Marty and Paul Schrader's best films. For all Travis's madness and disgust, he somewhat surprisingly becomes the saviour (the Knight) of Jodie Foster's teenaged prostitute (the Princess in the Castle). (Considering she's second billed, she's not in it much.)
A process called Chemtone was used to saturate those opening shots.
“Anything happens to my daughter, I’ve got a .45 and a shovel."
Alicia Silverstone's character Cher is quite sweet really - she doesn't have a bad bone in her body and is trying to look after her father (Dan Hedaya) as best as she can. He's very gruff but good ("I couldn't be more proud of you if you'd really achieved these grades") and when he sees Paul Rudd's interested in her he's secretly pleased.
With Stacey Dash, Brittany Murphy, Donald Faison, Wallace Shawn, Breckin Meyer, Jeremy Sisto, Twink Caplan (also associate producer).
Snaps to the costumer designer Mona May!
I had the day planned well: Strangers When We Meet, Petulia and Taxi Driver, but Q decided she wanted to watch Vice. The only problem with Adam McKay’s films is that they’re a bit like documentaries with lots of characters and lots of complicated information which combined with Hank Corwin hurling lots of images at you is quite exhausting and changes the shape of the day. (And somehow couldn't then be followed by Petulia.)
For me the problem with this film is Christian Bale / Cheney - uninteresting. But what he did was shocking and appalling (and laid the way for Trump's 'executive' behaviour now).
‘Did Americans watch it?’ Q asked. They did - it grossed $47m domestically.
Good cast otherwise: Amy Adams, Sam Rockwell, Steve Carrell, Eddie Marsan, Alison Pill, Jesse Plemons.
Won Oscar for Make Up and Hair - Greg Cannom, Kate Biscoe and Patricia Dehaney. Adams, Bale and Rockwell were nominated, as were film, director, screenplay and editing.
Margaret Sullavan and Douglass Montgomery share a bed - this is just before the Hays Code really clamped down. They are a couple who are struggling, she is going to have a baby. His employer is a right bastard, DeWitt Jennings, who only has him employed hoping he will marry his daughter; that game's soon up. His step mum offers them a room in Berlin and a job; she's a right cow - Catherine Doucet, wants to be paid for the room, there is no job, and regularly has 'parties' i.e. runs a brothel. There the couple meet charming rogue, Alan Hale, a winning performance. Then he gets a job with a total cunt Etienne Girardot, and following a disastrous encounter with actor Alan Mowbray he's fired. Luckily Sullavan has at least found lodgings with nice furniture dealer Christian Rub. Though basic, their little flat above the furniture shop at least has a Borzage Balcony.
So yes, another in Borzage's stable of lovers who triumph through love.
We're in Germany - there are signs of social unrest and near the end our hero is assaulted by the police. It's the first in Borzage's 'Weimar trilogy' which continued with Three Comrades and The Mortal Storm.
Photographed by Norbert Brodine, art director Charles Hall, editor Milton Carruth, score by Arthur Kay. A Universal picture produced by Carl Laemmle Jr.
I like all the profile shots: https://nicksfilmjottings.blogspot.com/2019/08/vertigo-1958-ah.html
This is definitely one of Hitch's most complex pictures, in which he effectively makes James Stewart the bad guy. Think about what happens after it's over: there's a good case that having found out what happens, Stewart drives her to the point of the first murder and then murders her. It's not hard to make that stick because he is obsessed (and has been ever since he first started following 'Madeleine'). (And the fact that he has implicitly stripped her naked after the 'fall' into the bay is another unspoken element.) When he struggles then succeeds to make Judy into Madeleine and she's 'Will you love me now?' it's one of the saddest and most haunting things in any Hitchcock picture - it's almost a case of domestic abuse. It's that that makes the film so chilling.
And here. it's not just the red / green, but that overly ornate ironwork that we've seen before:
Also that animated / dream scene is totally out there and once again puts Hitch way ahead of his time.
That isn't Novak though in the opening credits scene is it?
Oh, by the way, what's Hitch up to with his wall art in this one?
No idea about the tall one on the right. The bottom left could be a Klee or a Miro, same applies to the one above it. 0 / 4.
Good supporting cast as always, particularly Barbara De Geddes, but also Tom Helmore, Henry Jones (coroner), Ellen Corby, Konstantin Shayne, Lee Patrick (now owns Madeleine's car). Car? Did someone say car? Hers is a 1957 Jaguar Mk VII, his a 1955 Desoto Firedown Sportsman.
