Last Movie You Watched

[Karl Henning]

Cheers, Bill!  And promise me you will never operate your landcraft at warp speed 

[Bogey]

Cheers, Bill!  And promise me you will never operate your landcraft at warp speed 

It's a Honda Fit....at best, Galileo 7 Shuttlecraft handling and speed.

[Cato]

Always a pleasure Leo. 

One problem with movies which purport to show real events is that they can give a very distorted view which leads to a kind of 'factualisation of history'. Still, I learnt my lesson when, teaching a class about D-Day, - a visiting Canadian student of about 15 took me to task for not mentioning the important Canadian contribution. After that I always mentioned it.

Many thanks again!  Your story reminds me of a certain German exchange student some years ago: I had an exchange program with a Catholic Gymnasium, and so about 8 or 9 visitors were in my German III and IV classes for 10 days every year.

I believe I was playing part of the Gurrelieder (my students had translated the text) during the Germans' visit.  One of them came up to me after class (apparently as a representative    ) and announced in English:

"We are not liking such music."

To which I responded: "O Schade, aber...Heino  Schallplatten habe ich nicht!"  0:)   (Too bad, but ... I don't have any Heino records!)

For those who do not know of Heino...

[Karl Henning]

Oh, one more thing ...

Saavik is female, yes? Why does Spock address her as "Mr. Saavik"? As an authority convention?

Okay, I watched "Balance of Terror" as part of my Trek-binge yesterday, and a female member of the crew is addressed as Mister.  I consider my question answered.

[Bogey]

Okay, I watched "Balance of Terror" as part of my Trek-binge yesterday, and a female member of the crew is addressed as Mister.  I consider my question answered.

Loved that episode.  I watched The Doomsday Machine two nights ago.  Another favorite.  Was blown away as a kid when I saw another Starship on screen.

[Karl Henning]

Loved that episode.  I watched The Doomsday Machine two nights ago.  Another favorite.  Was blown away as a kid when I saw another Starship on screen.

Perhaps unusually late, but I have become a genuine fan.  "Balance of Terror" may be the most perfect script of the episodes I have yet watched.  I still have "notes" on practically every episode I watch, but I am a sympathetic audience now.

[drogulus]

     What's Fact and What's Fiction in Dunkirk

     There are spoilers here.

[vandermolen]

Great post.

Just be thankful you didn't teach WWI and not mention Vimy Ridge. He'd still be talking. 

For those not in the know, there were 5 beaches assaulted on D-Day. Two were bloodbaths, Omaha and Juno. Juno was the Canadian Beach. Canada had a bit less than 10% of the US population. But Vimy Ridge is the battle in Canadian history.

Those looking for really grim can google Newfoundland Somme. It was not part of Canada at that time.

Thank you! She was a she actually. 
Actually I took a school trip to Vimy Ridge in 2014 - great experience but the Canadian girl had returned home by then.

[vandermolen]

Many thanks again!  Your story reminds me of a certain German exchange student some years ago: I had an exchange program with a Catholic Gymnasium, and so about 8 or 9 visitors were in my German III and IV classes for 10 days every year.

I believe I was playing part of the Gurrelieder (my students had translated the text) during the Germans' visit.  One of them came up to me after class (apparently as a representative    ) and announced in English:

"We are not liking such music."

To which I responded: "O Schade, aber...Heino  Schallplatten habe ich nicht!"  0:)   (Too bad, but ... I don't have any Heino records!)

For those who do not know of Heino...

Excellent Leo! LOL.
Odd that your visiting children didn't appreciate Schoenberg! 
Jeffrey

[Cato]

Excellent Leo! LOL.
Odd that your visiting children didn't appreciate Schoenberg! 
Jeffrey

For the Germans, it just was not "cool" to admit that the music in Gurrelieder was ECHT PRIMA!!!   

     What's Fact and What's Fiction in Dunkirk

     There are spoilers here.

Thanks for the link!

Concerning an earlier comment about John Williams and his score for Brian DePalma's The Fury :

https://www.youtube.com/v/KqCOYkNO_nw

Great stuff!

Recently I discovered that Mosfilm has restored Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, and that it is now available via the Criterion Collection:

https://www.criterion.com/films/28150-stalker

A rave review from the Wall Street Journal:

'Don't hope for flying saucers. That would be too interesting," a jaded writer tells a glamorous woman in one of many strange and beautiful scenes in Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker" (1979). There are no flying saucers in the great Russian director's haunting tale of a journey into the depths of a postapocalyptic landscape, but it offers visual splendor, as well as mysteries, portents and miracles.

