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

Masirimso17

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TM2YC said:
50357386687_7e340f6b39.jpg

Wait, did Empire Strikes Back copy the poster of Muppet Movie?  :D
 

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Masirimso17 said:
Wait, did Empire Strikes Back copy the poster of Muppet Movie?  :D

That would be amazing  :D but I think it's probably, this:

71v6a-D8-3L._AC_SY679_.jpg


Then this:

50357386687_7e340f6b39.jpg


Then this:

18018_24x36_star_wars_-_episode_5_4x6.jpg


The text on the Muppets poster "Frankly, Miss Piggy, I don't give a hoot!" is a GwtW reference.

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The Adventure (1960)
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Country: Italy
Length: 143 minutes
Type: Drama

Michelangelo Antonioni's 'The Adventure' ('L'Avventura') begins when Anna goes missing with no explanation, during a yachting trip to islands near Sicily. The rest of the film follows her best friend Claudia and her boyfriend Sandro as they search Sicily looking for Anna and they begin to be attracted to each other. Monica Vitti and Gabriele Ferzetti are superb in the lead roles, the movie is very stylish but it didn't do much for me and it's very long for such a slim plot.

 

Masirimso17

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TM2YC said:
The text on the Muppets poster "Frankly, Miss Piggy, I don't give a hoot!" is a GwtW reference.

Oh yeah! I didn’t notice that quote lol and I haven’t seen that poster of GwtW before, interesting!
 

mnkykungfu

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TM2YC said:
Masirimso17 said:
Wait, did Empire Strikes Back copy the poster of Muppet Movie?  :D

That would be amazing  :D but I think it's probably, this:

71v6a-D8-3L._AC_SY679_.jpg


Then this:

50357386687_7e340f6b39.jpg


Then this:

18018_24x36_star_wars_-_episode_5_4x6.jpg

Oh, sure, and we're just supposed to ignore that GwtW has neither a Taun Taun nor a Skeeter just left of center!? Cherry-picker.  :p
 

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50372467808_e36d2a8288_o.jpg


Faces (1968)

Director: John Cassavetes
Country: United States
Length: 130 minutes
Type: Drama

So far I'm not digging John Cassavetes' mixture of lo-fi sound that rarely matches, purposefully abrupt "bad" edits and improvisational camera style.  That combined with 'Faces' two-hours of abrasive, vulgar, unsympathetic characters drunkenly ranting at each other in a couple of rooms, left me cold.  The performances are totally believable and unvarnished, so you can't fault it there.  I imagine in 1968, an American movie with middle-class, middle-aged characters talking frankly and even crudely about sex in a rough b&w documentary style was very new and very raw. An antidote to safe, polished Hollywood.

 

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50376679751_5fd581fa74_o.jpg


Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Director: George A. Romero
Country: United States
Length: 96 minutes
Type: Zombie, Horror, Drama

It's not often a Director (also co-Writer, Cinematographer, Editor and actor) invents a whole new genre of fiction, one that remains popular 50-years later. There had been movies featuring traditional voodoo hypnotised zombies before (e.g. 1943's 'I Walked with a Zombie') but this was the first "zombie movie" with all the walking-dead, pandemic-apocalypse, flesh-eating, paranoid, nail-the-doors-shut elements that define the genre.  It's a shame that because of a notorious copywriting slip up, George A. Romero didn't profit from it as much as he should have over the decades.

I don't know how much of the interesting reflections of the racial politics of the 1960s was intentional, or simply a by-product of casting African-American actor Duane Jones in the lead, just because he was the most talented actor Romero could find and afford for the part. This was made at the same time "challenging" new films like 'In the Heat of the Night' and 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' were just coming out. Romero has Jones as the cool headed, decisive action lead, issuing orders, slapping hysterical white women, giving beatings to cowardly irrational white men (and later executing them for more cowardice). The haunting power of the ending is obviously intentional, showing our hero killed by a gun-toting "lynch mob", who drag his corpse off with meat hooks while the credits role. After decades of much more violent material in the Zombie genre, the relatively tame scenes in 'Night of the Living Dead' still have a level of disturbing realism to them, due to the stripped-down B&W Documentary shooting style . A couple of the cast are a bit "am-dram", some of the Zombie makeup looks a bit cheap and there are some duff edits and rough audio (even in the lovely new Criterion restoration). The Doctor Who style electronic score is distinctive. The tight 96-minute running time and exponential building of threat and tension make this an easy re-watch every time.

