I saw MI:III tonight, which was loads of JJAbramsy fun. References to previous works (which may include current-season Lost/Alias spoilers) include:
*Opening with the hero tied to a chair being threatened by the bad guy, and then flashing back about 48 hours
*bombs in heads!
*Keri Russell, who almost gets to play Sydney Bristow
*failed CPR followed by desperate chest-pounding, which (surprise!) works
*Greg Grunberg in a cameo
*Geeky nervous tech guy who can be convinced to play along with off-the-books plan because hero is just that trustworthy
*hero betrayed by actually-evil boss at sooper-seekrit government agency
*missions all focused on an object whose mystery is exceeded only by its silly code namepower...and which ultimately fails to matter at all, since it's mostly about saving loved ones via jumps off of tall buildings
I thought it was a blast. The plot doesn't make a ton of sense, but that doesn't matter because it moves very fast, and is just FUN. Philip Seymour Hoffman is awesome, just deliciously evil.
I haven't seen very much Lynch, I guess. Mulholland Drive freaked me out and I didn't love it, but I was also high for the first time ever when I tried to watch it - maybe I should give it another whirl. Twin Peaks became spectacularly uninteresting to me after the random dream midget scene in the third episode or whatever - at that point, it stopped being interesting weird and merely became over-the-top stupid weird, at least to me. Didn't help that I found the characters amusing but not captivating - I just wasn't entertained. I've never watched Dune all the way through, but what I've seen is brilliant. And The Elephant Man will always live in my brain as that really good movie I searched out on Ebay, and watched with my dad: the only time I've ever seen him break down bawling.
Man, that's EXACTLY what I would have down, with the exception of Big Honkin' Love for The Straight Story.
I guess I'd better go watch it then.
And The Elephant Man will always live in my brain as that really good movie I searched out on Ebay, and watched with my dad: the only time I've ever seen him break down bawling.
Now
that's
a movie watching story. Let's see on that theme, I'll ante:
I watched
Return of the Pink Panther
on TV with my Dad and he laughed so hard his face turned red and he completely became overcome with the giggles. I never saw him laugh so hard in my laugh.
Curiously, the 70s Pink Panther movies are also the movies which have caused me to laugh the most in a theater.
I'll raise you: As a young girl my father brought me to the cinema to see Cool Runnings. Nothing's quite the same after your father breaks down in tears watching a comedy movie in a room full of your ten year old peers.
Oh! I can't believe I forgot to mention -- in the credits, JJ thanks (Lost current-season spoiler)
The Hanso Corporation.
I watched
La Dolce Vita
for the first time over the last two nights. Love! So beautiful and wacky and sad and funny.
I watched La Dolce Vita for the first time over the last two nights. Love! So beautiful and wacky and sad and funny.
If you haven't, you should see AMARCORD sometime. It's all those things, but from a different perspective (and involves small town life as remembered, rather than big city life as currently experienced).
81/2 is also great, but it's a lot more blatantly surreal/fantastic.
81/2 is also great, but it's a lot more blatantly surreal/fantastic.
I had an epiphany watching 8 1/2 and it's affected how I think about movies and art since. I realized that Fellini put his characters' memories and fantasies and their lives-as-lived and meta-commentary about filmmaking all on the same plane and let them ping off each other to great effect.
It wasn't a fantasy as I understood it, nor really surrealism. It was something more like extended metaphors or expressionism. The epiphany was simply that everything is taking place on the screen with the same value. The fantasies weren't set off as being distinct from the character's lives or memories. They all blended into a unity - and that just seemed like a great way to visually capture subjective, interior experience. I know that my day-to-day thoughts are constantly floating between fantasy and memory and focused activity, but I hadn't seen it on screen before.
This isn't unique to 8 1/2, of course, (in fact Flann O'Brien does it in At Swim-Two-Birds which I'm rereading right now) but you could see why so many other filmmakers since then have borrowed from it, particularly when they want to make an autobiographical statement. You see its influence on Stardust Memories, All That Jazz, Day for Night and many others.
Love Amarcord, which was Levinson's inspiration for Diner, btw.
side note: And Local Hero was the cited inspiration for Northern Exposure. (Which also has a lot of 8 1/2 moments, including a full on Fellini homage.)
I'm so provincial. If Munch wasn't an intellectual snob, I wouldn't recognize the names of those movies, but I do, because he grabs hold of that two years of college and rides, damn it.(But I've not seen them, even though I'm not one of those "I don't like to read while I'm watching," people either. I've seen some French films.)
Even though I've not seen the source material, a lot of Northern Exposure scenes *looked* homage-ish, if that makes any sense.
