What Movie Are You Watching Or Watched Today?

[philipchevron]

Which movie would you recommend to a Goddard newbie?

[sorry]

Which movie would you recommend to a Goddard newbie?

Love Bites (also known as Love Bites: The Reluctant Vampire) is a 1993 comedy film starring 1980s pop star Adam Ant

[Clash Cadillac]

Watched Source Code which was OK however a bit predictable.

Must now put the Rand and Goddard films on the list. Thanks for the reviews guys. I have found this thread to be a great source for my movie viewing pleasure.

[Low D]

Watched 'Touch Of Evil' (1958) last night. I have to say I love this movie, however it has its flaws namely that Charlton Heston is terribly miscast as a mexican detective, thats not to say he didn't do a good job, Just that a mexican actor would have been more appropriate...

Aw c'mon, if he can do an Egyptian Jew, what CAN'T he do?

[philipchevron]

Which movie would you recommend to a Goddard newbie?

Love Bites (also known as Love Bites: The Reluctant Vampire) is a 1993 comedy film starring 1980s pop star Adam Ant

Not Stuart Goddard, Liza Goddard!

[philipchevron]

Doctor Faustus (Richard Burton/Nevill Coghill, 1967)

Effectively a filmed version of a stage production Burton did for the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) the previous year, this picture is usually offered as Exhibit A in the case against Burton being a Hollywood sellout, a function it performs admirably. Not only did Burton agree to star (as Faustus) with the Oxford students who play all the other roles, but he recruited a Mrs Burton - Elizabeth Taylor (as Helen of Troy) for the movie to bolster funding for, interest in and, consequently, money for OUDS, who got all the profits from both theatre and motion picture versions. In the process, it records Burton's only stage appearance for ten years and Taylor, silenty beautiful throughout, despite some horrendous wigs, manages to speak one less word (ie none) than she would later do in the episode of The Simpsons in which she utters Maggie Simpson's first word ("daddy").

The movie is a strange hybrid of Hammer Horror, Swinging Sixties boobathon and Carry On comedy. Almost all the budget appears to have gone on a not especially valuable battle sequence (you can imagine the nervous producers confronting Burton: "not enough action, Dick, get some extras and some weapons") and the scene in the Vatican is not much more than an excuse for some crude fart jokes more appropriate to Mr Mozart than Mr Marlowe. Some of the acting students are very good, most of them astonishingly ordinary (and I can't say I've heard of any of them since) and Taylor always looks adoringly at Burton and gets to show off some flashy rocks on her fingers too.

But, every time Burton speaks, you understand immediately why he was considered the best actor of his generation. His voice unfailingly brings you back into the world of Marlowe's play and every word is spoken to better serve comprehension and meaning. It remains a terrific performance as an actor and an interesting one as a director.

[Mike from Boston]

Jersey Shore MTV

Let's admit it, we all slow down in traffic to look at the wrecks. During channel surfing the other night, caught bits of two episodes (filmed in Italy)

1. Snooki (just look up skank in the dictionary)- gets drunk and dances. She isn't wearing underwear and can't understand why her boyfriend leaves when she starts flashing the crowd and falling down. (I believe the now ex-boyfriend went to Vatican and is considered a candidate for Matyrdom).
2. Mike (I think) - gets drunk and dances. The home Italian crowd I guess has had enough of the future cast of CSI Skin Cancer Victims Unit, and starts chanting "Shame, Shame". Mike, a real faux tough guy, waits until his security is in place and then starts challenging the crowd. (kind of like Sean Avery or Claude Lemieux in Hockey, turtles until the ref gets there and then say you want to fight)

This would all be hilarious except for the fact we have Universities like Rutgers that pay these morons $30k to give a speech (which is tough when you only have a vocabulary of a dozen words). To steal from the Maitre' D in Ferris Bueller "I weep for the future."

[BelfastsLittlesHobo]

Which movie would you recommend to a Goddard newbie?

I would start with 'Le Mepris,' Philip. Like Two or Three Things it has a strong documentarian feel to it and there are strong allusions to the 'film within a film,' with the great auteur Fritz Lang playing himself as he attempts to adapt Homer's Odyssey. The inclusion of Lang and Goddard's overt look at the film industry serves to confuse the film, not in a negative sense but rather to cleverly blur the lines between fiction and reality, this being said Le Mepris is not as structurally fractured as Two Or Three Things I Know About Her, in-fact apart from the thirty-minute husband and wife exchange the film follows a pretty coherent narrative, the various quasi-documentary techniques employed throughout the film grounds it in a fundamentalism that makes it instantly recognizable as Jean-Luc Godard picture, and his finest one at that, in my humble opinion.

Oh and I amost forgot, there is a great sequence featuring Bridget Bardot and her rather ample derrière that couldn't go unmentioned.

[BelfastsLittlesHobo]

Which movie would you recommend to a Goddard newbie?

