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Marsellus_H

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Posts posted by Marsellus_H

  1. Posted

    Conservative films that are canon-worthy is an interesting thought.... Let's see. Maybe Ben-Hur? I've got a soft-spot for the 1949 film The Fountainhead, although I don't think it's particularly conservative, more of a sappy drama. Also, I guess there could be a case for Ghostbusters, since the main villain is an over-regulating EPA guy.

     

    I think with "Grand Budapest Hotel" there's already a pretty conservative film inducted into the canon.

  2. Posted

    Given the impact that film had on pop culture, music videos and band documentaries, I'd say it's definitely discussion-worthy. Also, I'd love to indulge in random Beatles trivia: Like, uh, that scene with Ringo you're talking about, it was filmed mainly because the other members of the Band were partying too hard the night before, and he was the only one showing up on the set...

  5. Posted

    Yes. I think Fincher is simply one of the finest craftsmen your country has ever produced. This film shows his best qualities as well as the limitations of them: He will take a pretty standard script and elevate the material with some smart directing choices, without sacrificing its mainstream appeal. I think that works best when the script is part of a clear genre, like here in Seven.

     

    While I get some of Amy's criticism, I'd argue that he still manages to make something worth watching out of the limitations he sets for himself. It's tight, it knows what it is, and it moves forward. Maybe, Fincher tackels with this way of working the medium's essence much better than filmmakers like Scorsese or Spielberg: Films aren't magic tricks. They are simply a craft. You go to the cinema, you watch them doing their job, and you move forward with your real life. To me, it's this remarkably modest approach in work philosophy that makes the product enduring.

     

    As for the comparisons to CIVIL WAR: If you quote Fincher as your influence, how can you end up with what is basically a 2-hour soap opera special with funny looking people in it, and some fun 20 minutes action sequences tacked to the end? If a film I've seen recently clearly has no idea what it wants to be, it was this one - except for if it wants to be a 2-hour soap opera special with funny looking people in it, and some fun 20 minutes action sequences tacked to the end.

    • Like 1

  7. Posted

    I give this one a yes. It's fun to watch. It's got a bit of a slow start, but the last 40 minutes are bonkers. There's also kind of a fan theory to it, in which Babe didn't survive the "Is it safe?" scene and everything else is a fever dream in his mind. That's just good enough for the canon. Also, I do agree that 3 great scenes make a at least a discussion-worthy episode, so I totally look forward for Amy to suggest shitty films with three kinda great sequences.

  9. Posted

    You like war epics? You like Alec Guiness? You like to blow up shit in exotic environments? I've got the right stuff for you. Let's waste 6 hours and 23 minutes of everybody's life to discuss which David Lean production does it best: Which film is better in representing the struggle of war as well as mid-century values and the golden age of production companies? I think we all agree that there only can be one! Gentlemen (and Ladies, although both films are pretty much saussage fests), the fight is on - literally!

  11. Posted

    Ok, guys, what leads me to say yes to Brokeback Mountain is simple. I'm pretty much a dude, I go skating, surfing, scuba diving, most of my friends are straight, we watch soccer and movies and drink beer, I'm pretty smart most of the times and really dumb sometimes - and I happen to like guys. I struggeled quite a bit. Part of that struggle came from not having any role models, like at all. To be honest, there still aren't many really good gay films with a positive message or strong characters (or, god forbid, with both of it). Brokeback at lest got the characters-part right. It's probably the only shot we really honestly got of a gay love story with the guys living happy together at least for some time.... The only other discussion-worthy film I can think of would be WEEKEND, a British 2011 film - which was such a small event that the only chance of an episode would probably be if a guest came along with this as a suggestion.

     

    Ok, now, with that soul searching stuff out of the way, here are my thoughts on the film making: I've never gotten quite warm with Ang Lee's directing style. I more often than not feel that he's a bit too formulaic for my tastes. This holds true for Life Of Pi, and it also is true to me for this one here, which, had it won best picture, let's be frank, would have probably had a backlash just as much as Dances With Wolves or Chicago. If something makes a film legendary, it's NOT winning these awards. Being the perpetual underdog helped this film to build a reputation that's a bit too large for its own good. I think it's simply a fine small film, based on a really, really well written script with some interesting characters. It is, however, by no means as daring a film as its subject matter. That's certainly a bit of a hard pill to swallow from an artistic point of view, but at the same time I'm pretty sure it's what made the huge success possible in the first place.

