 
|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
|
|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
70.239.151.132
Mates,I was watching "LA Confidential" last evening which I still think is one of the best cop movies around- not one car exploding while doing a barrel roll !
An especially nice feature of "Confidential" is the realistic evocation of the era- the clothes, hairstyles, interiors, cars, dialogue, and etc. seem quite true to the period- for the viewers the atmosphere created "feels like you're right there" .
Onr thing that often bothers me in period movies are the cars- they often just don't ring true- goofy modern colours, and/or they slip up like in the generally admirable "The Aviator" where a 1931 Packard crosses the screen during a 1926 movie premiere scene. Hairstyles are often terribly neglected for accuracy and left modern. Here are some other movies- in no particular order- that I think are especially successful in for creating a palpable, period atmosphere:
"Barry Lyndon"
"Blade Runner"
"Seven Samurai"
"Casino"
"Das Boot"
"A Man for all Seasons"
"Bonny and Clyde"
"Some Like it Hot"
"Paths of Glory"
"Ragtime"
"Amadeus"
"Seabiscuit"
"My Darling Clementine"
"Saving Private Ryan"
"Gangs of New York"
"The Grapes of Wrath"
"Elizabeth 1"
"Sleepy Hollow" (!)
"The Unforgiven"
"The Untouchables"There must be dozens of others I'm not thinking of at the moment.
Do you have any favourites for really good portrayal of a period? Any movies that really bother you for mistakes?
Cheers,
Bambi B
Follow Ups:
.
Ex nihilo, nihil fit . . .
I'll suggest Altman's "California Split", which, due to the use of Synanon members as bit players and un-cleaned-up racetrack & boxing match scenes, plop you right back into 1974. I think this may be Altman's best ever, btw.
His L.A. trilogy is inspired. The movie will pale for you.For instance, just wait until you learn the *real* reason the Lieutenant (?) had a briefcase full of coke. Way too strong for mere movies!
clark
I have all of Ellroy's books and have met him a few times... curiously we share a birthday and are both 6'5", just like Jan Gabarek whom I also like a lot.
In person, or, rather, performance, he is a bit like Groucho Marx... curiously funny like an old fairground barker.
I wonder if he has now exorcised his demons and will never produce work of that standard again. Not that I mind, his work is... work, while he is a person, but I miss reading them...
Any news on when The Black Dahlia is released?
I agree the books are faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar too dark to ever be made truthfully (!!!) as films.
.
..."Great Expectations"...); Lynch´s "The Elephant Man"; Hirschbiegel´s "The Downfall" (with a memorable goof: the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun move their feet a bit, just to fit in the hole they are in...); Kawalerowicz´s "Faraon" (still the best rendering of life in Egypt in the days of their splendor); Spielberg´s "Schindler´s List"; a few of James Ivory´s ("A Room with a View", "The Remains of the Day", "Maurice",...); Scorsese´s "The Age of Innocence"..., and, as something very special in what "being there" means, Tod Browning´s "Freaks", one of the most tender films ever made...There are many more, but these came to my mind first, after reading your, and rico's list.
Regards
BF
orejones,A very good list.
And how could we leave out Merchant/Ivory movies- which I think must all be all period settings.
A couple more that your list made me think of:
"Ghandi"
"Lawrence of Arabia"
"Death in Venice" -Visconti
"The Taming of the Shrew"- for a filmed Shakespeare play very real
"Treasure of the Sierra Madre"
"Shackleton"- Branaugh's best work too!
"Alien" - good hardware design!
"Master and Commander"- a friend who is a Patrick O'Brien cultist hated this amalgam of three novels as a sin of disrespect to literature, but the depiction of early 19th C. shipboard life in "M&C" is admirable- and I ducked in my seat when the splinters from cannon impact were flying!
"I Claudius"
"Capote"- the period atmosphere is not made a big feature- but seems natural and real.I shall have to look around for Kawalerowicz´s "Faraon" which I'd not heard of.
