1980s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 2)

[Dylan]

Is the novel funny like the film, or is it a straight-forward children's fairy tale?

It's absolutely hilarious and beautifully written - much, much more dark and ironic as well. William Goldman also incorporates a fair amount of his childhood and adulthood, albeit almost entirely fictionalized, via a prologue and various snippets in between chapters.

Speaking of which, Goldman wrote my all-time favorite novel, Boys and Girls Together (1964), as well as my second favorite novel of all-time, The Color of Light (1984). Needless to say, I'm a huge fan.

I've never gotten around to reading the novel. I've been given to understand, though, that one thing that the framing story did for the movie was to give them an excuse to add in some of the book's side commentary which would otherwise not have any outlet in the movie.

I believe when Norman Jewison was set to direct The Princess Bride in the early seventies, the setting for the bookends would've been Germany in World War II. Both are very different than the way Goldman does it in his original novel (though we're talking about a ninety minute film vs. a nearly four-hundred page book). I'll wager any fan of the film (or even if you only marginally enjoy it) will absolutely adore the book.

[Zumpano]

One of the things I've been doing to help pick movies to watch in preparation for this list is looking at the different posters at IMPAwards.Com. I've been punching in by year and scrolling around alphabetically.

The 80's really sold their films in a variety of ways and have a (variety) poster style(s) that I find lacking from posters starting in the mid-90's to present.

Just look at the posters from 1985. Not only does it seem like some bizarro genius year of cinema but a lot of the art is very striking. Either that or I'm being rather nostalgic...

Anyway, it puts you in a mood...

[zedz]

Near Death

I watched this on denti's dare: six hours of magnificent doom and gloom. Fred Wiseman is obviously a major filmmaker, but it's often easier to consider his output as a body of work than as individual films, and my encounters with his work have tended to be rather random, amounting to perhaps twelve to fifteen films from all over his career. None of those films have been less than involving and insightful, though my response to them has often been more about where my head was at when I saw them, or as another room in Wiseman's proliferating edifice than as objective evaluations of individual films.

Emboldened by denti's enthusiasm, I ordered four discs from Zipporah (this one, Welfare, Meat and Model - a flesh-processing tetralogy of sorts). I used Model (smooth) and Meat (gristly) to build up to this epic and get some perspective.

Near Death is a tough watch. Not quite in the league of The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, but approaching that in places. I was surprised that the impact of the film was not just in terms of empathy with the component narratives - though that's a big part of its power, and this film is far more narratively driven than most other Wisemans I've seen - but operated on a far, far more personal level. Like Brakhage's film, it's potentially transformative, allowing you to see life in its starkest, most fundamental terms from new perspectives.

The film, like all of Wiseman's work, contains no narration or explicit contextual material: we're simply observing the everyday work in a Boston hospital's ICU. However, the film is intrinsically narrative, with each third of the film (as it's conveniently divided onto separate discs by Zipporah) following the plight of a different patient and their family. The focus is not exclusive, but each two hour slab concentrates probably 80% of its time on a specific narrative. Because the film is to a very large extent about communication - the era of patients' rights had arrived with a bang and the medical staff are still coming to terms with the world of informed consent and DNR orders - we actually get far more 'narration' of the different situations than in most other Wiseman works. In fact, the repetitive nature of the consultations and discussions is an important part of the film's texture, and it's in those discussions that much of the drama can be found.

We get to watch concerned professionals self-consciously efface their own perspectives while almost visibly willing the patients and family to make the 'right' decision - not that the doctors are necessarily in agreement with one another over what that is. Is there any nice way to tell a mentally alert person that their completely alive mind is trapped in a dying body? The film is deliberately but perfectly paced: we, like the patients, need time for the ramifications of what is being discussed to sink in.

One of Wiseman's smartest strategies is his suspension of the various storylines (although we learn how they turn out just before the end credits). The film is about the moral, ethical and existential murk before death, not the act itself (hence the film's title), so we don't get the inevitable dramatic payoff each story is building up to. In some cases, we move on before it's even clear that all necessary decisions have been made, the decision-making process being so tortuous and fraught with ambiguity. The film is almost as much about semantics and linguistic comprehension as it is about life and death.

