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TM2YC's 1001 Movies (Chronological up to page 25/post 481)

TM2YC

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^ I quoted the film itself agreeing with what you say above, so I don't know what else I could possibly say to dissuade you.

just enjoy it yourself on a superficial level.

I'd prefer to enjoy it on a profound level.
 

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Bull Durham (1988)
Director: Ron Shelton
Country: United States
Length: 108 minutes
Type: Sports, Romantic-Comedy

Knowing almost zero about baseball, I sometimes found watching 'Bull Durham' like viewing a comedy in another language with the subtitles switched off. Unlike with Kevin Costner's next movie after BD, also about baseball, 'Field of Dreams', which didn't require any pre-knowledge, this one is set deep in the lower echelons of the sport, the lifestyle and the traditions of baseball. I also didn't feel like I fully got to grips with any of the characters either. The mission to make Tim Robbins' hotshot-rookie 5% better at baseball, 5% less dumb and 5% less of a cocky pr*ck didn't seem like much of a character ark to root for. It's pleasant enough romcom stuff though, so I can't say I regret watching it. I did enjoy all the vulgar swearing, which seemed very natural to the characters and stronger than many mainstream American comedies of this type and period.

 

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^Huh, that's funny, I'm not even a baseball fan, but I guess growing up in America, we take for granted how much of that cultural knowledge seeps in through osmosis. I don't really much like watching or playing sports, but I love sports films, and this is one of the all-time greats. It's one of these classic 'experience vs vigor' battles between Costner and Robbins, and the dichotomy is as fun to watch as in Shelton's other sports movies. I guess it helps that I just find Costner irrepressibly likeable, so his films already start with me invested, unlike many foreign films where I may be puzzling to find who I can root for.
 

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it helps that I just find Costner irrepressibly likeable, so his films already start with me invested

God yes. He brings a kind vulnerability that you wouldn't get from other male actors playing heroes. He was on fire in the late 80s/early 90s, not many actors have made that many classics in such a short time. His star faded big time in the mid 90s (not many actors have made that many bombs in such a short time :LOL: ) but he always does great work. His look in 'Bull Durham' had me wondering if he could have been Indiana Jones in another universe.

^Huh, that's funny, I'm not even a baseball fan, but I guess growing up in America, we take for granted how much of that cultural knowledge seeps in through osmosis.

A comparison to 'Almost Famous' occurred to me, it's got a similar tone and also written/directed by a guy from the scene its depicting. Little moments like when Lester Bangs throws a record off the turntable and instead puts on 'Search and Destroy' by The Stooges, in 1973, has layers of meaning that explain that character to the viewer, but only if you bring your own knowledge of 70s rock to the film (and I'm a fan). The film doesn't bother explaining it to the audience.
 

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<starts nervously sweating, realizing that there were whole layers of meaning in Almost Famous that he didn't get>
 

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<starts nervously sweating, realizing that there were whole layers of meaning in Almost Famous that he didn't get>

Nothing that deep, just that if a viewer knows that The Stooges 'Raw Power' was a commercial flop of the "dropped by the record company" order but also an "ahead of it's time" record that was one of the building blocks of the future Punk sound, then the viewer can read that into the character's view of the state of 1973 music. If they don't know that, or the context of any of the other records mentioned in the scene (e.g. him saying "Yes? no"), then it's just "guy puts on record he prefers".
 

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A Passage to India (1984)
Director: David Lean
Country: United Kingdom
Length: 163 minutes
Type: Drama, Historical, Epic

David Lean's final work, 'A Passage to India' is far less "epic" than his 60s films (it's literally lacking in "scope"... as in the ratio), it reminded me more of 'Picnic at Hanging Rock'. This too features a pilgrimage by English colonial women to picnic at a mysterious ancient cliff site, which seems to exude a primal humming power, inducing madness and sexual awakening and inflicting a terrible karmic price on the trespassers. In Lean's 'Lawrence of Arabia', his characters are at the centre of a whirlwind, in 'Doctor Zhivago' they are only vaguely caught up in the storm but in 'A Passage to India' the characters act in sympathy with the political context. The formally affable Dr. Aziz becomes sickened with British rule due to his personal mistreatment in the story, you can see echoes in the wider move to independence and Adela's condemnation of Aziz and then sudden admission of his innocence, precipitating his euphoric release. The cast is all-star, including a wonderfully strong willed Peggy Ashcroft and Richard Wilson plays a very hissable villain, exuding an air of condescending, paternalist, superiority without needing to say much. Alec Guinness in "brown-face" is regrettable for 1984 (but still not exceptional in the 80s sadly), although it's mostly harmless and partially offset by Lean packing the cast with top-tier South Asian stars like Victor Banerjee, Saeed Jaffrey, Art Malik and Roshan Seth.




