The Italian Job
Typical madcap 60's comedy starring Michael Caine. Not great cinema, but thoroughly enjoyable.
Typical madcap 60's comedy starring Michael Caine. Not great cinema, but thoroughly enjoyable.
The Last Movie You Watched?
- Thread starter TravelingMan82
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Just watched this one the other day. Glenn Ford and a very young Shirley Maclaine. Great fun.
My favorite Shirley MacLaine movie is still her first film, Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry. I'm digging through our boxes of dvds looking for our Blu of that one.
I like that one too, but for Miss MacLaine, my favorite is The Apartment.
The Wandering Shadow, a 1920 German silent film. I'm working my way through some shorter silent films, before tackling the 7 hour Blu-ray restoration of La Roue that I received from France this week.
Hannah's Dad
I Can See Better Than Bigfoot.
Mary Poppins — one of Hannah’s favs.
I don't remember The Apartment. My other favorite, that I remember seeing when I was in high school, was Irma la Douce. I'll have to watch TCM for Apartment and Sheepman. In the mid-60s, we had a guy in my dorm down south that we called Sheepman, for reasons I'll leave to your imagination. The guy did bring back some good moonshine and stories after trips home.
Coincidentally we just saw The Apartment last night. I can see why it won so many Academy Awards. Great on many levels. In a general sense it starts light hearted and slowly gets darker and more serious. Shirley MacLaine - I don't believe I have ever seen her in a movie. This one, she was outstanding. Filmed in 1960 one scene had Jack Lemmon refer to, "Computer Machines." They were not yet called, "Computers" in 1960. Great casting throughout, Fred McMurray and more.
The Apartment is one of those movies I enjoy enough to watch almost yearly. My wife and I watched it as a New Year's Day movie this year.
North by Northwest
A classic. One of the most quotable movies of all time IMO. Right up there with Caddyshack and Slapshot. Billy Crystal and Paul Shaffer are both excellent in their small roles.
We watched Parenthood (1989), quite enjoyed this one for an easy watching comedy and it had a pretty start studded 80s comedy cast with Steve Martin, Tom Hulce, Rick Moranis, Martha Plimpton, Joaquin Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, Jason Robards, Mary Steenburgen, and Dianne Wiest.
Finally sat down and watched Tokyo Story (1953). It routinely tops polls as one of the greatest ever made, along with films like Citizen Kane, Vertigo, and The Bicycle Thieves. It is a very simple story about very real people with ingenious, yet simple technique.
The other night my wife and I watched the Blu-ray of Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry on the 65" 4k TV that we splurged on last week. Besides the film being our favorite Hitchcock movie, the colors were gorgeous on the new TV.
Rhody
I'm a Lumberjack.
The new movie release “Soul”
Is fantastic and amazingly great. Want to see it again.
Is fantastic and amazingly great. Want to see it again.
LA ROUE (1923). My wife hid downstairs for two hours this morning while I watched the first of 3 discs of the 7 hour, 2020 French silent Blu-ray restoration of La Roue. Reported to be 9 hours long at its premier, it was cut and cut again for general release. I have the 2008 4.5 hour Flicker Alley dvd restoration, and loved it. I loaned it to a friend years ago who cursed me, saying that while it was the most depressing movie he had ever seen, he couldn't stop watching. The new French restoration looks great and was worth every penny of the $85 it cost me to order from France. While the film has English subtitiles, the bonus features and the 140 page booklet are in French, so I'm out of luck there.
Billy Wilder, the director, was brilliant. His films, at least the ones from about 1944 through to 1966 or so, leave you with a specific flavor, an after-impression in your mind, as it were. Sunset Boulevard is another great one, darker still; Spirit of St. Louis w/ Jimmy Stewart playing Lindbergh; Witness for the Prosecution with Charles Laughton . . . dynamite films. And I have yet to see Stalag 17 and others that he directed, wrote, or both.
A few years ago I had fun writing a Man From U.N.C.L.E. fan story with C.C. "Bud" Baxter and Fran Kubelik, Lemmon and Maclaine's characters, set in 1964 when they are married and have a child. Someone is trying to kill Bud, and U.N.C.L.E. agents Solo and Illya have to keep them alive. I think I managed to capture the way they both spoke while telling a fast-moving adventure:
"Star Trek Beyond." Incomprehensible, as well as a criminal waste of Idris Elba's talent. I felt like I was trapped inside a bad video game with no way out. Visually abusive, and aurally unintelligible, how "Beyond" got released is beyond me.
Last movie was It's a Wonderful World (yes, World, not Life) -- a 1939 screwball comedy/mystery written in part by Ben Hecht of The Front Page fame. James Stewart plays a private detective who has been hired to keep a drunk millionaire out of trouble. The millionaire is accused of murder; he promises Stewart $100 grand (in '39!) if he can prove that the client is innocent. Along the way he meets up with poetess Claudette Colbert. This one is sort of It Happened One Night meets hardboiled crime, more funny really than a mystery, but lots of fun.
I don't think I went to see that one. The second film, the unoriginal "remake" of Wrath of Khan, annoyed me. The casting in Abrams' Treks, I'll admit, has been great; Pine, Quinto, and Urban capture the look of the original Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. But there seems to be no imagination powering these films. Beautiful effects, lens flares on the bridge, but there is nothing like the original's excitement, no "Let's see what's out there!"
Abrams seems to be recycling certain well-worn elements of what made Trek great, while missing the essence . . . as if you were to mount a production of Romeo and Juliet and leave out the poetry in the scenes where the two teenagers meet and fall in love.
