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

mnkykungfu

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^Oh come now, all that about Evil Dead and no mention of the tree rape scene? That's the bit that's truly horrifying for me.

So, I actually saw The Blair Witch at a premiere screening at The Enzian theater in Orlando several weeks before its official release (it was made by Orlando film students who had a relationship with the theater). It was a pretty scary watch at the time because there was no such thing as "found footage films" as a genre, and also because of the moments when the camera is in total darkness, hence the theater audience is as well. The tension became palpable, which I'm sure you don't get watching at home. However, in the few weeks between then and the wide release is when Syfy (then the Sci-Fi Channel) aired a couple fake documentaries about the film which "went viral", prompting US audiences to believe them. Those docs gave no hint that they were just elaborate promotions, so by the time a wider audience saw the film, they were on pins and needles. I didn't understand at first the visceral reaction my friends had to the ending, and had to sort them out that it was, in fact, just a movie.
 

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Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Country: United Kingdom / United States
Length: 116 minutes
Type: War

I hadn't seen this Stanley Kubrick classic in ages.  It's as harrowing and shocking as always but this time I was noticing how darkly satirical and deadpan funny it often is.  Like Lee Ermey's drill instructor proclaiming, without a hint of irony, that murderous lone snipers Lee Harvey Oswald and Charles Whitman are exemplars of what marine training can achieve.  Ermey spends the first 20-minutes or so shouting and swearing constantly at the recruits (but also at us the audience) so loud and with such fury that they probably needed to install the microphones in a different building.  Dehumanisation is the main subject, breaking men down, building them back up and letting them loose and seeing the result.  I think I'd previous just assumed the powerful synthesiser score was also by Wendy Carlos but it's actually by Kubrick's daughter Vivian (under the pseudonym of "Abigail Mead").  I don't think you'd guess this was all shot a few miles from Kubrick's house in England and not in Southeast Asia.  When I probably first saw 'Full Metal Jacket' in the mid-90s, it's status as a masterpiece was already confirmed, so it's surprising to read that prominent reviews in 1987 were initially very mixed.  By the way, I noticed a mistake! At 00.27.45 a marine doing press-ups misses his cue to begin and is just staring at the camera for a second as the shot pans over him and I thought Kubrick was a perfectionist! :D


I was inspired to rewatch 'Full Metal Jacket' after watching this superb "Vietnam in England" mini-making-of essay by youtuber CinemaTyler. Highly recommended:

 

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The Shining (1980)
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Country: United Kingdom / United States
Length: 144 minutes
Type: Horror

I'd seen 'The Shining' several times on home-video in the shorter European cut and thought it was just okay.  Then I saw the longer US cut for the first time at the cinema during the 2012 theatrical re-release (it's debut on European screens) and my opinion totally changed.  The extra 25-minutes fundamentally change the tone, context, and clarity of the piece. It's re-framed as a film about a family terrorised by an abusive, alcoholic father, long before they arrive at the Overlook Hotel.  The prologue shows Wendy's hands shaking as she talks about Jack to a Doctor who is monitoring the traumatised Danny.  The hotel didn't create the madness in Jack, scare Wendy to death, or make Danny catatonic, it just magnified what was already there.  Shelley Duvall's performance is that of a wife always afraid of a husband losing his temper, trying to mollify him.  A woman locked in a bathroom as a man breaks the door down to get at her and his children is something that happens every day in the real world, not just in heightened horror movies about haunted hotels.  The other significant change in the longer cut is the inclusion of title-cards declaring the shifts in time.  Without knowing that between a cut, time has moved forward a month, a week, a day, an hour, or virtually no time at all, the speed of the decline in the family's relationship and the increasing level of Jack's psychosis is unintelligible.  You've no idea if the film takes place across a week, or months.  In the long cut it makes it clear that time slows exponentially as the film progresses, down to playing in almost real-time in the second half.

