The Criterion Collection

[MeMynonsense]

Recently caught Il Generale Della Rovere on dvd.

Directed by Rossellini, it features his neo-realist comrade (Vittorio De Sica) as Bardone - a petty wartime swindler who routinely fleeces vulnerable genoans to cover his gambling debts by posing as an influential war-veteran, having pull among the German higher-ranks. But when the Nazis eventually get wise to his schemes, he’s made an offer he can’t refuse. In lieu of a prison term or maybe execution, Bardone is forced to impersonate a recently assassinated resistance leader - the titular General Della Rovere.

De Sica seems equally proficient on either side of the camera and is sensational as Bardone - a desperate con man trading people’s lives for cash, who slowly transforms into a man of conscience. Beside some superficial similarities and the fact that both played war-weary, morally-corrupt criminals - De Sica’s Bardone was reminiscent of Chaplin in Monsieur Verdoux. In one of the disc supplements, Isabella Rossellini also draws pertinent parallels between Il Generale Della Rovere and AK’s Kagemusha.

Thematically, it acts as a worthy successor to Rossellini's WW2 films from the ‘40s - loaded with haunting shots of destroyed Italian cityscapes. And the grim finale was truly evocative of Rome: Open City.

[malakaheso]

Originally Posted by AaronJ

Anyhow, the Academy Awards are what they are. They aren't a critical examination of the year in film, nor are they a venue for complex deconstruction of cinematic efforts. They never have been and they never will be. That is what critical journals are for.

The Oscars are simply a celebration of the past year in Hollywood film. Anyone looking for more than that is missing the point of what the Awards themselves are intended to be.

Whether that makes the proceedings and results "meaningless and shitty" is up to each individual, of course. But I get sort of fatigued after hearing, year after year, people criticizing the Academy Awards for not living up to some bar which the Awards themselves never attempted to reach in the first place.

OK, rant over.

I don't necessarily disagree, but the bar has been lowered as the quality of output from Hollywood has declined. There is just no getting around the fact that films like Raging Bull and Taxi Driver would never be made in the studio system now, so I guess crying about it is totally redundant.

The last great year for the oscars in my view was the year No Country For Old Men, The Assassination of Jesse James and There Will Be Blood were released, and the year with Her, Nebraska and Wolf of Wall Street wasn't bad either, but overall, I just don't bother anymore. Most of the films are too middle of the road and take no artistic risks or fail to engage me in some other way.

Each to their own.

[mja345]

We'll never get the New Hollywood era back where tons of risky, possibly alienating films were released by major studios. That ship has long sailed. Film geeks like all of us pine for it, but most people probably don't even know what it is anymore. There are still excellent films made (I've only seen "Manchester by the Sea" and "Hell or High Water" of the best picture noms this year, enjoyed both), but they're few and far between. The studios take zero risks, there's little incentive to give challenging films wide theatrical releases. But, really, since the independent film movement of the 90s kind of faded out, movies have been in a slow, steady decline. It's just really intensified the last 5-6 years IMO with the relentless onslaught of CGI garbage.

1975 is the year I always reference when people argue that film didn't used to be that much better. "Nashville", "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", "Barry Lyndon", "Dog Day Afternoon", "Jaws" were the five best picture noms. Any of those five films would be the best American film released since 2010 if made today. Other films from '75: "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", "The Passenger", "Night Moves", "The Man Who Would Be King", "Salo", "Dersu Uzala", "Three Days of the Condor", "Love and Death", "Shampoo", "The Mirror", "Jeanne Dielman", "Seven Beauties", "Picnic at Hanging Rock", "Rollerball", "The Day of the Locust", "Inserts", etc. And '72, '73, '74 and '76 are pretty close.

[Jafar]

Originally Posted by mrjohnnyb

My second thought was The Wind Will Carry Us; a blu-ray release is currently available on the Cohen Media Group label, and along with the review of this website, I highly recommend it as well.

The Wind Will Carry Us was directed by Abbas Kiarostami, not Ghobadi.

[shadedpain4]

Originally Posted by Gacivory

I hope the Wong Kar-wai polaroid leads to a boxset of his films! Individually would be fine, but a set like Jacques Tati and Demy would make me happy!

You could always go for this.

[MifuneFan]

Originally Posted by Jafar

The Wind Will Carry Us was directed by Abbas Kiarostami, not Ghobadi.

He was assistant director on that film, and had a role in it too.

[Jafar]

Originally Posted by MifuneFan

He was assistant director on that film, and had a role in it too.

Wow! My bad! Wasn't aware of that! I would be all over a TWWCU Criterion release.

[ShellOilJunior]

Originally Posted by The Great Owl

On a closer-to-home note, I'd be willing to bet that younger people who visit this forum get the impression that John Carpenter's The Thing was a much more popular movie than E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial was back in 1982, while it was actually the other way around back then.

