I am a sucker for movies where everyone dies. I’m not a huge fan of violence or anything, but I like when the hero dies, and everyone else does too. I like the macabre, and I like sad endings so when the hero, plus everyone else dies, I tend to take notice, and usually it ends up as a positive for the film.
I have read that the ending for this film was heavily influenced by the long forgotten 1932 gangster film The Beast of the City. Now I am a huge fan of the film, having watched it recently and being enamored by it, especially the ending. Tragically the film has never been released on either VHS or DVD, and I happened to stumble onto it through my regular search for pre-code films on eMule.
Anyway, I uploaded the ending on youtube from the version I had, so here it is:
To me that’s a fantastic ending, I watched it for the first time without any knowledge or expectations, and was completely shocked to see something so violent, and so macabre take place in a 1932 film. Hell even today films don’t often end like that.
What I love about that ending is how sudden, brief, and completely destructive it is.
This film has everyone die, and die violently, excessively and in slow-motion. Basically the final 15 minutes of the film features our heroes getting wasting in slow motion by a gatling gun. On one hand the absolute slaughter is kind of cool and unexpected. When I watched it, I remember thinking: “I can’t believe how violent this is”.
But in 2008, something seems passe about filming everything in slow-motion. I think slow-mo has gone the way of the Dodo in terms of being a relevant and effective technique. I mean it was done to death over the past 20 or so years, and now it just seems like a joke. Maybe in 1969 it was fresh, but I can’t view it as anything but passe.
It’s the opposite of The Beast of the City in the sense that where Beast contains a sudden jolt of violence designed to shock the viewer, The Wild Bunch revels in the violence, and draws it out as long as possible, in a sense it is a precursor to the Tarantino films which glorify and sensationalize violence.
I can’t deny the influence of The Wild Bunch, because clearly action/crime/western film etc. that has come since has been in some way influenced by the spectacular violence of The Wild Bunch, but I am not sure that’s a good thing.
On filmaffinity.com I gave the film an 8/10. It’s a solid western, that is most noteworthy for the ending. The fact that I disagree with how the ending was shot, doesn’t really diminish my appreciation of the story or the characters.
I took a class one summer called “Film and the Bible”. It was a pretty interesting course even if we watched a lot of garbage. I mean “S1mone“, really? Come on. It was mainly cool because the prof took the approach that the Bible was more a construct of men’s desires and values rather than being divinely inspired. This notion that the Bible was authored, constructed, and compiled by men and not God opens up a lot of room for discussion.
One of the concepts that particularly struck was the idea of primacy, as in the way we perceive the books and chapters of the Bible strongly influenced by where they were placed. As an example take the book of Genesis which is the first book of the Bible, and depicts the creation story among many other things. If that book were placed elsewhere in the Bible rather than the beginning, its renown would be considerably less. Fewer people would know what was in it, or bother reading it. In essence primacy in this context is the idea that we place heightened value on that which comes first.
Now to tie the idea of primacy to “Blade Runner“. My older brother is very fond of this film. He’s a big Rutger Hauer fan, and he’s a devotee of Philip K. Dick, upon whose story this film is based. So naturally he tried to get me to watch this film. But there was a catch: he wanted me to see the theatrical version with the voiceover. This was problematic because that version wasn’t easily available after Ridley Scott came out with his so called Director’s Cut, which removed the voiceover. This version supplanted the original release, and made it difficult to find for rent. I don’t remember how my brother came across the theatrical version on VHS, I think he found it the previously viewed bin at Roger’s Video.
I don’t really remember why my brother liked the voiceover version so much, I just know he insisted it was better, so I went along with him. I would later learn that my brother is the only person in the world who prefers the voiceovers.
Anyway I watched it with him, and while it wasn’t revelatory, I did enjoy it. It’s a good looking film, with an interesting story, and fine performances. Plus Daryl Hannah was pretty ballin’ back in the day. That eye makeup is tight.
I have since seen the director’s cut, I am pretty sure it was in the fabled intro to film class of 2002. It was perfectly ok, but somehow it wasn’t as good as the voiceover version. I don’t know if I could really explain why it wasn’t as good, and even now having seen the film again, I am still certain I like the voiceover version better.
My theory is that the reason I like that version is because it was the one I saw first. It’s that simple. I suppose it could be a bit of a nostalgia thing in that I used to watch a lot of movies with my brother, and because he now lives in a different city, I can’t do that with him. But I think the ultimate reason I like the voiceover version best is a matter of primacy. It was the version I saw first, and thus it is the version I value most.
On filmaffinity.com I gave the film 8/10. I would like the revisit this film, with my discovery of how awesome film-noir is in the past year.
