Rate The Last Movie You Saw

[uncknown]

First. studio American film to have nude female #

[T.H.]

Pacino's best performance might be Donnie Brasco, and I agree that he was way better than De Niro in The Irishman, but the CGI is also to blame for De Niro's lackluster performance. The scene where De Niro was "stomping" the guy on the street was just terrible.

Pacino can obviously be ostentatious and hammy on screen, but I think it works perfectly in stuff like Heat.

As far as Lumet, Stanton and Noodles are both kind of right. Early Lumet movies were way too stagy and stuffy, even if 12 Angry Men is technically impressive, the structure is so TV and theater. Lumet pulled a 180 and became an infinitely better filmmaker in the 70s and his movies felt liberated and cinematic instead of stuffy, stagy junk. Even something as flawed as The Anderson Tapes is pretty interesting and cinematic whereas his early works like The Long Days Journey's into Night are total crap in my opinion.

Dog Day Afternoon is his masterpiece. That movie is much better than I remembered, and there's nothing stagy about it whatsoever.

Pale Flower is easily the best yakuza movie ever made. Nothing else even comes close.

I love the three Suzuki movies more than the next person, but you're 100% right.

[noodles_leone]

Twin Peaks - season 1 and 2
I'm back in a Twin Peaks frenzy. Season 1 is great, season 2 starts off as great and quickly goes down hill as soon as they reveal who killed Laura Palmer. Then the shows goes back to its former glory as soon as David Lynch returns as an actor (and probably screenwriter) for the last half a dozen episodes. The very last episode, ep 29, is a masterpiece. Now back to watch Fire Walk With Me and The Return (which means i still have something like 20 hours of Twin Peaks ahead of me).

[uncknown]

I couldn't get past episode three of the latest TP series.
Then.   again I'm not a fan of TOS.

[noodles_leone]

Season 3 is also incredibly NOT mainstream. It's a wonder it got aired.

[dave jenkins]

Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles (2014) - 8/10. The idea for this film is a good one: tell Welles's life story by stitching together clips and audio of the great man talking about himself (which he loved to do). Sample all the films. Then fill the gaps with comments by "experts"--those who were there, family members, biographers, film authorities (the usual suspects, Bogdanovich, Spielberg, Scorsese, but also Julie Taymor (!) and William Friedkin--when, oh when, did Friedkin become an authority on everything cinematic?). I particularly liked seeing and hearing Welles's daughters speak, as well as Oja Kodar (who seems pretty interesting). Less inspired, though, was the idea to sprinkle in scenes from filmed recreations. We get clips from Me and Orson Welles, RKO 281, Radio Days, even that one bit from Ed Wood. WTH?

The film is very entertaining because Welles was always entertaining. But it basically tells the story we all know without adding anything new, and, no doubt because of its short runtime (92 min.), is actually misleading in many places. For example, when covering Citizen Kane the filmmaker produces a clip of Welles saying the Rosebud ending "doesn't hold up." Yeah, Welles said that, and more than once, but he also said some other things. Like the fact that the device was useful for making the film work, and he couldn't, even in later life, think of a better one. Also, that it was Herman Mankiewicz's idea (like many a great man, Welles liked to take credit for the good things in his work, and blame others for the not-so-good things). But in order to bring in such helpful contextualizing you'd actually have to explore Mankiewicz's contribution to the film. The man gets one brief mention (Toland a bit more). Again, the runtime is brief, the focus is on Welles, so his collaborators get short shrift. Abbreviating everything, though, causes distortions. On the other hand, there's a really good sequence that shows Welles telling, in more than one interview, his How-I-Sold-Harry-Cohn-The-Lady-From-Shanghai story which does a great job of casting doubt on its veracity. More things like this would have been welcome.

Simply, the film needed to be longer. The Blu-ray is coming soon, no doubt--hopefully it includes more material that was cut for time. But with a someone like Welles, even more--ever more--will not be enough to give the subject his due.

