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Post by AD on May 31, 2011 23:05:59 GMT -5
I thought I was out, but you dragged me back in...
Watch any movie released in the 1970’s and review it by the end of the month.
Returning to the decade theme because I’ve got nothing better.
So yeah, the 70’s were awesome. Second golden age of Hollywood. Rise of Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, and all those guys. Have fun.
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Post by Rishlicious on Jun 1, 2011 22:41:54 GMT -5
You will get lots of Woody Allen.
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Post by Her 69 Eyes on Jun 2, 2011 0:34:51 GMT -5
This experiment may not have been a grand success, but it's pretty remarkable that we've made it this far. I can't remember the last time an MV Zone project was so resilient - we have a tendency to give up within a month or two in all of our ventures. Bravo, AwesomeDude!
I rarely watch movies made after 1960 these days, so this should be a good motivation to tick some big gaps off of my list.
If anyone is looking for anything interesting to watch, I would recommend Robert Altman's 3 Women. I just watched it last week and, although much of it still evades me, it hasn't left my mind. I think it'd make for a wonderful conversation piece and it should offer a hefty challenge for anyone in trying to articulate their opinions coherently.
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Post by maynard on Jun 3, 2011 2:17:32 GMT -5
www.imdb.com/chart/1970sSOOO many great films. On that note... Cabaret is pretty messed up. Nazi's, scary host, Basel Exposition as a 20-something, infidelity, abortions, and more. Very good movie, though. Liza Minneli's first movie... Won 8 Oscars. Give it a peep.
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Post by Rishlicious on Jun 8, 2011 16:45:07 GMT -5
TOTALLY ON BOARD WITH THIS NOW MY EXAMS ARE OVER! Bananas | Woody Allen | 1971Classic early Woody Allen - wacky sketches, great wit and a fun score but overall a little uneven because of a very thin and loose plot attached only to provide some context to the jokes and tie them all together. Some gags are naturally a little dated but as a satire it's utilized for comedy well, although ironically the strongest comedy actually comes from situations outside the political landscape in the film (except perhaps the language translator scene). It's quite difficult to not enjoy to some level, there's humour here of all kinds and it's all very funny! I think some other early Allen films are funnier overall for the type of comedy they generally contain, but there's not much difference between them really. I find them all hilarious! His most successful films are known for their wonderful observation of human insight, but his early satirized work is clever and shows the roots of the observational talent Allen has. I regard Bananas to be his best film of this kind because it knows its place - it doesn't intend to say anything or provide drama or force you to invest in any character relationship, it's simply pure comedy. I never take it seriously and I never fail to laugh, but it could honestly be so much more, as could all of his early work. I often wonder how differently Allen would tackle his early satires even just 10 years after them, in the early-mid 80s. He's gone on record as disliking some of them, notably Sleeper - but I think they have a very strong comedic basis and the shame is that Allen forces these films to rely entirely on that basis. There's not very much of an attempt at creating strong characters or any sort of pathos, but there could be so easily with the way he writes. 7/10.
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Post by Rishlicious on Jun 11, 2011 14:08:57 GMT -5
Sleeper | Woody Allen | 1973I watched this earlier in the year for the first time in a long while and I immediately had to tell Eric how sorry I was for recommending it to him as an introduction to Woody Allen all those years ago! I used to love this but after revisiting it a couple of times, it's definitely fallen down my pecking order. It's certainly a very intelligent satire and many of the parodies are amusing, but what dilutes its enjoyment is that its plot is too integral in the film and it isn't taken seriously enough. What makes other Woody Allen films so fun to watch from this timeframe is that while they’re all silly, they aren't presented in a way that means you have to closely follow the story and the developing relationships within it in order to fully enjoy and appreciate it. This was the first film of Allen’s to do so and while it's a film with many funny moments, it’s not a film with a terribly involving story and characters. Take the previous film I posted, Bananas. Its story is completely ridiculous! Of course, and the film treats itself as completely ridiculous. But sleeper - despite its equally ridiculous story - attempts to make you care about its journey and the relationship of its characters but it just doesn't do enough in that regard to make it happen. There is, however, one scene in which the characters of Allen and Keaton are treated seriously and it unsurprisingly happens to be my favourite scene of the film; because it's the one thing that actually has any substance. It's about halfway through the film where Miles and Luna are sitting on the steps of a house before it is invaded. Unlike the zany and over-the-top nature of other scenes, this is extremely intimate and focuses entirely on Miles and Luna connecting as individuals. They flirt, they tease and they learn about each other. More importantly, we learn about each of them and the connection they're developing. The acting is very natural and it's also a really funny scene comprised of razor sharp wit. It's the first example of the poise that Allen possesses in creating such engaging and charming relationships between his characters; this scene would fit into Annie Hall or Manhattan or any of his classic work with no trouble at all. Sadly, this is the only genuine moment between the two and nothing else they do is believable. Most of it is funny, but it's ironically at the expense of the film. Allen hadn't yet mastered the combination of comedy and drama he would achieve in his later work, and his first half-hearted effort here is just a mix of the wrong ingredients. 6/10.
