Film

[david]

I didn't like The Conformist much, though the original novel is very good. I'm trying to think of a Bertolucci film I liked . . . The one with Liv Tyler was actually pretty good, because it was great to look at (like all his films) and he wasn't trying to show what a deep thinker he was. On the whole, airheads are better off sticking to making lighweight, airhead movies.

Oh yeah, and Last Tango is worth watching because Brando is brilliant in it, though the film doesn't make any sense and is otherwise worthless . . .

[manho]

"because Brando is brilliant in it"

actors who put in shit performance after shit performance for other directors are always brilliant in bertolucci films.

so his films always look great and always have great performances.

so he knows how to make a film look good and he knows how to get a performance out of actors, even mediocre ones. and he deals with important themes.

so if you want a film which deals with an important theme, which looks great and has great performances you can safely rent a bertolucci dvd.

the only thing he lacks is a sense of humour.

[david]

I don't know about that. DeNiro and Depadieu (and Donald Sutherland) are capable of good performances, but were all pretty awful in 1900. Trintignant has been much better in other films than he was in The Conformist. Except for Brando, who was crap in a fair number of films but also gave many other brilliant performances, I can't think of any outstanding performances in a Bertolucci film.

It's true he deals with important themes, but in such a heavyhanded and humourless way that I'm always wanting to throw popcorn at the screen. I thought Stealing Beauty was good because it didn't pretend it had anything very important to say about the world, it was just about the beautiful Tuscan scenery and the hot naked chicks.

[Cat Stevens]

can someone post the... what is the word... line-up... no... shit... wait.. the order of tonights Oscar awards... ekhm.. not that I'm really interested.. just wanna see the "best foreign film" award (go, Mikhalkov!)... 2 am here... hopefully it'll be in the first hour, with the best costume shit and stuff.

[cripes]

It was our wedding anniversary last week and the wife wanted to go out (horror of horrors for home-body Cripes) for dinner & a movie. She wanted to see No Country For Old Men.

I figured, Coen bros--no problem. I found it to be a tedious load of crap. Same awesome yellow tinted cinematography as O Brother Where Art Thou but without characters that anyone could give a shit about. A very precious few laffs and those laffs were the tired ass 'ironic' hipster laffs that go down well with young San Franciscans (think M&A humor).

The Coens did so well with the psycho murderer theme in Fargo. What's the fucking deal? Some cunts fill a movie with an ominous brand of 'atmosphere' and everyone thinks it's a masterpiece? "Atmosphere" is just another word for "air".

Dinner was ok. The wife liked the movie, but she's more a 'film' type than me...she also read the book and was able to appreciate it from that standpoint.

It was better than The Hudsucker Proxy I guess....

[manho]

"I found it to be a tedious load of crap."

if you want to win an oscar you have to make compromises.

[cripes]

It was a big sky nihilist western--all hat and no cattle.

[manho]

the first coen bros film i watched was that hudsucker thing. on tv in italy, dubbed. it's called mr hula hoop or something here. i thought it was shite. so when some friends were pushing lebowski on me i was saying, thanks but no thanks. but then someone really insisted and i watched it and it changed my life.

they say fargo is also good, haven't seen that one yet, but could it be that the coens have only made one or two good films and the others are just ordinary?

[cripes]

I don't think so. I always admire their style. I can watch Raising Arizona repeatedly. Lots of levels of humor to appreciate. I'd rank the Coen bros up there in the echelon.

[manho]

so what are the good ones? lebowski, obviously. fargo? raising arizona. any others?

[cripes]

I'd go to Fargo and Raising Arizona first. Those are my 2 faves of theirs. Barton Fink and Miller's Crossing are pretty kewl.

[manho]

ok. i'm gonna have a coen bros dvd extravaganza in the summer.

[david]

I thought No Country For Old Men was terrific. I didn't think it was very typical of the Coens though. It looked like a Coen Brothers film, but the way the story was told had a lot more to do with the original novel (which I'd already read and liked). And while I'll watch Tommy Lee Jones in almost anything, I thought he was even better than usual here.

