What I particularly love about Beautiful Girls is that none of the actors in it were Big! Stars! at the time, although some have gone on to some level of Big! Stardom! since then (and then drifted back out).
Or they had been pretty big stars, but were no longer on the A-list (I'm thinking Timothy Hutton and Matt Dillon here)
It's just such a nice little self-contained movie.
I love it because it reminds me a bit of where I grew up (though Brunswick was a bigger town), and I knew/know people like those characters.
One of the other good ones on the list is THE PARALLAX VIEW, which is great 70's conpiracy thriller. Definitely good at inducing paranoia.
Sheryl Lee's performance ought to be legendary.
nods vigoroursly in agreement
So has anybody seen
A New Leaf?
Theo - you'd love it, I think. Scrappy too. It's about a bumbling nerd girl who falls for a playboy cad who's only in it for her money.
So has anybody seen A New Leaf?
Yes.
To expand, Matthau had a real gift for a certain kind of comedy. Unfortunately, A New Leaf didn't exploit it nearly as well as a lot of other movies (starting with, to state the obvious, The Odd Couple).
To expand, Matthau had a real gift for a certain kind of comedy.
I like it because it's a throwback to the leading man roles he used to get earlier in this career before he was confined to comic curmudgeondom.
I love that he wound up marryiing the real-life inspiration for Holly Golightly.
I'm curious about
Let's Scare Jessica To Death.
Anyone seen it? Good? Bad?
The Onion AV Club had a feature on it a couple of weeks back.
Wise Blood (Brad Dourif's greatest role! Perfectly cast. Doesn't quite get all the way to the book, because as Huston himself lamented, he didn't have Flannery's faith. Shot on the cheap and looks it. Awesome cast though).
Oh, what did Huston say exactly?
I think the problem with Wise Blood the film was that it couldn't come sidelong with the book without heaps and heaps of voiceover or experimental visuals or whatever'd be necessary to capture the characters' precise psychological processes.
Let's Scare Jessica To Death.
What a great title.
Safe
A friend of mine I saw that with has a habit of turning to me, without provocation, and doing that whimpering cough for minutes on end.
Oh, what did Huston say exactly?
I don't remember exactly, but I do remember reading a giant multi-generation biography of the entire Huston family many years ago, in which John talked about a woman coming up to him during filming to tell him how much she was looking forward to the film, how glad she was that he was directing it, and that he'd be in her prayers. He was a vigorous lifelong atheist, and was short and just almost rude to her; looking back, he said he regretted that, that even if he totally disagreed with her beliefs, her offer of prayers was kindly meant and he regretted that he'd been an asshole.
He also admitted that, after all, she had a worldview in common with O'Connor that he didn't, and that he thought, looking back, that his active resistance to that worldview had interfered a little with his approach to the film. Not that he for a second regretted his atheism, but he did regret his unwillingness to engage with the novel on its own terms.
Huston was an atheist? And he adapted Wise Blood? But, but, but it's a trenchant criticism of atheism.
So, er, he was either oblivious to the book's meaning (which I could believe 'cause, as fond as I am of the film, it's faithful only to the plot) or he adapted it with the intention of inverting it and that aspect flew over my head entirely (which I could believe 'cause it's me).
I'm just going to hide under a big pile of coats and hopes this goes away.
