NOW WATCHING

..the Rolling Stones at Hyde Park (2013), which is on BBC 1 right now. Charlie Watts is, what, 72? Bloody hell. What is it with drummers being slightly older than other band members, when you really want them to be a bit younger?! I really canny see Nicko drumming & touring seriously at this age; he'd really, really have to look after himself. Anyway, Mick is 70, Keith 70 later this year, & Ronnie is a bit younger --they all look fucking old, but still pretty sprightly. You wonder how long they'll seriously keep playing like this...
 
I watched 2 films today.

The Time Machine (2002) - Based on the novella by H.G. Wells and starring Guy Pearce as the protagonist Dr Alexander Hartdegen. I remember watching this film years back when it was new, and I had been thinking of getting the DVD to watch it again for a couple of years now. Strangely, even though it is probably 9 or 10 years since I watched it, I remembered it clearly. The first 20-25 minutes are brilliant, but after that it is leaning towards mediocre in some parts. The later part of the story is not developed enough and I think the monsters are silly. However, I still believe that the film is good mainly due to the fact that Guy Pearce carries it through and that the ending is great. The special effects and the design of the time machine itself is nothing short of spectacular.

Outlander (2008) - Loosely based on Beowulf, the film begins with spacetraveler Kainan crash-landing on Earth in A.D. 709. There he is captured by Vikings, and brought to their settlement. The settlement is soon attacked by the alien creature that Kainan was transporting, and Kainan becomes determined to track down the alien. I came to this with the plot description in mind, and my expectations was not high. What I got instead was a really well-made adventure movie with great acting and truly A-level production values. Jim Caviezel is excellent as the protagonist, and the cast also includes John Hurt in a supporting role as the Viking king Hrothgar. The story is great and even if it is not original, it is handled well and by the time the film ends, I am fully convinced.
 
Black Wizard said:
Agreed. I'm sick of Hollywood remakes of classic films. The new Italian Job was dreadful, and wasn't even set in Italy.:nuts2:
Click to expand...

I do not agree. Even if many remakes are considered worse than the originals, there have been a few really great ones. 3:10 To Yuma comes to mind. The 2007 remake is one of my favourite films. And even if they are just good remakes, they help keep the originals from being forgotten. I would never have know about many films had not the remakes been done. I am 20 years old, and I am not interested in cinema farther back than say the late 60's, and even then it is a stretch. It is not accessible. There are too many things that clash and makes the communication with the text hard and frustrating. And then I have studied literature at university level, spent weeks reading and discussing and fighting old texts that are important in Western society and found the same thing there. We discussed these matters at great length. Old stories always need to find new ways, or else they are forgotten. Film is the medium which most have happened to because it is so much younger than the written text.

With books you would have to go further back. Some older texts have to be read in special editions riddled with footnotes about the lost references that were widely known at the time. Could you read today's texts the same way 50-100-200 years in the future? Of course not. The events on which they build would in most cases be completely forgotten, and all you would have be what historians considered important. Or footnotes to the particular text, if a scholar considered the work important enough.

Would someone read Beowulf today? Probably not. What is then wrong by making a film of it, letting people know of one of the oldest surviving stories of Western literature? It is what always have been done. Before there was no printed text, there was an oral tradition of telling stories, and the stories only existed in the moment they were told. Our whole tradition of storytelling is still greatly influenced by that tradition.

Stories find their ways. If no one wanted a remake, they would not be done.
 
Maturin said:
I am 20 years old, and I am not interested in cinema farther back than say the late 60's, and even then it is a stretch. It is not accessible.
Click to expand...
May I invite you with the following to the Classic Cinema topic?
The last few years I have been getting more and more into older films. Older films? You mean, OLD films? Sounds boring doesn't it? Old is dull. Old is black and white. Old is slow.

Unfortunately, many people nowadays suffer from these prejudiced thoughts.
They appreciate current trends. Fast stuff. Easy stuff. Stuff that's now in the movie theater. All that's new is cool.

Alright then, what's nice about older, let's say classic films? I'll try to explain my point of view.

Earlier, I had never been so much into directors or actors. A film was good or not that good, regardless of the maker of this film. Until my wife introduced me to Alfred Hitchcock. He was the master of suspense and many of his ideas and techniques have been admired and later used by others. The tension he created is amazing!

Together we watched a Hitchcock-film, then another one... and suddenly I realized that it was mighty interesting to discover more and more of his work. It's like getting into the discography of Iron Maiden. :)

At the same time more things were happening. In films sometimes you can be impressed by a certain role or actor for the first time. I started liking people like Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Gregory Peck. I had to know what other films they did - what kind of genres etc. Like this, I got into a genre of which I wasn't aware of that much.:

Film noir --> From wikipedia: Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe Hollywood crime dramas that set their protagonists in a world perceived as inherently corrupt and unsympathetic. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as stretching from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. Film noir of this era is associated with a low-key black-and-white visual style that has roots in German Expressionist cinematography, while many of the prototypical stories and much of the attitude of classic noir derive from the hardboiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Depression. Way more info --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_noir

My favorite elements in films are good stories / scripts, tension, the earlier mentioned suspense. A film for me has to be exciting, giving the anxious feeling of uncertainty about what is about to happen. In real life such feelings are terrible, but in film! The film noir genre fits excellent with these demands :)

The best tool to explore films is imo The International Movie Database:

http://www.imdb.com

I checked some ratings and saw that the director Kurusawa has many high ratings. After the first film (Seven Samurai) I had to see more of this fantastic creator! His biggest strength is the way of telling a story, how real it looks.

