movies

[ghostrunner]

The Titanic rerelease made $58 million two years ago. It's hardly been lost to the sands of time. For what it's worth, on the TSPDT list, it comes in at 661. Some films in the same vicinity: Boogie Nights, Terminator 2, The Right Stuff, Die Hard, Miller's Crossing, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Time of the Gypsies, Orson Welles' Othello, Cool Hand Luke, The Killer; all classics.

The 3 LOTR movies are on the 21st century list, and in the right order, I'd argue. Fellowship is 44, ROTK is 62, and Two Towers is 80 something.

Fellowship is in the 800s on the all time List.

[JL21]

Also, the imdb thing is kind of a straw man argument.

Totally.

IMDb voters are hardly any reasonable standard to discuss film unless it's very specifically related to how popular a movie is with average schmucks.

[33anda3rd]

Also, the imdb thing is kind of a straw man argument.

Totally.

IMDb voters are hardly any reasonable standard to discuss film unless it's very specifically related to how popular a movie is with average schmucks.

Today's epic films are made for average schmucks. They exist to make money. The earlier epic films existed as grand artistic statements. Lean didn't make Lawrence as a piece of pop. Godfather wasn't produced for a well-timed, well-publicized Christmas Oscar campaign. It came out in March, where the graveyard of the studio's catalog gets released now. Visconti didn't make the Leopard to have a huge first weekend right around Memorial Day. These movies all came from the desire of the writer and/or director to express ideas and feelings on screen. They're classics because they're great films. An epic film should justify its run time without letting a frame get in that's not expressing an idea or feeling, and LOTR and Titanic are full of CGI stuff that exists only as spectacle. These moments might move an audience, but they're false and manipulative. They're moving the audience in admiration of the film team's technical savvy, and those feelings are getting confused for legit ones.

Take the TSPDT full list of 1000 and sort by run time. Look at everything running three hours or longer. How many of those films can you honestly say LOTR or Titanic is in a class with? If you sort the list by ranking, you don't find a lot of movies over 135 minutes toward the top, except several Coppolas, Fellini, Antonioni, Kubrick, Ozu, names like that. Master filmmakers who can fill 2.5 or more hours of your time without wasting a bit of it. Jackson and Cameron fill your time and produce some nice spectacle but they waste a lot of film and money and time on stuff that's just meaningless spectacle.

[The Third Man]

LOTR and Titanic are full of CGI stuff that exists only as spectacle. These moments might move an audience, but they're false and manipulative. They're moving the audience in admiration of the film team's technical savvy, and those feelings are getting confused for legit ones.

Went back to see Birdman a 2nd time with a friend who hadn't seen it. For anyone who hasn't seen it, and this is not a spoiler, it's edited so that except for a short bit at the beginning and end the whole film looks like one continuous unedited shot. It's technically probably the best film (requires both the most technical artistry and craft of anythign I've seen) of the last decade, far more interesting than a load of CGI monsters and other dumb spectacle nonsense. I wanted to go a second time to start from the beginning looking for the obvious-but-hidden cut points (camera spins around a corner leaving the screen blank, ducks behind a wall filling the frame with black for a half-second, time lapses of buildings at night, etc.) and going to look for those and being conscious of it from the start it really jumps out at you that the movie contains stacks and stacks of loooooooong takes. Which makes it really a remarkable film from an acting/directing standpoint as well as a technical one. The film all in all is great, the way it was made is downright remarkable. A really fun, really interesting high-wire act of a film.

[The Third Man]

My reaction to somebody calling a film "manipulative" is: yeah, no [expletive]. That's their job.

[Jocephus]

It's still real to me damnit

[33anda3rd]

LOTR and Titanic are full of CGI stuff that exists only as spectacle. These moments might move an audience, but they're false and manipulative. They're moving the audience in admiration of the film team's technical savvy, and those feelings are getting confused for legit ones.

Went back to see Birdman a 2nd time with a friend who hadn't seen it. For anyone who hasn't seen it, and this is not a spoiler, it's edited so that except for a short bit at the beginning and end the whole film looks like one continuous unedited shot. It's technically probably the best film (requires both the most technical artistry and craft of anythign I've seen) of the last decade, far more interesting than a load of CGI monsters and other dumb spectacle nonsense. I wanted to go a second time to start from the beginning looking for the obvious-but-hidden cut points (camera spins around a corner leaving the screen blank, ducks behind a wall filling the frame with black for a half-second, time lapses of buildings at night, etc.) and going to look for those and being conscious of it from the start it really jumps out at you that the movie contains stacks and stacks of loooooooong takes. Which makes it really a remarkable film from an acting/directing standpoint as well as a technical one. The film all in all is great, the way it was made is downright remarkable. A really fun, really interesting high-wire act of a film.

