ol' eddy wrecks

As a movie, my thoughts were, "it was alright, I guess. Some funny lines here and there. It felt like it was setting up some topic to be re-examined later (namely Sandy), which, well, it didn't." Which doesn't really stick out in my mind as great. This was a movie that I think I was only vaguely aware of its existence (didn't even know the basic premise) prior to the Criterion release. And when it did, I was like, "huh. I didn't realize/think there was anything that really set this 80's comedy apart any other movie of that era. It doesn't feel like I hear it get referenced that much." After watching it, I'm still feeling the same way. Not entirely sure what put it on Criterion's radar. Maybe Sydney Pollack being the director? I guess I'm just not getting the strong appeal of this one. Just checked, weirdly, Kenneth Brannaugh really likes it. https://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/sightandsoundpoll2012/voter/1020

I haven't listened to the episode yet, but all I could think of was in the All the President's Men and the part about the director complaining about Hoffman over-acting. As Michael, Hoffman is fine, but as Dorothy, all I could think was he's going full-on Chickenlady with his mannerisms and tics.

To mimic rolling a 50 sided die, they could also just divide the d100 roll by 2. Though the proper algorithm* for generating a random permutation requires decreasing n by 1 (of the, pick a random integer up to n) for each pick they make, so eh. *: So you didn't not have to worry a out re-rolling, and keeping the probability uniform for every possible pick (going to the nearest unpicked one increases the odds of selecting ones next to previously picked one, eventually resulting in clusters of numbers that are likely to be picked**). **: Back of napkin math reasoning, that has the possibility of being flawed.

I was a little surprised they were doing this movie because it is by no accounts, a bad movie. Maybe it's just the reputation of sequels-in-name-only films, but I feel Prom Night 2 >>> Prom Night. (Admittedly, my memory is a little shaky here, I haven't watched either in about 6 months). When Paul said he liked how they mixed the 1950's and 1980's era stuff, my mind went to, "he should watch Night of the Creeps," and I was hoping someone was going to introduce themselves as "Tom Atkins' Mustache," but that probably would have been too oblique (and the 80s part anyways). On the portal shredding trope, as I was channel surfing, Demons 2 came one, and it also had a scene like that. And I was thinking, "man, they also did this in Demons." And then I come on here, read this, and think, "man, they were doing this a lot back then." For some weird reason, I kept thinking this was all somehow Alien chest-bursting influenced. But I don't know why. Especially breaking it down, I think there was a scene in The Stuff that also had a similar effect and was probably more akin (with the lack of blood). Man, it's been forever (decades) since I've seen The Stuff. I guess we should point out coming out of the tv, I mean the trunk, covered in liquid is probably copying the firm rules of interdimensional spirits established in Poltergeist. Another movie with a woman walking around for an extremely extended period of time without any clothes. I'm starting to think this movie just has every movie.

Well, it affects how I feel about the quality of a film overall, and how I feel about its various strengths or weaknesses. A lot of movies are concerned about depicting human beings in a way that seem human like (maybe not Tommy Wiseau movies, but most movies). Movies based on real events are also at least somewhat concerned about depicting those events accurately. In theory. In practice, I find that they usually don't. I think a line from the movie feels apt: Which, since I haven't read All the President's Men or know the details, I can't say the movie fails one of the very lines it gives. I find myself coming out of movies based on real events suspecting that they usually do. Especially as they start to resemble what resemble fictional films. This is actually my first time watching it, and with my usual reservations about the true-events based movies, I'm overall positive on this one. It probably helps that I do like the cinema verite style used in some of the 70s films. Some criticisms though: I was concerned about how much it flirted with being a political thriller (as it progressed it made sense, but the all-encompassing conspiratorial nature of it, thinking of the early librarian phone call, seemed a little dubious in how it was portrayed). Though, this weirdly does add another texture to my memory of The Conversation. Just the phrase, 70's paranoia. I think this is influenced by a growing sense of, "man, a lot of today's crooks just seem too... dumb. Just too dumb to pull of a conspiracy." I also wonder if we could have gotten some more background texture beyond news events for conveying the sense of the passage of time (unless I missed something throughout the film). e.g. changing of seasons. They were on this story for a few years. Watergate was probably too sprawling of a thing to do everything, but I believe there were more breaks in the story than just what Woodward and Bernstein covered (though, as the line goes, "Watergate wasn't an issue, until it was." I know we got the NY Times story on the banks, but I think long term, having slightly more of those in the movie probably would have given a better texture to it all. Though, maybe that would have gotten us back into sprawling territory that wouldn't have feasibly fit in a 3 hour movie or would have been too unfocused. Watching this has got me wanting to go back and re-listen to the Slow Burn, season 1, podcast, which I did listen to the first episode again.