Actually, the film is so verbal that it's almost a perfect counterpoint to Brakhage's film - the two films approach the same endpoint from different directions: the build-up and the aftermath; anticipation and retrospection; words and images.

A really great film, but so personal in its impact that it's hard for me to assess it in terms of "the 80s list". I have a similar problem with Shoah, an overwhelming film experience that I nevertheless had issues with as a documentary, and thus I left it off my list last time around. Wiseman's film will certainly make my list, but I'll need some more distance from it before I can accommodate it.

[zedz]

Comrades

Word on this, way back in the dim, dark eighties, was that it was a misfire, a sidestep. Then Bill Douglas was gone and the film and its reputation were buried along with him. Having caught up with it some twenty years later, I can only guess that those discouraging reports were second- or third-hand from people that hadn’t actually seen it (a massive constituency, even among the cineliterate), and were swayed by the horror stories of its abject box office failure.

Quite simply, it’s a major achievement, one of the most ambitious British films of the 1980s and a completely convincing stride ahead for Douglas in terms of his filmmaking. There is, of course, a trade-off in intimacy and intensity – this is a historical epic, after all – but the film fully deserves to stand shoulder to shoulder with his acknowledged masterpiece. It also completes a picture of Douglas’ incredible talent, as it operates on quite a different scale from the trilogy, is in colour, and deals with radically different subject matter.

It relates the story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, rebellious Dorset farmers of the 1830s whose union is crushed by the powers that be and who are transported to Australia, but Douglas avoids the conventional contours of a historical narrative, focussing instead on everyday details, with the politics and violence swirling around the characters, often off-screen but frequently intruding on. The Martyrs thus become more than just historical action figures, and the film becomes more than just a politically-charged history lesson. One of the film’s most impressive achievements is the balance it strikes between the big political frame and the intimate personal details which flesh it out.

Given the intimate, autobiographical nature of his previous films, Douglas handles a huge, diverse cast brilliantly, and there’s a characteristic intelligence behind his casting decision to deploy the recognisable ‘name’ actors (James Fox, Michael Hordern, Vanessa Redgrave) as the authority figures and cast relative unknowns and newcomers as the working class. Not that they stayed unknown: Phil Davis and Imelda Staunton do sterling work, so I guess Mike Leigh at least saw the film.

Douglas makes exquisite use of light and sound, and on one level the film is a study in variant light sources: bleaching Australian sunlight, fog-filtered wintry English sunlight, cold moonlight, candlelight, and the light of the magic lantern. This final element is a crucial one – the film is subtitled “A Lanternist’s Account”, and Douglas’ surrogate, the lanternist, weaves through the story in multiple guises as an oblique narrator, foregrounding two other of the film’s organising themes: the idea of narration (who’s telling the story; who’s hearing it; whose stories get told) and pre-cinema technology. The magic lantern, dioramas, shadowplays, photography, spinning thaumatropes are all represented in turn – cinema deconstructed into its constituent parts, if you will – and in each instance the same actor portrays the bringer of the technology and the teller of its stories.

When the film leaps to Australia a couple of hours in, it’s dazzling and disorienting on several levels, and you feel for sure that Douglas has bitten off more than he can chew as the film starts off in a number of new directions. The narrative begins to fragment and disintegrate – where before we were following a complex but unified story, now we’re viewing a half-dozen individual narratives in parallel – but this is completely deliberate and to the point, as we’re witnessing the unravelling of a movement and, in many cases of the individuals behind it. Comrades has turned into a different film (one that’s a kind of midpoint, both aesthetically and chronologically, between Walkabout and The Proposition), but once its form and aims become clear, it’s no less impressive, and the radical gear change mid-film simply makes the whole thing that much more complex, challenging and impressive.

