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Hollywood Movie Reviews.........

 
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Reeth
post Sep 13 2007, 06:12 PM
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QUOTE(mmuk2004 @ Sep 11 2007, 10:52 PM) *

Thank you Reeth, I remember being entranced by the drama, the spectacle and the sheer lavishness of the movie. Btw, it has another claim to fame... both Sophia Loren and Liz Taylor were in the movie as extras biggrin.gif ...okay Liz had a cameo...


Dint know that .....i am going to see the movie again and look hard for them....
These movies can be watched any number of times....... smile.gif



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mmuk2004
post Oct 15 2007, 07:55 AM
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How about some Chaplin?

Here are some pics of Modern Times(1936). The film was defiantly made as a silent movie despite the fact that talkies had been introduced almost a decade ago. Chaplin effects a compromise of sorts by using dialogue selectively in the film by deliberately making dialogue emanate from machines and not humans. Chaplin famously also speaks for the first time in the film and again in a brilliant twist "speaks" complete gibberish.

The film is a satire on modern industrialization and the way it trivialized and dehumanized human beings. The movie boasts of several famous images, from the opening shot where a group of factory workers are juxtaposed against the image of a flock of sheep, to the tramp being literally swallowed by the machine, to the famous feeding machine that feeds the tramp and becomes maniacally uncontrolled. Set in post-depression America, the tramp and the waif(Paulette Goddard) remain endearing outcasts in the troubled, frightening landscape of economic deprivation and unrest, and the parallel emergence of an efficient mechanization in industry that was viewed by Chaplin with great distrust.

To make a comedy out of this, and that too a rollicking one, it required the genious of Chaplin. thumbs-up.gif


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mmuk2004
post Oct 15 2007, 08:19 AM
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The famous opening scene of the movie:








The feeding machine:



The famous scene where he sings gibberish and yet makes perfect sense entertaining his audience tongue1.gif



"This isn't right, this isn't even wrong."
Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958)

"There are no facts, only interpretations."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

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mmuk2004
post Oct 15 2007, 08:27 AM
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http://www.starpulse.com/Movies/Modern_Times/Summary/

Modern Times Summary:
This episodic satire of the Machine Age is considered Charles Chaplin's last "silent" film, although Chaplin uses sound, vocal, and musical effects throughout. Chaplin stars as an assembly-line worker driven insane by the monotony of his job. After a long spell in an asylum, he searches for work, only to be mistakenly arrested as a Red agitator. Released after foiling a prison break, Chaplin makes the acquaintance of orphaned gamine (Paulette Goddard) and becomes her friend and protector. He takes on several new jobs for her benefit, but every job ends with a quick dismissal and yet another jail term. During one of his incarcerations, she is hired to dance at a nightclub and arranges for him to be hired there as a singing waiter. He proves an enormous success, but they are both forced to flee their jobs when the orphanage officials show up to claim the girl. Dispirited, she moans, "What's the use of trying?" But the ever-resourceful Chaplin tells her to never say die, and our last image is of Chaplin and The Gamine strolling down a California highway towards new adventures. The plotline of Modern Times is as loosely constructed as any of Chaplin's pre-1915 short subjects, permitting ample space for several of the comedian's most memorable routines: the "automated feeding machine," a nocturnal roller-skating episode, and Chaplin's double-talk song rendition in the nightclub sequence. In addition to producing, directing, writing, and starring in Modern Times, Chaplin also composed its theme song, Smile, which would later be adopted as Jerry Lewis' signature tune. Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide


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mmuk2004
post Oct 16 2007, 11:51 PM
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The Great Dictator(1940)

Not the greatest of Chaplin's films, it has been criticized for its preachy ending which just does not gel with the genre of comedy. However, I cannot imagine Chaplin the director, without having this film in his repertoire. Chaplin had been told of his tramp's facial resemblance with Adolf Hitler. He later found out that they were both born within a week of each other and had a somewhat similar background of an early struggle with poverty before becoming extremely popular in their respective fields.

It is one of the rare films that deals with the Nazi regime through the genre of comedy. I can think of only two other films that have done that, To Be or Not to Be(1942) by the great master of genre, Ernst Lubitsch and, maybe, Life is Beautiful (iffy), which is not pure comedy anyway .