I expect to see you back when they get to the Godfather movies.

I know this won't change any minds, but it's pronounced, bio-pic. It's a misle word. It's one I used to mispronounce. I kind of like the sound of the mispronunciation more, but it is a mispronunciation. I also used to use "nonplussed" incorrectly for years. Just mentioning that, because they use it incorrectly a lot on HDTGM.

I feel like one could also breakdown what they mean by most influential. I feel like there's a lot of, "most well known," or "referenced (in the Simpsons)" or is meme-able statements when that's being said. And people are free to care about what type of influence they care about, but I find for answering, "is this a good/great movie," I don't know how much currency that type of influence has with me. I don't want to say it has none, but I don't find myself consciously wanting to use it as an argument. Then there's actually altering how film goes about conveying its narrative or story. This can be such things as editing techniques that convey a certain mood (which I could say is subtle, but Breathless was not subtle in its editing - and also had a lot of shallow mimicry in its time). There's also a question of how incremental it was, was it going to happen with or without the film. I mean, I ultimately decided to vote "no" now as well, but even the latter version of "most influential," Snow White does pretty well.

I think this came up the last time we discussed animated films on the list, but I'm not really a Disney person. Though, the one early-ish Disney film (I'd be down for watching The Black Cauldron again, though, it doesn't come to mind as a top 100 film) is Alice in Wonderland. Fwiw, or context or perspective, I prefer Totoro to Spirited Away. The latter had higher production values, and that first night as dusk sets is truly amazing, but the actual character progression of the child protagonist in Totoro is more complicated and seems more interesting to me than character development through questing - which I guess contradicts picking Alice in Wonderland above, but honestly, I have a hard time thinking of major American animated films that go that route. AiW just has a kooky, fantastical world that I just enjoy.

I'm holding off on watching this until the criterion channel launches next week because it's probably going to be on there (and doesn't make much sense for me to rent it in that time). It looks like I last saw this five years ago, so my memory is spotty, but I seem to remember thinking her response was more of an, "ooohhhh..." which was a likely precursor to rejection. But that's a vague memory to a movie that didn't really leave much of an impression on me. (If I were to vote for this movie, it'd be like The Searchers, mostly in deference to the critical consensus). I did want to throw out a couple of topics on silent movies though. One reason I've heard cited as to why they didn't want to move away from silent to sound was the international appeal. You can easily translate a silent film internationally without much if any loss of quality by just changing the intertitle cards. I can't help but wonder if some of Chaplin's lasting international popularity was... amplified by his major successes were probably amongst the last major US films that international audiences could easily watch. Just a thought. Based off of my recollection of Chaplin and the majority of this comes from that "recent" rewatch of City Lights, I'm not really that big on Chaplin, but did enjoy Buster Keaton shorts I watched (not so much The General, more-so the The High Sign sticking in my memory - mainly because I enjoyed his deadpan a lot more). Granted, I'm also recalling that some of my favorite silent film experiences were when they were accompanied with live music that was often anachronistic for the film (e.g. the afore-mentioned Buster Keaton shorts were accompanied by people playing blues-grass and I remember seeing a Lon Chaney film where he was a double-thumbed murderer/thief working at a circus where the band played amongst other things, an instrumental rendition of The Pixies' Where is my Mind?). I mention that with regards to how Paul tends to tune out after a bit while watching a silent film. I wonder how much the music choice might be affecting his viewing experience. Though I found Man with a Movie Camera, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Cabinet of Caligari all really good regardless. Though, those are older silent films. I wonder if Paul likes Mel Brook's Silent Film. More modern silent films that I can think of are mainly Guy Maddin's films (e.g. Cowards Bend the Knee), but that's probably more arthouse than what a lot of people here would like (based on what I've seen people say they hate - Man with a Movie Camera would also probably fall into this category since it was consciously trying to be experimental).

