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Resurrecting the Movies thread...

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MaineWriter:

--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on December 31, 2008, 02:33:03 pm ---To quote Terri Garr: "Woooff!!" I don't think I've seen a full frontal (in the movies  8)) since Richard Gere in Breathless! Of course, there was Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights, but that was just too freaky to enjoy! 



--- End quote ---

Very, very, very briefly: Dennis Quaid in The Big Easy. "Watch out for the gator, baby!"

ednbarby:
Ooh!  You all just reminded me (strangely enough) that I ought to watch "Holiday" tonight.  I can play a drinking game with myself of taking a swig every time Katharine Hepburn's alcoholic brother speaks.  It'll be fun!

Aloysius J. Gleek:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triptych,_May-June_1973

Triptych, May–June 1973
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Triptych, May–June 1973 is a triptych completed in 1973 by the Irish-born artist Francis Bacon (1909–1992). The oil-on-canvas work was painted in memory of Bacon's lover George Dyer, who committed suicide on the eve of the artist's retrospective at Paris's Grand Palais in October 1971. The triptych is a portrait of the moments before Dyer's death.[1] Bacon was preoccupied by Dyer's suicide in his last twenty years,[2] during which time he painted a number of similarly themed works. He admitted to friends that he never fully recovered from the event, and described painting the triptych as an exorcism of his feelings of loss and guilt.[3]



Biographical context

Francis Bacon's relationships prior to Dyer had all been with older men who were as tumultuous in temperament as the artist himself, but each had been the dominating presence. Peter Lacy, his first lover, would often tear up the young artist's paintings, beat him up in drunken rages, and leave him on the street half-conscious.[7] Bacon met George Dyer in 1964 when, he claimed, he caught the young man breaking into his home.[8] Dyer was then about thirty years old and had grown up in the East End of London in a family steeped in crime. He had spent his life drifting between theft, juvenile detention center, and jail. Typical of Bacon's taste in men; Dyer was not an intellectual, but fit and masculine.

Bacon was attracted to Dyer's vulnerability and trusting nature. Dyer was impressed by Bacon's self-confidence and his artistic success, and Bacon acted as a protector and father figure to the insecure younger man.[9] Dyer was, like Bacon, a borderline alcoholic and similarly took obsessive care with his appearance. Pale-faced and a chain-smoker, Dyer typically confronted his daily hangovers by drinking again. His docile and inwardly tortured personality belied a compact and athletic build; the art critic Michael Peppiatt described him as having the air of a man who could "land a decisive punch". Their behaviours eventually overwhelmed their affair, and by 1970, Bacon was merely providing Dyer with enough money to stay more or less permanently drunk.[9]

(....)

In October 1971, Dyer accompanied Bacon to Paris for the opening of the artist's retrospective at the Grand Palais. The show was the high point of Bacon's career to date, and he was now being described as Britain's "greatest living painter". Dyer was now a desperate man, and although he was "allowed" to attend, he was well aware that he was "slipping", in every sense, out of the picture. To draw Bacon's attention he earlier planted cannabis in Bacon's flat, then phoned the police,[14] and he had attempted suicide on a number of occasions.[15] On the eve of the Paris exhibition, Bacon and Dyer shared a hotel room, and Bacon spent the next day surrounded by people eager to meet him. In mid-evening he was informed that Dyer had taken an overdose of barbiturates and was dead. Though devastated, Bacon continued with the retrospective and displayed powers of self-control "to which few of us could aspire", according to Russell.[2] Bacon was deeply affected by the loss of Dyer, and he had recently lost four other friends and his nanny. From this point on, death haunted his life and work.[16] Though he gave a stoic appearance at the time, he was inwardly broken. He did not express his feelings to critics, but later admitted to friends that "daemons, disaster and loss" now stalked him as if his own version of the Eumenides.[17] Bacon spent the remainder of his stay in Paris attending to promotional activities and funeral arrangements. He returned to London later that week to comfort Dyer's family. The funeral proved to be an emotional affair for all, and many of Dyer's friends, including hardened East-End criminals, broke down in tears. As the coffin was lowered into the grave one attendant screamed "you bloody fool!". Although Bacon remained stoic throughout, in the following months Dyer preoccupied his imagination as never before. To confront his loss, he painted a number of tributes on small canvasses and his three "Black Triptych" masterpieces.[18]

Front-Ranger:
That is very powerful and sobering, friend. The panel on the left reminds me of Ennis in the alley.

The message loud and clear to me is that we must pay attention to and help our friends when they are emotionally dying or sooner or later they will be physically dead.

 :'(

delalluvia:

--- Quote from: HerrKaiser on December 30, 2008, 05:37:02 pm ---While the film opened with mixed reviews, it came in a surprising 4th place for Christmas weekend box office sales...a very good showing. And Tom Cruise, imo, remains huge box office and has much more left in his stellar career.

I thought Valkyrie was quite good. It was well paced, extremely intense and nerve-racking; in spite of my having read two bios on von Stauffenberg and knew the story quite well, the director had me on edge the full 2 hours.

Casting was overall superb. Cruise looked strikingly similar to von Stauffenberg, and his performance was a B+, imo; he came across very well. His stiffness was completely in character with von Stauffenberg.

Unlike most 'historical' films, it did not suffer the typical Hollywoodization by signifcantly altering historical fact, which was a pleasure. There was some obvious scripting that had to have been infused by the writers' imaginations, but overall, the history was solid.

The two areas that could have been better were the portrayal of Hitler as a munchin like creature, silent and brooding, slow and seemingly 'not all there'. This was inaccurate; while it did not majorly distract from the core film, it would have been better, imo, to portray Hitler as the strong and powerful and intense persona he was, and his being assassinated would have seemed all the more intriguing.

The other part that was under represented was the executions at the end. Hitler and his gang brutally murdered the conspirators and the killings were bloody, torturous and horrendous scenes of mayhem which did not get shown.

--- End quote ---

I'm going to go see it this weekend and am very much looking forward to it!!  I'm glad to read that they didn't Hollywoodize it too much.  Frankly, reality was better than any fiction that could be made up.  I'll wait to see for myself of course, but by July of 1944, Hitler was already deep into his addictions and I think Parkinson's was already taking hold, so he probably wasn't the imposing charismatic fanatic that we see in all the Nazi speech newsreels.

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