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What Is The Last Film You Watched? (Older Films)


Mr. Breathmask

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1 minute ago, Nick Parker said:

 

The Beatles: their influence--untouchable. Their music...unlistenable. ;)

 

So contrarian it's basically meaningless.  Like saying, "Shakespeare, what a hack." 

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3 minutes ago, Disco Stu said:

 

So contrarian it's basically meaningless.  

 

Well of course. To be more earnest: I like the sound of the Beatles a lot, and I'm a big fan of many things that have been influenced by that sound. But for the most part, I really don't find their songs, the actual musical content, that interesting to listen to.

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For the 100th annniversary of the birth of perhaps our best director, Zoltán Fábri, who masterfully found the way between being popular and internationally artistically acclaimed (in contrast to many young ones who are only popular but middling, or Tarr who is much acclaimed, but too overpretentious and inaccessible for the general populace), we're getting a collection (3 boxsets throughout the year) of his best works newly transferred and restored with many extras including foreign subtitles, old docus and news segments, newly recorded interviews and retrospectives, and booklets with details on his life and movies, including some script and storyboard photographs. The first box I just bought fittingly starts off with what's usually thought of as one of Hungary's finest pieces of cinema ever:

 

Körhinta (Merry-go-round) (1955)

How do I start on this one? How about Francois Truffaut's words at Cannes '56, as translated on the back of the box?

"This is the grand prize winner, my Palme d'Or winner.... The heroine of Zoltán Fábri's marvellous film would have deserved the prize for the best actress... the way she danced, laughed and cried, due to her freshness, purity, spontaneity..."

Well, the lead is certainly not bad, but her role doesn't give that much to work with at first. Körhinta is a Romeo and Juliet story of forbidden love in rural, agricultural, traditional Hungary in the early '50s, where the backdrop and cause for separation is political differences around land nationalisation and farmer's co-operatives. In that age and places, daughters were still mostly thought of as wares to keep quiet and to help gain respect, wealth and family status with by marrying them to the right person.

A young girl is in love with a boy, but their families drift apart over ideologies, she's forbidden to mingle with him again and is chosen a new suitor to marry. She keeps passive and goes along sadly with everyone for the first hour - she knows her place, after all. This was the hour when I didn't yet get what is so great about this movie. Then everything changed when a wedding scene came up.

Setup: the girl is reluctantly dancing with her chosen fiancé at a wedding, her father telling entertaining stories in the next room. Her temperamental lover gets slightly drunk, comes to the wedding and asks her for a dance. The fiancé gives her up, not thinking much of it, and joins the group in the next room, watching just to be sure. This is where this video starts:

 

To be societally clear: what starts at 3 minutes is rude enough, taking the attention away from the bride and groom, but is also basically the equivalent of taking someone's fiancée and fucking her on the market square for everyone to see, made even worse since their being forbidden to meet. The quickening tempo of the music and the cuts, the juxtaposition of the opening scene's idyllic happiness on the titular merry-go-round, the now amusingly electronic dance beat-sounding thumping of boots, those reaction shots, the acting in general, that shot at 7:03 where after an hour of passiveness the lead actress finally shows that blazing, radiating defiance when the fiancé makes them stop... This is truly one of the greatest scenes of Hungarian motion picture, and the remaining 23 minutes consistently keep this level up!

 

Now this has found its place among my favourite movies. I'm really looking forward to watching Fábri's others and have preordered the second boxset which does contain the two of his movies I have actually seen before - one's a dark, grotesque comedy, the other's an adaptation of our most popular kids' book that is obligatory reading in many foreign countries as well, and is technically a war drama about patriotism, loyalty and loss on a smaller scale with kids.

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7 minutes ago, Holko said:

 

 

Körhinta (Merry-go-round) (1955)

 

 

Thanks for the thorough write-up, @Holko. I don't understand a word of Hungarian, but the way that scene is put together, I can get the whole story without knowing the dialogue; a good sign if you ask me! I rewatched the dance scene from 1941 last night, so this the second cool dance scene I've seen in the last 24 hours!