My Shakespeare reading was mostly limited to high school (I'm sure I saw film adaptations as an adult, but really not that many), but did he have any other comedies where the main characters died at the end? To get to evRoberts comment about the absurdity of the situation, I would also use that language, and say, this play reads more like a dark comedy to me. But I think that's more of my personal take from modern sensibilities. I don't think that's how it was intended and am not sure if the notion of dark comedies existed back then (at least, like they do today).

I should clarify that I think Billy Shakes* is primarily criticizing the feud between the family as the real tragedy. The take on Romeo & Juliet's romance does make the difference between: Romeo & Juliet have true love: this feud is destroying a wonderful, beautiful thing (and the beauty of the romance is a more important thematic part of the story). Romeo & Juliet have a highly, over the top, teenage romance, and act irrationally. To the point of self destruction. And the adults of the family aren't behaving any better with their mutually destructive feud. *: I want to just keep calling him this, just because it's fun to say. Just rolls of the tongue.

So I realized yesterday I hadn't finished the podcast yet, so this comment existed partially in a vacuum to me and I didn't realize it. It was one of the comments that made me wonder what people's take on R+J was. On the question of, "does she date again?", there's two angles here. 1 - the idea the movie puts forward and 2 - realistically, how we think these fictitious, heavily stylized personality characters would act in reality (which, as I write it, I know sounds like a very self-contradictory self-experiment). Going off of my adolescent memory (and skewed take of WSS), it felt like it took the popular perception view of R+J that they have true love. I think the images you presented, lend weight to that. And my inclination was to assume they wanted something metaphorically similar to the suicides. I think Amy was thinking more in terms of angle 2, which is a, "yeah, she'll get over him. it wasn't really true love." Which is closer to how we're all taking R+J in this thread (and a number of us appear to believe the bard, Billy Shakes, also thought of it). I'm going to say, I think in the reality take, I'll still disagree with Amy. While I think it's wasn't necessarily true love, getting someone gunned down in front of you is traumatizing. When it's the person you think you're in love with, very traumatizing. When the person who gunned him down was the person you were arranged to be married, well, I guess it's better than a family member doing it, but still, it's someone you knew (my memory isn't good enough to remember Maria's opinion of Chino was). I'm just going to say, in reality, that'll emotionally scar you. I don't think necessarily become a nun because I know I'll never love again, but... I could see it undermining all her future relationships in a way that letting the relationship run its course wouldn't have. As I typed thought that through, surprisingly similar to the plot of Hiroshima mon Amour (which I mentioned in our last relationship, metaphorical/literal suicide thread, Sophie's Choice). Though since that's from the perspective of the woman who is an adult, the film/she acknowledges that her resolving her feelings about her teenage romance from the past is irrational and that it was stupid teenage romance.

Sycasey responded to that more thoroughly than I could have. Arglebargle's post left me assuming they were arguing there was some hidden metaphor that only Jews would recognize. I mean, it's a character named Ryan, played by Matt Damon. It was some real Charles Kinbote/exiled king of Zembla-reading of Pale Fire type there, but with uncomfortable amounts of anti-semitism. Though, for all I know, maybe Spielberg pissed off some Russian oligarchs and this was a bot. Or maybe Netflix hired the same PR firm Facebook hired in response to the whole Oscars stuff.

