Greatest Culture...

[The Atheist]

Outside of 2001:ASO, Lyndon, and Strangelove, I find Kubrick a bit overrated, though I certainly couldn't deny his supreme level of artistry. 2001 alone proves that film is capable of the same artistic heights as the best of any other artistic medium. I just wish he'd made more films, because the one thing I miss with Kubrick that is there in spades with more prolific great directors is a depth and richness to his oeuvre.

Yes, he was less-prolific than many directors, but I think that was more to do with only wanting to do films that turned him on.

I can understand you missing out The Shining*, but A Clockwork Orange stands out as a piece of work that looks as fresh today as it did 40 years ago and still retains its bite.

*Actually a hugely under-rated film, mostly because it's based on a Stephen King novel, I think. The film is different from, and so much better than the source material.

[MorpheusSandman]

Since there is focus on music and movies, etc. in this thread and since I have been a fan of animation for ten years, I thought I may put in my tuppence worth. With animation it’s quite easy. Japan is the leader here. It makes more animated films, series, etc. than any other country and it has influenced the way animation is done in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Obviously, animation cannot compete with other forms of art that have existed longer, but there are talented people in this industry.

Good call on animation and Japan, Aylinn. I'm a huge fan of anime myself and frequently feel it doesn't get the serious critical attention it deserves. I'm on record as stating that Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion is one of the finest works of art of the 20th century, but there are also other masterpieces like Satoshi Kon's Paranoia Agent, and Ueda/ABe's Serial Experiments Lain, Haibane Renmei, and Texhnolyze (the three taken together form an almost Divine Comedy trilogy), Ikuhara's Utena, and Watanabe's Cowboy Bebop; and films like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Grave of the Fireflies, Princess Mononoke, et al. all deserve their place amongst the best films ever made.

[MorpheusSandman]

Yes, he was less-prolific than many directors, but I think that was more to do with only wanting to do films that turned him on.

I think it had more to do with him being a perfectionist that couldn't make a film unless he had every detail planned out to the most minute. There's the now-infamous story about his lifelong dream project Napoleon that he kept a file cabinet documenting every day of Napoleon's life.

I can understand you missing out The Shining*, but A Clockwork Orange stands out as a piece of work that looks as fresh today as it did 40 years ago and still retains its bite.

*Actually a hugely under-rated film, mostly because it's based on a Stephen King novel, I think. The film is different from, and so much better than the source material.

I agree that The Shining film is far superior to its source material, but I still feel it's only, at best, a minor masterpiece. ACO has its strong-points, but I feel it's a bit overlong and, as one critic said, a case of production design gone berserk. Ebert also gave an eloquent, negative review of the film that echoes many of my thoughts (though I liked it more than he did).

[mortalterror]

Except for Lawrence, I’ve never been overly thrilled with Lean’s epics. In some respects I prefer his smaller films, like the utterly charming Hobson’s Choice. I simply can’t agree about any of them being better than Vertigo or Rear Window… or any of Hitch’s 4-5 best films.

I see where you are coming from. I think there are British people who really enjoy his quieter more human films like Brief Encounter, the same way that Kurosawa's non-samurai films like Ikiru or High and Low are more popular in Japan than abroad.

Hitch’s plots are frequently silly, if not risible, but making fun of them for that would be the equivalent of making fun of Shakespeare’s plots for being equally silly, full of inconsistencies and historical inaccuracies; it’s missing the artistic genius for the vehicle for that genius, the depths for the surface. Vertigo is not unlike Hamlet in its ability to stand up to every kind of critical scrutiny. Formally, it’s flawless, from the usage of color to the choice of lenses to the editing to the music to the evolution of narrative perspective; but it’s also one of the most daring experiments in genre ever crafted. Ostensibly, it’s a mystery, but it’s a mystery whose answer is explicitly spelled out 2/3 through, and that revelation and the resulting shift in perspective is as ingenious as anything that’s ever been done in film. It’s the very embodiment of the idea of epistemology remodeling ontology, as from that moment on the camera and our perspective have a completely different perspective and relationship with the characters. The audience goes from sharing in Stewart’s mystic bewilderment to criticizing what we now recognize as a near psychotic obsession.

Flawless? You think that Vertigo is flawless? I don't know about that. I see room for improvement all over the place in that film. There were a lot of things that Hitchcock didn't do as well as it can be done.

Also, of course, I mock Shakespeare's plots where they warrant it. Hamlet is full of junk he should have cut or changed. For instance, there's the part where he leaves the country but comes back in the next scene. He's been miraculously saved by benign pirates and returned to his doorstep without a scratch on him. Pirates? Really, pirates? That's the best he could do? And then we don't ever see them. Why not ninjas? And then that play within a play, I could never stand. "The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king!" Yeah, this is way better than fingerprints. I think I saw them do this on The First 48.

After that, what kind of film is it? It’s no longer a mystery; it becomes closer to a psychological character study, with Stewart trying to project his haunted unconsciousness onto a reality that will no longer cooperate. Plus, there’s the whole carefully composed mirroring structure, where we get echoed events in both halves with that change of perspective. You can even take a metafictional perspective (most of Hitch’s late masterpieces are, in some respect, allegorical for filmmaking and its viewing audience) in regards to how film remakes reality into a fantasy that audience’s gullibly buy into for the length of its runtime. I think Hitch was quite consciously aware of how manipulative the filmmaker/audience relationship was, with the filmmaker essentially playing the same role as Gavin. There’s the metaphoric quality of the vertigo itself, a psychological stalling on the brink of revelation. Hitch’s films are full of liminal characters being faced with physical, psychological, and social boundaries, and how/when they cross that boundary, and what’s on the other side, is one thing that gives his films their suspense, but also their philosophical depth and complexity.

