'Exposing Sodomite Rituals In Hollywood: So you wanna be famous? Watch this first. - YouTube' See more. Kind of what I envisioned for the underground cities - influence from The Kaleidoscope: The Gift of Madness by Adrian Mendoza'. 'If you were obsessed with Serial, go for If you're more of a Jojo Moyes person, hit up' 'Paris for One.
Before the emergence of Chang Cheh and fellow director King Hu, the swordplay and martial arts genres were relegated to B-movie status, whether they were made in any of the three centers of Chinese filmmaking – the Communist-controlled mainland, Taiwan, or Hong Kong. These productions were formulaic, staid, and plodding, although they attracted a loyal enough following to sustain them. A 99-film (!) series about legendary physician/revolutionary/martial artist/folk hero Wong Fei-hung, starring Kwan Tak-hing, played out on screens across Asia between 1949 and 1970. Taking his cue from the success of more graphic and cynical styles in contemporary Japanese samurai film and spaghetti Westerns, Chang created a film that questioned rather than affirmed the social order. His films ramped up the violence and bloodshed, creating a “bucket of blood” reputation for Shaw films that was decried in the West but sold tickets everywhere else. Unlike Hu, Chang pushed women almost entirely out of his pictures, focusing on male bonding and physiques and the concept of “heroic bloodshed.” (Chang’s purported homosexuality is often, seemingly knee-jerkingly cited, as an influence in this.). Thankfully, authors Mike Goodridge and Tim Grierson avoid the prescriptive route entirely.
We are not given a historical discussion, or a tedious technical exposition. (OK, there’s a glossary, but it’s in the back, and rightly so.) Instead, 16 artfully conducted, in-depth interviews, with the questions excised, with top-notch cinematographers with widely differing sets of experiences, temperaments and techniques dominate the book, including Vittorio Storaro (“Apocalypse Now”), Caleb Deschanel (“The Right Stuff”), and Barry Ackroyd (“The Hurt Locker”). These are punctuated by five “Legacy” profiles of landmarks figures in the discipline – James Wong Howe, Raoul Coutard, Jack Cardiff, Sven Nyquist and Freddie Young. By letting the subjects focus on concrete experiences rather than theory and eliminating the back-and-forth of conventional interview-writing, Goodridge and Grierson let the book take the shape of a long, relaxed and friendly conversation that gently grazes across the topics needed to understand the work involved. Surprisingly, a subject that seems intimidatingly complex is humanized. We learn how working relationships with directors are formed, how the cinematographer serves as the actors’ first and sometimes only audience, and just how improvisational much of a day’s work is, even when big stars and enormous budgets are concerned.
In all these films, the central figures have to fight not only others, but an oppressive system that uses violence as entertainment. Maybe the question here is not whether Collins is a plagiarist, but why this very specific kind of fantasy is so prevalent in the zeitgeist.
State-sanctioned killing, a rigged system, murder turned to righteous and even revolutionary ends, compulsive mass passive participation – and of course, the irony that the watchers of any of these given films is an echo of the complicit onlookers inside the films. Perhaps these movies are sketches for realities that haven’t been invented yet - or are just an encoded revelation of how we live right now?
Christl Ehlers in 'People on Sunday.' 'Kiki with African Mask,' Man Ray, 1926 People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag) Dir: Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer 73 min., 1930 Thirty years before Godard's 'Breathless,' the first New Wave film was completed. A gaggle of Berlin twenty-somethings, starting from scratch and working with few resources, created something remarkable - 'People on Sunday.' It has been referred to in countless textbooks and histories, and I have searched for it incessantly for decades.
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Finally, the Criterion Collection has come to the rescue, producing a disc last year that reveals the incredible 1997 restoration by Martin Koerber of this hybrid masterpiece. The gang of largely amateur movie men who put this piece together went on to fame and fortune, by and large.
Co-directors Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer went on to create such Hollywood classics as “The Spiral Staircase,” “The Killers,” and 'Criss Cross” (Siodmak) and “The Black Cat” and “Detour” (Ulmer). Co-producer and scenarist Kurt Siodmak, Robert’s brother, codified the Wolfman in the popular imagination, as well as “Donovan’s Brain” and other significant sci-fi and horror scripts. The film’s photographer, Eugen Schufftan, was the most well-known of the group at the time, having developed the optical-effects process that still bears his name, and having already worked on “Metropolis” and Gance’s “Napoleon.” He would later serve as cinematographer on classics such as “Port of Shadows,” “Eyes Without A Face,” and “The Hustler.” His assistant on the shoot – Fred Zinneman, who went on to direct “High Noon,” “From Here to Eternity,” “Oklahoma!” and “A Man for All Seasons.” Not too shabby. And the script credit itself?