 

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Gangs of New York (2002)
Director: Martin Scorsese
Country: United States / Italy
Length: 167 minutes
Type: Historical, Crime, Drama

I didn't think 'Gangs of New York' totally worked at the time and it still doesn't all add up for me. 2002 strikes again, the worst Bond, the worst Star Trek, the worst Star Wars and quite possibly one of Martin Scorsese's worst films but unlike those other train-wrecks, 'Gangs of New York' is still a quality movie by the standard of most other directors.  There were behind-the-scenes troubles with Producer Harvey Weinstein, dragging production out to 3-years, causing actors to leave, the budget to overrun and a delay to the film's release for over a year, as he demanded cuts, changes, rescoring, reshoots and an explanatory voiceover. At least 20-minutes were cut from a workprint Scorsese showed friends but Weinstein is quoted as saying it was a full hour longer when presented to him (if he can be believed). Scorsese was quoted as saying the Weinstein brothers "took the joy out of filmmaking".  You can feel those production issues in the finished product. There's this odd rushed pop-video editing, disjointed story telling, awkward cross fades in the middle of scenes, stylised digital tinting, a half-hearted love subplot, the unnecessary voiceover and a few pieces of 'Lord of the Rings' offcuts from Howard Shore are mixed with drum'n'bass and traditional music. It all feels overworked. I might be wrong but I personally get the feeling Scorsese intended there to be no score, with all the music supplied by the Folk music hubbub of the Five Points inhabitants. I actively hate the U2 song that plays at the end. There is a lot of gratuitous female nudity for no real reason, which I don't recall seeing in other Scorsese films (extreme violence and swearing but not exploitative nudity?). I wonder if this was at the insistence of the odious Weinstein? On the other hand, violent moments look censored, cutting away to soundFX instead of showing it.

The overall heightened cartoony style detracts from the story because it's about a little known piece of New York history, making it distracting to figure what to belief. Apply this style to the Prohibition era and you'd know where you are but here you're thinking "what? did a woman really have sharpened teeth and claws like a supervillain" but it turns out she did.  Being filmed in Europe, Scorsese relies on a lot of British/Irish actors, to supplement the US cast. Unfortunately although they are playing British/Irish/US characters, it feels like nobody is doing their own accent. Americans failing to do Irish accents and Brits failing to do American accents. The exception is Daniel Day-Lewis who disappears into his "Bill the Butcher" role. Every scene with him in is electric! Leonardo DiCaprio does fine work too but he's overshadowed by Day-Lewis and underserved by the script. The best parts of the film are about the power struggle between their two characters but even that seems to be missing scenes that show DiCaprio's rise to power. I suspect there was a masterpiece somewhere in the footage but Scorsese has so far refused the idea of doing a longer/different cut and no deleted scenes have surfaced. I'd love to see him given the kind of "Snyder Cut" deal and invited to put together a version of 'Gangs of New York' as long, slow and narratively epic as he likes.


