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Post by inlovewithcrow on Aug 7, 2011 18:17:56 GMT -5
They didn't say they were bad, just overrated. What about Casablanca or Citizen Kane? I'll probably get stoned for that. Not by me. I like Casablanca as a lite romantic piece (not saying it's a great film, but it's diverting if I'm in a eat-ice-cream-from-the-container mopey sort of mood), but I find Kane dull dull dull. Hey, want to see someone get stoned (and I don't mean the kind of stoned I'd get before Fantasia or 2001)? I could not sit through Godfather. Have tried twice, never could last long. There, toss away, people, but it's nowhere on my top 500 list (if I had such a thing), much less the #1 film of all time people say it is. Oh, and I think Brando and James Dean are vastly overrated, too. Now, pick up your rocks and have a ball!
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Torgo
Moderator Emeritus
-segment with Crow?
Posts: 15,420
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Post by Torgo on Aug 7, 2011 22:51:32 GMT -5
Eh. I like the Godfather (the first one far more than the sequels, the Al Pacino half of Part II is a pain in my ass and the less said about III the better), but I cannot obsess over it. I understand it's appeal, but its overwhelming praise goes over my head.
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Aug 7, 2011 22:59:50 GMT -5
a lot of the movies on that list i dislike not necessarily because they're bad but because i find their politics irksome. the sexism in 2001 is annoying, for instance -- although you COULD make an argument that the sexism isn't kubrick's but that it was part of a critique he's plainly leveling against the kind of hyper-rational, military-industrial culture 2001 presents us. i mean the movie is very understated and it doesn't guide you much or underscore its own points, but heywood floyd is actually an incredibly powerful and sinister embodiment of patriarchy, he's pretty much dr. friggin' evil but kubrick presents him so matter-of-factly you hardly notice. (think about it: they create a cover story about an epidemic on the moon base even though that's totally going to freak out the families of the people stuck there! also, everyone talks about how HAL9000 "went nuts" etc. but in the movie *I* saw he seemed to actually be following orders, that the astronauts were on the Discovery 2 for PR purposes but the powers-that-be (whom Floyd stood in for) were perfectly fine with turning the Discovery 2 into an unmanned probe if the crew started to give them trouble. so what i'm trying to say in my incredibly long-winded way is the sexism in 2001 may have been part of what kubrick was critiquing rather than a transparent extension of *his* ideology. That may be, but...apart from being a product of 1968, *was* it a sexist movie? I mean, yes, we see women still being stewardesses in "the future." But one of the scientists Floyd talks to is also a woman. Otherwise, women may well be conspicuously absent: the two astronauts are dudes. But the other women we see are Floyd's daughter and Dave's wife, right? Does that make it preachily paternalistic, or just...from 1968? (The whole caveman bit could also go to NewMad's theory, too: it's the dude cavemen who fight and use intelligence to kill better.) In sum: I don't really buy the sexist bit, apart from it being as sexist as 1968 may have been generally. And, all else being equal, Kubrick himself wasn't especially interested in pushing a feminist agenda...Barry Lyndon, anyone? But I'm definitely also willing to go with NewMads that such may actually help the themes of 2001. The monoliths are there to judge humanity's development, and each "test stage" judges physical advances: using tools, getting to the moon, getting to Jupiter, etc. But at each stage, the humans acquire intelligence but don't necessarily become better: the cavemen use tools to kill, getting to the moon goes hand in hand with government cover-ups, and the one on Jupiter is fused with murderous, hyper-rationality (HAL). That engimatic "star baby" may be a point about how the final evolution is more about a return to innocence than a technological evolution. Either way, I'm with NewMads on it being one of my all time favorite movies. My main reasons for loving it, though, are the reasons so many people don't: the pacing, the attempt to create something numinous in spite of the plot. I read somewhere that Kubrick really thought of the movie more as a piece of music than a story and that it should be watched as such. I agree. 