godthedog

i'm not a horror buff, but the scariest movie I've ever seen is 'repulsion'. and show of hands, who all is either majoring in film or planning on majoring in it? (besides me.) more seem to keep coming up, and i can't keep track.

is this going to be your first guitar? if so, just get the cheapest thing you can find that stays in tune. i find it's generally smarter to start cheap & just upgrade as you get better at playing. unless you can get your brother's les paul for less than $500. canadian too, that's gotta be like $400 US.

i'll say 'wizard of oz' is overrated, and with sincerity. i don't really find anything magical or entertaining about it.

actually, the only things 'kane' pounced on that are still being used today are having ceilings in the shot & using wide angle lenses. even when wide angle lenses are used, they're mostly used to make spaces or characters look distorted, not to have everything in focus. when was the last time you saw a hollywood movie that had 3-minute shots with everything on the screen in focus? actually, the trend in hollywood has gone away from the welles/toland style of long takes: the the 40s, the average length of a shot was around 10 seconds, in the 90s it was 4-5 seconds. and even when longer takes are used, they're not used for the compositions-in-depth that welles used, with multiple characters & characters shifting between the foreground & the background; normally, a long take today is usually used for tracking shots where the camera goes from place to place (paul thomas anderson, 'time code', etc). invisible edits didn't start becoming common practice, and except for some film noir examples, nobody in hollywood lit their sets with the big, baroque shadows that were in 'kane'. the movie was innovative, but it wasn't like every movie after 'kane' started looking the same as 'kane'. the only hollywood movie i can think of offhand that looks anything like 'kane' is 'the best years of our lives', & that movie had the same cinematographer that 'kane' had--the look of the film is hardly commonplace. if you pay attention and compare, it still looks totally unlike anything from hollywood since.

from what i've heard, mank was more responsible for the overwriting, just writing heaps and heaps of material with welles having to organize it & pare it down. but there is definitely an element of showboating in the writing for the actors that isn't totally necessary, & that welles may have been responsible for. and i may be shot for this, but i don't think cotten was used quite properly. he's great in it, but there's something about the movie trying to make him too proper & high class that just doesn't sit well with his everyman appeal. his character is written to be a little too articulate and self-aware. i thought cotten was MUCH better in 'the third man'. speaking of which... oh, hell yeah. that's one of my favorite scenes in any movie ever. joe is so boiling in his everyman way, and orson plays it off so cool. i've gone to the library between classes & taken the laserdisc to a video booth, just to watch that scene.

ok, someone explain to me why 'thriller' is more essential than 'off the wall'. and "it sold more" is not an acceptable answer.

i wish people would stop going to these nostalgia marketing movies, so that studios would stop thinking they're a good idea.

i rented some movies, but didn't get around to watching any of them cause i was too busy posting stuff about 'citizen kane' in the movies folder. i am the coolest man alive.

yeah, that relationship does get overlooked a lot, since his story is the one that focuses on his political career, and most just focus on the political career. kane & leland's final meeting is GOLD. i'd give my left nut to write 2 lines and a sound effect that perfectly. i don't know if there is a money relationship in 'kane', but i personally think the most interesting one is with susan...probably because it has so many great dramatic moments. i think jed leland's big speech after kane loses the election drags his segment down a bit, just because it's overblown and kind of embarrassing to watch. i personally think the writing is the best part about 'kane', but i agree that it has the most flaws. there's some parts of it that are just overwritten & don't work on screen. cotten didn't need a monologue about how kane wants the people to love him, one or two lines would've been fine. and dorothy comingore did NOT need to say "oh, i get it. it's not me this is being done to at all. it's you. i can't do this to you? oh yes i can." it draws out the moment for way too long. she could've just said "oh yes i can" and left. hell, a facial expression would've said everything.