I also think Fargo and Raising Arizona are their best, and then I'd go with Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing and Big Lebowski. I'd put No Country at about the same level as those. Then again, Barton Fink and O Brother, Where Art Thou? have some brilliant stuff in them too. I'd say all their films are worth watching except for Ladykillers, which was an awful remake of a very good film from the 50s. I even like The Hudsucker Proxy, except for the ending . . .

[cripes]

I didn't think it was very typical of the Coens though

There were only a few sections of dialog that reminded me that I was watching a Coen movie...kinda like Hitchcock cameos.

[owen]

according to my brother the first half of no country is a straightforward but good western and the 2nd half is just some weird shit....

[hills]

I've heard a lot of people complaining that No Country wasn't enough like a typical Coen movie. I loved it, though.

[manho]

The difference a year makes

If you're being reductive - and we are - you can boil cinema history down to the story of six years that altered the course of the movies. Here's how film journeyed from the Vitaphone sound system to torture porn
Friday February 29, 2008
Guardian

1927

The image of a blacked-up Al Jolson singing My Mammy in 1927's The Jazz Singer has come to define cinema's move from silence to sound, as if the talkies happened overnight. In fact, the first commercial showing of motion pictures with sound-on-film had taken place in New York in 1923, when a set of soundtracked shorts were placed on a bill with a silent feature. And the Vitaphone sound system employed by Warner Brothers on The Jazz Singer had been publicly introduced a year before, on the three-hour feature Don Juan, the first to employ a synchronised soundtrack throughout.

So why do we remember 1927? Because The Jazz Singer was the first commercial smash with sound. After opening on October 6, The Jazz Singer took $2.6m at the box office, nearly $1m more than Warner's previous highest-grossing film. Nevertheless, with the major studios still trying to work out which sound format they would back, there was no immediate rush to talkies - it took until June 1928 for anyone other than Warners to release a movie with dialogue - though by 1929 all the eight majors had seen the light (or heard the sound), and Fox president William Fox's proclamation to the New York Times that "in five years, no producer would think about making silent pictures" was proved correct.

The silents did not die without one last glorious hurrah, however. For 1927 also saw the release of arguably the most influential of all silent movies: Metropolis, Fritz Lang's expressionist masterpiece. Metropolis created a visual language for science fiction through its towering edifices and dystopian worldview - seen most clearly in Blade Runner - and provided direct inspiration for the comic book artists who invented superheroes (not for nothing does Superman live in Metropolis). Technically, too, Lang was pioneering, using the Schüfftan process of angled mirrors to make his miniature sets appear as huge cityscapes among which his actors walked. The technique has remained in use, and Peter Jackson employed it on The Return of the King.

But it wasn't all technical breakthroughs in 1927. The year also saw Hollywood establish the principal means by which it has maintained its own mythology, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded on January 11 1927. Henceforth, the world would listen when Hollywood patted itself on the back.
Michael Hann

1947

It was the best of times and the worst of times. In 1947, carrying on the surge in attendance that marked the war years, the American box office reached sales of 100m tickets a week. It has never again come near that number. And it was in 1947 that the Supreme Court judgment (long feared, long resisted) was being formulated that would compel the major studios to sell off the theatres they had owned. The golden age of the movies, it was decided, was founded on an un-American monopoly. In the same space of time, the craven studio system agreed to participate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. In just two years, the euphoria of victory and peace had given way to the paranoia of the cold war and the decision of Huac to make Hollywood a focus of its activities rooted the age of anxiety in Beverly Hills.

You could feel it in the best American films, not just Crossfire (a study of anti-Semitism), but in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, in which the Jimmy Stewart character, close to despair and suicide, has a vision of what his town might be like without him. That film ended cheerfully, but no one could forget its dark dream. In France, some critics saw the new brand of film from America - suspicious, shadowy, fatalistic - and they called the trend "film noir". In fact 1947 is a vintage year for the new genre, with Crossfire, Desperate, Out of the Past, Dark Passage, Gilda, Scarlet Street, Body and Soul, Kiss of Death.

Nor was film noir just an American sport: in Britain, it flourished with Odd Man Out and It Always Rains on Sunday; in France it was marked by Quai des Orfèvres, by Le Diable au Corps, and by Les Maudits. In Italy, neo-realism was underway and Vittorio De Sica was shooting Bicycle Thieves, the story of an impoverished man who needs a bike for his meagre job - sticking up movie posters in the city, posters of Rita Hayworth in Gilda.