Chaplin plays a double role in the film, of an amnesiac German barber and the dictator Adenoid Hynkel. There is a superb scene in the movie where he gracefully dances with a globe balloon as Adenoid Hynkel. I also love his speech as Hynkel when the mike bends with the force of his gibberish. And then there is John Oakie as Mussollini romping loutishly as a superb foil to the crazed Hynkel.

Chaplin obstinately did not allow the last scene to be deleted, where he gives a six minute speech straight from the heart. While it is, admittedly, one of those scenes that do not fit in the frame of the movie, it remains a testament of Chaplin's deep concern for freedom and humanity.


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mmuk2004
post Oct 16 2007, 11:55 PM
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The globe scene


The voice of Hynkel: once again using gibberish as satire


The last speech



"This isn't right, this isn't even wrong."
Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958)

"There are no facts, only interpretations."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

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mmuk2004
post Oct 17 2007, 12:03 AM
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Review by Mark Bourne

QUOTE
A number of things make The Great Dictator unlike any previous Chaplin film. Bosley Crowther's New York Times review noted that this was "no droll and gentle-humored social satire in the manner of Chaplin's earlier films. The Great Dictator is essentially a tragic picture — or tragi-comic in the classic sense — and it has strongly bitter overtones." And in a bow to technological inevitability, this was Chaplin's first full-on sound film with dialogue. Knowing that dialogue would destroy the essence of the necessarily silent Little Tramp, cinema's foremost pantomimist retired the character forever at the conclusion of Modern Times four years earlier. So The Great Dictator was the first feature-length film in which he starred as a character other than the Tramp.

In The Great Dictator Chaplin in fact plays two lead roles. One is a meek Jewish barber in the European country of Tomania. Granted, the barber bears more than a passing resemblance to the Tramp, even affecting the familiar bowler hat and cane. But Chaplin was clear that the barber is not the Tramp and The Great Dictator is not a Tramp movie. The barber is a World War I soldier stricken with amnesia in an aircraft accident. After twenty years in a hospital, he returns to the Jewish ghetto where he re-opens his long-abandoned shop, blissfully ignorant of how the world has changed in his absence. Thuggish Aryan stormtroopers patrol the streets to assault Jewish civilians. They paint the word JEW on the barber's shop windows. They wear armbands with the Swastika-like "double cross." The country is under the thumb of Adenoid Hynkel, the power-mad Fooey (that is, Führer), who with his jackbooted armies is determined to conquer the globe. Grinding the Jews in the ghetto beneath his heel is only the start of his plans.

Secondly (and more memorably), Chaplin plays the crazed dictator Hynkel. It's in this savage and undisguised parody of Hitler that The Great Dictator achieves its immortality. A pompous little megalomaniac, Hynkel was a pie in the face to a madman whom Hollywood and the rest of the world had come to fear. Chaplin inhabits Hynkel so fully that the barber is rendered almost perfunctory. Chaplin studied hours of newsreels to capture Hitler properly, and this lacerating sendup of the Führer's oratorical style blends mock-German gobbledygook with a bullseye on his theatrical bombast.

It turns out that the barber and Hynkel are lookalikes. ("Any resemblance between Hynkel the dictator and the Jewish barber is purely coincidental," quips an opening title card.) Hynkel prepares his plans to kill off all the Jews ("then the brunettes") with the aid of his loyal advisers, Field Marshal Herring and Propaganda Minister Garbitsch. Meanwhile, the barber innocently tries to adjust to his new life as a prisoner in his own country. He becomes involved with a young orphan woman, Hannah (Paulette Goddard), and through her falls in with a group of conspirators who aim to assassinate Hynkel. A scene where they consume puddings, and whoever spoons up a hidden coin must embark on the suicide mission, is one of the great Chaplin bits.

Each of Chaplin's pinnacle features — The Kid, The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator — contributed at least one of cinema's all-time indelible images. In Dictator that comes with the inspired scene where Hynkel, alone in his palatial Chancellery, dances a graceful ballet with a globe of Planet Earth. When the balloon-globe eventually pops in his face, the great dictator cries like a spoiled child. The scene is one of Chaplin's most sublime. Artistically, any faults one can quibble about in The Great Dictator are trumped by this famous sequence.