It didn't seem deep or complex to me. It seemed stupid.

If all you’ve done is ridicule the surface “story” of Vertigo then you haven’t really seen the film at all; I say the same thing to people that ridicule Marnie, Notorious, Spellbound, The Birds, and other Hitch films that tend to turn on some kind of superficial absurdity. I’d highly recommend Robin Wood’s analysis of the film in his pioneering book on Hitch called Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. His essay almost single-handedly ignited the reevaluation of that film, and has regularly been cited as one of the best essays ever written on any film. Spoto’s essay in his The Art of Alfred Hitchcock is also superb; he devotes almost 40 pages to Vertigo, far more than any other film covered in the book. There are also three books on the film: one from BFI, one by Dan Aulier, and one edited by Katalin Makkai (“Philosophers on Film”). If you really doubt the film’s substance, Makkai’s book would remedy that; the others are more concerned with the factual account of the production.

Yeah, I mostly hate Hitchcock films. Like that spot in Rebecca where the villain of the piece is trying to convince the girl to jump off the building to her death. "C'mon jump! Jump!" and the poor little doe is just shaking and maybe about to. I couldn't help but be sickened thinking, "This is your villain, someone who suggests to the heroine that she kill herself. Lady, if you want someone dead, you best push them off yourself, 'cause this ain't getting it done. How is she even afraid of this old bat? She could crush her orbital socket with one punch!"

Or how about 'The Birds' where they whole up in that bar and just happen to have a world class scholar on ornithology with them? And that drunk in the corner keeps saying "It's the end of the world." Then a seagull cuts a man's jugular, he falls down dead and the gas he's pumping hits a cigarette and explodes. Hitchcock's films are as simplistic and cheezy as Frank Capra's. That said, I really liked 'The Trouble with Harry'. I got a kick out of how everyone thought they'd killed him and kept trying to cover their tracks. It had that great black humor that Arsenic and Old Lace or Weekend at Bernies had.

I’ve seen every Kurosawa film; we simply meant different things by “artsy”. Dreams and Dodes’ka-den (and Ran and Kagemusha to a certain extent) are “artsy” in regards to Kurosawa’s interest in painting, so they all have an extremely vibrant, painterly use of color. Mizoguchi didn’t make many color films, but his Yokihi aka Princess Yang Kwei-fei proves he had a knack for it; it’s arguably as gorgeous as Kurosawa’s color films). However, what I meant by “artsy,” though, was in a cinematic context. No filmmaker ever cultivated a more complex mise-en-scene than Mizoguchi. His long-takes, especially in conjunction with the crane, multiple visual planes of action (foreground, mid-ground, background), geometric frames, extreme depth-of-focus, refusal to rely on close-ups etc. are pristine, and have been an enormous influence on all long-take filmmakers that came afterwards (another favorite of mine, Angelopoulos, cited Mizoguchi as THE influence on his decision to use extremely long takes). By comparison, Kurosawa was more traditional (certainly more western), modeling much of his cinematic style on Welles and Ford. Kurosawa is the more dynamic of the two, with his greater reliance on impactful editing and oblique angles. Kurosawa frames and cuts for drama, Mizoguchi frames and cuts for observation (it’s one reason many find Mizoguchi too cool and detached compared to Kurosawa’s drama/action and Ozu’s melodrama). While Kurosawa is more popular amongst viewers, Mizoguchi is probably more popular amongst academics, especially formalists.

I can agree with that.

I’ve also seen all of Tarkovsky’s; I do greatly admire Andrei Rublev, more than any of his other films, and love Stalker for its otherworldly atmosphere, but outside that I’ve been left disappointed by his other work. Solaris, IMO, simply doesn’t justify its runtime, and his late films just seem completely turgid and overwrought. His Mirror has always left me cold, despite seeing it three times (on the insistence of one of my best cinephile friends who claims Mirror as his favorite film ever). For the super artsy filmmakers I vastly prefer Hou Hsiao-hsien, Theo Angelopoulos, and Stan Brakhage.

Yeah, Solaris does seem unnecessarily long at times, but it's just so rich visually. When I first saw a clip of Mirror on youtube it was that long tracking shot through the house, then you see like the fire on the house behind them, and I thought that was just beautiful. That same scene didn't have that effect when I watched it in the actual film. Maybe, I was a bit weary by all the jumping around in time and perspective, or confused by how odd the characters acted. There's a lot to like about that film, but you are right it's no Andrei Rublev.

I simply don’t agree; I’ve never noticed any correlation between the quality of the source and the quality of the film. How many adaptations have there been of great novels? How many have been turned into masterpieces? In fact, looking at most any significant “greatest films” list, it’s difficult to find any films that were adapted from upper echelon source material.

