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Your Mom

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2 hours ago, Your Mom said:

So is Network not worth watching anymore? I was always curious about that one and I think I kinda like this director but does it not hold up?

Great movie that I should watch again sometime; I havent seen it in years.  I'd argue that if anything it held up *too well* - it may as well be a documentary on modern media.

Couple of quick random suggestions -

If you have even a passing interest or curiosity in film noir, see Double Indemnity and The Third Man sooner than later.

A little more obscure one that probably won't appear in any of these lists, but if you want to see just how out there some of the stuff in the silent era could get, check out The Unknown starring Lon Chaney (Sr.) from 1927.  A truly bizarre story and IMO one of the best Chaney performances (of which there were many great ones).  Directed by Tod Browning, who later did the Bela Lugosi Dracula as well as Freaks.

And if you like that there's lots of great Lon Chaney movies (one of my favorite actors, silent or otherwise).  For a real tearjerker - and another of his best performances -  see Chaney in Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928); the range of emotion he was able to portray through clown makeup is incredible.  And of course there's the big ones - Phantom of the Opera and Hunchback of Notre Dame.  The Penalty is a good crime movie starring him.  He Who Gets Slapped is another fun, strange thriller story; it's directed by Victor Sjostrom who later acted as the lead in one of my top five favorite films, Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries.

Edited by Dan B.
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I totally want to get one of those "100 _____ Movies" scratch-off posters, mostly because I love scratch-offs, and I love movies, but I hate lottery tickets. I don't even care if I've already seen most of the films, I'd rewatch them and scratch away one at a time.

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2 hours ago, Your Mom said:

So is Network not worth watching anymore? I was always curious about that one and I think I kinda like this director but does it not hold up?

I think the last time I watched Network was with my dad what feels like a few years ago but given that time is an awful trickster was probably a decade ago. It's very good and you should check it out at some point but on a night where you're ready to watch a real bummer.

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7 hours ago, Dan B. said:

Great movie that I should watch again sometime; I havent seen it in years.  I'd argue that if anything it held up *too well* - it may as well be a documentary on modern media.

Yeah that is what I mean when I say doesn't feel so much like satire now.

But its still a great movie.

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12 Angry Men is always a good recommendation.  Just a solid movie

Glengary Glen Ross is a great movie.  It gets so tense a point you feel you need to pause it to take a break about half way through it

I watched The Maltese Falcon at some point last year.  Its been called one of the greatest movies of all times and, yea, it definitely lived up to that hype.  I was completely captivated through the entire movie

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One of my favourite things in watching classic movies is the dawning realisation that oh, that's what every cartoon I watched as a kid was referencing, or that's where that line came from. One of the reasons I think Casablanca is one of the greatest movies ever made is that it's still compelling, and still incredible to watch, even when you basically know the entire film through pop culture osmosis. Similarly, on watching Citizen Kane, you realise you could probably piece together the entire movie from Simpsons episodes.

I listen to a podcast called Unclear and Present Danger, about political and military thrillers of the '90s and how they tie in with post-Cold War and pre-9/11 politics, and they've started a Patreon looking at Cold War era movies. They did one on The Third Man, which is a film I cannot recommend enough, and another that has a lot of those "oh, that" moments, as well as probably Orson Welles' finest performance. They've done a spate of Graham Greene adaptations, and I've yet to see Our Man In Havana, so that's high on my list as far as classics go.

I watch very few new movies these days, and while I have some real blind spots in terms of "classics" and best evers, a lot of my tastes lean towards mid-century cinema, I suppose, and I'm always fascinated by early filmmaking - I adore Nosferatu, and am disappointed I missed a load of 100th anniversary screenings last year, though I did go to a screening of Metropolis, which was a lot of fun to watch on a big screen. A lot of cinemas in London seem to be showing Rashomon at the moment, so might have to go to one of them.

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2 hours ago, Skummy said:

 A lot of cinemas in London seem to be showing Rashomon at the moment

Thats not now I remember it!

The Third Man is brilliant. It took me to a second watch to really appreciate how good it is.

Bringing up Nosferatu, I haven't seen all of Murnau's original but I love Werner Herzog's. It made the already creepy Klaus Kinski even creepie. Also Herzog released a load of rats on the streets of whatever town they shot in. Because of course. Its Werner Herzog.

I love movies from New German Cinema. Fitzcarraldo is great. Strozek is a personal favourite Herzog of mine (its got the guy who physically played Vigo in Ghostbusters II in it!)

I have a real soft spot for Wings of Desire (which, of course, stars Bruno Ganz who is perhaps most famous for playing Hitler in Downfall and the resulting meme) and Paris, Texas.

Fassbinder's Fear Eats The Soul is such a great film. 

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2 hours ago, Skummy said:

One of my favourite things in watching classic movies is the dawning realisation that oh, that's what every cartoon I watched as a kid was referencing, or that's where that line came from. One of the reasons I think Casablanca is one of the greatest movies ever made is that it's still compelling, and still incredible to watch, even when you basically know the entire film through pop culture osmosis. Similarly, on watching Citizen Kane, you realise you could probably piece together the entire movie from Simpsons episodes.

I've never seen Cape Fear, but whenever it's on TV and I accidentally flick it on partway through it's always a Simpsons scene.

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3 hours ago, Hobo said:

Bringing up Nosferatu, I haven't seen all of Murnau's original but I love Werner Herzog's. It made the already creepy Klaus Kinski even creepie. Also Herzog released a load of rats on the streets of whatever town they shot in. Because of course. Its Werner Herzog.

I love movies from New German Cinema. Fitzcarraldo is great. Strozek is a personal favourite Herzog of mine (its got the guy who physically played Vigo in Ghostbusters II in it!)