Within a few years, it could be said that mainstream cinema was over. Could art movies fill the gap? One answer eventually came via two people born in 1947 - Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steven Spielberg.
David Thomson

1959

Few people realised it at the time, but 1959 was the year cinema got truly modern. Classical Hollywood was at its peak - the big hits included Ben-Hur, Some Like It Hot, North By Northwest, Imitation of Life and Anatomy of a Murder - but on both sides of the Atlantic, cinema was loosening its necktie. At that year's Cannes film festival came the first ripple of the French New Wave: François Truffaut's The 400 Blows.

Not for nothing was Truffaut labelled "the gravedigger of French cinema". He and his fellow critics had been laying into the conventional studio system for some time. They objected to its retrograde period dramas and literary and theatrical pretensions, but they also separated Hollywood's wheat from its chaff, labelling Orson Welles, Nicholas Ray, Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock as auteurs - film-makers with a distinct voice that transcended their material. Truffaut was the first of the critics to become an auteur himself, but his colleagues - Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer - were close behind.

The 400 Blows was not particularly revolutionary in content - a sympathetic but unsentimental portrait of a rebellious youth - but in form it was a breath of fresh air, literally. It took to the streets, the fairground, classrooms, the beach, the cinema, tracking its protagonist from rooftops, running alongside him, picking him out in street crowds. The New Wave suddenly made Hollywood movies look ludicrously stiff.

Across the Atlantic, one young American was already planting the seeds of indie cinema. A stage actor with no directing experience to speak of, let alone a script to work from, John Cassavetes borrowed equipment and money and let loose his beatnik acting troupe on the streets of New York and got on with it. The result was Shadows, a hip, jazz-backed semi-improvised story of interracial relationships. Few Americans knew what to make of Shadows, but the French New Wave hailed Cassavetes as a transatlantic cousin. Cassavetes and the French New Wave didn't destroy the studio system, but they certainly gave it something to worry about. They were the outsiders, but they proved that the outside was the most interesting place to be, and that young audiences wanted to see a world they could relate to on their screens.
Steve Rose

1967

Through the early and mid-1960s, the American movie industry watched helplessly as time, audiences, and the rest of the world's film-makers passed them by. Constrained by a superannuated Production Code that had watered down the content of studio movies for more than 30 years, the studios continued to lean heavily on westerns, war movies, musicals and epics, all to diminishing returns.

In 1967, that all began to change. Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (financed by MGM), a cryptic, unblinking portrait of the sexual exploits of a London photographer, was released without a Production Code seal and shrugged off by Hollywood as an impenetrable art film that would find little life outside New York. Instead, it became a hit in cities across the country and helped drive the last nail into the code's coffin. Westerns would never be the same after Sergio Leone's "Man With No Name" trilogy, and the stalwart heroics of two decades of second world war movies were replaced by the amoral brutality of Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen.

By the summer of 1967, the code was dead, Newark and Detroit were burning in race riots, and America's escalating involvement in Vietnam was becoming a nightly horror show on newscasts. And a couple of movies suddenly seemed to emerge out of a collective consciousness that wanted more out of Hollywood. Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde drew not only from the French New Wave but from the earlier studio films that had inspired those film-makers. The movie's deliberately disorienting lurch from comedy into bloody violence thrilled some critics and outraged others; the debate raged for months as the movie, all but left for dead by Warner Brothers, gradually grew into an immense hit. And Norman Jewison's race-relations-tinged murder mystery In the Heat of the Night, made on the cheap so that it could make a profit without having to play in the American south, became a major success and was one of three 1967 films that turned Sidney Poitier, if only briefly, into the biggest box-office star in the country, the first time a black man had ever held that position.

By the end of the year, Mike Nichols' The Graduate had opened; it was the first comedy to speak directly to the under-25-year-olds who then made up half of the US moviegoing audience, and the first to echo their rejection of their parents' values. The film's immense popularity (and that of Bonnie and Clyde) began a decade of American cinematic resurgence.
Mark Harris

· Mark Harris is the author of Scenes From a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood, published by Canongate in March

1975

For the US, 1975 looked like a year of dullness and smugness, defeat and retreat. In Hollywood, things were equally uncertain. The period had seen popular masterpieces such as The Godfather, The Exorcist and Chinatown. But the box office was ruled by that most flatulent genre: the disaster movie. Into these bland yet choppy waters entered a great white shark, and changed everything. Steven Spielberg's Jaws was a sensational suspense classic which smashed box office records and became the film everyone was talking about. It bit savagely at the bloated disaster trope; like the predator itself, it was lean and mean and compellingly cruel. It was about survival, a key theme for the anxious 70s.