It been a long while since I saw Browning's "Freaks" but that is a powerful movie and would add another "trials of the different" movie that really impressed me, "The Station Master"- piles of obvious subtlety.
The one I'm waiting for now is the upcoming "Crwyth Lwhyth" (Barry Sonnenfeld) the tender story of the guy (Mel Gibson) that sold the stones to the builders of Stonehenge at extremely high interest rates, taunts them about their Sun/Moon religion and ends up in the foundations under a 40 ton rock.
Cheers,Bambi B
Another goodun from the same era as Casino was Boogie Nights.
"E Burres Stigano"
Road Warrior,Yes! Thanks- "Boogie Nights" just has everything, Wahlberg and Reynolds both were amazing and the clothes, sets, and hair were perfect.
Isn't "Casino" a great one? I pair with "Goodfellas"- another great one of the genre I can see multiple times. I'm surprised "Casino" isn't talked about more-every character was great- Whats-her-name did her best ever. DeNiro and Pesci can make that kind of violence and underworld come alive and those two movies for me ring true- that life has to be just like it's shown there.
Cheers,
Bambi B
Was that it had been done before and it was called Goodfellas.I'm not so sure that's justified. There are similarities, Pesci's characters are both cut from the same bolt of cloth. Remember our glee when he met his denoument in both? However, I don't think Scorcese repeated himself in these movies. He told a similar, but far different story from quite differing points of view. And yes, Sharon Stone has never been better!! She owned that character as few actors/actresses have EVER owned a character. Bravo madame Stone.
"E Burres Stigano"
Raquel Welch in that animal skin bikini... definitely feels like I am there, with her!
A good one!
Victor,Yes, "One Mil. BC" is a good one- full of fun if accurate period atmosphere, and only moderately anthroplogically accurate, but RW makes these points moot. You know the old expression: "это будет человеком молока, котор оно сдуру не знает своих коров." ( < Whew!)
As a tot I was a Sci-fi fan than the cave set, so fro me it was Raquel in that white diving suit in "Fantastic Voyage",.. I was too young to understand that odd tingling, but I never forgot the sensation!
I walked past Raquel Welch- within a couple of feet- at the Music Center here in Los Angeles about 5 or 8 years ago- she's quite a bit more petit than I imagined- perhaps 5'5". But, for someone born in 1940, she looked just great. I got a faint smile and this kind of thing is memorable. The time Dick Van Dyle opened the door for me at the Malibu deli is just not the same.
Nor when I met Bo Derek at the Jaguar shop years ago, or saw Dolly Parton in the restaurant, I had none of the same sensation as fair Raquel. She lacks sensuality, but in the mid-late 60's seemed perfect in all the other ways.
Cheers,
Bambi B
Trully one of the, ahem, seminal moments of cinema,
is in Fantastic Voyage when they have to pull and rip the oh-so
tightly clinging antibodies from Raquel's wet white diving suit...
Pepe Le Loco,Odd that the antibodies weren't interested in clinging to the male crew members- selective.
Though I was about 8 at the time I saw this, I still imagined volunteering to help out any way I could .
Cheers,Bambi B
Now I need to figure out that expression! :-)I love Bo... I have been indifferent to her until I saw her at Bush's inauguration ball, then it was love at second sight (the first one being, of course, the 10). She can also speak somewhat eloquently with no script.
With 35-23 1/2-35 1/2 measurements, she was probably the most effective Bush campaign fund raiser.
Victor,Thanks to my early life all over the place (my father worked in the oil industry '49-'66) I can embarass myself in terrible German, Dutch, English, and even a little French. Now I don't even remember what my first language was- German I guess.
You're right about my "Russian"- I should really learn English first before ruining new languages. My Mother is the linguist- Spanish is her degree language, but she does a few others- and when her sister lived in Leningrad for five years, learned a bit of Russian and that got me interested. Russian is fascinating to me as I can't tell what the hell I'm doing most of the time, and it becomes Duchampian poetry, with accidental meanings. A friend with a Russian degree from Dartmouth says my Russian is (paraphrsing) something like the sounds made when a Swedish person gets run over by a Buick with English plates! I did a painting of one of my heroes- Rasputin, and I'm sure the title I painted in Russian ("Портрет человека вытягивая его бороду.") is quite different from the intended!
