It’s real damn good
Bo Burnham is a treasure and it is very good that he only puts out stuff once in a great while
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The ending of In A Lonely Place is especially… interesting? to me, as a reflection of its time/values, because It’s played like "isn’t it sad that the exonerating phone call didn’t come a few moments earlier and save their relationship from his breakdown?" But I’m watching it in the 21st century thinking “dang, you really dodged a bullet getting clear of this dude, whatever his status re: murders committed.”
Anyway in the book he’s a serial killer, and if I recall you just live in his head? Dorothy Hughes was good!
This discussion is all reminding me of Peeping Tom.
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Watched The Dirty Dozen and The Great Escape back to back. I could almost run out of war movie classics at this point (I won’t.)
The Great Escape is so light for a PoW movie. It is somewhat almost a comedy? I think it adjusts it’s tone throughout well and Steve jumping that fence is legit great. Go watch those motorcycle tricks! It’s also 3 hours long and it’s status of being a Dad Classic is strange but I guess you just catch 45 minutes on television broadcasts. Also Charles Bronson is great in it.
The Dirty Dozen has a similarly absolutely stacked cast (and then a few redshirts.) I haven’t seen a film with Lee Marvin in it apparently. He’s fucking great. John Cassevettes is fucking great. That big tall handsome guy is fucking great. Charles Bronson is fucking great (again.) Telly Sevalas does a great job playing an absolute creep psycho that brings the whole tone down by a lot. A lot of the dirty dozen are in War Prison for justifiable war murder except Telly whos crimes are too horrible to mention here and are repeatedly referenced. They should have killed that psycho the first chance they got!
Then they kill a bunch of nazis at the end. And you realize these are a bunch of fuck ups and I kind of like how the plan goes to shit.
Honestly my favorite moment is that the writers thought of the title then worked backward to shoehorn the title into the film in the most artificial way possible. I definitely rang a bell and called my senator when they said “You…Dirty Dozen*.”
/*- The Dozen is actually 14 with the head MP and Lee Marvin.
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Oh I know you come to this thread for Rudie’s Military Fashion Opinions and the RAF uniforms in The Great Escape are snazzy.
The dirty dozen has a lot of anarchronisms but everyone seemingly wearing Army Surplus uniforms of different theaters and time periods and manufacturers kept distracting me.
Deniro clearly stole from Cassevettes here!!!
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I saw TDD for the first time recently and liked it for all the reasons you did
Have you seen The Hill?
I sure have! I think about The Hill every day. I thought it was gonna just be a war movie about taking a Hill. It is an extremely intense philosophic debate about morality and duty and the presence of evil.
Like dang! It is maybe too intense in our current world. I also think everyone should see it.
We’ve Won! We’ve Won!!!
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Also god don’t you want 15 films with that big tall handsome man. He was so tall and handsome!!
they never made a sequel to this called the clean thirteen and thus hollywood must be destroyed
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I can’t think of Cassavetes as an actor without also thinking of his body of work as a director, sometimes directing movies in which he also acted. So it’s weird for me to see him as a “free agent” of sorts. Also think my brain is still trapped in the auteur theory mentality that the director does everything in movies, and media in general I guess.
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He’s also good in Rosemary’ Baby. I like watching movies where auteurs are forced to act in order to fund their own movies. See Transformers.
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Don’t know how I keep forgetting Rosemary’s Baby exists when it was influential on a lot of things I like. He does some scary subtle (to my impaired senses at least) gaslighting in that.
I liked him a lot in Mikey and Nicky. That’s actually all I’ve ever seen that he’s been involved with. Except for Rosemary’s Baby, I guess, but I don’t remember him being in that.
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Killing of a Chinese Bookie might be a good starting point as outside of some of the nightclub scenes it’s not as emotionally intense and uncomfortable as his other stuff and it’s played pretty straight as a gritty wandering-camerawork low budget noir thriller. I really liked this trailer (NSFW and has a really loud gunshot at the start) with its out of place noisy bits of keyboard droning and drums at the start and end.
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chinese bookie top ten all time
i feel like woman under the influence is the obviousest entry point
(cassavettes is not actually in either)
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I learned earlier this week that my same friend who has the Criterion Blu-ray version of Come and See also has the Criterion Blu-ray version of The Night of the Hunter. So I watched it tonight.
And everyone who has praised it around here was right. It’s excellent. I like the way that there’s never really any mystery to the story but the film direction itself takes unexpected turns.
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A Night To Dismember (1983) is famous because I guess a disgruntled film processing lab employee set fire to it and half the film had to be replaced with stock footage and generic library music. That sounded fun to me but I ended up watching the rediscovered original version on youtube. It’s still extremely good! Lots of strange rambling camera work, uncanny moog drones, colour filters meant to represent psychic attacks and a kind of avant garde conception of gore (an axe chopping vaguely at the air is followed by a pair of mannequin heads rolling off 2 feet away). A good dream sequence. There’s also a horror host wraparound framing which informs us that if lightning strikes on a certain area of your brain you get satanic powers.
Directed by Doris Wishman, whose credits also include “Nude On The Moon”, “Beyond The Nudist Curtain”, “The Haunted Pussy”, “The Sex Perils Of Paulette” and for some reason a To Live And Shave In LA music video
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