ol' eddy wrecks

Anyhow, I guess I'll weigh in as, this was my first time watching The Philadelphia Story, and I can't believe how "meh" I was on this movie. Bringing up Baby at least made me laugh. I didn't care for It Happened One Night nor the story at the core of City Lights - so I can't say if it's just, I do not connect to classic romantic comedies or if it's just the types that I've seen that are coming to mind (and are on this list).

One thing they talked about in the podcast was how the role of alcohol in the movie. During the movie, I noticed Hepburn was a nigh-teetotaller (or maybe I misunderstood her, and she just didn't never drank too much) and learned to embrace alcohol by the end; which made me wonder about society's relation with alcohol in the context of prohibition at the time. Checking timelines: The 18th Amendment (prohibition) was ratified January 16, 1919, and repealed December 5, 1933. The Philadelphia Story was released in 1940. Seven years is and isn't a very long time culturally. Though I'm not familiar enough with the prohibition zeitgeist to know how it was viewed by the time it was repealed. Anyhow, I let what little I have heard in terms of the many reasons why prohibition was adopted in the first place texture the Hepburn character's opinion of alcohol and other people's reaction to her not drinking. (One of the reasons I've heard cited why one demographic wanted prohibition to happen was the women's movement wanted men to stop getting drunk so they wouldn't beat their wives. Though, to my understanding and recollection, the propaganda for this played into racist stereotypes of poor, eastern Europeans at the time. But backdrop that might be relevant for interpreting the beginning scene where Grant shoves her to the ground during his drinking days).

Still listening to the episode, but it crossed my mind for the re-cast, when someone said Idris Elba, it's a shame they didn't say, "Idris Elba, Jason Statham, and the Rock." Statham's clearly the Jimmy Stewart role. I think Elba could pull off the Hepburn role better than the Rock, and I could see the Rock managing the Cary Grant role.

Skimming through my letterboxd diary, checking one I liked that might be candidates, I found two: The Limits of Control Super Three that were in the 50's (so close) Beyond the Black Rainbow (funny comparing its critical reception to Mandy) The Neon Demon The Zero Theorem (actually right at 50%) (My opinion of the last two were mixed though, so it's not surprising to see they were close to the 50% mark.)

I enjoyed The Maltese Falcon, but decided to vote, and I voted, "no." I might be suffering from the bleed-out effect people often say they get with The French Connection, but TMF having been the archetype for so many stories it doesn't seem that unique. And while I enjoyed it, just going through other noir films, I'd just easily drop this for something like The Third Man or A Touch of Evil. I liked the tension in Double-Indemnity more. I liked the use of character-actors (Lorre and Greenstreet - though when I think of Peter Lorre, I think of M) and Spade's just completely dead cynicism, but I find the darkness of his character in A Lonely Place to be more interesting. I find the accepted nihilism of his character in Casablanca more poignant. I feel like this film is more iconic and good than it is great. As influence, in terms of a shift to what we'd now call noir films, my suspicion is it's more of "first of the trend" rather than "the movie that unexpectedly started the trend." Admittedly, that's pure speculation on my part.

It says "came out in your adult-life post-2000". I feel like there should be a comma there, but I read that as two criteria (even though each bullet point is supposed to be one criteria - nearly as bad as not labelling your axis on a graph).

I have not seen Short Cuts. In the past year or so, I've revisited McCabe & Mrs Miller, MASH, The Long Goodbye, and now Nashville. (In addition to catching up with Images - but that's a lesser and lesser known Altman). This is obviously personal opinion, but I'd be more than okay with MASH not being on the list. It has some poignant parts and some funny parts. But some of the comedy really doesn't age very well, is misogynist in a mean-spirited way. Basically the complaint people on the forums had about Cuckoo's, of the main characters being jerks... That's more of an issue with MASH. I wasn't particularly taken with Gosford Park (though I think other people are) nor A Prairie Home Companion. 3 Women is worth a watch (there isn't much comedy in this one), but (based on memory) I prefer Bergman's Persona (if we're talking Drop Dead Fred dramatic companion pieces). Popeye... is a movie that exists. I know I've seen it, but don't even remember my opinion of it. Buffalo Bill similar situation, except I remember being disappointed at the time of viewing (I had seen McCabe and Nashville not that long before, and it started Paul Newman, so my hopes we're also probably too high). ETA: I forgot The Player. I remember laughing at it (it's been a long time) and enjoying at least some of the skewering it aims at Hollywood. But barring a major re-evaluation if I revisit it, if it were on the list, I couldn't help but think it's film makers thinking the world revolves around Hollywood. Though, being cynical, a good chunk of me is thinking the reason MASH is on the list is due to how well known the title is, which is due to the long running tv-series it spawned.

