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Author Topic: The Top 100 Club (Episode III)  (Read 111722 times)

1SO

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Re: The Top 100 Club (Episode III)
« Reply #290 on: August 02, 2017, 02:40:54 PM »
pixote, I haven't selected yet because A Walk in the Sun was the most surprising choice in my history of The Top 100 Club. I'm paralyzed to try and match it.

If you can find it, I think it has to be The Way to the Stars, despite your Asquith aversion. It's another war film, pointedly British in contrast to the very American feel of A Walk in the Sun, and it's a film I discovered just two months before I first saw the Milestone film. Plus, it doubles as a 1945 Retrospots watch.

I guess the other option would be the films from the Marseille trilogy — almost solely on account of the recent Criterion Blu-ray release. I doubt you'll like them anywhere close to how much I do (and maybe in the opposite order), but still probably worth a shot.

Like last time, I want to will you to like It All Starts Today, but I think it's a longshot. Looking through your Essentials to see if there's a comparable film that might up the odds ....
I can find The Way to the Stars, which I avoided based on Asquith, but reading the description it does sound like my type of film. That will be my selection. (I almost went into the Marseille trilogy as a blind choice.)

It All Starts Today sounds like a cross between the inspirational teacher drama and To Be and To Have. It's not terrain I've found a favorite of - Goodbye Mr. Chips, which is best outside the classroom and perhaps Stand and Deliver - and usually face this assembly (To Sir With Love, Dead Poets Society, The Blackboard Jungle) with a shrug.

pixote

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Re: The Top 100 Club (Episode III)
« Reply #291 on: August 02, 2017, 02:50:57 PM »
It All Starts Today sounds like a cross between the inspirational teacher drama and To Be and To Have. It's not terrain I've found a favorite of - Goodbye Mr. Chips, which is best outside the classroom and perhaps Stand and Deliver - and usually face this assembly (To Sir With Love, Dead Poets Society, The Blackboard Jungle) with a shrug.

It's really more like a Ken Loach film than any of those; that's the best comparison I can think of off the top of my head. It's still not fully accurate, but it does provide a glimmer of hope.

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oldkid

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Re: The Top 100 Club (Episode III)
« Reply #292 on: August 02, 2017, 02:57:08 PM »
I moved the Silence discussion to the spoiler thread.
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Sandy

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Re: The Top 100 Club (Episode III)
« Reply #293 on: August 03, 2017, 10:52:06 PM »
Actually, I'm going to do the Before Trilogy, since you so nicely have all three of them on your list and also In the Name of the Father. But, if you or Mom have something else you want me to see, please advise!

Those are great choices! One caveat: The Before films might be better experienced over time rather than all together. (Did anyone here watch them all at once the first time they watched them? How'd it work out?) It's the difference between waiting all summer to see how of tv show's season-ending cliffhanger gets resolved and binging all seasons at once on Netflix.

Oops! Too late! :)

I actually started with Midnight and looped back around. I know, I know, I'm doing it all wrong and decades too late, but I think I'm still able to garner valuable insights... Not sure how to write about these, but have almost a month to figure it out!

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I haven't had a chance to confer with Mom, but I'm pretty sure she'd recommend Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, only to realize later that she was thinking of a different film. (It's a great choice for you, regardless.)

haha! I'll add it to my watchlist, just the same.

1SO

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Re: The Top 100 Club (Episode III)
« Reply #294 on: August 03, 2017, 11:24:41 PM »
The Way to the Stars
When the film is directed by Anthony Asquith, you can expect excellent performances and an unforced honesty. In terms of what he gets right time and again, I cannot call him a bad director. Individual scenes are top quality, but great storytellers stitch these scenes together in a way that makes the audience want to know what happens next. This is where Asquith trips me up time and again. With a tighter narrative than Way to the Stars, I still have no sense of the drama rising and falling with a calibrated rhythm. This film spans several years, and there are plenty of highlights and plenty of moments where characters just live and breathe, but the two ends don't come together for me. It needed either less stories to tell or more time to really dig into what it has.

A Walk in the Sun is certainly this film's American cousin, but Lewis Milestone's direction takes the complete opposite approach. There's a constant tension that infuses the quiet scenes in Walk, letting the highlights surprise like a grenade lobbed from the tall grass. Walk only pretends to not be focused on the war while treading through the deep heart of it. Asquith has made a picture about relationships, some of which the war has no bearing. It's The Hurt Locker minus the bomb diffusions.

jdc

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Re: The Top 100 Club (Episode III)
« Reply #295 on: August 03, 2017, 11:55:39 PM »
Children of Men

For unknown reasons, humans seemed to have stopped having children for the last 18 years.  This has seemed to have thrown the world into a state of chaos despite having many border collies and other dogs around to keep them company for their remaining years.  Great Britain still seems to be a beacon of stability though it hardly seems so as they are completely fearful of immigrants and trying to kick them out.  Throw in an immigrant girl that turns out to be the first human that gets pregnant in the last 18 years and you have a hell of a good movie.