This time I watched what I assume is the brand new 4K restoration in the cinema and it was the longer cut.  It might be the best looking transfer of an old film I've ever seen.  It's sourced from the original 35mm negative, with Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick's right-hand-man Leon Vitali overseeing the remastering.  Right from the opening helicopter shots the stunning levels of detail are apparent. I could make out fraying fibres on the actor's clothes and that was just in medium shots.  The maze optical shot has now been stabilised and graded to make the joins finally invisible beyond any scrutiny.  The sound mix is also amazing, revealing new subtle touches I hadn't noticed before.  This is up there with my best ever movie theatre experiences.  If/when I get a 4K blu-ray player this will be one of my first purchases.


 

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Through a Glass Darkly (1961)
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Country: Sweden
Length: 91 minutes
Type: Drama

Four members of a family stay on a remote island and confront their psychological problems. Emotionally closed-off novelist David (suffering writers block) is joined by his frustrated son Minus, daughter Karin who has just been released from an asylum and her caring husband Martin. All the actors excel but Harriet Andersson as Karin is totally believable as somebody suffering from a mental disorder.  The isolated windswept terrain adds to the introspective atmosphere.

 

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Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)
Director: Karel Reisz
Country: United Kingdom
Length: 89 minutes
Type: Drama

Another "Kitchen Sink"/"British New Wave" classic from Woodfall Films and Director Karel Reisz. Albert Finney plays a disgruntled young machinist who escapes the monotony of his job by spending the weekends getting drunk, causing trouble and chasing girls. The character's pent-up anger at everything around him pulsates out of the screen through Finney's eyes (No wonder he got the BAFTA that year).


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Shoot the Piano Player (1960)
Director: Francois Truffaut
Country: France
Length: 81 minutes
Type: Crime, Drama

Singer Charles Aznavour plays a once famous concert pianist who following his wife's suicide has retreated to playing in a dive bar.  His solitude is interrupted by the chaotic lives of his criminal brothers and the affections of the bar's waitress.  It's an American style crime Noir, infused with a New Wave detachment, Francois Truffaut's playful style and French wit and introspection.  The two bumbling, verbose hoodlums chasing the brothers were a lot of fun.

 

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Gertrud (1964)
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Country: Denmark
Length: 116 minutes
Type: Drama

Nina Pens Rode plays the titular 'Gertrud', a former opera singer who announces her intention to leave her politician husband and consider the potential of other suitors.  That this was the final film by the great cinema pioneer Carl Theodor Dreyer before he died is the only thing that can explain this being on many "best films ever" lists in my opinion.  It consists of long, sometimes 10-minute takes of two actors staring wistfully off into the middle distance (like they were reading off cue cards), never looking directly at each other, while discussing their lives and longings, sighing and saying "Gertrud" about 150 times.  At points Dreyer has his actors stand up from the couch they're sitting in and walk over to sit in a different couch and that's as action-packed as it gets.  It feels very stagy, restrained and mannered, although well acted in a depressive way.  Not my cup of tea.


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Pi (1998)
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Country: United States
Length: 84 minutes
Type: Drama

Darren Aronofsky employs the same frenetic lo-fi black & white style used in Shinya Tsukamoto's 'Tetsuo: The Iron Man'. Instead of a man locked in his chaotic flat going mad with metal, here it's Sean Gullette's 'Max' being driven crazy by number theory, in an apartment filled with his custom computer "Euclid". He becomes increasingly paranoid, obsessive, unwell and isolated, believing there is a 216 digit number that contains the secrets to life, the stock market and God. The feverish technological underworld portrayal of New York and the driving drum 'n' bass soundtrack seem influential on 'The Matrix'. Budgeted at only $60k, it's a lesson in how little money a film-maker needs if they've got enough style, creativity and ideas. It was shot on grainy 16mm positive (instead of the usual negative) giving it a very distinctive high-contrast "photocopied" look (in a good way).