There's more real emotion in 10 minutes of Birdman than there is is all of Titanic. And most of the cool technical stuff in Birdman is what they do with the camera and with blocking out the shots so it looks continuous. Yeah, explosions and flying and stuff. But that's a small % of what's technically rad about that movie. And the blocking/shooting of the movie adds to the feeling and idea AGI is expressing: that this life of his is hurtling along seemingly without a break. When the boat tips up in Titanic and the bodies all fall away, what is the idea that Cameron is trying to express? When Leo gets some in the back of the car, is the sex scene particularly well acted or realistic? Not really, they don't have spur-of-the-moment [expletive] -with-a-capital-F sex like Wiig and the scuba instructor in Skeleton Twins. They don't have sweaty, passionate, god-I-need-to-F-you-right-now sex. It's just a sex scene that's there for the audience to see Kate Winslet topless. They could leave it out, or cut it when it's explicit that they're gonna bone, but it stays despite its uselessness because nipples.

[JL21]

Today's epic films are made for average schmucks. They exist to make money. The earlier epic films existed as grand artistic statements. Lean didn't make Lawrence as a piece of pop. Godfather wasn't produced for a well-timed, well-publicized Christmas Oscar campaign. It came out in March, where the graveyard of the studio's catalog gets released now.

I honestly think you're fooling yourself if you think studios weren't always adamant about making money. And The Godfather's release had everything to do with the studio not trusting it to make money. The production battles between Coppola and the studio are very well-known and the studio thought they had a turd on their hand. Although really, technically, the Oscars were held in late March that year.

Visconti didn't make the Leopard to have a huge first weekend right around Memorial Day. These movies all came from the desire of the writer and/or director to express ideas and feelings on screen. They're classics because they're great films. An epic film should justify its run time without letting a frame get in that's not expressing an idea or feeling, and LOTR and Titanic are full of CGI stuff that exists only as spectacle. These moments might move an audience, but they're false and manipulative. They're moving the audience in admiration of the film team's technical savvy, and those feelings are getting confused for legit ones.

The Leopard is a totally different thing- foreign studios are apples and oranges. But if we're picking nits, it was released at a time when Italian studios were way down on their luck. The whole reason spaghetti westerns were popular in that era in Italy was that they borrowed from American studios... just like The Leopard did with Burt Lancaster, and a star-studded pan-European cast. That was no small budget lily. It was Italian cinema swinging for the fences to save their hyde.

As for the other stuff, I'd love to ask a filmmaker for any of these films- Peter Jackson in this case- about what you just said, whether or not he had any "ideas or feelings" in mind with each scene. I'd be shocked if there wasn't an answer.

Take the TSPDT full list of 1000 and sort by run time. Look at everything running three hours or longer. How many of those films can you honestly say LOTR or Titanic is in a class with? If you sort the list by ranking, you don't find a lot of movies over 135 minutes toward the top, except several Coppolas, Fellini, Antonioni, Kubrick, Ozu, names like that. Master filmmakers who can fill 2.5 or more hours of your time without wasting a bit of it. Jackson and Cameron fill your time and produce some nice spectacle but they waste a lot of film and money and time on stuff that's just meaningless spectacle.

Ok, but what kind of standard are we even talking about? There aren't MANY films of any length that match up with Kurosawa, Coppola's best, Fellini, Kubrick, etc... Those dudes are seen as the gold standard precisely because nobody matches up with them.

This is like crapping on a guy for hitting 25 HRs and an .800 OPS because he's not Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds.

[The Third Man]

The Leopard was mangled in its US cut, too. That was purely financial.

When the boat tips up in Titanic and the bodies all fall away, what is the idea that Cameron is trying to express? When Leo gets some in the back of the car, is the sex scene particularly well acted or realistic? Not really, they don't have spur-of-the-moment [expletive] -with-a-capital-F sex like Wiig and the scuba instructor in Skeleton Twins. They don't have sweaty, passionate, god-I-need-to-F-you-right-now sex. It's just a sex scene that's there for the audience to see Kate Winslet topless. They could leave it out, or cut it when it's explicit that they're gonna bone, but it stays despite its uselessness because nipples.

You don't see Kate Winslet topless in the sex scene. You see a hand smearing a fogged window and about a split second of them breathing heavily and trembling. It's all very chaste. It's pretty much exactly what you just described.

Titanic is explicitly not trying to be realistic. The entire thesis of the movie is that memories and experience loom much larger than the abstraction of the historical record.

[heyzeus]

Everyone who was a teen when titanic came out remembers that Winslett is topless during the "paint me like one of your French girls" scene.