I also need to put in a word for the music. Hans Werner Henze (Resnais’ Muriel, a handful of Schlondorff films) contributes a fantastic score which Douglas uses extremely sparingly, a strategic deployment that only enhances its greatness. One of the most important characteristics of the film, I’d say, is that in it Douglas demonstrates mastery of all the forms and techniques associated with the historical epic (e.g. stunning landscape photography, period recreations, elaborate action sequences, ‘big’ scores) but keeps them in reserve for much of the time, bringing them out very selectively for maximum impact. Sure, it’s a strategy befitting an under-capitalized production, but it’s one that much more lavishly resourced filmmakers could learn a lot from.

I understand that the chances of a DVD release of this film are remote (a three-hour flop that's the only feature of a forgotten filmmaker, with troubled production and murky ownership? Only a very brave or very foolish label would tackle that), but don't miss it if it happens to screen in your vicinity.

[Dr Amicus]

Comrades

Word on this, way back in the dim, dark eighties, was that it was a misfire, a sidestep.

Possibly - on it's release the only sources of film I had available were Barry Norman on Film XX and Philip French in the Observer. However, I did see a poll-of-polls in the Independent (?) at the end of the year which ranked films according to the number of appearances on 10 best of lists from broadsheets and a couple of other sources. Top the chart, beating Blue Velvet (IIRC), was Comrades, with 9 appearances.

It's a film I would love to see - I can't remember how many times Channel 4 has shown it over here, but I know it hasn't been often and I've missed it when they did.

[foggy eyes]

Thanks for the excellent comments on Comrades, zedz.

Douglas’ surrogate, the lanternist, weaves through the story in multiple guises as an oblique narrator, foregrounding two other of the film’s organising themes: the idea of narration (who’s telling the story; who’s hearing it; whose stories get told) and pre-cinema technology. The magic lantern, dioramas, shadowplays, photography, spinning thaumatropes are all represented in turn – cinema deconstructed into its constituent parts, if you will – and in each instance the same actor portrays the bringer of the technology and the teller of its stories.

It's no secret that Douglas was obsessed with pre-cinema paraphernalia, and the treasure trove of artifacts that he amassed with Peter Jewell (over the course of a lifetime) is nothing short of breathtaking. After Bill's death, everything was cleared out of their shared flat in Soho (books and antiques had taken over their living space entirely, scattered across rooms and piled up to the ceiling) and became the Bill Douglas Centre at the University of Exeter. Many of the items can be viewed through the EVE section of the website, and the optical entertainments used in Comrades can be viewed first-hand in the museum itself - see also Bill's essay 'A Lanternist and his Comrades' (The New Magic Lantern Journal 5.2, 1987).

[zedz]

Possibly - on it's release the only sources of film I had available were Barry Norman on Film XX and Philip French in the Observer. However, I did see a poll-of-polls in the Independent (?) at the end of the year which ranked films according to the number of appearances on 10 best of lists from broadsheets and a couple of other sources. Top the chart, beating Blue Velvet (IIRC), was Comrades, with 9 appearances.

That's extremely heartening, extremely surprising and pretty depressing in the bargain (considering how forgotten the film is now). My received notion came from supposedly knowledgeable sources that should have known better (and, I strongly suspect, hadn't seen the film) and some of the guarded and ambivalent comments about the film that cropped up in Douglas obituaries, which tended to bask in the glow of the trilogy.

Which neatly segues into:

The Terence Davies Trilogy

A million thanks to the BFI for putting this out (and the Douglas too, of course). It had been years since I saw it, and I was surprised to see how much I had amalgamated the three together in my brain.

Children (a 70s film and thus out of bounds) is the weakest of the three, as Davies himself acknowledges in his fascinating commentary, which offers almost a shot-by-shot evaluation (e.g. "I really should have moved the camera a little to the left here and lowered it slightly"; "Now. . . THIS is the moment I should have cut to a close-up" - fantastic insight into his style). It's also, not coincidentally, the longest.

