sidney lumet search and destroy etc

I was trying and trying during the film last night to remember who won Best Actor in '73. I knew it wasn't Pacino, knew it wasn't Nicholson for The Last Detail--their first awards came later--knew that Hoffman and De Niro weren't up that year. Had to look it up when I got home: Lemmon for Save the Tiger. Which is dumb, because that's a film I've always liked more than most people.

Some of Prince of the City I like better than Serpico, and there are some good performances: Jerry Orbach, Norman Parker as the attorney who recruits Ciello, Ron Karabatsos, and the guy who plays Blomberg's lawyer. Great ending. Treat Williams always wears me down after a while--he aims for Brando and De Niro, occasionally gets partway there, occasionally gives you Bobby Bittman.

Kael: "And that may be why Williams, as a New York City police officer who agrees to be wired and to obtain evidence about corruption in his unit, plays each scene as an acting exercise--going through so much teary, spiritual agony that you want to throw something at him."

I'm enjoying his book Making Movies and how much he hates teamsters.

I just saw an interview with Ava DuVernay on TCM talking about Dog Day Afternoon & she said that Making Movies was what inspired her to direct and she gives copies of it to people she meets who want to work in film <3

Also I rewatched Dog Day Afternoon last weekend and it is perfect

the teamsters part is great. also about how some hair & makeup people are leeches.

oft overlooked Lumet-Brando-Tennessee out on Criterion

https://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/blu-ray-review-sidney-lumet-the-fugitive-kind-on-the-criterion-collection/

Watched this last night on the Channel. There's something I just don't get about Williams' compulsive demon-exorcisms, but it was top notch filmmaking.

amazing I'd never watched Network until last night! familiar with the ott monologues from elsewhere, but I wasn't quite ready for how arch the performances would be. the idea people are playing out their roles in some metatextual way as if they're all caricatures of television characters, to the extent Holden articulates it in dialog, doesn't completely work as intended

it unintentionally bridges the gap between two movies I've recently watched: A Face in the Crowd and, for its subject matter and McLuhan-inspired theme, Videodrome

Fail-Safe CC is out too!

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6801-fail-safe-very-little-left-of-the-world

To create the animations of the various blips of planes and missiles seen on the massive screens that dominate many of Fail Safe’s spaces, the director turned to the acclaimed animators John and Faith Hubley.

had no idea of this

Is anything he did post-1990 worth watching? The Larry Cohen writing credit on Guilty as Sin intrigues me, but otherwise it looks like he fell off considerably in his last couple decades. A few of these titles (Night Falls on Manhattan, Strip Search) even sound like straight-to-video erotic thrillers.

MANHATTAN has one of Ian Holm's great performances and one of Andy Garcia's worst.

Some critics dig Q&A.

I haven't seen it, but Q&A is the most recent one that I've heard anything good about.

I liked Q&A alright, and skipped everything after til the last one (dreadful imho).

Before the Devil Knows Your Dead is aggressively grotesque, idk if I would actually call it good tho

I know I wouldn't.

Bye Bye Braverman and The Group are both curious movies

Q&A is really good. Nolte is incredibly and outlandishly sleazy. That's a compliment. Night Falls on Manhattan has some good performances and is a pretty compelling view, though as far as his crooked cops thrillers go it's the one that feels like a greatest hits package more than a new take on the genre (i haven't seen it in years, that was just my impression at the time).

Gilbert Gottfried mentions Bye Bye Braverman quite a bit on his podcast. I'll keep an eye open for that one on TCM.

saw that very long ago; like a much less gonzo, very Jewish precursor of Cassavetes' Husbands

I don't know where I posted about it if not here, but I thought A Stranger Among Us wasn't bad--at the very least better than Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.

this revive has made me rewatch Q&A

when i first moved to london and shared a flat with my sister, she was at film school with a bunch of ppl who were OBSESSED with 12 angry men, so we watched it a lot (i had a job and more importantly a video recorder). i haven't seen it for years but i became very fond of its performances and character actors and not-quite-formalism. i shd rewatch that too.

Just saying .. on R4 on Saturday night on what was actually a decent program (The Science of Evil) in which there was a reference to "Stanley Kubrick's 12 Angry Men" that got me thinking the BBC is not sacking enough of the right people.

lol i forgot i was rewatching Q&A 12 days ago, i am still rewatching Q&A

Network is still amazing, people I've never heard of ITT from 15 years ago are very much not amazing.

I might not be clear on the time line, but The Anderson Tapes (1971) seems like it was a couple of years ahead of the curve on the whole "70s paranoia thriller" thing, even if its basically a heist movie seasoned with some contemporary concerns re: surveillance issues. It feels a bit padded--the Dyan Cannon character and a scene involving Alan King's mafioso patriarch mostly serve to kill time until the caper gets underway--but it has a killer Quincy Jones score, and a supporting cast that includes a twinky Christopher Walken in his film debut, Martin Balsam as a gay stereotype (warning: the movie is in love with that word), Conrad Bain being punched in the nose, and Margaret Hamilton reading dirty books.

Wow--I always thought Annie Hall was Walken's debut. Took him another six years to land a one-minute part (albeit an unforgettable one)?