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Blade Runner (1982)
Director: Ridley Scott
Country: United States
Length: 117 minutes
Type: Sci-Fi, Noir, Drama

I’ve watched ‘Blade Runner’ more times than I can count, first taped off TV, then I remember buying a 1997 Director’s Cut widescreen letter boxed VHS from one of the now defunct Virgin Megastores, then upgraded to the 1999 DC snap-case DVD, then arguably downgraded to the 2007 ‘Final Cut’ blu-ray (simultaneously released on HD-DVD, when that was a thing) with its revisionist teal grade, this time it was my own 'Penultimate Cut' version, opting to watch with the isolated score and subtitles to soak up the visuals and appreciate the late great Vangelis’ peerless music. It’s interesting to hear how much of what you might think was soundFX, is actually part of the score and what sounds like music is really the rhythmic humming of the future city, or the hypnotic beat of computers, it’s a sometimes indivisible soundscape. Many of the things I love most about the 1982 original, are missing from the belated 2017 sequel. That gorgeous emotional score, perfectly fusing old fashioned Jazz with 80s synths, the film-noir romance, the colourful neon lighting, oppressive rain and atmospheric fogging, perfected in every camera angle by master Cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth and the beautiful detail of the design and visual FX that is so rich I doubt you could ever re-watch this and not spot something new. I love the eccentric way the three replicant designers are presented. One like a Yeti spider in a frozen web, another as a Geppetto toymaker squatting in a dilapidated, mouldering baroque mansion and of course Tyrell as an Art Deco pharaoh, bathed in golden 'Phantom of the Opera' candle light.


 
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Last Tango in Paris (1972)
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Country: France / Italy
Length: 129 minutes
Type: Erotic, Drama

When 'Last Tango in Paris' was released it was so scandalous, there were bans, denunciations as pornography, obscenity trials, smuggling of prints, the seizure and burning of prints and Director Bernardo Bertolucci was even given a suspended prison sentence. Despite the reputation, I find it pretty dull and pretentious, Marlon Brando rambles on about whatever he wants and Bertolucci doesn't cut away. I'd forgotten about all the interludes with Jean-Pierre Léaud acting out a tiresome Nouvelle Vague pastiche. 'Last Tango in Paris' works best when it's humorous and raucous, like the scene at the end where the characters get steaming drunk and Brando shows his bare arse at the titular Tango competition. 50-years later, most of the content isn't that big of a deal but it's controversial for a different reason. It's been claimed that Bertolucci and 48-year old megastar Brando decided to not tell 19-year old actress Maria Schneider what was going to happen in the infamous rape scene, so they could get "real" shock and tears out of her on camera. The scene was horrible enough to watch already, without knowing that. Brando was one of the originators of "method acting", so he maybe didn't recognised he was crossing a line, in a time long before people were thinking about "duty of care" and intimacy coordinators. Gato Barbieri's saxophone score is wonderful.




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Zabriskie Point (1970)
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Country: United States
Length: 112 minutes
Type: Drama

I think 'Zabriskie Point' was the only film Michelangelo Antonioni made in the USA and was a critically polarising, 60s counter-culture, box-office bomb. It's included in the '1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die' book and other "best ever" lists but is also included in the 1978 book 'The Fifty Worst Films of All Time'. Unfortunately it's not as interesting as that suggests. After a promising, kinetic start, set documentary like, in the radical late 60s student protest scene, with the real Kathleen Cleaver of the Black Panthers debating with students, the second half of the film is set mostly in the desert. Following two unfocused characters, played by people who can't act, with zero chemistry with each other, as they wonder around saying dated "I dig your rap" type dialogue. The soundtrack featuring Pink Floyd and Roy Orbison is great and the super-slow-motion repeated explosion at the end is strange and beautiful. If you cut out the two main characters you might have a decent film but then it'd only be about 30-minutes.