2001 has no padding, in other words. "Padding" is filler when there's no plot. But the real point of 2001 isn't the story or even the themes, it's the experience of waiting in the presence of the unknown (whether the unknown is knowledge and history with the cavemen, just waiting to find out what's going on with Heywood Floyd, the waiting in the face of trying to avoid HAL, and the general WTF of Dave's experience.) Some of my favorite scenes in the movie are of Dave just sitting there waiting for HAL to answer him or do something or die. There's something (to me) incredibly poignant about a human waiting on a machine to do something insane or just to cease to exist. Waiting on a nothing or on something ultimately irrational...which is incredibly different from the "spiritual" waiting at the end of the movie. But I'm partial. Yeah. Completely un-ironic and unselfconscious sentimentality for a fairy tale of innocence. Its complete opposite was Sellars' Being There which told a similar story, but did it with humor and grace and knew that it was a kind of wish-fulfillment rather than a celebration of know-nothingness that also somehow turns out to be blandly patriotic and in love with whatever happens to be the status quo. Hate that goddam movie. Tom Hanks should have known better. As for some other stuff on that list, I actually like American Beauty a lot. I thought the bag in the wind was beautiful, and I thought that Kevin Spacey made that whole mid life crisis thing seem completely substantive and believable. (I could have done without Anette Benning, though, although their daughter...forget the actress' name, was awesome.) Good Will Hunting? Manipulative feel good movie, but, as far as manipulative feel good movies go, it was excellent. Robin Williams was probably made for that role. Fantasia? Wonderful. And people who watch it now and think it's boring forget that this was HOW LONG before there was such a thing as a music video or people on youtube just throwing up images to music? The opening where they show visuals of what certain instruments' sounds might look like is still magical to me. Moonstruck? I defend it because it's one of my mom's favorite movies. So screw anyone who talks bad about it! Easy Rider? Of course it was "of its time," but, kind of like 2001, it remains a wonderful mood and tone movie, even when its story isn't really chugging along. The Wizard of Oz? I'm with other people: how can this possibly be overrated, either in terms of popularity or critical reception? I hate musicals, but I find myself singing some of these songs to my kids. The B&W to color STILL gets to me, and even my son, who just complained about the B&W for the first few minutes, said, "That's cool!" when she stepped out of the house.
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Post by TheNewMads on Aug 8, 2011 11:38:29 GMT -5
i think you're right about 2001. i mean, when i say it has "padding" i'm being sorta cute: it's actually a very experimental film, tight pacing is antithetical to its premise, i think, which among other things is to use silence and slow pacing to evoke the vast scale and emptiness of space. that's something you can know intellectually but 2001 actually wants to create something more visceral.
it reminds me of (sorry to bring this character up again) an interview with michael haneke about his "chronology of chance" movie, which has, among other things, a continuous scene of a guy playing ping pong that goes on for something like NINE MINUTES. the guy winds up being a sociopath who goes on a killing spree, no surprise from haneke there, and a part of the reason he chose to make the scene so long was to convey viscerally the maddening obsessiveness and desperate intensity of this guy. because that is so alien to most of us, haneke wanted to do something to really knock the audience for a loop, and he talks about the different moods you're likely to go through while you wonder why in god's name haven't they cut away from this damn ping-pong player yet? at first you're amused, then you get a little irritated, finally you're mostly just non-plussed and just taking it in.
i think a very similar thing is going on with, for instance, the 10-minute, or however long it is, heavy breathing scenes in 2001, and the gorgeous 8-minute continuous take at the end of "the passenger," if you happen to have ever seen that. also really instructive in terms of what i think kubrick was trying to do is the scene with the flight attendant carrying the tray and walking on the ceiling. they went to tremendous trouble to get that shot, building an enormous life-sized rotating prop and so on, and if you think about it, there was no way to cut that scene for brevity and evoke the sense of weightlessness and disorientation it creates. you have to show the whole thing to demonstrate quite clearly that there is no up or down, otherwise we'll employ a gestalt to create a sense of orientation in our own mind, because that's what we're accustomed to.
as for the sexism, another thing to consider is that the space program at the time was very, VERY male-centric and if you think about it from kubrick's point of view, he'd have had to do something pretty radical to portray it as being gender-integrated. and in doing so, he'd have had to imbue the space program with a progressive bent i simply don't think he wanted to allow it, since i get the impression the movie by and large is pretty critical of the space program in many ways. not so much the idea of space exploration itself, but the program as he portrays it is secretive, deceitful, antihumanist. it would be odd for it to also be integrated.
also, come on, the egghead dome hats on the flight attendants are awesome. i mean, he probably looked at those conceptual drawings and said, "i don't care, we're doing THAT." there's a lot of moments of subtle humor like that in the early reels, like the strange getups on the flight attendants and the ponderous zero-gravity toilet instructions, the bizarroworld meandering conversation he has with his daughter, you know, the overpriced phone call about phone calls.
