Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Spoilers What Movie Are You Watching?
- Thread starter Huntn
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I like House of Cards too and am looking forward to season 2 next month.
You can talk about it and other TV/Netflix series in the What's on T.V.? Thread.
I'm watching a movie about one of my favorite indulgences, The Perfect Cappuccino which was recommended in our Espresso Enthusiasts thread.
Attachments
Saving Private Ryan. Seen it a few times of course, but that opening 15minutes....
So glad my grandad went through that instead of me.
He never spoke about the war. So much trauma at such a young age.
So glad my grandad went through that instead of me.
He never spoke about the war. So much trauma at such a young age.
I don't think the film glorifies these people. Scorsese is known for his controversial films, but that is why I like him. All these things happened, and so to stay "true to the art" I have no problem with the excessiveness.
Was it over the top? Yes. But that is what really happened. Not calling you out specifically, but people trying to be politically correct about things like this are just pathetic. Would you want the film to be DeCaprio looking into a camera saying "kids what I did was wrong"? Furthermore, the film is about his account as to what happened at Stratton Oakmont. Did he meet any of his victims? No. The film isn't a documentary, more like a biopic.
I also thought it was DeCaprio's finest performance of his career.
Yes, but once you get beyond the now iconic first 15 minutes, it's just another superficial, shallow, cheaply sentimental, mile-wide-and-an-inch-deep Spielberg film, with the rather unprepossessing and minimally talented Tom Hanks.
Just one man's extremely unpopular opinion, of course.
Ah...now that's a recent era film worth seeing!
It was worth seeing. You should spend the $3.99 to rent it.
Yes, but once you get beyond the now iconic first 15 minutes, it's just another superficial, shallow, cheaply sentimental, mile-wide-and-an-inch-deep Spielberg film, with the rather unprepossessing and minimally talented Tom Hanks.
Just one man's extremely unpopular opinion, of course.
You just made be fall off the side of my chair!
Cheap and shallow? I think you might be in the minority on this one . 
Yes, but once you get beyond the now iconic first 15 minutes, it's just another superficial, shallow, cheaply sentimental, mile-wide-and-an-inch-deep Spielberg film, with the rather unprepossessing and minimally talented Tom Hanks.
Just one man's extremely unpopular opinion, of course.
Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes. A fervent and heartfelt amen to this exquisitely expressed sentiment - with which I find myself in wholehearted agreement.
Indeed, I have long wondered whether I was the only person on the planet who held this view, (and now know, to my relief and pleasure that I am not) and remain stupefied that this 'minimally talented' (Oooooh. Lovely....) actor is considered to be in any way a serious practitioner of his craft........
Last edited:
You just made be fall off the side of my chair!
I'm sure that you are right as, apparently, everyone but me thinks he's a genius.
No doubt that his films are visually excellent, but if you have all the money in the world, putting up good visuals is no big accomplishment. Compared to some of the amazing production values produced by directors, cinematographers, and lighting directors who are working with shoe string budgets...Spielberg's visuals, while well done, do not impress me.
And, yes, I think the emotions that he wrings from the audience are cheap...meaning he doesn't earn the audience's emotional response with fine directions, scripts, etc., he just pushes the buttons that exist in most of us. The buttons might be described as follows...show us a boy and his dog throughout the first reel, kill off the dog in the second reel, and I guarantee the audience will cry all through the third reel. Cheap, button pushing!
But then, what the heck do I know!
Last edited:
I'm sure that you are right as, apparently, everyone but me thinks he's a genius.
No doubt that his films are visually excellent, but if you have all the money in the world, putting up good visuals is no big accomplishment. Compared to some of the amazing production values produced by directors, cinematographers, and lighting directors who are working with shoe string budgets...Spielberg's visuals, while well done, do not impress me.
And, yes, I think the emotions that he wrings from the audience are cheap...meaning he doesn't earn the audience's emotional response with fine directions, scripts, etc., he just pushes the buttons that exist in most of us. The buttons might be described as follows...show us a boy and his dog throughout the first reel, kill off the dog in the second reel, and I guarantee the audience will cry all through the third reel. Cheap, button pushing!
