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18 hours ago, Raja said:

I enjoyed Heat but I'm not sure I was *that* into it to be honest. And yeah, I'm lucky in that I live in a place where there are a couple of independent cinemas that show all kinds of older stuff, which is pretty neat.

I saw The Matrix there last year and will be catching 2001 soon, which is another classic I haven't seen.

Mine shows an older movie every week, this just hasn't come up yet. Did take family to see Elf two years ago and theater was like 75% full, $5 a person for the older movies. This coming week is Grease  

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I am all caught up with Barry's fourth season. Ready for episode 6 to come out. This show is a true delight in my opinion. It's just incredibly impressive to see the cast switch seamlessly from farcical comedy into profound tragedy in the blink of an eye. The fact that both extremes can be present in the same characters and still make sense is a testament to just how good the acting and the writing are on this show.

I also think it's a visually appealing show. The colour palette might be quite drab, but they have such interesting cinematography that helps to ground the out-there-nature of the characters. I'm sad it's the last season, but if they manage to stick the landing on this one it's one for the history books.

As much as I like Pedro Pascal, chances are pretty good for Barry to be my favourite season of HBO television to air in 2023.

 

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Watched John Boorman's Deliverance for the first time (I had glimpsed bits and pieces before, but never the full thing). The making of is pretty crazy, what with the actors doing their own stunts (like falling over a waterfall) while being uninsured, and of course there is an especially infamous incident in the film, but there's something strangely compelling about its throwing four city slickers from Atlanta into remote backwoods of Georgia, challenged by nature (the fictional Cahulawassee river) and by man (the lawless hillbillies) and ultimately  by their own fallability. I know Roger Ebert gave it a 2.5 stars and thought it failed in delivering a message, but I'm not sure he was right (Siskel, OTOH, gave it 4 stars). 

The sequences on the water are of course a lot of the visual highlight, as Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox, Jon Voight, and Burt Reynolds were of course doing the actual canoeing on the rapids, but if anything I feel like the last twenty minutes or so -- after they reach safety -- is the most interesting, as the weight of what happened presses on them at the same time that they're being questioned about whether their story is true or not, all the while being aware that the town they're in is just a few weeks away from becoming the bottom of a lake when a new dam is completed. 

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13 minutes ago, Ran said:

Watched John Boorman's Deliverance for the first time (I had glimpsed bits and pieces before, but never the full thing). The making of is pretty crazy, what with the actors doing their own stunts (like falling over a waterfall) while being uninsured, and of course there is an especially infamous incident in the film, but there's something strangely compelling about its throwing four city slickers from Atlanta into remote backwoods of Georgia, challenged by nature (the fictional Cahulawassee river) and by man (the lawless hillbillies) and ultimately  by their own fallability. I know Roger Ebert gave it a 2.5 stars and thought it failed in delivering a message, but I'm not sure he was right (Siskel, OTOH, gave it 4 stars). 

The dueling banjos scene is really sweet as it's happening and then the end of it lets you know this is going to take a dark turn. 

Can't believe Boorman made this movie and then followed it up with Zardoz.

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2 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

The dueling banjos scene is really sweet as it's happening and then the end of it lets you know this is going to take a dark turn. 

Yep. Really memorable, and basically changed how "Dueling Banjos" is played, as well. The original version just starts at lighting speed and keeps the same tempo the whole time, none of the slow call-response that builds to the "duel" that's more typical now Here's the original:

2 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Can't believe Boorman made this movie and then followed it up with Zardoz.

Yeah, that was a whiff. 

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6 minutes ago, Ran said:

Yep. Really memorable, and basically changed how "Dueling Banjos" is played, as well. The original version just starts at lighting speed and keeps the same tempo the whole time, none of the slow call-response that builds to the "duel" that's more typical now Here's the original:

 

Interesting, didn't know that. Guess I've just always assumed it's a thing musicians do where they play a note or two, then the other plays it back and adds a bit and then they go until one breaks.

Quote

Yeah, that was a whiff. 

It's comedy gold, but for all the wrong reasons. You also feel like you lost 10 IQ points from seeing it. Just an absolutely terrible film.