I consider satire comedy - so both Network and Dr Strangelove (missed above) I consider Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf a dark comedy, which wouldn't have crossed my mind based on my vague knowledge of it beforehand. While I laughed at a number of points in Nashville, I didn't think of it as a comedy, though after revisiting it, I think someone arguing it is does have a lot of scenes to justify their claim. I think that general impression isn't limited to just Paul and Amy (I think fueled partially by other lists, but also the comedic entries being just slightly older, so a lot of people in their 40s and younger don't have famous comedies from their youth on there, outside Toy Story). But just stopping to tally them up, the number actually seems fairly high. Like I said, I think I want to revisit it afterwards because there might be some I wouldn't have thought as comedies just by reputation.

When we get through this whole list, it might be good to review just how many are comedies. I know I tried it once when we were doing the Marx Brothers movies, but I remember putting enough disclaimers on filtering out movies that are probably on the list for non-comedic aspects, so it turned into a short list. But it's been feeling like there's actually a lot of comedies on the list (which is contrary to how it felt when we first looked at the list).

I think it's more of a reflection on RT's sampling of data. They don't have as complete of an archive of movie reviews from before 2000. e.g. I genuinely enjoy Terrorvision (it's an intentional campy comedy from the 80's). Last I checked, it has a critic's score of 0%. If it came out today, the set of critics who would have reviewed it positively would have been picked up by RT and I suspect would have made it well to the 30-percent mark. The critics who liked it back then probably weren't the critics getting their Terrorvision reviews archived for something called the internet back then.

I guess I must be the one person who really enjoyed this the first time they watched it - which was back in college. Though it's one I never really revisited until now. I still think it's great. One thing I found myself puzzling over this time - HPW is a third party candidate. What does it mean for him to be "winning primaries"? I still think McCabe & Mrs. Miller is his best. I agree with @sycasey that Nashville is his most Altman-y film. To draw one relation between the two, McCabe & Mrs. Miller's ending kind of informs my take on the ending of Nashville. There are people who seem important to a town or community, but they can die, but society will still march on without them. In the case of Nashville, it can be taken as a more hopeful and defiant rebounding. Hamilton's urge for someone to keep singing, seems to me, is the sense of not wanting a complicated, violent, outside world taking away the city's identity. I find it also kind of discomforting though. The "they can't" implies it being taken away by cogent outside forces. And in real life cases, such as the chanting of "USA" days after the Twin Towers went, also filled me discomfort at the sense of potential jingoism (admittedly I lived on the other side of the country and didn't have emotional ties to NYC). Yeah that was a weird day. For many people when Nashville came out, the Kennedy assassinations were in the past decade, so that was probably evocative of something being taken from them. Though Taxi Driver came out the following year - another movie about failed political assassinations. One thing I've heard it said that he does is keep the primary character in a scene off-center in their scene. I assume that de-emphasize their importance and increase the emphasis on their relation or role in their surroundings. Or possibly just to make it easier to glide to other characters sometimes. I half-heartedly paid attention to this here and there, and there were a number of scenes that strengthened this claim. This is in addition to, as Paul really focused on, overlapping dialogue. I think I would be surprised if Short Cuts was the first movie that was a collection of short stories that intertwined. And Altman had a number of movies where he was balancing an ensemble cast (though I remember being disappointed by Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bulls History Lesson). Admittedly, I'm not recalling of another 60's/70's one where there wasn't a sense of a main character (outside of Popeye and Tanner '88, I haven't seen anything of his from the 80s). Are we talking Simpsons' reference or Simpsons' dabbling in the same genre, because we couldn't find an actual reference? Checking wiki, the episode was meant as a parody of Pulp Fiction and the title is a parody of Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.

My memory is hazy, but those were more discrete and each story usually had a distinct main character. I think Short Cuts is the main Altman I haven't seen, but I think that one might be more similar. Nashville is more fluid and as memory serves (I'm only partway into this rewatch and it's been a couple of decades), you aren't left with the sense of "this is the central character." Paul said the movie is more character-driven rather than plot driven, but I'd posit it's societal-fabric driven, which is composed of a lot of individual units coalescing into a messy whole. As primed by the beginning song focusing on the state of America.

I don't know if this is relevant for why the national anthem was part of the campaign, but Robert Altman was 6 when The Star-Spangled Banner was designated the US's national anthem. Though The Pledge of Allegiance came even later (and the "Under God" change came when he was 29), and that isn't mentioned. So it may have been more something in the zeitgeist at the time.