 

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Independence Day (1996)
Director: Roland Emmerich
Country: United States
Length: 145 minutes
Type: Sci-Fi, Epic, Action

For some reason I was in a "Yay America!" mood last night, so I really fancied a re-watch of this one.  Looking back over the stats, 'Independence Day' was one of the cheaper blockbusters competing in the summer of 1996 but you wouldn't know that from the epic scale, impressive FX, plus the marketing was inescapable and the movie made almost double what most of the others films did (it was the 2nd highest grossing film ever for a time).  It's a bit cheesy, overblown and simplistic and even dumb at times but there's no cynicism to it.  It's not a Michael Bay situation where he's talking down to the audience, it feels like Director Roland Emmerich and Producer Dean Devlin (both the writers) just wanted everybody to have a great time at the movies.  It's triumphantly heroic, wildly cliched, unapologetically sentimental and full of flag-waving, positivity and messages of human unity.  A lot of the characters are massively stereotypical but never in a negative way, they're good, honest people. An aspect I hadn't appreciated before was that the four main characters are all, in some way, flawed failures, men who haven't fulfilled their potential but "Cometh the hour, cometh the man"Jeff Goldblum's David is a computer genius but lacks the ambition to achieve anything with it, something that has cost him his marriage.  Will Smith's Cpt. Hiller dreams of being an astronaut but he kinda knows it's never gonna happen (so he thinks).  Randy Quaid's Russell is a washed up alcoholic pilot who has become a joke and lost the respect of his family. Lastly, Bill Pullman's President Whitmore is introduced as a compromised politician, ridiculed in the press but like the others, when the world needs him, in it's darkest hour, he's the right man, in the right place.  Decisive, yet receptive to advice, the perfect war time commander and ready with a Churchillian speech and like Henry V, actually leads his gravely outnumbered troops into the final battle.  The bit where Russell sacrifices himself, having earned back the respect of his step-son, gets me every time.

David Arnold's magnificent score is an all-time great soundtrack, he really needs to get back to scoring big movies like this.  The practical FX all hold up but some of the then ground-breaking CGI is looking creaky 24-years later, although nothing looks terrible and distracting.  I get as much of a kick out of laughing with the movie on classic one liners like "That's what I call a close encounter" (many delivered by Smith), as I enjoy laughing at it in moments like the posh British pilot saying "'bout bloody time!" and the bit during the President's big speech when a guy in the crowd gives him a salute so fierce it's almost a karate move.  I watched the extended cut, which adds 9-minutes of extra little pieces, nothing that spoils the film but nothing that improves it either.  It's just longer.


The end titles suite is one of the greatest things ever:


I had BBC Radio's official tie-in UK based drama on cassette, imagining a parallel story.  It's done in the style of Orson Welles' 'War of the Worlds' with some real UK broadcasters pretending it was real:

 

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Lolita (1962)
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Country: United Kingdom / United States
Length: 152 minutes
Type: Drama, Comedy

I've seen all of Stanley Kubrick's major films multiple times, except oddly I'd never watched 1962's 'Lolita' even once.  After his big-budget, high-pressure colour epic 'Spartacus', this sees him return to modestly financed auteur black & white.  It was also the first project he filmed in the UK, where he'd stay for the rest of his career, at a distance from interfering Hollywood executives. Unfortunately the nature of this controversial film meant that although he had complete control of production again, he could hardly get anything past 1962 censors.  I'd also argue 'Lolita' is his first film to be promoted with a notably designed, iconic poster, something that the rest of his films would all have.  The tone is an odd mix of comedy and drama, sometimes with James Mason playing it straight on one side of the screen and Peter Sellers being ludicrously camp on the other side. Mason, Sue Lyon and especially Shelley Winters deliver amazing performances but Sellers was very distracting. His zany characters work perfectly in 'Dr. Strangelove' with it's outrageous premise but for this serious and disturbing subject it's jarring. I didn't like the decision to put the final scene at the start, it gives the viewer too much information, which the characters do not have but it's still played like a mystery.



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Winter Light (1963)
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Country: Sweden
Length: 81 minutes
Type: Drama

Gunnar Björnstrand plays the Pastor of a bleak country town, going through an existential crisis, doubting his faith and struggling with the fallout from a love affair. Most of the film is him moping about, or staring off into space looking miserable while a clock ticks away in the background. Before I'd watched a few good Ingmar Bergman films, this is exactly what I feared they'd be like.