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Post by AD on Jun 13, 2011 1:16:52 GMT -5
PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE (Brian De Palma, 1974) Netflix description: Phantom of the Paradise represents Brian De Palma at his most creatively uninhibited. That’s saying something, considering this is the guy who brought us films as stylized, bombastic, and enjoyably overblown as Dressed to Kill, Body Double, and Scarface (1982). De Palma, for those of you who remain unfamiliar with his work, could easily be described as the precursor to Quentin Tarantino. The most cinephilic director of his generation, whose films are loaded from start to finish with quotes (both in the dialogue and shot compositions) and tributes to the directors that came before him. He would eventually settle down a bit, and focus his efforts on following in Alfred Hitchcock’s footsteps (just as QT has mainly been fixated on becoming the new Sergio Leone in recent years), but in Phantom his lack of restraint carries him past whatever problems his lack of narrative focus might have caused. This not a film that could be made today, simply because it’s too much fun. The only movie in recent times that comes close to matching the freewheeling inventiveness on display here is Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. That’s not a movie I personally enjoyed, but, credit where credit is due, director Edgar Wright’s combination of playful surrealism and screwball comedy mixed with a kinetic visual style is very much in the same spirit as this movie. The key difference is that Scott Pilgrim’s plot carried us through a series of mind numbing action sequences, whereas Phantom gives us delightfully campy musical numbers as the key set pieces. It’s not a movie that’s going to stimulate the intellect, or move you to tears, or, you know, make sense. But I dare say if you can’t find something in this movie to make you smile then you don’t have a pulse. It’s just a pure, unadulterated exhibition of cinematic panache. You can call that “style over substance” if you like, I call it fucking awesome!
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Post by AD on Jun 19, 2011 15:20:24 GMT -5
BLACK CHRISTMAS (Bob Clark, 1974) Netflix description: To this day, there remains a good deal of contention among horror geeks over what movie can truly claim to be the first slasher film. Many trace the lineage back to 1960, when Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom both hit theatres. Bout those films were more like the mother and father of the genre. (And they were great parents, so they can‘t be blamed for how terrible most their offspring turned out.) Some say it was Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood. Which was probably the first movie structured entirely around a series of gory death scenes, but it doesn’t follow the mad killer formula (everybody‘s killing everybody in that movie). Others will say it was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but that’s really more of a sleazoid hicksploitation horror movie. One must then conclude that Bob Clark’s 1974 cult classic Black Christmas was the true original of the genre. And it's the rare film that manages to be seminal but still remain unique from the works it inspired. Of course the genre wasn’t popularized until John Carpenter’s original Halloween hit theatres four years later. Watching Black Christmas for only the second time in my life (and the first in a decade) while having seen Carpenter’s movie at least a dozen times, I couldn’t help but compare the two. Just about every direct comparison I could make would favor Halloween, but the first thing that jumps out is the shared use of point-of-view shots from the killers’ perspective. Carpenter used the technique less, but did it better. In the opening sequence of Halloween the viewer is almost trapped in the killer’s perspective, knowing something horrible is going to happen and feeling powerless to stop it. (This scene gave me nightmares the first time I saw it!) In Black Christmas the POV is used strictly to hide the killer’s identity from the audience. Clark cuts in and out of the POV liberally, which I think hurts the atmosphere some. I give the edge to BC in one category, though: character development. At times the movie almost feels more like a melodrama than a horror film. Instead of the sustained suspense you generally hope for in these movies, the atmosphere is more about maintaining a constantly heightened state of emotionality. The common moral defense of these kinds of pictures is that, by rule, the one virgin girl is always the survivor. So the films actually espouse traditional conservative values, right? The gaping whole in this argument is it implies that any teenage girl who has premarital sex deserves to be murdered. But the virgin girl actually dies first in this film, and the real heroine is pregnant out of wedlock! We actually want this girl to survive, though, not because she meets some medieval standard of purity and innocence, but because she’s a respectable, independent young woman. We see her strength shine through in a scene where she refuses to be bullied into marriage by her boyfriend after she mentions she wants to have an abortion. So, in addition to being arguably the first film of it’s kind, it may also be the most morally progressive slasher movie ever made.