Without seeing the movie I'm #team-I-don't-think-it-matters-if-we-can-go-with-fred-acting-as-a-manifestation-of-part-of-lizzie's-id and #maybe-the-two-scenes-people-cite-for-team-sanity-are-lot-more-convincing-fred-has-to-be-a-separate-entity-in-execution-but-hearing-them-described-do-not-sound-that-convincing-to-me I vaguely remember seeing the trailer of this movie way back when. I do not remember much about it. I do not think I will be watching it. I do not think its style would be my cup of tea at my age. I would put something like Bigmouth (which also hasn't always been consistent with whether the hormone monsters are separate entities as opposed to manifestations of the parts of the children) in a different category than Monsters, Inc., Beetlejuice, and Little Monsters. Namely because the entities, even if they are separate, act as a manifestation of how the children are feeling/thinking. Beetlejuice is just more of a separate agent of chaos doing his own thing. I think people who didn't like the movie and felt they were separate entities, and felt they were completely separate entities like a poltergeist or Beetlejuice, gave ground for Jason to keep arguing the point they were Lizzie in the episode... as most seem to keep arguing it here. This talk of children's movies as horror movies made me think of this article (mostly unrelated, except, let's look at this movie through the eyes of the other characters): https://www.theringer.com/2016/9/28/16045542/big-is-secretly-a-horror-movie-95d766715a7b

Clearly this movie would have benefited from a Babadook-style pop-up book for Dropdead Fred. /disclaimer - I did not actually watch this movie. I am somewhat confused why Paul said it was like The Babadook and then started describing Hereditary. Jason asked him if he was confusing the two, but I've already forgotten Paul's answer. Still seems weird, even in retrospect, making that jump.

I was wondering that as well. I suspect, they might be saving it for October since I think it's the last horror film on the list.

I guess I subscribe to the auteur theory too much, because I think that's weird. I've heard Tarantino has said this wasn't it. I personally like the theory that they were just trying to pick up his stolen breakfast order of an Egg McGuffin. ETA: Ftr/just to state it - just because the director said that wasn't what intended, doesn't mean it can't be how you interpret it when viewing the movie.

Yes, but was he the first person to pull this off? You mean, dedicate an entire film to doing this? Outside of comedies like Mel Brooks' Silent Movie or say, Singin' in the Rain, which was a send-up of musicals/switching over to sound? I guess Warhol's movies also fall into the comedy category (counting the Morissey ones he produced - Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula). I think Star Wars and Indiana Jones both qualify since they're recreating old serials that Lucas and Spielberg saw as kids. American Graffiti was Lucas being nothing but pop-culture nostalgic (which in turn inspired a 50's nostalgia craze. And later, shark jumping). Chinatown is consciously playing with, but subverting the conventions of noir. Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai came after, though that's the most immediate comparison coming to mind at the moment. Miller's Crossing was the Coens doing their take on The Third Man (both comical and nominally serious). In terms of homages in specific scenes - off the top of my head: In Taxi-Driver - there's a scene where he puts alka-seltzer in a glass of water and watches it bubble (indicating an inner self that's about to boil over) is supposed to be an homage to a scene in, I believe, Godard's 2-or-3 Things I Know about Her (which in turn is also an homage to something else - IDK if Scorsese is actually doing an homage to both - which was quite possible). Quick-cutting which came from Godard's Breathless is in Taxi Driver. Scorsese also had De Niro do the On the Waterfront bits in Raging Bull (I don't know if you can get more explicit than this). 2001 recreates to Da Vinci's The Birth of Adam (four times). E.T. has an homage to 2001 doing The Birth of Adam. De Palma recreates the baby carriage scene from Battleship Potemkin in, I believe, The Untouchables. In Godard's Breathless, that whole lip thing Jean Seberg does is supposed to be doing an homage to Bogart (I never really understood this, myself). Which as I type that out, I'm thinking you weren't thinking about explicit scenes. However, I don't know what a film of a lot of film homages should add up to by virtue of being a lot of film homages (unrelated side comment, I weirdly remember coming out of Toy Story 2 back when it was in theaters. I enjoyed it in the moment, but shortly started going, "but all the jokes were basically reference humor. Recreating scenes from other movies. At some point, you'd like a comedy to come up with new jokes and not try to get you to laugh just because you recognize something they're showing you." This may or may not be relevant for my frame of reference in this discussion). But I suspect I might have missed the point you were going for. I just remember Chungking Express came out the same year as Pulp Fiction. I don't remember people talking about his (WKW) movies being groundbreaking (but maybe they did - definitely never heard "revolutionary" used), but they did talk about them being stylized and how/if that style had any purpose (I'd say it did - though I'd prefer his next three films). I'm now straying off on a tangent. I associate "groundbreaking" and "revolutionary" with innovative or new, and I think for a number of people, Pulp Fiction being presented that way probably hurts it for them, because in many ways it isn't (I think your post breaking down the editing focuses on what the movie does well, rather than necessarily what is "new" about it - which behooves it); and part of the reason why I asked the original question was, is the association of "groundbreaking" and "revolutionary" with "new" or "innovative" flawed? Like, if someone said, Pulp Fiction was a breath of fresh air, I don't think I'd have challenged that. So I was wondering if I was misreading people if by revolutionary, it was more just changing the style of mainstream movies for a while. Bleh, too many words. Not enough cogency.