There was input from Siodmak's brother Curt, but credit went primarily to Billy Wilder (“Sunset Boulevard,” “Some Like It Hot,” “Double Indemnity”). It would be simple to say that all this genius gathered together is responsible for the film’s success.
But in fact, all these men faded in and out of the production process as it stumbled along, and they disputed each others’ roles in the creation of the film for decades after. All of them used it as a calling card to further their careers. All of them found themselves in flight from the Nazis shortly after its completion. “People on Sunday” catches the universality of that brief, ungrounded period of the lives of singles, the sensual emphasis that dominates before irrevocable decisions are made – a microcosm of the larger loss pending in the characters’ surroundings. The summer being filmed, 1929’s, was the last normal, peaceful and prosperous one Germany was to enjoy for more than half a century.
The Depression, the Nazis, the Holocaust, the Second World War, the Cold War blues, all swept away everyone and everything you see into their maws. The camera moves in close to these faces. Ignoring the usual close-up, middle-distance and long-shot framings that were already industry standards, the camera drinks in the expressions of the players. It sits low, dangerously close to the surface of the water they splash in. It winds through the undergrowth – in fact, the Criterion cover till of Christl’s sleeping face, framed by Wolf’s hand, and the sunlit shadows of the shore’s grasses, seems as iconic an image of that time as Man Ray’s 1926 “Kiki with African Mask.”. The only narrative commentary in the film takes place right here.
We cut back to the apartment, where Annie still sleeps, and a crumpled newspaper on the table near her displays the headline, “. And so you spend your fleeting days.”. The tension is never broken – nothing earthshaking takes place – the day ends, the players part, and they are lost in the crowd. The camera pulls back again and surveys the larger scene, and the final title cards state, “Four million waiting for next Sunday.” For everyone you see, the age of peaceful Sundays is about to vanish forever. That, as much as anything else, led to my drinking problem.' Robert Hays as Ted Striker in 'Airplane!' Lists are addictive.
What started as a handful of recommendations turned into a comprehensive search. There are a lot of idiosyncratic choices here, many of which I'm sure people will not find agreeable. There are a lot of filmmakers and films left out as well (no apologies to Jerry Lewis, teen sex comedies, Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, most of Adam Sandler's work, and others I just can't stand).
SAMURAI COP (18) D: Amir Shervan Hollywood Royal Pictures (Orlando Corradi & Amir Shervan) US 1991 96 mins Action/Crime W: Amir Shervan DP: Peter Balian Ed: Ruben Zadurian & Amir Shervan Mus: Alan DerMarderosian Matt Hannon (Joe Marshall), Robert Z'Dar (Yamashita), Mark Frazer (Frank Washington), Cranston Komuro (Fuj Fujiyama), Janis Farley (Jennifer) Samurai Cop is a 1991 direct to video action movie which many people would consider 'so bad, it's good.' Matt Hannon plays the title character, although he's just a standard cop, the only reference to samurai in this movie is the fact that the bad guys are Japanese. The film is so poorly made that it will provoke laughter rather than thrills and spills. The performances are all atrocious, especially Matt Hannon, who wears a pathetically unconvincing wig in several scenes due to reshoots. It is bad, but nowhere near the 'So Bad It's Good' reputations of Troll 2 or The Room (qv). Still, it has gained a huge cult following due to its general awfulness and even generated a sequel, 24 years later.
The movie opens with a group of elves (or 8-year-olds in green outfits) singing tunelessly about the whereabouts of Santa as they make toys out of plywood on a set made of MDF. Cue some stock footage of Reindeer somewhere in the great outdoors then a fade to reveal that Santa is castaway somewhere on a beach in Florida because his sleigh is trapped beneath half an inch of sand. This is no usual Santa though, it's a really thin bloke with a pathetic stick-on beard, dressed in a bargain bucket costume covered in sweat patches which possibly reek of Captain Morgan rum. Santa then bursts into a tuneless song about how his 'predicament lacks it's usual cheer' as he waves his hand to-and-fro to the banal kazoo music. Using magic telepathy powers, he enlists help of some local kids (and Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn for some bizarre reason, who seem to find Florida pretty darn quickly from the Mississippi River). All the kids don't seem too thrilled to be in the presence of this obscenely drunk & possibly drugged Santa, most probably because he smelt of his own piss, but nevertheless they listen to his plight and wander off to find an indigenous animal to tie to the sled, including some random guy in a Gorilla costume, a dog and increasingly smaller animals, because these kids are stupid. The production values of Thumbelina aren't too pretty either, with a twentysomething girl warbling songs around sets made of balsa wood and looking like it was filmed in the prison of a Communist Regime.
