Movies IV: A New Hope (The Original Trilogy)

Just watched The Graduate (1967) again for the first time in maybe 25 years. Why did Mrs Robinson not want Benjamin to date her daughter? Was it because Benjamin was her fountain of youth?

I'm a big Jeff Bridges fan, watched Crazy Heart the other night and liked it.

MGM bankruptcy: lion's roar has long been a whimper

Quote:

In its heyday, MGM stood for something. If Warner Bros meant Depression-era social dramas and gangster movies, and Disney meant animation, then MGM was a glamour factory, and what it largely churned out was wholesome, escapist fantasy.

This business model found its most glorious expression in its musicals of the post-war era, many produced by Arthur Freed. They featured such names as Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly and Judy Garland, and included Singin' in the Rain, On the Town, An American in Paris, Easter Parade. It was an amazing era.

Frankly, I don't know if I should give a damn, as MGM is just another poorly-managed big company, but they sure used to make some good pictures, and that lion's roar at the start of a movie usually meant that you were in for a good show..

Catchfire wrote:

I just watched Gone with the Wind last week. Damn, that's a long movie. As God as my witness, I'll never sit through that again.

heh. I'm 60 years old and I've never sat through an entire showing of GWTW. I sat through about half of Reds (the Warren Beatty epic) but that was about all I could take. I'll have to try to remember what was the longest movie I ever sat through fully.

melovesproles wrote:

I'm a big Jeff Bridges fan, watched Crazy Heart the other night and liked it.

I got this as a back-up movie because my partner loves country music. I figured I would like it but I was surprised with how much I enjoyed it.

al-Qa'bong wrote:

Frankly, I don't know if I should give a damn, as MGM is just another poorly-managed big company, but they sure used to make some good pictures, and that lion's roar at the start of a movie usually meant that you were in for a good show..

You should give a damn because of the rich history that MGM has, and of the pedigree of film that was made during the heyday of Irving Thalberg (all of those adaptations they made of classic novels, their musicals, their science fiction, etc.)

If all else fails, I hope that the MGM catalog can be kept by the Smithsonian, or with another company (maybe a Japanese one? South Korean one?) 

..i have never cried watching an animation before. i did for...

Grave Of The Fireflies - 1988

I watched Arabs and Terrorism a couple of days ago.  It featured some interesting interviews with people such as Hizbullah's Hassan Nasrallah and Nawwaf Musawi, Hamas' Khalid Mish'al, as well as other Arab activists and journalists, including Azmi Bishara, Rami Khouri and Talal Salman. Western figures such as Jeanne Kirkpatrick and various "terrorism experts" were also interviewed.

I was impressed by the contrast between the Arabs' thoughtful, complex responses and the boilerplate talking points of the Westerners.

Has anyone seen the movie, Inception, with Dicaprio and Ellen Page(born in Halifax, Nova Scotia)? I thought it was a very different kind of movie. Not a great movie, but different and interesting for sure.

Boom Boom wrote:

Just watched The Blues Brothers. Jeez, what an incredibly wasteful and destructive movie - dozens of cars getting wrecked just for a movie. Maybe they were junkers destined for the scrap yard, anyway. Loved the music - especially James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Cab Calloway,  and Ray Charles - but this movie has really aged.

Boring to you, maybe-but to the millions of fans worldwide, not at all. And cars have been crashed in movies since the Keystone Kops era.

I just got back from watching American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein.

http://www.americanradicalthefilm.com/

There wasn't much there that I didn't know already. Nevertheless, the power of Finkelstein's adoption of the categorical imperative is striking. The guy is fearless in his pursuit of what he thinks is right, yet he does it in a such a self-effacing way that he almost erases himself as an actor.