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Posted: **Mon Dec 16, 2024 6:15 pm**

I used to think it was one of the lesser Hitchcocks in my youth, as I was anticipating a different kind of movie. Now I love it - it's only bested by North by Northwest - but I 'get' why someone would walk away disappointed on a first viewing, especially if expecting typical Hitchcock trappings for stimulation

Posted: **Mon Dec 16, 2024 6:19 pm**

Many of the people I know under the age of 30 can't even make it through an entire film, let alone one from the 20th century. I doubt "Gummi" will just have a problem with Rear Window when it comes to classic cinema, so good luck to them with that box set.

Posted: **Mon Dec 16, 2024 6:28 pm**

The Curious Sofa wrote: Mon Dec 16, 2024 6:19 pm "Gummi"

...stage name for, like, the worst stripper in the world? or the worst hooker. Gummi the hooker.

Posted: **Mon Dec 16, 2024 6:36 pm**

'Gummi' is German for 'rubber' and there is a demand, so let's not judge too quickly here.

Posted: **Mon Dec 16, 2024 6:45 pm**

domino harvey wrote: Mon Dec 16, 2024 6:10 pm We’ll allow Orson Welles to be wrong, but anyone who didn’t direct Citizen Kane who thinks this should just pack it up and find a new hobby, because movies ain’t it for you

Ha! Thanks for saving me a lot of time!

Aside: I have a vague memory that Hitchcock himself held Rear Window in relatively low esteem among his work, but Mr Google is too cluttered with appreciations (and I'm too lazy) to confirm or deny this. In any case, I need to get back to my new hobby. :)

Posted: **Mon Dec 16, 2024 6:48 pm**

I have a good friend who has only recently become interested in film. We've watched a lot of contemporary films together, but he was curious about older films, so I showed him P&P's A Matter of Life and Death, thinking he'll be in for a treat. He hated it. The earliest he can watch is 60s cinema, everything before that is too archaic for him.
We've now settled on getting through the winter by watching all the Bond films, we've made it through Connery and are doing well so far.

Posted: **Mon Dec 16, 2024 7:03 pm**

yoshimori wrote: Mon Dec 16, 2024 6:45 pm
Spoiler
domino harvey wrote: Mon Dec 16, 2024 6:10 pm We’ll allow Orson Welles to be wrong, but anyone who didn’t direct Citizen Kane who thinks this should just pack it up and find a new hobby, because movies ain’t it for you
Ha! Thanks for saving me a lot of time!

Aside: I have a vague memory that Hitchcock himself held Rear Window in relatively low esteem among his work, but Mr Google is too cluttered with appreciations (and I'm too lazy) to confirm or deny this. In any case, I need to get back to my new hobby.

I've never read anything about Hitchcock being down on Rear Window, but he did express doubts to Truffaut about Rope. Maybe that's what you're thinking of as it's another one-location experiment?

I'm pretty sure Tarantino doesn't like Rear Window either, he seems to dislike all 50s cinema, especially Hitchcock. His complaint is that censorship limited filmmakers. The 50s are my second favourite movie decade after the 70s and I think censorship often made them more inventive, especially Hitchcock who has so much queer subtext running through his films.

Posted: **Mon Dec 16, 2024 7:23 pm**

Anyone posting here is obviously exempt, since that is functionally the same as directing Citizen Kane

…and the MacMahonists didn’t like Hitchcock (or Welles), but you can’t count them because what they do like is far too specific to not be forged from having seen far more movies of note than someone dismissing Rear Window on Blu-ray.com has achieved

Posted: **Mon Dec 16, 2024 9:10 pm**

Welles was pretty candid about not liking many films in general. In that interview he gave for Arena in 1982, he
said that one always lost something as a filmmaker every time you saw a good film because you either worry
about imitating it or worrying about trying to not imitate it. I would take what he said with a grain of salt.
The one film I know that he absolutely loved was La grande illusion.

Posted: **Mon Dec 16, 2024 9:22 pm**

He also said he rewatched Stagecoach over and over to prepare to make Citizen Kane

Posted: **Mon Dec 16, 2024 9:46 pm**

Re: Welles, I've seen him praise quite a few films across many interviews and filmed or broadcast appearances, so it's likely an exaggeration if he ever said he didn't like many films. I just saw an introduction he filmed for a television broadcast of Buster Keaton's The General where he couldn't have been more generous with his praise, for both the film and Keaton's work in general

Posted: **Mon Dec 16, 2024 10:13 pm**

Yes, but if you notice throughout these many interviews, they are generally films made before 1939, in a word, before
he started making films in earnest himself.

Posted: **Mon Dec 16, 2024 11:49 pm**

domino harvey wrote: Mon Dec 16, 2024 7:23 pm ... the MacMahonists didn’t like Hitchcock (or Welles) ...

Hilarious! :)

A friend of mind once drew a caricature of Vladimir Nabokov scaling the highest of peaks, his gaze fixed intently on the sun above, his foot swatting the likes of Dostoyevsky, Camus, and Conrad off the mountain below him.

BTW: I like Hitchcock (in general) and, of course, Welles (in general).

Posted: **Tue Dec 17, 2024 1:42 am**

Here's one of the more head-spinning paragraphs I've come across in a while, not exactly helped by the irrelevant aside at the end:

There’s only one thing holding My Old Ass back from being a more unqualified success: the potential dubiousness of that sexual awakening, in a film climate where the opposite sort of sexual awakening seems like a better use of the platform and the celluloid. (As if “films” are actually still made on film.)

For those as nonplussed as I was, the reviewer happens to be taking issue with

Spoiler

the film's queer protagonist realising she's not exclusively into women: there's "something a bit too heteronormative about exploring this as a central theme of a movie", apparently, when, after all, as a director, "you have the chance to explore any theme you find worth communicating to your audience".