But then, what the heck do I know!
Well, I dont describe Spielberg a genius, I do consider him a capable director capable of average to excellence and popular story telling. His top movies have to be Jaws, Saving Private Ryan, and Schindler's List. Although not directing he has been associated with the good Band of Brothers and The Pacific (WWII) documentary, and the mundane such as Tera Nova and Falling Skies.
As far as SPR being shallow, to me this can be hard to pin down without more explanation. If you are speaking of character development, my counter is that this is simply a story of a mission to find a soldier in a theater of battle, coupled with painting a realistic portrait of war, suffering, acts of heroism, and the personal sacrifice of young men (and families) for their country, along with survivor guilt experience by Ryan. Due to the setting and pacing of the story, there is not much time, nor should there be to develop character profiles other than how you see them react to a situation and lots of stress. All major characters had distinct personalities and I was most intrigued by Upham's struggle not to be a coward. (Jeremy Davies, who played Upham also played Daniel Farraday on Lost.
) In contrast, by nature of being a mini-series BoB had more time to develop personalities. If eliciting emotions is "button pushing", then I agree, but I would not describe it as cheap, I believe they are a genuine emotions felt when witnessing the destruction of war, personal loss, and survivor's guilt. I thought "Have I lived a good life?" was very emotional. Just my opinion. As far as the talents of Tom Hanks, I consider him to be a comfortable actor that I like , but I don't go see a movie just because he is in it. His single best performance would have to be The Green Mile. This was the perfect vehicle for Tom Hanks to do what he does best, playing an average person.
Last edited:
Well, I dont describe Spielberg a genius, I do consider him a capable director capable of average to excellence and popular story telling. His top movies have to be Jaws, Saving Private Ryan, and Schindler's List. Although not directing he has been associated with the good Band of Brothers and The Pacific (WWII) documentary, and the mundane such as Tera Nova and Falling Skies.
As far as SPR being shallow, to me this can be hard to pin down without more explanation. If you are speaking of character development, my counter is that this is simply a story of a mission to find a soldier in a theater of battle, coupled with painting a realistic portrait of war, suffering, acts of heroism, and the personal sacrifice of young men (and families) for their country, along with survivor guilt experience by Ryan. Due to the setting and pacing of the story, there is not much time, nor should there be to develop character profiles other than how you see them react to a situation and lots of stress. All major characters had distinct personalities and I was most intrigued by Upham's struggle not to be a coward. (Jeremy Davies, who played Upham also played Daniel Farraday on Lost.
As far as the talents of Tom Hanks, I consider him to be a comfortable actor that I like , but I don't go see a movie just because he is in it. His single best performance would have to be The Green Mile. This was the perfect vehicle for Tom Hanks to do what he does best, playing an average person.
As always, your comments are well thought out and a pleasure to read.
My comment on Speilberg's shallow and superficial treatment of all aspects of his films (character development, story line, sentimentality) are not a direct comment on Private Ryan, but on all of his films. He cleverly skims the surface of his subject, apparently in an attempt to impress the audience with his visuals.
There are, for me, different ways of eliciting genuine emotions from an audience. As I said above, you can just push the buttons with "kill the dog" tricks...which is what I mean by cheap emotions. Not that the emotions are cheap, what is cheap is tha manner in which they are elicited. Generating emotions in an audience by character development,script, and direction earns the audiences emotion by genuine concern for the character...not by manipulating with trickery.
Anyway...he has certainly gained a wide and devoted audience. So as with my general dislike of Hitchcock's American made films...I'm out there on the fringe.
As always, your comments are well thought out and a pleasure to read.
My comment on Speilberg's shallow and superficial treatment of all aspects of his films (character development, story line, sentimentality) are not a direct comment on Private Ryan, but on all of his films. He cleverly skims the surface of his subject, apparently in an attempt to impress the audience with his visuals.
