|
< Earlier Kibitzing · PAGE 939 OF 963 ·
Later Kibitzing> |
Aug-04-17
 | | Domdaniel: "He could probably have made an ass of me at draughts but he would not have attempted to learn chess, for he knew his station in life. This is the art of dealing with the lower orders: praise their mastery of the craft to which they are born but keep the chess-board locked up as you would your wine-cellar." Kyril Bonfiglioli, All the Tea in China |
|
Aug-11-17
| | Domdaniel: <cohare> It is very good to hear from you again, BTW. Please accept my apologies for vanishing last time - it's a long story and I'm not sure I understand it myself. But I hope to send you an email once I can dig up the address... |
|
Aug-11-17
| | Domdaniel: Has anyone seen the new Fischer movie, Pawn Sacrifice? It opens this week in the UK and Ireland. Reviews aren't great, but film reviewers - I speak as a formerly paid-up member of that tribe - tend not to understand chess. |
|
| Aug-11-17 | | Boomie: <Reviews aren't great, but film reviewers - I speak as a formerly paid-up member of that tribe - tend not to understand chess.> Or films for the most part, I would add. But it's a great way to make your doss, eh? I was wandering aimlessly in Wiki yesterday and stumbled on a Luis Buñuel story. He was in Hollywood promoting his wonderful "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and his friend, George Cukor, organized a luncheon in his honor. The attendees included a murderer's row of directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, George Stevens, Rouben Mamoulian, John Ford, William Wyler, Robert Mulligan and Robert Wise. Fritz Lang was unable to attend, but Buñuel visited him the following day and received an autographed photo from Lang, one of his favorite directors. Buñuel was a one off, eh? Has there ever been a director like him before or since? |
|
Aug-12-17
| | Domdaniel: <Boomie> - < Has there ever been a director like him before or since?> David Lynch, possibly, but with transcendental meditation instead of communism.
And Neil Jordan at his best (The Crying Game) has a certain Bunuelesque flair. But nobody has made anything quite like L'Age D'Or or The Exterminating Angel.
Or 'un Chien Andalou' (aka 'A Dog and a toilet')... |
|
| Aug-12-17 | | Boomie: <Or 'un Chien Andalou' (aka 'A Dog and a toilet')> Heh. I wonder if Buñuel also directed Prêt-à-Potty (aka Ready to Go). |
|
| Aug-12-17 | | Boomie: On a rare serious note, Buñuel worked much like Hitchcock. They completely planned the movie and rarely deviated from their plans. They both hated the actual shooting. Heh. |
|
Aug-13-17
| | Domdaniel: <Boomie> Just recently, I wrote a review of a reissue of Truffaut's great book on Hitchcock. I had forgotten that, until the Cahiers crowd in France proclaimed him to be a great filmmaker, Hitch wasn't taken very seriously in the Anglo-American world. He was seen as a sort of proto-Tarantino - populist and popular, but lacking depth, a purveyor of effects and cheap thrills.
As Hitchcock himself pointed out, he never won an Oscar. And the only time one of his films won, it was producer Selznick who got the statuette.
It was only after Truffaut wrote about him that his great originality, willingness to experiment with cinematic form, and incredible technical ability were widely recognized.
I'm a Hitchcock fan, as you can perhaps tell. |
|
| Aug-13-17 | | Boomie: In my unschooled and unwashed mind, the most important rule of good film making is "Show it. Don't say it." Whenever there is some explanatory speech, I wonder why they didn't just show that. People go to movies to watch, not to listen. Hitchcock never relied on dialogue unless necessary. That scene in "The Birds" where the moron blows up the gas station is a brilliant example. I think the directors that had experience with silent film learned this. In fact, most of what works in movies was learned before sound appeared. Mary Pickford and Lon Chaney discovered almost everything that works and a lot that doesn't in movie acting. When this skill of telling a story with the camera is combined with great writing, as in Billy Wilder for example, wonderful things happen. |
|
| Aug-20-17 | | Boomie: <Dom>
I have a bit of an ulterior motive for opening your favorite topic here. Jess and I have been babbling about writing a horror movie. She's been sending me films to get me up to speed as my film knowledge is a bit retro, which is a nice way of saying outdated. Anyways...I've been reading up on movie making and it occurred to me that you would have tons of input lurking behind The Eye. |
|
Aug-28-17
| | Domdaniel: <Boomster> I don't know that much, really. I guess I used to be semi-expert on the movies of 1986-92 (the period when I was writing reviews and interviewing filmmakers... after that I moved on to writing about more civilized pursuits, like novels and visual art and, eh, radio). Plus, I've forgotten most of what I used to know about late 80s cinema... though I still think Cronenberg's 'Dead Ringers' is the best film of the era. Some 'Eye/horror' films:
Un Chien Andalou (Bunuel/Dali, 1929)
The Eyes of Laura Mars (Kershner 1978)
The Man With the X-ray Eyes (Corman 1963)
Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960)
Cactus (Paul Cox, 1986) |
|