Mosfilm recently carried out digital restorations of "Solaris" (1972) and "Stalker," Tarkovsky's two majestic adaptations of science-fiction novels. The Criterion Collection has just released "Stalker" on DVD and Blu-ray, and it is also currently screening in New York and select cities in the U.S. A profound exploration of spiritual desolation and the power of love in a damaged world, it's a film whose poetic vision seems more valuable than ever.

The story unfolds in the aftermath of some disaster, a meteorite or an alien invasion. Troops were sent in but never returned. A forbidden Zone was established but failed to keep out adventurers, called stalkers. A holy fool, the film's idealistic Stalker ( Aleksandr Kaidanovsky )—who has a sick daughter, called Monkey ( Natasha Abramova ), and a loving wife ( Alisa Freindlikh )—continues to smuggle the unhappy or curious into the Zone, despite having been imprisoned and tortured.

Inside the Zone, which he describes as a "very complex maze of traps," the Stalker claims there is a Room where one's deepest desires are fulfilled. This time, he accompanies two men of art and science, the Writer ( Anatoly Solonitsyn ) and the Professor ( Nikolai Grinko ), whose lack of belief in the possibilities of the Room grieves him. At times Tarkovsky suggested that the Stalker conjured up the Zone from his own imagination.

Is the Zone life or death? Perhaps both. In any case, it is zealously guarded. Before entering, the travelers navigate a misty labyrinth of muddy alleys and barbed-wire fences—a grimly magical space that at times echoes Cocteau's "Orpheus" (1950)—fleeing helmeted policemen on motorcycles. Eventually, they escape deep into the Zone, a world that is like and unlike our own. As Geoff Dyer, author of the book "Zona," notes in an interview recorded for the Criterion release, while the film resists easy allegorical interpretations, it's impossible not to think of the gulag, and of how the Zone anticipated Chernobyl.

"Stalker" is loosely based on the novel "Roadside Picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who worked on the screenplay. The production was fraught with difficulties, from an earthquake that necessitated a change in location to thousands of feet of ruined footage. Much of the film was shot under harrowing conditions at a desolate site in Estonia.

"Stalker" often shifts between dreamlike color and glowing sepia. The film's charged images include drowned detritus—such as syringes, coins and a depiction of St. John the Baptist from the Ghent Altarpiece—and lush underwater grasses like human hair. Glass objects float in a flooded interior space and there is a sudden shower of shimmering rain.

A mysterious black dog also appears in the Zone, like a figure from a hieroglyph. Back in the outside world, this benign spirit is still with the travelers, as if having guided them out of the underworld, and in a painterly sequence it follows the Stalker's family home through a ravaged, snow-dusted landscape. When the dog laps milk from a bowl, it seems as miraculous as the apparently supernatural event in the final scene.

The hypnotic electronic score, by Eduard Artemyev —who also worked on Tarkovsky's "Solaris" and "The Mirror" (1975)—combines Eastern and Western musical influences. In "Solaris," an adaptation of a Stanislaw Lem novel, a psychologist and cosmonaut, Kris Kelvin, travels to a space station by a planet with a sentient ocean, where he confronts his conscience. In one of the most exquisite scenes, Kelvin levitates while embracing his resurrected dead wife in the space station's library, a room filled with books, musical instruments and paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Despite the poignant humanity of "Solaris," Tarkovsky expressed dissatisfaction that the science-fiction aspect wasn't more muted. Both films are powerful interior journeys, but in "Stalker" dreams are pursued on Earth. As Mark Le Fanu writes in an essay for Criterion, the dialogue is "magnificently ambivalent: witty and fantastical beyond measure."

"Stalker" was the last film Tarkovsky made in the Soviet Union. In 1984, while in Italy, he announced that he would not return. When he died of cancer in 1986 at age 54, he had completed a small but towering body of work. In his book "Sculpting in Time," published the year of his death, he wrote, "In Stalker I make some sort of complete statement: namely that human love alone is—miraculously—proof against the blunt assertion that there is no hope for the world."

See:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/love-in-a-damaged-world-1500656676#livefyre-toggle-SB10991613259963344133404583261911060813492

[Drasko]

[André]

     What's Fact and What's Fiction in Dunkirk

     There are spoilers here.

