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George Lucas should never have made another Star
Wars movie after A New Hope. He should have just filmed Apocalypse Now (originally his project) or Indiana Jones or whatever else he wanted for his next movie and left well-enough alone. Star Wars garners its entire imaginative appeal
from the fact that it’s just one episode in a huge Saturday Morning Serial
which anyone who saw B-movies or read comics and science fiction could have
thought up just as well. Even if The Empire Strikes Back is better than the
original movie, all follow-up installments were bound to be a disappointing next to the continuing stories which
fans could imagine for themselves.
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At this point I think I prefer watching Star Wars Uncut. The rabid fandom is
in so many ways more interesting than the work they worship.
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Jaws was the beginning of the revolution which
allowed special effects to take over humans in American movies. In the year
Jaws was released, moviegoers had the options of seeing One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest, Taxi Driver, Nashville, The French Connection II, Dog Day
Afternoon, The Magic Flute, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (and those were
just the ones by directors I like). Compared to that fare, Jaws seems totally
brainless. Yet if Jaws were made today, it would be considered daringly brainy
and completely undriven by special-effects compared to today’s thrillers.
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Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a miracle.
It’s one of the few movies that uses special effects to make us feel awe rather
than fear. James Cameron has been trying to recapture that awe for his entire
career, but he never did it better than the original.
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It’s best to view ET as a sequel to Close
Encounters of the Third Kind (still his two best movies). Spielberg said in an
interview that the germ of ET was the thought ‘What if one of the aliens from
Close Encounters got left behind?’ But I’ve always thought that it was the
other way around. The missing father in ET is in fact Richard Dreyfuss.
Together, the two amount to a kind of secret emotional autobiography by
Spielberg. More on ET later…
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Soylent Green is not nearly as good as Soylent
Cow Pies.
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Forty-five years later, The Producers remains
the funniest movie ever made.
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Every Mel Brooks movie is slightly worse than
the one before it (yes, even Robin Hood: Men in Tights, which honestly sucked
pretty badly…why do I think this is the comment that will get protest
tomorrow?) – a cycle ending in Dracula Dead and Loving It – a movie so
depressingly unfunny you can’t even laugh at how bad it is.
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Today, a Mel Brooks in our age group couldn’t
get a job fixing a film studio coffee machine. Hollywood, like America, has become
so timid about offending one another that a director wouldn’t even be able to
get financial backing for a movie that makes fun of bigots. We can show gratuitous feces and penises now, but god forbid anybody make a joke or even say a word that's politically charged - even (especially?) if it's being said for all the correct reasons. I don’t know if it was
a wish to avoid controversy, but after The Producers and Blazing Saddles, Mel
Brooks grew ever more timid. Perhaps he realized the depressing truth about
those movies: people were offended when they realized that the most honest
discussions of anti-semitism and racism in American movie history were made by a low-brow comedian.
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I can understand people who dislike later Woody
Allen films, even if I completely disagree with their assessment. But if you
dislike earlier, purely funny, Woody films like Bananas or or Take the Money
and Run or Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid To
Ask, you’re a bad person.
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Woody Allen is the world’s most fervent believer
in the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
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Love and Death has dated rather worse than some
of the other early Woody films because it makes fun of literary pretensions.
The fact is that few people have literary pretensions anymore, and that is
incredibly sad.
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I love both Annie Hall and Manhattan. I do not
defend the overwhelming narcissism of either movie, I nevertheless love them
both.
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Rocky is awesome, it’s just not good.
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The only evidence ever uncovered that a Jewish
conspiracy controls Hollywood is that people still think Marathon Man is a good
movie.
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Walkabout sucks.
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I’ve never seen a single Alien movie and I don’t
particularly want to.
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Monty Python and the Meaning of Life is the best
of their movies, because it’s by far the closest in spirit to the original
show. Holy Grail is too ‘nice’ and G-rated, Life of Brian is too ambitious. It’s
the only Monty Python movie with anything approaching the anarchy of the show. Meaning
of Life is one giant misanthropic middle finger to every convention a proper movie
is supposed to have.
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OK. So Clockwork Orange tells us that the
personality of a rapist thug can be conditioned into not assaulting people, and
we’re supposed to think that’s a bad thing?
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Jack Nicholson does everything he can to save
The Shining. But not even Jack can breathe life into a movie when Stanley
Kubrick is there to suck all the life out.
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I somehow always manage to fall asleep when the Mad
Max movies are on.
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Like all Werner Herzog movies, Aguirre, the
Wrath of God is absolutely ridiculous. And that’s what makes it great.
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I didn’t much care for Fitzcarraldo, perhaps
because this is precisely how I behave
on a regular basis whenever I’m working on my latest world-changing project.
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If I can help it, I solemnly swear that I will
never watch another Wim Wenders movie.
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I’m ashamed to say that I really love Z. It’s a
shameless piece of pure communist propaganda (seriously), but it’s amazingly
well-made.
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Last Tango in Paris is so amazingly dumb that
there isn’t a word for it except the string of pigshit vomit and butter
tourettes type rants Marlon Brando keeps going on.
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Cries and Whispers is amazingly disturbing – and
still a wonderful movie.
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Bergman’s The Magic Flute is the best production
of Mozart’s Magic Flute I ever expect to see – even if it is in Swedish.
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Fanny and Alexander is very nearly my favorite
movie. I love every minute of it, every scene, every weird not-quite-right
piece of dialogue. I do not, however, love the five hour TV version, and
neither did Bergman – who agreed with me. It’s a perfectly imperfect three-hour
movie that is not a second shorter or longer than it needs to be.