"Victory is the same as defeat. It's giving in to destructive competitive urges."
Director: Danny Boyle Starring: Ewan McGregor, Kerry Fox, Christopher Eccleston
1. Danny Boyle = yes. 2. The Last Scene of Shallow Grave = yesss. 3. The First Scene of Shallow Grave = yessss. 4. Shallow Grave = do I even need to say?
"We brought nothing into this world and it's certain we can carry nothing out."
Director: Howard Hawks, Arthur Rosson Starring: John Wayne, Montgomery Clift
Well here is the credits, mainly for the music/I'm a huge fan of the old-school scroll:
Not much in the clip department by way of youtube..what's there now either isn't one I want to use or has a white-noise type sound behind it, or just is slightly terrible quality..
More to come, but all in all I'd say not my favorite, but as far as classic westerns go pretty much the tops. Following Wild Bunch with this was rough, I've started to speak with a drawl.
Director: Steven Shainberg Starring: Nicole Kidman, Robert Downey Jr., Ty Burrell
No scene has been more satisfying to watch than the weird and bestial yet intensely intimate shaving of Robert Downey jr. My god under what other circumstances could I ever use those words together?
"You have no idea what a long-legged woman can do without doing anything."
Director: Preston Sturges Starring: Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea
Funny, charming, and entertaining, but ultimately nothing to write home about. I love both Colbert and McCrea, and smiled the way through, but by the end I didn't feel great about...could possibly be blamed on all loose ends tied up in one line of dialogue, I actually think the last line of dialogue. Save it for a rainy day, but don't make an event out of it. Here is my favorite scene anyway: God bless the archetypal creepy old man.
" I can't live without you. The thought of leaving you kills me. Do you love me?"
Director: Stephen Daldry Starring: Kate Winslet, David Kross, Ralph Fiennes
Quite the new perspective on the Holocaust and I thought David Kross was absolutely brilliant. I liked The Reader a lot, and although I can't say I'd rank it as a favorite it's definitely lingered with me for a while now. I was left with a lot of questions and frustrations. Winslet's character Hanna is so stubborn and complex and yet we are given very little information about her. In contrast, we follow Michael (played by both Kross and Fiennes) throughout his entire life and yet his actions and decisions are equally mysterious. I have big plans to read the book this film was based on, The Reader (Der Vorleser) by Bernhard Schlink.
"Nobody's perfect. There was never a perfect person around. You just have half-angel and half-devil in you."
Director: Terrence Malick Writer: Terrence Malick Starring: Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard
Nothing short of astounding. One of the most beautiful, delicate, careful, and monumental films I've ever seen. It's truly American, capturing all sorts of symbols and ideologies and sort of just easing them onto the viewer...nothing is forced or gimmicked, and I never sensed the silly elaborate details that go along with some period dramas. Most synopses use three plot tags in them: a love triangle, a swarm of locusts, and a wildfire, mimicking hell. Given those three alone, I hope you can picture that beyond the historical character Days of Heaven takes on, it's ultimately rather timeless and dreamlike.
What I'm reading tells me Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World (below) inspired the visual motif of field and farmhouse.
Out of context, I don't know what you'll make of this but someone's cut the whole movie up and put it on youtube and this is the clip I'd like to show without giving too much away. I suppose I'll just summarize briefly now or never with the help of imdb (because if I tried personally to do this film justice in a summary you'd be reading for hours)--Bill (Gere), a hot-tempered farm laborer, convinces the woman he loves, Abby (Adams), to marry their rich but dying boss so that they can have a claim to his fortune :
"No, I'm not ready; I have no makeup on... but things are getting better!"
Directors: Albert and David Maysles, Susan Froemke, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer Starring: Edith "Big Edie" Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale as themselves, the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis
My, everything I heard from these two women was so strange, sad, funny...they drove me crazy but kept me captivated throughout...I swear at times I just wanted to shut the television off to get rid of the pitch in their voices competing against one another, but I never could, I loved them, I wanted to see what they would say or do next.
And what's this I hear about an HBO adaptation starring Drew Barrymore? Hmm.
It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present. You know what I mean? It's awfully difficult.
I only cared about three things: the Catholic Church, swimming and dancing, and I had to give them up.
Will you shut up? It's a goddamn beautiful day, shut up!
"Thirty seconds after you're born you have a past and sixty seconds after that you begin to lie to yourself about it."
Director: David Cronenberg Starring: Oliver Reed, Art Hindle
I've just read that the inspiration for this movie came from writer/director David Cronenberg's vicious and drawn-out divorce and child-custody battle. This makes an amusing amount of sense, given that the picture itself involves a dashing male protagonist, a kind-hearted and mild-mannered near single father struggling to raise his daughter while his wife burns away in isolation at a private psych ward.
***I'm about to say things that will divulge into the plot. Do not read this if you do not like your endings ruined. Slash just watch the movie***
Oh. And this wife gives birth to angry and deformed stumpy rage-babies by means of an external fetus that run about doing her subconscious biddings i.e. killing lots of people.
I was shown this after my friend watched it in film school. Fiiiillm schooool. Apparently it has good structure. I personally thought it was nothing short of entertainment brilliance.
Hey, I'm just keeping track of everything I watch.
"My people, my people, what can I say, say what I can. I saw it but didn't believe it, I didn't believe what I saw. Are we gonna live together, together are we gonna live?"
Director: Spike Lee Starring: Spike Lee, Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Bill Nunn, John Turturro
Another Spike Lee, note the previous Bamboozled (2000). Pretty amazing, rich, intense, cool, funny, provoking.
"Now you listen to me, I'm an advertising man, not a red herring."