A measured character scene like this one with the music being provided by a fiddle player in the back of shot is near perfect, if the whole film was edited and mixed like this it'd be fantastic:


^ Although the mood and classicism of that scene is slightly spoiled at the end by distracting OTT drum sounds being placed over the knife impacts. That kind of scene is jarring when put next to the rock guitars, frenetic editing, speed-ramping and unrealistic sound of this fight scene:

 

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^Great points about Gangs. I'm not a huge Scorsese fanboy in general, but for me this film especially was a hot mess. A lot of very good performances that just get lost in this morass. Your point about nudity is definitely from Weinstein (he'd done similar things during other film productions, like Frida). On the other hand, he was famous/infamous for having a good sense of what audiences responded to and trying to force directors to make those changes. I think Scorsese had a sprawling near-4 hour historical epic in mind like Once Upon a Time in America, and that kind of film usually goes over like death on a general audience. Even look at The Irishman or The Aviator... he keeps telling these historical tales that even his fans admit are overlong. I don't know if there's a cut of this that tells the story it needs to in 2 hours... I suspect Scorsese would benefit from somebody stepping up to the master and telling him before filming "I know this script looks juicy, but it's 20 pages too long. We need to get there more efficiently." But hey, I know Scorsese is God to film geeks, so I'll shut up now.
 

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mnkykungfu said:
I think Scorsese had a sprawling near-4 hour historical epic in mind like Once Upon a Time in America, and that kind of film usually goes over like death on a general audience. Even look at The Irishman or The Aviator... he keeps telling these historical tales that even his fans admit are overlong.

The Irishman is too long but The Aviator was too short for me ;) . Generally I find Scorsese and Schoonmaker's editing to be pretty damned tight and well paced, though perhaps it has gotten looser in the last couple of decades. This one is only 109 minutes...

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The King of Comedy (1983)
Director: Martin Scorsese
Country: United States
Length: 109 minutes
Type: Satire, Drama

This was only the second time I've watched 'The King of Comedy', having considered it one of the lesser Martin Scorsese/Robert De Niro collaborations but it's really gone up in my estimation on the second viewing. I was struck by the real tragedy of Diahnne Abbott's 'Rita' because unlike the other self-deluded, dishonest characters she's awake to her disappointed reality but with just enough hope left to pretend to believe Rupert. You can see a whole lifetime of better times past and the sad, declining years ahead.  Rupert and Masha might be mad but they do seem happy.  The recent 'Joker' has often been compared to 'The King of Comedy' but the sympathy and warmth Scorsese has towards his troubled characters was missing.  For example, Scorsese takes the time to show the lonely home life of Jerry Lewis' TV host but the equivalent person in 'Joker' has no such development (played in that by De Niro).  'Rupert Pupkin' starts off fairly harmlessly, then slowly descends towards genuinely psychotic behaviour but he does it all with such an irrepressible upbeat optimism, that you kinda love him and cheer him to succeed, even though you know you shouldn't.  Judicious editing leaves a lot of room for the viewer to decide for themselves which parts of Pupkin's life to believe. It shows you early on that some of it is definitely self-delusion and then leaves the rest up to you. In today's world which increasingly blurs the line separating the public from celebrities and where anyone has the means to broadcast an actual TV show from their mother's basement, 'The King of Comedy' is an even more relevant satire than when it came out.



 

mnkykungfu

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TM2YC said:
The Irishman is too long but The Aviator was too short for me ;) . Generally I find Scorsese and Schoonmaker's editing to be pretty damned tight and well paced, though perhaps it has gotten looser in the last couple of decades. This one is only 109 minutes...

50383749931_167fa3e5fd_o.jpg

I'm sure it all depends greatly on how much you're enjoying his style. I did like The Aviator, but it also just felt sprawling and somewhat aimless to me. But I'm a Philistine who enjoys Scorsese's more commercial efforts the most. Even King of Comedy's briefer runtime felt draggy to me. Part of it is just that yeah, he loves his @$$#ole characters a lot. I don't. So I have a much lower tolerance for spending time with them. It's weird, as masterful as DeNiro's performances are, I never find anything likable about him in Scorsese's films, so I have no desire to spend more time in those worlds. They're one and done. Compared to DiCaprio, whose guys are flawed but you can root for. I'll rewatch those films. Props to Lewis for playing such a total d-bag here though.
 

mnkykungfu

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TM2YC said:
77 years ago...

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TM2YC said:
78 years ago...