that's a very good point about "being there" being like a "forrest gump" that didn't suck. it never occurred to me to link the two. i think annette benning was being deliberately insufferable in "american beauty", i mean on a level i guess that's obvious but it basically worked for me. deep down i thought she was a bit sympathetic as a character, there was obviously some sort of transference going on with her insane obsession with real estate. she managed to create a character of some unplumbed depth in AB, and that's a tough balance to make, her abrasive unlikeability was the motor driving the narrative but you run the risk of making the thing unwatchable if you pitch it too hard. american beauty's one i'd like to see again, i haven't seen it in a few years. maybe i'll watch forrest gump again, too, just to remind myself why i hate it so much. it's that validation of infantile sentimentality that hollywood peddles so shamelessly, maybe i'm going too far but i actually think it damages the culture and the body politic. it encourages an electorate that expects to be pandered to and that thinks cheap sentiment in pretty window dressing is a synonym for profundity. it's actually funny because i think 2001 was a seminal movie in combining spectacle with actual narrative and thematic depth, but since then its many imitators have retained the spectacle but substituted a hollowed-out sense of self-importance for the thematic depth part. (for instance, i see a bit of that with "contact," a sorta 2001-y movie by, i THINK, the same character who directed gump. i liked contact more than i liked gump, but they both come across as movies that seem to think they're better than they actually are. if that makes any sense.)
ok. that was a bit overlong. but it has made me think of an ACTOR i'd like to see in the overrated category: jodie foster. her early work is genius ("the little girl who lives down the lane" is a life-changer, seriously) and she's plainly a great actress and ferociously intelligent, but she's just made some weird choices in her later career. "contact" is probably the best of it and i'm fairly meh on that, even, but "flight plan"? that one where she was a female vigilante? "flight plan" did a pretty good job of building tension, i suppose, but it just doesn't measure up to her earlier stuff at ALL. and the vigilante movie was pretty tepid stuff.
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Post by TheNewMads on Aug 8, 2011 11:47:35 GMT -5
also, i've never cared for the godfather movies particularly, either, though i don't detract from people who love them. you can tell they're finely crafted films, at least the first two, but something about them just doesn't scratch my itch. (i think that probably mirrors the way a lot of people feel about "2001.") when the movies came out the mario puzo novel was a runaway sensation (anyone here old enough to remember when novels were still sensations?) (i mean a novel for grownups?) and i think a lot of the frenzy surrounding the movies was borrowed from the book and the storyline. i actually like "the conversation" a lot more, which came out i think the same year as one of the godfather movies. it was certainly around that time, in any case.
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Aug 10, 2011 19:57:57 GMT -5
Just a short note, but a great novel critical of the space program from the 70's is Beyond Apollo by Barry Malzburg. May be oop by now, but just a great book about astronauts as unheroes and what the unknoen of space travel might do to the human psyche. Malzburg is NEVER optimistic. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Apollo
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Post by TheNewMads on Aug 11, 2011 12:25:06 GMT -5
Just a short note, but a great novel critical of the space program from the 70's is Beyond Apollo by Barry Malzburg. May be oop by now, but just a great book about astronauts as unheroes and what the unknoen of space travel might do to the human psyche. Malzburg is NEVER optimistic. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Apollohmm, i clicked around on that link and it looks like they're doing a movie adaptation of "Beyond Apollo." starring bill pullman, of all people. for anyone who's interested, here's a great article on 2001 from "Sight and Sound" a few years ago. i gleaned a lot of insights from it... www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0011.html
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Aug 11, 2011 18:58:36 GMT -5
Huh. I can't imagine it would make a good film unless they're planning on doing tons of fudging. The entire book takes place in a mental ward with only the barest of flashbacks to actual space stuff. Much of the point is that there's no way to know what actually happened out there except through this guy's fractured memory, so actually SHOWING the audience something would go against the whole point.
But who knows.
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donmac
Moderator Emeritus
Beedee Beedee Beedee This Sucks!
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Post by donmac on Sept 22, 2011 19:11:45 GMT -5
I think it's important to define if a list like this is determined by a film being overrated by film critics, or a film being overrated by the general public. That's a very important distinction.
For example, if by critics, then 2001 makes sense on the list (even though I personal don't agree).
But, if by the general public, then stuff like Transformers should be on the list.
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