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It's been a long time since I saw It, but from what I remember, Tim Curry is good and it's a valiant attempt but the whole thing is brought down by budget issues (Christ, that ending) and the constraints of television. Plus the book is such a masterpiece that the miniseries can't help but pale in comparison.
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So I watched Cyrus last night. It was a decent movie with a good performance by Jonah Hill, but the characterization was anemic and cliche (what is it with love triangles where the object of desire has no character and isn't desirable?) and the whole thing was shot with a bullshit hand-held style with a bunch of stupid zooms, like The Office but without the actual mockumentary conceit. PUT IT ON A TRIPOD DAMMIT
Yeah, after seeing the CGI in the Hunger Games suffer so much from the questionably needed shakey-cam, I'm getting a little tired of everyone jumping on that bandwagon.
Their shaky camera is different from action films in that it's more about DIY authenticity or whatever than thrilling the audience.
Like there's this scene in te Jeff trailer where the camera zooms in on Ed Helms' face as he hides behind a bush that makes the while thing feel like a home movie.
But anyway I hate their films and I hate them.
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Willis?
Well, to be fair, the book had that
Anyone else see A Dangerous Method? I was looking forward to it, and the film has some good performances and production values, but it seems to really have no major theme other than, "Jung was different from Freud because he liked getting him some."
Duly edited.
What is the statute for spoilers around here? I assumed that something over twenty years old would be fair game. :?
I saw this recently, and enjoyed it. Great performances, and even very funny at times. I do agree on the lack of really strong thematic thrust, but that may be due to it just "telling the story" (which is adapted from play that is based on the true events). Then again, that's not an excuse for not feeling the themes--nobody writes a play without some themes in mind. I probably need to watch it again at some point, though.
/spoiled
TIME NAZIS
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You know, looking at their photo reminds me of something movies get wrong all the time.
Why is it that in most period dramas nobody ever actually wears their hair, beards, or mustache as they would have. Leo should have definitely been rocking the twirly-bar.
Some do, but I think even the most authenticity-minded productions end up falling prey to time and cost issues when it comes to coifs. Chinatown's a good example - Nicholson and Dunaway's hair don't give away its 70s origins, but check out random extra number one here:
More generally, I've always been struck by how, even though it's not like 70mm film or sound recording have changed that monumentally in the last thirty or forty years, it's always trivially easy to pick out, from a lineup of three or four movies taking place in the same era (1930s Los Angeles, for instance), which one was made in the 70s, which in the 80s, which in the 90s, etc., even though, given equivalently persnickety directors, that doesn't seem like it should be the case.
What I imagine, though it's not like I've undertaken an exhaustive study of the subject, is that the creatives involved in a period movie (the production designer, costumer, cinematographer, and so forth) tend to unconsciously mediate their influences to highlight stuff that seems appropriate or fashionable for the movie's actual era, and we pick up on that in turn. Like that Chinatown image - nothing about it beside the helmet hair is really glaringly inappropriate, but Nicholson's lapels seem a shade on the large side, and while the warm, earthy color palette isn't out of place for hot summer LA, it also seems right at home in context for 1974. I imagine that if it had been made in 1987, Nicholson's suit would have been darker and the tie would be more vivid.
Actual Play: Mage: the Awakening - At the Edge of All Things
I've watched the movie 2-3 times
I've watched the performance of Hamlet 2 probably 30 times
It's not really until the later 90s that accuracy above all else seems to be the watchword amongst those who care. If you look at something like a Coen brothers movie, be it early nineties on, or a Woody Allen, those guys are super sticklers. But average Hollywood didn't seem to start really "getting" it until the late 90s (e.g. L.A. Confidential is just a very spot on looking movie).
But the ideas about clothing reflecting their time of making is true for older films. How much I can forgive seems to be how directly related to how well the clothing from the era looked in general.
Oh, I've read It several times; it's one of my favorite books and so I'd hate for somebody to see the ending and get spoiled (especially since it was described in a really reductive and snarky way--not that there's anything wrong with that) and decide not to read it.
@Jakobcosh, I think you're probably correct, but I also think it's pretty easy to peg a movie to a decade based purely on the way the film stock looks.
My period gripe is the way everybody costumes in grey and brown, even though we know that past fashions were as (or more) colorful than they are now, simply because the actual examples of clothing we still have to look at it have lost their dyes over time. It's one of those anachronisms/inaccuracies that feel more real to most moviegoers than the truth, like sound in space. (Or my favorite example: Kubrick once tried to shoot guns and gunshots with the sound out of sync with the image, because in real life and for that time period's guns, you actually would see the smoke from the rifle and then a beat later hear the crack of the shot. But when he tried it, everybody just thought it was a mistake, so he scrapped it.)
You know, I'd never run into this bit of pop culture trivia before.
I'm not whining, mind you, because odds of me reading IT were already pretty low; just noting that it may not be as culturally pervasive as you thought.
Steam: DigitalArcanist | XBoxLive: DigitalArcanist | PSN: DigitalArcanist | Backloggery: Houn
I kind of felt the same way. Been pondering it a little since then but I never found much to really say about it. Fassbender and Mortensen nailed it though.
Even when interesting things cropped up like
Nah, that's all Kubrick.
Dude's estate is full of big boxes crammed full of index cards full of stuff, each concerning scores of details for one. little. thing. in something he was up to at the time.
For example, I believe he had an entire shoebox stuffed with photos of different doorway entrances when deciding which one should be used in a scene for one shot in Eyes Wide Shut.
Another movie that I felt was tremendously poor about its detail w/r/t its period setting was The Godfather pt3. It's a movie that is supposed to be set during the heady disco days of New York in the late 1970s, and everyone in the movie looks like they just walked off the set of Clerks. Which I always felt was a double failure, as the movie was not only a big-budget prestige picture, but its two predecessors were some of the best examples of period costuming in all of cinema history.
Godfather 3 is truly a shitty movie on so many levels.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2004/mar/27/features.weekend
One thing I've come to realize about all the Aniquity Period Pieces how everyone's got the stateliest King's English going on in the way they talk, when, well, that may not have even been CLOSE to the way Romans/etc would've sounded in the original tongue. The whole patois of the speech was probably nothing of the sort.
Sometimes I wonder if Julius Caesar's whole cadence and meter would be more along the lines of, say, some guy from Kentucky. It's the sort of thing we just won't ever know.
He'd sound vaguely Italian.
Not quite, actually. When Rome fell, the people in power hired Plutarch to make a new language because people were done with the tongue of the empire. So he prettymuch crafted the Italian language to with the intent of being very unlike whatever they were using in Rome before.
I mean, it was Romantic so it fed off a lot of the Iberian and Gaul dialects in terms of structure, so it wasn't all new, but...yeah. Italian didn't exist during the actual Roman Empire.
Well, the Norwegians tried to create a 'new' language when they became independent from Denmark but 125 years later most still write and speak the old language. Dialect might be a better word for it instead of language.
I'm also guessing that the fact that Latin-Americans pronounce Spanish differently from the actual Spaniard would mean that while the language may change, the pronouncement stay pretty close, so that Italian is most likely pronounced much like they pronounced Latin.
Than again, I don't speak any of the four languages I just mentioned so I might just be talking out of my ass. Just like in movies!! (Got that back on topic, oh yeah)