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Post by AD on Jun 27, 2011 7:19:47 GMT -5
Only four days left if you want to join in on the fun. ----------- THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (Nicolas Roeg, 1976) Netflix description: Casting David Bowie as an alien not long after his Ziggy Stardust days might seem like a stunt, and that’s because it was. But that doesn’t mean the shape-shifting rockstar wasn’t the perfect choice to play the lead in Nicholas Roeg’s hallucinatory sci-fi epic The Man Who Fell To Earth. (Roeg also gave Mick Jagger his first film role in “Performance.”) Bowie is pitch-perfect as Thomas Jerome Newton, an extra-terrestrial disguised as a human who uses his knowledge of advanced technologies to excel in the American business market. His performance adds weight the satirical script, and provides an emotional center for this scathing critique on the human race. The tragedy of this story is in the humanization of this almost angelic visitor. The three most prominent human characters all represent a different form of human corruption and/or weakness which will be inherited by Newton during his stay on Earth. The lawyer Farnsworth is greedy and power hungry, Newton’s lover Mary-Lou is an emotionally needy alcoholic, and the scientist Dr. Bryce is a self-destructive womanizer. After arriving on this planet with the noble task of saving his home-world in mind, Newton is slowly corrupted through his contact with the human race. The joke is that we, as a species, taint everything we touch. The final image of Newton is strangely heartbreaking. This is not a film for the impatient or inattentive viewer. If you like to text your friends, or play around on whatever social networking site is popular this month while watching movies you shouldn’t even bother trying with this one. It’s fragmented structure and abstract editing demand that you really watch it or you will be lost. But if you have the necessary attention span, and you don’t mind a healthy dose of ambiguity in your narrative, then I believe you’ll find The Man Who Fell To Earth not only a masterpiece of style, but also an intensely emotional experience. (As a side note, if you ever wanted to see David Bowie’s penis, this is the movie for you.)
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Post by Her 69 Eyes on Jun 28, 2011 4:44:49 GMT -5
MVZ MMC: June 2011 The Spirit of the Beehive (dir. Victor Erice, 1973) Writing about The Spirit of the Beehive after one viewing, or even at all, seems misguided at my critical level. To watch it is to appreciate its sound design, its lighting, the expressiveness of the girls' faces. How to capture such an experience with words? The film begins in 1940 with Spanish children chasing a truck, which we soon learn is a traveling cinema carrying a print of James Whale's Frankenstein. After watching the film, Ana and Isabel, two sisters, respond to the experience in wildly different ways. Isabel, the elder, develops a macabre fascination with death, and Ana becomes swept away in the mysticism, believing that Frankenstein's spirit lurks somewhere in her town and that she has the power to summon him. Knowing little about this period of Spanish history, I had to read a few critical pieces to make the connection between Frankenstein and the dictator Franco, as well as the beehive as a symbol of not just the specific experience of the family, but of the fascist rule of Spain at large. To know such things, however, is not essential to the viewing experience. Though evasive, the camera's expressivity creates interest in the smallest of gestures. In one of the most memorable scenes of the film, the girls and their parents sit together at a table. There is no establishing shot, and none of the characters appear in frame with one another. This spacial separation has an almost disturbing effect, commenting on the character's isolation from one another and, in particular, the vulnerability of the children who seem helpless with such parental neglect. There are clear parallels that one can draw to the work of Guillermo del Toro - Pan's Labyrinth especially, with the young Ana become entranced in her own fantastical world, completely oblivious to the political realities around her. My MMC History:06/28: The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice, 1973): 4.5/5 05/25: Le cercle rouge (Melville, 1970): 4.5/505/24: Le samouraï (Melville, 1967): 5/505/18: Le deuxième souffle (Melville 1966): 3.5/505/02: Le doulos (Melville, 1962): 2.5/505/01: Bob le flambeur (Melville, 1956): 5/503/07: Jigoku (Nakagawa, 1960): 3.5/503/07: Black Narcissus (Powell & Pressburger, 1947: 4/502/25: A Damsel in Distress (Stevens, 1937): 3/502/25: Alien (Scott, 1979): 4.5/502/22: Manhattan Melodrama (Van Dyke, 1934): 4/502/11: The Matrix (Andy & Lana Wachowski, 1999): 3/501/12: My Dog Tulip (Paul & Sandra Fierlinger, 2009): 4.5/512/31: Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969): 2.5/512/31: Head (Rafelson, 1968): 3.5/512/31: Le bonheur (Varda, 1965): 5/512/31: Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson, 1966): 4.5/512/31: Alphaville (Godard, 1965): 2.5/512/16: Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Aldrich, 1963): 3/512/14: The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963): 3.5/510/30: Blood for Dracula (Morrissey & Margheriti, 1974): 4/510/30: Flesh for Frankenstein (Morrissey & Margheriti, 1973): 3/510/30: Eyes Without a Face (Franju, 1960): 3.5/510/30: Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960): 5/510/29: Onibaba (Shindô, 1964): 4/510/14: Near Dark (Bigelow, 1987): 3.5/5 [/url] 10/13: Vampyr (Dreyer, 1932): 5/5[/url] 10/06: Daughters of Darkness (Kümel, 1971): 3.5/5[/url][/spoiler]
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Post by Her 69 Eyes on Jun 30, 2011 3:00:58 GMT -5
MVZ MMC: June 2011 Don't Look Now (dir. Nicolas Roeg, 1973) Very few filmmakers would consider setting a horror picture of this kind in Venice, but it is perhaps that reason, above all others, that the film works so well. The same canals that make for the recyclable romantic backdrops of countless pictures contributes instead to this film's unforgettable tension, with the eerily empty streets evoking an incomparable helplessness. It is even more frightening that the city is not simply "sleeping" - throughout the picture, there are several brief shots of on-lookers from windows, suggesting that Sutherland is under a constant surveillance. Venice is also the perfect location because, as we see early on, the daughter of the protagonists was killed in a drowning accident. The location itself taunts the characters, and Roeg and editor Graeme Clifford frequently reinforce this motif through shots of the canal, with rats struggling to keep their head above the surface or a doll discarded face-down in a shallow puddle. The editing is what the film is most known for. Most notable is a famous sex sequence wherein Clifford cuts between Sutherland and Christie making love and them getting ready to go out to dinner. Such a sequence further elaborates on the film's fractured timeline - the past, present, and future exist concurrently within a single sequence. Editing is also used memorably in a simpler way in a later chase sequence. In a foot race, Clifford cuts to empty alleys three or four seconds before the character runs by. The audience can only judge who will be coming into frame by the sound of their footsteps - whether it be Sutherland, Christie, or perhaps the reveal of the supposed supernatural presence that has lingered throughout the entire picture. My MMC History:06/30: Don't Look Now (Roeg, 1973): 4/5 06/28: The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice, 1973): 4.5/505/25: Le cercle rouge (Melville, 1970): 4.5/505/24: Le samouraï (Melville, 1967): 5/505/18: Le deuxième souffle (Melville 1966): 3.5/505/02: Le doulos (Melville, 1962): 2.5/505/01: Bob le flambeur (Melville, 1956): 5/503/07: Jigoku (Nakagawa, 1960): 3.5/503/07: Black Narcissus (Powell & Pressburger, 1947: 4/502/25: A Damsel in Distress (Stevens, 1937): 3/502/25: Alien (Scott, 1979): 4.5/502/22: Manhattan Melodrama (Van Dyke, 1934): 4/502/11: The Matrix (Andy & Lana Wachowski, 1999): 3/501/12: My Dog Tulip (Paul & Sandra Fierlinger, 2009): 4.5/512/31: Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969): 2.5/512/31: Head (Rafelson, 1968): 3.5/512/31: Le bonheur (Varda, 1965): 5/512/31: Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson, 1966): 4.5/512/31: Alphaville (Godard, 1965): 2.5/512/16: Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Aldrich, 1963): 3/512/14: The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963): 3.5/510/30: Blood for Dracula (Morrissey & Margheriti, 1974): 4/510/30: Flesh for Frankenstein (Morrissey & Margheriti, 1973): 3/510/30: Eyes Without a Face (Franju, 1960): 3.5/510/30: Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960): 5/510/29: Onibaba (Shindô, 1964): 4/510/14: Near Dark (Bigelow, 1987): 3.5/5 [/url] 10/13: Vampyr (Dreyer, 1932): 5/5[/url] 10/06: Daughters of Darkness (Kümel, 1971): 3.5/5[/url][/spoiler]
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