I certainly agree with your thoughts here, and The Straight Story and Lucky DO have that tie of David Lynch.
Its been a long time since I've seen The Straight Story but I certainly remember how it, too, took up the importance of "ordinary events for ordinary people" -- but in that case with a very EXTRA ORDINARY premise(true?): An old man driving hundreds of miles on a John Deere to make amends. And Richard Farnsworth ended up with a good final (?) film, too. (I put in question marks where I'm only guessing.)
As I note in another post, i elected to watch "Lucky" without reading any reviews, so I didn't know if it was well received, I wasn't sure how long Stanton lived after making it, or where the plot would go (I did watch the trailer and it did hook me in .) Reading up afterwards, I learned that it was VERY well reviewed(what I could find), that Stanton died before its release. And the story was a nice one.
I suppose The Straight Story will forever stand apart because of its "gimmick" (the John Deere drive) and its role in the David Lynch catalog(surprisingly "straight" and non-surreal), but that movie does nonetheless fit in nicely with other movies about older men (and women, I know there are some out there) making the quiet most of their lives "late in the third act."
As should we all.
PS. This is terrible: I've never seen Paris, Texas, though I've been reading about it for years. I guess I better go take a look at Harry Dean Stanton's OTHER lead role, when he was younger, but let's face it: the fellow looked pretty much the same for his entire career.
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Lucia2016 (612)
2 years ago
I didn't realize the director was the guy from Fargo i saw the surname and that Dvid Lynch and Stanton were acting and assumed it was his son or something because having a film to honour an old character actor much like Straight Story just gave me the feeling this had his stamp all over this film, i guess i was wrong about that but we don't know the legnth of his involment maybe he did have a hand i don't know.
Well a funny thing about Straight Story which i have seen come up a few times which is debated is that it is actually a lot more darker film than it appears, there are apparently hints that the old man may have done some really bad things. Like setting the house on fire that killed his Grandkids.
You should really watch Paris Texas i know when people hype films it can ruin them so i won't say too much but it is beautifully Directed and has one of the best Scores i have ever heard
It is a beautifully sad film, one i am not even sure i 'get' but i dont think it matters you definitely feel it
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
I will get around to Paris, Texas -- I am quite the sucker for great scores, as a starter.
And my memory is so weak on the story of The Straight Story that I just plain don't remember the dark parts, or the back story with the house fire. Which means I should go back and take a look at that movie, too!
I will.
The "world of cinema on paper" can be very confusing. With Lucky, we have actor John Carroll Lynch directing director David Lynch in an acting role!
Its good to try out different jobs....
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Lucia2016 (612)
2 years ago
I have come to realization lately that in the grand pecking order of good film making it is Screenplay/Writing first and score second.
I think Scores have done a lot of heavy lifting for a lot of films and if you took them out of it you wouldn't be left with half as good- Imagine Jaws without that track.
Directing and Acting are a nice garnish on top and if you get them all together then now we're talking but if you have just the first two you can have a great film.
You can't polish a turd
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
I have come to realization lately that in the grand pecking order of good film making it is Screenplay/Writing first and score second.
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Yes. Screenplay above everything. Its funny. Its been said that screenwriters have little power in Hollywood -- stars have more, directors have more, producers have more -- but we've got a few 'writer-directors" who have been given all the wealth fame and power Hollywood has to offer --- Billy Wilder, Woody Allen(for a few decades there), Quentin Tarantino, The Coens, and Paul Thomas Anderson modernly. If they write REALLY good, AND they direct...nobody can beat them. Major stars flock to them. Plus: Aaron Sorkin, more a writer than a director, but his screenplays have gotten him a lot of power and attracted a lot of stars.
The Oscars have two screenwriting categories -- Adapted(from books or plays, a very competitive category) and Original(less competitive, fewer originals are filmed.)
And in the modern history of Hollywood, its often one of those two screenplay awards that goes to the movie that SHOULD have won Best Picture that year. Examples:
Chinatown(1974) instead of Godfather II.
Network (1976) instead of Rocky.
Pulp Fiction (1994) instead of Forrest Gump.
Fargo (1996) instead of The English Patient.
LA Confidential (1997) instead of Titanic.
(Ok, so I can dream.)
The point is that BOTH the Best Picture winners AND the also rans have great scripts, that's a big old bunch of great scripts that made a big old bunch of great movies.
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CONT
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
I think Scores have done a lot of heavy lifting for a lot of films and if you took them out of it you wouldn't be left with half as good- Imagine Jaws without that track.
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Absolutely. I think a lot of Jaws would fall pretty flat without the John Williams score and that famous "duh-duh-duh" locomotive track for the shark.
