Aug 20, 2015

smh @Vahn forgetting Tarkovsky, Bergman, and Dreyer

And where's China bro?

Fei Mu
Tian Zhuangzhuang
Chen Kaige
Xe Fei
Jiang Wen
Zhang Yimou
Wu Nien-Jen
King Hu

 

Aug 20, 2015

And where are the Italians @Vahn?

De Sica
Visconti
Rossellini
Antonioni
Pasolini
Dario Argento
Lattuada
Francesco Rosi
Sorrentino
De Santis

 

Aug 20, 2015

I needed more Chinese directors. The rest are pretty well accounted for. Already a fan of Bergman and Tarkovsky. Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc has been on my watchlist for ages. Anyway, all I need now are screenwriters and cinematographers. Any and all. No need for obscurity here. Obviously Billy Wilder is already covered in directing so people like that I need not repeat.

 

Aug 21, 2015

Cinematographers...

Kazuo Miyagawa
Sven Nykvist
Slawomir Idziak
Vadim Yusov
Emmanuel Lubezki
Subrata Mitra
Roger Deakins
Christopher Doyle
Gregg Toland
Pi Bing Lee
Russell Metty
Darius Khondji
Benoit Debie (for @Vahn)

 

Aug 21, 2015

 

Aug 21, 2015

Awesome post @Dew, how the h--- did you embed that? lol

 

Aug 21, 2015

u can post imgur albums. Those aren't mine specifically, but i agree with a lot of them

 

Aug 22, 2015

ah, cool. I like a lot of those but there are many stock shots which pale in comparison to other shots in their respective films.

 

Aug 22, 2015

The Deer Hunter (1978)


Loved the mill town aesthetic, the three act structure, the political ambiguity, the raw violence, the wedding, and Walken's performance. Didn't care for the use of Meryl Streep, letting DeNiro wing the final Russian Roulette scene, or the God Bless America thing. Also, didn't care for the way that two of the characters flip flopped after a single scene. It seemed like a cool idea, but they didn't execute it believably. More about that in the Wiki down below.

Of the movies on Vietnam that I've seen, this one might say the littlest about it. It's not really about the war itself, but the impact of any type of extreme experience on a personal and interpersonal level. The producer says something similar down below. The evacuation of Saigon was done really well. Shooting on location gave it authenticity. No complaints.

It's a pretty simple film for being 3 hours long, kind of barren in retrospect. The star ensemble cast saved it from a lot of its problems. I understand why it would win Best Picture and agree with all of the positives and negatives that honor usually suggests. 3/4

Spoiler: Cool things from the Wiki

Deeley felt the revised script, now called The Deer Hunter, broke fresh ground for the project. The protagonist in the Redeker/Garfinkle script, Merle, was an individual who sustained a bad injury in active service and was damaged psychologically by his violent experiences, but was nevertheless a tough character with strong nerves and guts. Cimino and Washburn's revised script distilled the three aspects of Merle's personality and separated them out into three distinct characters. They became three old friends who grew up in the same small industrial town and worked in the same steel mill, and in due course were drafted together to Vietnam.[21] In the original script, the roles of Merle (later renamed Mike) and Nick were reversed in the last half of the film.

According to Cimino, De Niro requested a live cartridge in the revolver for the scene in which he subjects John Cazale's character to an impromptu game of Russian roulette, to heighten the intensity of the situation. Cazale agreed without protest,[7] but obsessively rechecked the gun before each take to make sure that the live round wasn't next in the chamber.

Zinner eventually cut the film down to 18,000 feet (from 600,000).[44] Zinner was later fired by Cimino when he discovered that Zinner was editing down the wedding scenes.[30][47] Zinner eventually won Best Editing Oscar for The Deer Hunter. Regarding the clashes between him and Cimino, Zinner replied "Michael Cimino and I had our differences at the end, but he kissed me when we both got Academy Awards."[44] Cimino later commented in The New York Observer, "[Zinner] was a moron ... I cut Deer Hunter myself."[23]

In his review, Roger Ebert defended the artistic license of Russian roulette, arguing "it is the organizing symbol of the film: Anything you can believe about the game, about its deliberately random violence, about how it touches the sanity of men forced to play it, will apply to the war as a whole. It is a brilliant symbol because, in the context of this story, it makes any ideological statement about the war superfluous."[61]

In her review, Pauline Kael wrote, "The Vietcong are treated in the standard inscrutable-evil Oriental style of the Japanese in the Second World War movies ... The impression a viewer gets is that if we did some bad things there we did them ruthlessly but impersonally; the Vietcong were cruel and sadistic."[6]

In his Vanity Fair article "The Vietnam Oscars", Peter Biskind wrote that the political agenda of The Deer Hunter was something of a mystery: "It may have been more a by-product of Hollywood myopia, the demands of the war-film genre, garden-variety American parochialism, and simple ignorance than it was the pre-meditated right-wing road map it seemed to many."[6]

