I think Cassavetes's is a general influence on Scorsese, like he's in his DNA. I don't see much of it in Goodfellas - far less than say Mean Streets - but it is there, almost by default. Altman does make sense though, in a way that I don't think I'd ever think of him in relation to any Scorsese film prior to Goodfellas.

And Oceans 11 yeah, the more I think about it. Yeah I'll buy that. If Altman had directed Oceans 11 with a cast picked by Cassavetes it might not've been too far removed from Goodfellas.

Good one
===



Good call on After Hours. Also not challenging Raging Bull but another 80s one that gets too easily overlooked is The Colo(u)r of Money. A great film, although a lot will depend on how people deal with Tom Cruise in it - essentially a flash little cunt playing a flash little cunt.

Also, from the 90s, Bringing Out the Dead is a great little nod back to the pre-Goodfellas era. It doesn't completely come off but I really like it. Taxi Driver is the obvious reference point but something about it also reminds me a bit of After Hours.

Fuck that guy's made some great films!

Really has. And if I was to pick any director to sit and chat with it'd be him. Man, that guy knows his beans about film.

you didn't like the Departed because it sucks ass, that's why.

70s: Taxi Driver ... love me some Mean Streets, but... fucking Taxi Driver.
80s: Raging Bull
90s: GoodFellas
2000s: The Departed
2010s: I'm torn here between Wolf of Wall Street (which really is fantastic), and HUGO. HUGO is a very atypical Scorsese film, so it's not a great representation of his work, but goddammit... it's BEAUTIFUL, and epic and charming and very sweet. I didn't think it would work out for him, but it proves (along with Kundun, King of Comedy, etc.) that there is very little he can't do when he puts his mind to it.

Fuck it. I'm going to say HUGO. :)

alright I watched goodfellas for the first time like 20 minutes ago. Can words describe how good it was?? Holy shit. This one was definitely better than Taxi Driver, that's something that I'm completely sure about. More characters, better story and more satisfying. Looks like now I'm obligated to watch Raging Bull. Will watch tomorrow. Man what a good film holy shit..

holy shit indeed

remember today cuz it will never be the same ha ha ha

raging bull is very good too, but "heavy"

you might feel morose afterwards, so time it right

maybe don't watch it so soon. let goodfellas sink in

Agreed. Raging Bull is fantastic, but left a bit of a shadow over me.

Good Fellas ends with Sid Vicous snarling "My Way." Raging Bull ends with... well.. you'll see. But maybe let "My Way" ring in your soul for a bit before moving on.

FINALLY hunkering down to watch this ...



15 minutes in and I'm hooked.

it cant be true cuz you actually stopped to post here

but ok, if we're your imaginary friends then yes, turning sideways and saying holy fuck i'm hooked is perfectly hell yeah

--

post us more when it's over. no spoilers though!

I had to pause it actually. Girlfriend's out of town and called.

Anyway...


HOLY FUCKING GOD THIS IS THE BEST MOVIE I'VE SEEN IN AGES.

This really needs to win Best Picture. I don't even need to see the other films, but I will eventually.

Not sure about acting awards, but this should be a LOCK for BP... it's politically and socially relevant (most people probably missed that... the ones who were disappointed that it wasn't more Alien-y), and also emotionally gripping in more ways than I can list.

This is the real deal. 10/10.

There once was a move called Contact. It need not exist anymore. Much later there was a brilliant movie called Interstellar... and... well... I should watch that one again before I comment, but... ARRIVAL seems to perfect that a bit.

The score is EXCELLENT. Buying it now.

MUST WATCH. You guys... I cried.

See why the score was in my top albums of last year? Brilliant movie. I've watched it twice nice and it holds up just as much on second viewing.

There was a dearth for years of really good sci Fi films. However, since a little bit after district 9 I reckon there's been at least one really decent sci Fi film out every year since.

think I will follow your advice and just watch T2 today haha

I'm not a big fan of sci-fi, but ARRIVAL is clearly at the top of the heap.

That said, the beginning's slow--do we really need to spend a minute watching her pull into her drive, park, get out and walk to the house?--and the movie goes on a few more minutes than it needs to, well after we "got it." But 97% of the flick is flawless.