All the other characters in this story are in random animal costumes, including Thumbelina's mother, who is a mole for some arbitrary reason. The result is actually quite creepy, but it has the expected fairytale ending when a bird whisks Thumbelina to a world of flower children where she is crowned queen. Cue The Ice Cream Bunny, another extra in an ill-fitting fancy dress costume, who comes to save the day in an antique fire engine which is clearly being pushed from behind by a Production Assistant. The Ice Cream Bunny is likewise accompanied by several Florida kids who obviously had nothing to do during their holidays except sing about Santa's 'predicament lacking it's usual cheer' as the fire engine makes it's way through Pirate World, and past all the wonderful rides in Pirate World, and past all the wonderful stalls in Pirate World and down another road, through another part of Pirate World, round in a circle past more delightful rides until 5 minutes later it is leaving Pirate World via a dirt track which may lead to drunk Santa.
Young children will enjoy it, but the obvious, ubiquitous product placement will make most adults absolutely sick. The production itself is also quite ropey, with some unconvincing special effects, terrible production design (Santa's workshop just seems to be a huge warehouse for plywood) and some of the cheesiest editing you'll ever see. Still, it's understandable that people will feel nostalgic about this film, probably from watching it on Christmas morning while opening their presents, but that didn't count for anything in 1985 when the film was a huge box office flop, costing the studio millions and causing the rights to Superman to be sold to Cannon Films. SATURDAY NIGHT & SUNDAY MORNING (1960) D: Karel Reisz Bryanston/Woodfall (Tony Richardson & Harry Saltzman) UK 1960 89 mins Drama W: Alan Sillitoe based on his play DP: Freddie Francis Ed: Seth Holt Mus: Johnny Dankworth Albert Finney (Arthur Seaton), Shirley Anne Field (Doreen Gretton), Rachel Roberts (Brenda), Bryan Pringle (Jack), Norman Rossington (Bert), Hylda Baker (Aunt Ada) Among the first of the Angry Young Man melodramas from Great Britain at the beginning of the 1960's, setting of the UK's own new wave of filmmaking to rival the French. Albert Finney stars as Arthur Seaton, a Nottingham factory worker whose love life gets him in hot water as he embarks on an affair with a married woman, while also dating a younger local girl. Very much a product of its time, but the excellent performances of Albert Finney and Rachel Roberts still hold up strong.
The idyllic existence of the consumables soon takes a dark twist when an item of food makes a return to the supermarket and tells the truth about what their fate is to become, leading to a skirmish where the sausage and bun escape from their packets and need to find their way back to their aisle with a bickering lavash bread and bagel, while a rogue douche wants revenge for not being able to fulfil his destiny. En route, Frank the sausage discovers the truth about the great beyond and makes an attempt for the food population of the store to rebel against their human overlords. I wanted to like this film a lot more than I actually did and it took a while to figure out why it just didn't ring true to me, then it suddenly dawned on me. The film is produced by Disney, therefore it wouldn't dare show it's Uncle Walt in a bad light, and it doesn't.
It's well documented that P. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins series of books, was reluctant for her work to be adapted into a film, even after it was a successful motion picture which earned the studio (and herself) millions, she wasn't pleased with what they'd done with her work, which was incredibly personal to her. The film portrays P.
Travers as a neurotic, prim and proper killjoy (which maybe she was) who builds several obstacles to prevent Walt Disney from producing her work, including 'no songs', 'no animation', 'no Dick Van Dyke' (in fairness, she had a good point on the last one), but is slowly seduced by 'Feed The Birds' and 'Let's Go Fly A Kite', meanwhile she reminisces on her childhood and real-life events which inspired her books. This, as far as the history books, isn't too far from the truth. The story then whisks to the world premiere where the audience are wowed by the film, including Travers who sits in the theatre choked by tears. Although these scenes have been added for the sake of dramatic plot devices, they are nothing more than a fabrication. None of it happened. Travers only allowed the filming of her novels because she was facing financial hardship, she despised the treatment of her work so much that she refused West End producer Cameron Mackintosh rights to her work to make a stage play (which only came into fruition after her death).
SCARFACE (aka SCARFACE: THE SHAME OF A NATION) (PG) D: Howard Hawks United Artists/The Caddo Company (Howard Hughes & Howard Hawks) US 1932 95 mins Crime/Drama W: Ben Hecht, W.R. Burnett, John Lee Mahin & Seton I. Miller based on the novel by Armitage Trail DP: Lee Garmes & L.W. O'Connell Ed: Edward Curtiss Mus: Gus Arnheim & Adolph Tandler Paul Muni (Tony Camonte), Ann Dvorak (Francesca Camonte), George Raft (Guino Rinaldo), Boris Karloff (Tom Gaffney), Osgood Perkins (Johnny Lovo), Karen Morley (Poppy) Adapted from a novel which was loosely based on the rise and fall of infamous mobster Al Capone, Scarface was released during the prohibition era and was considered at the time to be both gratuitously violent and that it glorified gangsters.
