Movies (and occasionally face slaps) (Part 3)

exactly how Scorsese intended it to be watched

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Bitch you made me spit out my drink.

I watched Misery (1990) for the first time last night. I think it has a really strong reputation, but I would probably pencil it in at a 3.5/5. Bates has a good performance, but it doesn’t really stand out as an Oscar-level effort. I actually think Caan’s performance is just as strong, although much more nuanced. The other performances (such that there are) leave something to be desired.

The film’s premise is strong enough. While the execution is steady, the suspenseful parts lean a little too heavily into the frenzied music. I think part of the issue is that in the 90s, horror was a very schlocky genre, and I’m judging it from a time when the genre is receiving much more care. I would classify this as more of a thriller that is horror adjancent, and the adjancency comes perhaps more from the author of the source material than from the content of the film. This film could definitely rock purely in the suspense place, but I don’t think Reiner has the chops of Hitchcock or De Palma for that kind of work.

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Reiner was definitely harnessing the right sort of energy in Caan, I think. People always talk about how crazy it drove him to have to give most of this performance from a bed when he’s generally a really demonstrative and physical actor. His forcibly bottled energy is pretty perfect.

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The Mist has no business being remade so soon, but I would kinda love to see a new version of Misery.

So as not to clutter the other thread.

@nunnehi I got these at the library book sale. I know some of these are on free streaming but it feels like the ad time doubles the length of the movie.

Drive (2011)
Something About Mary (1998)
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
Ronin (1998)
The Big Short (2015)
Donnie Brasco (1997)
My Darling Clementine (1946)
On the Waterfront (1954)
Enemy at the Gates (2001)
High Fidelity (2000)
Jarhead (2005)
White Men Can’t Jump (1992)
Unforgiven (1992)
Syriana (2005)
The Road Warrior (1981)
A Star is Born (1976)
Platoon (1986)
The Longest Day (1962)
The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005)
The Girl Next Door (2004)
Good Night and Good Luck (2005)
Body Heat (1981)
Desperado (1995)

Also some TV shows I didn’t watch in their day.

Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000) S1
Entourage S1 (2004)

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You got 4 I did work for. For Ronin, I probably did the audio layback (final sound output) for the version you got. It was toward the end of my run at a post house in the late 90s (I did this for either 6 or 8 different versions of the movie).

I met John Frankenheimer after we finally got his biopic Wallace out the door. The movie was a disaster due to a 2 pop generator at Sony not working right. They started showing synch problems in Telecine and even though my job on the movie was only supposed to be doing the M&E laybacks and creating the TV version of the movie, it became one of the most epic things I experienced over about the course of a week, while the senior mixer was on vacation. After he returned, and we were slow, I assumed I’d get fired because that’s just how it works in the industry. To my surprise, he was fired on the Friday after he came back, and I was promoted to day shift mixer from night shift mixer. They totally blew it with me after with a series of bad business decisions, but it was nice I had that happen when I’d always been low person on the totem pole previously.

First off, as cool as it was meeting John Frankenheimer (I was told by his Co-Producer he wanted to meet me and when I met him he said, ā€˜thanks for saving my movie’ which I hadn’t thought I’d done lol), multiple other cooler things happened. The first and biggest, even though I didn’t know it at the time, was that Frankenheimer’s Co-Producer was Ethel Winant. She was probably in her late 70s at the time and was an awesome woman, just so much knowledge. What I didn’t know at the time, and if I had, I probably would have quizzed her extensively on it is that she was the casting director for the Rod Serling version of The Twilight Zone.

On top of that, I got to work with supervising sound editor Mike Le Mare, which was another wild experience I haven’t had duplicated in my career. These people knew so much about filmmaking, and I was still pretty young in my career and just doing whatever they asked me to do. For a horrible thing, it was a great and memorable experience.

The other three I worked on were The Road Warrior, A Star Is Born, and Good Night and Good Luck. There should be a commentary on The Road Warrior and maybe some other piece, but I don’t remember for sure. The DVD was held up in a rights dispute after we did it for several years but eventually did come out. There’s probably a scene specific commentary for Streisand on A Star Is Born. This was for a box set where she didn’t really want to do full commentaries, but screen specific ones (the worst way to do these). I feel like she did one full commentary for the box set, but I can’t remember what it was. It was either Nuts or Up the Sandbox. I don’t think there were any other features on those discs other than her commentaries, but my memory is very fuzzy. Good Night and Good Luck was a commentary with Clooney and Grant Heslov, which is worth a listen.

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Wow, that’s amazing. Thanks for sharing.

I haven’t seen or or maybe just don’t remember seeing about a quarter of these. They just seemed notable and a bargain. Of the 4 you worked on I’ve only seen Road Warrior, ha.

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The girl next door is an odd anomaly in that list.

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Yes. I may have been unduly influenced by the cover art. If I’d read Ebert’s review, which I just have, I would have passed…

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Cuthbert is very sexy so at least there is that.

Yeah. I did glance at this at this before I put it on my stack. Seemed mildly promising.

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i wonder how entourage holds up. i remember loving it at the time but i was a drunken teenager

curb is elite

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I’ve only seen bits of Entourage. They had the whole series there but I didn’t want to get them all because I’m not sure I’ll like it. I’m ok with crude humor, up to a point. This might be over the line for me. Larry David level humor is probably fine.

Interstellar

Have not seen this since the theatre. I forgot how much of a rip off of Contact it is and Contact is way better.

It’s good but not great. The space science is pretty awesome. The story is pretty blah.

Grade: B-

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I basically remember two things about the movie, the excellent video message scene and the fucking bookshelf. Oh and a big wave.

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Like all Nolan films the sound mix is fucking awful too.

Nunn we don’t need to relitigate this either. :laughing:

Sagan wrote Contact, the book. Kip Thorne advised on Interstellar. Heavyweights. Contact was my 90s favorite. Haven’t watched Interstellar all the way through but I thought aspects of it were really cool.

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wrong thread

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The science in interstellar is really great. Not quite contact great but great. It’s just the ā€œNolanā€ of it that makes is worse than Contact.

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