Cloud Atlas, No Country for Old Men, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Battle Royale, The Thin Red Line, Hamlet, Trainspotting, Ghost in the Shell, To Live, Glengarry Glen Ross, Henry V, Dangerous Liasons, Amadeus, The Right Stuff, Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, Barry Lyndon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Godfather, Solaris, A Clockwork Orange, 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Lion in Winter, Marat/Sade, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Closely Watched Trains, Doctor Zhivago, Zorba the Greek, The Leopard, Inherit the Wind, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Julius Caesar, A Streetcar Named Desire, Rashomon, All the King's Men, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, All Quiet on the Western Front.

Even outside of film, one can look at the crappy/middling/unknown sources Shakespeare adapted and turned into masterpieces.

His Greek and Roman plays are based on Plutarch's Parallel Lives, Hamlet is based on The Oresteia of Aeschylus, All’s Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline and The Two Gentlemen of Verona come from Boccaccio's Decameron, Troilus and Cressida is taken from Chaucer's epic poem, Two Noble Kinsmen is based on Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, The Comedy of Errors is a combination of two plays by Plautus.

If anything, it seems like it’s easier for great artists to do more with sources for which there isn’t much there to start with; there’s more for their imagination to transform and elevate.

The story of the House of Atreus begun by Homer has been a touchstone of playwrights for over two thousand years. You could read the whole story, in chronological order through six tragedies and six great authors if you wanted: Thyestes by Seneca, Iphigenia by Racine, Agammemon by Aeschylus, Elektra by Sophocles, Orestes by Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris by Goethe. How about the Oedipus cycle just starting with Sophocles, then you get The Thebaid by Statius, and the Thebaid by Racine. Jean Anouilh is known in the twentieth century for his Antigone. Brecht produced an Antigone. Eugene O'Neill wrote a modern adaptation of Aeschylus called Mourning Becomes Electra. How many crucifixions and passions are there in art?

We just disagree on everything regarding film! 

Yes, but how dull it would be to agree on everything?

I love silent cinema but, tragically, it ended right at the pinnacle of its artistry with filmmakers like Dreyer, Murnau, Eisenstein, Lang, Stroheim, Sternberg, and others all making their best films in the mid-to-late 20s. Personally, I think silent cinema gets closer to the core art of film than sound does, it pushes film closer to the abstraction of music. I simply disagree about color being better than black-and-white; I’ve always preferred B&W because of what can be done expressively through the play of light and shadow. So much of that is eliminated with color, and far too few directors pay attention to how to utilize a color palette as expressively as it can be, so color just becomes a distraction (for me). The number of directors adept at using color I can count on my fingers. I also tend to prefer pre-1960s cinema, especially the 50s, which had my three favorite filmmakers (Hitch, Bergman, and Kurosawa) at the height of their powers.

Sure, the number of directors adept at using color can be counted on one's fingers, but so can the number who can play with light and shadow the way that black and white is intended. They are both rare skills, and if the majority of film makers can't accomplish those feats of excellence then at least they can give us some semblance of reality and color. The masters can do what they want, but your average film is better off for the color and sound. And let's be honest, most of the films we watch aren't masterful. We must wade through twenty middling films to find one great one and an average film without sound or color is unbearable.

The best year in film history is 1957. Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Paths of Glory, Nights of Cabiria, Throne of Blood, The Bridge on the River Kwai, 12 Angry Men, Witness For the Prosecution, Kanal. You've got Bergman, Kurosawa, Kubrick, Fellini, Lean, Lumet, and Wilder all producing gems. More than half of those, like you say, are in black and white; but I think all of these men went on to show us they could handle color just as well.

[Ecurb]

Yes, he was less-prolific than many directors, but I think that was more to do with only wanting to do films that turned him on.

I can understand you missing out The Shining*, but A Clockwork Orange stands out as a piece of work that looks as fresh today as it did 40 years ago and still retains its bite.

*Actually a hugely under-rated film, mostly because it's based on a Stephen King novel, I think. The film is different from, and so much better than the source material.

Since we were just discussing the Pauline Kael vs. Andrew Sarris debates, I thought I'd mention that Kael despised Kubrick. Her evisceration of "A Clockwork Orange" shows Kael at her best: opinionated, moralizing, literate, and knowledgable. She had generally read the novels on which movies were based, and was often critical of the changes (as in the case in her review of "Clockwork Orange"). Also, Kael supports the argument I made earlier in another thread (with regard to Tolstoy) that we need not agree with the judgment of a critic to think he or she writes great critiques.

Here's a link: http://visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0051.html

Kael loved to battle what she considered overly "high-brow" movie critics (I remember her trashing Dwight McDonald's rave about "Hiroshima Mon Amour"). (By the way, Kubrick isn't my favorite director, but I like many of his movies, including "The Shining".)

Speaking of highbrow movies, I saw Terrence Malick's "To the Wonder" last night. I'm a big Malick fan (I think "Days of Heaven" is a great movie), but "To the Wonder" is not his best. It skips about in time, outlining a relationship between Ben Afleck and a young beauty whose name I didn't catch. The beauty enjoys gamboling, first in France, then in the American Southwest. Raising her arms and spinning appears to be her favoirite pasttime, although she occasionally indulges the audience with some sexy, feline crawling.