Excellent, thanks !

The Slate article contains a link to a another writing piece that is very interesting as it sheds light on the fact that, as war movies go, Dunkirk (or, to give it its french title, Dunkerque) is as close to an anti-war movie as could be (even though he starts by saying it's not an anti-war movie !). The author rightly points out that it was civilians who carried the day, not soldiers.

Link: http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/07/21/dunkirk_isn_t_anti_war_but_it_subverts_war_movies.html

I'm surprised that the line of Churchill's speech (in voice over in the last scenes) in which he obliquely hints at an eventual entry of the New World into WWII has not been commented on. I admire both Churchill's and Nolan's restraint here....

[aligreto]

Le Week-End....





Very entertaining and engaging.

[aligreto]

Well, and I cringe, I heard that they announced Tim Burton was to redo Dumbo.  Seeing I loved the original and that I do not care for his work, I just cannot see it.  Maybe he will surprise me, but until then I will continue to breathe normally.  As for Beauty and the Beast I thought the animated version and the Broadway play were both superior to this installment.

I did not see the Broadway play but I agree on the superiority of the original animation version over the live action one. More importantly, so does my daughter, who is the real critic when compared to me 

[Karl Henning]

Yeah, I've kept myself off the streets 

Is that Peter Weller?

[Karl Henning]

No matter where you go, there you are.

[Bogey]

One of my guilty pleasures.  Some have it as a cult movie.  I've had to had watched it more than a dozen times over the years:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51i328ViSXL._SS500_.jpg

[Karl Henning]

One of my guilty pleasures.  Some have it as a cult movie.  I've had to had watched it more than a dozen times over the years:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51i328ViSXL._SS500_.jpg

Is it a guilty pleasure?  I mean, I can be your cover, by pointing out that I like The Shining  0:)

I went to see that in the cinema back when it was released, and I remember that being a fun night at the movies.  What a cast, for goodness' sake:  Harry Dean Stanton as "Brain," Isaac Hayes as the Duke of New York, President Donald Pleasance, cabbie Ernest Borgnine . . . and of course, Adrienne Barbeau as "Brain's squeeze."

[Karl Henning]

All of which is to say . . . I suppose it is time I watch it again . . . .

[Karl Henning]

Escape from New York Blu-ray Review
The Big Apple is rotten.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, April 18, 2015

When one Rudolph Giuliani undertook a major scrubbing of Manhattan during his mayoralty, promising to make formerly (supposedly)  nefarious spots like Times Square family friendly, he perhaps helped to erase the last vestiges of a situation which informed the subtext of  John Carpenter's fondly remembered 1981 film Escape from New York.  Even during Giuliani's reign, when typically curmudgeonly New  Yorkers may have been perhaps a little surprised at the changes their urban environment was undergoing, there was at least a simmering  subcutaneous feeling of incipient chaos that might break out, despite the best efforts of a gentrification that by most accounts did  materially improve the look if not the actual feel of the Big Apple's mean streets.  But things were definitely tamped down under Giuliani's  aegis, at least in terms of rampant, in your face, crime, and memories perhaps soon faded as to how things had been before Giuliani  and his team took a figurative antiseptic wipe to the burg.  That adrenaline fueled, slightly scary ambience which had been part of New York's  stock in trade for untold decades before this turn of events may have provided at least the semblance of "reality" in the admittedly pretty  fanciful setup of Carpenter's film, where the entire island of Manhattan has been sequestered from the decent folks of law abiding society  and turned into a prison.  In the wild and wooly eighties it wasn't hard to imagine the already turbulent environment of New York City tipping  completely over into lawlessness, and the concept of simply transforming the isle into a fortress filled with criminals may not have seemed  that big of a stretch.  Carpenter is actually on record as stating it wasn't New York's then roiling atmosphere which inspired his original  screenplay (written in the 1970s) as much as a post-Watergate feeling of cynicism and perhaps even disgust with government, though  Carpenter also has basically stated that it didn't take a rocket scientist to look at the "jungle" of New York and imagine a scenario where the  inmates took control of whatever remained of the asylum.  This new Shout! Factory release touts a new 2K scan of the film's interpositive  struck from the original negative (more about that in the video section, below), while also porting over both previously released  (DVD) supplements and a bevy of new  material that were not part of the previous bare bones  release from MGM.