I haven't read Romeo & Juliet since I was in high school, maybe middle school, but reading this thread, I realized I'm unclear how people view Romeo & Juliet - i.e. are they actually in love. Somewhere along the way I transitioned from thinking it's a love story (plus other stuff) to thinking, "oh, those two were never in love, they were just really highly, emotional, melodramatic teenagers." And coincidentally at the time, I was reading other people's posts, basically saying, "yeah, and Shakespeare dropped cues in the play to convey that." Googling, I noticed people often cite the parts about Romeo professing to be so madly in love with Rosaline, that he would die without her, right before he meets the next love of his life that he would also die without, Juliet. This both portrays him both as someone who loves being in love, and one astute take I saw, playing up the Italian stereotype of being overly passionate, setting the stage that he would be someone who could kill himself later, mostly on an impulse. I also haven't seen WSS since middle school or high school, and don't think I'll be able to make time for revisiting it now, but I don't remember any situations that might have been commentary on the silliness (or I guess stupidity) of the impetuousness of the drama of youth romance, since, no literal suicides. But I also haven't seen it since an age when I probably would have missed it if it was there.

Growing up I liked Holy Grail more the sheer silliness of it (and TBH, I was young enough I may not have been getting LoB). As I've gotten older, I like Life of Brian more for the religious satirical-aspect. Which I don't think social-political satire's sense of relevance (different than story, but possibly more difficult to land without a story) has been acknowledged yet in these comparisons. I still haven't bought into the political satire argument I've heard people say about Duck Soup. I won't be getting A Night at the Opera until after the polls close.

I guess I'll be the person who finds this to be a troubling. Orrr... The movie is steeped in the worldview of the American nationalistic and often jingoistic mythology of, "Be grateful to war vets. They gave their lives so you could have your freedom." (which doesn't even apply to any military conflict since WW2, yet, still said). I'll caveat it with the fact that I haven't seen the movie, but having heard everyone talk about it, I feel like I have seen good chunks of it, and it seems pretty clear that's what's going on here. I mean, looking up who wrote the screenplay, I'm not recognizing much of their other works (actually there aren't a lot), but they also did American Braveheart. I mean, The Patriot. Another war movie, which I also have not seen, but I'll guess based on true events that manages to be very ahistorical and pulls at nationalistic strings (I'm literally just guessing, by taking Braveheart and making it American). It seems like everything else you're reading into is a weird conspiratorial bent, while not factoring in, that's just how American culture remembers the two World Wars.

I'm looking through the list of 1998 films on letterboxd and I'm just thinking, "I think 1998 may just have been not a good year for film." Granted, I'm less taken with Rushmore and Lebowski than just about everyone else I've encountered talked to with movies over the years. So that might be skewing my take on the year. From the nominees, I'd probably take The Thin Red Line, but Mallick isn't for everyone, particularly later-Mallick (sometimes including me), and it doesn't seem like the type of movie that would win.

So, fwiw, I looked it up. https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/this-sea-battle-claimed-the-lives-of-5-brothers-in-world-war-ii There were 4 brothers. When it looked like 3 of them had died (it looks like one was shot down and presumed dead, but actually survived), the last one was sent home and basically served as an MP for the rest of the war. No stupid suicide mission. From the description of what I'm hearing from this movie, that final battle seems to be more based on the story of one of the brothers who died. My uncle's story checked out (5 brothers, not 7 though. Though I couldn't really remember the number he gave me). I am still curious what a good Eddie Slovik movie would have been. I guess I have to just imagine Paths of Glory, but set in WW2.

