My poor writing started a Kubrick vs Nichols debate. It just struck me that there are different ways of being a "good director." That's all. I'm not sure one type is better than another, although I respect anyone's preference.

There are craftsmen directors, who can take any story and make it work on screen, and then there are visionary directors, who are obsessed with bringing specific stories to the screen. Nichols was a craftsman in my eyes.

This.

Kubrick and Nichols are totally different directors. In every single way at that. Comparing the two is just plain silly.

It's funny but I watched The Graduate a two weeks back with my film club thing, and every time I've watched it I've loved it more and more. It's pretty much a perfect film for me.

yes. the thing with film is that it's a massive kind of work of art with many sides that requires a lot of collaboration between a lot of people. therefore a director can be many things--work on some things and outsource others.


but he was an actor and theatre person first and foremost, that's the thing. in fact he won a bunch of tony awards. his first film effort (who's afraid of virginia woolf) was literally a filmed play. i think that was his strength-- working with actors-- and comedy.


yes. maybe he was a bit of a duck in the sense of that fable of the duck who can swim, fly and walk but can't swim as well as the penguin, fly as well as the eagle or walk/run as well as the ostrich (i forget exactly how it went). or maybe he was a specialist w/ the actors.


totally. kubrick came into film through photography, nichols from the theatre & radio/tv. thank fuck we have both. then there's terrence malick the philosopher, julian schnabel the painter, leni reifenstahl the nazi, & so on & so forth.


i've seen it a bunch of times and i'd totally sit down and watch it right now.

btw, have you seen "catch 22"? i saw bits and pieces in a tv many years ago and i always meant to get back to it but haven't. anyone?

Nah man, I've not seen it. The only reason I haven't is because I still haven't read the book. I've heard nothing but good things about it if that's any use to you.

I've watched it maybe 5 or 6 times, but not in a few years. Obviously, I must have liked it a lot. It's his most experimental and if he ever was a "visionary," it was in this one.

Actually, I was thinking about getting it this weekend to see if it holds up to my memory of it. Criterion. Nice commentary with Nichols and Steven Soderbergh if I remember right.

I saw Catch-22 not too long ago. I remember really liking it. I loved the novel.

Agree with everything said about there being no set criteria for qualifying as a 'great' director apart from making 'great' films, which are obviously just as impossible to quantify. And yet for all that apparent uncertainty it's interesting that some filmmakers, say, Hitchcock, are near universally acknowledged as great, just as others, say, Michael Bay are considered bad. And then there's those, say Kubrick, who it seems will forever divide people.

This movie was on Belgian TV yesterday evening, and I would highly recommend it to anyone. Except if you're looking for a happy blockbuster movie to watch with the whole family. Because that's not what this is.
Here's the trailer
In fact, I am going to watch it again, because I wasn't really paying much attention during the first half. Oh and it has music of Radiohead in it.
So go watch it!

grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/mike-nichols-obituary/

Latest Hunger Games movies. Definitely leaves you not wanting to wait another year for the actual conclusion.

@h8kurdt & evol -- thanks! i added to netflix

@tunic -- i had never heard of that director-- thanks! i'll check him out

@ suchfriends-- nice read! thanks!

@ tw - what hunger games is that? catching fire? i tried watching that catching fire but changed in 5 minutes (online watching allows for little patience). don't know.

PACIFIC RIM

so idiotic, yet so entertaining! great with pizza & beer ha ha ha. damn! i had forgotten why i put this shit in my queue, and then at the end i realized del toro co-wrote & directed it. awesome!

definitely not a masterpiece but 5/5 if you're looking for something like anime but with live action (and lots & lots of sfx).

hilarious b-movie cast picks up actors from a lot of cable shows: jax & hellboy from sons of anarchy, charlie day from sunny, stringer bell from the wire, the marine dude who bangs the wife from homeland, kaleesi's knight dude from game of thrones, and i'm sure some of you will identify others. ebolgoat probably has a crush on the japanese girl already.

damn ridiculous but awesome. check it out in a big screen with loud speakers and a big pizza ha ha

Mockingjay Part 1.

They split the 3rd book into two movies. Catching Fire is the 2nd movie and the 2nd book.

"To Fight Monsters We Created Monsters"

This film is obviously a complex metaphor about the CIA, loaded with pointed political barbs designed to puncture the complacent masses. This film is a subversive bomb tossed into the status quo. This film IS revolution. I'm surprised you found it so funny. It's the most serious-minded film I've seen since Costa-Gavras's Z. Some films are important; I'd say this one is crucial.

Just kidding. Never saw it. Looks like a winner for the next time I get really high.

I ended up seeing Interstellar on Sunday with my parents. Not bad, but definitely a lot of theoretical physics to understand too.

Ronin.. its possibly the last great De Niro flick

Love "Ronin". Still one of the best car chases ever. I miss Frankenheimer.

Interstellar, a little too much "family dynamics" but the rest was pretty nice

6/10

last Xmen movie - a somewhat convoluted time travel plot and why did they need to put jennifer lawrence in this movie, I'm kind of tired of her.