Director: Alfred Hitchcock Writer: Ernest Lehman Starring: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason
I am with proud and awesome admiration giving the coveted title of "King of Sass" to Cary Grant for his role in NxNW. I swear. Whether riding in taxis cabs, making business deals, being kidnapped and threatened, getting a DUI, being seduced on a train, getting chased about the midwest, cropdusted, semi-seduced again, evading the police, turning himself in, being fake-murdered, breaking and entering, creeping, sneaking, hanging from George Washington's nose, or finally getting the girl, Cary Grant drips and glimmers with sass. "Mm, Where did that wit come from?" ye olde viewer wonders, "That Cary Grant-ish grin and charm, all sturdy and urban-masculine inside his gray suit?" Well, folks, it is all to clear: from his mother.
In case you haven't noticed, I love Cary Grant. I love Alfred Hitchcock. North by Northwest is a wondrous mistaken-identity-chase-crime-thriller-espionage run with the expected spice of romance that seals the deal as far as American classics go.
"Now what would a bail of cotton be doing in Harlem?"
Director: Ossie Davis Based on the 1965 novel by Chester Himes Starring: Godfrey Cambridge, Raymond St. Jacques
"Introducing Coffin Ed and Gravedigger. Two detectives only a mother could love." Most 1970s. Most Blaxploitation. I was amused, and throughly entertained. Pretty sure I could only follow the characters and plot because we'd just read the book in my African American lit class...although it did stray from the book a bit as well. Anyways, book and movie share the point A start and point B end but everything in between is just crazy. I suppose I need to get more used to the genre, this was definitely a first besides, well, Shaft.
Director: Raoul Walsh Starring: James Cagney, Virginia Mayo
Ohh, I couldn't resist. No no no no no. Forget the VU for now. This is it, this is great:
A psychopath, gunquick and cruel, his brains and strains of human compassion hanging on his equally cold, stern-faced mother. And imagine, we just started Freud in my Humanities class. White Heat is fast-paced, intriguing, a fine and classic gangster film. I think my favorite aspect is somehow throughout the movie I found myself rooting for both the good guys and at times the bad as they dabbled on the fence, wheeling and dealing affairs of love and murder like a walk in the park.
"You can dish it out, but you got so you can't take it no more. "
Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Take the proverbs "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall" and bowl in down into the windy streets and back room cigars of Chicago, the climbing ground for the brutally ambitious criminal Rico, more notoriously known as Little Caesar. Widely successful after its release, the movie really is a killer. It's everything you could ever want in a gangster movie, everything the modern greats were built upon, ranked #9 on the American Film Institute's list of the 10 greatest films in the genre "Gangster" in June 2008.
Amusing observation, later affirmed by imdb: despite the characters speaking with rusty Italian drawl with names like "Joe Massara", "Tony Passa", "Sam Vettori", and "Ritz Colonna", none of the actors really seem to be actually Italian (this is no insult to their acting or film presence, that's all grand).
"I feel something important is happening around me. And it scares me."
Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski Starring: Irene Jacob, Jean-Louis Trintignant
This is the end. My, what an end. Well, Red on its own I think I would say was my least favorite of the three. I just can't forget Bleu and the humors of White. Red as the end of the trilogy though, perfect. The end end I was not expecting, just because it was so incredibly sudden and I found myself almost over-satisfied with the connections between the other two colors. Over-indulgence is not always a bad thing though.
Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski Starring: Zbigniew Zamachowski, Julie Delpy
At the middle of the trilogy now, I love Kieslowski. Like the others, I believe this movie is about love. It's somewhere in there. This time, however, underneath the cruelty between the lovers I think its equally about possession, potency, of owning things and controlling others. Equality? Is that the word this one gets? The connection back to Binoche's character tying White to Blue was swell, I was completely charmed by Karol Karol in all his strangeness and character shifts.
Here is the beginning a) because it is genius b) look for the colors c) it was available d) due to copyrights it probably won't be available for long:
"Now I have only one thing left to do: nothing. I don't want any belongings, any memories. No friends, no love. Those are all traps."
Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski Starring: Juliette Binoche
Juliette Binoche is remarkable. This movie is a work of art. First in the Colors trilogy, I was quieted and awestruck by the silent, gentle way in which Bleu played across the screen. It's about grief and recovery, of fragile things, focusing on a young widow dealing with the death of her husband and daughter. Binoche acts with delicacy and power, holding sorrow in her limbs and conveying the most tenuous of subtleties. Watch this at once.
" I always say, when you got a job to do, get somebody else to do it."
"Victory is the same as defeat. It's giving in to destructive competitive urges."
"We brought nothing into this world and it's certain we can carry nothing out."
"Why don't you tell a secret?"
" We're after men - and I wish to God I was with them. The next time you make a mistake, I'm going to ride off and let you die."
"You have no idea what a long-legged woman can do without doing anything."
" I can't live without you. The thought of leaving you kills me. Do you love me?"
"Nobody's perfect. There was never a perfect person around. You just have half-angel and half-devil in you."
"No, I'm not ready; I have no makeup on... but things are getting better!"
Will you shut up? It's a goddamn beautiful day, shut up! 
"This film should be called 'The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola.'"
"Thirty seconds after you're born you have a past and sixty seconds after that you begin to lie to yourself about it."
"My people, my people, what can I say, say what I can. I saw it but didn't believe it, I didn't believe what I saw. Are we gonna live together, together are we gonna live?"
"Now you listen to me, I'm an advertising man, not a red herring."
"Now what would a bail of cotton be doing in Harlem?"
"Made it, Ma! Top of the world!"
"You can dish it out, but you got so you can't take it no more. "
"I feel something important is happening around me. And it scares me."
"Are you sure?"
"Now I have only one thing left to do: nothing. I don't want any belongings, any memories. No friends, no love. Those are all traps."