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Oh, also a fun bit of trivia I forgot: while embracing and laughing on the merry-go-round, he says "We're flying, Mari!" Eat that, Titanic!

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So when I was a kid we had this random VHS of this old live-action movie version of Sleeping Beauty.  For some reason, my sister and I watched this movie probably 20 times, we were obsessed.

 

The VHS was thrown out by my parents a long time ago and it took some googling to figure what version it was.  I did remember noticing even as a kid that the actors' mouths weren't matching the dialogue, so I figured out it was a dubbed version of European movie.  Anyway, turns out it was a West German movie from 1955.

 

Sadly, it doesn't seem to exist in the digital world.  All I could find were these two clips.  I especially have fond memories of this chef character who for some reason used a large group of little boys as his kitchen staff.

 

 

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Just now, Quintus said:

Eh, my YouTube link was changed to the MORTAL KOMBAT theme??!! WTF?!

 

 

? I'm seeing Paul McCartney carpool over here...maybe your YouTube account decided to recommend something similar in quality? 

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I don't know what you're talking about Quint.  It's the Paul McCartney carpool thingy in your post

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Yeah I know, it is now and it was when I first submitted the post. So you know when you refresh the page when you see there's been subsequent posts? MORTAL KOMBAT THEME was there instead. Absolutely no idea why that techno monstrosity appeared.

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Only Angels Have Wings - This is probably about as well-constructed and as well-paced as a film can get, terrific performances, and it definitely has that terrific old-timey Hollywood feel. Definitely a film I'll be returning to again. - 9 / 10

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6 minutes ago, Fancyarcher said:

Only Angels Have Wings - This is probably about as well-constructed and as well-paced as a film can get, terrific performances, and it definitely has that terrific old-timey Hollywood feel. Definitely a film I'll be returning to again. - 9 / 10

 

I own the Criterion blu ray and still haven’t gotten around to watching it!  Really need to do that some time...

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34 minutes ago, Disco Stu said:

 

I own the Criterion blu ray and still haven’t gotten around to watching it!  Really need to do that some time...

 

Definitely recommend. You can see why Hawks is so well-regarded by filmmakers such as Spielberg, and the black and white helps the film tremendously. Cary Grant was also one of the greats, and Jean Arthur's performance is terrific, one of those roles where you really wanna see everything else the actor has done. The first forty minutes alone feel more satisfying and authentic then a lot of films.

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6 hours ago, Quintus said:

Did you other Beatles fans see this then?

 

 

I'm not the biggest Corden fan, but by the end it's amazing.

It was discussed in the pop and rock music thread, I believe. Brilliant video. 

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6 hours ago, Quintus said:

Absolutely no idea why that techno monstrosity appeared.

Perhaps you linked from a playlist that had both videos in it, and it showed the MK video?

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Moving forward in the Fábri boxset, another highly thought of one:

 

Hannibál Tanár Úr (Professor Hannibal) (1956)

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Képernyőfelvétel (120).png

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The release of this one was a bit overlooked - 5 days later, the Revolution broke out and people had bigger things to worry about for a while, but it got a rerelease next year and placed well at the Karlovy Vary film festival.

 

The film follows Béla Nyúl, a completely insignificant and unnoticed Latin teacher in the early '30s among the slow rise of far-right, Mussolini-backed fascism. When he writes a paper about the death of the Carthaginian commander Hannibal, contradicting accepted history based on his take on newly discovered documents, a manipulative far-right paper misinterprets it and makes a pawn of him along with the extremely gullible masses. One moment he's a hero for getting recognized for the paper, the next day everyone shuns him for supposedly inciting far-left revolution, the right-wing mob tries to maul him until he changes his viewpoint, after which he's immediately hailed as a hero again - mind you, nobody has actually read his original paper, everyone just goes along with whatever the big dogs are saying. The filmmaking also reflects these changing moods: from satire to dark realism, to a goofy dream sequence of him smoking cigars with Hannibal, to realistic long shots following him around trying to pass time waiting for a politician friend, to slapstick drunken racist parties or expressionistic talks in the pool where the politician floats and talks his head off while he struggles as the waves wash over his head. 