Although her nose did pull me out of the film a few times.

It should win best adapted screenplay, although Moonlight probably will.

Oh hey. That's tomorrow.


Best Picture: Moonlight
Actor: Casey
Actress: Not sure. Haven't seen two or three of those.
Supporting actor: Dude from Moonlight
Supporting actress: Viola Davis
Adapted screenplay: Moonlight. Fences would be a nice upset though.
Original screenplay: I dunno. LaLa or Machester. Or The Lobster might be a surprise.

(Lots of black people will win. Too many innocent blacks got shot by cops last year, so it's the least we can do.)

The technical stuff...why bother? Everything looks and sounds great anymore.

I need to see Moonlight stat! I know the dude you're talking about who's up for best supporting (he was in House of Cards) and he is a hell of an actor.

Re: ARRIVAL stuff

About the beginning, I really think it was expertly paced. Very little "wasted" time. It would never have occurred to me to gripe about watching her go about little mundane day-to-day things. But I guess if it was an issue for you, it's probably an issue for some other folks.

About the end, I really think you're taking the "we-get-it-ness" (ouch... that was a rough one, but I'm in a hurry) of the climax for granted. Not everyone "got" it... right away or at all. Type in "Arrival" in Google and "Arrival explanation" and "Arrival ending" will pop up as frequent searches.

A lot of people are... hmm... I want to say dumb, because that is absolutely the case, but I also don't want to be mean (I realize I just said it anyway, so no need to point that out), so let's just say impatient and/or distracted. The movie's "a-ha" moment was kind of bubbling under the surface with me from about 30 minutes in, but it still made my mouth drop when I realized the extent of what was happening.

I cried, like I said. Cried like a little baby. Not just at the heart-rending personal story, but at the larger commentary on humanity, fear, nationalism. I think it's a relevant enough film that it could take Best Picture and still be meaningful. Black folks need to win acting awards, for real, but I think this film could be part of Oscar's overhaul of conscience.

Re: Sci-fi ...
I think h8kurdt is right thathere have been some genuinely good, truly high-quality SF films over the last several years. Not to beat a dead horse, but I truly think Christopher Nolan is partly to thank for this. Yeah, District 9, but before that there was Dark Knight, and The Prestige. Inception happened that same year (think that may have been the first time two SF-adjacent films were nominated for Best Picture at the same time), and then there have been some real gems at the not-quite-Hollywood levels (Primer, Under the Skin) that could have/should have received some attention from Oscar and company.

I'm an SF advocate. I'm a very literary person, and it upsets me to see SF cast aside by the academic literati. Some of the most powerful and most well-written books I've ever read have been SF. Same goes for movies. Sci-fi is done wrong a lot, but so are all other genres. When it's done right, in film perhaps even more so than in lit, it fucking really shines. It's high time Oscar caught on to this. Literary science fiction can tell us just as much about life, be just as profound and relevant, as anything else. It tells us what people think about the future, which helps us understand how they feels about the present and the past. De-segregate the arts! Let SF in, god damn you all!

I'm also a massive freakin nerdo, so there's that too.

ARRIVAL

im in between two halfs of a futbol game so just quickly to say i don't think science fiction is any longer some sort of pariah of the narrative arts and hasn't been for a very long time

are there some probably older people who just don't get it? sure. but for the rest of us i think science fiction is often the best way to understand the heavily technological world in which we live, to the point that "science" fiction and just fiction are becoming indistinguishable. e.g, delillo.

don't know about other arts but this desegregation already happened in academia, a long time ago, at least since the publication of "technoculture" back some time in the 90s when the professors publicly and massively acknowledged the importance of the formerly pulpy genre, but since way before then there were people like darko suvin taking a serious look at science fiction

---

eta (because now you got me going) things like nuclear war have always been almost exclusively dealt through science fiction-- ever since h.g. wells coined the term "atomic bomb". i think even after hiroshima and nagasaki, which actually happened, the thing was so incomprehensible that instead of looking at it as history we kept grappling with it as science fiction.

nuclear war was the biggest most important question facing humanity in the XX century (don't know why it's not still, maybe we got used to it not happening yet) and i don't believe that the fictions that attempted to deal with it were somehow unserious, even though they were often extremely funny (e.g. strangelove)

btw, speaking of nuclear war, and the neutron bomb, just rewatched repo man this past weekend and it keeps getting better and funnier with every rewatch. why??