So the Star Wars Episode trailer is premiering on Friday, but haven't hear if its playing in front of specific movies or just in front of various movies (Hunger Games/Big Hero 6/Interstellar?) seem like the more likely ones, also doesn't seem to be anything special for IMAX like IMAX-exclusive trailer, did Abrams even film any of Star Wars in IMAX?

Abrams has confirmed via twitter that some scenes have been shot for imax after photos were 'leaked' showing imax cameras being used on set.

Wait, there is even MORE Star Wars crap coming?? I swear they ruined a beautiful film legacy with those "prequels" in the 90s/2000s, why could they KEEP ruining it? The first three were brilliant, why not cap it off there? Why milk an already epic brand into the ground? Let X-men and Batman continue to shoot themselves in various body parts, but Star Wars should have quit when they were ahead.. in the motherfucking 1980s yo ;)

Have you been living under a rock or something?!

Simple answer.. yes ;)

Finally saw all of Cloud Atlas and perhaps its because of love great set production and costumes.. I also connected with it deeply. I particularly liked the juxtapositioning of different eras and time periods almost seamlessly.. however I didnt like the romance novel ending, too many movies make romance the center of plot, that "the guy gets the girl" is the happy ending and I thought it totally unnecessary for this particular story.

May the Swiss Army Knife be with you.

Im crawling back under my rock where Star Wars wasn't milked not only to death, but the corpse was fed upon.

shallow grave - what a bunch of dicks! the movie was okay.



coriolanus - cool as fuck! yes yes, shakespeare with modern weapons has been done before and it may be a cliché of college theatres but in this case it works really well i thought



we are the best - 3 swedish girls in the 80s start a punk band. nice movie, at times a little sad, most times hilarious.



transporter 2 - good cartoon. cheesy and absurd but good martial arts, flying cars, and psycho gun-toting chicks in lingerie. one thing i learned from this movie is that if someone is shooting at you just turn away!. better than some stallone movie though because there wasn't any evident plastic surgery and the guy doesn't wax his chest.

I found this a good read and I more or less agreed with it..

http://www.cinelinx.com/movie-stuff/...-prequels.html

When I woke up this early afternoon, Mildred Pierce (1945) was coming on. To be honest, I didn't know a thing about the movie, but wanted to watch some because of the SY song......didn't realize Joan Crawford was in it.

oh, hey, there was a pretty good hbo miniseries of this done a few years ago-- better than the original movie in several ways. todd haynes directed it (there's another SY connection, as he directed some of their videos [eta: disappearer])

so wait, its not a half baked fantasy of Col. Sherman T. Potter's wife Mildred having an affair with Hawkeye?? SHIT.. I probably should have googled it years ago ;)

I don't know. I liked the miniseries but Crawford is so perfect in the original that any attempt to remake it without her would be struggling to compete.She defined tht character, almost like an alter-ego.

i liked the movie a lot too but when i meant better in several ways (not every way) i was thinking for example of the detailed period reconstruction and the muted color of the cinematography and the detailed novel-like narrative and all kinds of attention to detail in the todd haynes version. more naturalistic, less melodramatic (there's that word again).

both definitely have their merits and i wasn't really declaring the new one better than the original-- but to have remade such a classic, i thought the hbo series justified its existence well-- it wasn't a superfluous piece of work and i think it's better tailored to our audiences today. works kinda like "mad men" looks at the 60s but looking at the 30s, whereas the original didn't need to add a sense of historical perspective because the great depression was a recent thing and everything was sort of a given.

but what the hell is chicken and waffles anyway? i've never eaten that stuff in my life (separate yes, together no).

I agree. In turning it into a miniseries they were at least able to concentrate and expand on things the movie couldn't. It's always gonna be difficult when someone's already given such an iconic performance but to Haynes' credit he never even tried to compete on that level. Saying that, while I generally like Kate Winslet I do think she was wrong in that role. Not just cos she wasn't Crawford, it needed someone like ... I dunno ... I was about to say Julianne Moore ... but that'd be me falling into the very trap Haynes did well to avoid, by not trying to find an equivalent to Crawford. Still, Winslet never quite worked for me.

oh i hear that. i sort of have a crush on winslet so i can forgive her pretty much anything ha ha ha (but still i won't watch titanic). still i though she was fantastic in this one if you don't think of crawford. my iconic/imprinted vision of crawford is vienna in "johnny guitar" so she didn't interfere with my imagination in that sense. maybe i saw the series first and that helped? but anyway i love kate winslet--imperfect and adorable. awwww....



just read the wikipedia article and it turns out (i didn't know) the movie had to change from the original novel due to the production code whereas the todd haynes version follows the novel very closely. i find veda's fate in the first movie more satisfying though ha ha ha ha ha.

-----------

anyway, last night watched



la grande illusion - what a movie!!! (don't watch any trailers because old trailers ruin everything. ) i have no words right now to say how good it was, but it was...! the criterion disc did a great transfer.

The Production Code was great. It made directors really work to smuggle their message in, under its radar. That was where Lang was so fantastic


Yeah, brilliant film. Too many great scenes but I love the bit when the POWs spontaneously start to sing La Marseillaise, and when Erich Von Stroheim talks to the French general about their class affinities. Brilliant film by a brilliant filmmaker. Have you seen La regle du jeu?