During the agonised filming process, Spielberg feared he was making a dumb exploitation picture. Peter Biskind, in his Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, persuasively claims that Spielberg was actually creating classic entertaiment for middle America, but with a hipster "New Hollywood" edge.

Jaws was more than a film, it was a phenomenon. It was Hollywood's first cinema release as talking point, news item and commercially managed festival event. Studio executives were stunned with the profits they made by opening Jaws so widely, and with such massive TV advertising. The days of letting classy little films build gradually, though word-of-mouth, were over.

After Jaws, commercial cinema was all about the opening weekend. There was an overwhelming need to shake the money tree with a single enormous impact - then move on. And the youth demographic was more important than ever. Despite the (relatively) low-budget brilliance of Jaws, it ushered in the behemoth blockbuster. It was like a punk revolution immediately followed by more and bigger prog albums. Jaws was nominated for the best picture Oscar, and though that went to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Jaws was far more important.
Peter Bradshaw

1994

It's not often that a film festival prize symbolises the turning of a cinematic generation, but the almighty tussle for the Cannes Palme d'Or between veteran Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieslowski, with his final film, Three Colours: Red, and upstart American smartmouth Quentin Tarantino with his second feature, Pulp Fiction, set the tone for the subsequent decade and a half. Tarantino got the nod, thereby making him the figurehead of a generation of American independent film-makers.

The victory of the Tarantino school was so complete that American directors no longer cared to draw their inspiration from outside sources, as previous generations had done; in Tarantino's hands America's own pop-culture mythology offered all the brain food the 90s audience wanted. European cinema was instantly on the back foot; its most celebrated products of the era - such as 1995's La Haine - showed them trailing the Americans rather than leading them. In any case, Kieslowski's death in 1996 marked the end of the classic school of European film-making; the art cinema fiend had increasingly to make do with the rather more recondite pleasures of Iranian film or the stately beauty of Wong Kar-Wai's movies. And the enthusiasms Tarantino championed - Hong Kong gunplay, on-screen sadism, 70s blaxploitation, kick-ass martial arts, John Travolta - worked their way into the cinema establishment so firmly that it now seems inconceivable they were ever marginalised.

1994 saw a similar changing of the guard in this country, replicated with very British parameters. A month after Derek Jarman died in February, a little movie called Four Weddings and a Funeral opened in the US, establishing a template for that floppy-fringed, tourist-Englishness cinema which has deluged us since. You couldn't find a more dramatic U-turn.

Whatever else it did, Four Weddings delivered an electric shock of self-confidence to the then-beleaguered British commercial sector, which, augmented by the injections of public money from the National Lottery, decisively ended the supremacy of Jarman and his ilk. In fact, a large chunk of the British film world's activities since 1994 have been to wreak a gruesome revenge on the art film types who, supported by patronage, had kept going while the embittered mainstream producers were forced to shut up shop.

Taken together, these two near-simultaneous shifts in the balance of power influenced what we've seen on our screens since. Why so many "torture porn" movies? What happened to foreign language films? Why do they make so many Brit-lit movies? Six months in 1994 explain why.
Andrew Pulver
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

[Cat Stevens]

last footage/interview with Pier Paolo?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyPdp81HDTg

could someone translate those few lines?

[Cat Stevens]

UPDATE: in the meantime, I've found someone posted the same clip on IMDB, with following explanation --

"It's short and in italian, but I thought it might interest some of you.
He says - if I understood it right, that there is nudity and sex in the film, but

"Its based on Sades 120 days of Sodom, but its put into the 40s in Italy. There is a lot of nudity and sex in it but basically sex as torture (masochistic). Its the reduction (degradation, humiliation) of the human body and the human being...""

- is that it, then?

[Cat Stevens]

ok, thanks.