Her relationship with Affleck involves very little talking -- it's mainly nuzzling and gamboling. Javier Bardim plays a priest, whose bored, monotone sermons are funny, at first, because they are the precise opposite of "fire-breathing". Nonetheless, the movie grabs the viewer visually (like all Malick movies). The scenes aroung Mt. St. Michael in France are stunning. When the couple moves to a treeless, drab sub division; when the priest visits parishoners in the slums; when the Polish beauty has an affair at a sordid Econolodge; Malick's photographs of these seemingly ugly places transform them into gorgeous still lifes. The priest, fruitlessly seeking God, continues with his bored monotones: "You are everywhere, God, but I cannot see you. You are below me and above me, to my left and to my right....." Once you actually start listening to his words, the seemingly disconnected still lifes begin to make sense. Yes, unpainted wooden houses with hulking wrecks of cars strewn in the front yard are beautiful. Yes, mud filled ditches surrounding oil wells are beautiful. Yes, divinity is above and below, left and right.

When I walked out of the theater into a cloudy Eugene evening, there was beauty everywhere I looked. Any movie that can help one see that can't be all bad.

[Emil Miller]

I see where you are coming from. I think there are British people who really enjoy his quieter more human films like Brief Encounter, the same way that Kurosawa's non-samurai films like Ikiru or High and Low are more popular in Japan than abroad.

Including myself. I consider Lean's Brief Encounter as the best British film and if you haven't seen it you can't credibly discuss his work as it's the benchmark by which everything else he directed is usually measured. It's worth recalling that it had great success in Japan and many Japanese came to England to visit the railway station which is its main setting. Noel Coward, the film's screen writer said that he thought it was quite a good little film, which was a good example of English understatement. One can see the similarities in Tokyo Story which is also heartbreakingly sad and, for my money, the best Japanese film I have seen despite great work by Kurosawa and Mizoguchi.

[JBI]

Actually, if you check what I wrote, I agreed with that myself.


I'll just repeat that I'm neither denying Chinese influence or the extent of it, but I won't sit idly by and let yet a Sinophile give out false information as factual.

As has been shown by the continued refusal to give evidence for the claims, I'll ignore them now.

Give me the claim I'll give the reference book. For technology you can skip right ahead and check the works of Needham, particularly the Cambridge history of Chinese Technology.

For Economic history there is a lengthy history by a a scholar named Nicolo Di Cosimo published by E J Brill.

For literary discussions of transmission there are numerous books and articles.

As for Chinese language sources you cannot expect me to pretend to your familiarity with them, especially since you know nothing about the subject let alone the language itself.

Arguing with you is arguing with an ignorant child who wants proof in the absolutist sense. Did I ask you for proof of Britain. Why apply the double standard?

Seriously you're infuriating in your deliberate polemical ignorance and accuse me of being a sinophile as if to not be a Mother Country Colonial Worshiper is dismissed as ridiculous. Get over yourself. I have no invested interest in proving china the greatest, as I noted I dismissed such a notion on page 1.

[OrphanPip]

Good call on animation and Japan, Aylinn. I'm a huge fan of anime myself and frequently feel it doesn't get the serious critical attention it deserves. I'm on record as stating that Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion is one of the finest works of art of the 20th century, but there are also other masterpieces like Satoshi Kon's Paranoia Agent, and Ueda/ABe's Serial Experiments Lain, Haibane Renmei, and Texhnolyze (the three taken together form an almost Divine Comedy trilogy), Ikuhara's Utena, and Watanabe's Cowboy Bebop; and films like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Grave of the Fireflies, Princess Mononoke, et al. all deserve their place amongst the best films ever made.

Japan's animation style is Western influenced as well though. Eastern European animation is far more ignored than Japanese, though Jiri Trnka, Yuri Norstein and Jan Svankmajer are all fantastic. In general, Japanese animation is often overrated because of the attention it receives as a popular medium, along with Disney whose technical innovations are without par at many points in history. I'm even fond of non mainstream American animators like Ralph Bakshi (though lord knows he's got his major flaws).

Walt Disney stands at the centre of film animation in a way no other figure can. Disney's early stuff is pretty much responsible for inspiring the careers of Osamu Tezuka in Japan and Fydor Khitruk in the Soviet Union. Tezuka is on record citing Disney for the large expressive eyes characteristic of much of the Japanese animation that followed him.

I'm also ambivalent to aspects of Japanese animation which have popularized artistic styles from French and Belgian comics, and which many people assume to be of exclusively Japanese origin. The history of animation, as much as that of film, is one of complex international influences.

[Darcy88]

No, its translation is. The flavor of the original is different (coming from someone who has more than half of it memorized).

We like to think of it in different terms, mostly based on a misreading of Wang Bi's Jin Dynasty commentary. But even in the early ages, it was translated as a sort of Christian propaganda, and even today there are countless translation issues, mostly focusing on the inputting of other traditions, and values into a rather open text. That's why there are so many Buddhist translations of the work, when the book predates Chinese Buddhism by hundreds of years.

But there must be translations which are better than others. Right now I have that done by Jonathan Star as well as this one which has multiple translators http://www.amazon.com/Tao-Te-Ching-T...+te+ching+star

I read a couple other translations year ago. I think the reason there are what you call "Buddhist translations" of the work is the fact that the Tao te ching was a major influence on Zen Buddhism.