What I find most remarkable about the latter films of the trilogy, and the trilogy that followed is Davies' intense narrative compression, achieved not through fast-cutting of cramming of visual information (as he progresses he tends to move in the opposite direction), but through the layering of narrative, in terms of sound vs. image, transitions between different time periods, and building symbolic of metaphorical resonance into simple actions.

This aspect of Davies' style really leaps out at you in the trilogy, as the ambitious but linear Children gives way to the complex, provocative layerings of Madonna and Child, most famously the Stations of the Cross / tattoo my bollocks scene, but also the shuttling back and forth between gay sex scenes and childhood 'innocence'.

Death and Tranfiguration goes even further, existing simultaneously in multiple time frames, collapsing a long, painful life into a continuous raw present. I've only ever seen it as the third act of the trilogy, and the films are so interdependent I can't imagine whether or not this extraordinarily intense 25 minutes makes any sense on its own, but I find it one of the most moving films of the 1980s, with Wilfred Brambell giving a simply hair-raising performance (yes, I know all he does is lie in a bed). And the end of the film shows beautifully how Davies' choices build up layers of meaning, with the night nurse's searching light merging with the encompassing light around Tucker. There are plenty of films that end with the death of the main character, but Davies performs a conceptual hat-trick in this film that I don't think anybody else has attempted, ending with the death of a character that is also the death of the filmmaker and the death of God.

[zedz]

80s lists are due at the end of December, but I'm proposing a slight shift of the deadline over here. Let me know what you prefer.

[zedz]

New list deadline is January 15, which gives you all about two months to catch up on all those teen comedies.

A couple of recent viewings:

Eijanaika

A fine film, but second-tier Imamura in my book. It’s a densely-plotted, sprawling period film, extremely well-handled, but for much of its length slightly lacking in directorial personality. A lot of it unfolds in pretty much the same manner it would with another accomplished director. Things pick up sharply in the final 45 minutes or so, which consists of a series of superb set pieces (an assassination, a double suicide to firework accompaniment, an anarchic grass-roots revolt and its suppression). Generally, I expect to be more surprised by an Imamura film, but this is nevertheless excellent.

I saw this in a ratty transfer of an open matte video, so the film didn’t look anywhere near as good as it should, but it did give me an opportunity to reflect on that popular bugbear, the incorrect aspect ratio. Almost all of this film looks wrong in open matte, with dead empty spaces at the top and bottom of the frames. No booms in evidence, so the full frame was protected, but the compositions tend to get blanded down into the same weird openness, and at times the meaning of the image is compromised, as when a throng of people reaching to the foreground is revealed to end at the edge of the widescreen frame. Even with all this clear evidence of the wrongness of the ratio, there are plenty of shots that seem to work better in 1.33. They seem better composed, or present meaningful visual information at the top or bottom of the sceen - but this doesn’t mean they’re correct. This experience has warned me to be extremely skeptical of evidence for a given aspect ratio based solely on screen caps – you really need to see the entire film.

The Ballad of Narayama

Imamura’s subsequent film is a much stronger work in my opinion, circling back to territory similar to what he dealt with in The Profound Desire of the Gods. It could well be both his most beautiful and most brutal film, its interpolated nature studies (the local fauna fornicating and killing one another - Werner Herzog would surely approve!) acting as a parallel to the bleak, pitiless human nature on display. The very act of transposing such ruthless Darwinianism to human subjects is the film’s raison d’etre, and Imamura follows the stark logic of that equation to its darkest conclusion(s). Grim as the movie is, there’s still room for the director’s bitter humour, however.

The ending of the film is telegraphed from the outset, and probably known to most viewers beforehand, but Imamura fashions from it a bravura 40 minute, nearly wordless sequence of extraordinary power and several genuine shocks. Again, the sequence’s power and surprise derives directly from Imamura’s steadfast refusal to duck any of the implications of the story he’s chosen to tell, and if we’re surprised by what we see, we realise that this is only because we ourselves haven’t followed the tenets of this world through to its logical conclusion.

