bride of best movie thread ever

[YojimboMonkey]

My guess is he's wording it in such a way that it sounds like a joke but that there is sadly too much truth in it.

[slow west vultures]

i watched Knute Rockne: All-American last night on TCM.  i didn't realize his name was pronounced Ka-noot, but people in the 40's apparently hadn't lost the proper norwegian pronunciation.  this movie was slightly more entertaining to me since i went to Notre Dame, but i was a little disappointed at the quality of it.  i thought it was supposed to be one of the great all time sports movies, but it was a little stitched together, and i wouldn't call the story or the acting top notch.  it did however provide some moments of amusement and hilarity though.  like the scene in the president of the university's office where the german priest professor nieuwland tries to convince knute that he's very talented in chemistry, and wants him to stay and help in his lab that summer:

professor nieuwland: you must stay and help me discover the secret to synthetic rubber in my lab
knute rockne: i'd like to . . . but gus and i signed up to be lifeguards at cedar point this summer
professor nieuwland: but ka-noot, you must focus on zee chemistry
father callaghan:  you wouldn't by any chance be bringing a football to cedar point with you would you . . .

its kind of funny to me because cedar point now has this big amusement park where people usually go during senior week, but even back then it was a beach get away.

there was other funny stuff in the movie, like knute's rousing speech to the professional educators panel who wanted to shut football down in the colleges.  among its highlights "gentlemen every red blooded young man has what we like to call the spirit of 'combat' in him.  now in european countries and elsewhere they have no natural outlet for this spirit, and that's why there's so many wars and revolutions.  but here in america we put our young men to more productive uses, teach them how to play football . . "  or later in the speech "gentlemen football provides an education in itself.  the men travel the whole country and meet other people like themselves and they learn that southerners aren't dumb, northerners aren't cold, midwesterners aren't all hicks on a farm and californians aren't all poor and hungry." 

here's my favorite line maybe though

Knute Rockne: [frustrated that his class isn't learning the chemistry he's trying to teach them] There's nothing dumber than a dumb irishman .
Priest, walking into the room: Except a smart swede  (class erupts in laughter)

oh yeah, and i almost forgot the sequence of knute teaching his players a new formation to try out to showtune piano music, that had been inspired by watching chorus girls perform.  i really wish i would have seen this movie when i was at notre dame. it would have been way better than Rudy as far as unintentional irony goes. 

[Trousers and Pat]

This morning I watched A Hearty Response, a mid-80s Chow Yun-Fat movie. It swings wildly between goofy romantic comedy and brutal violence and rape, but the image that will stick with me forever (SPOILERS!) is the random little boy peeing on a man's face to see whether or not he's really unconscious . A little totally unexpected comedic brilliance in what seems to be an unassuming commercial flick. And there's also a good dose of those cluttered, neon images of the city that look so good on the trashy VHS tapes I get from the library.

[Maaik]

We went out tonight to this outdoor Movie Under the Stars thing at a park a couple cities over, spread out a blanket with some of tMO's friends and watched Night at the Museum.  It was actually really cute and funny--though the gigantic plot hole at the end really bugged me.  What the hell happened to the old security guards?  Well, Ben Stiller?  Huh?

[Greg Nog]

300.  For the second time.  Hoo boy.

[guanajuato]

watched this movie called shooter. it was directed by the guy who directed the movie training day which at one point in my past satisfied my gangviolence/badcop/bloodlust. since training day this director guy must have been mainlining the movie commando starring california's gov. i don't necessarily think that's a bad choice, some people even become murders. however, a hobby like this should be confined to staying home and watching such movies not securing mark wahlburg to star in an 80's commando-fetish-fantasy. liked the movie though.

[coldforge]

Guano, that shit is straight christgau

[Aglaya]

Finally saw Pan's Labyrinth.  I really, really enjoyed it, and I have since been trying to figure out how to convince my friend Stacie that the assumption that she is basing her refusal to watch it on is ludicrous.  She somehow got the impression that it would be like Mirrormask which she somehow hates.  To be fair, Stacie has the worst taste in movies of anyone I know.

[guanajuato]

Guano, that shit is straight christgau

i looked that dude up and enjoyed! thanks forge of ice!

[auto-da-fey]

Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film was decent and entertaining, but a little lacking in depth, I thought. The historical part was pretty weak--why discuss Psycho and Peeping Tom, two films that have tangential relevance at best, but not mention Blood Feast or the killer's-POV style that was lifted from Italian giallo? And then the arguments for sociopolitical relevance were ridiculous--how could slasher films reflect AIDS fears when they showed up before AIDS and featured almost exclusively hetero teens? Meanwhile, Gene Siskel was portrayed as an ass for calling the genre on its conservative sexual ideology, which I consider a strong argument.

Anyway, it was still fun to watch all the bloody deaths.

[auto-da-fey]

After that came Jess Franco's A Virgin Among the Living Dead, which my lady failed to appreciate, despite a consciousness-expanding scene in which our heroine wakes up butt-naked in a room that's entirely empty except for a gigantic black dildo sitting upright on the floor; she walks over to it and swats it away, then the camera pans over to a ghost (?) woman who suddenly appears and shouts, "You've toppled the Giant Phallus! Now the curse is upon us all!" Then ghost-woman leaves and is suddenly strangled by the butler. The film never references her or the Giant Phallus again.