Walken had a big role in Next Stop Greenwich Village ('75)

saw Anderson Tapes at a rep house, possibly in the '80s

also a pre-SNL Garrett Morris!

watched The Pawnbroker the other night. just a great performance by Steiger, and the movie it reminded me most of oddly was The Blue Angel. Steiger looks and acts like Emil Jannings in that movie, they're both professors, movies + stories set at opposite ends of the biggest event of the 20th century. the difference is at least Jannings has Dietrich, and for 5 years no less. Steiger has his apprentice, who ends up dead and Steiger has to continue on! there are similarities too in the lighting and blocking of everything in the pawnshop, it's very Sternbergian / clearly drawing from German Expressionism in a way that I haven't seen in any other Lumet films.

Fail Safe was great. Really the perfect movie to watch during a pandemic. I couldn't stop violently sobbing at the end!

Very New Wave, mostly in the titles and that truly overwhelming final shot of white

also watched the Fail-Safe Criterion last night, which i've been a fan of since high school, although I think it's a very good film while Strangelove is great and more attuned to my sensibility.

Didn't remember the second part of Matthau's first appearance, where his Herman Kahn-like nuclear hawk is nearly picked up by a D.C. party girl who is aroused by nuclear doomsday. Weird scene, though one of the few bad ones in the picture.

I also think the backstory of the breaking-down colonel (Fritz Weaver)'s shame over his alcoholic parents was too on-the-nose and gratuitous, and Lumet says pretty much the same thing on his commentary track (recorded in 2000).

Funny that Matthau, Dom DeLuise (one great sweaty scene) and Sorrell Booke (Boss Hogg on The Dukes of Hazzard, here playing -- only 33! -- the bespectacled congressman in the SAC hq) all reached stardom as comedic actors.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but was anyone in American movies doing anything like this w/r/t title-cards/text/opticals? The timing, style, and purpose of the titles and very quick cuts and that final white screen just scream Godard. and not only that, there's the photo negative footage of the planes, something Pasolini claimed Godard invented in Alphaville, in 1965.

I think nouvelle vague stuff starts showin up in some US films by '62 tho I can't think of any examples right now (Manchurian Candidate?)

also A Hard Day's Night, made by a Yank

obv this was more apt to show up in indie productions

The use of hard cuts (instead of dissolves/wipes) as transitions in Lawrence of Arabia was Nouvelle Vague-influenced.

Lumet was ahead of the curve in many ways. There are Kurosawa visual riffs in The Fugitive Kind from 1960.

I started watching the 2000 remake with George Clooney a few years ago, and either I gave up on it, or it made so little impression on me I've forgotten it all.

Fail Safe was great. Really the perfect movie to watch during a pandemic. I couldn't stop violently sobbing at the end!

― flappy bird, Friday, March 13, 2020 12:58 PM (two days ago)

In addition to the pandemic, I'm reading an essay on "Cold War rationality" right now. So now I'm trying to decide whether to watch Fail Safe or Seven Days in May tonight (I've seen neither).

Tried watching "Network" with my 15-year old and it was pretty tough going. Crossing over with the "Is Dylan overrated?" thread,I noted there how I tried to explain to her why Dylan was so important or noteworthy, and even though I could list all the reasons, not many of them resonated with a (my) teen in 2020. Same things with "Network." I see William Holden and Faye Dunaway, she sees mostly old men she can barely tell apart. I see a satire of Things To Come, she sees a milder version of what she has lived with and seen her whole life. I see an iconic (like it or not) exemplar of '70s filmmaking, she sees ugly earth tones everywhere (compared to "His Girl Friday," which she loved for the acting, characters *and* wardrobe). We made it about halfway, since it proved a paradoxical dead end: trying to explain its novel ideas was pointless, since those novel ideas are not only no longer novel, but they're downright quaint (if not outright clunky) compared to what we see and hear on TV etc. today. She's seen and liked "Dog Day Afternoon" and "12 Angry Men" (and seen and hated the slo-mo "Murder on the Orient Express"), so I think that might be it for her and Lumet.

the group is pretty interesting

I see William Holden and Faye Dunaway, she sees mostly old men she can barely tell apart.

kinda harsh on Faye Dunaway!

Ha, yeah. I guess I mean she didn't even recognize her movie star qualities, she was struggling so hard to tell apart the old white men. I mean, she's seen "Chinatown" and still couldn't place her! Which is a testament to Dunaway, in a sense, but also underscores the distractions built into the movie that my daughter had to deal with. Fwiw, she's seen and liked "Sunset Boulevard," too, but failed to make that connection as well, thus missing the impact of stately, old veteran William Holden in the put out to pasture role. It would be like showing her "The Verdict" years after "The Hustler" or something and expecting old Paul Newman to resonate as more than old white man.

I don't remember thinking super highly of Network when I watched it the first time as a 14-year-old either.

But it is hysterical to imagine someone my age now showing it to a 14-year-old today and defending it as a "those were the good old days of things-getting-worse" proposition.

I was 14 when it came out. I liked the high-pitched acting, jokes and profanity.