As an 80s baby I agree. ET was ubiquitous then. It seemed like each and every year in grade school my teachers would wheel out one of those VHS telivision carts to show ET the last day before a holiday break. Years later when I saw the film again I was still tired of it.

[MifuneFan]

I've still never seen E.T.

[The Great Owl]

Originally Posted by ShellOilJunior

As an 80s baby I agree. ET was ubiquitous then. It seemed like each and every year in grade school my teachers would wheel out one of those VHS telivision carts to show ET the last day before a holiday break. Years later when I saw the film again I was still tired of it.

Originally Posted by MifuneFan

I've still never seen E.T.

I was 10 years old when E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial was released in theaters, so it was quite an emotional gut punch for me, although I managed not to cry in the theater around my friends and family, because I did not want to seem like a wimp. Most of the other people in the sold-out audience were practically crying rivers, though. I'm still amazed that we all didn't get flooded out of the theater.
I loved the movie at the time, although it paled in comparison to Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I had seen earlier that year.

I went for 20 years without seeing the movie again, but then saw the horribly-altered 2002 re-release in the theaters, where Spielberg had added CGI scenes of E.T. and digitally removed the guns from the hands of the FBI men at the end. The less said about that re-release, the better.

I finally saw the original 1982 theatrical version of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial again when I bought it on Blu-ray back in 2012.

In retrospect, it's a bit quaint, but it still appeals to my rose-tinted 1980s nostalgia in a big way. More importantly, it still works, thanks to some ingenious storytelling choices made by Spielberg, including the camera angle which is positioned low to the ground as if to accentuate the short alien's point of view.

John Ford's The Quiet Man is referenced wonderfully during a key scene.

Incidentally, the summer of 1982 was perhaps the most magical cinematic summer of my lifetime. There were so many amazing films released at that time, and they all still resonate with me today.

[AaronJ]

Originally Posted by MifuneFan

I've still never seen E.T.

IMO, you're not missing much. Then again, I'm not a big Spielberg fan to begin with, beyond Schindler's List, Munich, and a couple others. So I'm biased in this case.

[AaronJ]

Originally Posted by mja345

We'll never get the New Hollywood era back where tons of risky, possibly alienating films were released by major studios. That ship has long sailed. Film geeks like all of us pine for it, but most people probably don't even know what it is anymore. There are still excellent films made (I've only seen "Manchester by the Sea" and "Hell or High Water" of the best picture noms this year, enjoyed both), but they're few and far between. The studios take zero risks, there's little incentive to give challenging films wide theatrical releases. But, really, since the independent film movement of the 90s kind of faded out, movies have been in a slow, steady decline. It's just really intensified the last 5-6 years IMO with the relentless onslaught of CGI garbage.

1975 is the year I always reference when people argue that film didn't used to be that much better. "Nashville", "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", "Barry Lyndon", "Dog Day Afternoon", "Jaws" were the five best picture noms. Any of those five films would be the best American film released since 2010 if made today. Other films from '75: "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", "The Passenger", "Night Moves", "The Man Who Would Be King", "Salo", "Dersu Uzala", "Three Days of the Condor", "Love and Death", "Shampoo", "The Mirror", "Jeanne Dielman", "Seven Beauties", "Picnic at Hanging Rock", "Rollerball", "The Day of the Locust", "Inserts", etc. And '72, '73, '74 and '76 are pretty close.

1) Great films were ALWAYS far and few between.

2) Lots of challenging films are made today. They simply aren't the films that people talk about and that get advertising.

3) Nearly 1,000 films are released each year in the US alone.

4) This is an entirely new era. Film in 1975 didn't have to compete, for instance, with massive TV shows that had big budgets and even larger crowds (think "Game of Thrones").

5) People forever believe that things were better in "the old days." I'm sure there was a great number of people in the 70s who believed that cinema had gone to hell, and if only we could have the days of the 40s-50s back, everything would be great. As a sports fan, I am acutely aware of this sort of thing.

6) Again, the Oscars are not about deconstructing the most complex cinema of any given year. It's a celebration. Of Hollywood. One of the best 2016 films I saw was a documentary about STUXnet -- Zero Days. How many people have even heard of it, let alone seen it? Is it going to get an Oscar nom for Best Picture? No. Is it incredibly powerful? Yes. Should everyone see it? Absolutely. But it's not the sort of film that we will be talking about when the Oscars come into play.

7) Say what you want about my opinion, and many have ( ), but I have so far ranked The Neon Demon as the best picture of 2016. Total Oscar noms = 0. Heck, Total Oscar noms for Nocturnal Animals = 1. Do I feel this is the downfall of Western Civilization? No. Not at all. I just realize that the sorts of films that will be celebratory are not those sorts of films.

8) You know how many Academy Award Nominations that Jean-Luc Godard has received in his 57 year career as a director? 1. And it was an Honorary Award.

