- Sat Jul 28, 2007 6:50 pm
#6047
On July 4th, the USA celebrated its annual Independence Day. So, there were a number of movies and documentaries on TV about the American Revolution.
I watched one documentary and one movie about the subject this month. The movie was adapted from a Broadway musical about our Continental Congress and its Declaration of Independence and all that back in the eighteenth century. I was actually glad that there weren’t too many songs. The dialogue was slick. Here are a couple of examples of what I call slick dialogue from that movie.
John Adams, grumbling about all the positive press Benjamin Franklin gets. “Franklin did this. Frankiln did that. Frankiln did some other damn thing.â€
Adams again, checking up on Thomas Jefferson’s progress with the Declaration draft.
Adams: You’ve had two weeks, and you haven’t finished?
Jefferson: I haven’t even started.
Adams: Even the Earth was created in one week.
Jefferson: Someday you must tell me how you did it.
I like musicals with a lot of gay-ass singing—yar, same to you, lol—but I would have watched this movie even if I didn’t like that sort of thing because I like looking at costumes and stuff in movies set during that time period, especially movies about the American Revolution.
I recently got a chance to see Chronicles of Riddick with Vin Diesel, and I liked watching that very much. Cool movie, to be sure. With some futuristic super science fiction film like that, I don’t have any problem with all that totally fake BS they inundate the viewer with. But spare me when it comes to average people in present day history, as I said before when I first joined the DM.net message board.
Here’s another example of that peeve. I saw this one movie not too long ago, called Day After Tomorrow, which was to some extent difficult to enjoy because of the major BS characters were pulling off in the film. For instance, within the first five minutes there was a moment where some regular old scientist guy was making a huge leap on foot across a fissure appearing between him and his colleagues down in Antarctica. Then, after successfully making the jump across—barely—he did the teetering to recover his balance thing on the other side. More ice gave way beneath his feet and collapsed into the forming crevice. He disappeared in an instant. Then you see him hanging from his ice pick hammer just below the ledge. Like he could have whipped it out that quick, thrust it into the cliff that wasn’t strong enough to hold him up, and managed to grip the handle tightly enough so his frozen glove didn’t just slip right off as he fell. While that sort of business made it more difficult to appreciate that movie in general, it didn’t really interfere with my ability to appreciate the technical aspects of creating such a load of hogwash, including the jump stunt I just referred to. Great special effects. I liked it when a big huge ship was moving through New York City as it flooded and turned all frozen.
I watched this movie called The Big Carnival, starring Kirk Douglas. He plays a ruthless newspaper reporter who comes across a cave-in accident at some Native American ruins, and exploits the story, trying to create his own so called ‘big break’, trading that for the best possible chances of saving the man inside. I liked the movies because even though it was an opportunistic move on the reporter’s part, drawing national attention to the accident, there would never have been a realistic effort to save the guy trapped in the ruins if the reporter hadn’t done what he did. The thing was that—being a shrewd estimator of human nature—the reporter was playing chess with all the people he got involved, and they were in turn trying to do the same for the sake of their own benefit, each with his or her own personal ulterior motives.
In the end, though, the reporter had crossed a line drawn through even his own conscience by influencing the decisions involving which method of rescue to use in attempting to reach the victim, who wound up dying just before they finally got to him with equipment. Even that wasn’t all black and white, as the more time-consuming method was probably safer, so they had to gamble with safety versus rescuing a corpse, being that the guy was injured and trapped under rubble for so long. It tore the reporter apart, but at the same time, he was the only one willing to wriggle his way in there at his own risk all through the film, taking food, water, and medical supplies to the trapped victim and bracing the guy’s hopes for survival. There was nothing strictly cold-blooded about the reporter, even though he was a cool calculator, fed up with scratching out a living, and recognizing it when he saw a way to make the big time and write his own ticket though life.
