious and lazy. I think the movie would have you believe it was telling a compelling story, when in actuality it said very little at all. But then again, I like words, and I feel that movies have to earn the emotions they would have you believe their characters are experiencing (see also, why I believe the last scene in Lost in Translation was a cop out).
2) My wife convinced me to watch The Help with her. For some reason, I got it into my head that it was based on a true story. Upon learning that it was not about 3/4 into the film, I came to feel that the movie was nearly unforgivably self-congratulatory and borderline shameful.
3) I enjoyed Midnight in Paris and The Descendants very much.
4) I will not watch Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close because I am too close to 9/11 and because I read about 60 pages of Everything is Illuminated and decided that Jonathan Safran Foer was the most self-indulgent writer imaginable. This may not have been a fair sample size on which to base so extreme of a judgment.
The most important character in Casino isn't an individual- and especially not a really interesting one like Henry Hill- it's a city. A city we really only see through its impact on the other characters.
Good to see Casino getting some love. I definitely agree that its "connection" to GoodFellas colored its perception to a large degree. Hopefully, as time goes by, the two don't get tied together quite as much.
LQ Jones, Joe Bob Briggs and Dick Smothers???? Can't go wrong.
yeah, cuz it was awesome. Shakespeare in Love would win this year pretty handily.
Of the films I've seen, Moneyball is the best by a nose. The Artist and The Descendants were both solid, but not great. I am surprised at no nods for Dragon Tattoo or Melancholia, which while not perfect were extremely interesting films.
I am looking forward to Tree of Life, and not looking forward to Extremely Indulgent and Incredibly Manipulative, but maybe it will surprise me.
But the Jeter flip/ Giambi non-slide wasn't in the opening scene. I remember sitting through that, expecting the flip/non-slide and was disappointed when I realized it never came.
Don't forget "precocious kid who teaches us about life" and "supporting role by a great actor we've long forgotten about" (Max von Sydow)
And Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman playing himself as Rothstein's attorney. And Don Rickles!
I actually prefer Casino over Goodfellas, albeit slightly, only because I found myself liking Abe Rothstein more than Henry Hill, and I found the story of him trying to go legit more interesting than Hill working his way up the mob - but they're both fantastic movies.
I was spellbound.
As Alex points out, the theological/universal aspirations make Tree of Life as ambitious as any American movie probably ever made. Anything that ambitious is going to be seen as pretentious. Perhaps you're unfamiliar with Malick but at no point was I led to believe I was going to be told a compelling story; and I think managing your expectations for this film is crucial to what you may get out of it. I tell everyone who is about to see it that this is not your ordinary Act 1/Act 2/Act 3 film, and you shouldn't expect your typically Hollywood movie (or even your typical indie movie) just because Brad Pitt is in it.
As for "earning the emotions they would have you believe their characters are experiencing...." Well, the characters did not feel the emotions I felt. Or rather, the small boys haven't quite had the life experience/understanding to appreciate the emotions they were feeling in the then and now. God, if I knew then what I know now, simply playing in the field by my childhood home with my younger brother would've been absolutely overwhelming with the purest love imaginable. ####, I'm tearing up now just thinking about it.
You're either going to emotionally respond to it, or you won't. Unlike other movies that are divisive, I don't feel compelled to defend Tree of Life to those that hate it. That said, it's not a flawless movie, and complaints about it are not entirely unfounded.
And of course, it’s just unbelievably beautiful to look at and hear. Some of those pieces – namely, “Lacrimosa: Day of Tears” by Zbigniew Preisner, who did some amazing scores for Kryzystof Kieslowski’s films, Respighi’s “Suite III: Siciliana. Andantino,” and Gorecki’s “Symphony No. 3: Il Lento e Largo” – get serious play on my iPod at work. Emmanuel Lubezki has to be the best cinematographer this side of Vittorio Storaro, or at least in the conversation – the intimacy with which he captured Penn’s character’s childhood is vital to the tone and success of the film. And the effects work is as stunning as either.
Out of the Oscar-nominated films I have seen Hugo, Tree of Life, Midnight in Paris, and The Descendants. Will probably the The Artist this week and rent Moneyball and The Help soon enough. Definitely feels like a weaker year, or simply movies that really didn't grab my interest (for example War Horse and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, though I read the book in high school). Albert Brooks and 50/50 for best original screenplay seem like snubs.