[islandclimber]

Japan's animation style is Western influenced as well though. Eastern European animation is far more ignored than Japanese, though Jiri Trnka, Yuri Norstein and Jan Svankmajer are all fantastic. In general, Japanese animation is often overrated because of the attention it receives as a popular medium, along with Disney whose technical innovations are without par at many points in history. I'm even fond of non mainstream American animators like Ralph Bakshi (though lord knows he's got his major flaws).

Walt Disney stands at the centre of film animation in a way no other figure can. Disney's early stuff is pretty much responsible for inspiring the careers of Osamu Tezuka in Japan and Fydor Khitruk in the Soviet Union. Tezuka is on record citing Disney for the large expressive eyes characteristic of much of the Japanese animation that followed him.

I'm also ambivalent to aspects of Japanese animation which have popularized artistic styles from French and Belgian comics, and which many people assume to be of exclusively Japanese origin. The history of animation, as much as that of film, is one of complex international influences.

Svankmajer and Norstein are two of my favourites. Popescu-Gopo might be my favourite animator/director though.Petrov and Dinov were pretty amazing too. Jankovics. So many talented Eastern Europeans. Outside of a few select directors (Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, Eisenstein, Wajda), Eastern European film is far too ignored. Even a director like Bela Tarr is relatively unknown in North America. And then you have Wojciech J. Has, and his rarely seen masterpieces Saragossa Manuscript and Hourglass Sanatorium. Kira Muratova from Russia. It's almost impossible to find her films. I saw Melody for A Street Organ in 2009 at TIFF. Just a brilliant film. The list goes on though. Mitulescu. Mungiu. Porumboiu. Djulgerov. Heskiya. Korabov. Georgescu. Meszaros. Makk. Lanthimos. Tsangari. Zafranovic. Pavlovic. Etc. Etc.

[MorpheusSandman]

...the same way that Kurosawa's non-samurai films like Ikiru or High and Low are more popular in Japan than abroad.

Ikiru is pretty damn popular; it's usually mentioned with Rashoman and Seven Samurai as being Kurosawa's best (I place it second). High and Low is certainly underrated, though, along with Kagemusha; however, I see H&L show up on more lists of "underrated films" than any other film, probably. It has a strong following, but, for whatever reason, has never moved to the forefront of Kurosawa's oeuvre.

Flawless? You think that Vertigo is flawless? I don't know about that. I see room for improvement all over the place in that film. There were a lot of things that Hitchcock didn't do as well as it can be done.

Well, go ahead and name them--and I'm talking formally, here. I know you don't like it from a writing perspective, but I really don't care much about that.

Also, of course, I mock Shakespeare's plots where they warrant it. Hamlet is full of junk he should have cut or changed. For instance, there's the part where he leaves the country but comes back in the next scene. He's been miraculously saved by benign pirates and returned to his doorstep without a scratch on him. Pirates? Really, pirates? That's the best he could do? And then we don't ever see them. Why not ninjas? And then that play within a play, I could never stand. "The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king!" Yeah, this is way better than fingerprints. I think I saw them do this on The First 48.

I agree about the leaving the country bit; I also think Mozart was right that the ghost encounter goes into a state of entropy very quickly and needed editing. The play within a play, though, I disagree with; it's crucial as the turning point of the play, the point where Hamlet realizes that, with reality being so mutable, unreliable, a mere matter of perspective, that fiction is actually better at capturing the truth of things. "By indirections we find directions out," indeed.

It didn't seem deep or complex to me. It seemed stupid.

Yeah, but, you're wrong. Seriously, read some of those essays; probably no film has had more brighter critical minds analyzing it, and it's not because it's stupid.

Like that spot in Rebecca where the villain of the piece is trying to convince the girl to jump off the building to her death. "C'mon jump! Jump!" and the poor little doe is just shaking and maybe about to. I couldn't help but be sickened thinking, "This is your villain, someone who suggests to the heroine that she kill herself. Lady, if you want someone dead, you best push them off yourself, 'cause this ain't getting it done. How is she even afraid of this old bat? She could crush her orbital socket with one punch!"

Rebecca was as much Selznick's film as Hitch's; certainly much of it is rather outside of Hitch's comfort zone of perversities and obsessions. I think his attempt at turning Danvers into a murderous lesbian was hit attempt at injecting something darker into the film, but it still plays like an awkward mix of Hitch's oddities and Selznick's mainstream, crowd-pleasing sensibilities. I don't think Danvers is meant to be a villain, per say, she was just someone obsessed with her dead mistress. She's not the murdering type at all. Of course Fontaine is a weakling, but she's characterized as that from the beginning.

Hitchcock's films are as simplistic and cheezy as Frank Capra's.

No. You couldn't be more wrong if you said the earth is flat. Seriously, stop looking at the silly superficialities of the stories; otherwise, you're not really watching the films, you're just playing Mystery Science Theater 3K. Logicality in stories is not what makes a great work of art, like, at all. There's an ornithographer in The Birds because Hitch needed an "expert" to ridicule and put on the same level as drunkards and everyone else. It's meant to parallel the audience and critics interpreting the film itself.