--

eta, again

so the games are over and i think science fiction became mainstream in academia through the rise of cultural studies in the... 80s? one of the few good things about this plague, actually, as well as putting film and literature in the same plane-- though literary people tend to do film poorly, as purely subject matter analysis.

anyway i'm fucking rambling now ha ha ha. your turn.

Ok, well, I concede that culturally, SF is far from the fringes. If anything, it's right smack dab in the center of a lot of social and cultural conversations.

However... SF films represent some of the greatest achievements in cinema, but the closest one has ever come to winning best picture is Return of the King (only SF in the Barnes & Noble category sense, if that... also, not a great film by any stretch of the imagination).

The lines are definitely less present in literature. It's true, you can find plenty of SF in the fiction section. But in my own experiences in academia, even in a field of study that is perhaps more closely linked to the stuff of SF than any other (neuroscience), I can honestly say that the genre was still considered something of an academic curiosity at best even as recently as I was in college and grad school (early 00s). The psychology club would show movies like Blade Runner and Clockwork Orange and as a big topic of conversation in social and personality classes, and I had a cognition and perception prof who name-dropped William Gibson, but still the genre was by no means broadly integrated.

My harder-nosed, old school profs would actually kind of sneer at SF in media. "That's not how it works," and the like. "If you're here because you like the Matrix, you should probably go elsewhere." That kind of stuff.

Anyway, I do feel silly for implying that SF segregated out of arts discussions, because it's not really true at all. But still, 2001: A Space Odyssey wasn't nominated for best picture. Some musical won. Recently, Ex-Machina was compelling and smart as all hell, but it didn't get that kind of attention. Great SF books are usually lucky to get a HUGO nomination, along with a bunch of shitty SF books that cater to cross-media franchises.

Gene Wolfe wrote a great essay about this in the late '70s or early '80s, addressing the need to NOT exclude SF from writing and lit courses in academia. Yeah, a lot has changed, but still... we ain't there yet.

Dennis Villeneuve is an extremely talented director, but now he's doing Blade Runner 2 and being courted for a Batman movie. Watch... his credibility will decrease if he gets sucked into being an "SF filmmaker."

I could be wrong about everything of course, but I really love SF, and Gene Wolfe is one of the greatest authors alive, responsible for at least two of the best epic novels of the 21st century. I'll bet nobody other than myself and Rob (I forced Wolfe on Rob :D ) even know who he is. NPR listed two of his novels in the top 5 "Best SF/Fantasy books of all time... one was number 1! Above Lewis, Tolkien, Bradbury, etc. But he's never had anything close to a bestseller.

I'm supposed to be working god dammit.

i think you're giving too much credence to the fucking oscars, and with that canard (canard?) as a starting point you're building your case on a sandy foundation

the oscars maybe tell you something about what people are talking about today, and that has some weight for sure but it's not really the end all be all of aesthetic judgment, and it certainly has little to do with academia.

i mean. here we were talking about goodfellas and how great it is a quarter of a century later.

you know what won the oscar that year?

dances with wolves.

--

eta: canard was not the right word. what's the right word? i'm hungry, and slightly hangover. i'll find the word later.

Yeah, I know Dances With Wolves won. An absolute travesty, that.

The Oscars make me mad because when the Academy DOES make the right decision (Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood, Heath Ledger, No Country for Old Men), it's awesome. It feels legitimate, like a true honor. When they fuck to it infuriates me because I am a very categorical thinker, so when something is both legit and bogus, I get a little autistic.

Problem is that it's given so much credence and hype every year that it can't help but be noticed. Sci-fi and comedies are two of the most maligned genres critically maligned and will do for a long time yet.