my problems with the dick-waving are two: 1) there's always someone with a bigger dick than you. if you're in 3rd grade and telling a kindergartener you can beat him up, your point is moot if there's a 5th grader right behind you waiting to kick your ass. no, i'm not the 5th grader in this analogy, but what's the point in going on & on about how much more educated you are when you don't know one tenth of one percent of anything? someone can turn around and make an example out of you, just as you can make an example of some of the kids here. and when you can be chided for the same thing you're chiding someone else for, it's pointless. 2) it's off-putting. when it's done excessively, we turn into a clone of the puro board. about 'kane': i did a little half-assed review of it once as a tryout column that never really got off the ground. and, though it could use a rewrite, it explains at least why I think it's so great: ...Of course, not everyone thinks it’s the “greatest movie of all time.” Its reputation as the “greatest movie of all time” has garnered the usual backlash, especially from young people. Of all the movies in this “greatest” pantheon (The Godfather, The Rules of the Game, The Bicycle Thief, etc.), Kane is by far the most hated. And it’s easy to see why: in some ways, its appeal just hasn’t aged too well. Modern audiences tend to have a lot of trouble sitting through a movie that, when all is said and done, is just about a bunch of rich white people. On the surface, nothing much happens: the movie’s entirely driven by visual tricks and dialogue (in fact, if there weren’t so many camera tricks, it could very well have been a filmed play). Much of the first half is supposed to be light-hearted and comedic, but writer-director-producer-actor Orson Welles’s attempts at comedy seem flat and forced today. These make the movie seem pretty trite and boring at first. But if one digs past all this, the rewards are incredible. The story in a nutshell is this: newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane dies, and his last word is “rosebud.” A reporter seeks to find out what this word meant by asking the people who knew him best, and he’s left with a handful of conflicting stories of Kane’s life, told from various people’s points of view. This is not the kind of story structure that allows for lots of things to happen, but it’s the perfect format to build themes, motifs and character studies from. Each person’s story of Kane reveals new things about his character, but each story also seems to be describing a slightly different man every time. Some of the stories are flattering, most aren’t. We’re left with a portrait of failed idealism, a man who used and pushed away almost everyone who cared about him. And yet, he can’t just be pigeon-holed as an asshole or a bad guy because he’s so complex and fascinating. His motives are good, and Kane follows the arc of how he lost track of them along the way. (Well...kind of. Whether or not he even had those ideals in the first place is itself debatable, but it only adds to the enjoyment of the experience.) The film begins and ends as a mystery, and becomes a tragedy inbetween. The tragedy and the mystery are what make Kane one of my favorite movies, and they tend to get lost in the fray when critics and other filmmakers speak about it. (This is another thing that makes the movie seem less accessible to the audience: Kane is always praised for its technical virtues and groundbreaking methods, never for the story or the characters.) Scores of books have been written about the techniques Welles and his cinematographer Gregg Toland used: putting ceilings in shots, deep focus photography, overlapping dialogue, long takes, invisible edits, etc. And these are the things that help make the movie so great: it still looks like no other movie ever made, and from a technical standpoint it is a ton of fun to watch. But it is often forgotten that all the bells and whistles are done in aid of the story, and at heart Kane really is a great story. It creates its own universe of sharply drawn characters that think and feel react and ebb and learn and change. Kane himself is one of the most sharply-drawn characters I've seen in a movie, with dozens of contradictory pieces that still somehow add up into a complete person. The viewer's changes in attitude towards him are the key to what makes it all work. He has a whole cluster of emotions, actions and motivations that just can't be sifted through. Scorsese did something very similar with Jake La Motta's character in Raging Bull: an example of a man who threw his own greatness away by his excesses and the way he treated the people who loved him, but someone impossible not to feel sorry for. It almost becomes a kind of pathetic anti-tragedy, and it shouldn't even work dramatically (how am I supposed to care about what this guy does for 2 hours if I don't even know if I like him?), but it works beautifully. When Kane asks Susan in that great, soft Orson Welles voice, "Please don't go," it's impossible to just sit back and hate him (even though he almost drove her to suicide less than a reel ago); the kind of complicated emotional payoff that comes when you react to this is one of the few perfect moments I've seen in movies. There are hundreds of engrossing details in the film (in the acting, the writing, the sets, the lighting…everything) that draw one further into the story, create little eurekas in the heads of the viewer that discovers them for the first time, and combine to give a sense of total awe in anyone who tries to take it all in at once. The little things are so subtle, and there are so many of them coming at once (Welles did have a tendency to bombard the viewer with information, making it almost impossible to easily follow the story), that most of them go right over the first-time viewer’s head. The film seems to be totally chaotic and go in a million different directions at once: now it’s just the story of a newspaper man, now it’s a political epic, now there’s a love story, now there’s just a lot of opera, and how the hell did that fireplace get so big? The subtleties are what hold the entire movie together, and the first time around they’re invariably lost. I can’t think of anyone I know who thought Kane was a great movie after seeing it for the first time (myself included). However, I don’t know anyone who’s taken a second or third look at it and hasn’t thought it was great. One’s enjoyment of the movie relies on one’s ability to pay close attention to the motifs: notice how the little things are repeated (like Kane’s empty promises), changed (like Kane’s relationship to his best friend or his second wife) or contrasted (like Kane’s total lack of journalistic integrity coupled with his ability to sincerely create a “declaration of principles” for his paper). The more one watches, the more one picks up on, and this is easily one of the most re-watchable movies ever made. More likely than not, everyone who watches Kane will constantly be asking himself, “Is this the greatest movie ever made?” throughout the 119 minutes. When I first saw Kane at 14, I thought, “No way in hell.” Now I watch it and think, “Well, why shouldn’t it be?”