Sandy's issues seem like they come back more to the pressures of society that a woman should become pregnant. She actually very much doesn't want to and is afraid of it. I took her pregnancy to have been more likely a miscarriage or abortion. Martha's state of sanity and George going along with it, that strikes me as something more deeply rooted in their personalities than her wanting to have a child and not being able to. Granted, I do like movies/media about horrible being horrible to each other in darkly comic ways that can evoke equal degrees of loathing and pathos (maybe more loathing than pathos). When I watched this movie, it made me think of the more bitter phase of Noah Baumbach's films (Greenberg and The Squid and the Whale came to mind), which are... not broadly enjoyed. So I was kind of surprised a movie like this was on the list. Maybe Bojack Horseman, season 4, mainly the story arc with his mother, would also fit into this general categorization. I think I've gone off on a tangent.

So I guess my question stems from the impression that for a lot of people (at least of a certain age) this was their first indie or art-house type of film. And so it often sounds like to them, Tarantino innovated... a lot. And despite being a younger teenager when Pulp Fiction came out, it never seemed like as big of a deal as people made it out to be (maybe I think I was less blown away by the fragmented narrative since it didn't seem that different than a lot of other movies and their use of flashbacks or other various media where the narrative was chronologically fragmented). Now to be clear, I do enjoy his films (it sounds like more-so than Crummy Scrimage, as I've watched post-Jackie Brown movies. Though I found waiting until the hype died down before doing so to be helpful). And as we get older, I assume we also realize almost everything Tarantino does is taken or referenced from somewhere else (I think detractors overstate it by saying he's stealing and doesn't have a creative bone in his body. I think the metaphor I go for in my brain is, he's at least exercising the creativity of a DJ mixing or sampling together other people's music - which might not be the same creativity as creating music, but there's a type of artistic creativity involved - and the ignores the actual skills necessary of still directing/managing the creation of a film)... Just, yeah, culturally it was revolutionary in terms of how Hollywood interacted with independent films (at least, for a while), but that feels like more of a commentary on the financial success of the movie rather than films. And I don't mean to diminish that, but it feels like when people say it's revolutionary, I get the impression they mean it was doing something new. Which seems contradictory for a film that's a lot of homages. Admittedly with culture, it is turtles all the way down.

I'm curious what other people think about the "revolutionary" label being applied to this film (which both Paul & Amy both mostly asserted). i.e. Do you think it's revolutionary. If so, how?

This was the first time I saw this and only had a vague sense of its plot (I did know the possibility that the child wasn't real, so the big reveal didn't feel so big because there felt like hints early on). I do not have any deep analysis of the film nor much time to say much, but one thing I will say, I really enjoyed the hell out of this movie.

Despite seeing Bringing up Baby as a young teen, I have zero recollection what it's about (I couldn't give you even a one sentence plotline or synopsis). Though I had never seen Woolf (I went with that this past weekend), I at least had a vague understanding of the plot (high level), a vague recollection of one of the stars, and I think I noticed a couple weeks ago it was another Mike Nichols film. I will say, it was definitely more than I was expecting though. I don't have a good feel on how people will react to it.

Due to inclinations and time, I did not watch Gone with the Wind this past week, so I still have not yet seen it. If it didn't also place within the top 250 of the Sight & Sound critics' poll (#232 with seven votes) and #109 on the They Shoot Pictures aggregate list, I'd be perfectly content to skip this altogether entirely (classic melodramas that I like, while not unheard of, are still more an exception). All I can really contribute at this point is meta-commentary, though not tonight. Behind on my sleep. But one thing I did note while looking, for the BFI critics' poll both Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation (which received 5 votes from critics*, placing it at position #323), each only received one vote from an American. All the other votes came from other countries. I don't know if I should find that as a sign that the problems of the films haven't been conveyed as much overseas and there's just a lag... or if it should be disconcerting that America is exporting its racism. *: One downside to the BFI practice of asking people for just their top 10 films, which for the most part I like, is beyond a certain point, the number of votes involved is small enough, it doesn't really take a lot for movies to swing a lot of spots (which could also be an argument to stop looking at somewhere like spot 50 or 100, but I find lots of good movies worth watching on the list well after that).

Birth of a Nation isn't on the list anymore. #44 is The Philadelphia Story. Maybe you're still looking at the 1997 version.