So, speaking as someone who generally doesn't like Spielberg's movies and has never seen this one, what I'm hearing is this the one I should definitely see. It is interesting seeing the criticisms leveled at this film feeling similar to how I feel about his other films. (At least as best as I can recall. The one possible exception being Jaws and possible Close Encounters, which I am still curious to see how my opinion of Jaws lands when we get to it). I think when people accuse a film of being "emotionally manipulative", I think they're trying to communicate something different than "something that was able to evoke an emotion in the viewer as was intended." Though exactly what, I have never been able to split that semantic hair to a degree that has wholly satisfied me. Apart from possibility the difference is in reference to being blatant or in your face (as Cameron stated above), I think the phrase, "unearned emotional response" also gets used and seems to also dance around what is off to the viewer. Logically speaking, does that mean, single children can't serve in World War II at this point? A story my uncle told me, of the "always a little suspect that this was just a story passed around." There were seven brothers, comprising all the children of a couple, all stationed on the same ship in WW2. It sank. The family lost all of it's children that day. So the army decided that they weren't going to station all siblings altogether on the same boat, or location or what-have-you, so that something like that wouldn't happen again. My uncle was stationed in Korea, and if I'm doing my math, it would have been in the 50s. For some reason idk if he actually served in the war or not. I feel like, he didn't, given the way he talked about it (which wasn't much). But I give that context for being around in the era shortly after WW2 and there was at least a story, if not an actual policy (which seems a lot more sensible than the plot of this movie, which I didn't know that was the reason for the rescue until the podcast.) I wonder if that was the basis for this movie (because I have a really hard time believing that war that spawned a book like Catch-22 and had the last time capital punishment* was invoked on a U.S. troop for desertion would have a policy of risking that many people to save one life). Maybe I could use "the google" to verify the basis of this movie or my uncle's story. But, heh, I'm lazy. *: This would have probably been a more interesting WW2 movie - one that you usually don't get to see. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Slovik#In_popular_culture

If they do the BFI list, I am going to wonder how many people are going to be on board to watch a 9 1/2 hour Holocaust documentary.

The BFI Sight & Sounds poll precedes the AFI's by a number of decades. Just looking at their top 10 should answer your question about all the films being from a single country. https://www.bfi.org.uk/news/50-greatest-films-all-time Their ballot also didn't restrict people to choose from a small set (400) of films either.

Are you saying Green Book won't join the hallowed legacy of such greats as Crash, Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, Chicago, Oliver!, and Driving Miss Daisie?

One weird thing about thinking about Annihilation on the AFI list, is that we live in a world where Tarkovsky's Stalker exists, and it isn't eligible for the AFI list because it's Russian. But it's weird to see an American film that is so directly influenced by it, but then the list can't have the seminal film (which is extremely well regarded internationally. it's 29th on the BFI critic's poll, 30th on the director's poll). On the flip side, that's two for two Alex Garland sci-fi films that have felt really solid and understood its material. I agree with Paul's assessment, if he gets a couple more solid entries, in, well, anything, I could see something like that happening. Though maybe not with the AFI list, since it seems to have a real hard time with independent films. I do want to say on Buster Scruggs, well, first a side-comment. I was once told that Moby Dick was a pantheistic novel, in which multiple people could interact with one physical thing in the universe and they'd all have this different way of perceiving it and what it meant to them. And if you just kind of weaved all those different things together, you got this complex, nuanced thing that was both a bit of all those things, but not necessarily any of them wholly and completely. I kind of took all the different tones of Buster Scruggs that way. We have all of these different stories of the west, what we cared about (gun slingers, bank robbers, artists trying to get by in the frontier, a miner encountering and spoiling an untouched valley for gold, and the story of nervous settlers just trying to find someone else to spend their time with as they migrate west), and all the crazy different tones in how we tell those stories. And so, it's just kind of contemplating through example, what do all these western stories add up to? (literal question about the afterlife presented in the first segment). Oh yeah, that, and death. So, I kind of loved it for what it did there. That said, I agree, there are a number of other great Coen Brothers movies, that I would expect and prefer to make the list. It did seem to get a short shrift (I think Amy's take of, "this is how we screwed it all up," seems most applicable to the Tom Waits segment, less-so the other segments).

