Oh, I think Burstyn perhaps should have won. It's a sharp, enigmatic performance with a lifetime behind it. It might be my favorite Burstyn performance outside of Requiem for a Dream. The Last Picture Show is one of the few movies I'll go 10/10 for.
Barton Fink - 8.5/10
Love it. Rosenbaum's review is brilliant but this is the Coen Bros. film that needs to be devoted entirely to fraudulence.
Last Seen Movie - The Latest Movie You Have Seen; ratings
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Big Magilla
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Four 1933 films from from William Wellman:
Frisco Jenny (7/10)
Ruth Chatterton in an interesting variation on her Madame X character. She plays a pregnant girl whose fiance (The Crowd's James Murray) is killed in the San Francisco earthquake. She becomes a madam to support her son then gives him up to be raised by a respectable family. Years later he is the D.A. who prosecutes her for murdering gangster Louis Calhern, not knowing she is his mother.
Midnight Mary (7/10)
In her later career Loretta Young specialized in playing women of high moral purpose and character. Not in this film, made at the age of 19, where she effectively ages from 9 to 27, going from depression child to gangster's moll to angelic secretary to sophisticated lady to reluctant murderess. It was her own favorite film.
Heroes for Sale (9/10)
Richard Barthelmess is a World War I hero addicted to morphine who spends five years behind bars for a crime he didn't commit and ends up a "forgotten man". Loretta Young, Aline MacMahon and Gordon Westcott co-star along with a gallery of familiar faces. One of the three great Warner Bros. depression films along with Mervyn LeRoy's I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang and this one...
Wild Boys of the Road (9/10)
Frankie Darro and Edwin Phillips take to the rails when they realize their parents can no longer afford to care of them. There they meet hundreds of other adolescents in the same predicament including Dorothy Coonan, a 17 year-old chorus girl in 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 who Wellman cast in the role and who upon completion of the film became his fourth wife and mother of his seven children. According to Bill Wellman, Jr.'s commentary, the dance from 42nd Street which she reprises here she was still able to perform on her 90th birthday.
Wellman reportedly hated the studio imposed happy ending but it suits the material. After watching these kids go through hell for two hours you want them to have a chance at something better even if it is only menial work.
Frisco Jenny (7/10)
Ruth Chatterton in an interesting variation on her Madame X character. She plays a pregnant girl whose fiance (The Crowd's James Murray) is killed in the San Francisco earthquake. She becomes a madam to support her son then gives him up to be raised by a respectable family. Years later he is the D.A. who prosecutes her for murdering gangster Louis Calhern, not knowing she is his mother.
Midnight Mary (7/10)
In her later career Loretta Young specialized in playing women of high moral purpose and character. Not in this film, made at the age of 19, where she effectively ages from 9 to 27, going from depression child to gangster's moll to angelic secretary to sophisticated lady to reluctant murderess. It was her own favorite film.
Heroes for Sale (9/10)
Richard Barthelmess is a World War I hero addicted to morphine who spends five years behind bars for a crime he didn't commit and ends up a "forgotten man". Loretta Young, Aline MacMahon and Gordon Westcott co-star along with a gallery of familiar faces. One of the three great Warner Bros. depression films along with Mervyn LeRoy's I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang and this one...
Wild Boys of the Road (9/10)
Frankie Darro and Edwin Phillips take to the rails when they realize their parents can no longer afford to care of them. There they meet hundreds of other adolescents in the same predicament including Dorothy Coonan, a 17 year-old chorus girl in 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 who Wellman cast in the role and who upon completion of the film became his fourth wife and mother of his seven children. According to Bill Wellman, Jr.'s commentary, the dance from 42nd Street which she reprises here she was still able to perform on her 90th birthday.
Wellman reportedly hated the studio imposed happy ending but it suits the material. After watching these kids go through hell for two hours you want them to have a chance at something better even if it is only menial work.
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Precious Doll
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Jiyan (2002) Jano Rosebiani 4/10
Salvation (2009) Paul Cox 6/10
Duplicity (2009) Tony Gilroy 5/10
12 Rounds (2009) Renny Harlin 1/10
Salvation (2009) Paul Cox 6/10
Duplicity (2009) Tony Gilroy 5/10
12 Rounds (2009) Renny Harlin 1/10
"I want cement covering every blade of grass in this nation! Don't we taxpayers have a voice anymore?" Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) in John Waters' Desperate Living (1977)
Enchanted April (1992) - Mike Newell
6/10
Fine little british film that looks like a made for television film from the BBC. Overall the cast is very good and the real standout is Joan Plowright who really deserved her oscar nomination.
The 1992 BSA race was really tight. My choice still is Judy Davis, but I wouldn't mind any of the other four winning.
6/10
Fine little british film that looks like a made for television film from the BBC. Overall the cast is very good and the real standout is Joan Plowright who really deserved her oscar nomination.
The 1992 BSA race was really tight. My choice still is Judy Davis, but I wouldn't mind any of the other four winning.
--Mister Tee wrote:Lovely Bones does seem just the right material for the director of Heavenly Creatures, We'll see if his time among the behemoths has rendered him no longer capable of dealing on such a small scale.
Sebold's novel really does seem like the perfect material for this director especially in light of how he handled the wonderful fantasy sequences in Heavenly Creatures. The Lovely Bones' "Heaven" sequences are numerous and important to the impact of the story. I wouldn't handover the presentation of Susie Salmon (a difficult character, no matter how you look at it) with just any director. Just because a director has gone BIG, to me, doesn't mean he cannot return to his roots. This seems like just the right opportunity to do so.