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Having never read anything about the case of Candy Montgomery in Wylie TX of 1979-80, or even heard of it, until this HBO series, Love & Death, the fifth episode had a lot of surprises.  The actors are all just pitch perfect, Elizabeth Olsen in particular.  Despite the Tru Crime formulas and so on, it seems to me, anyway, these are not easy roles to perform, particularly since so much of what is happening for us as viewers is nuance after nuance of their body language, their facial expression, their -- often! lack of gesture.  It's eyes and mouths.  I'm really impressed.

Plus it is so much a period piece, along with these new fangled approaches to life's problems such as your church denomination of choice's encounter marriage therapies and Primal Scream therapy -- along with hypnosis.  O my.

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On 5/9/2023 at 1:54 PM, Veltigar said:

Not to mention that most characters who describe her as such have spent like 5 minutes in her company, although I have to admit that at least in

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episode 8 it made some sense in hindsight since David, the community leader was basically grooming her. I disliked it when he first started hyping her up, but after seeing the end of the episode, telling a victim that they are super special and chosen and all that jazz seems rather credible from a sexual predator.

You're right by the way, I did mean palpable. Corrected that in the original post.

I do disagree with your take on TWD however. Admittedly, I dropped out after season 4 or 5 so perhaps it got better afterwards but to me in the seasons I watched, TWD never really broached the subject with any sort of complexity. The performances were almost uniformly terrible, the villains were idiotic and it was rather too focussed on shock value and action instead of giving the world and the characters time to breath and develop.

I also hated the slow ambling zombies. It's ridiculous that they would be a problem, so at least in The Last of Us the fungus has created several types of antagonists.

As I said, I think it is quite a difficult thing to compare a show that's only had one season with a show that had 10 (?11 -I still haven't finished watching it but I am going to do it) seasons. I'm not going to argue that TWD was full of incredible acting performances, but I disagree that they were uniformly terrible. Some of the cast did phone it in but I think you'll find that in most apocalyptic horror shows. The villians were some of the better actors, in fact. I would argue that Negan was a well-rounded character, probably as much as any of the main cast. The Govenor and whatshername (from the Whisperers) were both played by great actors that most TV shows would be happy to have in their cast. Those three were interesting villians and were enjoyable to watch.  

For me, the best thing TWD did was to do a solid job with the main theme of the books - it showed us over and over again that people are fucking awful and no matter how bad things are, there will ALWAYS be some awful people who are ready to take advantage of the suffering of other people. Deep down it was a show that made you hate humanity most of the time.

I have always enjoyed slow zombies. I don't object to fast zombies if done well (28 Days Later) or other variants, like in The Last of Us. The horror is less about the 'monsters' than it is about the people (the real monsters) anyway.

Overall TWD had more filler and weak/annoying storylines than good ones and it went on for way too long. You won't find me arguing about that. But it wasn't all bad. :)

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I always found that TWD was a show that deliberately punished you for ever getting it into your head that it was a good show and worth watching. Every single time there were a string of episodes that you enjoyed, where characters acted in natural ways, or there was some sort of compelling plot, someone somewhere decided that was too much good stuff, and threw in hours of tedium and soul grinding despair to balance things out.

There were points in the show where I genuinely liked it. Half of season one is good, the first episode is great. Second season is a total disaster, after some missteps I think the prison stuff and the governor was actually really good. Season 4, or 5. (I forget) I think was maybe actually my favourite as it just made wandering in a zombie wilderness a thing, rather than boringly sitting in a town and waiting for stuff to happen.

Of course after that it just became so unbearably unpleasant to watch that I gave up. There is nothing that would make me want to finish it. 

The thing is, it felt pretty accurate to the comics in some ways, which also feel like mostly filler and tedium. 

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I just watched the sci-fi thriller Possessor and thought it was really good. An assassin possesses stranger’s  bodies through an agency to do hit jobs and one particular job goes awry. It’s dark and gritty, and has some ultra-violent, bloody scenes with some intriguing world building by Cronenberg. 

Christopher Abbott is great in everything I’ve ever seen him in. He has a certain realistic presence to him, or something. Very underrated. 

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4 hours ago, Ran said:

Rewatched Taxi Driver. One of the all-time great films, with a riveting performance from De Niro, and a remarkably assured performance from a very young Jodie Foster. Cybill Shepherd as Travis's object of desire was a great choice.

Rewatched it a few months ago.  I think what strikes me the most is how understated it is compared to most Scorsese films (tbc in a good way).  Also forgot how much I loved Al Brooks being That Guy.