Much to everyone's surprise, Kerri-Kenney Silver helps look after Erika Henningsen's baby. Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani decide against adoption. Will Forte has hidden anger issues, and in flashback episode with Steve Carrell, gives everyone Covid. Tina Fey gets high.
From the inserts it looks like it was filmed in 1928. Must have been one of Fox's last silent film releases.
This obviously can't compare to Sunrise. but is nevertheless a fine film and another meditation on city vs. country life. Loved the sequence of him chasing her through the wheat.
Sent to Chicago to sell the corn crop, Charles Farrell bumps into waitress Mary Duncan and falls for her immediately. They marry but when he gets home the brutish father David Torrence is outraged that the son's made a loss and immediately accuses the girl of bring a gold-digger and hits her. The son sees red but his beloved mummy stops him from retaliating - giving the girl a major problem from the get-go.
The harvest begins and all the workers lust after her, especially Richard Alexander, who we fear is going to rape her at one point.
Murnau has borrowed Borzage's DP and art director Ernest Palmer and Harry Oliver, thus the farm has a distinctive design and the night scenes are memorably well lit.
The horses - at one point a single horse is pulling a cart with about six people on it. Later about twenty of the noble beasts are dragging a combine harvester along.
Palmer was Oscar nominated for Street Angels and 4 Devils, both 1930, and Broken Arrow, 1951, and won for Blood and Sand in 1942. First credit 1918, shot many lesser films. This and his work for Borzage represent his best work.
Ellen Burstyn and son Alfred Lutter are skint; she dreams of happiness in Monterey, and to be a singer. They get stuck in Arizona and she has a close call with psycho Harvey Keitel, then finds more comfort with farmer Kris Kristofferson and waitress Diane Ladd.
Jodie Foster had been in absolutely tons of things before this: many TV appearances, including The Courtship of Eddy's Father, Gunsmoke, and Ironside, and some movies such as Napoleon and Samantha and Kansas City Bomber (both 1972) and Tom Sawyer (1973), and right after this took the lead in a TV version of Paper Moon, the pilot of which you can see here. She's very cool in this.
Kent Wakeford's operator Owen Marsh is somewhat flighty. Marica Lucas edited.
The group reunite at Miles' huge country pad. Egg and Millie are still together, amazingly, but it seems only a pretence; Egg has written a hit novel based on the group. Miles appears successful and remarried but both are a fraud. Warren seems to he running his own business but it's a failure. Anna's only regret is not having a baby; turns out she wants Warren's sperm. Jodie Whittaker films everything.
It was an hour and a half - no wonder everything seemed to take so long.
Fairly cheesy crime / family drama / food thing set in Italy (Croatia). A (police) man, Warren Brown, who's recently lost his (Italian) wife goes back to her home town to visit Nonna and Nonno Phyllis Logan and chef Urbano Barberini, with stupid 17 year old daughter Beau Gadsdon (The Crown) in tow.
I don't mean stupid intellectually, she just picks the worst guy on the (unspecified) island (somewhere near Napoli) to date, and keeps doing stupid things.
Anyway Brown gets involved with local detective Christiana Dell'Anna (Napoli-born, British trained) who grudgingly starts to respect him because he's a bit of a super sleuth, interspersed with Italian cookery lessons.
There's a new case in each 45 minute episode and an over-arching story involving the Gomorrah and Nonno's restaurant.
The last season. Deborah has been branded 'the woman who killed late night', still banned from getting a gig. But announces when the ban's over she will sell out Madison Square Gardens, finds her fans still behind her.
She has a brief fling with a young pop star who turns out to be ridiculously over-sensitive; Ava gets together with a sex worker, but when she finds out he's really into magic (and isn't very goof at it) she goes off him.
Deborah and her daughter (Kaitlin Olson) go on 'The Amazing Race' - cue amusing sequence where they're trying to perform a Mexican routine in clown costume.
Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) decides to buy a landmark Vegas Casino and refurbish it. Deborah almost makes the mistake of working with an AI entrepreneur who was planning to gather all of her material - realises the mistake she's making.
Jean Hart's changes of expression, and the restrained sarcastic way she says things like 'Oh my God' are wonderful, as is the repartee between her and Hannah Einbinder. Which is tested in the end as Deborah decides she's dying, doesn't want treatment but does want a European holiday with Ava before going to a Swiss clinic.
The style isn't sustainable: everything in close up, whip pans, sudden edits. It's exhausting.
The Pantomime Bitch Queen turns up. Rachel - Natasha Little - is so passively grasping and insinuating we want to shout at her and hurl rotten eggs and fruit at her.