And, yes, Tee, Lynskey was hauntingly effective. I was surprised at how much she took control, too. Especially in that final scene when it seem Winslet wanted to perhaps back out?
Edited By Big Magilla on 1241577703
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
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Mister Tee
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Lovely Bones does seem just the right material for the director of Heavenly Creatures, We'll see if his time among the behemoths has rendered him no longer capable of dealing on such a small scale. (And I liked the Rings movies, though progressively less as they went along. It was King Kong I thought insufferable)flipp525 wrote:Heavenly Creatures (dir. Peter Jackson, 1994) 7/10
A fairly absorbing coming-of-age/true crime tale filled with imaginative direction and a consistent narrative point-of-view. Even though the audience knows the murder is coming the whole time, it's still a rather shocking, horrific scene. Kate Winslet shines in her screen debut and Melanie Lynskey is very believable as an impressionable, young girl who does the unthinkable (and I recognized her from "The L Word"!)
This film reinstates my faith in Peter Jackson's directorial prowess (after the masterbatory LOTR series) and makes me look forward to what he'll end up doing with The Lovely Bones, another story that is both fantastical yet brutal in its depiction of adolescence and violence.
I went into Heavenly Creatures with little expectation -- somehow I'd managed to not hear much about critical response -- and I was completely wowed. Jackson was my best director that year, largely for the fantasy sequences. But the film's great achievement was capturing the life-perspective difference between parents and children -- the way something totally irrational (like, you can't move away) seems not only reasonable but certain from a child's point of view.
Obviously in retrospect you notice Winslet. But when I saw the film, Lynskey was the standout for me. What surprised me was how she became the dominant force in the friendship. The opening scene -- Winslet being such an extrovert -- would lead you to think she was the one who'd steer the narrative.
Heavenly Creatures (dir. Peter Jackson, 1994) 7/10
A fairly absorbing coming-of-age/true crime tale filled with imaginative direction and a consistent narrative point-of-view. Even though the audience knows the murder is coming the whole time, it's still a rather shocking, horrific scene. Kate Winslet shines in her screen debut and Melanie Lynskey is very believable as an impressionable, young girl who does the unthinkable (and I recognized her from "The L Word"!)
This film reinstates my faith in Peter Jackson's directorial prowess (after the masterbatory LOTR series) and makes me look forward to what he'll end up doing with The Lovely Bones, another story that is both fantastical yet brutal in its depiction of adolescence and violence.
Edited By flipp525 on 1238009719
A fairly absorbing coming-of-age/true crime tale filled with imaginative direction and a consistent narrative point-of-view. Even though the audience knows the murder is coming the whole time, it's still a rather shocking, horrific scene. Kate Winslet shines in her screen debut and Melanie Lynskey is very believable as an impressionable, young girl who does the unthinkable (and I recognized her from "The L Word"!)
This film reinstates my faith in Peter Jackson's directorial prowess (after the masterbatory LOTR series) and makes me look forward to what he'll end up doing with The Lovely Bones, another story that is both fantastical yet brutal in its depiction of adolescence and violence.
Edited By flipp525 on 1238009719
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
I Love You, Man- 6/10
Mister Tee cringes as I post this film in this thread, but really I don't see this as a stand alone "critic review" type thread. Really there isn't too much new per se in this film, outside Paul Rudd on his lonesome as a mainstream star of a film in this seemingly forever long line of Apatow type deals. Jason Segal provides several of the laughs, I know, but we'll say that Sarah Marshall thing was his "big time". The script is unbelievably strange and oftentimes awkward, but less so than a Wedding Crashers - this is loud and funny look at me and laugh- type way. I'd see several more of these Paul Rudd films. Overall, I thought this was actually impressive compared to all the films thrown down our throats on a monthly basis in this same vein. I laughed a lot and most of the time it was a joke that triggered thoughts of how did someone come up with that? rather than just a new version of a typical genitalia or dirty sex joke.
Mister Tee cringes as I post this film in this thread, but really I don't see this as a stand alone "critic review" type thread. Really there isn't too much new per se in this film, outside Paul Rudd on his lonesome as a mainstream star of a film in this seemingly forever long line of Apatow type deals. Jason Segal provides several of the laughs, I know, but we'll say that Sarah Marshall thing was his "big time". The script is unbelievably strange and oftentimes awkward, but less so than a Wedding Crashers - this is loud and funny look at me and laugh- type way. I'd see several more of these Paul Rudd films. Overall, I thought this was actually impressive compared to all the films thrown down our throats on a monthly basis in this same vein. I laughed a lot and most of the time it was a joke that triggered thoughts of how did someone come up with that? rather than just a new version of a typical genitalia or dirty sex joke.
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HarryGoldfarb
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--Sabin wrote:When one considers how far superior Anjelica Huston and Gwyneth Paltrow were in The Royal Tenenbaums or Scarlett Johansson in Ghost World or Frances O'Connor in A.I. or Carrie-Ann Moss in Memento, it's hard to muster much enthusiasm.
A great list... still, out of the actual nominees, Smith was robbed.
Edited By Big Magilla on 1241577712
"If you place an object in a museum, does that make this object a piece of art?" - The Square (2017)