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swanstep (2715)
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Monstro Elisasue deja vu?
'Verify that you're human' test layer
Italian designer claims Hitchcock's women as inspiration for latest collection
Ultimate Movie Rankings Site
VistaVision returneth
Isn't the Nomad just a big, floating, sitting duck?
SNL online archive including Anthony Perkins' ep..
QT shares how much he likes Simon Oakland's big scene in Psycho
Hitchcock never made a self-conscious 'magnum opus' (thoughts on Megalopolis and the like)
Margo Epper (Mrs Bates in the window and with blackened face behind the shower curtain)
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It's disturbing to me how much I *feel* like I can know where Coppola's getting his ideas from. I'd put money, for example, on his having got the idea for Wow Platinum from Sarah Michelle Gellar's apothegm-spouting ('Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted.') character in Southland Tales (2006), porn superstar and terrorist wannabe, Krysta Now. And Meg's goes-nowhere subplot about a Russian satellite falling out of orbit and crashing onto the city.... that's pasted over from Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World (1993) (where the subplot was *also* a waste of time). Coppola's semi-mystical take on the Chrysler Building and general freewheelingness is right out of Matthew Barney's triumphantly weird art-film Cremaster 3. And so on. Technically then, Meg. is a synchretic text - Francis has had the basic Metropolis-y script for 40 years, but then he's cut and pasted in ideas from every big-idea, broadly futuristic or apocalyptic movie he's seen in that period, all without addressing any of his underlying script or character problems. The deepest pools of paste-ins here are those from The Matrix and Dark City... and that's OK, a *lot* of people were inspired by the ideas and techniques of those films at the time - e.g., video games like Mirror's Edge - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzmUde_EK5Y and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjNPHmXtwx0 - but I don't see that Francis has *done* anything significant with these influences (he was just too old perhaps to 'get it'). Larry Fishburne as Cesar Catalina's driver and one of the film's narrators presides Morpheus-like over Meg. but he *does* very little and as a kind of paste-in can't solve any of the film's underlying problems. No one can take away from what Coppola achieved in the 1970s and occasionally since but Meg. is a hell of an expensive folly.
<blockquote>Its interesting about how narration and/or voiceovers can HELP a movie (Goodfellas, Casino, and The Wolf of Wall Street for Scorsese -- the narration makes everything funnier , if nothing else) or how it can look like "screenwriting narration.</blockquote>Yes, amazing isn't it? voice over can be glorious *or* terrible. As Spinal Tap famously said:
David St Hubbins: It's such a fine line between stupid, and uh...
Nigel Tufnel: Clever.
<blockquote>Aubrey Plaza</blockquote>
She wears some sexy outfits etc. in Meg. that are going to frame-grabbed for all eternity by her fans... but her character is so silly and says such silly stuff all the time (often with a 'snipping scissors' sound fx added to the soundtrack to punctuate her every sentence - madness!) that I was not amused. Note that Aubrey's character is called 'Wow Platinum' and at one point they do the obvious joke with the name: Aubrey's character rants on to Adam Driver's genius character, Cesar Catalina, and the scene ends/tails off with him walking away shaking his head, 'Wow...'
I dunno, maybe I'm the wrong person to appreciate Meg.. I'm the sort of viewer who's never been able to get on board with the resuscitation of Verhoeven's Showgirls - to me it always was and is a flatout bad movie.And recently I tried to watch the latest, supposedly purified, elevated cut of Caligula (1979). Nope, couldn't finish it. It's still terrible, incompetently shot, staged, edited, the sort of thing you can't believe for a second. It may be the best version of Caligula but that's still an amateurish embarrassment in my view. I don't doubt that Meg. has enough in it that some cult following will probably develop around it but I know enough to know I won't be joining them.
An update on the terms of Avary and QT's podcast. In its first season the episodes were roughly two hours long (and normally covered three films) - all for free. In its (just-started) second season the fully free episodes are only an hour long and comprise the discussion of just the main film each week. To get the full (normally three-film) discussion each time you have to subscribe to Roger and Qt's Patreon at either $US5 or $US10 per month levels. Sigh...I guess they didn't want to have to deal with the advertizing that most podcasts use to keep things freely available (perhaps saving advertzing-free versions for the patreon subscribers).