The "kid's movie" might not be the best case for the argument since that's not just "for the genre," but is making assumptions about the target audience, no? I think my answer was kind of a drift from the original complaint. It was in respect to "why do critics hate super-hero movies?" And my response seemed more akin to Amy trying to address it in the (next episode) Critics episode. Which is, I don't know if critics really hate them. Like, it is a sampling bias, but the podcasts I listen to, the critics seem to mostly enjoy them, but (outside of Amy who seems to just flat out hate the genre), the negatives seem to be of the nature of fatigue, exhaustion, and the despair of looking at the future release schedule. Now, maybe it's projection, but I only watch an MCU movie about once every other year, and it's usually well after it's left theaters (e.g. at the end of 2018, I watched Thor: Ragnarock). And as such, I end up with the experience of, "I enjoyed it. Very disposable and I don't know if I'm going to think much about it again." Though Thor was funnier than the others. But I also live in kind of a comparative cultural bubble. I don't see trailers for these movies, because I haven't had cable since 2000. Being able to not be overexposed to these movies, I don't really care about their existence, as opposed to really having any type of hate towards them. But it does leave me wondering how I would feel about them if I had to watch them even if I didn't feel like watching them. I imagine I'd start to hate them. Then again, I do watch Game of Thrones, which is a fairly empty show. A critic's job can be multiple things, so I don't fully disagree. I mean, sometimes, it's valid for them to discuss how does this entry in a genre stack up against other entries in the genre. Another thing they might engage in, what are limitations or shortcomings of this genre (or at least most known entries in the genre)? Is this movie derivative? Are we currently over-saturated with entries in this genre? Somewhat related to the above, I feel like if someone was making the case for the merits of A Nightmare on Elm Street, they're probably better positioned to do it now after we've forgotten about the campy sequels rather than in the late 80s when so many of horror movie franchise sequels were coming out. But that might just be me. I also don't think ANoES should be on the AFI all time list (and it's been too long since I've seen it), but compared to other potentially "good" horror movies, something related to the franchise horrors of the 80s, might be a better reference point for thought experiments for the present. Judging a westerns against other entries informs one's opinion of the movie, but, there's still the, "but is it 'good' compared to movies outside the genre?" Which is grudlian's point of, does it have to elevate it to the best movies of all time classification? I think choosing westerns from the AFI list is interesting as a comparison point since pretty much all the entries are considered subversive. It would be funny if the super-hero movies that made it on the AFI list were things like James Gunn's Super. Or, what Watchmen could have been (from what I've gathered. I read the GN over the years. Never saw the movie, because, Zach Snyder. I heard it discussed to death at the time. I say that one, because it's the story that would probably be considered most analogous like The Searchers). Though circling back to people dismissing action movies... Gladiator won best picture. And Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was nominated (coincidentally the same year X-Men came out, which was ground zero for the current superhero movie boom). I don't think the former was very good. But I think action alone isn't necessarily what disqualified them from people taking them seriously. I think when there's an ephemeral quality to the current crop of superhero movies, especially the MCU (admittedly speaking from limited exposure), that's causing people to not take them seriously. But I haven't seen Black Panther, and, as the AFI list is concerned, as was pointed out in the comments section, there are action-adventure movies on the list that also don't have a lot of gravitas. Though, I can't help but wonder, if a superhero movie had the right type of drama or gravitas it would be more reasonably considered (which makes me think The Dark Knight, after we get out of the current superhero glut, might be something people won't moan at in 30 years, in terms of, "should this be on the AFI list?"). Then again, Shane is on the list, and Logan (haven't seen) was supposed to be an updated version of Shane... I would be curious what the people who voted for Shane on the AFI list felt of Logan (not talking these forums, but for the actual AFI poll). Granted, I am the person who hasn't been too big on the blockbusters on the list. But, the list is what it is (in terms of perceived strengths and perceived shortcomings). I don't know. I feel like I drifted pretty far away from annetaylorphoto's original complaint in discussing all that.