Buffista Movies 5: Development Hell
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.
The movie I saw most in the theater? Has to be a tie between Grease and (cringes in anticipation) Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. What can I say? I was ten. And oddly, that seems to be the last time I ever went to the theater repeatedly for anything, although I had a friend in high school who saw Endless Love in the theaters eight times the summer it came out. She had a broken leg at the time.
This game is too hard. I keep remembering movies I didn't originally list, like The Haunting, which I usually watch twice a year usually. And then there are the movies I can never *not* watch when I catch them -- my all-time favorite on that list is Coal Miner's Daughter.
although I had a friend in high school who saw Endless Love in the theaters eight times the summer it came out. She had a broken leg at the time.
Couldn't she have escaped the theater by crawling on her arms and the good leg?
This game is too hard. I keep remembering movies I didn't originally list
A few months ago, Pete re-organized our DVD collection. He ended up designating one small shelf as "Jilli's Comfort Movies", because that way he didn't have to worry about alphabetizing movies that were sure to get pulled out and watched multiple times.
She loooooved it.
So did I, kind of. So tragic! Such love! Sex! Hey, we were, like, fourteen.
I keep remembering movies I didn't originally list, like The Haunting, which I usually watch twice a year usually.
It's so freakin' great! Robert Wise, who directed it, specifically wanted to get back to the kind of filmmaking he had done at the beginning of his career making those fantastic, moody RKO horror movies like Curse of the Cat People. Also, whenever I watch it I think "Claire Bloom! She and Philip Roth had an affair for decades!"
Robert Wise did such a variety of films in his career, it was really amazing. Everything from The Sound of Music to The Andromeda Strain. (Oooh, and I just double-checked his filmography, and he also did The Day the Earth Stood Still!)
The Cultural Attache at the embassy in Athens, that is, the man responsible for promoting American culture overseas, deemed
The Haunting
"the worst movie I have ever seen."
Shame, because otherwise he seemed like a really smart guy.
Robert Wise did such a variety of films in his career, it was really amazing. Everything from The Sound of Music to The Andromeda Strain. (Oooh, and I just double-checked his filmography, and he also did The Day the Earth Stood Still!)
He also did a great real-time (as in, the movie is the same length of time as the story) noir called THE SETUP.
I think I've talked about my Wise affection before when he died, but he also did the classic noir
The Set-up
(boxing film with Robert Ryan) and the very cool, yet little known noir-western
Blood on the Moon
(which we jokingly called Plaid on the Moon around my house because of certain costuming decisions).
Oddly, despite the number of stone classics he worked on as director or editor, he was frequently dissed by cinephiles. He was seen as a studio hack -- plus they wouldn't forgive him for
Sound of Music.
The Cultural Attache at the embassy in Athens, that is, the man responsible for promoting American culture overseas, deemed The Haunting "the worst movie I have ever seen."
If he was talking about the Jan DeBont remake, he's not too far off the mark. In and of itself it's a wretched movie; as a version of the novel or even as just a remake of the Wise version, it's a crime against humanity (especially since they had a cast that could have easily pulled off a REAL version of the story).