Ask The Gold Trumpet

Started by Gold Trumpet, April 30, 2003, 07:35:07 PM

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SHAFTR

Quote from: SHAFTR3.)  A Better Place:  a film that GW reminded me of, if you haven't seen it, check it out and let me know what you think.

You suspected right. I haven't seen it. Unless I ordered it off the net, I likely have no chance of watching this anytime soon. I'll keep an eye on IFC and Sundance for it, though.[/quote]

From what I can gather you live in a small town in the middle of no where (no where to rent films at).  I could be wrong though.  Either way, you should go Netflix.
"Talking shit about a pretty sunset
Blanketing opinions that i'll probably regret soon"

Gold Trumpet

Quote from: SHAFTRFrom what I can gather you live in a small town in the middle of no where (no where to rent films at).  I could be wrong though.  Either way, you should go Netflix.

I do live in a small town. My world so remote I can even say I spent nearly half my childhood growing up on a farm. We have video rental stores, but I know that wouldn't be there. I'd do netflix, but I have so many problems with internet ordering that I am very wary of trying it.

SHAFTR

Quote from: The Gold Trumpet
Quote from: SHAFTRFrom what I can gather you live in a small town in the middle of no where (no where to rent films at).  I could be wrong though.  Either way, you should go Netflix.

I do live in a small town. My world so remote I can even say I spent nearly half my childhood growing up on a farm. We have video rental stores, but I know that wouldn't be there. I'd do netflix, but I have so many problems with internet ordering that I am very wary of trying it.

It is quite simple.  You put in your debit/credit card information, every month it takes out $21 until you cancel.  You create your queue and it follows it.

What small town do you live in?  I have a feeling your from Wisconsin, which means I might know.
"Talking shit about a pretty sunset
Blanketing opinions that i'll probably regret soon"

Gold Trumpet

Quote from: SHAFTRWhat small town do you live in?  I have a feeling your from Wisconsin, which means I might know.

Nope. I'm in Michigan in the Upper Peninsula. And yes, I am a yooper (if you ever heard that nickname). The nickname means I am a flannel wearing, beer swiggling, pastie eating, canadian sounding, deer hunting, redneck who is dumber than rocks. I guess my town isn't that small because it is labeled a city, but it is a small town to me. The town is Escanaba. Just don't fucking stalk me or anything.

SHAFTR

Quote from: The Gold Trumpet
Quote from: SHAFTRWhat small town do you live in?  I have a feeling your from Wisconsin, which means I might know.

Nope. I'm in Michigan in the Upper Peninsula. And yes, I am a yooper (if you ever heard that nickname). The nickname means I am a flannel wearing, beer swiggling, pastie eating, canadian sounding, deer hunting, redneck who is dumber than rocks. I guess my town isn't that small because it is labeled a city, but it is a small town to me. The town is Escanaba. Just don't fucking stalk me or anything.

Oh man, the UP is a scary place.  I went camping up there once in one of the national parks and a bear ran by me when I was in the woods, scared the shit out of me.  I had a very strange weekend there with some friends from HS (2 of the 3 of which I have grown apart from).  

Anyways, I'll give you some more film questions, starting with my favorites.

1.)  Chasing Amy
2.)  Breathless
3.)  Shaft (1971)
"Talking shit about a pretty sunset
Blanketing opinions that i'll probably regret soon"

Gold Trumpet

Quote from: SHAFTROh man, the UP is a scary place

That's our goal for tourists. I went on a hunting trip once when out of state guys started marching on the land where my friends were baiting for deer. We asked these guys nicely if they could stay away from the area because our group had been baiting all week. They told us to fuck off and just went hunting there anyways. To get revenge, one of the guys in the group got a deer corpse from a guy who ran one over and we found the camp for these guys and we stuck the deer in one of the sleeping bags on the ground. The sleeping bag was soaked in blood when we finished. The guys were off hunting so never caught us doing it.

Also, you gotta visit the bar that is owned by a 300 pound lady who is known on some nights to challenge men and women to mud wrestling matches. It is popular and she always gets challengers. Worst, she is also a part time stripper. She's become sorta legendary around here.

SHAFTR

Quote from: The Gold Trumpet
Quote from: SHAFTROh man, the UP is a scary place

That's our goal for tourists. I went on a hunting trip once when out of state guys started marching on the land where my friends were baiting for deer. We asked these guys nicely if they could stay away from the area because our group had been baiting all week. They told us to fuck off and just went hunting there anyways. To get revenge, one of the guys in the group got a deer corpse from a guy who ran one over and we found the camp for these guys and we stuck the deer in one of the sleeping bags on the ground. The sleeping bag was soaked in blood when we finished. The guys were off hunting so never caught us doing it.

Also, you gotta visit the bar that is owned by a 300 pound lady who is known on some nights to challenge men and women to mud wrestling matches. It is popular and she always gets challengers. Worst, she is also a part time stripper. She's become sorta legendary around here.

I grew up in Northwestern Wisconsin which is scary in it's own right.  One time a bunch of my friends and I were ice fishing and some snowmobilers decided to run over our tip ups.  It was very uncool, so we saw where they came from and decided to exact our revenge.  They had made a nice little skating rink on the ice so we drilled holes everywhere on the rink and pissed on the ice.  We felt very good about our actions until we found out that that it wasn't the snowmobiler's home.
"Talking shit about a pretty sunset
Blanketing opinions that i'll probably regret soon"

Gold Trumpet

Hahaha....thats great. Most people here can't identify with these kinds of stories at all. We know them all too well.