 

Also interesting is the subtext: through the guise of fascists harassing the little man, Fábri also comments on the show trials in the dictatorship of the early '50s, and the rehabilitations afterwards - a bold thing to do so very soon, it would have been hailed as one of the greats and we'd still all remember it had it not been for the Revolution 5 days after the opening.

 

Now that remembering part is not 100% like that - the name of the main character, Nyúl Béla (yes, Hungarian name order!) is still a commonly used word (as nyúlbéla) for an insignificant, cowardly person - maybe a bit misrepresenting the movie's hero.

 

I liked it fine, 4/5. 

 

Going back, Körhinta is a very very solid 5/5!

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15 hours ago, Holko said:

Hannibál Tanár Úr (Professor Hannibal) (1956)

 

I had time to dwell on this more and my opinion only grew better. With that James Gunn thing yesterday and many similar events recently, the movie is still extremely relevant today.

Spoilers at the end just in case, although I don't think you guys have any means of getting this without my... ahem... help.

 

Béla's thesis is about Hannibal's death - instead of suicide by drinking poison as historically accepted, he proposes he fell to a Carthaginian mob's uprising. this is what the paper takes out of context to say he's inciting revolution. 

The night before the smearing article is published, Béla is just extatic that he will have something written about him and his works, thinking he'll get famous. Everyone sends him presents and all. That night, he dreams of having a talk with Hannibal. He asks him how he died, and he says he can't remember. The cause, whether Béla is actually right is made completely irrelevant, what it brings him is the focus.

Next morning, he's shunned by the city because of the smear article - again, what he wrote is completely irrelevant in the public eye, only what it brought upon him is important.

Next day, there's even graffiti on the walls saying "Death to all 'Nyúl Béla's!"

There's a fascist meeting in the ruins of a roman amphitheatre, where the finale takes place. The mob tries to kill Béla until the leader (his old friend) gives him a chance to revoke his words. We all expect defiance like he already did, causing him to lose his job, but no. He gives in and echoes all the fascist buzzwords back to the mob like a schoolkid, even revoking his paper, after which the crowd chants "Long live Hannibal! Long Live Nyúl!". They rush him in joy, but he falls down from the stand and dies. The exact way is left intentionally ambiguous and ultimately irrelevant, paralleling the basic Hannibal death conundrum that started it all - did he commit suicide because he was ashamed of what he became by giving into pressure or was it an accident caused by the crowd pushing him back in ecstasy? What matters is how dictatorships abuse and puppeteer irrelevant little people, public opinion and crowd mentality.

 

The whole film is framed in a similar way to his 12 years later work I already know - the joyous tone of a street organ. After Béla dies, the camera drifts off of him and follows a mobile street organ, again trying to reinforce how Béla was irrelevant, his death is not important, don't look there, here's some amusing music! It plays with the tones to try and sway the audience's mood in the exact same way the powers influence public opinion in the movie. It's a really great one. I'll modify my rating to 4.5/5 instead of the 4 of yesterday.

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So, as Part 1 of tonight's double-feature:

 

Édes Anna (Anna) (1958)

 

In 1919, right after the fall of our first, short-lived communist government, Anna, a lively idealistic girl is forced to take a job as a servant-girl at an upper-class couple's flat. She falls in love with their womanizer nephew, who leaves her after getting her pregnant. She also gets friendly with a widowed chimney-sweeper with a little kid, but waits too long to tell him and he finds someone else. By her masters, she's treated like second-rate walking garbage, even though she does her work perfectly. After slowly getting her soul crushed, she kills her masters after a night's abuse. Her investigation, of course, is sensationalised instead of being treated with the understanding she craved so much.