This was something you could sense in just about all of the film’s central characters. The trapped man’s wife was tired of living out in the middle of nowhere in the desert, running their souvenir type shop at which few passers by stopped. “We’re lucky if we sell twelve hamburger a week out here.†Maybe it was a month, she said. I forget. Anyway, she got there in the first place by marrying a guy who was a little bit less then fully forthcoming about the true nature of his “property and privately owned businessâ€, as he had described this place she now was stuck in. She hated her husband because it was easier than hating herself for making the foolish decision to grab at that in order to get out of whatever rut she felt stuck in before that. You know what I mean, here? I like movies that portray people this way, because I think that’s how people are, and these old black and white movies seem to dig that crap out and put it on the table in a very competent and convincing way.
Regardless of the age of a film, I like what I do typically see in the better of these older movies, which is often missing from even the best of modern films. That, I think, is the seemingly genuine portrayal of characters, even when the portrayals are exaggerated or like caricatures. I don’t know how they do it, but somehow the acting in a lot of these old movies doesn’t seem so disingenuous as a lot of acting I see in modern films, which comes across as just plain mediocre acting, and seems to be inspired less by an understanding of the character and more contrived according to a perception of the audience.
Anyway, at one point in The Big Carnival, business is booming at the souvenir shop because of all the people coming to the site of the big news story the reporter is cultivating and milking for all it’s worth. The trapped man’s wife is counting the cash she now sees as her trip out of the middle of nowhere in the desert, and away from that little nothing of a man she married, the most despicable thing about whom is the fact that he feels content while she wants more, because after all you only go around once. She even tries to hit on the reporter, because now he’s the next something better to come along, and without something to hook her claws into, she’s basically a leaf in the stream of life anyway.
The reporter isn’t having it, though, because he’s got his eyes wide open, and he sees where she’s acting a bit too uppity for a desperately worried wife, which is what he needs her to be. Her lack of discretion is compromising his own designs that so far are coming off without a hitch (unless you count selling his soul), thanks in no small part to his diligent attentiveness to every detail and nuance of his plan. So, he belts her in the face, and—snap, just like that—she looks all scared and stressed out. The reporter says something like, “There, now you look the way you should. Now get out there and cook more hamburgers.†She stabs him in the gut with some scissors. LOL!
Cool movie, to be sure.
I still haven’t looked around for a copy of the director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven to rent. I have to see that, though. Thanks again for telling us about it, whoever that was.
I watched one documentary and one movie about the subject this month. The movie was adapted from a Broadway musical about our Continental Congress and its Declaration of Independence and all that back in the eighteenth century. I was actually glad that there weren’t too many songs. The dialogue was slick. Here are a couple of examples of what I call slick dialogue from that movie.
John Adams, grumbling about all the positive press Benjamin Franklin gets. “Franklin did this. Frankiln did that. Frankiln did some other damn thing.â€
Adams again, checking up on Thomas Jefferson’s progress with the Declaration draft.
Adams: You’ve had two weeks, and you haven’t finished?
Jefferson: I haven’t even started.
Adams: Even the Earth was created in one week.
Jefferson: Someday you must tell me how you did it.
I like musicals with a lot of gay-ass singing—yar, same to you, lol—but I would have watched this movie even if I didn’t like that sort of thing because I like looking at costumes and stuff in movies set during that time period, especially movies about the American Revolution.
I recently got a chance to see Chronicles of Riddick with Vin Diesel, and I liked watching that very much. Cool movie, to be sure. With some futuristic super science fiction film like that, I don’t have any problem with all that totally fake BS they inundate the viewer with. But spare me when it comes to average people in present day history, as I said before when I first joined the DM.net message board.
Here’s another example of that peeve. I saw this one movie not too long ago, called Day After Tomorrow, which was to some extent difficult to enjoy because of the major BS characters were pulling off in the film. For instance, within the first five minutes there was a moment where some regular old scientist guy was making a huge leap on foot across a fissure appearing between him and his colleagues down in Antarctica. Then, after successfully making the jump across—barely—he did the teetering to recover his balance thing on the other side. More ice gave way beneath his feet and collapsed into the forming crevice. He disappeared in an instant. Then you see him hanging from his ice pick hammer just below the ledge. Like he could have whipped it out that quick, thrust it into the cliff that wasn’t strong enough to hold him up, and managed to grip the handle tightly enough so his frozen glove didn’t just slip right off as he fell. While that sort of business made it more difficult to appreciate that movie in general, it didn’t really interfere with my ability to appreciate the technical aspects of creating such a load of hogwash, including the jump stunt I just referred to. Great special effects. I liked it when a big huge ship was moving through New York City as it flooded and turned all frozen.