Myself, I thought the movie was okay, but not much more than okay.

[edison]

After that came Jess Franco's A Virgin Among the Living Dead, which my lady failed to appreciate, despite a consciousness-expanding scene in which our heroine wakes up butt-naked in a room that's entirely empty except for a gigantic black dildo sitting upright on the floor; she walks over to it and swats it away, then the camera pans over to a ghost (?) woman who suddenly appears and shouts, "You've toppled the Giant Phallus! Now the curse is upon us all!" Then ghost-woman leaves and is suddenly strangled by the butler. The film never references her or the Giant Phallus again.

Myself, I thought the movie was okay, but not much more than okay.

I have nothing of substance to add, but your movie posts are part of what makes reading LPTJ an absolute joy!

[YojimboMonkey]

Whit, thanks for being you.  You are amazing.  I need to know that such things exist.

Also I initially read "swats it away" as "squats away" but then I had to go back and reread it 'cause the rest of the sentence didn't make sense.

[auto-da-fey]

Also I initially read "swats it away" as "squats away"

That's actually what I expected, because Franco does have a penchant for perviness shot in extremely gynecological detail, but this film was a little more conventional than his usual fare.

But thanks, and too edison too.

[Andrew_TSKS]

you're right about your criticism of the origin stuff in "going to pieces", i too was all "well, if they're gonna talk about psycho, shouldn't they talk about all the other movies inbetween that and halloween? where's dario? where's fulci? where's h.g. fucking lewis already?" but i wasn't really watching it for historical accuracy as much as to see awesome stuff about early 80s slasher movies, which i definitely did get. i was sorta bugged by what siskel was saying, too, but i think he had somewhat of a point, so on that part i'm a bit ambivalent.

[auto-da-fey]

i was sorta bugged by what siskel was saying, too, but i think he had somewhat of a point, so on that part i'm a bit ambivalent.

As I see it, Siskel has an irrefutable point: slasher movies do equate sex with death, and encourage conservative values very commensurate with the Reaganite social agenda of the 1980s, which strikes me as their major sociopolitical relevance.

At the same time, film scholar Carol Clover makes a persuasive argument for the subversive qualities of slasher flicks--their blurring of gender, the identification of male viewers with female heroines, their spectatorial gaze as fundamentally masochistic rather than sadistic, etc.

I think both perspectives are accurate. The real problem comes when people insist on reading slasher films as coherent texts rather than polysemous hodgepodges--something Siskel is guilty of, but Clover is not.

[Andrew_TSKS]

i was thinking that siskel was one of the "girls dying in horror movies is inherently sexist" people. was he not? i agree that horror movies equate having sex with getting killed. that's totally true.

[auto-da-fey]

you're right--that was the clip in the movie. i totally got carried away and forgot the source material in question. though he definitely also made the case i attributed to him.

[Ah_Pook]

slasher movies equate existing with getting brutally killed. sitting next to the road eating a banana? yea youre toast.

i mean the people having sex get killed too, but theyre hardly the only ones getting knifed through the trachea.

[auto-da-fey]

So I've survived Ojete de Lulu, and cinema does not get much bleaker than this. Watching Lina Romay--who was gorgeous in the 1970s but looks very much worse for the wear a decade later--engage in a series of sex acts with 2/3-flaccid men, scenes heavily dominated by endless close-up meat shots, is painful enough, but then enduring even more endless shots of her spooge-drenched asshole "talking" makes me want to end my participation in the human race.


I think this is the effect black metal bands strive for, and I've never heard one succeed at it as well as Jess Franco does here.

*edited because people might be eating while reading this*

[auto-da-fey]

 . . . and the porn train keeps a'rollin' tonight:

The Taming of Rebecca is one of those movies I think all the poststructuralist/queer theory film people who laugh dismissively at Andrea Dworkin should be required to see. Not because Dworkin was right, but because it does no one any good to offer a knee-jerk sneer at her, watch some vanilla dyke porn, and feel justified in not even engaging with Dworkin. Watching stuff like this--a bunch of malnourished junkies performing ugly sex acts involving piss, fisting, and nonconsensual BDSM--really gives one a window into what Dworkin saw when she saw pornography.

I still liked it more than that motherfucking Lulu movie.

*edited, again*

[elpollodiablo]

Could you not talk about movies any more?

[alistarr*]

Family Plot was awesome and hilarious. Frenzy was funny and clever. The Man Who Knew Too Much was intense and low on humour, and the ending didn't quite sit right with me, but it was still good fun.

series 3 of buffy was pretty much as good as series 2, but the ending of course was less epic as it involved fewer swords.

[auto-da-fey]

Could you not talk about movies any more?

Hey, I hold my tongue during the Pirates of the Caribbean and Shia LaBeouf discussions, even though that shit bores me to tears, so fair is fair.

But you know, it crossed my mind that not everyone might want to read about this stuff. Probably everyone, really, except maybe Swimmy and Andrew. I didn't really care too much last night, but on reflection, to be fair to those with more tender sensibilities, I went for some retroactive whiting-out. It seems to work better on the white-backed entry than the blue one, but I'm satisfied with it.

[elpollodiablo]

J/K

I'd much rather experience violent smut vicariously