Cloud Atlas, No Country for Old Men, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Battle Royale, The Thin Red Line, Hamlet, Trainspoting, Ghost in the Shell, To Live, Glengarry Glen Ross, Henry V, Dangerous Liasons, Amadeus, The Right Stuff, Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, Barry Lyndon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Godfather, Solaris, A Clockwork Orange, 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Lion in Winter, Marat/Sade, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Closely Watched Trains, Doctor Zhivago, Zorba the Greek, The Leopard, Inherit the Wind, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Julius Caesar, A Streetcar Named Desire, Rashomon, All the King's Men, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, All Quiet on the Western Front.

I wasn't asking for a list, since I could provide an even longer one of bad/mediocre film adaptations of great novels. It should also be said that several of these films are not masterpieces, nor are their source material. I thought Cloud Atlas and The Right Stuff (film) were awful, and you didn't even bother to list which Henry V/Hamlet you're referring to (and you really don't want to get in to figuring how many Shakespeare adaptations have made great films; the answer is not many at all, and even the best tend to only be good, but hardly great). The Godfather novel is mediocre, at best, as was The Big Sleep, Maltese Falcon, and Gone with the Wind.

His Greek and Roman plays are based on Plutarch's Parallel Lives, Hamlet is based on The Oresteia of Aeschylus, All’s Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline and The Two Gentlemen of Verona come from Boccaccio's Decameron, Troilus and Cressida is taken from Chaucer's epic poem, Two Noble Kinsmen is based on Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, The Comedy of Errors is a combination of two plays by Plautus.

You're fond of listing exceptions; I didn't claim every Shakespeare adaptation came from crappy sources, I said many of them did. Besides that, what makes any of them great has absolutely nothing to do with what the source is to begin with; it has to do with what Shakespeare did with them. Othello, Measure for Measure, Much Ado, R&J, et al. certainly have dubious sources. I don't know where you get the Hamlet/Oresteia connection; I've never heard that, nor do I see many connections between them. Most modern scholars believe there was an ur-Hamlet text probably by Thomas Kyd.

The story of the House of Atreus begun by Homer has been a touchstone of playwrights for over two thousand years.

I don't get your point; there are some classic stories that artists continue to draw inspiration from? I never denied that, but a lot of these adaptations tend to have very different takes on the matter than their predecessors. What makes any adaptation great has nothing to do with the source and everything to do with what the artist does with it. If a terrible writer were to take up the Atreus or Oedipus myth the result would in all likelihood be a terrible novel/play/poem. I don't see what's controversial about that; you listing great authors that have tackled the same source is hardly proof that a great source is important, since you're conveniently leaving out all of the adaptations that have been forgotten because of how bad/mediocre they were.

Sure, the number of directors adept at using color can be counted on one's fingers, but so can the number who can play with light and shadow the way that black and white is intended.They are both rare skills, and if the majority of film makers can't accomplish those feats of excellence then at least they can give us some semblance of reality and color. The masters can do what they want, but your average film is better off for the color and sound.

Honestly, I do think there are more masters of B&W than color, perhaps because many of the early great directors had a background in art and they tended to pay more attention to how to expressively use the visual medium they were working in. By the time color came out, most young filmmakers came to film through film as opposed to the other visual arts. It's also more difficult to manage color since there's simply more to work with. What you say about a "semblance of reality and color" means nothing to me (perhaps you've noticed that in my lack of concern that Hitch's plots are so silly); I find bad/bland use of color far more distracting than bland use of black & white. I simply prefer the abstraction of B&W that, even when it's rather bland, it has a certain stripped down, focused quality that doesn't get in the way of what's going on. Plus, I often say that even if we see the world in color we experience it in black & white.

[MorpheusSandman]

Since we were just discussing the Pauline Kael vs. Andrew Sarris debates, I thought I'd mention that Kael despised Kubrick… Also, Kael supports the argument I made earlier in another thread (with regard to Tolstoy) that we need not agree with the judgment of a critic to think he or she writes great critiques.

I often use Kael as THE example of a critic when, even when their judgment is off, I still admire their ability to express their opinion intelligently and eloquently, so I very much agree with you and Tolstoy on that. In fact, I often cite her review of 2001:ASO as the antidote for all of the terrible negative reviews the film receives; she may be wrong, but at least she didn’t turn into a blathering idiot when expressing that wrongness.

Speaking of highbrow movies, I saw Terrence Malick's "To the Wonder" last night. I'm a big Malick fan (I think "Days of Heaven" is a great movie), but "To the Wonder" is not his best.

Shame to hear that; I quite like Malick too, and both DoH and TTRL are amongst the 10 most gorgeous films ever made, but I feel like he’s been going downhill since then. The New World was just dull, Tree of Life was too pretentious for its own good (I tend not to mind such ambition, but I think you could feel Malick striving towards masterpiece status too much there)… I’ll be seeing TTW soon.

When I walked out of the theater into a cloudy Eugene evening, there was beauty everywhere I looked. Any movie that can help one see that can't be all bad.[/QUOTE]

Including myself. I consider Lean's Brief Encounter as the best British film… One can see the similarities in Tokyo Story which is also heartbreakingly sad and, for my money, the best Japanese film I have seen despite great work by Kurosawa and Mizoguchi.

Tokyo Story’s source is actually Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow, a sublime film in its own right (Orson Welles said of it: “My God, that’s the saddest movie ever made; it would make a stone cry!”). The only major difference is that Make Way doesn’t end with a death. FWIW, I don’t even think Tokyo Story is Ozu’s best; I’ve always thought Late Spring was better. It has the same emotional punch, but is much subtler. Ozu once said that Tokyo Story was so popular because it was the most melodramatic film he ever made, and there is some truth to that. He also made a lot of films that are nearly as good (The Only Son, There Was a Father, An Autumn Afternoon, Floating Weeds, etc.).