Producer Spikings, while proud of the film, regrets the way the Vietnamese were portrayed. "I don't think any of us meant it to be exploitive," Spikings said. "But I think we were ... ignorant. I can't think of a better word for it. I didn't realize how badly we'd behaved to the Vietnamese people ..."[6]

Producer Deeley, on the other hand, was quick to defend Cimino's comments on the nature and motives of the film: "The Deer Hunter wasn't really 'about' Vietnam. It was something very different. It wasn't about drugs or the collapse of the morale of the soldiers. It was about how individuals respond to pressure: different men reacting quite differently. The film was about three steel workers in extraordinary circumstances. Apocalypse Now is surreal. The Deer Hunter is a parable ... Men who fight and lose an unworthy war face some obvious and unpalatable choices. They can blame their leaders.. or they can blame themselves. Self-blame has been a great burden for many war veterans. So how does a soldier come to terms with his defeat and yet still retain his self-respect? One way is to present the conquering enemy as so inhuman, and the battle between the good guys (us) and the bad guys (them) so uneven, as to render defeat irrelevant. Inhumanity was the theme of The Deer Hunter's portrayal of the North Vietnamese prison guards forcing American POWs to play Russian roulette. The audience's sympathy with prisoners who (quite understandably) cracked thus completes the chain. Accordingly, some veterans who suffered in that war found the Russian roulette a valid allegory."[63]

Canby said in his famous review ofHeaven's Gate, "[The film] fails so completely that you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the Devil has just come around to collect."[79]

More recently, BBC film critic Mark Kermode challenged the film's status, "At the risk of being thrown out of the 'respectable film critics' circle, may I take this opportunity to declare officially that in my opinion The Deer Hunter is one of the worst films ever made, a rambling self indulgent, self aggrandizing barf-fest steeped in manipulatively racist emotion, and notable primarily for its farcically melodramatic tone which is pitched somewhere between shrieking hysteria and somnambulist sombreness."

The film is referenced three times in The Simpsons: once in "Kamp Krusty" when Krusty is captured and brought before Bart, in "Skinner's Sense of Snow" when Bart overpowers Principal Skinner and forces Skinner to climb a rope while towel snapping him, and again in "Simpson Tide" when Skinner and Krusty are forced to play Russian roulette while being ordered to by a mob boss, just before Moeinterrupts to announce he is closing the bar to join the Naval Reserve. The Vietnamese phrase "Mau, didi mau!" ("Go, go quickly!") is also referenced to by both Bart and the mob boss to force someone to do an activity they won't willingly do.

Edit: This was supposed to go in the Last Movie You Watched thread. Sry.

 

Aug 24, 2015

This is dope: http://www.vulture.com/2015/08/quentin-tarantino-lane-brown-in-conversation.html

 

Aug 24, 2015

So he hates Oscar Bait and loves David O Russell?

 

Aug 24, 2015

Yyyyeah. People aren't going to talk about American Hustle in 30 years sry. Russell and QT were indie darlings in the mid 90s, I think he's showing a little bias. Interesting point about The Town though.

 

Aug 24, 2015

Gone Baby Gone had all kinds of ugly, down to Earth people in it. I think it's fair to say everybody was surprised that Affleck could make good movies, but honestly, I've never seen anybody overstate his product. David O on the other hand...

Also, can we all agree that Django Unchained is in the bottom half of QT's catalog?

 

Aug 24, 2015

It's the most straight forward, obviously. I posted my QT rankings somewhere, Django was nearish the end, if I remember right. But I also rly prefer Jackie Brown to k--- Bill so...

Yeah, good point about GBG, but QT was making a specific observation about The Town. And def don't disagree that David O. is overrated -- that said, Argo became ridiculously overrated, no?

 

Aug 24, 2015

Oh yeah, Argo totally was, but it's nowhere near as bad as American Hustle is what I'm saying. He's pretty consistent.

Let's remember that he compared the star leads from The Town to very minor characters from The Fighter. He should have been comparing Affleck and Lively to Whalberg and Adams lol. His agenda is pretty clear. It's impressive for Affleck to be in competition with Russell and embarrassing the other way. Of course he's not using Steve McQueen ya know, who also had an overrated Oscar film, because McQueen's other work is sublime.

I'd rather watch Shanghai Noon than Django or k--- Bill.

 

Aug 24, 2015

You think 12 Years is overrated?

 

Aug 24, 2015

Yes. Hunger and Shame are both superior. I think 12 Years was a good step up propelled by politics.
Then again, that was the last film that I got super hyped for. I watched the trailer many times. I should revisit it.
I will say beyond doubt that he didn't cut out enough of the source material to make it a movie.
It ends up more like a book set to the screen. Less intimate than his prior films no matter the weight or performances.

 

Aug 24, 2015

Tarantino dickriding O'Russel & the mumblecore directors is hysterical. He's making all these big statements about the state of movies yet only mentions the most basic of films. Delusional.

 

Aug 24, 2015

Also, like, mumblecore has been around for awhile. I saw Mutual Appreciation when I was a freshmen in college..

 

Aug 24, 2015

Linklater has been doing it since pre-Slacker depending on how you define it.