There are, for me, different ways of eliciting genuine emotions from an audience. As I said above, you can just push the buttons with "kill the dog" tricks...which is what I mean by cheap emotions. Not that the emotions are cheap, what is cheap is tha manner in which they are elicited. Generating emotions in an audience by character development,script, and direction earns the audiences emotion by genuine concern for the character...not by manipulating with trickery.
Anyway...he has certainly gained a wide and devoted audience. So as with my general dislike of Hitchcock's American made films...I'm out there on the fringe.
I enjoy your posts and accept that we don't agree on everything.
I won't contest that Spielberg is guilty of the accusation, but for Ryan and Schindler, I'll respectfully ask what subject matter was sacrificed for grand visuals? Because of the subject of both those movies, it's not kill the dog, but "kill the people" in actual historical context. If these stories are to be told in a realistic, other than Hogan's Heroes manner
, then this is what I imagine I'd see. Consequently, I would use the word "accurate" instead of "cheap". Such as the German Officer (Ralph Fiennes- Goeth), after a romp in bed, standing on his balcony picking off Jewish prisoners who are not moving/working fast enough (Schindler's List). In Ryan, I had a hard time watching the Medic (Giovanni Ribisi) die while his compadres did what little they could do for him. These are great visuals that tell the story, illustrating human violence, suffering and abuse like no other method does.
Last edited:
Back in the 1960s (actually 1959) there was a Twilight Zone episode The Lonely about a convict and his relationship with a woman (Jack Warden and Jean marsh) who turns out to be a robot, and then there was Stepford Wives, and later A.I., so this seems to be theme with the real likelihood of coming true when technology is up to the challenge. Although I've not seen this movie, my impression it's about a guy who falls in love with the A.I. without a body. Maybe the computer comes with "attachments".
I'll stream it when the opportunity arises.The Lonely (Twilight Zone 1959):
I enjoy your posts and accept that we don't agree on everything.
I won't contest that Spielberg is guilty of the accusation, but for Ryan and Schindler, I'll respectfully ask what subject matter was sacrificed for grand visuals? Because of the subject of both those movies, it's not kill the dog, but "kill the people" in actual historical context. If these stories are to be told in a realistic, other than Hogan's Heroes manner
As I'm sure you know, the "kill the dog" phrase was not meant to be taken literally. It is meant to suggest that a director can manipulate an audience's emotional responses using simple, tricks....of character, of artificially constructed situations, of timing, or numerous other manipulations to wring emotion from an audience that has not been earned by the director.. It is these "unworthy" manipulations to which I refer as cheap.
As I have not seen Schindler's List, and have no intention of doing so, I cannot comment upon that film. Having seen Private Ryan only once, and quite a while ago, I can't discuss it in the detail you are able to do.
My comments are my assessment of his films seen over time. The criticisms I raise are, in my view, common to all of his films.
About Schindler's List...as I have not seen it, I don't know if it is the usual Spielberg production, or a brilliant and admirable film. I'm afraid that his track record (for me), and the immense magnitude of the subject, and it's significance to me, led me to avoid the film on the possibility that it was the usual Spielberg movie. I have no desire to see him deal with the Holocaust in his usual manner...and if he really transcended his usual mediocrity...my loss. I'm will to risk that loss to avoid exposing myself to the probability that it is another Spielberg film...dealing superficially with a subject way out of his league.
In general, I find myself in agreement with Shrink with his comments on both Steven Spielberg as a director, and, Schindler's List, the movie, which I have seen.
Precisely because I am an historian by training and background (and my main interest and area of academic expertise for years has been 20th century European history, large sections of which I taught), I am extraordinarily intolerant of historical inaccuracies in movies.
If they are marketed and pitched as entertainment, or as an interpretation of a narrative (with a historical background) fair enough, but please don't try to pass that off as 'real' history.