The Animeigo disc is a great transfer. Its subtitles are eccentric as ever (multiple colours indicating different speakers; explanatory notes) but fastidiously correct, as far as I could tell. An essential disc.

[swo17]

New list deadline is January 15, which gives you all about two months to catch up on all those teen comedies.

Are there any obscure Asian teen comedies you would recommend?

[zedz]

New list deadline is January 15, which gives you all about two months to catch up on all those teen comedies.

Are there any obscure Asian teen comedies you would recommend?

The Boys from Fengkuei (there's at least one good joke in it) and Ishii's The Crazy Family (there's a teen in it)!

[sidehacker]

Another good teenage-related effort from Hou: Daughter of the Nile - I guess it's never said if the characters are teenagers, but it certainly seems that way. Maybe it's just because I tend to associate it with Unknown Pleasures and Rebels of the Neon God.

[brendanjc]

Like someone mentioned earlier with A Christmas Story, making an 80's list is a daunting task for me compared any earlier decade. There are so many films that I've seen so many times and loved so dearly growing up, the ones that got me into movies in the first place, it's hard to rank them next to films I've seen more recently that are probably objectively better. I mean, for every Ran and Paris, Texas there is a Ghostbusters, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Gremlins - it's like comparing apples to the teddy bear you've had since you were an infant. The film currently sitting at the top lies squarely in-between the two camps: I can't explain why Raising Arizona stays just as funny on repeat viewings as the first time and it feels silly to have a comedy starring Nicholas Cage at the top of this sort of list, but I can't figure out a way to displace it.

Going through my preliminary list so far, the 80's turns out to be a good decade for my second-favorite films from a number of directors, including the following I haven't seen mentioned before in the thread: Once Upon A Time In America, The Elephant Man, Brazil, My Neighbor Totoro and Sex, Lies and Videotape, along with the aforementioned The Purple Rose of Cairo.

[GringoTex]

I mean, for every Ran and Paris, Texas there is a Ghostbusters, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Gremlins - it's like comparing apples to the teddy bear you've had since you were an infant.

Don't feel guilty. Gremlins is a much better film than Ran or Paris, Texas.

[zedz]

Sherman’s March

One of my favourite American comedies, which may well be because it’s also so much more: diary film, picaresque, Civil War documentary, time capsule, self-reflexive Escher loop, cavalcade of mutts. Even in its comic dimension, it functions on many levels at once: satire, romantic comedy, screwball comedy, self-deprecating stand-up. A lot of bad and lazy filmmaking has arisen in its wake (sit down, Michael Moore, for heaven’s sake) but McElwee can juggle the personal element and all the rest of what his films are about far more elegantly than most.

It’s one of the films I’ve seen the greatest number of times (probably seven or eight by now – I’m not a compulsive rewatcher generally) and it always works a charm. What drags me back each time are the characters, who are sketched beautifully during their short appearances – it always surprises me just how deep an impression each of these women make with such little screen time – and the laughs. How can you not listen to Pat’s screenplay summary with appalled fascination (“and by this time, I’m basically a female prophet. . .”), or grin when the news about the imminent arrival of the Antichrist is accompanied by a giant bunny rabbit? And the film is full of so many wonderful bits that no scriptwriter could have dreamt up: the late-night discovery of Burt Reynolds hanging around outside the Quality Inn; Charleen’s breathless recommendation of her post-Dede choice, just after the film has run out in Ross’s camera; the mike going off just as Pat starts her cellulite exercises (I still don’t quite believe that this was accidental); Cam’s surreal occupation.

Despite the sheer rollicking enjoyment of the film, it’s offset by serious subtexts. The nuclear anxiety that permeates the film might look quaint from a modern perspective, but it powerfully evokes the mood of the times for me, and McElwee’s oblique consideration of race in the American South (a recurrent theme in his work) surfaces unexpectedly throughout the film. The moment when his conversation with the black mechanic working on his brother’s sportscar takes a sudden turn for the deadly serious always leaves me transfixed, and familiarity with McElwee’s other work (specifically the parts of it that deal with his mother) just intensifies the sudden emotional power of that look and McElwee’s response.