 

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Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Country: United States
Length: 101 minutes
Type: Drama

Editing this entire film with a similar intense style and fast rhythmic pace to that of a high-end pop video must have been laborious to do, impressive, unique to watch but occasionally tiring on the eye. The run-down Brighton Beach boardwalk location and damaged characters reminded me of Louis Malle's 'Atlantic City'. The subject is addiction in different forms and across different ages and societal settings.  The young self-obsessed druggie characters played by Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly and Marlon Wayans are okay but I had much more sympathy for and interest in watching Ellen Burstyn's nice old lady suffering paranoid delusions on prescribed amphetamine "slimming pills".  Burstyn's performance is insanely good, I'd have rather spent the whole 2-hours with her.  The sexual stuff involving Connelly, which even heavily censored earned the film an NC-17 rating but which is now totally uncensored on Amazon Prime (and blu-ray etc) is unpleasant and not just for the character in the story, it's uncomfortable, exploitative and questionable to ask an actor to do it in my opinion.  It took me out of the film because I wasn't feeling sympathy for the character but for the actor instead.  I think it would be highly unlikely that director Darren Aronofsky could get away with it in 2020.  The powerful string score by Clint Mansell/Kronos Quartet/David Lang has become so iconic and re-used everywhere.


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Cries and Whispers (1972)
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Country: Sweden
Length: 91 minutes
Type: Period Drama

'Cries and Whispers' ('Viskningar och rop') is contained within a 19th-century mansion, where Agnes is in the last hours/days of dying from cancer, as her two sisters, Maria and Karin and maid Anna watch over her, although the sisters are mostly concerned with their own problems.  The depiction of acute suffering, death and self-harm are hard to watch, especially Harriet Andersson's tortured performance.  The sisters have issues with touching, physically and emotionally, too much, or too little.  The house is all red and the women wear all white, or all black, which makes for some striking visuals.  Ingmar Bergman also repeatedly uses fades in and out of red, to indicate moves back and forward in time, or an emotional crisis.  There's also red hair, red blood, red lips and a revealing red nightgown.  It's all well shot and acted but the deliberate extreme slowness of the pace of editing wasn't to my taste.  It feels like you're staring at characters not talking for whole minutes with the tick of a clock reminding you of how slow time is passing and how much silence there is between them. I get what it represents but it was too much.

 

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I waded through all the extras on Second Sight's new ultimate 'Dawn of the Dead' boxset (it's only my 6th copy of the movie :D )...

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Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Director: George A. Romero
Country: United States
Length: 127 minutes
Type: Drama, Horror, Zombie

Seconds Sight's new 7-disc blu-ray set arrived and I decided to revisit the new transfer of the extended preview "Cannes Cut", or as it used be marketed, "The Director's Cut".  It's how I first saw this film on DVD (being the most prevalent version) back when I naively thought the term "Director's Cut" always meant better, longer and definitive.  I've since seen the actual preferred cut of director George A. Romero several times, which is the shorter "US Theatrical Cut" and it's my favourite too.  I last watched 'Dawn of the Dead' back in March, in the even shorter Dario Argento "Zombi" cut, which is different but inferior.  The "Cannes Cut" is about 12-minutes longer than the "US Theatrical Cut" but none of the extra footage feels obviously missing in the shorter version. The material is mostly lots of nice extra nuggets of dialogue but nothing essential and it does slacken the pace. Plus the unfinished library music augmented score isn't as good as the full Goblin soundtrack. I noticed that some pieces which are used seriously, are the same as used in 1975's 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail' ironically.  The new 4K transfer from the negative looks great and at a glance, looks far superior to earlier flawed HD transfers.