In the 36th Awards, the year that Le Mépris (Contempt) would have been up, Tom Jones won. The other nominees? America America, Cleopatra, How the West Was Won, Lilies of the Field.

And someone wants to tell me that those choices are somehow better, in relation to Contempt, than whatever films someone things should be nominated this year in relation to La La Land or Manchester by the Sea or Arrival or whatever?

Yeah, stuff was SO MUCH better in the past.

[silverlakephil]

Originally Posted by mja345

We'll never get the New Hollywood era back where tons of risky, possibly alienating films were released by major studios. That ship has long sailed. Film geeks like all of us pine for it, but most people probably don't even know what it is anymore. There are still excellent films made (I've only seen "Manchester by the Sea" and "Hell or High Water" of the best picture noms this year, enjoyed both), but they're few and far between. The studios take zero risks, there's little incentive to give challenging films wide theatrical releases. But, really, since the independent film movement of the 90s kind of faded out, movies have been in a slow, steady decline. It's just really intensified the last 5-6 years IMO with the relentless onslaught of CGI garbage.

1975 is the year I always reference when people argue that film didn't used to be that much better. "Nashville", "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", "Barry Lyndon", "Dog Day Afternoon", "Jaws" were the five best picture noms. Any of those five films would be the best American film released since 2010 if made today. Other films from '75: "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", "The Passenger", "Night Moves", "The Man Who Would Be King", "Salo", "Dersu Uzala", "Three Days of the Condor", "Love and Death", "Shampoo", "The Mirror", "Jeanne Dielman", "Seven Beauties", "Picnic at Hanging Rock", "Rollerball", "The Day of the Locust", "Inserts", etc. And '72, '73, '74 and '76 are pretty close.

I recently bought a book 1,001 Films You Must See Before You Die .It's a huge tome, and as I skimmed through it, less films for each year are mentioned after 2005 I believe. They update the book every few years, but I found a list of every film mentioned since the list was created.

http://1001films.wikia.com/wiki/The_List

[AaronJ]

This is ridiculous. Sorry.

[MifuneFan]

Originally Posted by silverlakephil

I recently bought a book 1,001 Films You Must See Before You Die .It's a huge tome, and as I skimmed through it, less films for each year are mentioned after 2005 I believe. They update the book every few years, but I found a list of every film mentioned since the list was created.

http://1001films.wikia.com/wiki/The_List

Great book. Love the quality of the printing and paper. Got mine many years ago, but I haven't looked through it as much as I should have. Will have to remedy this.

[AaronJ]

Originally Posted by MifuneFan

Great book. Love the quality of the printing and paper. Got mine many years ago, but I haven't looked through it as much as I should have. Will have to remedy this.

Well, Godard said that the only way to criticize a film is to make a film yourself.

[thatguamguy]

Originally Posted by silverlakephil

I recently bought a book 1,001 Films You Must See Before You Die .It's a huge tome, and as I skimmed through it, less films for each year are mentioned after 2005 I believe. They update the book every few years, but I found a list of every film mentioned since the list was created.

When I got that book ten years ago, there were fewer films mentioned after 1995. There is always a general reluctance amongst critics to declare new movies "classics" when compared to older movies, for a variety of reasons probably not worth getting into.

I do think the 1970's is probably the best period for American filmmaking, and even there you get stuff like "Airport" and "The Towering Inferno" getting nominations. There are few years in any period where the Best Picture nominees were as strong as 1975, but I think that has always been inherent to the Oscars.

[Abdrewes]

Originally Posted by silverlakephil

I recently bought a book 1,001 Films You Must See Before You Die .It's a huge tome, and as I skimmed through it, less films for each year are mentioned after 2005 I believe. They update the book every few years, but I found a list of every film mentioned since the list was created.

http://1001films.wikia.com/wiki/The_List

They actually add a bunch of new releases with each year. I you compile all the editions, there has been 115 films added with release dates between 2005 and 2015.

That's a decent slice of the pie.

But yes, the book is really nice. I bought my older edition for $4 shipped via Amazon and it has been money well spent. I still have a hundred and fifty films to seek out from all the editions and I look forward to reading the capsules after each viewing.

[silverlakephil]

Originally Posted by Abdrewes

They actually add a bunch of new releases with each year. I you compile all the editions, there has been 115 films added with release dates between 2005 and 2015.

That's a decent slice of the pie.

But yes, the book is really nice. I bought my older edition for $4 shipped via Amazon and it has been money well spent. I still have a hundred and fifty films to seek out from all the editions and I look forward to reading the capsules after each viewing.

Yes, I noticed that from the wikia list. For example, the current edition only list one film from 2006 (Pan's Labyrinth). A little disappointed they omitted Children of Men for the 2015 edition.

[bdmartin134]

A glaring missing film in the updated version I have (12 Years a Slave on the spine) is Tree of Life.. I don't understand why they would have this not in the list and have the likes of Cabin in the Woods or Paranormal Activity?? Crazy