I appreciate the response. I'm really not trying to attack Tree of Life or any of it's supporters "Compelling" may have been the wrong word to describe the movie's intentions, but I have seen defenses of the movie commonly describe it as ambitious. While I do favor movies with ambition, to me, the ambitiousness of Tree of Life has the quality of a stoner in a college dorm room pointing out that every particle in your body used to be part of a star. I'm by no means a cinephile, but I try to be openminded about more unconventional movies, and I had some idea what I was getting into with Tree of Life. There were moments that resonated with me and moments that did remind me of my childhood. I felt like to some extent the universal origin "story" did not go as far as it should have, but I also felt that with regard to the central family drama, the movie merely skimmed poignant visual snippets but never coalesced into any kind of substantive coherent narrative. And while the movie certain intended to be an unconventional narrative, I don't think that it was so unconventional as to reject the notion of narrative in the entirety. I guess, to each their own.
Of the 4 Best of Noms that I watched I thought they were all pretty much "eh" movies. Hated Thin Red Line so I pretty much knew going in that I wasn't going to like Tree of Life. I think it had some poignant moments but it wasn't really a movie.
I agree that this was the strength of the movie, and many of these scenes resonated. But I think it took a lot of work to get there, and the pay-off wasn't all THAT high. I think the movie gets a lot of points for attempting to address grand, significant issues, but, at least for me, the movie didn't say much about these issues that I found especially interesting or insightful.
This is essentially where I am. I intended to see it in December but got bogged down with other things that I probably would have worked around if not for Badlands and The Thin Red Line -- both of which are, to me, seriously overrated.
I found it just the opposite: Pretty entertaining to sit through, and technically well done, but the story is totally hackneyed, and the characters are paper thin. It strikes me that it's really difficult to establish character in a silent movie, which is probably why silent-movie stars like Chaplin and Keaton had to stretch their personas over a whole series of movies.
Here's a serious question: Why is it called "The Artist"? It's about an adventure-movie star who falls on hard times, and makes one auteur-like film that's a big flop. The main character is as much an artist as Jean-Claude Van Damme. I really hate that title.
Me too!
1) It was his first film after a mysterious two-decade self-imposed exile from film, right on the heels of two of the most acclaimed films of the 1970s.
2) It’s a war film, which is More Serious and therefore Better Than. (Not that this is a bad thing…my favorite film is Apocalypse Now, after all.)
But while I’d put it slightly above Badlands (which I really wish I loved more, because I adore Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen, and they’re both wonderful in that movie), I still think it’s the weakest of his subsequent films because it’s the most scattered. I think it’s illustrative of a storytelling paradox wherein a work becomes less universal/effective the wider it reaches. There are just so many characters in The Thin Red Line that it’s hard to become invested in any of them. Ostensibly, this is to portray the faceless, nameless indignity of death in battle – the anonymity of the soldier – but for me it just lessened the impact of any one character’s death. However…it’s the only Malick film I haven’t seen multiple times, so my opinion on it might soften or change entirely if I revisit it. We’ll see. And of course, all of the strengths of Malick’s other films are still in play here – like I said, I still think it’s a great film.
The New World is absolutely criminally underrated. The lack of reception that movie received…argh. I only regret that I had yet to really convert to full-fledged film snob by 2005 when it was rounding the arthouse theaters, so I never had a chance to catch it on the big screen.
Right - I was fine until later, when they were trading Jeremy for a reason OTHER THAN THAT HE DIDN'T ####### SLIDE.
I think this is the best defense of the movie I've heard. As in any piece of art, ultimately, I think it comes down to a matter of taste. Because the themes are so archetypal, I think the movie requires more than a snippet of dialogue, body language or a facial expression to convey it's message. I think the ambiguity in which the movie converses is cheap in some ways - it conveys ambitious themes, provides signifiers of grand emotions, and asks the viewer to color inside the spaces of these emotions. The death of a child is such a tragic event that every visual representation of a recollection of the child and the related tragedy can't help but be imbued with great emotional significance, but to grasp at that emotional significance in such an obtuse manner strikes me as facile. Maybe what bothered me (aside from the, you know, extreme boredom) is not so much that I found the answers pat, as much as I thought the movie studiously avoided giving any answers. I admit that my perceptions may stem from a desire for a conventional narrative that might make the movie less boring to me, but I've never found the frustration of convention to be laudable enough in itself to excuse the pain that a movie that makes such a choice risks inflicting upon it's viewers.
That (in part) is why I was specific and careful to say that Hugo is probably my favorite Scorsese movie, not necessarily (or even probably) the "best" Scorsese movie. Those are two very different things -- one movie can have a more personal impact because of its subject matter and the way you relate to it, on any one of a number of levels. That individual, subjective reaction can make one movie more of a personal favorite, even if it is not as deserving of a place as high among the "best" movies.