Back to Arrival, the shot where you see one of the ships for the first time in that massive field with the mist rolling down the hills is just...I came.

Maybe, but what credence do you give to SF being taken seriously in academia? At least the oscars have some impact on what kinds of films are made, who makes them, who stars in them, etc. It's nice that academia accepts SF but I don't see how it actually impacts on the genre. I wouldn't even say the writing on SF has improved since university departments have decided its now worthy of discussion.

*Some university departments deem it worthy of discussion.

Otherwise, yes. There are maybe 1-2 truly great SF and/or fantasy books a year, and THOUSANDS of mediocre and outright terrible ones. HUGO doesn't mean much anymore.

The book I've referenced in the what are you reading thread (Ancillary Sword) was the winner of virtually every SF award the year it was released, and yeah, it's fucking incredible, but it's one in a million. Ignored by mainstream critics for the most part.

EDIT: Is it clear that I'm agreeing with you? Not sure if it is. Anyway, let it be known: Severian agrees with demonrail666. About this.

ANOTHER EDIT: I feel like Symbols/Slambang kind of has a monopoly on "ETA," which is why I never write it. But it's an established post-script. "EDITED TO ADD" takes longer to type. If I start appending posts with ETA, and haters start saying I'm aping Slambang, I'm gonna have really hurt feelings.

Also, for the record, I'm using the shorthand "SF" pretty liberally here. If there are any other freakin' nerdos among us, they'll know that "SF" technically, traditionally, stands for "speculative fiction," not "science fiction." This includes speculations about the future, present and past events or scenarios as they affect humanity and the earth.

SF is a better genre term anyway. Clockwork Orange is not really science fiction. It's speculative fiction. Anyway, just wanted to put that out there so my fellow freakin' nerdos don't think me a fraud.

if it's given credence in academia then at least the college kids are reading some of it. and that's a good thing.

but in general i give little credence to most academic writing these days. this is why i said SF's acceptance was one of the few good side effects of the rise of cultural studies-- the others are dismal, like-- cheap applied sociology as hifalutin' "theory". but you already know that lol.

the other thing i forgot to answer to severian is that-- his complaint seemed to me in the end about scientists not taking science fiction seriously. which, ok. why would they?

but also i don't know that the oscars really matter in the end. yes it adds sales and publicity for a while, but it doesn't make movies magically stick in the public consciousness or endure time.

didn't that shitfeast avatar win a bunch of oscars anyway? that was science fiction.

OTOH matrix (the first) was of course way better and i don't know if it won anything, but i don't know if anyone cares if it didn't?

the matrix is such a part of the culture now, it's part of how we understand the world. remember when h8kurdt found zonal marking and said something like "that shit's like the matrix"? (or something like that).

we've had lots of good science fiction lately as i recall. gravity. moon. the martian (i haven't seen the martian yet but i've read good reviews). i liked the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy w/ sam rockwell. the scottish one with scarlett. the other one with scarlett that's not as good. the spike jonze one about the OS-- her--that's scarlett too lol. i coud go on. oh! 2046 is a scifi film but do we think of war kai wong as a scifi filmmaker? no...

existenz. cosmopolis. the one with clive owen about the last baby something something? there are too many to think about it. even the superhero movies are science fiction movies-- thor, avengers, all that BS ends up boiling down to technology these days-- "tesseracs" or something.

no. science fiction is the MAIN mode of fiction these days. if it doesn't get prizes it's probably because dinosaurs are the ones handing them out.

but it doesn't matter because h8kurdt is gonna see things throught the filter of the matrix anyway.

chappie! fucking chappie!

etc etc etc etc

Well, that really wasn't my complaint. I didn't mean to make it sound like it was. No, some of my science profs didn't like it. But I was just using that to point out that it's acceptability in academia isn't, from my experience, very far reaching or widespread.

But on the other hand, you say why should they, I might ask why shouldn't they? If it's just fiction after all, why should it be less accepted by anyone than any other type of fiction? Just playing devil's advocate here.