In fact, Capone himself was a huge fan of the movie and cast member George Raft, a childhood friend of real life gangsters Ben Siegel and Meyer Lansky, became a surrogate style consultant, due to his participation in the film. As for the movie itself, it may have been groundbreaking for the early 1930's, but it's incredibly tame by modern standards, and even in comparison to the 1983 remake (starring Al Pacino). For the time, it's incredibly well made, directed with some style and good performances. Influential and groundbreaking it may have been, but it's definitely weakened by age.
The film is a remake of a 1947 film starring Danny Kaye, but in this version Stiller plays the title character, a photo archivist at a magazine publisher who escapes from his own mundane existence by daydreaming on a frequent basis, when the negative for the upcoming final issue of the magazine goes missing, Mitty goes on a worldwide quest to relocate it, taking him to Greenland, Iceland and the Himalayas, meeting an array of characters while he pines for the woman of his dreams (Kristen Wiig). The main problem I had with this film was not knowing whether what I was seeing was real or merely a figment of Mitty's imagination and even by the end I was left completely undecided. This erotically-charged black comedy studies the kinky relationship between a sexually dominant lawyer and his submissive secretary. Socially awkward, emotionally sensitive and youngest of a hugely dysfunctional family, bookish secretary Lee Holloway starts a new job for perfectionist lawyer E. Edward Grey, whose sexual urges are stirred by her obedience and his disciplinary methods (which would be unlikely to carry him favour at an employment tribunal). However, Lee feels empowered by the treatment, gains confidence and desists from self-harming, which would be her usual way of coping with stress.
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The film was hugely controversial at the time of release, with criticisms of sexism, but considering the subject material, it's actually very tastefully handled, with an excellent lead performance from Maggie Gyllenhaal, who brings humanity and sexuality to a very challenging role. It's almost ironic that just over a decade later, a similar theme of sado-masochism would be used in the Fifty Shades Of Grey series of books and be considered romance. At least the relationship presented here is a two-way street, with both consenting adults approving of their mutual desires. The secret of a good period drama is that it should be able to appeal to those who don't necessarily enjoy costume dramas. However, Emma Thompson cast this logic aside when she adapted Jane Austen's literary classic, doubling the age of the main character, Elinor Dashwood, so she could take on the role herself, and it's in that respect, where she succeeds.
As a matter of fact, all the performances are excellent, particularly Kate Winslet as younger, more reckless sister Marianne. It's the story itself which is a little too twee and not appealing to those who aren't aficionados of costume drama. Although this film features one of Marilyn Monroe's most iconic moments on the silver screen, it has not dated well at all. A rarity for a Billy Wilder film.
Tom Ewell may not get top billing but he plays the lead role of Richard Sherman, a publisher whose wife and son have gone on holiday for the summer, while he stays at their Manhattan apartment where a beautiful tenant (known only as 'The Girl') subletting the room upstairs becomes the object of his infatuation and a series of imaginary moments transpire between the two. Though the film captures the culture and mannerisms of the 1950's, it's far too twee by modern standards and just doesn't dare to be brave enough. THE SHAPE OF WATER (15) D: Guillermo del Toro Fox Searchlight/TSG/Double Dare You (Guillermo del Toro & J. Miles Dale) US 2017 123 mins Fantasy/Romance W: Guillermo del Toro & Vanessa Taylor DP: Dan Laustsen Ed: Sidney Wolinsky Mus: Alexandre Desplat PD: Paul D.
Austerberry Cos: Luis Sequera Sally Hawkins (Elisa Esposito), Michael Shannon (Col. Richard Strickland), Richard Jenkins (Giles), Octavia Spencer (Zelda Fuller), Michael Stuhlbarg (Dr. Robert Hoffstetler), Doug Jones (The Amphibian Man) Guillermo del Toro may owe a debt of gratitude to other filmmakers and their visions, particularly French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, but this 2017 fantasy romance does have enough originality of its own to escape any allegations of plagiarism.
Sally Hawkins really shines in the lead role of Elisa Esposito, a mute cleaner at a government laboratory in 1960's Baltimore, where the new asset is an aquatic creature which the military plan to experiment on to give them an edge in the race for space. Initially hostile, the amphibian man soon becomes able to communicate with Elisa and a unique romance develops between the two, threatened by the monstrous army colonel in charge of the operation, but Elisa also finds assistance in the form of her gay next door neighbour and her co-worker who provides a voice for her. The direction, cast, music and technical achievements are all excellent and the visuals are a marvel to behold. The amphibian man is basically the Creature From The Black Lagoon with a better physique, but it's refreshing that the creation was mostly done with practical effects rather than CGI.
Certainly one of the best films of 2017, reflected by its deserved haul of 13 Academy Award nominations.