Egg has started work in a café. Millie is so nice to everyone - it's about time she wasn't. Then she has an affair and we go right off her
And Kira is trying to keep Joe at arm's length - will she push him away? Luisa Bradshaw-White was latterly in Eastenders for a mere 693 episodes. Steve John Shepherd was only in it for 314 episodes. We just saw him in the Silent Witness film Discovery - didn't even recognise him! And most recently in both seasons of Karen Pirie!
21 episodes, culminating in Miles marrying despite his wife being ten years older than himself and Egg finding out about Millie's affair (through the Pantomime Bitch, of course). Shame as Millie has finally seen the light about her slimy boss David Mallinson.
Casino manager Michael Socha (fabulously weary and depressed) and employee Sheridan Smith find out each other has been stealing, Socha to repay gambling debts, Smith to try to buy her gran's council house. But they don't realise that the casino's boss's son, Barry Sloane, is using the casino to launder drug money.
Along comes a detective Sophie Mensah who coerces Socha into spying on the son, who himself starts dating Smith. Factor in the errant behaviour of their children and the demented grandmother and you have a merry pudding.
Shaun Mason (Good Cop, Line of Duty, Cilla), Geraldine James, Sue Jenkins and Louis Emerick (both from Brookside).
Tough situations, imperfect people, a little Scouse wit and flavour. A five part series, for a change, for BBC. We did enjoy it, but found it quite plot-holey, e.g. why did the money have to be laundered before going to the coke supplier (make it his problem), and how come Smith hadn't been killed six months later? And - most importantly of all - what prison stretch did Socha end up with?
And - when the Yorkshire police are searching the car, and one copper says 'Are you Scouse?' - I didn't like the implication of that. It was almost 'What have you nicked?'
Some great stuff on the eclectic soundtrack reflects the record collection that Socha (and his brother) have.
There are four people who helped make this film as great as it is, though most people won't know the names. The first two are the film's editors, Verna Fields (who the studio wanted for her experience) and Marcia Lucas, neither of whom are mentioned at all in the 'Making of' feature (they were Oscar-nominated). Oscar-winning cameraman Haskell Wexler is credited as 'Visual Consultant' and helped immeasurably to get the night photography as good as it is. And Walter Murch, who does an amazing job of the sound mix, artfully weaving bits of Wolfman Jack's radio show in and around the action. More jottings this way.
Marcia Lucas died May 29. She was a major force behind the shaping of Star Wars, for which she shared the Oscar with Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew. She'd worked on The Rain People for Coppola and assisted Verna on Medium Cool, cut Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More for Marty and is credited as the supervising editor on Taxi Driver (that I did not know) and New York, New York.
As for that poignant postscript - at least one of them didn't make it in Vietnam - you have to see that in the context of 1973, when the film came out, and Vietnam protests were at their height.
"I get the distinct feeling that I'm lost," says photographer Clint to Italian housewife Meryl Streep, and so a Brief Encounter begins, even down to a chatty neighbour who comes in right at the end and interrupts his departure. I particularly liked the beautiful oner at the candlelit table (Jack Green's the DP) that lasts four and a half minutes - hope it was a first take. And the scene with the cars in the rain - up until then the pace has been leisurely, with lots of dissolves, intimate filming and quiet - but here the pace is more jagged, the camera is her POV looking out of the truck as it first follows, then leaves, Clint's truck ahead. It's a great bit of direction. (Joel Cox edited.)
This is the one where Clint tears up in a scene but keeps his back to the camera, when most actors would be making the most of it - give me the Oscar. When asked why he replied "No one wants to see Clint Eastwood cry." Streep loved the first take spontaneity of the filming and the two worked well together.
It was a Malpaso / Amblin co-production, interestingly. Amblin held the rights to Robert James Waller's novel and Spielberg was at one time going to direct it. The screenplay is by Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King, A Little Princess, The Mirror Has Two Faces, The Horse Whisperer, P.S. I Love You, Water for Elephants, Behind the Candelabra). Good music from Lennie Niehaus. Note the first scenes where they're together all the music is naturally occurring - what's on the radio.
I remember the first time I saw The Mule I wished I'd seen more smiley Clint like he is at the beginning. Of course here he is, and no doubt also in things like Bronco Billy. It's a most refreshing change.
The kids are Annie Corley and Jim Haynie.
Can't quite see the attraction of the covered bridges - and why cover a bridge at all - but thought the film wonderfully tangy - port and stilton.
Weird the credits say it was filmed in Panavision when it wasn't. Nice bits of Clint's beloved jazz here and there. Intriguingly, the film won the Cahiers Du Cinéma Best Film of the Nineties award (tied with Carlito's Way and Goodbye, South, Goodbye). Unforgiven was also in the Top Ten.