Japan's animation style is Western influenced as well though. Eastern European animation is far more ignored than Japanese, though Jiri Trnka, Yuri Norstein and Jan Svankmajer are all fantastic. In general, Japanese animation is often overrated because of the attention it receives as a popular medium, along with Disney whose technical innovations are without par at many points in history.

Oh, no doubt that Japan’s animation is Western influenced, but so is their filmmaking; I think a certain amount of cross-influence is inevitable in this day and age. I do agree about European animation being unfairly ignored, and outside the more experimental animators like Svankmajer (whom I love), there’s also great, more mainstream films like Persepolis, The Triplets of Belleville, and Waltz with Bashir (the last one not European, though). I also love The Quay Brothers, whom are kind of a gothic version of Svankmajer. Their In Absentia is my favorite short film (though there’s not much animation in it). As for Japanese animation being overrated, I think its best work stands with the greatest art produced in the century; the bad part is that they are the exceptions rather than the rule. The majority of it is merely popular crap that’s no different than your average Saturday Morning Cartoons.

Even a director like Bela Tarr is relatively unknown in North America.

Tarr’s reputation has grown in leaps and bounds in the past several years after getting released on DVD. Satantango is now within the Top 100 on TSP’s 1000 Greatest Films list. I do think he’s extraordinary, though. I do hope The Turin Horse isn’t really his last film.

[islandclimber]

Tarr’s reputation has grown in leaps and bounds in the past several years after getting released on DVD. Satantango is now within the Top 100 on TSP’s 1000 Greatest Films list. I do think he’s extraordinary, though. I do hope The Turin Horse isn’t really his last film.

You are right. It has grown by leaps and bounds, but it is still severely lacking for how incredible his body of work really is, in my opinion. I really hope The Turin Horse isn't his last film either. I'd really love to see Krasznahorkai's "War and War" made into a film. And Tarr is the only man for the job. Brilliant novel. Imagine Bela Tarr completing a "Cloud Atlas" type project... But from an even better book.

Speaking of film adaptations of books. Tarr's adaptations of Krasznahorkai's "Melancholy of Resistance" (Werckmeister Harmonies) and "Satantango" are pretty incredible. Tarkovsky's adaptation of the Strugatsky's "Roadside Picnic" (Stalker) also. Wojciech Jerzy Has did a couple brilliant adaptations as well... "The Saragossa Manuscript" based on the Jan Potocki novel, and "The Hourglass Sanatorium" based on the Bruno Schulz stories. The Yuri Kara version of "Master and Margarita" is quite good as well.

I do agree with you though, that the vast majority of adaptations are quite terrible. It makes one wonder why they keep adapting the same works over and over, poorer than the previous attempt. Oh well.

[mortalterror]

Well, go ahead and name them--and I'm talking formally, here. I know you don't like it from a writing perspective, but I really don't care much about that.

I'd have to re-watch a film I really don't care for to do that, but I'm willing to concede that the film has good technical points since you concede that it's got bad writing.

Yeah, but, you're wrong. Seriously, read some of those essays; probably no film has had more brighter critical minds analyzing it, and it's not because it's stupid.

I've seen some very bright people write some very witty things that were entirely off the mark. That's one of the flaws of intelligent people, they are very good at constructing arguments full of sophistries and lying to themselves, convincing others even when they are wrong. Critics often see things were nothing exists and read into texts or films some grandiose meaning where nothing was intended. Sometimes they get a hold of some bad ideology or some fashionable idea in academia and apply it in their judgements. Personally, I've never seen the wonder in metafiction, or marxism, or any of the isms and philosophies that people frequently apply to these sorts of things and get so excited by. I like traditional aesthetics, the kind that Aristotle, Horace, or Longinus would talk about.

I don't think I've ever had my mind changed by reading an essay. I've read reams and reams about Joyce's Ulysses and I still hate it like poison.

No. You couldn't be more wrong if you said the earth is flat. Seriously, stop looking at the silly superficialities of the stories; otherwise, you're not really watching the films, you're just playing Mystery Science Theater 3K.

I like MST3K.

Logicality in stories is not what makes a great work of art, like, at all. There's an ornithographer in The Birds because Hitch needed an "expert" to ridicule and put on the same level as drunkards and everyone else. It's meant to parallel the audience and critics interpreting the film itself.

That seems a little far fetched to me. It feels like you're reaching in order to justify all the flaws of the film and turn them into positives. I see a very simple work of art being championed by some very creative people.

I wasn't asking for a list, since I could provide an even longer one of bad/mediocre film adaptations of great novels. It should also be said that several of these films are not masterpieces, nor are their source material. I thought Cloud Atlas and The Right Stuff (film) were awful, and you didn't even bother to list which Henry V/Hamlet you're referring to (and you really don't want to get in to figuring how many Shakespeare adaptations have made great films; the answer is not many at all, and even the best tend to only be good, but hardly great). The Godfather novel is mediocre, at best, as was The Big Sleep, Maltese Falcon, and Gone with the Wind.

