What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Fading Fast]

"Magnificent Obsession" on TCM yesterday. While great time travel - cars, clothes, sets, location shots - for most of the movie, it felt to me as if most of the actors were reading dialogue and not into their roles (with the exception of Otto Kruger). Also, I'm just not a fan of Jane Wyman - IMHO, she looks uncomfortable in front of the camera.

Also, it drove me nuts that in the scene where Kruger makes Hudson breakfast, Kruger never touches any of his food. He eventually just gets up from the table, lights his pipe and goes on with his day - who does that? Especially since the bacon and eggs looked so good.

 

[Dennis Young]

The Whisperer In Darkness

Lol! I had that one recorded and watched it last night. I like Lovecraft and it was a pretty neat film. J

 

[LizzieMaine]

We're screening "Lawrence of Arabia" later this month, and I'm in the middle of previewing it for problems. If there's one thing I really can't stand, it's any three and a half hour Sixties Cinemascope epic. (Unless it's "It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World.")

 

[emigran]

Thunderball... there's something great about the musical scores of the early Bond movies... Really well done... perfect orchestrations...

 

[Feraud]

We're screening "Lawrence of Arabia" later this month, and I'm in the middle of previewing it for problems. If there's one thing I really can't stand, it's any three and a half hour Sixties Cinemascope epic. (Unless it's "It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World.")

How do you select older films for screening at your theater?

 

[LizzieMaine]

This one's part of a series put on by the art museum across the street. I gave them my own picks and they disregarded all of them, saying they needed to get stuff that was "familiar to contemporary audiences." Nertz to that. If you're showing pictures to educate people you ought to show them things they'd never seen before and would never otherwise see.

I wanted to show Lillian Gish in "The Wind," which is an astonishing work of art, but they absolutely didn't want to touch any silent pictures. "Not accessible enough to modern audiences." I guess that means Gance's "Napoleon" is out, too.

 

[Feraud]

I understand. That "familiar to contemporary audiences" mantra is an annoying and a lazy excuse for dismissing something one is unfamiliar with.

All things considered Lawrence of Arabia is not a bad choice for reaching into the dark recesses of film history. You could have ended up having to run ancient classics like Porky's or Dirty Dancing..

 

[LizzieMaine]

Yeah, it's not a bad picture as far as historical epics go, but you get tired of looking at sand for three and a half hours.

At least it isn't Dr. Zhivago. I think if we tried to show that, after the winter we're still very much going thru, there would be an uprising.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Thunderball... there's something great about the musical scores of the early Bond movies... Really well done... perfect orchestrations...

[video=youtube;r81iUVZR9Jw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r81iUVZR9Jw[/video]

 

[Feraud]

Hey, no one does sand like David Lean!

 

[LizzieMaine]

If we're showing David Lean pictures, I'd rather see "Brief Encounter" any day of the week.

 

[Fading Fast]

We're screening "Lawrence of Arabia" later this month, and I'm in the middle of previewing it for problems. If there's one thing I really can't stand, it's any three and a half hour Sixties Cinemascope epic. (Unless it's "It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World.")

Even "Doctor Zhivago?"

Edit - should have read further - wow, you really don't like that one.

That said, I agree, "Brief Encounter" is his best - it's a, as Worf would say, "stop and drop" movie for me.

What do you think of "I Know Where I'm Going?"

 

[Feraud]

If we're showing David Lean pictures, I'd rather see "Brief Encounter" any day of the week.

It's hard to disagree. That is a wonderful film. Although the film being shot in b&w might lead severe confusion by the movie going public.

 

[Doctor Strange]

I prefer David Lean's amazing b/w Dickens adaptations - Great Expectations and Oliver Twist - to his bloated historical epics. (Not that they aren't great films, some of them.)

And I love I Know Where I'm Going!... but that's because it's a Powell & Pressburger film. They should be as well known by current film fans as David Lean... but aren't!

 

[LizzieMaine]

Excellent picture, but when it comes to P&P my favorite is "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp."

 

[Fading Fast]

It's hard to disagree. That is a wonderful film. Although the film being shot in b&w might lead severe confusion by the movie going public.

I enjoy and see the benefits of both black and white and color films - "Brief Encounter" and "The Third Man," as examples, need their black and white as much as "The Wizard of Oz" and "Brideshead Revisited" benefit from color. However, all four movies would be fine in black and white, but "Brief Encounter" and "The Third Man" would lose something critical if shot in color.

I was raised on color movies - so it is not a "I don't like change" thing, but I absolutely prefer black and white to the point that when I'm watching an old movie for the first time, I pray it is in B&W and cringe if it's the '50s and they are going to show me one of those color-exxagerated technicolor productions.

And for my money, British B&W movies of the '40s - '60s are the crispest B&W movies ever done.

Edit add: never got to my point (not that anyone would care), but it is a shame if today's public really isn't open to B&W movies - they are depriving themselves of some incredible cinema.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Gregg Toland shot some gorgeous B&W for Sam Goldwyn in the thirties. Look at a good print of one of the Goldwyn Eddie Cantor musicals, and you'll be astounded at how rich and detailed the images are, and how well they work with the overall concepts of the films.

I never even think of B&W versus color. I became aware of television when it was still mostly B&W, and never really developed a preference one way or the other. I don't like the candy-store Technicolor of most '40s and '50s pictures that use the process, but they got some nice effects out of it in the thirties, when they were paying close attention to issues of color design. I also very much like the two-color Technicolor process of the twenties and early thirties -- it was real enough not to be jarring while at the same time being unreal enough to get some very interesting design effects when it was carefully used.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Lizzie, I love most of the Powell & Pressburger films, but their entire late-forties run - The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes - constitutes a really remarkable sequence of masterworks. (Who else ever made four comparable masterpieces sequentially in four years?!?) And their opera/dance film The Tales of Hoffmann (just making the rounds now in a new restored release) is kind of a mess, but the visuals! It's the most psychedelic film made between Fantasia and 2001: A Space Odyssey!

We didn't have a color TV until I was 15, but besides that, growing up working in a mom and pop commercial photo studio made me a dedicated b/w guy. Not that I don't also love color when it's properly used... like in those gorgeous P&P films.

 

[hatguy1]

"Capone" with Keith Carradine. Not sure it's very historically accurate, but there's fedoras and straw panamas wall to wall!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Wally_Hood]

Lizzie, I love most of the Powell & Pressburger films, but their entire late-forties run - The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes - constitutes a really remarkable sequence of masterworks. (Who else ever made four comparable masterpieces sequentially in four years?!?) And their opera/dance film The Tales of Hoffmann (just making the rounds now in a new restored release) is kind of a mess, but the visuals! It's the most psychedelic film made between Fantasia and 2001: A Space Odyssey!

We didn't have a color TV until I was 15, but besides that, growing up working in a mom and pop commercial photo studio made me a dedicated b/w guy. Not that I don't also love color when it's properly used... like in those gorgeous P&P films.

A Matter of Life and Death is a phenomenal film; Marius Goring gets some of the best lines. The Red Shoes is breath-taking. When it seamlessly moves from "stage performance" to the purely cinematic you are dazzled~