Movies to consider watching today: - 6:50am on MGM (892): Beach Red (1967), an interesting American film set during World War II, directed by Cornel Wilde, who also stars in the film, along with Rip Torn. At times it feels very much like a precursor to a Quentin Tarantino film. Its execution is flawed and its really not too good, but if you like cinema, its worth seeing. Its different, its original, and its likely to stick with you after its over. Rating: C - 10:45am / 10:10pm on RetroPlex (168): Blood Simple. (1984), the debut film by the Coen Brothers. This was their first, and its supposed to be great. Ebert wrote two reviews on it during his lifetime, one in 1985 and the other in 2000, and he gave the film four out of four stars in both. It stars John Getz and Frances McDormand. Rating: N/A (havent seen it) - 1:30pm on Flix (170): Gosford Park (2001), a British film by American director Robert Altman (M-A-S-H, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts, etc.). It features an ensemble cast, and is Altmans third most recent film. Altman had been directing films since 1967, television series for over a decade before that, and some short films and documentaries as early as 1951. He made films right up until his death in 2006, his final film being Prairie Home Companion that same year (he was 81-years old). Gosford Park won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Ebert gave the film four out of four stars, so you know its got to be pretty great. Rating: N/A (havent seen it) - 3:40pm on RetroPlex (168): Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), a World War II film about the attack on Pearl Harbor, told from a wide-angled perspective with many characters (and therefore a very large cast) and many separate storylines (think The Longest Day, Midway, or Battle of Britain -- all the same type of movies). The film is a Japanese-American coproduction. It tells both sides of the story, and even uses three different directors, one for the American sequences in the film (RIchard Fleischer), and two others for the Japanese sequences (Kinji Fukasaku and, interestingly, Toshio Masuda, an older Japanese director who I know from his days at Nikkatsu, the Japanese film studio that put out a lot of film noirs in the late 50s into the early and mid 60s -- Masuda directed a solid film called Rusty Knife). Again, the film has a very large cast, but interestingly most the names are not familiar. Among the ones that are familiar is Joseph Cotten (Citizen Kane, The Third Man, etc.), George Tobias, a character actor from a bunch of the World War II movies made during the war that I saw (Captains of the Clouds, Air Force, Mission to Moscow, Passage to Marseilles, and Objective, Burma!), and three Japanese actors: Sô Yamamura, who was in Ozus Tokyo Story and Kobayashis The Human Condition, Tatsuya Mihashi, who was in Kurosawas The Bad Sleep Well and High and Low, and Takahiro Tamura, who was in Oshimas Empire of Passion. This is a good movie thats worth seeing, even if its not anything truly great by any means. Rating: B- - 2:30am on TCM (890): Lacombe, Lucien (1974), a great French film by my favorite French director, Louis Malle. Malle was a shapeshifter, a master of changing styles, so much so that his contemporaries often resented him for it. He could dabble in documentary filmmaking, surrealism, classicalism, etc., and nail it nearly every time. Here he goes for an approach of quiet realism and a very plain, undressed style and narrative. This film is a classic example of the greatness of French cinema, which was suffering a come down from the nouvelle vague, yet still outputting films like this one. I highly recommend this film. Its about a young man who collaborates with the Nazis (or rather with the French quislings who are collaborating with the Nazis) during the occupation of France during World War II. This also makes it a very personal film (even autobiographical to a certain extent) for Malle, who contemplates his own feelings of guilt after collaborating during the war himself. Very good film. Rating: B+ -
Posted on: Sun, 11 May 2014 11:23:20 +0000