Star Wars is full of silly, on-the-nose names, from Darth Maul's brother Savage Opress to a Tusken Raider named URoRRuR'R'R.
However, my least favorite has to be a sinister nobleman and Sith Lord named Count Dooku. A really goofy name that's completely inappropriate for that character.
I recently read Beatlebone and quite enjoyed it. I know there's the whole discussion about using real people as fictional characters, but this is a novel where John Lennon has a conversation about death and the afterlife with a talking seal.
I found it quite entertaining, imaginative and yes, even Joycean, which I know is a cliched thing to say about an Irish novel.
Any thoughts on Barry, this book, or his other books?
There are very, very few people in film history who could be accurately described as visual effects auteurs.
Ray Harryhausen is undeniable a member of that small club, and I thought I'd start the first thread about him in a decade.
We talk about Jason and the Argonauts as a Ray Harryhausen movie, not a Don Chaffey movie... we look at Harryhausen's films as a body of work, with his stop-motion creatures (not the directors or actors or screenwriters) as the salient feature.
To me, the fascinating thing about Harryhausen is that he had a massive impact on film history (influencing Godzilla, inspiring George Lucas, Peter Jackson, Tim Burton, pretty much every vfx blockbuster director of the past 50 years) as the special effects artist on low budget b-movies that generally aren't particularly compelling when his creatures aren't onscreen.
There are some really good, entertaining movies in his filmography, but just as many where the creature battles are the only reason to watch.
In other words, Harryhausen has a pretty unique place in film history. His name is synonymous with stop-motion animation; his creatures still have a charm, a personality, a presence even if they're technically 'outdated' compared to CGI.
I had the joy of seeing him host a screening of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad a few years before his death; a signed copy of his memoir is still a prized possession of mine.
I know Harryhausen isn't the kind of filmmaker who generally gets discussed on r/truefilm, but I think he did have a pretty major impact & brought a virtuoso creativity to his films.
For me, it would have to be the "lifetime achievement award" for Gosford Park (2001).
He was also nominated for M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player and Short Cuts.
Someone recently started a thread on Mazursky on r/blankies and I thought I'd ask about him here, because his filmography is a real blind spot for me. I've only seen one of his movies, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, and I didn't love it.
On the surface, it's odd that a New Hollywood filmmaker with five Oscar nominations has been so forgotten in film circles. Especially when he has some other claims to fame: working with a young Stanley Kubrick in the early 50s, helping create The Monkees, acting in The Sopranos and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Any thoughts on Mazursky? His body of work? Why he's slipped into obscurity?
Inspired by a recent thread, I thought I'd start a discussion of a pretty fascinating, polarizing film.
When it came out, it underperformed at the box office and got mixed reviews, with the discourse dominated by the question of how much of it is Kubrick's vs. Spielberg's.
(For what it's worth, based on everything I read I think it's on the whole pretty true to Kubrick's original vision. He was getting schmaltzier as an old man, telling his circle about his love of Pinocchio and desire to make a film for children. And he was more involved in what became the final film than you might think; he directed Robin Williams's voice acting performance (the last time he ever directed an actor) and approved the concept art that informed the film's design.)
It's a film that underwhelmed and somewhat baffled me when I first saw it, but also a film that I've really come to appreciate on subsequent viewings. To me, the mix of tones (somewhat child-friendly Pinocchio retelling in a dystopian world of sexbots and anti-robot prejudice) gives it a really unique personality that stands out from every other science fiction movie. A pretty unique mix of ingredients.
From 2001 on, Kubrick was really interested in films divided into discrete sections, and AI is no exception. The juxtaposition from the end of the first section (David and Teddy lost in the woods) straight to Gigolo Joe selling a client on his robotic lovemaking abilities feels vintage Kubrick comedy.
Stanley Kubrick thought that the protagonist David would be some kind of special effect, but I think that Haley Joel Osment gives one of the great child acting performances in the role. He really goes from creepy and uncanny valley at the beginning to a character that feels extremely human.
The ending was the part that really put me off when I first watched it. I honestly thought it would end with>! David in the submarine staring at the Blue Fairy statue in sunken New York for eternity!<. But I think the ending is keeping with the sense of wonder of 2001, that it does something interesting by putting this story in a gigantic, cosmic context.
This film has been reappraised, not just by me but by quite a few people. It made last years' NYT top 100 films of this century. Part of it has to be the world we live in, which is increasingly AI-dominated. It's a film, on its most high-concept level, about AIs becoming more and more like humans.
Years before Francois Truffaut coined "la politique des auteurs," a few Hollywood directors had already attained a de facto auteur status. Alfred Hitchcock, for example.
Cecil B DeMille was in that category. As early as 1919, his name appeared above the title in film posters. In the thirties and forties, his role as the host of Lux Radio Theater made him a household celebrity.
And, in the sound era, he was known for a very distinct style and aesthetic. Biblical epics, massive setpieces, purple dialogue. Even now, comparing something to a Cecil B DeMille movie brings a pretty specific mode of filmmaking to mind.
That being said, he's rarely discussed in cinephile circles and, I get the impression, rarely taken that seriously. But I think are at least two fairly strong arguments for DeMille as worth of more serious consideration.
First, he was undoubtedly a massively important, innovative figure in the earliest days of Hollywood. He directed the first feature ever shot in California, was a major player in the founding and early success of Paramount, and coined the term "art director." He was the first filmmaker to utilize dramatic light and shadow onscreen ("Rembrandt lighting," as he called it) and the first to draw on paintings and other images to really inform visual composition. He directed Gloria Swanson in her starmaking performances.
Second, he was arguably the filmmaker who codified Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking: films focused on visual spectacle that hit with a massive audience. Someone who has talked quite a bit about DeMille as an influence is Steven Spielberg, and I don't think it's that much of a stretch to see DeMille as something of an Old Hollywood Spielberg. Who else at that time specialized in big, expensive, visual effects-driven blockbusters?
The most recent project from Fillipino writer/director Lav Diaz, Magellan tells the story of Ferdinand Magellan (Gael Garcia Bernal) from the conquest of Malacca to his death in the Philippines during the first circumnavigation of the globe.
Its most salient feature is that it's not the spectacular historical epic you might imagine from that basic summary. It's very much slow cinema, with minimal camera movement and long takes. It's also a film about war and colonization with zero onscreen violence; we see the macabre aftermath of battles but not the battles themselves.
It's a fascinating, somewhat counterintuitive mix of style and subject matter that really worked for me, and I'm interested in other takes on it.