Avatar was terrible. Let's not talk about that at all.

because science fiction is thought experiments inspired by some sort of scientific or technological premise but it is in fact neither science nor technology, and many people don't get that, and that's gotta get annoying eventually when you're trying to do some actual tedious, methodical, painstaking research to find out a little piece of a very large and still meaningless puzzle, and not the giant explanations of the cosmos that people think about when they think "science!" (the new opium of the people)

there are plenty of scientists who like science fiction and that's a well-known thing, but clearly it's a total non sequitur whether they do or not for their academic/research pursuits because it has nothing to do with them except maybe as a distant inspiration.

the one thing that really bothers me about futuristic sci fi is that they have the same cars. hairstyles and especially music 500 years in the future. I mean WTF?!?

Films about the future are usually interestingly more for what they tell us about the time they were made, than the one they're meant to represent.

Anyway, just watched the very un-SF ...



La Strada

Fellini may have made 'greater', more 'important' or 'iconic' films than La Strada but it still might be my favourite. A film I can watch at any time, in any mood and still absolutely love it.

la strada is AMAZING

--

speaking of non-science fiction, just watched altman's AWESOME "shortcuts"

(took an intermission to ramble here a bit because it's 3 hours long and ADHD HAPPENS)

first time i ever see it. great fucking movie. i really loved it. for me it's probably the best i've seen of his films.

while i enjoy his 70's stuff like mash and nashville, i was actually fully cognizant of the world in 1992 when he released this one, and can relate in a non-anthropological way (or whatever you call the "being there & not an outside observer" thing). so maybe it was that or maybe something else but i reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally loved it. a beautiful work.

Ok! Still, my complaints or whatever had nothing to do with whether scientists should/shouldn't like/not like SF. I did do that devil's advocate thing though, which is what I assume you're addressing here. Am I right?

Either way, I honestly don't have an opinion on this specific subsection of the overall conversation.

I think SF is cool for, as you said, thought experiment purposes, and for grandstanding BS that can kind of glamorize the sciences, which is fine as long as people understand that actual scientific inquiry is noting like what you see in sci-fi movies or read about in sci-if books. If people don't get that it's their own damn fault.

Anyway, really I just want ARRIVAL to win Best Pic, just because it bloody well deserves it.

I'm about to watch Nocturnal Animals too. I think Michael Shannon is a lock for best supporting, so I just see that. And a little more Amy Adams never hurt anyone.

Not always... but much of the time yeah. Guardians of the Galaxy rocking to "Hooked on a Feeling?" Star Trek and "Sabotage?" It doesn't really bother me much, as these are both examples of pretty low brow SF as entertaining as they are.

Have you seen PRIMER? Really really fucking excellent low-budget (but not "b") realistic SF film from 2011 I think. Goddamn incredible.

I dunno, considering every time I see her I sort of ache a little bit inside. Love hurts.

Re: La strada - while La dolce vita is the ultimate in my eyes my favorite is also la strada. He somehow balances his "Felliniesque" circus aesthetic on top of a fucking bleak atmosphere and setting. Seriously the setting reminds me sometimes of like Bergman's Winter Light.

I can see the Bergman similarities too, although if anything I think it comes closer to Shakespearean or Greek Tragedy than anything explicitly from the cinema - without falling into the trap of being filmed theatre. For all its surface simplicity I think it goes deeper than any of his more iconic films. There's something timeless, universal about it.

Anyway,



My Darling Clementine

My favourite Fellini and my favourite Ford, all in the same night. I'm spoiling myself.

You are on a fucking roll. If I ever had to rank my favorite films Clementine would no doubt be top 3. I can watch it any day and any time. I actually just ordered a poster of Fonda sitting on the porch.

Not to mention the rushing blood. I feel ya, you dirty bird!

I watched the 2008 ep of SNL that Amy Adams hosted tonight. My wife said I "got my fix"

Nocturnal Animals is quite brutal in a very specific kind of way that unsettles me. Gonna stick it out though, just to see what all this Michael Shannon fuss is about.

Tom Ford making movies. Yeesh. It's like.. what it David Lynch had no sense of humor or heart? Or talent for filmmaking. Still, stylish enough.

Hello. Who is sober? A lot of people talking downstairs