Without trying to understand or explain maybe the overall themes here, this just amazing me a great piece of film making. There were a few times in the beginning where I wasn't certain where this was going and not sure it would hold my attention. All doubt was gone by the car chase scene until the very end.  I am not sure the battle scenes were not real or the birth scene.  Is this Dogma filmmaking?  OK, I know it is not but I don't think I have seen many films that can quite compare.

This goes on my Top 100 list considerations and will likely try to watch again before the year is out as I feel some guilt that I allowed myself some distractions in the first 30 or so mins.
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ses

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Re: The Top 100 Club (Episode III)
« Reply #296 on: August 05, 2017, 01:10:58 PM »
For Sam:

Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)

My apologies for the late review.  Certified Copy has been on my watchlist for years, and I'm glad Sam has given me the opportunity to finally catch up with it. The film begins with a British writer (William Shimell) speaking about his book, Certified Copy, to a group of people in Tuscany.  In his book he argues the authenticity in works of art doesn't necessarily matter as the forgery in itself is its own work of art.  In the audience is a woman (Juliette Binoche), she is distracted by her son, but she wants to meet up with the author, so she leaves her number with the host.  The author meets the woman at her shop, and she proceeds to take him around Tuscany to various locations, a gallery, a coffee shop, a restaurant, a hotel.  I saw A Taste of Cherry earlier this year, and there are definitely similarities, the conversations while driving, the ambiguity, the cryptic nature of the the purpose of the interaction.  I was also reminded of both Before Sunrise and Before Sunset/Midnight (at different times during the film).  This meandering conversational nature of the film.  They stop at a cafe and the writer takes a call outside and the woman proceeds to have a conversation with the shop employee.  It's here where the film shifts.  The shop employee thinks they are married, and the woman doesn't correct her, then the rest of the film the two leads talk and act as if they have been married for 15 years. What are we to believe? The first half of the film or the second half?  Does it matter? Kiarostami presents both halves that have clues that could lead us to decide that either half could be the "authentic" version of this relationship.  It's very thought provoking, it languid, it's painful, it's sad, it's familiar, it's hopeful, it's hopeless, it's beautiful.  This film has stuck with me since my viewing a few days ago.  I definitely want to go back and rewatch, especially the first half again, to see if I notice anything that I didn't the first time.  Thank you, Sam, for finally giving me a change to watch this film. 
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Sam the Cinema Snob

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Re: The Top 100 Club (Episode III)
« Reply #297 on: August 06, 2017, 06:13:23 AM »
Glad you finally got to watch it! It's definitely a film that holds up on a rewatch and you'll notice things you didn't before.

Bondo

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Re: The Top 100 Club (Episode III)
« Reply #298 on: August 06, 2017, 11:04:20 PM »
Johnny Guitar (1954)

Is there an AFI 100 FILMSPOTTER!s list? Because Emma Small would be very high on that list. So much so that it is perhaps the weak point in the film. Her single-minded hatred of Vienna (Joan Crawford) might be understandable given her romantic jealousy. What is less established is why most of the men in the community are so happy to go along with her paper thin aggression. What leverage does she have over them? But I guess it doesn't take much to rile up this lousy bunch.

If this point undercuts the plot, it doesn't touch Crawford's steely performance which lifts the film to where I could see it being a top-100 film for someone. She is a veritable symbol of anti-patriachy, both as an independent business woman in a male-dominated age, and in her shunning of arbitrary moral codes (and thus suspected of shunning all moral codes). If the film doesn't work as a logical assault, it does as a metaphoric conflict.

I'm not usually a fan of hyperviolence, but the ending here is where I could have gone with a nice repeated, multi-angle shot of Emma's head going pop ala Calvary. She deserved more than what she got.

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Re: The Top 100 Club (Episode III)
« Reply #299 on: August 07, 2017, 10:08:51 PM »
San Pietro (1945)

I'm trying to decide if this is the most in the thick of it documentary footage of war I've watched. In B&W, with middling film quality and an excess of shaky cinematography, testament to the chaos of the moment, this isn't actually a particularly graphic depiction of war. Narrative filmmaking has certainly delivered more lurid takes on the horrors of war. Somehow what settled in with me watching this was that war is insane...like, it really undercuts our perception of ourselves as a species that we have decided this is our means of settling disputes. At least as depicted in black and white during winter, San Pietro looks like a wasteland (not the verdant wine country it apparently is), the capture of which would hardly seem to justify the steep cost. Alas, I went in with a pessimistic mood and came out the same. The only thing I ponder is whether this film effort was intended to capture heroism and promote the war cause or simply to capture, because I didn't feel very rah rah.

 

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