I have a love/hate relationship with Fellini’s work. I love La Dolce Vita, and I hate this film.
The premise for this film is that some idiot girl, played annoying by Fellini’s wife Giulietta Masina, is sold off by her poor family to circus strongman Anthony Quinn. She becomes his partner in his act. Quinn is a total prick who basically abuses her, and she shuts up takes it. That’s your movie.
Masina mugs for the camera the whole movie, making these stupid faces that you want to punch, and she takes so much shit from Quinn, that you wonder why she stays. There was one point where she could have left and went off with an equally annoying performer called “The Fool”. All that guy does is run around like a spaz. His laugh is this completely and utterly irritating high-pitched giggle, and he does it constantly. He is equally punchable.
There’s like 6 scenes of her dancing and playing with children, which get old very quickly. I guess she’s supposed to be gentle, childlike soul or something. I just thought she was retarded.
It’s always a bad sign when the characters that you are supposed to sympathize with annoy the shit out of you. This movie has that in spades. This is in conjunction with the fact that Anthony Quinn’s character is so unsympathetic that you can’t even find solace in him.
This movie is highly punchable.
The poster isn’t bad though.
On filmaffinity.com I gave this film 5/10. I don’t know why it’s even a 5.
I’ve been trying to think of something funny, relevant, acerbic, or insightful to write about this film, and so far I am shooting blanks.
The plot is as follows: an old man, played by Victor Sjöström(who was a bitchin’ silent film director), travels with his daughter-in-law and some hitchhikers to the city to collect an honorary doctorate degree. Along the way he daydreams and is forced to confront how fucked his life is.
I guess that’s a function of being old: you dwell and reflect on the past, and the mistakes and what-went-wrongs especially.
This was the second Bergman film I watched after The Seventh Seal, and it’s a bit more uplifting, but that is as much a product of it not being set in the time of plague. It does probably have the most hopeful resolution of any Bergman film I’ve seen, in that the old man kind of comes to terms with his life, and regains a bit of what he had lost. But it’s still pretty much a bummer.
The poster’s a bummer too.
On filmaffinity.com I gave the film 7/10. Maybe I’ll start digging Bergman in my 60’s when I am filled with painful regret.
This poster is simply glorious, perfectly worthy of this glorious film. Those Germans know their shit.
I have a fascination with the Weimar Republic. Basically post-WWI Berlin was a wonderfully decadent, cultured, sex-crazed, artistic mecca. Then the Nazis had to come in and fuck it up. Jerks. I find the brazen sexuality of that era to be fascinating, simply because very few cultures in history have ever been so open and tolerant of sexuality(of pretty much every kind). Fucking interests me OK.
Anyway this film isn’t really about that, but it is a product of that place and era, so it seemed relevant, and the poster is very reflective of that time.
This film is wonderful. It’s the earliest film I know of that I would consider film-noir. It’s dark, suspenseful, powerful, and compelling. Within 10 minutes I was crying. Peter Lorre gives an incredible all-world performance as a tormented child-molester/killer, I mean by the end I almost felt sorry for him. It’s absolutely fascinating.
Lorre gives this incredible speech at the end where he pleads directly into the camera for mercy. There’s an absolutely insane Nazi propaganda film from 1940 called “The Eternal Jew“, which among other things calls Albert Einstein a pseudo-scientist, Charlie Chaplin a Jew, and compares the migration pattern of rats to those of Jews. They also show this scene as proof that Jews are child molesters. The fact that Lorre is not Jewish, and that the scene is from a fictional movie, doesn’t seem to matter when there is propaganda to be made.
On filmaffinity.com I gave the film a 10/10. It drags a little bit in the middle, but it’s a small complaint.
I believe this is reproduction of the original Japanese poster. It’s a little bit too busy for my liking. And I find the Japanese writing covers too much of it. I think that’s typical of 1950’s Japanese poster art.
Just your average story of ghosts, greed, samurais, and pottery.
It’s also the least melodramatic of the Mizoguchi films I’ve seen.
Melodrama is generally a field I am fond of, but it seems odd to me that Mizoguchi has earned such an elite reputation when most of his films end up as weepies. Usually melodrama is easily dismissed. He is a skilled film-maker, maybe you could say he’s the Japanese Douglas Sirk, making what seems to be formulaic melodramas, with tons going on underneath.
This poster is straight ballin’, which is no shock given how cool pre-WW2 German art looks, and the fact that 1910’s and 1920’s poster art has a certain feel to it that evokes the time very well. Something about the font, I am a big font guy.