An amazing, inexhaustable film. The FirstRun transfer is not great, but it's serviceable (don’t forget that this originated on 16mm) and I also strongly recommend the entire McElwee box set (Time Indefinite is a shoo-in for my 90s list).

Also seen from the 80s: some great and less great Zbigniew Rybczynski shorts and Glauber Rocha’s unhinged final film, The Age of the Earth. But I’ll comment on those in their respective threads. And I’ve started on Reitz’s Heimat, which I saw almost exactly twenty years ago. So far it’s holding up to the memories: one of the most cinematic pieces of television I’ve ever seen, with technical attributes (Ruizian deep focus, multiple textures of colour and black-and-white stock) that are easily overlooked on the small screen.

[life_boy]

zedz:
Knowing you to be a proponent of Raoul Ruiz, have you seen or have any thoughts on Ruiz's On Top of the Whale (1982)? I picked up Kino's VHS years ago during a sale and never watched it. I have no Ruiz experience and am curious about Whale as an entry point.

[zedz]

I only saw it once in a small retro and wasn't as taken with it as the other Ruizes I saw at the time. Who knows how it would seem to me now!

My favourite 80s Ruiz films (though there are literally dozens I haven't seen - I think this was his most ridiculously prolific period in a ridiculously prolific career) are:
City of Pirates - again, I only saw this once, but it's etched into my brain as if by acid (hydrochloric and lysergic). It's only available unsubbed from France.
Three Crowns of a Sailor - available from Facets (apparently a port of the fine French disc, so a comparatively safe bet) and I'd recommend this as the best entry point for 80s Ruiz. Elegant and hallucinatory.
Treasure Island - Spot the maritime theme. This film was part of the notorious Cannon debacle of the mid-80s which saw the company fund various unlikely arthouse projects (e.g. Godard's King Lear) in an attempt to buy themselves some cred. It all ended badly and the films seem to be in rights hell now. This film is insane, a fever-dream updating of Stevenson's novel that continually folds in on and out of itself. It's less an adaptation than it is an exploration of a narrative world whose founding rules were extracted from Treasure Island. (Ruiz seems to do a similar thing with Dracula in L'Oeil qui ment).

So I'd recommend going for Three Crowns of a Sailor if you can get it (Facets or Blaq Out - if you get the Blaq Out set you'll also get The Suspended Vocation and the indispensible Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting) before On Top of the Whale, but if that's not an option just dive right in. Any Ruiz is better than nothing.

[Cold Bishop]

Manoel in the Island of Wonders/Manoel's Destinies is arguably the best of the bunch, but good luck finding the Australian bootleg (Clips are on Google, so it must be out there in some avi/mpeg form). It's Ruiz's take on the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Carroll, and its even more wonderful than it sounds.

I've long been trying to track down his adaptation of Blind Owl, which I heard is another standout. Ditto with Mammame and Richard III. Once all films surface, and the final tally is made, it may turn out that Ruiz was the finest filmmaker of the decade.

[Forrest Taft]

No love for Runaway Train(Andrei Konchalovsky, 1985)? Not number one on my list, but this is the B-picture of 80s, courtesy of the Cannon Group. Also, I´d like to put in a good word for Local Hero(Bill Forsyth, 1983) and Wayne Wangs´Life is Cheap, but Toilet Paper is Expensive(1989). I haven´t seen these two in years, but remember them both as being terrific films.