When accuracy is sacrificed for entertainment, I find that I am unable to forego the counsel of my critical faculties, and the 'willing suspension of disbelief', so crucial to the enjoyment of most movies and indeed, plays, becomes impossible for me.
Where Spielberg is concerned, it is the tone of his movies that bothers me. Actually, the movie Schindler's List is basically accurate, (in that outrageous liberties were not taken with the actual story). Nevertheless, I still disliked it, as I find the shameless attempt to play on emotions, and encourage sentimental responses (a failing of quite a number of US films, but rarely found, thankfully, in European cinema) disagreeable.
That does not mean that the Halocaust, or the Nazi era, cannot be portrayed successfully and with searing insight in movies and on TV. It can, and there have been some outstanding movies which deal with various aspects of that world - for example - the wonderful Cabaret, or Mefisto - Istvan Szabo's superb movie which looks at artistic and moral compromises in an utterly compelling piece of work.
Downfall, of course, is superb - Bruno Ganz as Hitler is mesmeric - there is the excellent Dutch movie, The Assault (based on Harry Mulisch's book of the same name), as well as the impressive and powerful German TV series Heimat (from the 1980s - an astonishing achievement of narrative force, faithful to both character and history, as it took the story of a village in the Hunsruck region, in the Rhineland, in Germany from 1918 up to the early 1980s), and many more.
What they all have in common is an understated force, and a verisimilitude, a respect for story, character, source and historical truth.
Likewise, the best documentaries which deal with that era, and this topic, are all the more powerful for being understated, rather than the reverse. Their force comes from the steady, undramatic accretion of meticulously observed mundane details. Marcel Ophuls, and Claud Lanzmann have both made searing and stupendously powerful documentaries about that period, ('Hotel Terminus', 'The Sorrow and the Pity' and 'Shoah' - all outstanding) using the technique of 'cinema verité', and highlighting, above all, the sheer, excruciating, mind numbing, horror of what Hannah Arendt has described - with devastating insight - as 'the banality of evil'.
So, mawkish sentimentality doesn't cut it with me, irrespective of how popular such a tone is in cinemas across the Atlantic. Give me the bitter-sweet integrity of art (& life) anyway, as portrayed in European cinema, instead.
Precisely because I am an historian by training and background (and my main interest and area of academic expertise for years has been 20th century European history, large sections of which I taught), I am extraordinarily intolerant of historical inaccuracies in movies.
If they are marketed and pitched as entertainment, or as an interpretation of a narrative (with a historical background) fair enough, but please don't try to pass that off as 'real' history.
When accuracy is sacrificed for entertainment, I find that I am unable to forego the counsel of my critical faculties, and the 'willing suspension of disbelief', so crucial to the enjoyment of most movies and indeed, plays, becomes impossible for me.
Where Spielberg is concerned, it is the tone of his movies that bothers me. Actually, the movie Schindler's List is basically accurate, (in that outrageous liberties were not taken with the actual story). Nevertheless, I still disliked it, as I find the shameless attempt to play on emotions, and encourage sentimental responses (a failing of quite a number of US films, but rarely found, thankfully, in European cinema) disagreeable.
That does not mean that the Halocaust, or the Nazi era, cannot be portrayed successfully and with searing insight in movies and on TV. It can, and there have been some outstanding movies which deal with various aspects of that world - for example - the wonderful Cabaret, or Mefisto - Istvan Szabo's superb movie which looks at artistic and moral compromises in an utterly compelling piece of work.
Downfall, of course, is superb - Bruno Ganz as Hitler is mesmeric - there is the excellent Dutch movie, The Assault (based on Harry Mulisch's book of the same name), as well as the impressive and powerful German TV series Heimat (from the 1980s - an astonishing achievement of narrative force, faithful to both character and history, as it took the story of a village in the Hunsruck region, in the Rhineland, in Germany from 1918 up to the early 1980s), and many more.
What they all have in common is an understated force, and a verisimilitude, a respect for story, character, source and historical truth.