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The cast all deserve Oscars

I saw you watched these back to back... can you believe Stewart got the Oscar for Philadelphia Story instead of Fonda in Grapes? The latter was so far ahead of its time in my opinion, whereas the former film seems like such lightweight filmmaking.  
 
For the political climate of 1940s America, I thought the film was daringly close to sympathizing with Socialist/pro-Union principles.
I read that not only was the FBI and various government agencies harassing Ford and the crew while they were trying to film (so much so that between them and various business interests, they felt they had to lie about the production and film in secrecy), but that many of the cast and crew were hounded afterwards and accused of being communists. JOHN FORD was accused of being a communist! He practically bled conservative capitalism in most respects!
You'd think the US would've learned from the Communist witch-hunts of the '50s, but actors and directors who tell stories about compassion for the average citizen or changing the system are still tarred with the "communist" label today.
 

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^ That is a bit of an odd choice, not least because Cary Grant is better by a whisker in the same film.

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The Pianist (2002)
Director: Roman Polanski
Country: Poland
Length: 150 minutes
Type: Drama, War

'The Pianist' portrays the life of famed Polish classical pianist and holocaust survivor Wladyslaw Szpilman, beginning almost exactly when the first bomb falls on Warsaw, then it's occupation, the gradual creep of anti-Jewish policies, followed by years of hiding and isolation, until Warsaw is finally liberated. It's told exclusively from Wladyslaw's (Adrien Brody) perspective, taking us through the horrific experience with him, we know what he knows and see nothing outside of that. As viewers we can't un-know what fate awaits the characters and to what depths the Nazis are capable of taking them but told in this way we can experience the Szpilman family's inability to imagine how things could possibly get any worse, until it does the next day and so on. The casual randomness of the brutality is so shocking. The first 50-minutes showing the lovely Szpilman family's sad decline is perfect, humane, fiercely dramatic and beautifully acted. The other 90-minutes in which Wladyslaw is alone and often hiding in a single room, unable to talk and make noise is less powerful and engaging. Yes the length successfully conveys his grim isolation but I think the movie would've worked better with more of the former and less of the latter and still achieved the same ends.  The film looks incredible, Director Roman Polanski and Cinematographer Pawel Edelman use a lot of natural light and a varied array of browns, greys and pale blues to evoke the feeling of a bleak, cold past.  I saw it on DVD when it came out but this was the first time seeing it in pin-sharp HD. There are a few early CGI smoke and fire FX that haven't held up but these are very minor quibbles. I watched the last sustained shot of Wladyslaw's hands playing Chopin as the credits role right to the last frame.

 

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Rocky (1976)
Director: John G. Avildsen
Country: United States
Length: 119 minutes
Type: Drama, Sports

I've watched 'Rocky' once or twice ages ago (and sporadically viewed some of the sequels) but this was the first time seeing it up on the big screen and I was totally blown away. Every part is utterly believable, unvarnished and truthfully acted. That Sylvester Stallone's Rocky Balboa is a failed local boxer facing a "David versus Goliath" match with the world champion is actually secondary in importance to his touching wooing of Talia Shire's timid Adrian. Also Rocky facing up to his own demons and resolving fractious relationships with Adrain's slobby brother Paulie and cantankerous boxing trainer Mickey, are dramatic enough to have sustained the film without needing the climactic match against Apollo Creed (a Muhammad Ali proxy).

Like 'Taxi Driver' from the same year, it looks like everybody is living in a cesspool, rubbish dump. NY and Philadelphia were both visibly on skid row with the contents of Rocky's locker.  Every inch of the screen is filled with filth and litter, as characters sit on couches disappearing under the detritus of their lives, wearing clothes covered with suspicious stains and holes, punching carcases in stinking meat-packing warehouses, chain smoking and drinking booze like they're dying of thirst.  Burgess Meredith and Burt Young look to be one beat away from a massive, anger-fuelled heart attack, although that's all makeup and great acting because they've both lived to ripe old ages (Young is still going).  It's as if the whole community and the very city itself has Rocky's stink of failure on it, their destinies tied together, so by facing Apollo and triumphantly climbing back up to the top of the striking architectural steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (built exactly 100 years before the film), Rocky will somehow fix the city too.