I watched this movie called The Big Carnival, starring Kirk Douglas. He plays a ruthless newspaper reporter who comes across a cave-in accident at some Native American ruins, and exploits the story, trying to create his own so called ‘big break’, trading that for the best possible chances of saving the man inside. I liked the movies because even though it was an opportunistic move on the reporter’s part, drawing national attention to the accident, there would never have been a realistic effort to save the guy trapped in the ruins if the reporter hadn’t done what he did. The thing was that—being a shrewd estimator of human nature—the reporter was playing chess with all the people he got involved, and they were in turn trying to do the same for the sake of their own benefit, each with his or her own personal ulterior motives.
In the end, though, the reporter had crossed a line drawn through even his own conscience by influencing the decisions involving which method of rescue to use in attempting to reach the victim, who wound up dying just before they finally got to him with equipment. Even that wasn’t all black and white, as the more time-consuming method was probably safer, so they had to gamble with safety versus rescuing a corpse, being that the guy was injured and trapped under rubble for so long. It tore the reporter apart, but at the same time, he was the only one willing to wriggle his way in there at his own risk all through the film, taking food, water, and medical supplies to the trapped victim and bracing the guy’s hopes for survival. There was nothing strictly cold-blooded about the reporter, even though he was a cool calculator, fed up with scratching out a living, and recognizing it when he saw a way to make the big time and write his own ticket though life.
This was something you could sense in just about all of the film’s central characters. The trapped man’s wife was tired of living out in the middle of nowhere in the desert, running their souvenir type shop at which few passers by stopped. “We’re lucky if we sell twelve hamburger a week out here.†Maybe it was a month, she said. I forget. Anyway, she got there in the first place by marrying a guy who was a little bit less then fully forthcoming about the true nature of his “property and privately owned businessâ€, as he had described this place she now was stuck in. She hated her husband because it was easier than hating herself for making the foolish decision to grab at that in order to get out of whatever rut she felt stuck in before that. You know what I mean, here? I like movies that portray people this way, because I think that’s how people are, and these old black and white movies seem to dig that crap out and put it on the table in a very competent and convincing way.
Regardless of the age of a film, I like what I do typically see in the better of these older movies, which is often missing from even the best of modern films. That, I think, is the seemingly genuine portrayal of characters, even when the portrayals are exaggerated or like caricatures. I don’t know how they do it, but somehow the acting in a lot of these old movies doesn’t seem so disingenuous as a lot of acting I see in modern films, which comes across as just plain mediocre acting, and seems to be inspired less by an understanding of the character and more contrived according to a perception of the audience.
Anyway, at one point in The Big Carnival, business is booming at the souvenir shop because of all the people coming to the site of the big news story the reporter is cultivating and milking for all it’s worth. The trapped man’s wife is counting the cash she now sees as her trip out of the middle of nowhere in the desert, and away from that little nothing of a man she married, the most despicable thing about whom is the fact that he feels content while she wants more, because after all you only go around once. She even tries to hit on the reporter, because now he’s the next something better to come along, and without something to hook her claws into, she’s basically a leaf in the stream of life anyway.
The reporter isn’t having it, though, because he’s got his eyes wide open, and he sees where she’s acting a bit too uppity for a desperately worried wife, which is what he needs her to be. Her lack of discretion is compromising his own designs that so far are coming off without a hitch (unless you count selling his soul), thanks in no small part to his diligent attentiveness to every detail and nuance of his plan. So, he belts her in the face, and—snap, just like that—she looks all scared and stressed out. The reporter says something like, “There, now you look the way you should. Now get out there and cook more hamburgers.†She stabs him in the gut with some scissors. LOL!
Cool movie, to be sure.
I still haven’t looked around for a copy of the director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven to rent. I have to see that, though. Thanks again for telling us about it, whoever that was.
Generally I adore comedies too. So, probably, they deservedly are in the lead 
:) .
)
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