Fitzcarraldo is my favourite "narrative Herzog", rather than his documentaries. Just a spectacularly insane, ambitious film. 


There are two odd wrestling connections here! The opening sequence of Herzog's Nosferatu features footage of the Mummies of Guanajuato, and the same mummies feature in a Lucha Libre movie called The Mummies Of Guanajuato, in which El Santo, Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras battle said mummies, and a reanimated undead luchadore named Satan. It was originally planned as just a Blue Demon/Mil Mascaras vehicle, with the studio insisting that they add Santo late in production, so he just sort of shows up two thirds of the way through the film.

The other is that the guy who played Vigo - who is, incidentally, at least as much of a creep as Kinski - was also a wrestler, in a tag team with his dad, either wrestling as Vikings or Nazis. Unlike most people who wrestled in Nazi gimmicks in America in the '50s, his dad actually was a Nazi, though still probably the less problematic of the two. I've been planning a blog post on him for a while.

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I remember showing Fitzcarraldo at our movie night early on and the then only other person in the group being flabbergasted by the fact they actually pulled a ship over a mountain.

Fitzcarraldo also has two Mystery Science Theatre connections as the actor who plays Vladinho in Pumaman is in it and Klaus Kinski was in The Million Eyes of Sumaru.

Oh yeah, i remember reading an article about William von Homberg a few years ago. He was not a nice guy.

I only watched Strozek because I was curious about seeing him in another role (with his actual voice) but ended up really enjoying it. It's probably the funniest feature film Herzog has made?

The lead, Bruno M. wasnt an actor but the film was loosely based on his life. Herzog wrote it for him after Kinski demanded he play the lead role in Herzogs previous film Woyzeck - which Bruno M was supposed  to star in (and would've been a much better fit).

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I've never seen 12 Angry Men but it's been on my "to watch" list for a very long time. One I'd definitely recommend, because it's my favourite film of all time, is Some Like It Hot. It's a classic comedy featuring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon, all of whom have amazing chemistry with each other. Curtis and Lemmon also worked together on The Great Race, which also has Natalie Wood and a pre-Columbo Peter Falk in it. I've only seen the latter film once about 15-20 years ago, but can still remember it almost scene-by-scene.

Sticking with the comedy theme, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is basically Rat Race but from the 60s, Duck Soup for some Marx Brothers madness that sets some of the key tropes for satire and black comedy, anything directed by Mel Brooks, and basically anything with Peter Sellers in it, especially Dr Strangelove.

I'll have a think about non-comedies, but that's definitely my favourite area when it comes to classic film.

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12 hours ago, Lint said:

12 Angry Men is always a good recommendation.  Just a solid movie

Glengary Glen Ross is a great movie.  It gets so tense a point you feel you need to pause it to take a break about half way through it

I watched The Maltese Falcon at some point last year.  Its been called one of the greatest movies of all times and, yea, it definitely lived up to that hype.  I was completely captivated through the entire movie

12 Angry Men is a total masterpiece. If I could give it more than 5 stars, I would. It and Julius Caesar (the 1953 version with Marlon Brando and James Mason) are the only two movies I watched in school as a kid/teen that I have watched multiple times as an adult.

The Maltese Falcon falls into the same category: deserves more than 5 stars. 

A few recommendations for Humphrey Bogart movies:

Dark Passage

The Petrified Forest (He is the bad guy)

The African Queen (he won an Academy Award for it)

The Caine Mutiny (Nominated, and should have won)

In A Lonely Place

Sabrina (If you've seen the one with Harrison Ford and Greg Kinnear, the original is a LOT better.)

Cary Grant

None But The Lonely Heart

Mr. Lucky

The Philadelphia Story

Arsenic and Old Lace

 

Edited by GhostMachine
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7 hours ago, Naitch said:

I've never seen 12 Angry Men but it's been on my "to watch" list for a very long time. One I'd definitely recommend, because it's my favourite film of all time, is Some Like It Hot. It's a classic comedy featuring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon, all of whom have amazing chemistry with each other. Curtis and Lemmon also worked together on The Great Race, which also has Natalie Wood and a pre-Columbo Peter Falk in it. I've only seen the latter film once about 15-20 years ago, but can still remember it almost scene-by-scene.

Sticking with the comedy theme, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is basically Rat Race but from the 60s, Duck Soup for some Marx Brothers madness that sets some of the key tropes for satire and black comedy, anything directed by Mel Brooks, and basically anything with Peter Sellers in it, especially Dr Strangelove.

I'll have a think about non-comedies, but that's definitely my favourite area when it comes to classic film.

The Great Race is hugely underrated.  It also has one of my favorite movie cars, the Hannibal 8 - basically an early 20th-century Bond car, except nothing on it works right - and the mother of all movie pie fights.

Regarding Herzog, I'll throw in a recommendation for The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser for his narrative films, and for his documentaries I can't recommend Cave of Forgotten Dreams enough; it's actually my favorite documentary period.  Some of the commentary on the sheer *age* of the cave paintings is mind-boggling.

That said, one of my single favorite Herzog things is this forty-second clip of him talking about chickens.

 

Edited by Dan B.
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I have a big soft spot for Kasper Hauser, as it was the first Herzog film I saw, and the kind of historical story I love - either a mystery or a con man and either way is interesting.

My favourite thing about Cave of Forgotten Dreams is how at the end, he just starts banging on about crocodiles for no reason at all.

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10 hours ago, Skummy said:

I have a big soft spot for Kasper Hauser, as it was the first Herzog film I saw, and the kind of historical story I love - either a mystery or a con man and either way is interesting.

My favourite thing about Cave of Forgotten Dreams is how at the end, he just starts banging on about crocodiles for no reason at all.

There's always room for a healthy dose of "Werner being Werner" after all!

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