Composer Bill Conti's score is subtle and restrained for most of the runtime, in sympathy with Director John G. Avildsen's grounded documentary-like visuals but when the music rises for those iconic moments, he really gets the blood pumping.  After 4-minutes of the music-free final fight, Conti's 'Going The Distance' slowly begins and it's goosebumps time.  'Rocky' was one of the most profitable low-budget films of all time, costing less than a million and taking a quarter billion at the boxoffice (a billion in today's money and about a 22500% return). I hope writer/star Sylvester Stallone got his cut because he deserved it. He wrote with such sympathy and compassion for his flawed characters, even the violent lone-shark has an asthma problem and a soft caring side. 'Rocky' has gone from a film I didn't mind, to a total soul stirring masterpiece.



 

mnkykungfu

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TM2YC said:
^ That is a bit of an odd choice, not least because Cary Grant is better by a whisker in the same film.
Regarding The Philadelphia Story, I read (and totally believe) that this is the first case of Academy voters giving the sympathy vote to an actor because they realized the vote had broken the wrong way the previous year, i.e. Stewart got Best Actor in '41 because he should've won the previous year for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.  Thereupon starting a long-running trend of voting based on extraneous factors instead of the merit of the category that year.
 
The first 50-minutes showing the lovely Szpilman family's sad decline is perfect, humane, fiercely dramatic and beautifully acted. The other 90-minutes in which Wladyslaw is alone and often hiding in a single room, unable to talk and make noise is less powerful and engaging. Yes the length successfully conveys his grim isolation but I think the movie would've worked better with more of the former and less of the latter and still achieved the same ends. 
Totally agree with this comment about The Pianist btw! This was one of the first Oscar films I watched where I was like "That's it?! So just make a long film about a tragedy and they hand you an award?!"
 
TM2YC said:
'Rocky' has gone from a film I didn't mind, to a total soul stirring masterpiece.

Beautiful write-up on Rocky. I feel so bad for people who don't get it. When someone just thinks "oh, yeah, that fun boxing movie", my heart sinks a little. So many people have just caught clips here and there, or seen Rocky IV or III, and don't get that the boxing has always been secondary (and in service of) the character development. The whole series is great...well...um, worthwhile in the middle there... and I legit tear up nearly every time I watch. The first two films especially are stone cold masterpieces that are so much more than the reputation they have with modern audiences. Glad to see it resonated with you this time.
 

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TM2YC said:
The Pianist (2002)
Director: Roman Polanski
Country: Poland
Length: 150 minutes
Type: Drama, War

I just watched this recently, knowing nothing about it except that it had Adrian Brody and it was supposed to be good. I thought it was going to be about a pianist's musical career so I was totally unprepared for what I got instead. I did think it was really well made, but I didn't really enjoy it, partially due to the nature of the subject matter, and partially because I was not in the right head space to watch it. I'll have to give it another viewing when I'm more prepared.
 

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asterixsmeagol said:
TM2YC said:
The Pianist (2002)
Director: Roman Polanski
Country: Poland
Length: 150 minutes
Type: Drama, War

I just watched this recently, knowing nothing about it except that it had Adrian Brody and it was supposed to be good. I thought it was going to be about a pianist's musical career so I was totally unprepared for what I got instead. I did think it was really well made, but I didn't really enjoy it, partially due to the nature of the subject matter, and partially because I was not in the right head space to watch it. I'll have to give it another viewing when I'm more prepared.

Did you think it was 'The Piano' or 'Shine'?  ;)   I cherish those rare times when I can sit down to watch a movie knowing zip about it beforehand.