     

    So, yes, and it was a fun episode as always. Cheers!

  12. Posted

    I have seen it before- and wasn't too flash on it. Maybe a second viewing will help

     

    You should give it another shot. When I first saw it, the film didn't convince me as being that special. A second viewing did the trick - I could concentrate better and I realized how spot-on the editing and the directing was, how well each scene led to the next one. I know, this sounds kind of elementary, but that isn't easy to achieve.

    • Like 1

  15. Posted

    I'm fine with this being an important film, and also being a best picture winner somewhere in the same realm of Gentlemen's Agreement and All The King's Men, but how could this ever win the the Grand Prix at the Cannes film festival? I do think it's a fine viewing in the same way double indemnity is. It's a good film, but minor Wilder. If I can't be passionate about an entry I rather go with a no, although a soft one.

  16. Posted

    This is an idea for an episode that came up at the old forum. Since Pennies From Heaven has been mentioned by Amy during the last episode, and Devin's been going on about having a classical musical added to the canon since the Rocky Horror Show episode, it's about time that we give two of the genre's greatest a shot. Both are undeniably influntial, both for their own reasons: One is the prime example of the streamlined 50s jukebox musicals with the overpowering charme of Gene Kelly, the other one has pretty much invented the "serious subject"-musical, with one of the best scores ever written for the stage. But which one is to be preserved for all eternity? The one that wants to make you laugh, or the one that makes you want to move rhythmically through empty parking garages?

    • Like 2

  17. Posted

    Yes. Fun fact I just found on wikipedia: The guy playing Little John, Alan Hale, already played the same character in the 1922 Douglas Fairbanks film, and would play it again in 1950. Thus, he played the same role for a 28-year-span, making this one of the longest period over which any film actor played the same major role, second only to Stallone's Rocky.

  19. Posted

     

    I hope you do give it another chance, and, moreso, that you find more to enjoy the second time. I'm one of the many who feels that THIS was the movie where Wes Anderson finally came together to produce something more than just cute and twee, but actually meaningful and timeless.

     

    Out of curiosity, how do you feel about Anderson's other films? As far as stageyness goes, what about Fantastic Mr. Fox in particular? I find it hard to wrap my mind around how anyone could like that film (which I consider one of his weakest) but not ADORE Grand Budapest. Sure, the latter is a very setpiece-based film, enormously stagey, a love letter to a time the filmmaker could never have known himself, based on the work of someone long dead who actually did understand his past, even as he struggled to understand his present. But....it's of a time long ago. How could any of us (fairly) young people hope to understand such a time, without indulging in some amount of either shallow fancy, or passive acceptance? Zweig's a fascinating author (do read "The World of Yesterday" if you have any interest in what must have been running through Anderson's mind when he came up with this movie), but "Grand Budapest" must exist as half-second-hand-memoir and half high-fantasy romance, in every sense of that word. It's a story all about a time that has almost completely faded away. Almost every impression is going to be second-hand now.

     

    As a compulsive devourer of the culture of bygone days, I couldn't have resisted this movie if I tried. It was MADE for me. There's my bias.

     

    However, I must take exception to something you said in this post. Borderline racist depiction of Eastern Europeans? I don't want to get into a broad/vague/pointless discussion of what races are or what it means to have negative perceptions of anyone different from you, but....you had clear heroes, clear villains. Very old-fashioned, that. But everyone (with the possible exception of Agatha, I'm not sure I remember what her story was) was Central/Eastern European in some way. In a fictional way, of course. Where was the Lobby Boy from? Turkey? Probably. Played by a guy with an Italian name. The others? Hungarian? Russian? White or Red Russian? Polish? Austrian? Does it matter? I prefer to think it didn't, at least to the author (the author-within-the-movie) especially since the clear sentiment of the film was based on a (as the film pointed out) bygone sentiment that such notions as nationality didn't need to matter. Not that they didn't, to some. But that, at least to the heroes, they didn't. The historical backdrop to the movie was the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Which, sadly, was not a multicultural utopia where everyone lived in harmony regardless of their religion or the culture they accepted as their first. But, also sadly, was a more multicultural and tolerant state than the various nation-states that succeeded it, where anyone - Hungarian, Austrian/German, Romanian, Czech/Slovak, Serbian, Croat, Italian, Jewish, others - who found themselves living in a successor state where they weren't of the majority...ethnicity?...were certainly worse off in their new "modern" nation-state than they were in the old one. It's not a co-incidence that most ended up going full-on fascist during this period.