The Academy rewarded Jaws with Best Original Score accordingly -- about 15 years too late for a movie that SHOULD have won in 1960 -- Psycho with its famous "screeching" murder motif that made even more history than the Jaws score(and imagine the murders and climax in Psycho WITHOUT that music.)
John Williams "made" Spielberg movies just as Bernard Herrmann "made" Hitchcock movies(Vertigo isn't Vertigo without its score.) Alas, Hitchcock got jealous or scared or something and fired Herrmann from Torn Curtain and never worked with him again.
The other John Williams score for a Spielberg movie that made all the difference was the one for ET -- it took the ordinary and made it EXTRA ordinary, helped the movie draw tears from the audience and was truly epic a the very end. The Academy awarded THAT one, too.
On the "beautiful and heartbreaking" side, I always recommend Marvin Hamlisch's sweet and sad main theme for "Sophie's Choice." That Holocaust-based movie was too rough for me to take but one time, but the theme has always stayed with me; it conjures up an immediate emotional experience while sparing me the grueling movie itself.
And so forth and so on.
CONT
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
Special note: the scores and songs of Henry Mancini in the 60's. Moon River and the score of Breakfast at Tiffany's. The Pink Panther. Days of Wine and Roses. On the scary side: Experiment in Terror and Wait Until Dark. (Hitchcock FIRED Mancini from Frenzy!) Mancini was Blake Edwards composer until Mancini's death, its another Spielberg/Williams; Hitchcock/Herrmann combo and longer lasting than the latter. And yet Mancini provided scores to OTHER directors -- Terrence Young(Wait Until Dark), Howard Hawks(Hatari, with Baby Elephant Walk on the radio)..others. (But not Hitchcock, Damn.)
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
Directing and Acting are a nice garnish on top and if you get them all together then now we're talking but if you have just the first two you can have a great film.
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Absolutely. Directors and actors KNOW this. Especially directors. As one critic noted "if one movie has a great script and the other a bad script, does the bad one fail because it was DIRECTED badly?"
Of course, that's why a number of writers became directors -- to do their stuff right.
Actors -- movie stars -- can often entertain us just by standing around being beautiful or saying things in their great voices. But boy do they stress and strain when given a mediocre script.
Paul Newman once said "If I only acted in good scripts, I would only work every five years or so." He knew while making his movies which ones were going to be hits and which ones weren't -- and it was ALWAYS the script that told him. Still, "mid-range" movies with mediocre scripts are often saved just by having stars we like in them.
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This being a "Lucky" board, I must say that the film had a pretty good script, but -- as indie scripts sometimes do - it had to stress and strain a bit to "make itself important." David Lynch's speech about the tortoise was great(as was his line reading! He can ACT!)...Tom Skerritt's speech about WWII seemed a bit more "shoehorned in."
But the script won out in the end, in its constant attentiveness to Harry Dean Stanton's old but vibrant man , with his daily routine and his small but life-giving group of friends (and even his big conflict in the movie works out.) I liked James Darren's "Ungatz!" speech, too.
Can't remember much of the score for Lucky. I have to check it out again. But Mr. Stanton sang a traditional Mexican song, in Spanish, with real heart.
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You can't polish a turd
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No, but the studios sure have to TRY sometimes..
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Lucia2016 (612)
2 years ago
'And in the modern history of Hollywood, its often one of those two screenplay awards that goes to the movie that SHOULD have won Best Picture that year. Examples'
Good point, in fact i don't hold that much stock in the Oscars any more i am more of a Palm D'or man, the amount of Slave/Gay/Holocoust films that win you can't help but think the winners are more based on the topic than the material.
So when the winners are announced every year i skip past the best Film/Actor/Director all the way down until the lowly best screenplay winner, further more in the same way i am sceptical of the winners i wonder if the Screenplay 'Winner' is laced with academy pandering material so it's actually the nominees who i am looking out for.
'The Oscars have two screenwriting categories -- Adapted(from books or plays, a very competitive category) and Original(less competitive, fewer originals are filmed'
Interesting you say that i recently watched Who's Affraid of Virginia Woolf and it's already an all timer for me that was a case of having ALL the ingredients
Marlon Brando said in that film based on his private tapes that Hollywood is a Business, it isn't Art!
He was very disillusioned by this.
I think maybe a lot of Actors and watchers seek out deep and meaningful films but ultimately they are off the conveyer belt stock rehashed material,
However there are Truly great pieces of 'Art' that manage to slip through the Hollywood net and it's fishing them out which is the skill.
So many times i have been caught out by something that looks interesting in the trailor but is then a nothing lazy film.
Bit like Music i suppose if you try to be too experimental you lose a lot of the casuals-££ so you need to play it safe to keep your job- but the ones who manage to sneak in a bit of substance under the guise of a standard film are truly worth their weight in Gold
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Lucia2016 (612)
2 years ago
ernard Herrmann "made" Hitchcock movies(Vertigo isn't Vertigo without its score.) Alas, Hitchcock got jealous or scared or something and fired Herrmann from Torn Curtain and never worked with him again.