amen, brother. i don't even find this movie all that funny, and i never saw what was so "defining" about it.

not a comment about this particular post, but about the discussion in general: since you pulled the "last 5 years" card on mideon, i have to pull the "why are there no non-hollywood studio movies" card. EVERYONE on this board has a limited taste compared the the huge volume of movies that are out there (myself included), and essentially asserting your superiority over him is kind of pointless. you can name 20 great movies he's never heard of, i can name 20 great movies you've never heard of, lethargic can name 20 great movies i've never heard of, corey can name 20 great movies lethargic's never heard of...it goes round and round. this discussion so far has pretty much amounted to a dick-waving of connaisseurship, and it leans towards elitism. back on topic...i saw it "reduxed" about a month ago on bravo, and my opinion on it hasn't changed much: 'apocalypse now'. i can't even muster up the strength to go on about how much i hate it, like i normally do. i'm not a huge fan of 'casablanca' either. 'rashomon' might have been great 50 years ago, but it hasn't aged well, and i wouldn't even put it in kurosawa's top 5, much less an all-time top 10. i'll also jump on the 'titanic' bandwagon: i'll admit that i bought into it when i first saw it in a crowded theater, but in retrospect it didn't deserve half of what it got. and 'chicago' is awesome. best pure showmanship i've seen from a movie in a LONG time (especially in an era where musicals are trying to downplay their "musicality" and be less showy about it).

With all due respect, I must disagree. Jericho was never anything more than just a body to keep the title warm until the glorious return of the WWE messiah HHH. no, i think they had genuine faith in him and sincerely wanted to create a superstar (otherwise, they just would've had austin or rock win & had trips beat either one of THEM at wrestlemania), but they did it in too wishy-washy a way, trying to keep austin strong. they thought he could carry the company without giving him the real credibility to do so.

nothing.

Her acting talents are average. Certainly nowhere near a woman like Salma Heyek. selma can't act her way out of a paper bag. when i watched 'time code', i basically saw her get lost, wither and die right before my eyes. it was horrid.

no.

also: if you decide to be an arty band for whatever reason, i recommend picking some imagery from any bob dylan song at random, & it'll sound like a band name. visions of johanna, sheet metal memory, fifteen jugglers/five believers, flesh colored christs...it's all good.

i almost pissed myself when i read this one. i think "oedipus rex and the motherfuckers" would sound a little better, with a natural meter to it, but...god damn that's funny. the huggable puppies of utter damnation mr. t ate my balls autoerotic asphyxiation baby in a microwave running with scissors

miles davis - 'miles smiles'

"smackdown recap up! feedback it!" says jhawk, but we love only dean

oh, and who could forget 'BIKINI CAR-WASH'~! which admittedly sucked, since it wasn't funny and had no good sex scenes.

i mark for the godard references myself.

Well zacalax was a big fan again: he had a reputation?

i'm in total agreement with pretty much everything choken said. what's the point in going back to the same direction you took 10 years ago? was there something you missed the first time?

velvet underground - "venus in furs"