     

    Long story short (too late), Grand Budapest is an elegy to an age that, while it certainly wasn't the acme of civility and tolerance, being very socially rigid and tradition-bound, it nonetheless "officially" held such civility in high esteem (as Fiennes' character represented)., and was, once, wistfully looked back upon by many in Europe who lived during the most savage and tragic time of the 1930s and 1940s. Things were inconsolably bleak at the time (Zweig committed suicide in distant Brazil before World War II even ended), and, in that light, the old days couldn't help but seem like an Elysium, whatever faults it had paling in comparison to the manifest sins of their present.

     

    It's a movie about nostalgia. Partly rose-colored, but partly not. About missing more innocent days, if only because modernity can sometimes be worse. And, most of all, missing the idealism and innocence of a time that wouldn't know how to tell the difference between the two, because it hasn't even conceived of how much worse things could be, but which we, the readers/viewers know better from hindsight. I don't think you have to be necessarily wistful of the past to feel an emotional pull from "Grand Budapest". I think, maybe, it's enough to appreciate innocence, to think that there maybe were SOME advantages to living in an earlier time, when things weren't necessarily worse than they are now, even if that innocence was based in a necessary ignorance of the future. Or at least, to be able to empathize with those who were necessarily tinged with this innocence and ignorance, given the time they lived in.

     

    You're absolutely right that the film is based on ignorance. At least the flashbacks are, the way Future Zero tells most of the story, it's clearly framed to put the viewer in the 1930s, and not the 1960s looking back on the 1930s. Had these characters (in their younger days) known what was to come of their communities in the years following the main part of this movie, they probably would have acted very differently in their time, if they could even have believed it (and it's quite likely they couldn't have, I think, given the example of actual witnesses of the time, who couldn't believe what they were witnessing). But that's nonetheless what the film's about. It doesn't advocate the idea that the past was necessarily better. Just that the future isn't necessary better for being closer to our present, and that intolerance of any kind, in any time, is always with us, and, one hopes, always worth fighting against, even if it doesn't work out in the short term. Just the example of standing up for one's sense of standards, of decency, it can leave a mark on the future. It can inspire. And, one day, perhaps that bygone sense of civilization can flourish again, once they are rediscovered.

     

    Thank you so much for your elaborations. I was thoroughly touched by the passion and lenghth of your arguments - a rare feat in here as well as in any forum on the internet, I feel. Right now I don't have neither the time nor the muse to answer in a just way, but let me say so much: I DEFINITELY need to rewatch Grand Budapest, now more than ever.

  22. Posted

    I haven't actually watched The Adventures of Robin Hood. Just never got around to it. This is as good an excuse as any to finally watch it.

     

    I thought I've never watched it, and when I put the film in the dvd player tonight, I found out that I've watched it a long time ago when I was about 10 years old. Funny how things can play out.

     

    The thing that impressed me most this time around was the film's length: it clocks in just around 100 minutes. It's really well edited. An epic like this would nowadays be stretched over at least 2 hours... and probably a couple of sequels. Not a trend I appreciate much in modern movies.

  24. Posted

    I vote yes. I wasn't quite sure where I'd land on Slacker, partially because this is such an American film with a very specifically American point of view - which is by no means any negative criticism towards it. It's simply sometimes very hard for me, as a middle European guy, to adjust to it. I often feel like I overlook some small fun details that seem to be like inside jokes in American culture. For example, this doesn't happen in Tarantino movies, which, as he likes to say, are films for the earth, made by a guy from earth that just happens to be American. I feel that Linklater can't really escape his roots.

     

    That being said, Amy's and Devin's arguments on the show convinced me in the end, and I'm not going to argue against a film, simply because I don't "get" it fully. Also, the one-take-sequence about 10 minutes into the film, in which this guy drives overhis mother, must have been a small miracle to pull off.

    • Like 1
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