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Posted: |
Sep 11, 2013 - 10:15 AM
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By: |
mastadge
(Member)
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Apparently the other thread is taking a long time to load, so I thought I'd go ahead and start the sequel. Why not? For posterity, the old thread is here: http://www.filmscoremonthly.com/board/posts.cfm?threadID=14202
Diving right in, the most recent movies I've watched are:
José Padilha's Elite Squad (2007). I was curious to see what the director bringing us the new RoboCop had done, and I was quite impressed. It turns out that Elite Squad, while the director's first feature film, is the second in his trilogy about Brazilian urban violence, following 2002 documentary Bus 174 (and followed by 2010's Elite Squad: The Enemy Within). This is a nasty movie, in which crime is rampant, law enforcement extremely corrupt, and the few who aren't corrupt are (by necessity, they'd argue) extremely brutal in their methods. It's not always easy to watch, it doesn't offer easy answers, and I'm not sure there's a single character I actually liked, though some where less awful than others. Nevertheless, it was a captivating film, and I'm now very curious to see if Padilha can carry his sense of social dynamics into a Hollywood actioner.
The Black Stallion (1979) dir. Carroll Ballard -- Thanks to my ongoing best-of threads I recalled the films of Carroll Ballard, which I have not seen since I was very young, so I thought I'd start revisiting them. Just a bit of trivia: Ballard was a second-unit photographer on Star Wars, filming many of the desert scenes before behind hired by Francis Ford Coppola to direct this movie. Anyway. In my book this is a good movie but falls shy of being a great one. The first half is great, carried by wonderful visuals coupled with some excellent music by Carmine Coppola, but the second half is merely pretty good -- nothing wrong with it, but very standard stuff. I will say this movie definitely deserves better than to languish in its current non-anamorphic DVD availability -- I'd love to check it out again cleaned up and remastered, because I have to believe it could look better than the very soft picture on the current release.
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Just finished watching The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid for the first time. Cliff Robertson as Cole Younger, Robert Duvall as Jesse James and a whole cast of eccentric characters and character actors. Some of the jocular male humor that writer/director Philip Kaufman wrote for his later "The Right Stuff" is evident here as well. There are some crazy setpieces in this - a hilarious baseball game circa 1876 (it's like the first Seattle Mariners game!), a night with Russian whores, one of them singing a mournful tune throughout, and a wild, wild bank robbery in which Kaufman finds an 1870s version of a blaring car horn to add to the mayhem and confusion. Very wry with some handsome atmospheric lensing by Bruce Surtees. Dave Grusin's score is not one of his more captivating ones however.
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Just finished watching The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid for the first time. Cliff Robertson as Cole Younger, Robert Duvall as Jesse James and a whole cast of eccentric characters and character actors. Some of the jocular male humor that writer/director Philip Kaufman wrote for his later "The Right Stuff" is evident here as well. There are some crazy setpieces in this - a hilarious baseball game circa 1876 (it's like the first Seattle Mariners game!), a night with Russian whores, one of them singing a mournful tune throughout, and a wild, wild bank robbery in which Kaufman finds an 1870s version of a blaring car horn to add to the mayhem and confusion. Very wry with some handsome atmospheric lensing by Bruce Surtees. Dave Grusin's score is not one of his more captivating ones however.
Nice review mark. With your film knowledge i wouldve expected you to have seen this already!!
nice steady 70s western. Always liked it.
Im fond of the little touches like luke Askew - whose character has previously been shot in the mouth - lowering his scarf to eat. R G Armstrong is great and Duvall is at his peak here with anothr believable portrayal.
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