The last years I saw many old films (from "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (1920) till let's say the fifties/sixties).
The forties and fifties are probably my favorite decades.

---------


So what's my point:

Everyone could look back. There's a whole world left to be discovered. For everyone his / her own taste. ... [continued in topic]
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
Black Wizard said:
Agreed. I'm sick of Hollywood remakes of classic films. The new Italian Job was dreadful, and wasn't even set in Italy.:nuts2:
Click to expand...

I am not "sick" of the remakes themselves, I am sick of them not being done well. Like Maturin, I think some have been well done and some (Like John Carpenter's The Thing) surpass the original. I think True Grit was one of those occasions. IMO the original is just laughable by today's standards, many disagree and that's just fine. I HATED the Rollerball remake and don't get me started on Tim Burton's version of Planet of the Apes, however the reboot Rise of the Planet of the Apes was amazing, specially considering the source material and the original films. The team that created was very smart in rebooting the franchise, in a way starting from scratch rather than try and compete with the classic original.

Some remakes are necessary, updating it for current audiences, making it relatable. Some films I don't see being remade EVER. Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, Wizard of Oz (The Wiz is more of a retelling than a remake), etc. Some are clever retellings like "O' Brother, where art thou?" is based on the Odyssey, but you'd never guess it. 10 Things I hate About You, with the late Heath Ledger is based on Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. The late 90's were rife with teeny-bopper adaptations of his works, some ok, some really bad.

If anything they get people talking, then there some old fool saying, "The original was better! You damn kids with your hipping and your hopping! Don't know nuttin' 'bout Jaaazz music!" So it gets people looking at the originals and making up their own mind. I for one would LOVE a remake of the Star Wars Prequels, I don't care if it hasn't been 20 years.
 
Without getting into movie bashing, as I did in The Hobbit thread, I'd like to pick up on a few points...
Maturin said:
Some older texts have to be read in special editions riddled with footnotes about the lost references that were widely known at the time.
Click to expand...
Some of us actually quite enjoy this you know...
Onhell said:
The team that created was very smart in rebooting the franchise, in a way starting from scratch rather than try and compete with the classic original.
Click to expand...
Eh, if they'd started from scratch, they wouldn't have been making a film about monkeys that had been made before. "Rebooting" by definition is about reusing older material. Nothing wrong with that; but if it's shit, it just looks lazy.
Onhell said:
Some films I don't see being remade EVER.
Click to expand...
Is it the mission of Hollywood to remake everything or something? I'd hope most (when you count up everything that's been filmed) don't get remade.
Onhell said:
I for one would LOVE a remake of the Star Wars Prequels, I don't care if it hasn't been 20 years.
Click to expand...
Why do you want them to waste all this money? These films cause mindboggling amounts of money to make (or remake). Do you honestly think the end artistic product is worth it? As I've said elsewhere, I certainly don't.
 
CriedWhenBrucieLeft said:
Without getting into movie bashing, as I did in The Hobbit thread, I'd like to pick up on a few points...

Why do you want them to waste all this money? These films cause mindboggling amounts of money to make (or remake). Do you honestly think the end artistic product is worth it? As I've said elsewhere, I certainly don't.
Click to expand...

The first Star Wars was fairly cheap. Movies don't have to be expensive to be good or done "right." Look at the LotR trilogy. BECAUSE it was going to be so expensive to make each movie individually they just shot it as one big production and sliced it up in 3. Star Wars films can take a cue from that instead of doing it the now, "old fashioned" way of taking 3 freaking years for each films. The fact that The Hobbit and LotR were released one a year was a studio decision, but the movies were already done, they could've released them every 6 months (like The Matrix II and III) or three months in a row.

So to answer your question... Yes, I want them to waste that money because ANYTHING would be better than those atrocious movies.
 
If you get a decent translation, you can have that over with in an hour, actually.
 
I really enjoyed the Kalevala when I read it; although I took longer than an hour to read it! :D (--I'm a slow reader tho'...) The translation I read was also very smooth; quite a lot of humour in it too. Beowulf I've read; being a massive Tolkien reader/collector, that was a given though.
 
I'm a slow reader too. The fastest I've read a book was three days, Micheal Crichton's Prey, literally could not put it down, in those three days I must have slept a collective 8 hours, did zero homework and I may have skipped a class or two lol. After that Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet took me a Month, but it is over 1000 pages. It usually takes me a week or two to make it through an interesting book.
 
Taking literature courses at university level helps you overcome slow reading... Now I can easily read 200 pages in one go, and generally finish shorter novels in 2 days. 80-100 pages an hour could be a fair estimate. Not overly fast, but still not slow.

On topic, I watched Outlander again yesterday. Not something I do often, unless the film is great. Which it is, of course.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top