Love Bites (also known as Love Bites: The Reluctant Vampire) is a 1993 comedy film starring 1980s pop star Adam Ant

Hahahaha

[NewJerseyRich]

Jersey Shore MTV

Let's admit it, we all slow down in traffic to look at the wrecks. During channel surfing the other night, caught bits of two episodes (filmed in Italy)

1. Snooki (just look up skank in the dictionary)- gets drunk and dances. She isn't wearing underwear and can't understand why her boyfriend leaves when she starts flashing the crowd and falling down. (I believe the now ex-boyfriend went to Vatican and is considered a candidate for Matyrdom).
2. Mike (I think) - gets drunk and dances. The home Italian crowd I guess has had enough of the future cast of CSI Skin Cancer Victims Unit, and starts chanting "Shame, Shame". Mike, a real faux tough guy, waits until his security is in place and then starts challenging the crowd. (kind of like Sean Avery or Claude Lemieux in Hockey, turtles until the ref gets there and then say you want to fight)

This would all be hilarious except for the fact we have Universities like Rutgers that pay these morons $30k to give a speech (which is tough when you only have a vocabulary of a dozen words). To steal from the Maitre' D in Ferris Bueller "I weep for the future."

Ahh the embarrassment of the Garden State, perpetrated mainly by NYer's.....btw Rutgers paid the snook $32k for a mid semster appearence to a few hundred kids while Toni Morrison got 30k for a commencement speech. My son attends there. They informed us the funds came out of the pool cash all students pay into "activities fees". Nice to see more money well spent. Opps sorry I went off on a tangent after reading Mike's post.
Watched "The Shining" again as it's Halloween season it seems to be on a loop on the cable movie networks.

[Frances]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=941UvwBvz40&feature=player_embedded

[BelfastsLittlesHobo]

I just watched 'Ma Vie En Rose' (1997). This is a throughly enjoyable film that tackles a sensitive subject from an innocents perspective. It deals with a young boy who is confused about his gender and how his family and community struggle to cope with his behavior. The opening scene gives the viewer a real sense of what Ma Vie En Rose is going to be about. The vibrant colours displayed by the characters tend to be a little misleading in terms of the mood of the movie and may not prepare audiences for some of the darker moments later on. However from the start the director definitely does a good job in giving us a sense of who these characters are, although their motivations and the subject matter is left rather ambiguous until the appearance of the films protagonist, Ludovic.

Ma Vie En Rose belongs to a genre that has struggled to be classified, I suppose it sits somewhere between 'Boys Dont Cry' (1999) and 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch' (2001) -although not quite as harrowing or as camp. Im surprised and glad Hollywood hasnt yet tried to remake it which would be a shame, it's strange how our colonial cousins fear subtitles so much!

Anyway, I give it a solid 8/10

[philipchevron]

Prohibition (Ken Burns/Lynn Novick, PBS 2011)

The voiceover script never actually says so in its 6 hours running time, though it occasionally seems sorely tempted, but this film could not be more timely as a reminder of the unintended consequences of dishonest, mendacious and self-serving legislative reform. The campaign to pass, dodge and subsequently repeal the Volstead Act has an oddly contemporary ring in what it says about the eternal font of bullshit that is American Conservatism. As the series' website nutshells: "......the enshrining of a faith-driven moral code in the Constitution paradoxically caused millions of Americans to rethink their definition of morality. Thugs became celebrities, responsible authority was rendered impotent. Social mores in place for a century were obliterated. Especially among the young, and most especially among young women, liquor consumption rocketed, propelling the rest of the culture with it: skirts shortened. Music heated up. America's Sweetheart morphed into The Vamp. Prohibition turned law-abiding citizens into criminals, made a mockery of the justice system, caused illicit drinking to seem glamorous and fun, encouraged neighborhood gangs to become national crime syndicates, permitted government officials to bend and sometimes even break the law, and fostered cynicism and hypocrisy that corroded the social contract all across the country".

Neatly divided into three episodes whose titles speak for themselves: "A Nation of Drunkards", "A Nation of Scofflaws" and "A Nation of Hypocrites", Burns and Novick manage to fill 6 hours without even getting close to approaching the participation of Big Oil in the 18th Amendment (the Women's Christian Temperance Movement, the special interest lobby group which finally brought enough pressure to bear on Congress to cause the Act to pass in 1919 had, since 1913, been bankrolled by John D. Rockefeller, the Koch Brothers of his day; Henry Ford's Model A had run on alcohol as well as gasoline and a turf war ensued. Burns shirks this.) but it has some entertaining talking head contributions, notably from Pete Hamill, thirty years a recovering drunk but salty as ever ("Virtually every part of the constitution is about expanding human freedom except Prohibition, in which human freedom was being limited. When people cross the line between our essential character as Americans and some other superseding vision of what we should be, then we get in trouble" ).

The third episode follows the route to the Repeal of the Licensing Laws, and is a complete joy.

[tjacks55]

I watched the classic Hitchcock film - Rebecca. I love it but I prefer the book.

[O'Blivion]

As they did with the last archival concert footage unearthed from the Stones' vaults, Ladies & Gentlemen (the document of the '72 tour), this 1978 concert film was released to theaters for one day only. And as was the case with that last film, I walked out buzzing, remembering why I've loved the Stones my whole life.

The difference is that I had seen L&G before. THIS gem, somehow, has remained unseen even by bootlegaholics like myself. My own experience of the '78 tour, at the monolithic JFK stadium in Philly with 90,000 other people, was less than stellar. I've read that the Stones themselves thought that might have been the worst show they ever played. So seeing the same band play the same songs in a small venue with their freakin' pants on fire was quite a revelation.

I had heard the show before - it's the source for Handsome Girls, a must-have bootleg - but SEEING it was a whole 'nother thing. The thing that struck me was that all the Stones had to do to be a "punk" band was change into some vinyl trousers.