Thursday, November 11, 2010
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Top 5 Top 5 Lists Related To, But Not Including, El Dorado
1. A Girl in Every Port (1928)
2. Red Line 7000 (1965)
3. I Was a Male War Bride (1949)
4. Barbary Coast (1935)
5. Tiger Shark (1932)
Top 5 John Wayne Films That Are Not Westerns:
1. The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952)
2. They Were Expendable (John Ford, 1945)
3. Donovan's Reef (John Ford, 1963)
4. Hatari! (Howard Hawks, 1962)
5. Flying Leathernecks (Nicholas Ray, 1951)
Top 5 Robert Mitchum Films:
1. Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)
2. Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995)
3. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
4. Angel Face (Otto Preminger, 1952)
5. The Story of GI Joe (William Wellman, 1945)
Top 5 James Caan Films:
1. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
2. Bottle Rocket (Wes Anderson, 1996)
3. A Bridge Too Far (Richard Attenborough, 1977)
4. Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty, 1990)
5. Misery (Rob Reiner (1990)
Top 5 Films of 1966:
1. Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson)
2. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky)
3. The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (Sergio Leone)
4. The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo)
5. 7 Women (John Ford)
Monday, November 8, 2010
Links: El Dorado
Back on its premiere in 1967, a young critic named Roger Ebert raved about El Dorado:
"For people who like well-made, entertaining movies with suspense, violence, horses, colorful characters, lots of shooting and a few pretty girls, El Dorado is about the most entertaining Western to turn up this year."
Ebert also threw in a nice dig at Pauline Kael, not yet the critic for the New Yorker, but well on her way to being every auteurist's favorite villain:
"Pauline Kael, the New Republic's film critic, claims El Dorado has the second worst lighting she's seen in a movie. That's not bad lighting, that's good old Howard Hawks with all of his shadows and kerosene lamps and murky atmosphere and dark alleys (remember The Big Sleep?). Miss Kael needs her glasses scrubbed."
And speaking of auteurists, Michael Grost devotes his website to cataloguing in exacting detail the recurring subjects, images, characters and visual styles of various directors' films in an effort to generate evidence for the uniqueness of each filmmaker. With a director like Hawks, who's recurring plots, characters and dialogue style are easily noticed, but who's visual stylization is less obvious, this can be an invaluable resource.
"The ride through the desert features three long take lateral tracks. These are the biggest and longest camera movements in El Dorado. They recall a bit the lateral camera movements in other Hawks, which show "characters walking through architecture". Only here, the characters are riding horses, and more importantly, what is being revealed in the background is not an architectural set, but an outdoors ecosystem. Just as Hawks always shows his sets in beautiful clear detail in his typical camera movements, here in in El Dorado we see every detail of the plants."
The thing everyone knows about El Dorado, though, is that it's a remake of Rio Bravo (which is of course why it fits in this series). At Only the Cinema, Ed Howard traces the complex relationship of this film to its original, along with Hawks's third version of the same basic story, Rio Lobo.
"Ultimately, what's great about El Dorado is how Hawks and his cast take what should have been an utter throwaway project, a shameless retread of a relatively recent film, and turn it into something special of its own. It's a roughshod film, casually skipping over long periods of time with inexplicable edits . . . . Somehow, though, these elliptical narrative shenanigans only add to the film's indelible charm. This is especially apparent in the ending. . . redacted for spoilerism . . . it's absurd, strangely touching, and funny all at once, just like the film as a whole."
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Top 5 Top 5 Lists Related To, But Not Including, The Thing
Top 5 John Carpenter Films:
1. Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)
2. Halloween (1978)
3. Escape From New York (1981)
4. Big Trouble in Little China (1986)
5. Starman (1984)
Top 5 Kurt Russell Films:
1. Escape From New York (John Carpenter, 1981)
2. Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007)
3. Big Trouble in Little China (John Carpenter, 1986)
4. Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe, 2001)
5. Tombstone (George P. Cosmatos, 1993)
Top 5 Wilford Brimley Films:
1. The Natural (Barry Levinson, 1984)
2. True Grit (Henry Hathaway, 1969)
3. The China Syndrome (James Bridges, 1979)
4. Cocoon (Ron Howard, 1985)
5. Remo Williams: the Adventure Begins (Guy Hamilton, 1985)
Top 5 Keith David Films:
1. Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986)
2. There's Something About Mary (The Farrelly Bros, 1998)
3. The Quick & The Dead (Sam Raimi, 1995)
4. Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998)
5. Road House (Rowdy Herrington, 1989)
Top 5 Films of 1982:
1. Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog)
2. The Atomic Cafe (Jayne Loader, Kevin and Pierce Rafferty)
3. White Dog (Samuel Fuller)
4. Passion (Jean-Luc Godard)
5. The Verdict (Sidney Lumet)
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