I will have to look into that, i wonder if that coincided with his decline
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
Bernard Herrmann "made" Hitchcock movies(Vertigo isn't Vertigo without its score.) Alas, Hitchcock got jealous or scared or something and fired Herrmann from Torn Curtain and never worked with him again.
I will have to look into that, i wonder if that coincided with his decline
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It DID coincide with Hitchcock's decline but there's a "chicken or the egg" element here: Hitchcock last used Herrmann on "Marnie"(1964), fired him off of "Torn Curtain" and never used him again. So Herrmann can be said to have "been pushed off the train before the wreck."
The run of Hitchcock's movies after The Birds in 1963 was generally seen to be "not good" overall, so Herrmann scores could not have saved those films. There was one exception -- the sexual psychothriller Frenzy of 1972. It is too bad -- given how well that film was reviewed -- that it did not have a Hitchcock score.
But here is the thing: a "kindler, gentler Hitchcock" -- if only in gratitude for the scores of Vertigo and Psycho alone! -- coulda shoulda used his clout to KEEP Herrmann there to the end, just like Blake Edwards did with Mancini, and Spielberg is doing with John Williams. (Irony: Herrmann died in late 1975, and COULD have done all four Hitchcock scores from Torn Curtain to the end: Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy, Family Plot.)
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
'And in the modern history of Hollywood, its often one of those two screenplay awards that goes to the movie that SHOULD have won Best Picture that year. Examples'
Good point, in fact i don't hold that much stock in the Oscars any more
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Who does? The ratings for the show keep going down as does the familiaity of audiences with the winning films.
I offer this comparison between the popularity of films that won Best Picture in the 70s to today:
1970: Patton
1971: The French Connection
1972: The Godfather
1973: The Sting
1974: Godfather II
1975: Cuckoo's Nest
1976: Rocky
1977: Annie Hall
1978: The Deer Hunter
1979: Kramer vs Kramer
...those were all hits, some were blockbusters and a LOT of people saw them and knew them.
Today: Nomadland? CODA? Moonlight?
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i am more of a Palm D'or man, the amount of Slave/Gay/Holocoust films that win you can't help but think the winners are more based on the topic than the material.
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Afraid so. Also biopics and "affliction" films(as with CODA, with a deaf cast in the main.) I expect that the Academy would answer: "These are the films we want to support and extol. this is our mission." But...audiences aren't always there for these films. (Sometimes, sure.)
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CONT
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
'The Oscars have two screenwriting categories -- Adapted(from books or plays, a very competitive category) and Original(less competitive, fewer originals are filmed'
Interesting you say that i recently watched Who's Affraid of Virginia Woolf and it's already an all timer for me that was a case of having ALL the ingredients
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I can't recall if Virginia Woolf -- from a Broadway play -- won one of the Screenwriting awards. Best Picture was A Man For All Seasons that year, it was from a play, too...I wonder if THAT script won. I'll check.
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Marlon Brando said in that film based on his private tapes that Hollywood is a Business, it isn't Art!
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Brando was a bit of a nut in his final decades, but he was on the money ABOUT money and how it drove EVERYTHING: Hollywood, television, politics. (I would say that today's polarized politics is a direct function of cable TV and the internet earning the most money off of polarized opinion writing.)
Brando turned his contempt over Hollywood money to his own use in his final films: seeking very high pay and top billing for cameos. He knew his value even if he didn't care that much about acting anymore.
He won two Best Actor Oscars -- both deserved -- but turned the second one down.
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He was very disillusioned by this.
I think maybe a lot of Actors and watchers seek out deep and meaningful films but ultimately they are off the conveyer belt stock rehashed material,
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There are still good films made and there is a great library of good to great films at our fingertips.
Movie stars in general at a certain level have always tended to mix "one for them, one for me" -- commercial films with Oscar-bait of serious content. Consider Jack Nicholson in 1988 (Ironweed for art) and 1989(Batman for his bank account.)
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
However there are Truly great pieces of 'Art' that manage to slip through the Hollywood net and it's fishing them out which is the skill.
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Well, the critics who are paid to see EVERYTHING try to find those for us, but they don't always match our individual tastes.
I don't think that "Lucky" got any Oscar love despite HDS's last perf. Its a "good little movie" with a fairly ambitious script elevated by a very good cast. But in the end, I don't think the makers had the clout or connections to get Oscar notice.
A different kind of "good little movie" from last year -- Licorice Pizza -- got noms for Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay. Partially because its a good movie(I loved it) but also because its maker -- Paul Thomas Anderson -- has "auteur" cred and power in Holllywood (and it was a story about the edges of show business and Hollywood.)
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