Considering the recent pandemic experience, when panic-buying caused supermarket shelves to be cleared front-to-back when society was still fully functioning, DotD's depiction of the chaos and looting that would take place when the actual end of the world is nigh, looks entirely believable.  The four main actors are so damn good, totally naturalistic, although some of the smaller supporting performances in the opening act are variable.  That and the cheap grey/blue makeup on all but the "hero" zombies, are the only things that prevent this from being a perfect movie.  I can forgive those little flaws because it was a super low-budget film, so corners had to be cut to allow the money to be spent on scale and action.  The zombie makeup might not look great but when there are hundreds of them in frame it really increases the horror.  Also, the zombies still looking recognisably so human, arguably adds something emotional, sad and empathetic that other more realistic, gory and monstrous looking zombies lack.  Tom Savini's up-close makeup, stunts and squibs are fantastic though and really fun.  Romero's inventive documentary style editing gives the film so much energy. I could rewatch 'Dawn of the Dead' anytime.


Document of the Dead (1980)
'Document of the Dead' was originally conceived as a teaching aid about independent production.  This gives it a wonderfully analytical, conversational, serious and dry (in a good way) style very unlike other contemporaneous "behind the scenes" pieces, or retrospective documentaries. It pays particular attention to George A. Romero's filming style, editing, ethos and the logistics of low-budget production. Romero talks openly and expansively, cigarette in hand and clips from 'Martin' and 'Night of the Living Dead' are brought in to enhance the arguments.  Opening with a clip from the Marx Brothers' 'A Night in Casablanca' made me well disposed toward the documentary from the get go.  There have been two extended re-releases of 'Document of the Dead' adding after-the-fact traditional sit down interviews.  They're informative but they dilute the unique fresh style of this original 66-minute film.  It's a shame that the new Second Sight boxset only has 'Document of the Dead' in DVD quality, when an HD transfer of the 16mm has been done.


The Dead Will Walk: The Making of Dawn of the Dead (2004)
This isn't anything like as interesting as the original cut of 'Document of the Dead' presentation wise, it's just your standard talking-heads documentary about 'Dawn of the Dead'.  But the information and anecdotes within are wonderful.  You can really tell what a blast everybody had working on the film and how much they loved Director George A. Romero and wanted to give him their all, not caring about food, sleep, or money.  The discussion of the wrangling with the censors to get it released uncut were the most fascinating.  It ultimately got released without an official rating but with a disclaimer that basically said "this is unrated because of violence, it's not because its a porno" :D .


Zombies and Bikers (2020)
Unlike other making-of documentaries that would seek to get interviews with the principle cast and top crew members, 'Zombies and Bikers' shines the spotlight on the regular people who played key zombies, the bike gangers who appeared in 'Dawn of the Dead' and film crew who were happy to appear as both. Everyone gives the impression of George A. Romero being the kind of lovely guy they'd all go to hell and back for.

Memories of Monroeville (2020)
Tom Savini and a few other members of the 'Dawn of the Dead' crew take us on a tour of the Monroeville mall as it is today.  Fortunately it hasn't changed too much in three decades so you can still recognise the details and locations.  Their anecdotes and continuing comradery convey how much fun they had making the film.

Raising the Dead: The Production Logistics (2020)
Production crew from 'Dawn of the Dead' talk through logistics, lighting design, budgets, makeup etc. If you're into the movie, this is fascinating stuff to hear and informative for people interested in making movies.
 

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Day for Night (1973)
Director: Francois Truffaut
Country: France
Length: 116 minutes
Type: Drama

'Day for Night' was originally called 'La Nuit américaine' ("American Night") in France, which (as a character in the film explains) is apparently the French film-making term for the process (not sure why?).  Francois Truffaut plays himself as a director working on a film-within-a-film called 'Meet Pamela'.  We see little of the actual film's content, with the focus mostly on the behind-the-scenes problems, love lives of the crew and general "controlled chaos" of the production.  It's about all the things that take up a director's time, apart from the actual directing.  Soothing the fragile egos of his stars, cock ups at the processing lab, solving casting issues, restructuring after an actor dies and general "disaster management".  Unlike fellow New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard's 'Contempt', which is a negative and cynical portrayal of film-making, Truffaut's 'Day for Night' is full of empathy and warmth for the crazy folks that work in his business.  14-years into his career and it seems Truffaut was still in love with his art, where as Godard was already jaded after 3-years.  I loved the little dream sequences where his character remembers being a child, at the moment he first became obsessed with film, stealing all the lobby postcards from a 'Citizen Kane' foyer display.  It's impressive the way he shoots the imaginary film with the same thought and artistry as the real film, so crane shots observe crane shots and tracking shots observe tracking shots.  'Day for Night' is a tragi-comic love letter to film-making and makes you wanna be there.  I loved it!