I loved Cloud Atlas and The Right Stuff. I'd be interested to hear what you disliked about them. The Henry V and Hamlet I referred to are the Kenneth Brannaugh versions. I really hate the old Lawrence Olivier versions. IMDB says that there have been 950 Shakespeare films. At least some of those have been good if not great. I like almost all the ones Kenneth Brannaugh and Orson Welles did. Then there's the Julius Ceasar with Brando, even though I don't like Brando in that, I thought John Gielgud's Cassius was spectacular. There's Kurosawa's Ran, Throne of Blood. Shakespeare isn't usually a masterpiece on the stage, as any high school drama teacher could tell you. The reason that it's hard to make a hit with Shakespeare is because you have to be a master yourself to properly interpret another master. Beethoven said something similar about setting Schiller's Ode To Joy to music. It's not that the subject matter doesn't matter, it's that the content is so rich that a novice misses most of it. As for the Godfather, I liked the novel more than the film. It's one of the best action books I've ever read with a pacing and page turning quality that is seldom seen. Also, I loved The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. I'm a big fan of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet. They both had great literary styles and their stories were incredibly innovative for their time bringing murder out of the drawing room and into the streets. I haven't read Gone with the Wind, but it's still a popular book a century later and that tell's me something.

You're fond of listing exceptions; I didn't claim every Shakespeare adaptation came from crappy sources, I said many of them did. Besides that, what makes any of them great has absolutely nothing to do with what the source is to begin with; it has to do with what Shakespeare did with them. Othello, Measure for Measure, Much Ado, R&J, et al. certainly have dubious sources.

You see, I tend to think that Shakespeare found these great plots which lesser writers just hadn't made the most of and used them to their fullest extent.

I don't know where you get the Hamlet/Oresteia connection; I've never heard that, nor do I see many connections between them. Most modern scholars believe there was an ur-Hamlet text probably by Thomas Kyd.

Starting with the father King Hamlet/Agamemnon is murdered by his brother/cousin Claudius/Aegisthus who's the lover of Queen Gertrude/Clytemnestra. Hamlet/Orestes returns from abroad and is told by the ghost of his father to kill the usurper. Hamlet/Orestes is accompanied by his trusty companion and foil Horatio/Pylades. The ghost of Hamlet's/Orestes' father comes and warns him not to kill his mother the queen when he takes his vengeance but to limit it to the usurper. Hamlet/Orestes both go mad from time to time. And Eletra's role as the sister has been transformed into the love interest Ophelia.

I don't get your point; there are some classic stories that artists continue to draw inspiration from? I never denied that, but a lot of these adaptations tend to have very different takes on the matter than their predecessors. What makes any adaptation great has nothing to do with the source and everything to do with what the artist does with it. If a terrible writer were to take up the Atreus or Oedipus myth the result would in all likelihood be a terrible novel/play/poem. I don't see what's controversial about that; you listing great authors that have tackled the same source is hardly proof that a great source is important, since you're conveniently leaving out all of the adaptations that have been forgotten because of how bad/mediocre they were.

Numerous masters have reworked old tales by their predecessors because they've seen how rich they were in possibilities. When a terrible writer gets a hold of an Atreus or Oedipus he fails to exploit all that he finds there.

Honestly, I do think there are more masters of B&W than color, perhaps because many of the early great directors had a background in art and they tended to pay more attention to how to expressively use the visual medium they were working in. By the time color came out, most young filmmakers came to film through film as opposed to the other visual arts. It's also more difficult to manage color since there's simply more to work with. What you say about a "semblance of reality and color" means nothing to me (perhaps you've noticed that in my lack of concern that Hitch's plots are so silly); I find bad/bland use of color far more distracting than bland use of black & white. I simply prefer the abstraction of B&W that, even when it's rather bland, it has a certain stripped down, focused quality that doesn't get in the way of what's going on. Plus, I often say that even if we see the world in color we experience it in black & white.

You said it yourself, with color there is more to work with.

[The Atheist]

Did I ask you for proof of Britain.

Did you net see the point where I noted that I had considered it so blindingly obvious that it was satire that I didn't qualify the post itself?

You know, I always like when responses asking for evidence instead produce a tirade of abuse, but heck, I'm used to it.

As to the claims you need to support, since you obviously don't know what you typed yourself, I'll give you just the first three that spring up:

The Chinese economy throughout the Tang occupied 70% of the world Economy

Any kind of evidence will be fine. I'd buy almost half, say around 40-45%. Why ridiculously overstate an already impressive statistic?

In Economic terms China has been rolling ahead of the world for most of recorded history

Palpable nonsense. For some periods, it certainly has, but "most of recorded history" is simply incorrect. Unless you have proof to the contrary, you really ought to retract that one. As I will, should you actually present evidence that proves your case. I will gladly apologise for my "ignorance", so please do enlighten me.

England is a late player that never really solidified its grip on the world the way China did

Again, a massive overstatement. China has never, ever dominated more than half the world. As I pointed out, they didn't even know one half existed. I don't know of any historian that would ever try to claim world dominance for the Romans, because that would be truly absurd. Like the Chinese, they didn't know a large part of the world existed.

Note that I don't claim world dominance for England, either. Half the world, sure, and with a lasting legacy as the spread of the language proves.

How many people outside of China speak Chinese again?