Perhaps the best stroke is seeing how her master, though being an upper-class woman, is still as much a servant as Anna, having to keep up appearances and pretend to be a nice person while being incredibly tired of it. This similarity is why they hate each other so much.

 

'twas good, but not on par with the previous two films. 3.5/5

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Part 2 of tonight's double feature:

 

Két félidő a pokolban (Two Half-Times in Hell) (1961)

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Képernyőfelvétel (123).png

 

1944, a German-Hungarian Prisoner of War camp in Ukraine. Ónodi, a charismatic, temperamental ex-professional football player (played by Imre Sinkovits, one of our best actors with an incredible voice and presence) is called to the side and tasked with building a team out of the prisoners so they can play a friendly match agains the Germans a week later in celebration of the Führer's birthday. This succeeds in a few days, a passable team is assembled (except for Steiner, the little Jew who never played ootball, but lied about it because he was afraid of death), and Ónodi manages to convince the captors to allow them not to work and get raised food portions that week so they can train well. The team has differences, everyone has ways they want to survive. Ónodi cares about nothing, only football is sacred to him (and he does act as strict as the captors on some occasions), one steals food from the others and gobbles it up just to be sure, some hatch escape plans while training. These plans do come together, and they try to escape two days before the match, but are caught the next morning and thrown into a cell. The day of the match, they're allowed to go and play, but right beforehand, a captor slips that they will be court-martialled the next day. Deflated by the certainty of death, Ónodi decides to half-ass the first half, never touching the ball. When the other prisoners boo him, calling him a traitor for getting food and no work from the Germans then not even playing the match he got them for, he kicks a goal in, ending the first half in 3-1. In the break, a captor trash-talks them, when Ónodi suddenly beats him up and goes into the second half with full ofrce and determination to show the German bastards a good time if they die regardless. The German General watching the match gets increasingly nervous with every Hungarian goal, while the prisoners and players go wild. When Steiner scores their fourth goal, putting them in the lead, machineguns gun down the entire team and any prisoner caught in the spread.

 

Based on supposedly true events, if it's a bit familiar to you, it's because there's a British-American remake called Escape to Victory, naturally with a happy ending to ruin the whole thing. I'm starting to get Fábri's pattern down: historical context, big powers abusing the little man trying to take their humanity away, while they try and step up to keep their integrity. I read this was mostly a pattern of his earlier works, so I'm not worried the other two boxsets will get stale.

 

This was bloody great again, it made me excited for football for the first time in my life. 4.5/5 again.

 

Well this boxset was really worth the purchase! 4 classics, 3 of which are new favourites of mine, plus one other good one, and I haven't even seen the extras yet!

 

Here's a pic of the individual digipaks, featuring the original theatrical posters, exactly the way I like it!

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Well, one of the last films I watched prior to Pool of London was The Boys from Brazil.

 

I recently brought a secondhand copy of the book, I've not read it in years but have seen the film a few times and so revisited it. I guess it's largely a weird, hokey film. Cloning Hitler, having the said little Hitler's turn into said Fuhrer by killing the fathers when the boys' are a certain age and so forth. But personally, it's driven by the performances of Peck (tad hammy I suppose but something quite enjoyable about it) and Olivier. And then there's the score. 

Still, I read that Peck's Mengele got voted villain of the year or was nominated for it. Something weird about that in itself. 

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Red Heat. 

 

Silly stupid film but it's fun in a way and I like the score (Russian Streets was one of the first Horner tracks I ever heard thanks to the 2CD Titanic: Best of Horner thing I got for Christmas aeons ago). Also, only just twigged it's got the guy who looks vaguely like a Russian Connery in Hunt for Red October. Sven-Ole Thorsen...and he's Danish. 

 

It's like 30C here so I apologise...

 

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Geostorm

 

Funny that in 2016, Roland Emmerich made one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Then in 2017, Dean Devlin said "here, hold my beer". Like, fuck, seriously, what the hell is wrong with you two?

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