<blockquote>So is QT losing on his argument about "old directors in decline?"</blockquote>I've looked around online but haven't been able to find any QT remarks about Megalopolis. Having seen it now, it definitely feels like the sort of embarrassing, hopelessly out-of-touch, low-action, "Old Man's" movie that QT has a horror of and wants to forestall himself from making. That said, the script which has apparently been in process since the '80s *does* feel incredibly young, like something a couple of tripping undergrads high on Metropolis and The Matrix and bits of their Western Civ and Western Lit core classes might pull together in a weekend. All the characters are very broadly drawn, symbolic class representatives (we learn in the first scene that the Randian super-genius protagonist can literally stop time with his mind but we later learn that his girlfriend and child can also exit from time like him - symbols!), never change at all, and exist just to give speeches at and about each other (and the movie itself keeps giving speeches to us - sententious, silly voiceovers and onscreen titles abound to kind of paper over the multitudinous cracks, solve myriad transition problems. etc.). It's a script that somebody might write before he/she encounters Mamet, Pinter, Chayefsky, and so on. You feel for the actors; they must have felt like they were just doing repeated acting exercises rather than either playing real characters or telling any real story. I'm guessing that QT and Avary will discuss Meg. sometime in this season of their podcast, and assuming they feel free to crack wise about it, it could be a hoot!
I don't find woke/not-woke discussions especially productive but I was a little incredulous at the film's premise that a very small, rural community would have at least 4, similarly-aged out lesbians in it. I'd guess instead that a typical trajectory for a young LBGT person in such a small community would be to have to move to a city or a college town to find that many people like themselves.
That is, a more realistic Elliott would have 'finding same-age LBGT friends and romantic partners' as part of her explicit motivation for heading off to the University of Toronto. The film's premise thus felt a little LBGT-wish-fulfillmenty to me, which may be part of what some people call 'woke'.
Also, Lynch's Dune has the odd good idea but it looks and sounds - score by Toto! - so terrible (seriously, if you watch it right after Star Wars 1977 - which drew a lot on the Dune book for its desert/Tatooine sequences - it's like there's been this terrible recession in sfx and music so that Lynch's Dune just feels like amateur hour) that for most people it's never been so much as basically watchable. Lynch has always disowned it for a reason. Literally *nobody* thinks that it's even close to being the definitive adaptation of a long, very-hard-to-adapt, important book. *Of course* other people were eventually going to have a go at adapting it. QT's position makes no sense.
<blockquote>QT said he will never watch Denis Vellenueve's "Dune" because its a remake of the Lynch 80's version.
Denis shot back: "I don't care if sees it or not...but I see mine as an original -- an adaptation of the book."</blockquote>QT's remark is quite strange (the differences between Lynch's and Villeneuve's 2-film version of the same underlying material are so enormous that no one completely sane would think that the mere existence of Lynch's version made the latter redundant). I'm guessing that QT feels a rivalry with Villeneuve, who's only made good or excellent films so far. I didn't much care for his Blade Runner sequel but most people seem to love it, and everything else I've seen from the Dunes to Arrival (although in that case I knew and loved the award-winning sci-fi short story it was based on and felt the film was clumsy and padded out compared to it - but if you hadn't read the stpry then maybe the good-enough movie worked better) to Sicario to Prisoners to his early films like Incendies and Polytechique has been pretty immaculate. His stuff has a corporate slickness about it, like Zemeckis and Spielberg or Abrams back in the day, so that it lacks the kind of personal edge that you get with QT, Scorsese, Lynch, Hitchcock etc.. If I'm honest, Villeneuve never seems quite a top-tier talent to me, and I suspect that he'll never be *my guy*. I suspect that QT holds this lack of personality against V. but to jump from that to not even seeing stuff as painstaking and kind of magnificent as the Dunes is kerrazy.
<blockquote>Well, isn't that sort of a paywall -- you have to pay for these outlets like Apples iTunes or Spotify?</blockquote>No, they're both completely free I can assure you, unless they mange to upsell you to some fancy package (which I've always been able to resist). For what it's worth, you can also listen to all episodes directly from Quentin and Roger's own website (they'll try to upsell you to their patreon page too mind you):
http://videoarchivespodcast.com/
<blockquote>A podcast, I guess(though paywall.)</blockquote>No, QT's 'Video Archives' podcast with Roger Avary and Avary's daughter is freely available - no paywalls - from most of the major podcast outlets as far as I know. For example, I get it through Apple's iTunes store but since I use spotify I also have the option of listening to it there. As it happens, the Video Archives podcast, which has been off for about 6 months, just began its second season with an ep. on the sub-par Peter Hyams-directed Gene Hackman thriller Narrow Margin (1990), a minor, late Edward Dmytryk thriller The Human Factor (1975), and a truly obscure junker Killpoint (1984). Life's too short for stuff like this!
1986 is one of those years when *my* official best picture goes to something I didn't see until later, at least March 1987: Lynch's Blue Velvet. Other things I rate highly: The Fly, Aliens, Decline of the American Empire, The Singing Detective, Stand By Me, The Mission (with its remarkable Morricone score). The Singing Detective is notable because it was a prestige TV miniseries, one of the greatest ever that got reviewed as if it was a movie-level event. Incredibly, all its episodes are watchable on youtube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI10_bFyqig&list=PLxyYxI-hs0bAilZC2ol8OLYDxp4WNPXno&index=128&pp=gAQBiAQB
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