 

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Ordinary People (1980)
Director: Robert Redford
Country: United States
Length: 124 minutes
Type: Drama

You couldn't ask for a better written and acted examination of an ordinary family's internalised pain, varying personality flaws and mental trauma following a couple of tragedies. The problem is Robert Redford chooses to direct this with such matter-of-fact, minimalist, suburban mundanity, that although this approach brings believability and authenticity, it also makes this feel oddly unremarkable and unmemorable. It won the major Oscars that year, beating films like 'Raging Bull' and 'The Elephant Man' but those two films remain popular and acclaimed because they have more to offer than great acting and writing alone. Nevertheless, the performances by the quartet of Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, Judd Hirsch and Timothy Hutton had me glued to the screen.




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Blow-Up (1966)
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Country: United Kingdom / Italy
Length: 111 minutes
Type: Mystery, Thriller

I've been meaning to watch 'Blow-Up' for years. I'd assumed it was a colourful, groovy "swinging London" type thing but it's actually really dark, nasty and focused on death and alienation. David Hemmings plays a misogynistic mod fashion photographer channelling his boredom and self-loathing toward his female models, sick of their "perfection" and sick of how easily he achieves success in his work. Accidentally stumbling into a mystery involving a young Vanessa Redgrave and murder seems to finally give him something to care about again. It's got shades of Alfred Hitchcock's 'Rear Window' from the 50s and in turn clearly influenced people like Dario Argento and Brian De Palma in the 70s and 80s. Allegedly the unresolved, or rather unrevealed, puzzle at the centre of the plot, was partly down to Antonioni going wildly over-budget and then not being able to shoot the scenes needed to explain everything. Antonioni cleverly made Hemmings not knowing, more revealing for his character. It was cool to see The Yardbirds (featuring young Jimmy Page) rocking out in a nightclub scene.

Apparently 'Blow-Up' was a watershed moment for film censorship in America, as it was refused a certificate under the old "Hays Code" permission system, but MGM said "f*ck it" and released it anyway to boxoffice success, so censorship soon switched over to the sort of ranked ratings system still in use today. 'Blow-Up' has a bit of nudity and a scene at a house party where everybody is stoned but it's pretty tame by even the standards of the decade that followed it.

 

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Ordinary People (1980)

You couldn't ask for a better written and acted examination of an ordinary family's internalised pain....It won the major Oscars that year
I watched this for the first time last year, and could not have been more surprised that it was actually worthy of all the awards. It isn't as pretty as Raging Bull, but I found it a lot more moving.
 

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Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
Director: Stephen Frears
Country: United States
Length: 119 minutes
Type: Period, Drama

As the title suggests, this is sexy, devious stuff. Based on a French novel but a lot like an Oscar Wilde play but with the dial turned to "evil". However, it gets forlornly tragic and unexpectedly romantic toward the end. Glenn Close and John Malkovich are having enormous fun playing rivals, competing in the mantipulation and ruination of their fellow human beings. Terrific acting from an all-star cast, even young Keanu Reeves does great work. Director Stephen Frears fills the frame with satin opulence and outrageous pre-revolutionary indulgence. The style of the production feels like an attempt to replicate the success of 'Amadeus' from 4-years earlier and it actually doesn't suffer by comparison. There is a brilliant smashcut from Malkovich who is pretending to be Uma Thurman's "tutor" in sex, where he's kissing his way down her midriff and says "I think we might begin with a few Latin terms"... smashcut to a Catholic priest droning on in Latin :LOL: .