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Black Sunday (1960)
Director: Mario Bava
Country: Italy
Length: 87 minutes
Type: Horror

The Italians doing their own black & white take on the Hammer Horror formula with great success. The opening scene featuring a mask with nails on the inside being hammered into a witch's face (without cutting away) instantly tells you that this is going to go a wee bit further than the Horror films of the 40s and 50s (it was banned in the UK for a few years).


 

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Day for Night is a great film! I think the reason for the french term may have something to do with the time difference (when in France it is day, it is night in America).
 

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Canon Editor said:
Day for Night is a great film! I think the reason for the french term may have something to do with the time difference (when in France it is day, it is night in America).

Ahhh, that would make sense.
 

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Dirty Harry (1971)
Director: Don Siegel
Country: United States
Length: 102 minutes
Type: Action, Thriller

I'd never seen 'Dirty Harry' before but now I can see why it was controversial, he's such a twisted, deranged character.  The famous "Do I feel lucky?" scene is much more than just that quotable line, it's a scary sequence where Callahan casually strolls about executing people as he chomps on a hot dog, enjoying the violence with a disturbing ease, much more than any of the actual criminals in the movie.  The movie can be taken both ways, as a tirade against a permissive liberal society, or a condemnation of right-wing, out-of-control authority.  The viewer can take what they want from it but whatever your response to the contentious politics, it's still a damn fine action thriller.  Plus the San Francisco photography looks gorgeous and the story makes full use of the city's locations.  The "Scorpio" serial killer plot is loosely based on the "Zodiac" reign of terror which was still in the headlines in 1971.

I've seen comparisons between my all-time favourite pop-culture character, future cop Judge Dredd and Harry Callahan. However, Dredd is a moral, incorruptible, by-the-book cop, benevolently serving a fascistic regime, where as Callahan is a corrupted, undisciplined, borderline fascist railing against the laws of a free society which impeed his own personal definition of justice.  Dredd would have Callahan thrown in an iso cube so fast his feet wouldn't touch the ground.



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Come Drink with Me (1966)
Director: King Hu
Country: Hong Kong
Length: 91 minutes
Type: Martial-Arts, Action

The English title 'Come Drink with Me' did not lead me to expect this full-on Genre-defining Kung Fu action film from Director King Hu. From what I can work out, the three word Mandarin title 'Da Zui Xia' is more accurately translated as something like 'Big Drunken Hero'. A girl known as "Golden Swallow" (Cheng Pei-pei) is an impetuous but deadly martial artist who sets out to rescue her helpless brother from an evil bandit gang. Along the way she is aided by an amiable drunken beggar, who actually turns out to be a secret Kung Fu master (It's got a Yoda/Luke vibe). A much older Cheng will be familiar to most people as 'Jade Fox' from 'Crouching Tiger, Hiden Dragon'. 'Come Drink with Me' is an influence on that film stylistically but it also shares one or two basic plot elements.

(I watched with the excellent original Mandarin audio, despite the temptation of the hilariously bad English dub.)

 

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^That scene in the bar where the 3 guys confront her in particular makes this a good candidate for "Influence, Homage, or Theft?" with Crouching Tiger. Then again, Chinese films cannibalize each other so much I'm not sure if it's worth singling out CTHD...
 

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TM2YC said:
73 years ago...