Anyway I enjoy the irony of Griffith following up his awesomely racist epic “The Birth of a Nation” with a film titled “Intolerance“. I guess the title isn’t so ironic, but the content is. For those who don’t know Griffith essentially created the American movie with Nation, a film so impressive in scope and polish that in spite of the despicable portrayal of the KKK as babyfaces liberating the South from the oppressive rule of the black folks, it still lives on as one the greatest films ever made.
The backlash against Nation was such that although it did break box-office records, Griffith felt compelled to film a response that would shut up the critics who accused him of racism. This is Intolerance.
The film intercuts 4 stories throughout the ages to promote tolerance. You have religious strife in Babylon, the crucifixion of Jesus, religious strife during the French Renaissance, and moral and economic strife in contemporary America. Interestingly enough none of these stories involve black folk, or deal with race in any way at all. Griffith seems to be promoting a tolerance of ideas and religion, but not race. I’m not sure what to make of that.
The scope of the film is fantastic, Griffith built massive sets and used a literal cast of thousands, and the use of intercutting of 4 different stories from 4 different eras is well done and demonstrates Griffith’s mastery as a filmmaker. The dude was innovative if nothing else.
But something rings hollow about the film. At best it comes off as apologist for the ideologies of Nation, and at worst it feels disingenuous. For sheer spectacle it works fabulously, but as a statement on mankind it fails miserably.
Tarkovsky’s movies makes Antonioni’s movies seem like “Crank“. In other words, Tarkovsky likes to take his time.
This is one of those films I was absolutely dreading. It’s 3 hours long, and Tarkovsky’s reputation preceded him. But as is usually the case when I am absolutely dreading a film, it actually ended up quite good.
I don’t really know how to explain the film, structurally it’s completely linear divided up in to 7 parts. It’s designed as an autobiography of Andrei Rublev, a 14th century Russian artist, although it’s not really accurate(at least according to the wikipedia page). But Rublev isn’t really the focus of the movie, it’s more like he is there in order for Tarkovsky to have a reason to show the turmoil of 14th century Russia(at least according to wikipedia).
The film does a great job of creating and evoking the middle ages (or at least how I imagine them). It just looks primitive.
And I just purchased the Criterion DVD on Ebay as I type this. God bless cheap buy it now listings.
The poster is pretty solid too, I don’t know if it’s the original theatrical one, but Rublev looks ‘hood in it, so I am down.
On filmaffinity.com I gave the film 8/10. I think it could go higher with a rewatching, as with any 3 hour film there is a lot going on.
Somehow I managed to avoid this film until this past year. I think everybody has their one or two Christmas movies that they watch every year. I know “It’s A Wonderful Life” is the staple one for many people, my brother used to watch “Scrooge” on Christmas Eve, there’s also stuff like “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer“, or “The Charlie Brown Christmas“. I was always a fan of “Mickey’s Christmas Carol“, but I haven’t seen it in years. But the one movie I have to watch it “The Christmas Story“. Every year I watch it, I know it incredibly well, but I adore it. From Flick getting his tongue stuck to a pole, to the stupid leg lamp, to “I like Santa” kid, to Scott Farkus, to the Bumpus hounds, it’s just filled with tremendous stuff.
So about this movie…I watched it while drinking alot of wine on Thanksgiving…Canadian Thanksgiving. There were some curse words, but curse words generally mean I enjoyed the movie.
What I liked about the movie was that George Bailey was the kind of everyman you can get behind, he’s decent, charming, charismatic and most of all sympathetic. You identify with him wholly, and even when he is being taken advantage of you sympathize rather than think he’s a moron. Sometimes that happens where the supposed hero is either a retard or a dick and it ruins everything, but in this film, there is the right amount of awareness on Jimmy Stewart’s part that you get hooked.
I will admit that I got mad at this movie, I was swearing alot, first when Uncle Billy misplaces the money because he’s a fucking old idiot. When George is all getting pissed at him, I totally thought a good old fashioned curbstomping was in order, but it doesn’t happen. The rest of the cast even shames George, which is kind of disappointing, because Uncle Billy is the one who fucked up, and should suffer some punishment rather than getting absolved. Ignorance is not an excuse.
Then the fact that evil fucking Mr. Potter doesn’t give back the money or get punished in anyway, that makes me mad too. There’s not denying what a total douchebag Mr. Potter is, and then he doesn’t get what’s coming to him? Not cool man.
But other than that the movie is a lot of fun, and I look forward to watching it in the holiday context.
On filmaffinity.com I gave the film a 9/10 because it’s fun, uplifting and eminantly rewatchable.