Now, I happen to think Hugo is both a very great movie, and one of my favorites -- both. I take it (from your description of your own strong affinity for Scorsese) that I am not as much a fan of his as you are, even though I like him a lot. I rarely connect to movies as filled with strong and graphic violence as most of his tend to be, even in those instances when I admire them. There is just a visceral part of my reaction to those movies that distances me from them. Part of what made Hugo so thrilling for me was to see his amazing craft taken in such an unusual direction for him, for telling a story about very different people in very different circumstances than he has often tackled in his career. Those departures have been -- for me -- generally closer to the top of my own personal list of Scorsese favorites than they usually rank for most people.
Boy, you missed out. Since it was shot on 70mm film, they had to project it on a screen otherwise reserved for IMAX films to maximize it. The screen I saw it on was much much bigger than the screen in the arthouse theater I saw Tree of Life on, so it was visually that much more majestic.
I watched the nominations get announced and both Max von Sydow and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close got a round of applause when they were announced. No other nomination got a reaction from the crowd. Either the Hollywood Insider Crowd likes that movie a lot more than everyone else or there was a secret movement afoot to stuff the ballot box and some people showed up to see if it worked.
I've seen sixteen of the 61 movies nominated for anything. I'm going to try to see them all, but documentary shorts aren't easy to find.
My top 5 of this year:
Midnight in Paris
Warrior
Moneyball
Tree of Life
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Other picks:
Actor: Tom Hardy, Warrior
Actress: Elizabeth Olsen, Martha Marcy May Marlene
Supporting Actor: Brad Pitt, Tree of Life
Supporting Actress: Jessica Chastain, Tree of Life
This is probably more or less where I'm at with it at this point. It just seemed wispy in the extreme. I generally appreciate a non-conventional narrative and count some experimental films among my favorite works of art. But all the beautiful touches (and there were many) made the film more glaringly lacking in any sort of judgement or narrative. I will agree that the childhood sequences were probably the most evocative treatments of what it's like to be a child of any I've ever seen.
--Brad Pitt did a great job as a dad
--loved the daughter scenes
--loved the flashback scenes
--found the interaction between the 'GM' and 'Manager' fascinating in that the manager could ignore his boss' orders.
--the depictions of players and the clubhouse
--that Brad Pitt managed to look just cute and not gorgeous. (that's a direct paraphrase of something I heard several times)
Though, you give that guy anything to do with film/film history and he’ll throw himself into it. His documentary, My Voyage to Italy, about the Italian films that shaped his tastes as a young man, was extremely informative, and touched on a lot of works that aren’t the typical Italian canon. Hearing Scorsese talk about any movies for 4 hours is a treat, but hearing him talk about stuff like Rossellini’s late career with Ingrid Bergman was that much more of a revelation. I really need to get around to seeing his documentary on American film – hell, there’s only a handful of his films left that I haven’t seen (Kundun, The Color of Money, New York New York…that might be it).
On the issue of what I think is “best” vs. what I consider a “favorite,” if you drew a Venn diagram of my tastes, the two would come pretty close to a circle, with the occasional outlier. I’m a bit of a chameleon, taste-wise, and it takes a lot to make me dislike something. Sometimes I wonder if my tastes aren’t a bit impersonal because of it, but ah well. I love what I love all the same.
AJM: Taxi Driver played in AMC theaters for a single night last fall, and you can bet I was there. It was absolutely thrilling when that jazzy Herrmann score kicked in and I realized, “Holy hell, I’m watching ############# Taxi Driver on the big screen!” I really need to move to a major city with significant options for revival screenings– I’d be in heaven. Kansas City doesn’t really cut it. (Though I did discover, recently, a chain called Screenland which shows mostly arthouse but more importantly the occasional classic – Casablanca and Amelie are on the slate in the coming months, so I’m gonna have to do everything I can not to miss those.) Sometimes I find myself on film snob forums and somebody mentions that, say, Satantango is playing in New York, and I just get all dejected. Lucky bastards.
Does anyone know of a place in Seattle where they do this? I am sure it exists, and I would go to them if I knew about it, but it has slipped past me.
Well, the Metro and the Egyptian do revivals occasionally. And the Cinerama had that 70mm film festival last year where they showed proper 70mm movies like Lawrence of Arabia and 2001. And there's the Grand Illusion, which shows weird old movies almost constantly. You can also see hard-to-see movies at the Northwest Film Forum and SIFF Cinema. SIFF Cinema is where I saw the restored full-length Metropolis last year. It was amazing.
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