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 The old "Separated by a common language" quip came to mind during my watch :D . I kept having to look things up on Wikipedia because apparently, a trolley is a tram (not a shopping cart), corned-beef is salt-beef (not canned minced-beef) and an exposition is an exhibition (not an explanation).

To be fair, this is all pretty old-fashioned language. Nowadays, you're more likely to hear streetcar instead of trolley, just "expo" (not exposition), and instead of corned-beef: SPAM.  ;)
 

TM2YC

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mnkykungfu said:
^That scene in the bar where the 3 guys confront her in particular makes this a good candidate for "Influence, Homage, or Theft?" with Crouching Tiger. Then again, Chinese films cannibalize each other so much I'm not sure if it's worth singling out CTHD...

I didn't even know CDWM was a martial arts film before I pressed play but when I got to that bar scene you mention, I couldn't not notice the similarity. I haven't rewatched Crouching Tiger in ages. I watched the hell out of it 20-years ago and dragged my whole family along to see it at the cinema (they hated it :D ).
mnkykungfu said:
TM2YC said:
73 years ago...

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The old "Separated by a common language" quip came to mind during my watch :D . I kept having to look things up on Wikipedia because apparently, a trolley is a tram (not a shopping cart), corned-beef is salt-beef (not canned minced-beef) and an exposition is an exhibition (not an explanation).

To be fair, this is all pretty old-fashioned language. Nowadays, you're more likely to hear streetcar instead of trolley, just "expo" (not exposition), and instead of corned-beef: SPAM. ;)

Now I'm more confused ;) . So "corned-beef" (which is actually salt-beef), is now referred to as SPAM, even though SPAM is SPAM (a brandered pork product)?

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mnkykungfu

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I was kind of being facetious on that last one. I don't think people even really eat corned-beef in the US anymore, but if they eat something like that, it's probably SPAM. lol  (And sorry, I'm with your family. I think CTHD was made for film connoisseurs <pinkies out> who would not normally sully themselves with a <wrinkles nose> martial...arts... movie.)
 

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mnkykungfu said:
I'm with your family. I think CTHD was made for film connoisseurs <pinkies out> who would not normally sully themselves with a <wrinkles nose> martial...arts... movie.)

Absolutely but I think it's fine to have some arty films in a genre, like Kubrick's 2001 for sci-fi, or The Shining for horror.  Besides Ang Lee showed respect for the genre by casting it with stars from the genre.

Speaking of arty takes on a genre...

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Hour of the Wolf (1968)
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Country: Sweden
Length: 88 minutes
Type: Drama, Horror

A very small 'h' psychological horror from Ingmar BergmanMax von Sydow and Liv Ullmann play a painter and his wife living on an isolated island plagued by visions and visitations from what may be ghosts, or may be real people.  There is an underlying 'Dracula' and 'The Shining' kinda vibe to proceedings but it's mostly about the subtle terror of having your personal-space invaded, insomnia, paranoia and uncomfortable social situations.  The most intense scene features the already traumatised and taciturn couple being invited to a dinner party with strange people who chatter over them to the point of cacophony.  I don't think it's anywhere near as good, or as weird but if you liked 2019's 'The Lighthouse', this might scratch a similar itch.


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Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)
Director: Werner Herzog
Country: Germany
Length: 107 minutes
Type: Horror

Werner Herzog remade F. W. Murnau's 1922 film as a way to connect the pioneering birth of German silent film, to it's later (and then current) "New German Cinema" re-birth. Herzog eschews romantic lighting and Gothic artificiality, in favour of stark location filming, minimal music, no visFX, pale natural light and nary a smoke machine in sight. When it works, it works beautifully but the pace of the editing is often interminably slow. A youthful looking Bruno Ganz plays a rather grave 'Jonathan Harker', while Klaus Kinski's 'Count Dracula' isn't a powerful, alluring Byronic figure like in some adaptations, he's an awkward lonely man. Another difference from other versions is 'Lucy' being the one who sets out to defeat Dracula, not her incapacitated husband Jonathan, or a sceptical 'Dr Van Helsing'. I thought the ironic surprise ending had a Python-esque quality to it.