| Aug-29-17 | | Alien Math: not really a specialist on movies, i'm more a bookworm yet i liked several from the early 1980s to around the 2k mark, found a halfway decent sf book list that i read several books from so i would probably recommend this list more than others https://forbiddenplanet.com/log/50-... hope all of you are doing well, been a bit hectic here with school approaching |
|
| Aug-29-17 | | cohare: Dom Gerry (Sounds like a godfather) PM anytime at ciaran-ohare@ouhsc.edu |
|
| Aug-29-17 | | Boomie: After playing a lot of computer games, I was surprisingly turned off by CGI in movies. You'd think that a hippie that wanders around in Syberia just to admire the landscape would embrace graphics in film. But no. I'm not sure what I don't like about it. Perhaps it's the "Omnipotent Being" gimmick in movies like "The Omen". If the thing is all powerful, how does it lose? If cars can morph into bipedal King Kongs, why not something more potent? There is an illogic to all this but I haven't been able to adequately describe it. Anyway, I'm turned off by modern movies for the most part. The Coen brothers are an exception, but they don't use magic, except the magic of the camera. |
|
Sep-02-17
| | Domdaniel: <Boomster> - < You'd think that a hippie that wanders around in Syberia just to admire the landscape would embrace graphics in film> No, not at all. I had a personal computer back in the 1970s, wrote programs, behaved like a good little early adopter. But these days I have no time for it - I don't have a smartphone, avoid social media, and use laptops for strictly limited purposes. About ten years ago I taught some classes in schools on the subject of film. All the kids wanted to know about was special effects - they were fascinated by Terminator etc. Actually, several of my favourite SF films use little or no SFX. Let me see... Godard's Alphaville, Wollen's Friendship's Death, and others. Far as I'm concerned, 'Star Wars' in the 70s launched a retro SF trend, heavy on SFX but very light on ideas. Speakina SF-with-ideas, I only just noticed that the title of Gattaca is formed from nucleotides of DNA. |
|
Sep-02-17
| | Domdaniel: <Alien Math> As a very smart and clever young person, you will probably observe that <Boomie> and I are just a couple of old farts who spent too long in the tubelight. And we're possibly a bad influence too.
;) |
|
Sep-02-17
| | Domdaniel: I have also been known to claim that "me and Bill Gibson invented cyberspace". There's even a smidgin of truth in this. The big difference is that lots of people read Gibson's early stories, and almost nobody read the visionary crap I was writing. |
|
| Sep-06-17 | | Boomie: <Domdaniel: "me and Bill Gibson invented cyberspace"> And here I thought Al Gore created it in his own image. |
|
| Sep-07-17 | | Alien Math: well <bad influence> or not, you both are some of the few who know the earlier syfy authors liki clarke, harry harrison, william gibson and other writers from then |
|
Sep-07-17
| | Domdaniel: <Boomie> - < I thought Al Gore created it in his own image> Nah, that was the information superhighway thang. (Wonder what happened to it?) Gibson invented cyberspace. As did I, but much more secretly. |
|
Sep-07-17
| | Domdaniel: <alien math> Hi, Alien. I'm fascinated by the way you lump Clarke, Harrison and Gibson together. (I never met Clarke, but I visited Harrison a few times when he lived in Ireland around 1978-80, and I knew Gibson in the 1990s). But the point is: I think of Clarke and Harrison as 'classic' writers, who were already well-known when I began reading SF. While Gibson - though 10 years older than me - was a 'new' writer for a new generation. Maybe they all seem old now. I still think of Gibson as a different SF generation. His predecessors were writers like Ballard, Dick, Barrington Bayley, MJ Harrison (M. John Harrison, no relation to Harry), and perhaps the Aldiss of 'Barefoot in the Head'. Aldiss died a few weeks ago aged 92: 'Barefoot' is one of my favourite works of fiction. |
|
| Sep-07-17 | | Alien Math: oh the odd grouping might be from me being born in 1988 and seeing them about the same era, like before the 1984 battletech series appeared |
|
Sep-07-17
| | Domdaniel: <Alien> Yes, that makes sense. Though I'm not really sure that it's useful to divide things into generations or decades etc. There are always exceptions. Anyhow, you're nearly 30 now. Time to think like a teenager. That's my attitude to age anyway... |
|
| Sep-13-17 | | cro777: Chess and (Naked ) Art.
The most original commentary on the FIDE World Cup dress code incident, as expected, came from Czech GM David Navara: "When the game in the picture was played, Zurab Azmaiparashvili was already born:" https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJlgn4P... Eve Babitz and Marcel Duchamp by Julian Wasser, Art Museum of Pasadena, 1963. (Zurab was born on March 16, 1960 in Tbilisi, Georgia) Czechs have a particular sense of humour. In general, their humour is characterised as dark and sarcastic: Why does the lion on the Czech national emblem have a double tail? It doesn't. Originally there were two lions. |
|
Sep-14-17
 | | moronovich: "How do you adress a banjoplayer ?"
"Will the defendant please rise". |
|
 |
|
|
< Earlier Kibitzing · PAGE 939 OF 963 ·
Later Kibitzing> |
Kibitzing