Tom Stern isn't on this one - he was working on French Kiss and Dangerous Minds at the time.
Based on a novel by Shelby van Pelt, we open on a captive octopus telling us about the great days it was free - immediately gaining our sympathy. Its only friend is a reclusive widow, the cleaner, Sally Field. Her life changes when a young man turns up in town searching for his father, Lewis Pullman.
Her friends are Joan Chen, Kathy Baker and Beth Grant. Colm Meaney is the shop owner, Sofia Black-D'Elia the surf girl. The octopus was voiced by Alfred Molina.
An unusual film; good. Actually filmed in Canada, British Columbia.
Something of an epic World War 1 movie over 2 hours 20, notable for its elaborate and exciting aerial sequences and impressive ground combat footage. Charles Rogers thinks he loves Jobyna Ralston but she really loves Richard Arlen. Rogers' girl-next-door Clara Bow is nuts about him but he doesn't realise. The rivals go to war but end up buddies; thus the ending is suitably ironic when Rogers kills his friend, who's stolen a German aircraft (cue an early version of a plane flying into a house).
Amusing scene in Paris where Rogers is so drunk he doesn't recognise Bow; then she is sacked when military police think they're having a thing - most unfair!
The restoration is great - the flames from the aircraft have been coloured giving the battle scenes an extra vividity (if that is a word). Spectacular scenes of destruction e.g. bombings, with synchronized sound.
Gary Cooper has a brief but telling appearance; Roscoe Karns features briefly.
It was the fist time I'd encountered the 'It Girl' Clara Bow - found her a bit OTT.
Wellman himself has been a WW1 flyer so he knew his stuff, and reckons that was the only reason that got him the job at the tender age of 28. Original author John Monk Saunders had been too. DP Harry Perry had dozens of cameramen, Russell Harlan among them.
The Last Command (1927) Underworld (1928) and Docks of New York (1928). Josef von Sternberg.
7th Heaven (1927), Street Angel (1928) and Lucky Star (1929). I was already a fan of silent, but Frank Borzage sent me on a journey in a big way. I encountered these three masterpieces in the Spring of 2026.
The Wind (1928). Victor Sjostrom.
The Crowd (1928) and The Big Parade (1925). King Vidor.
The Lodger (1927). Hitch.
The General (1926). Clyde Bruckman / Buster Keaton.
Pandora's Box (1929) / Diary of a Lost Girl (1929). G.W Pabst. Once you've met Louise Brooks, there's no turning back.
The Last Laugh (1924). Murnau.
The Student Prince (1927), So This Is Paris (1926) and The Marriage Circle (1924). Lubitsch.
Broken Blossoms (1919). D.W. Griffith.
Greed (1924). Eric von Stroheim. I was lucky enough to get hold of the four hour version that was broadcast on TCM.
Safety Last (1923). Fred Newmeyer, Sam Taylor.
Man With a Movie Camera (1929). Dziga Vertov. One of the most stunning endings to a film ever.
Sunrise. If you look at the first Oscar ceremony in 1929, you'll see that Wings won the Oscar for Best Picture, Production (7th Heaven was nominated) and Sunrise won for Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production (The Crowd was nominated). Janet Gaynor won Best Actress for 7th Heaven, Sunrise and Street Angel and Emil Jannings won for The Last Command! 7th Heaven won again for Best Writing, as did Underworld, Frank Borzage won Best Director and Sunrise again for Best Cinematography.
When Cahiers Du Cinema created their Top 100, Sunrise came in at No. 4, Greed was 11, City Lights and The General were 17 & 18 (and Nosferatu 19), Pandora's Box 27, The Wind 42 and The Crowd 45. Sight & Sound published a similar list voted on by directors. Here Man with a Movie Camera was 9th, Sunrise 11, The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, from that great year 1927) 21 and City Lights 36.
A cheerfully silly comedy from Zemeckis and Bob Gale, who were later to write Back to the Future. Kurt Russell is a hustling car dealer who also wants to run for Senator, a suitably ironic plot point. But he's in competition with dirty dealer Jack Warden (who also plays his brother) in the lot opposite. That's pretty much it, but it's daftly enjoyable.
With Gerrit Graham, Frank McRae (mechanic who keeps falling asleep), Deborah Harmon. And a useful dog. And a camel.
It's expertly edited by Michael Khan.
Q thought she'd recognised Al Lewis from TV's Batman but in fact he played Grandpa Munster.
