I don’t think that movie was so much about Hugh Grant, but about friendships, loyalty and true love. It spoke to me and I laughed all the way through it. Saying “Oh dear” seems disrepectful. Is your opinion of my favorite movie more important than mine? Hmmm. 
Interesting choice… I don’t think we’ve seen this one on the thread yet… and I’m sort of surprised by that for some reason.
Hey monkey,
My favorite part was all those flying monkeys. They used to scare the life outa me. 
S
Some.
The scene when Cruise is awkwardly negotiating with the (unrealistically beautiful) prostitute is hilarious.
Dead on, (and you’re right to be precise about “erotica”). Even more telling is the scene sequence where Kidman and Tom have their pot-smoking soul-bearing talk, and we are supposed to feel, ah…the surface is finally stripped bare, finally some substance, (which you describe perfectly) but then notice, Cruise goes on a house call, and the couple he visits is a visual and emotion parody of Kid and Tom, a cartoon of both their serious, “true” selves, and even of the two of them as a celebrity couple. Beyond hilarity. Who even knows if Tom even got the joke within the joke, within the joke.
Dunamis
O.G.
when it ended I literally sat there for an hour and tried to figure it out…
I know what you mean, but Lost Highway was even more inviting than Muholland Drive in terms of feeling you might be able to figure it out, but can’t. M.D. just went too far, so one just gave up – or at least I realized that this was Lynch’s game. I knew there was no answer. It had excellent eye candy though, incredible opposite casting, proved the beginning of the wonderful Naomi Watts.
(man… I really need to watch a Kurasowa movie)
No, if you don’t mind me saying, you need to watch like ten Kurosowa movies. No one movie will give you the sense of his mastery – nothing made my top 10 list. It is the incredible depth and variety of his powers. No director even comes close to the diversity of films he made. He practically invented the cop buddy movie with Stray Dog (Lethal Weapon borrowed heavily here), and the kid-nap drama in High and Low. Empire Strikes Back was said to be taken from his epic Hidden Fortress (see C3PO and R2-D2 as human beings first), the western The Magnificent Seven from his Seven Samurai. His pairing with Mifune makes “Scorsese and de Niro” seem like kids playing with the super 8 in their backyard. The man filmed violence, pathos, romance, war, comedy, morality, murder, crime, perfecting genre form after genre form, inventing techniques and styles. Its almost ridiculous. But if you see only a film or two, you may just say to yourself afterwards, “what a well-made film†or “how interestingâ€, and little more. Anyways, that’s my rant on Kurosawa.
Dunamis
Some,
The best Hugh Grant vehicle is The Englishman who went up a hill and came down a mountain
That’s funny…Divine Brown said it was a rented BMW.
Dunamis
p.s. actually Polanski’s delicious satire Bitter Moon was pretty damn good, if only a bit twisted. Though I’m not sure a cruise ship would count as a Hugh Grant vehicle.
Bessy,
Princess Bride
Awesome movie.
Westley: You’re that smart?
Vizzini: Let me put it this way. Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates?
Westley: Yes.
Vizzini: Morons.
is one of the all time written and delivered comedic lines ever. It still makes me laugh. To me the film is near in class with the wonderful Young Frankenstein and Life of Brian. 
Dunamis
Hello F(r)iends,
Princess Bride truly is a work of comical genius.
The Man In Black: You guessed wrong.
Vizzini: You only think I guessed wrong - that’s what’s so funny. I switched glasses when your back was turned. Ha-ha, you fool. You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is “Never get involved in a land war in Asia”, but only slightly less well known is this: “Never go in against a Sicilian, when death is on the line.”. Hahahahahah.
-Thirst4Metal
I coulda swore he said “never try to match wits” or “never have a battle of wits,” instead.
No? Am I totally off or does that also sound more familiar to you?
Yeah, that specific scene was one of the highlights of that excellent movie.
Remember the scene when they roll down the hill accidentally, and the scene is drawn out so long it becomes obvious the directors are being sarcastic. If you remember that directors too are aware of those classic car chase scenes where in one frame the car is like thirty feet away from the wall and going fourty miles an hour- and then a good minute or two passes before the car actually hits the wall. Ha! That’s what you call “movie time.” Extended scenes that build into a climax can be purposely drawn out just a little, passing unnoticed, to increase the anticipation and satisfaction for the movie.
So the directors of The Princess Bride were probably making a parody of the technique of extending segways, and using “movie time.”
Dear Dunamis
You are spot on. What I like is that Kubrick disguises this parody by heavily implying that this is nothing more than the first temptation of many (the prostitute Domino, Milic’s daughter, the orgy in the mansion) for Cruise that night. You may also remember a moment later in the film when Cruise rings up the daughter of the deceased (who doesn’t want to marry Karl) and Karl (the maths professor - as you say a sort of exaggeration of Cruise’s role as a doctor) answers the phone - to whom Cruise has nothing to say. This is possibly meant to symbolise how Cruise cannot actually confront his fear and jealousy but can only wage war against it. He cannot stop the fantasy his wife has revealed, but he can go one better by actually sleeping with someone else.