 

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The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
Director: Sergio Leone
Country: Italy
Length: 179 minutes
Type: Spaghetti Western, War, Epic

'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' is probably my least favourite of Sergio Leone's Westerns but I still love it and have seen it many times.  His film before, 'For a Few Dollars More' is his perfect action film and his film afterwards, 'Once Upon a Time in the West' is his perfect epic but 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' sits awkwardly between the two modes.  The scale is epic but the story isn't, it's just about three gunslingers tracking down a pot of gold, being constantly interrupted in their search by the vast canvas of madness going on around them during the American Civil War.  It feels like Leone is much more interested in that canvas and less in his characters and the action, comedy and drama they are playing.  There are so many scenes that could be cut and the characters would still get from the start to the end with no effect on the plot.  However, this is one of those "too much of a good thing" type non-issues because it's a great movie and there's three whole hours of it to wallow in.

The verbal and physical sparring between Clint Eastwood's "Bondie" and Eli Wallach's 'Tuco' is endlessly entertaining.  I hadn't considered before that Tuco is arguably the protagonist, rather than the more traditionally heroic "Blondie".  There are whole scenes devoted to introducing Tuco's friends, exploring his backstory, his troubled relationship with his brother and learning what makes him tick.  All we know of the mysterious "Blondie (aka "the man with no name") is that he's witty, deadly and smart.  It's testament to Leone's powers as a visual story teller that he uses no dialogue for the first 11-minutes and still introduces two of his main characters in that time.  The third character of the title's trio, Lee Van Cleef's 'Angel Eyes' arguably gets a bit lost in the story and it's focus on the humorous relationship between "Blondie" and 'Tuco'.  The few big scenes he does have, are plenty strong enough to establish him as a threat, murdering a family, betraying his employer, torturing Tuco and running what appears to be a concentration camp regime.

That 20-minute finale at the cemetery is one of the greatest things in all cinema.  Leone's visuals and editing are in a glorious synergy with Ennio Morricone's operatic score.  Those first few notes of 'The Ecstasy of Gold' begin as Tuco's head hits the gravestone and then it builds in scale, drama and violent beauty toward the movie's blackly comic conclusion.  I never get why more isn't said about this being presented as a prequel to the other two Dollars movies, as "Blondie" slowly loses his badass duster outfit from the beginning scenes and piece-by-piece aquires his poncho and sheepskin outfit from the first movie by the end credits of 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly'.


Somehow the whole movie is on youtube:


Sad Hill Unearthed (2017)
A documentary following the effort by fans to restore the enormous (fictional) cemetery location in Spain where the finale for 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' was shot.  Even pre-restoration it's surprising to see the patterns of the graves still there in aerial shots 50-years later, like the site of an ancient Saxon burial mound at an archaeological dig. The film is also about exploring how deeply a film can connect with people on an almost religious level.  I kept wondering why the doc was annoyingly cutting to rambling thoughts from a guy from Metallica all the time, when they've got expert Sir Christopher Frayling (the man who literally wrote the book on Leone) to hand.  It's only 5-minutes from the end when the film finally thinks to mention that it's because Metallica use the cemetery scene as the intro for all their gigs.  The soundtrack is a decent Ennio Morricone pastiche.


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McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)
Director: Robert Altman
Country: United States
Length: 121 minutes
Type: Western

A revisionist Western from Director Robert Altman, with beautiful hazy Cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond making it look like it really was shot in 1902. This isn't a Western about wide open sunlit vistas, the frontier mining town is cramped, hemmed in by nature, sinking in mud, beaten by rain, or smothered in snow. The deaths aren't noble and meaningful, they're random, callous and forgotten. The people huddle round for any warmth and companionship going, so the characters of the title (Warren Beatty and Julie Christie) setup a saloon, a bathhouse and a brothel. It's a story of small-time American entrepreneurs but like today, a more powerful company wants to muscle them out. Songs from Leonard Cohen's debut LP provide the soundtrack, giving everything the tone of a sad lament.

 
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