[domino harvey]

Watched Bob Fosse's Star 80 and good lord, what a repellent picture this is! Granted, I was pretty skeptical going in, but this sleazy bit of trash sidesteps nearly every moment where gravitas, emotion, or interesting ideas could be employed. Star 80's first and biggest problem is its mistaken emphasis on Paul Snider over Dorothy Stratten. What happened to Stratten was a tragedy, what happened to her pimp boyfriend isn't. A film based on a psychopath could of course have been interesting, even this one, but it would have required far more effort to make it work than is exerted here. Eric Roberts greases the screen with his slimy portrayal, but doesn't show anything beyond a one-dimensional possessive thug. Now, I'd argue that all known evidence about the real Snider suggests that's just what he was. Well, okay then, why is he the star of the film? What does this movie have to say or present or reveal or clarify (about the real events or in general) that wasn't already apparent beforehand? Hemingway's overly stupid portrayal ("Things have been pretty bananas!") and a hands-off approach to both Hefner and Bogdanovich that uncovers no insights into anything portrayed effectively make only the case that the film has no reason for existing.

Even as an aesthetic product, a movie, the film is a mess. Hypercut in the typical overactive style of its director, the picture contains no attempts to humanize anyone portrayed on-screen. I can see how this flat method could possibly be used to further larger ideas, but the picture isn't interested in doing anything with anything. Fosse doesn't help matters either when he intercuts random talking heads with peripheral characters discussing Snider into the action either, as though anyone cares. The movie comes dangerously close to blaming the victim, which leaves unsettling questions about who the target audience for the film was. And Fosse tries to have his cake with a scene chiding the misogynistic violence in Stratten's film Autumn Born, but then ends his own film by showing the shotgun blast to Hemingway's face and following that with the reenactment of her corpse being sodomized. "Take that, violence against women! Oh, and here's some even worse violence against women." Add to that more gratuitous nudity than any Playboy special would have bothered to include and a cheesy score interspersed with Scorsese-level classic rock hits and this adds up to one irredeemable piece of shit.

[domino harvey]

I've loaded up the queue with 80s films as we enter the home stretch. First up was Things Change and despite it being a lowkey, minor Mamet film, it certainly has plenty of the great charm one finds in his works. The opening ten minutes are classic Mamet, including this great exchange which opens the film:

Ricky Jay: A friend of mine would like to meet you
Don Ameche: I shine shoes
Ricky Jay: There will be shoes there

But the film eventually settles into a relaxed putter towards the finish that is very out of place within Mamet's oeuvre as a director. Despite how cute the whole enterprise is, the film unfortunately lacks the succinct care and craft of Mamet's other films. Also, with the exception of Crouse, Meshach Taylor, and the old lady, I think every single other speaking part from House of Games has a role in this film-- including William H Macy with bleached blonde hair and an earring!

[Steven H]

I don't want to get my heart broken again, so I'm politely asking everyone participating in this list to please see my number-one lock, They All Laughed. For anyone willing to at least give the movie a shot, tell me your presumed number one choice and I will exchange the favor of making sure it gets a viewing.

...[Suzuki Seijun's] Zigeunerweisen comes in the grand (in my opinion) tradition of gorgeous full-frame color Japanese presentation from the ATG (and I'll go ahead and say this is my "if you watching one film" film, as I place They All Laughed on my netflix queue).

*cough*

[domino harvey]

That's actually number 3 in my Netflix queue right now, surrounded by a mix of my own picks and everyone's number ones from the suggestion thread-- and the Alligator's Wiseman is on my way from ILL! I haven't forgotten my promise, everyone's number one films will be watched!

[zedz]

Which reminds me. . . I don't think I've said this 'above ground' yet, but my 'number one film' for the purpose of swapsies is Sherman's March (since my actual number one film is pretty much unavailable).

This is probably a good time to remind everyone that the deadline in 15 January, a little more than a month away.

PM me your fifty favourite 80s films, in order of preference. IMDB decides the date, not you, me or common sense. Trilogies are separate films; two-parters are singles. Shorts and music videos are eligible. TV films, specials and mini-series are eligible, but not TV series or episodes of TV series.

I did receive one list, but since it covered more than fifty films and was in chronological order, it's not eligible. The submitter is welcome to resubmit a rejigged list.

[souvenir]

Should there be a distinction made when voting for Fanny & Alexander? I can see some people singling out the television version, some voting for the theatrical version and others not specifying.