Unlike many Kubrick movies I’ve never read the novel on which the film is based. Apparently the original was set in turn of the century Vienna, but you can understand why the setting is shifted to the now fashionable city of New York. Though a lot of the movie was shot in Chelsea, London.
One other aspect - the masks at the orgy. The woman who eventually redeems Cruise, and who warns him of the dangers, wears a preposterously large mask with feathers protruding all over the place. I’m sorry but there’s no way a man of Kubrick’s attention to detail would have had such a key character wear such a ridiculous outfit (remembering she is naked apart from a glitzy thong and the mask) unless he intended it to have a comic effect. The masks are yet another common symbol of dreams which pervade the whole movie.
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to answer in such a flippant manner. One thing in my defence: that movie is heralded as reviving the British film industry (something which has been dying since its inception) and although I do enjoy it as a movie (plenty to like) I’ve just heard it mentioned too often. You know when you hear a song you like so much that it gets irritating?
Is my opinion more important? No, probably not. It might be somewhat better informed, I’ve spent a long time watching and studying movies. But no, that doesn’t make it better or more important. I actually think that most of the movies in your list are very good choices, better than most here have selected.
detrop,
Another parody of movie time takes place in the second Austin Powers film.
If you’ve ever seen Golfinger (Shirley Bassey et al) you’ll notice a prime example of classic movie time at the end when Bond is trying to defuse a nuclear bomb that is set to blow up Fort Knox.
As though the Americans would let some limey defuse a bomb on their own territory…
On MD,
I figured it out. Lynch said somewhere there WAS an answer… and with the help of my friend and a couple sites I think I got it. I thought about that movie for honestly a week… the sign of a great peice of art. Basically Naomi and the Brunette are both ‘Aunt Ruth’ or whatever the aunt’s name is. I forget exactly now… but basically Naomi represents the innocent ‘get by on talent’ side of aunt ruth… and the other is the ‘whoring themselves out to get ahead in Hollywood’ side. In the dance scene at the beginning we see the aunt winning… notice how Naomi is smiling, with the crowd (the 2 other old people I think) and the brunnette (Carmilla) is slightly off to the side, but there nonetheless? It reprents her state of mind if you will, in other words, she tried hard and won the contest… but in the back of her mind, she knew she could have ‘cheated’ if she wanted. Somewhere in the haze… aunt ruth sleeps with the director to get the part, hence Naomi seeing Carmilla with the director near the end… she eventually shoots herself because that part of Aunt Ruth is dead… it cannot deal with the choices she’s made, and so in effect… Aunt Ruth makes the switch from the ‘let’s do it with talent’ Ruth, to the ‘Sleep with the director Aunt Ruth’. The scene where the guy sees ‘the fear’ is the fear we have for ourselves, hence the familiarity of his ‘dream’. The homeless guy (the fear) drops the box (and I forget what the box represents) and the old couple (innocence) chase after Naomi because they are her conscience… she is no longer innocent. Everything else is to demonstrate the nature of Hollywood
Anyways… I’m in a hurry and that came out with way too many brackets… but there is an answer.
On Kurasowa,
All I’ve heard are good things… I just haven’t gotten around to one of his movies for whatever reason. But I will.
Some,
He cannot stop the fantasy his wife has revealed, but he can go one better by actually sleeping with someone else.
I think you are crediting the character with far too much “substance”, even if in the form of some legitimate existential angst or paralysis, (though I certainly can see where this reading can come from). To me this is just an idiot who takes his own desire seriously, a kind of paper soul. Unbelieveably L.A. I suppose a good film can bear multiple readings. I just am not sure this is a good film, in that sense.
Dunamis
O.G.,
I figured it out. Lynch said somewhere there WAS an answer…
What I suspect is that this confuses what Lynch was thinking about when he made/wrote it, with what it really means. The combinations of images, characters and reversals I believe would be as likely to be reducible to a single meaning or message, as a dream could be. But that is just my way of relating to latter, less narrative Lynch. It is a dream space for me. But I appreciate the effort to dig down into it. As it proved satisfying and meaningful, that is all one can ask.
Dunamis
- Matchstick Men
- John Q
- Man on Fire
- Bowling for Columbine
- F 911
6.Suicide Kings - Heat
- Lost Boys
- American Pie 2
- Shot to Kill
-
Donnie Darko
-
Stalag 17
-
shawshank redemption
-
Hotel Rwanda
-
Pi
-
Birth
-
Les Miserables
-
Flight of the pheonix
-
To kill a mocking bird
-
Anything with pauly shore in it…
-
Backdoor sluts 13
To Kill a Mockingbird
Unforgiven
Apocalypse Now
The Godfather
Natural Born Killers
The Wizard of Oz
Prince of the City
Godfather II
Moonstruck
Leaving Las Vegas
- Pulp Fiction
- Platoon
- Apocalypse now
- For a few dollars more
- Fight Club
- Austin Powers
- Scary Movie (1-4)
- Airplane
- Crash
- Legends of the fall
kurosawa movies. …I find them intense, and somewhat untimely.