The blu did come out, but without extra footage. I stand by my earlier comments.

[noodles_leone]

The Sunchaser - 8/10
It's a 7/10 that drops to a 5 because of all the botched scenes, bad editing and the terrible music and rises back to 8 because of its soul and because of the cool Monument Valley/horses scene.
Anybody knows where the actual lake is? My guess so far is Ice Lake, Silverton, Colorado.

Jojo Rabbit - 6/10
Ok

Once Upon A Time In America - 12/10
Nice one.

[dave jenkins]

Once Upon A Time In America - 12/10
Nice one.

Your valuation is much too low. Btw, which version are you rating?

[noodles_leone]

The US cut of course. Nah the regular 221 min cut. I still haven't seen the long cut as a whole.

I agree with you on my valuation, but you get the point of a 12/10: whatever you throw again it, OUATIA is higher.

Anyway here is my new take on the movie: I don't think we can expect a Lynchean rigor in symbolism from Leone. So I don't think the dream theory, or any kind of "this symbolizes that" reading of the movie really works. Everything changes from a scene to another. All in all, for Leone, cinema is a dream and that's the way Sergio sees the world. So everything is a dream and nothing is a dream, life is cinema, cinema is memories, and the movie keeps showing (more than telling) you that in every way possible. Evrything in it both happened and never happened, it's a movie, Noodles' smile in the end is also the audience's smile. It's funny because in the end, despite everything you can think of, OUATIA isn't that different from the really naturalistic Tale of Cinema.

Also they spend a huge time opening and closing doors, curtains and hidden hatches in this movie.

[dave jenkins]

The US cut of course. Nah the regular 221 min cut. I still haven't seen the long cut as a whole.

I agree with you on my valuation, but you get the point of a 12/10: whatever you throw again it, OUATIA is higher.

Anyway here is my new take on the movie: I don't think we can expect a Lynchean rigor in symbolism from Leone. So I don't think the dream theory, or any kind of "this symbolizes that" reading of the movie really works. Everything changes from a scene to another. All in all, for Leone, cinema is a dream and that's the way Sergio sees the world. So everything is a dream and nothing is a dream, life is cinema, cinema is memories, and the movie keeps showing (more than telling) you that in every way possible. Evrything in it both happened and never happened, it's a movie, Noodles' smile in the end is also the audience's smile. It's funny because in the end, despite everything you can think of, OUATIA isn't that different from the really naturalistic Tale of Cinema.

Also they spend a huge time opening and closing doors, curtains and hidden hatches in this movie.

Not to mention the fact that the front for the opium den, which we see at the very beginning, is a kind of theater.

Citta Violenta (1970) - 6/10. The Violent City part is great, as is the Violent Racetrack sequence. Then they move to the Violent Studio Set, and that's a bit slow. However, things are somewhat redeemed at the end with the Violent Glass Elevator gag. Also, Sollima does that great homage to Bronson's Two Beeg Green Eyes by shooting them upside down after he's been cowboyed. There won't be no stinkin' Rising From the Dead scene in this picture!

[noodles_leone]

Not to mention the fact that the front for the opium den, which we see at the very beginning, is a kind of theater.

We see that front room in the first shot of the last scene (that ends with the smile): close up of the show that takes place in that place. The camera zooms out. The room looks exactly like a movie theater. We're leaving the movie.

[drinkanddestroy]

Also they spend a huge time opening and closing doors, curtains and hidden hatches in this movie.

http://www.fistful-of-leone.com/forums/index.php?topic=6937.0

[noodles_leone]

Nice one. I forgot about that thread. But it seems we forgot something at the time, I'll add it there.

[dave jenkins]

The camera zooms out. The room looks exactly like a movie theater. We're leaving the movie.

I like the way I spotted the ball perfectly so you could spike it.

[noodles_leone]

I like the way I spotted the ball perfectly so you could spike it.

Telling the truth I almost included it in my first post but chose to keep some amunition, hoping that someone would lead me there. You did. Perfect team work.