I loved Papillon. Wow, I had no idea that movie was done in the 70s. I thought that was an 80s movie. I also had no idea it had Dustin Hoffman. I need to watch it again I guess.
Steve McQueen. Loads of great character actors (George Colouris, Anthony Zerbe, to name a couple). Fantastic period piece.
John Huston’s Fat City (1972) is an extremely depressing boxing drama set in Stockton starring Stacey Keach and Jeff Bridges, which I would highly recommend checking out if your into low-key character studies.
This IMDb summary does not do this film justice (it greatly over-simplifies it), but it’s one of my all-time favorite existential road movies from that era. Highly recommended.
A far better plot description can be found on the film’s wiki entry. While it’s a fascinating story to read in this form, it does contain severe spoilers, so if you have not seen it yet, I recommend going into it blind. This movie was a pure pleasure to watch; the Director’s Cut if you can find it.
Herzog Report: Stroszek.
Didn’t enjoy this as much as Little Dieter Needs To Fly, but it had its merits. I might be reading too much into it, but I felt a tiny echo of this film may be in Lanthimos’s films — an absurdist sense of humour, characters disconnected from people and things around them, and a pastiche of societal norms.
If you didn’t like Chinatown, I wouldn’t seek out Night Moves. It’s even more low key.
Both Fat City and The Man Who Would Be King are fine movies, both completely different - low key character study and swaggering adventure movie - and both made when Houston was pushing 70. What a career!
I saw the first half of Taxi Driver last night. I’m really loving this so far. I can’t believe Travis took Betsy where he did for their second date. He complains about this filthy city to the Politician running for President, but the filthy city has already had a big effect on him.
I love Scorcese’s way of filming the nightly taxi scenes throughout the city. And the soundtrack reminds me a lot of the original Death Wish, which I also saw recently. That kind of jazz-type soundtrack is pretty typical 70s, and I kind of miss it. It’s a shame that went out of style almost completely after the era ended. The only modern movie I can think of that had this kind of emotional tone with its soundtrack was “There will be Blood”.
Fun trivia you might not know: Taxi Driver’s score was written by Bernard Hermann, the guy that did the music for Vertigo and Psycho (and many others). Taxi Driver was the last movie he scored. In fact, he died the night he finished working on the score, and the movie was dedicated to him.
Then you had John Williams coming in around the same time, borrowing from Holst, Copland, and Wagner. Other popular movies moved in the direction of Star Wars and Jaws for their scores, and that full orchestral bombast also used by Goldsmith and Horner started outweighing the more impressionistic or jazzy orchestral music. (edit: plus popular music started being used a LOT more in soundtracks starting with George Lucas’s 1973 retro-fest American Graffiti. And the versions of Kustom Kar Kommandos and Rabbit’s Moon that avant-garde, satanic, experimental film director Kenneth Anger finally released in the early '70s also featured wall-to-wall pop songs… but those weren’t exactly blockbusters.) At least that’s one way to look at the situation; there’s plenty of counter-examples.
Hermann scored Citizen Kane, as well.
Freaky coincidence time: this week’s pop culture reference on Judge John Hodgman was Little Dieter Needs To Fly.
I just finished this. So good. I loved the twists and turns of this movie. It’s about a man and his melons. Just when you think you know what the movie is about, it turns into something else. But about 30 minutes in, it finally settles into what it is for sure.
There’s a gratuitous, almost pornographic scene involving melons that almost brought me to tears.
There’s vehicle chase scenes in this movie that REALLY made me crave a real driving game with good physics where I can tear along a dirt road sideways in a old-timey Ford pickup truck.
My only real complaint about this movie is that it lacks a real ending. I’ve noticed this in other movies from the 70s as well. It’s as if they didn’t really know how to end movies back then, so they just ended. No epilogue, no emotional callbacks to the things you cared about earlier in the movies, nothing. Just cut to credits. It leaves a bad taste on an otherwise brilliant movie.