 

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Drugstore Cowboy (1989)
Director: Gus Van Sant
Country: United States
Length: 101 minutes
Type: Crime, Drama

I'm trying to see any redeeming features to a film that is regarded as a classic, has 100% on RT, is on many best-of-all-time lists etc but I'm struggling, it's utter cr*p. Obviously I'm wrong but hey, that's how I feel. I couldn't help comparing 'Drugstore Cowboy', to 'Midnight Cowboy' (because the title invites you too) and to 'Trainspotting' because of the subject. Next to both of those 1969 and 1996 films, 'Drugstore Cowboy' feels so bland and lacking in edge and grit. Matt Dillon is so fake, some kind of pretentious gesture towards acting, a walking Gen-X sigh in a leather jacket. He's too young to play the father-figure character that is written in the script (the real person was 10-years older), plus he's too clean-cut and Hollywood to be believable as a drifter who has been robbing, in and out of jail and shooting hard drugs... "(Sigh) all my life". Bizarrely, the great James Remar is in the cast as the cop character, when he was the correct age to play Dillon's role, he looks right, he sounds right and Remar has had substance abuse problems in real life to draw on, having been fired from 'Aliens' just three years before (and was replaced part way into shooting by Michael Biehn). My engagement somewhat rallied in the last act when the small family of boring young junkies disappear from the film and are replaced by croaky old writer William S. Burroughs, as a drug addict, former Catholic priest, a metaphorical spectre of death, musing on life.

 
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Turkish Delight (1973)
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Country: Netherlands
Length: 108 minutes
Type: Erotic, Romance, Drama

At first I wasn't sure if this early Paul Verhoeven film was going to be a more hardcore 'Confessions of a Window Cleaner', or like a less saucy Tinto Brass movie. As it goes on it becomes much darker, more tragic and artistically interesting and Verhoeven piles on the vulgarity to a point were it ceases to become vulgar and instead takes on a strange unabashed innocence. As we witness horse eyeballs in stews, wriggling maggots on nude bodies, mould growing everywhere, blood, human faeces, endless full-frontal nudity (one of the first shots in the movie is focused on Rutger Hauer's junk), amniotic fluid being licked by dogs and urine raining down in buckets. If a character catches his loved one kissing another, most Directors would show them being angry, or sad, perhaps only Verhoeven would've thought of having them express their inner pain by projectile vomiting into people's faces. Despite all that, the lasting impression of 'Turkish Delight' is that of love, loss and fragile beauty.

The English dubbing and voice-over in this vintage trailer is hilarious "A fascinating film with provocative and shocking scenes we cannot show you in this trailer" :LOL: :


I was a little distracted by the ever present harmonica love-theme sounding near identical to the theme tune to the long-running British soap opera 'Emmerdale Farm' (1972-present):


 
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Jacob's Ladder (1990)
Director: Adrian Lyne
Country: United States
Length: 113 minutes
Type: Psychological, Horror, Drama, War

A rare old movie that I knew literally nothing about beforehand. I didn't know what the subject was, who was in it, or where the story was going, which was very much an advantage, so I'll try not to spoil things here. Tim Robbins plays a Vietnam veteran suffering terrifying PTSD flashbacks, paranoid delusions, nightmares, or visions featuring demons, aliens, or drug induced terrors. It's like the best movie David Cronenberg never made, mixed with 'The Exorcist' and 'Platoon'. 'Jacob's Ladder' is one of the best and most psychologically horrifying movies I've ever seen. Tony Scott's regular cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball gives the film a dark grimy, noirish look as good as early David Fincher. I didn't realise until I read afterwards that all the FX were done in-camera, which only increases my respect for the movie and makes me want to see it again. If I had to criticise, I personally might have ended the film a couple of shots earlier but I don't know, I'd have to think about it some more.

Oooh, a dirty lookin' 35mm trailer:

 

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The Vanishing (1988)
Director: George Sluizer
Country: Netherlands / France
Length: 107 minutes
Type: Psychological, Crime, Drama, Thriller

I loved the way this took what would normally be the plot of a high-concept, "cat and mouse" psychological thriller and did it in an everyday, scarily believable, matter-of-fact way. It's the "banality of evil" thing, beginning with the seemingly random, unexplained kidnapping of a man's wife. Then we flash forward and back between the man becoming obsessed with finding out what happened and following the psycho who did it, as he methodically plans the abduction and mentally tortures the poor man, in-between idyllic scenes with his own family.