For good measure, Chaplin drives a clown car up Mussolini's ass as well. Vaudeville-trained Jack Oakie turns Il Duce into "Napaloni of Bacteria," a back-slapping, uncouth, low-comedy bulldog of a despot. He competes with Hynkel for everything from the height of their barber chairs (which telescope toward the ceiling in a brilliant one-panel cartoon of political one-upmanship) to whose army invades a country first. It's to Chaplin's credit that he shared so much screen time with the born scene-stealer Oakie, who barrels through the movie like a New York cab driver through a yellow light. The performance earned Oakie an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Events turn so that the barber must impersonate the dictator in a radio address to the entire world. And here arrives the most controversial scene in The Great Dictator, probably in all the Chaplin syllabus. The barber, disguised as Hynkel, steps up to the podium and through the camera faces us eye to eye. Now Chaplin drops character utterly. He speaks not as the barber, but as himself and from the heart in a screen-filling close-up. In an impassioned six-minute speech he pleads for tolerance and the elevation of the innate greater good of the human spirit, and an end to oppression, industrial dehumanization, greed, militarism, and nationalism.




"This isn't right, this isn't even wrong."
Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958)

"There are no facts, only interpretations."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

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Reeth
post Oct 17 2007, 09:55 AM
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How about some Chaplin?


Sure madhavi, Thanks a million for all this Great write up on his films. bow.gif .....i love his incomparable films....
I want to see them all over again now after reading your reviews... smile.gif



The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives
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-William James
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mmuk2004
post Oct 18 2007, 09:23 PM
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QUOTE
I want to see them all over again now


Do you get good copies of old hollywood films in India? Just curious, wanted to know if the libraries had copies of these films. Here, in the public libraries, you get an amazing selection of classic hollywood and even "foreign" language films.

Annie Hall (1977)

And from early modern comedy to contemporary comedy... I am a big fan of Woody Allen's films. He redefined the genre of modern romantic comedy, making it intellectual, "stressed out" and incredibly funny and bitter. The archetypal Allen hero(often played by Allen himself) is a neurotic, self-conscious, obsessively vocal figure who moves in and out of romantic relationships and does not seem to have gained much from his experiences. Allen's films are all usually based in New York, he has always claimed that he cannot survive without a daily dose of its pyschedelic, pychosomatic and high-pressure life.

Here are some pictures of Annie Hall (1977), one of Allen's lighter satires, it has the superb Diane Keaton in one of her early major roles and it won her an Oscar. She is perfect in the movie as the small-town girl with her odd clothes and her "la di dah" who still seems to be able to adjust to the rules of the game in the slick city slightly ahead of Allen. The movie begins with Allen directly facing the audience seemingly unable to stem his nervous verbosity:

"Life is full of loneliness, misery, suffering, and unhappiness- and it's all over much too quickly"

Quoting Groucho Marx: "I would never belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member."


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mmuk2004
post Oct 18 2007, 09:26 PM
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http://www.culturevulture.net/movies/AnnieHall.htm

"Life is full of loneliness, misery, suffering, and unhappiness - and it's all over much too quickly," says Woody Allen at the beginning of Annie Hall. This could be a statement of the ongoing theme of Allen's movies over a career that spans forty years and continues apace.

It is also the kind of line we expect from Allen - funny and observant, with that special New York twist. New Yorkers use irony more than other Americans. When New Yorkers make a statement, there are generally no fewer than two meanings contained at once and the listener is assumed to pick up on the multiple meanings. (Southerners, on the other hand, tend to say what they think you want to hear and hope you will not know what they are really thinking. Out here in sunny California, most people deal only in one meaning at a time, if there is meaning to start with.)

If Annie Hall is the best of this genre, it is because it is one of Allen's happier films. The suffering is kept light, the laughter is not heavily tainted with bitterness. The relationship of the hero, intellectual Jewish comedian Alvy Singer, with gentile, white bread, "neat" Annie Hall (Diane Keaton - very young and fresh and deliciously daffy here) allows for the amusement that arises out of the conflict of their cultures and the delight of the real romance they find in each other's differences.

Allen cleverly uses a variety of film techniques, enhancing his consistently witty dialogue as he makes his points. He steps out of character to share a thought directly with the audience. He takes us on a visit to his childhood home, where the contemporary figures dialogue with the historical ones. He uses split screens to allow interaction between characters who would not be interacting in a realistic treatment, but whose verbal interplay provides still another method to explore meaning by playing off of differences. It is a tour de force that only the most skilled writer/filmmaker/comedian could pull off. There may be others who can do it, but none with the viewpoint, the wit, and the insight that Allen brings to it with seeming effortlessness, and, surely in the case of Annie Hall, great joy.

