Faith ,'Get It Done'
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
I've not been into the premium channel thread, but I figured they both knew it was there, therefore reminding isn't exactly the word.
Topic drift. Happens. All the time here. If it's going to start being a problem, the landscape is definitely shifting.
plowing the same tired old farrow
Mia Farrow. On topic! (ding ding ding)
Go Raq!
Anyone else looking forward to Hollywoodland? I am a sucker for Old Hollywood stuff. I hope it is good, I have been avoiding reviews, since I knew I was seeing it no matter what.
What I'd like is to see a movie dealing with the William Desmond Taylor murder in 1922. Early Hollywood, successful director murdered, studio coverup--it just screams Good Cinema!
I'm looking forward to it, Raq. I want to see Black Dahlia too, but it's not something to get me running to the theater at the moment.
Yeah, that's a great story. Also Paul Bern's suicide would make a terrific film.
Anyone else looking forward to Hollywoodland?
I am, in the sense that I think it'll be very interesting and I hope I make it out to the theater to see it but I'll probably have to Netflix it. I suck.
I put The Matrix on the other night while I was tidying up (does anyone else do that? Put movies on instead of music?), and I was struck by how outmoded the technology looks in the first shot of Neo. Beige CRT monitor (instead of a black flatscreen), stacks of CDs (instead of a mp3 player or earbuds going into the computer), minidiscs, the search engine on his machine.... I know not everyone has a flatscreen or mp3, but I remember how very now everything was when it was released. Which was the point - 1999 as Golden Age. But I couldn't help mentally substituting things in. Not much of a point, except to note cyberpunk's limitation in trying to portray cutting-edge and futuretech - it always gets outstripped.
does anyone else do that? Put movies on instead of music?
One of my favorite things to do when I get my full-on-must-clean-everything-now!-mode is to pop in my dvd of Branagh's Henry V, recite the opening monologue along with Derek Jacobi ("O for a muse of fire / that would ascend / the brightest heaven of invention..."), and then start cleaning.
I was just looking up the Taylor murder info over at the Crime Library, and saw this wonderful summation of why it would make such a great movie:
The case has all of the elements of the unreal world of Hollywood. It has a famous director of silent films shot in the back. It has, among the suspects, a dope-possessed movie star, several sex-crazed female movie stars, a young up-and-coming screen goddess with an insatiable lust for the director, the starlet's monster of a stage mother, hitmen, drug pushers, and the victim's brother. If this were not enough, there's an embezzling chauffeur, a gay housekeeper, charges of gay and bisexual escapades, hysterical and dishonest movie executives, and a district attorney who seemed to want to produce a cover-up.
Place all of these characters in the context of 1920s movie scandals, prohibition, and the raffish characters that made up the movie industry at that time, and you have a story of passion, greed, and, most of all, a very mysterious murder.
You know, Scarlett Johansson would make a perfect Mary Miles Minter: [link]