Likewise, the best documentaries which deal with that era, and this topic, are all the more powerful for being understated, rather than the reverse. Their force comes from the steady, undramatic accretion of meticulously observed mundane details. Marcel Ophuls, and Claud Lanzmann have both made searing and stupendously powerful documentaries about that period, ('Hotel Terminus', 'The Sorrow and the Pity' and 'Shoah' - all outstanding) using the technique of 'cinema verité', and highlighting, above all, the sheer, excruciating, mind numbing, horror of what Hannah Arendt has described - with devastating insight - as 'the banality of evil'.
So, mawkish sentimentality doesn't cut it with me, irrespective of how popular such a tone is in cinemas across the Atlantic. Give me the bitter-sweet integrity of art (& life) anyway, as portrayed in European cinema, instead.
Last edited:
Thanks guys for your perspectives!
It's always a pleasure discussing film with you...even when we disagree or, perhaps, especially when we disagree, because you engage in disagreement in a civi, respectful, and well reasoned manner - an unusual pleasure around here.
Thanks...
Last edited:
it's always a pleasure discussing film with you...even when we disagree or, perhaps, especially when we disagree, because you engage in disagreement in a civi, respectful, and well reasoned manner - an unusual pleasure around here.
Thanks...
That goes both ways.
I think we three got to raise our points and that is enough for me. Yes I disagree, but don't begrudge differing opinions.
The Thing From Another World- really good for a 1951 SciFi movie with James Arness in a plant suit. It came out before I was born, but I remember as a kid watching this with a coat ready to throw over my head. In this version The Thing was an animated plant in humanoid form who liked blood for sustenance.
Of course the 1982 version with Kurt Russell is superb and the concept of taking over cells and replicating organisms, was much more menacing, and I admit to having a restless night after watching it. I was in the Navy at the time and in my squadron there was a guy named Clark, and he was teased for sometime after this came out with "Where is Clark"? Anyone play the video game? It was tense. The 2011 movie version was ok, but a letdown as to what came before it.
The Black Stallion (1979)- a beautiful, artistic and atmospheric movie. My DVD copy is showing its age. I might have to spring for BluRay, if and when it ever becomes available. I remember a time when I don't remember that much difference between DVD and BluRay, but as televisions have gotten better the difference is much more apparant.
In this version The Thing was an animated plant in humanoid form who liked blood for sustenance.
Of course the 1982 version with Kurt Russell is superb and the concept of taking over cells and replicating organisms, was much more menacing, and I admit to having a restless night after watching it. I was in the Navy at the time and in my squadron there was a guy named Clark, and he was teased for sometime after this came out with "Where is Clark"?
Anyone play the video game? It was tense. The 2011 movie version was ok, but a letdown as to what came before it.
The Black Stallion (1979)- a beautiful, artistic and atmospheric movie. My DVD copy is showing its age. I might have to spring for BluRay, if and when it ever becomes available. I remember a time when I don't remember that much difference between DVD and BluRay, but as televisions have gotten better the difference is much more apparant.
Last edited:
I remember reading the book 'The Black Stallion' as a child, and loved it. unfortunately, I have never seen the movie, although I believe that it got some very good reviews.
Last edited:
The first time I watched it, it was for typical narmy humor. I've seen it a fourth time tonight and developed a bizarre Stockholm syndrome with (for?) it. It's weird how often this happens with me and bad movies.
I'm really excited to watch that for some reason.
I finally decided to see Elysium and I wasn't disappointed. It started off slower then I thought it would, but it picked up. I wasn't sold on Jodie Foster as a villain - she could have pulled it off, she did have that icy demeanor but something about it just failed. I also get what accent she had
Overall it was entertaining, though I'm glad I didn't spend the $$ to see it in the theaters, definitely a good movie to watch on demand or a premium channel not worth the cost of a movie ticket
Overall it was entertaining, though I'm glad I didn't spend the $$ to see it in the theaters, definitely a good movie to watch on demand or a premium channel not worth the cost of a movie ticket