They knew how to “end” movies (I assume you mean tie up all plot strands with a stylistically emphasized scene or scenes that drive home whatever themes the film is presenting – I feel forced to point out that this is a rather narrow definition of “end”'. In any case if you’ve ever seen Casablanca you might notice that this particular art had been mastered at least as long ago as 1942!) In some cases they were trying something different. Of course, we are always talking about many different individuals working in many different genres and reacting to various cultural influences of the day.
I won’t keep harping on this more, but I would strongly urge you not to view old texts merely through a teleological and progressive lens, as if to say all of their characteristics can be explained in terms of ignorance of the lofty standards we now possess.
Sorry, I was trying to be vague to avoid spoilers. That’s the only reason why I didn’t go into it.
As for the definition of ending, I always judge endings by the stories themselves. What is the story that’s being told? A good ending doesn’t have to tell you what happened in the future after the movie/book ends, it doesn’t have to provide you with any other answers, but it has to finish the main story that was being told. That’s all. So in a science fiction book, for example, a reader might be frustrated that he doesn’t know what happens after the last page. But that’s okay, because a story has to end somewhere. So that’s what I always ask myself. What was the story about. What was it that I cared about? And was I shown the end of that particular strand to my satisfaction?
Edit: I believe I read that in an essay from Isaac Asimov once, or maybe another science fiction author. I can’t remember anymore. But it’s a definition that has served me well over the years. Before I read it, I was always dissatisfied with endings, because I always wanted to know more. Particularly in science fiction books. But once I came in with this perspective, I was much happier with most endings.
Sadly, Mr. Majestyk is not one of them.
The Progressive Theory of Art, so, almost, well, pervasive and ingrained in the DNA of popular culture and opinion today, really bothers me as well. It’s pure bunkum.
Nope! Not necessary at all. Plot strands can be there to present flavor. They don’t have to be tied up.
Nope. Not that I’m against such an ending, but it depends on the story being told. Most stories don’t need such an ending.
I agree that Casablanca had an excellent ending. The movie knew what it was about, and it brought that story to a very satisfying conclusion.
True, but I think my definition of a good ending still works across genres. And across different eras of films and books. A story is a story. It has to have an ending. Endings are not an easy thing to do.
I’m not judging them by some kind of standard of movie-making in the 2010s. I’m not a film student. I’m judging them by the only criteria important to me: emotional resonance, entertainment value, whether the movie makes me care about the characters, whether it makes me care about the plot, whether it makes me tense and fill up with anticipation, etc. These things don’t change because the era of movie-making changed. They are basic to us humans as story-tellers.
I watched the second half tonight. Just a brilliant piece of film. Also, the famous lines from the movie “Are you talkin’ to me?” were completely unexpected when they came. I always had a vision in my head for how and under what circumstances those lines would be delivered by De Niro. And I was completely wrong.
There’s only one thing I couldn’t figure out about the movie.
spoiler mystery from late in the movie
Why did Travis clearly plan to kill Palpatine, the politician running for President? Clearly when he got spotted, he ran, and aborted the plan. But I never really understood his motivation and why he’d be mad at the politician in the first place. Is it because Betsy worked for his campaign? Everything else in the movie ties to his sexual frustration and his efforts to be what he believes to be righteous. But the attempted assassination really confused me, unless it ties into his sexual and romantic frustrations with Betsy somehow.
I should have jumped on Get Carter and Marathon Man earlier I guess. They no longer seem to be on Hulu. I’ve got 5 days left on my subscription of Hulu/HBO. I guess The Omen and Carrie and Butch Cassidy are the three left from that service. Then I can watch my rented movies (Duel and One Flew Over Cuckoo’s Nest).
The only plot question in Mr. Mjestyk that matters is whether or not he got his melons in.
Yep. And that’s what the ending leaves out.
This thread reminds me that I often think movies were much better back in the day. Compared to the mainstream stuff of today this thread is a goldmine. Dozen’s of movies mentioned here are very interesting, daring, edgy and simply worth the time to watch them. “Like” or “don’t like” - I don’t care, if the movie has something which stands out.