I think there's far too much concentration on language having to "mean" something just all the time.
More often than not, I end up really hating Blake Edwards movies***, but "10" has some great comedic features and for Edwards is actually a rather quiet movie.
***Except "The Party"
Did you speak with Derek at the Ball? I started chatting with her at the Jaguar shop- she was waiting for a car, I was waiting for XK140 suspension parts. But in jeans and little makeup- she was highly freckled and had obviously been in the Sun a lot, plus being really quite petit- maybe 5-3, 5'4, I didn't recognize her. The mechanic told me when she'd gone. But, yes, a strong presence, and a definite, (slightly unexpected) intelligence and nicely calm.
Another chance meeting like this was in my local espresso hole and there was Jamie Lee Curtis in muddy riding clothes. She's tall- 5'9/5'10, athletic looking, and though she's not often in movies I like much, I've long thought she was attractive and a strong character.
Did you speak with Derek ?
Cheers,
Bambi B
PS: The sidebar auto-adverts on this page at the moment: "Bush Countdown clocks", "Free song-"Bush ain't no poor Mans's friend", "Become a powerful leader, you can learn to conquer the World", and "Replace Bush- respond now and get a free laptop" -What kind of intelligence-free programme comes up with this, well, "stuff"?
Never met Bo close up... they did not even invite me to the Bush' bash!The ads I see say "Study Russian in Moscow"! I think they want you!
With a hero like Rasputin you are assured good time there!
.
Good list. I'd add "Chinatown","RKO 281", "Titanic", and "The Godfather I and II".
rico,Very good choices. I have a lot of criticisms of "Titanic" because of the goofy love story centred around the "Blue Doorknob", plus the Winslet and DiCaprio characters are 1966 and not 1912 personalities in my view, but the craftsmanship and period atmosphere is supebly done.
I was thinking of "Name of the Rose" in that regard too, many faults with the very modern William of Baskerville (Connery) monk/detective character, but loads of Mediaval goodness all around him.
Cheers,
Bambi B
Say what you will about the film, the costuming was meticulously researched and the clothing is dead accurate 1912, not 1911 or 1913, nut 1912.
Naah... maybe I shouldn't.
rico,I agree "Titanic" is a fantastic body of period accuracy and marvelous movie craftsmanship- but I maintain the Winslet and Dicaprio characters do not reflect realistic attitudes and dialogue of the time- these are modern people. The fiancee was a one dimensional snob/brute/coward and doesn't ring true- he would have been carefully brought up and charmingly elite.
But, with the "hardware" part of "Titanic", everything seems correct. I think the tristing-Renault in the hold was the the exact model and body style that was known to have been shipped. In "Ghosts" we see the rusty remains of one of the front wings and wheel of the actual car. I spoke to James Cameron about the research for Titanic and he mentioned that even the angle of light of the simulated Sun on the ship was completely accurate to the day, time, and position the ship was in. It's an impressive movie in these regards.
Cheers,
Bambi B
A couple that come to mind is O'Brother, Where art Thou? While I generally found it to be authentic, and so what if it is not, it is hilarious, they kept referring to "old timey music", and I am wondering is how is it "old timey" if the music was of that time? It may be old timey now, but during the depression?The other is King Arthur. I thought it a decent popcorn film, but a character with a cockney accent?
It's period piece that doesn't put the period in your face.
Marie Antoinette is amazing on the reconstruction (filmed at Versaille with a, duh, historian advising) but the New Jersey accents are impossible for me to listen to.
Seeing it dubbed in French, however, would not have saved it for me.
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
Top of Page ]
[ Contact Us ]
[ Support/Wish List ]
[ Copyright © 2024, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]
