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Me too. I was 15 I think? - perhaps already too old? - but I thought it was synthetic, not real emotion but just sentimentalism.
Movies back then really seemed to be hyped up. These days the number 1 box office winners are films I often have to look up, only to discover they're yet another superhero movie.
I do have a nostalgia for ET, but that's nowhere near the devoted love I have for the following year when we got OCTOPUSSY, JEDI, and others.
That said, I was crazy for one film that very year by Spielberg: Jurassic Park. No boy at my age then would have possibly been uninterested in a movie about dinosaurs.
- Not sure if this is controversial or not, but I find Sir Alec Guinness' performance as Prince Faisal in Lawrence Of Arabia the best of his career. I've seen the man in many other films, and he's never not good or even great, but Davil Lean certainly managed to elicit a superb acting job from him.
- A more general statement: movies have a hard time winning me over if the lead character is played by an actress who speaks with her throat rather than her mouth--you know what I'm talking about. And yes, I'm looking at you, Anna Kendrick. Produce a sound, ar-ti-cu-late, don't swallow the words down to the lower base levels of the vocal cords, almost as if you're roaring rather than speaking. Clear sounds, please! I want to be able to understand language without having to decipher an actress' attempt at mimicking an electric toothbrush.
- I'll just flat-out say it: I love Torn Curtain and Topaz. The general consensus seems to be that Hitchcock lost it after Marnie, but in truth, those two, along with Frenzy and Family Plot, have always struck me as quite entertaining and well-made.
I like Torn Curtain. It's common for people to single out for praise the scene in which Armstrong and the woman kill Gromek, but for me, the highlight of the film is that scene between Paul Newman and Ludwig Donath. How wonderful to see such an exciting scene based on a potentially uncinematic concept. They're writing equations, derivatives and what have you, and I'm enjoying every second. "You've told me nothing... you know nothing!"
I have yet to see Topaz and Family Plot, but I'm sure I'll enjoy them. Frenzy is just a superb film; I cannot praise it enough. "Twenty to bloody one!"
I think it's pretty universal, actually, that Faisal is Guinness at his absolute best. That's certainly the first performance I think of when I hear his name, and I'd actually argue that he did his best work with Lean overall (he's magnificent if perhaps a touch more in the background in Doctor Zhivago, he's absolutely electrifying in every frame of TBotRK, and A Passage to India which has become quite underrecognized in the past couple decades features similarly brilliant work).
Torn Curtain is fairly underrated but imperfect. Family Plot is a slog. Frenzy is God-tier Hitchcock and a mainstay in my top five.
But Topaz? You're insane, my good man. Topaz is his worst film and that's really saying something considering it's competing against garbage like Jamaica Inn and Waltzes from Vienna.
Actually here's my controversial Hitchcock take: The Birds is an exceedingly mediocre film with moments where it veers into being quite awful, it has aged horrendously in ways that no other film of his has (give me the shot of the autogyro in The 39 Steps, a film made 28 years earlier, over a lot of what's here), and the overwhelming praise that this film elicits has always confounded me.
That does sound like a controversial assessment, to be sure. ;-) I can't agree with your take on Topaz, and neither with The Birds. But hey, that makes life interesting.
Ah, a fellow Prequel Fan! Hoorah!
That sure is very controversial!
More controversy: I don't like Vertigo either. The mysterious, strange atmosphere it seems to be going for leaves me cold. As far as Stewart-Hitchcock collaborations go, I much prefer Rear Window and especially Rope. I haven't seen The Man Who Knew Too Much in full, but from what I've seen, I already like it better than Vertigo.
Edit: Also, in Notorious, Ingrid Bergman should have made a copy of the key.
@classic007bondfan High five my friend! Yes, prefer them 10 to 1 over the other two trilogies. Especially the new garbage. Would love to discuss the films sometime! @jobo , yes. There aren’t many of us! Haha.
I love the renaissance the prequels are going through, but 10x better than ANH and Empire Strikes Back? Dubious…
I find it very un-Star Wars in tone, so I sort of know where you're coming from. If I'm in the mood to watch a SW movie I never put that on. The battle sequence in the last act is very good though.