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Belle de Jour (1967)
Director: Luis Buñuel
Country: France
Length: 101 minutes
Type: Drama

I've first watched 'Belle de Jour' ('Beauty of the Day') way back when I was beginning to get into The Velvet Underground (the lyrics to their song 'Venus in Furs' heavily references the film) and it's one of the few Luis Buñuel films that I actually like (so far). The colour photography looks gorgeous for a start and Catherine Deneuve also looks striking in her Yves St. Laurent couture. She plays an outwardly demure housewife of a successful Parisian Doctor, unable to be intimate with him, she has sadomasochistic waking dreams but finds an outlet secretly "daylighting" in a high-end brothel. Playing characters for and/or being dominated by her clients gives her something that her caring, patient husband seemingly cannot. Pierre Clémenti is visually arresting as a young Freddie Mercury-looking violent gangster-pimp, strutting around with a cane, greasy black hair, metal teeth and long goth leather coat.



 

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Another Deneuvre film...

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Repulsion (1965)
Director: Roman Polanski
Country: United Kingdom
Length: 105 minutes
Type: Horror

Roman Polanski's first English language film is set in "swinging" 60s London and starring the breathtaking Catherine Deneuve, who plays a disturbed girl who is repulsed by sexuality and human interaction in general. When her older sister and boyfriend go on holiday she is left alone in their flat where isolation, paranoia and hallucination set in. An almost entirely artificial soundscape is used to jangle the nerves with repetitive bell sounds, running water, flies buzzing and walls cracking. There are some genuine jump scares, wince inducing violence and disturbing psychological horror. Comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho' are easy due to the stark black & white photography from master Cinematographer Gilbert Taylor ('Star Wars', 'Dr. Strangelove' etc).

 

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50402288746_50fd8a0cee_o.jpg


Clueless (1995)
Director: Amy Heckerling
Country: United States
Length: 97 minutes
Type: Comedy, High-school

Writer/Director Amy Heckerling cleverly transposes Jane Austen's 'Emma' to Beverly Hills, 90210.  Alicia Silverstone brilliantly plays Cher, the wealthy, spoiled teen daughter of a top LA lawyer, with a mansion, a maid and a designer clothes collection so large that it needs a computer system to run it.  Heckerling gives a masterclass in characterisation by making her potentially annoying lead thoroughly lovable, by giving her traits of compassion, selflessness, innocence (rather than ignorance), fallibility and with a nearly irrepressible positive outlook.  Cher is an inveterate match-maker, the joke being that she is wrong about almost every pairing and we the audience know all along who needs to end up with who. It's a very funny, bright, cheerful and uplifting movie.  If I had to criticise, some of the references and humour have dated, the Britpop-era soundtrack is good but sooooo 1995 it hurts and the last act wraps things up a little too quickly. I should've watched this comedy classic much sooner.

 

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TM2YC said:
Clueless (1995)

As a teenager I didn't realize Cher in this film and Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde were subversions of the dumb blonde trope and I didn't give them a chance, even though I did watch and enjoy Clueless when it came out. As an adult I can appreciate the care put into their portrayals and lament the systemic sexist assumptions of my youth. The movies hold up.
 

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^ Good points, I should give 'Legally Blonde' a go too.

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Contempt (1963)
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Country: France / Italy
Length: 101 minutes
Type: Drama

I love movies about movie-making, so I went in to Jean-Luc Godard's 'Contempt' ('Le Mépris') expecting to love it too but I only liked it.  It playfully opens by showing the film you are watching being shot. Fritz Lang plays a lovable old version of himself, a master Director finishing out his career working on a compromised version of 'The Odyssey' for Jack Palance's vulgar US producer 'Jeremy Prokosch'.  He throws money at Michel Piccoli's 'Paul', a French playwright, to re-write Lang's script. Then Prokosch openly pursues Paul's beautiful wife 'Camille' (Brigitte Bardot), which Paul submissively permits. These are the poisoned relationships to which the film's title refers.  The Technicolor images of Italy are stunning, as is the stylish, gliding camera work.  Georges Delerue's ever-present 'Theme De Camille' music is intoxicating and one of those pieces which you realise you've heard many times before but never knew where it was from. It's a wistful film about regret, loss and miscommunication, symbolised by everybody literally speaking different languages.


 
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