Not that this badly written review warrants a serious rebuttal, but the film's director has been pretty clear about why she did, in fact, find this theme worth communicating to an audience: https://www.polygon.com/movies/456620/m ... t-bisexual

Posted: **Tue Dec 17, 2024 2:45 am**

An IG post on the announcement of a Re-Animator 4K edition (in the US from Ignite Films):

Too bad about the garbage format. 4K remasters ruin films and erase history.

Posted: **Tue Dec 31, 2024 5:19 pm**

I like many old black and white movies. If it was in the budget a professional color vision of an old movie could be included with the original black and white version of the movie. It takes a lot of time and money to make a good color version of a movie that use to be black and white. Maybe one day with AI automation the colorization process could be a lot better and faster at a cheaper price.

Posted: **Tue Dec 31, 2024 10:08 pm**

Or you could just not bother and put the money into restoring another black and white film properly.

Posted: **Wed Jan 01, 2025 9:40 am**

One suspects they'll get their wish for such processes to be faster and cheaper, though I can only imagine what might constitute "better" to people like this.

Posted: **Wed Jan 01, 2025 10:25 am**

Waiting with baited breath for the colorized version of Satantango!

Isn't this just the annual reminder that Ted Turner is still alive? Thank goodness for Gremlins 2, which punctured this aspect extremely well:

Gremlins 2 wrote:Building announcement: Tonight, on the Clamp Cable Classic Movie Channel, don't miss Casablanca, now in full color with a happier ending!

Which itself is a really nice callback to the first Gremlins, where all the films shown on television - Orpheus, the Harryhausen monster movie, It's A Wonderful Life (one of the first "colorized" films, after Topper) - are black and white, and the only colour film is the theatrically shown Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs!

Posted: **Wed Jan 01, 2025 4:10 pm**

Was recently watching an 80s commercial compilation taped off TBS and did a double take when one of the commercials of upcoming programming showed clips from Somebody Up There Likes Me in color, as even though I've seen the film I had no idea what I was even looking at until they told me (and imagine spending money to colorize such a mediocre film)-- what a bizarre footnote in history, it's horrifying that anyone wants it back

Posted: **Wed Jan 15, 2025 3:38 am**

Sully Seagull

Biography

Overview

Nickname

Sully

Mini Bio

2016 marked the year that Sully Seagull's extraordinary career started. He landed a substantial supporting role in The Shallows (2016), co-starring with Blake Lively in what was to become one of the most successful summer movies of the year. Sully received rave reviews for his multi-layered portrayal of a handicapped gull bravely trying to escape a scary shark's appetite. Vulture.com called him "The Breakout Movie Star of the Summer", and renowned film critic Winston Cook Wilson praised his "bold, controlled, and unexpected" performance and even demanded an Oscar nomination for the feathered star of Jaume Collet-Serra's thriller. Entertainment Weekly published an insightful article about the making of The Shallows (2016), pointing out: "Forget the shark that stalks Blake Lively; the seagull stranded with her on the rock [...] stealthily stole every scene he appeared in. Nicknamed Sully by the film's animal trainer, Katie Brock, the feathered star engaged comically with Lively's heroine Nancy and drew praise for his performance."

After a three-year hiatus from the spotlight, Sully was persuaded to take over a more demanding character role in Robert Eggers's The Lighthouse (2019) with Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe. He agreed to appear uncredited in this acclaimed fantasy drama.

In his spare time, Sully enjoys flying and fishing.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Train Wreck Lady

Trademarks

Cleanest bird on set

Trivia

He was very close to his leading lady from The Shallows (2016), Blake Lively. Lively later admitted that she occasionally turned to Sully for acting advice.

Sully lives (to this day) in a seagull sanctuary in Australia. He is a very private bird and shows absolutely no showbiz attitude in real-life, even though he is famous for his Streep-like work ethics in the film industry.

Two extra seagulls were used to portray Steven Seagull in The Shallows (2016). According to producer Matti Leshem, she added "They were all good but not nearly as good as him. Peggy was the vocal one, the very squawky bird. Gaviota (which means seagull in Spanish), I think he's almost 30 [as Steven is estimated to be about 15 or 20 years old]. The most challenging thing about Sully Seagull as an actor is that seagulls are remarkably clean. They self clean a lot, so the blood on Sully, obviously fake blood, he kept wanting to clean it off, so we had to deal with that.".

Appeared with Jamie Dornan in Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar (2021), his first comedy. He was also in the music video, "Edgar's Prayer", playing a gull on a tire.

Posted: **Wed Jan 15, 2025 9:48 am**

That's rather adorable.

Posted: **Sat Jan 18, 2025 12:18 am**

The Curious Sofa wrote: Thu Jun 06, 2024 6:22 am
Fiery Angel wrote: Thu Jun 06, 2024 3:28 am Cancel Kael!
Nicely sums up where cultural discourse is today.

You know, there's a little old-fashioned transphobia in her review of The World According to Garp ("he thinks surgery can turn him into a woman")... and LOL I distinctly remember, no really, that she actually invoked James Agee to indirectly call Eddie Murphy the n-word in her review of 48 Hrs. (I've never enjoyed watching Eddie Murphy do anything). Off with her head!!

Posted: **Sat Jan 18, 2025 1:30 am**

Randall Maysin Again wrote: Sat Jan 18, 2025 12:18 am I've never enjoyed watching Eddie Murphy do any thing.

Not even playing a donkey or Rudy Ray Moore?

Posted: **Sat Jan 18, 2025 1:34 am**

Nah, not really. He stinks

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