ABCs at the Movies: The Doubles Round!

[southendmd]

From IMDb:  A young woman, Tara Maguire (Robin Wright) scandalizes her provincial Irish village in the 1950s by having a baby out of a wedlock, and refusing to name the father. She has a rare beauty and every man in town desires her, especially Sergeant Hegarty (Albert Finney). The arrival of a dramatic troupe stirs things up even more, especially when she falls in love with one of the "Playboys", Tom Casey (Aidan Quinn).


Next:  "Q" from 1991

[Ellemeno]

From IMDb: Montreal 1948. On Rosh Hashanah, Chaim (a Yiddish writer) is forced to think of his religion when he's asked to be the tenth in a minyan. As he sits in the park, he suddenly sees an old friend whom he hasn't seen since they quarrelled when they were yeshiva students together. Hersh, a rabbi, survived Auschwitz and his faith was strengthened by his ordeal, while Chaim escaped the Nazis, but had lost his faith long before. The two walk together, reminisce, and argue passionately about themselves, their actions, their lives, their religion, their old quarrel, and their friendship.

P.S.  The waitress is played by Merlee Shapiro. 

[MaineWriter]

==comment==

Steven Bradford at IMDb has this to say about this movie...

Okay, right off, one has to get past the point that this is, aside from John Hurt, an all cat version of Romeo and Juliet. Got that? Okay.

But don't imagine some odd circus act. With narration by John Hurt, and Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet as the score, it is was beautifully shot in Belgium and Venice. They're not really trained cats, they don't wear little costumes, it looks like they're regular cats that they coaxed to move across the sets etc. Then through slow motion effects and editing, they create an illusion of interaction that accompanies the narration. (In much the same way that R2D2 becomes a believable character in the first star wars.)

What recommends this film is the book, by Shakespeare of course, as read by John Hurt, accompanied by beautiful visuals. If you think of it as a picture book that happens to have cats in it, It is easier to lose yourself in.

Amazingly it was also shot in Standard Definition PAL video. Not even digital. It predates the first professional digital camcorders. I believe they did this because they needed to do so many takes to get what they needed from the cats. I heard they ended up with 200 hours of tapes.

I saw it in the transfer to 35mm film in a large theatre. It is certainly one of the best examples of this up to the time of its production. Great care was obviously taken to work within the limitations of video's color and lighting boundaries. It is a marked contrast to so many of the sloppy and awful looking independent digital video productions that we've seen so much of lately.

Unfortunately it's likely impossible to see this film. Its interest is probably limited to Shakespeare enthusiasts who must see every version, and people interested in seeing a fantastic example of a feature shot on video.

Next up: S in 1989

[southendmd]

I had to choose this for the BBM allusion.

Next:  "T" from 1988.

[oilgun]

Canadian experimental director Guy Maddin's first feature.

An excerpt from a review by Michael Brooke at DVD Times:
Much like David Lynch's Eraserhead or Lars Von Trier's The Element of Crime, Guy Maddin's first feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, is almost unclassifiably strange. I have plenty of reservations about it, but there's no danger of déja vu: it's safe to say that even its detractors aren't going to be saying "Oh no, not another semi-silent melodrama based on Icelandic folk tales featuring weird diseases and traditional buttock wrestling!".
Full article at: http://dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=3360

[Fran]

[southendmd]

Tagline:  "They thought they took his life...now he wants theirs. Invincible. Unstoppable. Indestructible. He's out on the street and out of control!" Oy.

Next:  "W" from 1985.

[MaineWriter]

==comment==

A concert movie starring Queen



==aside==Paul

You could've picked "Vasectomy: A Delicate Matter"...LOL

Next up: Wildcard X: any movie, any year! A double wildcard!

After that: Y in 1984

[oilgun]

==Comment==
Michael Haneke's controversial shot-by-shot remake of his earlier film of the same title.  Check out the original before seeing this one.  However, be warned, his films are VERY psychologically disturbing. 
Love the poster! (Watch the studio change it for the DVD release to include the floating heads of all the actors in the film.)The smaller image is for the 1997 film.



From an IMDb User lucky enough to have already seen this film:

I saw this at the London Film Festival and found it to be exactly what I expected: an English-language facsimile by Michael Haneke of his 1997 German film of the same title. Not that this is a bad thing. It is a testament to Haneke's artistic ability to replicate perfectly his previous film shot-by-shot with equal effect, tension, and intrigue even as one knows what to expect--although it might also say something about Haneke's ego that he doesn't feel that he needed to change or add new material for audiences who've already seen the original. The performances are overall well-executed, especially by Naomi Watts, an actress who has proved that she will still take risks despite the fact that she has made it both in the art-house scene and in mainstream Hollywood.

Haneke wanted to replicate the original film for American audiences since he has considered the story closer culturally to American society. That is a noble effort, but I am not sure if it required him to remake an exact replica of one of his earlier works, nor am I sure that it will have quite the impact he wants since the American audiences he is targeting might avoid it all together (as it might be seen as too art-house or extreme) or be completely turned off by its content and artistic approach. Nonetheless, it is interesting to witness as an exercise in a film artist revisiting his earlier work, even if he didn't bother changing anything.

==Comment==
I'm so excited right now, I'm having trouble typing!!

[oilgun]

AKA:  Behind the Yellow Line.  Featuring early performances by the wonderful Leslie Cheung and Maggie Cheung



Next "Z" in 83