I didn't 100% buy the ending. Would Rex really submit to a logically certain fate of either death, torture, or imprisonment (it turns out to be all three) and be happy gifting his and Saskia's tormentor with the final horrible victory he craves, rather than the option to simply call the police, ruin his carefully laid plans and still stand a very good chance of having him arrested, having his life ruined instead and of finding out what happened to Saskia anyway (as it turns out a virtual certainty, given the very obvious location of Saskia's body and Raymond explaining his entire evil plan in detail). It's a minor criticism, as that flaw is needed to create the really chilling ending, which is not recommended viewing for sufferers of claustrophobia.




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Trainspotting (1996)
Director: Danny Boyle
Country: United Kingdom
Length: 93 minutes
Type: Comedy, Drama, Crime

I've watched 'Trainspotting' countless times since 1996 but not for a while, so I was amazed how just about every scene is iconic and filmed in it's own unique way. The film was an instant classic, all the actors were instant stars, the poster was genius, the soundtrack was everywhere, it's near perfect in every way. It seemed like every great British hit film in the mid-90s was made by Channel Four Films ('Four Weddings and a Funeral', 'Shallow Grave', 'The Madness of King George', 'Brassed Off', 'The Full Monty' etc) and they still make a lot of great stuff... until they get privatised. It's astonishing the way Director Danny Boyle is able to simultaneously show a world so grim, grey, violent and realistic but also go to such heights of nightmarish fantasy and black comedy. Many tried to copy him and ended up with painfully 90s Brit-flick cliches but I think Boyle's secret was keeping it timeless, this could've been made in the 80s, or now, with a soundtrack featuring 1970s music from Iggy Pop and Lou Reed, combined with newer electronic music from Underworld and Leftfield (the one link between all the music is the subject of drugs). Choose life, choose to re-watch 'Trainspotting'.


I fondly remember my class listening to PF Project's 'Choose Life' (featuring Ewan McGregor's famous mantra) at max volume on the last day of term in 1997 :) .

 

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Turkish Delight (1973)
Director: Paul Verhoeven
"A fascinating film with provocative and shocking scenes we cannot show you in this trailer" :LOL: :
I've been wondering how far back I should go in my Verhoeven exploration. I appreciate your description, because while you enjoyed it, this sounds like something I would definitely not be able to get into. lol

Jacob's Ladder (1990)
A rare old movie that I knew literally nothing about beforehand.
I'm so jealous! I knew little enough that there were still surprises to be had in this film...Lynne has a deft hand with some misdirects...but this was a long time before we had so many films like Inception or Total Recall or Primer or even Shutter Island, Vanilla Sky, or Oldboy. My young mind was unprepared to have to reconceive my impression of a film when I got to the end. I haven't rewatched in years, so it's good to know that it still hits people even if they're now used to this kind of filmmaking.
 

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this was a long time before we had so many films like Inception or Total Recall or Primer or even Shutter Island, Vanilla Sky, or Oldboy.

(y) Interesting comparisons I hadn't thought of. I see people mentioning Shutter Island a lot these days. It did nothing for me 12-years ago, so maybe I should chalk that one up for a reappraisal.



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Apocalypse Now (1979)
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Country: United States
Length: 147 minutes
Type: War, Epic, Psychological

'Apocalypse Now' is one of my favourite films but I didn't have a good time when I last watched it in "The Final Cut" version. So today I went back to the perfect "Theatrical Cut" again. In that original version, the boat never stops for long enough for it not to always feel like Willard is relentlessly pushing forward on the mission, up the river, down to hell and back in time. I noticed a couple of things on this viewing, one that although Kilgore always came across as mad, the difference between him and Kurtz seemed so slight and two that the night time bridge scene, which the boat crew drift through forms a kind of leaderless "no man's land" between these two extreme Colonels, at the films mid-point. A site equidistant between their two quasi-fiefdoms, where they rule like gods over life and death. I've never understood the way quite a few people and critics have a dislike of voice-overs, derided as something you only put in to explain an incomprehensible film, when in things like 'Apocalypse Now', they are central to what makes it great. A hypnotic stream of terrifying poetry, which creates the sense of it being a dream, or nightmare. The now 11-year old "Collector's Edition" blu-ray transfer was mind blowing at the time but it's showing it's age on a 65" 4K TV. Never mind though, it's still a great looking movie and Walter Murch's 5.1 DTS soundscapes swirl wonderfully round the speakers. It's definitely not one of those movies where you aren't aware of the surround sound effect.