Arthur Lazere


From the Wiki:

In 1977, Keaton starred with Allen in the romantic comedy Annie Hall, in which she played one of her most famous roles. Annie Hall was written and directed by Allen, her paramour at the time, and the film was believed to be autobiographical of his relationship with Keaton. Allen based the character of Annie Hall loosely on Keaton ("Annie" is a nickname of hers, and "Hall" is her original surname). Many of Keaton's mannerisms and her self-deprecating sense of humor were added into the role by Allen. (Director Nancy Meyers has claimed "Diane's the most self-deprecating person alive".[15]) Keaton has also said that Allen wrote the character as an "idealized version" of herself.[16] The two starred as a frequently on-again, off-again couple living in New York City. Her acting was later summed up by CNN as "awkward, self-deprecating, speaking in endearing little whirlwinds of semi-logic",[17] and by Allen as a "nervous breakdown in slow motion."[18] The film was both a major financial and critical success, and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Keaton's performance also won the Academy Award for Best Actress. In 2006, Premiere magazine ranked Keaton in Annie Hall as 60th on their list of the "100 Greatest Performances of All Time":

“ It's hard to play ditzy. ... The genius of Annie is that despite her loopy backhand, awful driving, and nervous tics, she's also a complicated, intelligent woman. Keaton brilliantly displays this dichotomy of her character...



"This isn't right, this isn't even wrong."
Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958)

"There are no facts, only interpretations."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

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mmuk2004
post Oct 18 2007, 09:30 PM
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Now for some youtube clips:

The opening scene:



Lining up to see a movie, Woody is annoyed with the person standing behind him going on and on about Fellini and is vindicated by cheating and breaking the dramtic illusion biggrin.gif I love this scene...boy if life were only like this!



Some scenes from Annie Hall:



"This isn't right, this isn't even wrong."
Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958)

"There are no facts, only interpretations."
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simplefable
post Oct 18 2007, 09:33 PM
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QUOTE(mmuk2004 @ Oct 18 2007, 09:23 PM) *

QUOTE
I want to see them all over again now


Do you get good copies of old hollywood films in India? Just curious, wanted to know if the libraries had copies of these films. Here, in the public libraries, you get an amazing selection of classic hollywood and even "foreign" language films.



Actually the scene looks pretty bright right now..even in the small town i live, there is one shop which keeps all good films irrespective of whether they are taken off shelf or not, including a rack for World films..which are from other languages. Actually i am a movie buff and when i visited US, i copied around 100 dvds for my collection.. smile.gif

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
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mmuk2004
post Oct 18 2007, 09:35 PM
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Wow, I am a big movie buff too...

Phir der kis baat ki... smile.gif Please do tell us about the movies you enjoyed watching, SF.



"This isn't right, this isn't even wrong."
Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958)

"There are no facts, only interpretations."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

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simplefable
post Oct 18 2007, 09:48 PM
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I really dont go for popular movies. I search for those which have a distinct human drama with all failings, yet looking on bright side. Off hand, if i have to say some names...for war films....Operation daybreak * timothy bottoms.. The Great escape * Richard Attenborough.. there is Papillon....Human dramas ( almost mono acting) of emma thompson in Wit ....one flew over the cuckoos' nest, anatomy of murder, it is a wonderful life...comedies... Getting away with murder, quick change, all chaplin movies..city lights is very special.. Yes, i will sit down and write up. You are doing great job Madhavi...Thanks a lot.. smile.gif

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
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mmuk2004
post Oct 18 2007, 10:21 PM
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Ah, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"... Jack Nicholson is one of my all time favorites. Would love to discuss some of his films too...after the Allen round though... tongue1.gif


And talking of war films...check out some of Stanley Kubrick's masterpieces:

Paths of Glory (1957): Straight war film, sparse and tense..

Dr. Strangelove or How I Stopped worrying and Learnt to Love the Bomb (1964): Exaggerated satire with Peter Sellers in a brilliant performance.

Full Metal Jacket (1987): Dealing with the Vietnam War.



"This isn't right, this isn't even wrong."
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"There are no facts, only interpretations."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

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