SHAFTR

Quote from: The Gold TrumpetWe know them all too well.

Yes we do, all too well.
"Talking shit about a pretty sunset
Blanketing opinions that i'll probably regret soon"

Ghostboy

I hail from Wisconsin, too, but a more civilized part. AKA Milwuakee.

SHAFTR

Quote from: GhostboyI hail from Wisconsin, too, but a more civilized part. AKA Milwuakee.

My g/f is from West Bend.
"Talking shit about a pretty sunset
Blanketing opinions that i'll probably regret soon"

aclockworkjj

you guys are just like mike and mark from american movie right?  

Wisconsin nerds!!!! yeahhp, a hey der hey, hows bout da Packers?

hehe...

west bend...that is funny...I know it well.

Sanjuro

hey gt i really agree with you on your take on dancer in the dark.  i actually feel that chicago and dancer in the dark are quite same in structure.

im excited to hear your take on breathless.

edit: oh yeah and for wild at heart i think you just have to put up with it with the first parts of the movie. as someone said before , it really is a gem.
"When you see your own photo, do you say you're a fiction?"

NEON MERCURY

GT..its been awhile.....

who in your opinion is the most over-rated actor/actress..

Gold Trumpet

Quote from: SHAFTR
1.)  Chasing Amy
2.)  Breathless
3.)  Shaft (1971)

For now, I'll do Breathless. Chasing Amy will be much shorter so it expect it soon. I haven't seen Shaft, though.

Breathless
I'm not sure Breathless is a great film, but it is no doubt a very influential one. To give it identification, I'll say it is the very first modernist film and the main movie to usher in the French New Wave. By the first modernist film, I mean it is the film with clearest public accepted break between old and new cinema: techniques of filmmaking were not as formal but guerilla. The actors were very natural in approaching the the roles instead of structured. The story could also be called anarchaic to the old style story in which the three act play is clearly shown over and over again. Breathless seems to just follow a character.

My highest appreciation of the film comes in being able to create a tonally complete view point of a man that is rewarded with filmmaking to push his situation. The portrait is, as someone might say, of modern day man and how he is different from a movie character. In telling this man's story, what we follow is his little patience, his quircks and the wandering thoughts he has everyday in every banal situation. This is where the filmmaking works for his situation. The camera movement is anarchaic. The editing jumps all over the place in order to grasp how quickly this man changes his mind and his general restlessness in the world. The filmmaking and story do follow hand in hand for what they want to achieve. The best thing of the movie is the effect of watching this man live his life.  

Then there is what the movie is trying to achieve. The story is simple: A man kills a police officer and cares little about doing it and continues on with his life. He has a girlfriend carrying his child and he is ignorant of many of her needs but she still loves him. He is hiding out from the police and she is helping. The idea is that they will run off to Italy together but in her mistreatment, she betrays him and he is shot down by the police. The ending is suppose to be tragic. The movie is an attempt to see how far will we go to have sympathy for this man who does crimes and cares little for it. We follow him and get to know his personality. Even with all the immorality in the film, it does have a moral basis in trying to get us to care for this man and also his girlfriend's situation. This is the part of the movie still in the old world objective, even if the characters are tainted to severer levels. Often movies today just have no morals.

My criticism of the movie in what keeps it from greatness is that it does little to understand this man's situation of how he got to such a point. Like I said, the movie's highest achievement seems to be technical in just being able to show this man to an effective level of filmmaking achievement, but how well does that hold up? Its goals really are to put itself as a clear barrier between old and new cinema. It is Godard acting as the critic and saying, morally, how his film is different than the ones preceeding it and challenging us to accept it as a movie on the same level of sympathy for the main character as we would an older movie. After some years, we do accept it and his challenge has been answered. What else is there of the film? The story simply follows this man in the most superficial way. It retains little insight into this dangerous world that has not been delved into further by any American Indie director to come out of the 70s. The filmmaking achievement is all that stands.

Also, the movie is out of date. Modernism is dead. The French New Wave seemed, out of the films I've seen from it, to really mock a lot of the traditions of old cinema. In a wonderful essay titled "What's Left of the Center?", Stanley Kauffmann says The French New Wave eventually just became mocked itself and rested as just another movement. He cites the 1974 film French film Going Places (which I have not seen) and its importance to the film world. Going Places follows two men who are bright and intelligent, but without any moral basis. The film also has no moral basis. They roam around doing moral and criminal crimes for little reason. We are also not to care for them. In the very opening of the film, one character pushes another around in a supermarket cart as they pursue a stout woman and the one in the cart tries to pinch her ass. The scene, as Kauffmann says, was very well known to be a goof on Breathless because the most publically detailed filmmaking technique in the film was that Godard put his cinematographer in a shopping cart and pushed him around in it. With Going Places, enter Post Modernism. Kauffmann further identifies how this move by Godard was addressed as "witty, direct assault on convential filmmaking". Thing is, that idea doesn't last and didn't. It was being mocked by the 1970s and no one now sees filmming from shopping carts as any anything really innovative. Thus, the technical hoopla of the French New Wave movement has faded and all that exists are the films to be judged as ones. And for reasons already given, Breathless is for me a very good film but not a great one.