It's wonderful that a movie like 'Apocalypse Now' exists but also kind of sad for a film fan that this was arguably the final peak of cinema, an era never to be repeated, a couple of years before I was born. At one point Francis Ford Coppola has fourteen helicopters flying in formation (8 Bell Hueys and 6 Hughes Loachs) and shows five Northrop F-5 jets dropping napalm on a tree line. No film-maker will be allowed to make something like this again. You can imagine an executive now:

"Let me get this straight. You want triple the budget of the biggest blockbuster of all-time to do an R-Rated trippy hyper-violent war movie, where you're going to go into the actual jungle with an actual army, use no special-effects, cast two of the most unreliable and crazy actors in the business, film for over a year on 35mm, shoot a million feet of film, spend another 2-years editing it and then you expect a mainstream audience to make it a huge box-office hit?!? Get with the program kid, it's 2022, not 1979. Here's a green-screen stage, you've got a month".

This time I got weirdly fixated on AP being similar to 'Blade Runner', in the voice-over version. Both open on a panorama, which is suddenly engulfed in a ball of flame timed with the music, then our main character is dragged out of his grief-hole by mysterious taciturn underlings and taken to the head honcho, to get briefed about an assassination mission, against a poetry spouting super-soldier, who has gone rogue and started slaughtering people. Ceiling fans, copious smoke everywhere, synthesiser music, alcoholism, incessant rain, dancing girls and flying machines abound. Oh and it's got Harrison Ford in it of course. "I've seen horrors you people wouldn't believe". :LOL:



For some reason I've felt the need to review AP twice before, in 2011 and 2019:


 
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Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Director: Alain Resnais
Country: France
Length: 94 minutes
Type: Drama, Romance

Like some of the French New Wave films I've seen, 'Last Year at Marienbad' is clearly massively influential on later works, supplanting conventional rules of narrative film-making, with a dreamlike non-linear approach, based on unreliable memory but I found it patience testing and monotonous after a while. Sound and image are often disconnected on a literal level, instead new connections are created on emotional and tonal levels. It's no doubt a stunning effect, stylish and beautiful, which I initially found extremely compelling but it goes round and round in the vein, saying the same things, for 94-minutes. But thanks Alain Resnais for rewriting the rules of cinema and all that. I don't think a modern viewer could watch this and not see similarities to Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining', in the way the camera glides around the empty corridors of a large strangely designed hotel with geometric gardens, in which statue-like people may, or may not exist, they've just "always been here". Francis Seyrig's ecclesiastical organ score is not a million miles away from the Moog music of Wendy Carlos. The surreal tableau shot with the characters standing in the garden, where only the human figures cast long artificial shadows, is very cool.


Blur very closely recreated 'Last Year at Marienbad' for the video for their 1994 single 'To the End':




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L'Eclisse (1962)
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Country: Italy
Length: 126 minutes
Type: Drama, Romance

Simply watching two jaw-droppingly beautiful and subtly talented actors like Monica Vitti and Alain Delon wonder around Rome and around each other's emotions, in stylish black & white, is almost enough to sustain a 2-hour film, which contains little else. It needed the couple of frenetic scenes at the stock exchange to break things up. There is one sequence that gets uncomfortably racist, which cast a shadow over the film for me. Afterwards, I had to look up what the melancholy ending meant to be sure, as it's a tad unclear.


Call the fire department, this pair are smouldering! :love:

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I see people mentioning Shutter Island a lot these days. It did nothing for me 12-years ago, so maybe I should chalk that one up for a reappraisal.
Shutter Island is for Scorsese what Inside Man is for Lee. Discuss.

'Apocalypse Now' is one of my favourite films
Interesting thoughts on this. I'm not one of these cinephiles who maintains that film peaked in the '70s and it's been mostly downhill since then. That said, AN is such a one-of-a-kind film that it's hard to think of a good comparison in other decades. We'll probably never get another like it.
 
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