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Before there was The Wire, there was Homicide: Life on the Street -- a retrospective. 

I watched this (on dvd, which is how I watched The Wire) after viewing the seasons of The Wire.  In several ways it seemed even more impressive, with its smaller budget, its network (NBC) programming structure and all the rest.  The actors and scripts just hit the mark every time, and so often were above and beyond. Prior to viewing both shows, I'd gotten to know Baltimore and the Chesapeake region well.  Homicide included the regional context, in ways The Wire didn't.

Yet, this magnificent television remains unavailable via streaming.

When ‘Homicide’ Hit Its Stride
The influential crime drama debuted 30 years ago. Here, the creators and stars reflect on its legacy and on an early episode that served notice that it was a different sort of cop show.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/11/arts/television/homicide-life-on-the-street.html

Quote

 

.... The series was called “Homicide: Life on the Street,” and it was based on a book by David Simon, then a Baltimore Sun reporter who had spent a year tagging along with the police department’s homicide squad. Post-Super Bowl premiere notwithstanding, “Homicide” was never a ratings success, but it stayed on the air for seven seasons, winning four Emmys and three Peabody Awards. The show was prickly, funny, morally forceful, endlessly discursive and filled with a murderers’ row of actors, including the future stars Andre Braugher (who won an Emmy for his performance as Frank Pembleton), Melissa Leo and Giancarlo Esposito, along with veterans like Ned Beatty, Yaphet Kotto and Richard Belzer, known primarily then as a stand-up comedian.

The show’s fifth episode, “Three Men and Adena,” which first aired in March, was a stark, dramatic example of what made “Homicide” different from other cop shows. (In the DVD release, the episode is sixth.) It takes place almost entirely within the confines of an interrogation room, with the detectives Pembleton and Bayliss (Kyle Secor) attempting to wring a confession out of Risley Tucker (Moses Gunn), an itinerant fruit-and-vegetable man, after the murder of a little girl named Adena Watson. Pembleton and Bayliss prod, provoke and rage, but “Homicide” refuses to grant the audience the resolution they crave. Tucker doesn’t crack. Adena’s case is never solved. (The showrunner, Tom Fontana, won an Emmy for writing the episode)

Thirty years later, Fontana, the executive producers Barry Levinson and Paul Attanasio and the actors Andre Braugher and Kyle Secor reflected on “Three Men and Adena,” in particular, and on the broader legacy of the series and their frustration at its still not being available to stream. These are edited excerpts from conversations with them. ....

 

 

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42 minutes ago, DMC said:

Rewatched it a few months ago.  I think what strikes me the most is how understated it is compared to most Scorsese films (tbc in a good way).  Also forgot how much I loved Al Brooks being That Guy.

I think it's a blend of Scorsese wanting to make something dream-like, and Paul Schrader drawing on his own experience as an insomniac in NYC (lets just say Travis Bickle wasn't the only insomniac watching porn movies in Times Square at 3AM to pass the time.) and just bringing his sensibility to things. It was a very fruitful partnership, as seen with Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ (so-so on Bringing Out the Dead).

 

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36 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Before there was The Wire, there was Homicide: Life on the Street -- a retrospective. 

I watched this (on dvd, which is how I watched The Wire) after viewing the seasons of The Wire.  In several ways it seemed even more impressive, with its smaller budget, its network (NBC) programming structure and all the rest.  The actors and scripts just hit the mark every time, and so often were above and beyond. Prior to viewing both shows, I'd gotten to know Baltimore and the Chesapeake region well.  Homicide included the regional context, in ways The Wire didn't.

Yet, this magnificent television remains unavailable via streaming.

When ‘Homicide’ Hit Its Stride
The influential crime drama debuted 30 years ago. Here, the creators and stars reflect on its legacy and on an early episode that served notice that it was a different sort of cop show.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/11/arts/television/homicide-life-on-the-street.html

 

I do recommend the book if you haven’t read it.

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1 hour ago, WarGalley said:

I do recommend the book if you haven’t read it.

I was living Maryland, going to Baltimore, researching history and the region thereof, reading the Baltimore Sun every morning. . Plus it got reviews in the NYT when it came out, iirc.  Of course I read it. :D

Spoiler

And before that,we met David for reals in real life, via Treme, because we'd also lived in New Orleans and did the book that was the series's bible for history and music. 

 

Edited by Zorral
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