I think A NEW HOPE is the best Star Wars movie.
Even more controversial opinion:
I don't care for the title: A NEW HOPE and far preferred the days when the film was simply referred to as STAR WARS.
I agree, it’s just more of George Lucas’s special edition garbage. The man needs to accept the fact that art is in the moment.
Agreed. Films like this just bleed every aspect of the series dry. All the mystery is sucked out of it. I couldn't give a toss how the Death Star plans were stolen. Same with Prometheus. I don't want to know where the Alien eggs came from. Keep the mystery.
I don't know if that's massively controversial. My controversial thought on that is that Force Awakens is better than Star Wars. Less original and iconic, most definitely, but a better film.
What about it don’t you like?
Would it be a cop out if I said "everything"? :)) :))
Honestly, the characters, mainly. Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor to me are both completely hollow, one-dimensional outlines that never feel fully formed. In addition, I don't think anyone who criticizes Hayden Christensen has a leg to stand on if they're fans of Andor, because Diego Luna is absolutely atrocious in this movie, I think Christensen in his worst scene is still better than anything contained in that performance.
I've come around on Ben Mendelsohn as an actor but I also think he gives a particularly weak performance here as a nothing villain who similarly has no proper definition. I also find K-2SO incredibly annoying and I've never understood the fan love for him. Forest Whitaker also shows up and gives what is the worst performance I've seen from him BY FAR, this wheezy, weirdly accented, stilted nightmare of a turn that is unbecoming of him as an actor.
Ultimately, I not only felt nothing when each of these characters died (except for maybe Donnie Yen), and in fact would say I'm glad in retrospect that they did as I don't have to deal with any kind of sequel (although they are making that Andor series which annoys the hell out of me).
The entire thing honestly felt like a Star Wars fan film. Vader in the hallway was like a nugget of gold buried in the mountain of shit that Jeff Goldblum inspects in Jurassic Park, it was a magnificent scene but it amounts to all of 60 seconds of the film. The general adoration of Rogue One completely astounds me, it makes me wonder if the Vader scene was all those people have seen and they assumed that the rest of the movie was like that, too.
In fact, Rogue One and the animated Clone Wars, out of all three trilogies and all of the spin-off films, remain the only Star Wars films I've seen but one time. I saw Rogue One at one of those early fan screening things and never looked back. My immediate reaction as the credits rolled was "that wasn't very good," and by the time I had gotten out to the parking lot it had already decayed to "you know what actually I bloody well despise this film." Hell, I even saw The Rise of Skywalker a second time and I hate that film, too!
I always refer to it as just "Star Wars" and to the other two OT films as their subtitles alone. The prequels can be "Episode I/II/III" and the sequel trilogy I refer to as "Star Wars: Title." But that first film will ALWAYS just be "Star Wars" to me.
I wouldn’t go quite THAT far in calling the prequels 10x times better than the OT but for sure do agree that they are miles better than the creatively bankrupt sequel trilogy.
I do enjoy the prequels a lot despite their faults.The world building is incredible,Terrific lightsaber fights and the clone wars animated series was so good that they make the prequels even more enjoyable ( They explain in several key episodes why the Clones were so quick to turn on the Jedi during Order 66 ).
It's also funny that the entire SW saga is basically the story of two families. Although I am no fan of The Last Jedi, I understand completely why Rian Johnson felt he needed to shake things up.
Completely with you on TFA: it's a brilliant adventure film and a great Star Wars film. Slightly less with you on TLJ as I find it charmless and plodding, although it does contain lots of interesting ideas. ROS I agree isn't great, but is a totally inoffensive bit of Saturday-morning cartoon space opera stuff and I tend to think would be regarded as a pretty decent if unmemorable film if it didn't have the Star Wars title above the door, but because of that it gets torn apart, rather unfairly I think.
I'm not a massive SW fan but I know the films and enjoy them, and ROS gave me everything I look for in a couple of hours at the cinema in front of a Star Wars film, even if it was in a mildly underwhelming package; where to be honest I thought TLJ didn't.