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Elite

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Uncle Frank - Alan Ball, writer of American Beauty and Six Feet Under, writes and directs this small story of a girl realizing her uncle is gay in '70s America and connects with him as they travel from New York back home to South Carolina. There's nothing here you haven't seen before but it's all done well and Paul Bettany has the right mix of ease of who he is mixed with self loathing brought on by the relationship with his father. Good way to pass the time even if sentimentality creeps in towards the end. 7 out of 10

 

Mulan - Disney live-action version of the Chinese legend. You can't really call it a remake as it's not like the Lion King or Beauty and the Beast where it's almost a shot for shot imitation. It's not bad, not that long and Yifei Liu has all the necessary qualities in the title role but it's lacking anything other than surface characterisation for any of the characters or their relationships. You know someone is evil but you're never really told why. You know Mulan likes Chen but it's never explained outside of 'because the story demands it'. The action scenes are pretty good, albeit completely bloodless, and it's different enough from the animated version to warrant watching, which some of the other Disney live-action updates haven't justified. 6.5 out of 10

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Long Way North - beautiful French animation about an 1800s Russian aristocratic girl trying to find her grandfather's lost ship. Fairly formulaic, but the illustration more than makes up for it. Loved it. Must watch for any animation lovers (think Red Turtle style minimalism in terms of the animation). On prime (English language).

 

8.5/10

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HULLFISH: You’ve cut a lot of very iconic movies. But you asked me to check out Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Why was that one of the things that you suggested that I watch?

 

HIRSCH: Because there is an interesting story about the editing. The first cut was three hours and 45 minutes. The final film is 90 minutes.

 

HULLFISH: Wow.

 

HIRSCH: So we actually took out more than we left in. But to put it in a context that editors will appreciate — they shot for eighty-five days. John would shoot without cutting the camera. And this was shot on film. So if he was doing a close-up, he would do a reset and there’s no slating or anything, just, “Okay do it again. Pick it up from here.” Finally, somebody would yell, “Runout!” And they’d have to stop and reload. I went down to the set one day and I asked the script supervisor how we were doing that day. She said, “Not good.” I said, “Why?” She said, “The master lasted 14 minutes.” I said, “How can that be? The camera only holds it 11 minutes of film.” She said, “We did a pickup.”

 

HULLFISH: Wow.

 

HIRSCH: He was rewriting scenes the night before and handing the dialogue to Candy and Steve and the scenes would get longer and longer. In the original script, the scene in the taxi when they drive to the first motel was about a third of a page. “Why didn’t we take the interstate?” The cabbie says, “Well, on the interstate all you see is the interstate.” Candy says, “This guy is proud of his community and wants to show it off.” Steve says, “But it’s night.” That was the whole scene. So we get the dailies and John (director, John Hughes) has written this whole dialogue for the cab driver: “See that over there? That’s where I lost my virginity when I was 18. See that tree over there that looks like a hanging tree? Well, there’s a funny story about that tree.” And it goes on and on.

And then there was the coverage: there was a front shot of the cab, and you see the cab driver in the foreground and Steve and Candy in the back seat. So there’s a thousand feet of that. Maybe two takes, 2,000 feet. And then every take of every shot I’m describing to you was a thousand feet without stopping. So we had a front wide shot, then a front close up of the driver, then front close ups of Steve and Candy. They had a raking 2 shot of them one way an a raking 2 shot the other way. Then they had a tighter raking shot both ways. Then they had a close-up shot from the rear, of the cab driver turning around and looking into camera as if he was addressing them. And then there were details all of the decorations in the taxi. It was decorated like a Philippino taxi cab. So we had forty thousand feet of film for a scene that — in the script — was less than half a page. I had to hire another editor and just say, “This is yours. Go work on this.” In the end, the scene turned out to be exactly as originally written.

 

HULLFISH: Was there also a lot of ad-libbing in that movie?

 

HIRSCH: Well I wouldn’t say ad-libbing. It was John writing new lines and feeding them to the actors.

They shot for 85 days. There was a threatened directors’ strike that year and principal photography had to be done by June 30th because that was the deadline for the strike. We’d go to dailies each day for 4 months and often we’d see three hours of dailies. One day I turned to the crew and said, “We just watched more dailies in one day than the whole film can run.” And that went on for 17 weeks!

 

HULLFISH: And this was back in the day of actually shooting film!

 

HIRSCH: Film. Yeah. So we finish the shoot on June 30th. John immediately goes on vacation for two weeks, while I worked on the first cut. By that time there were four of us cutting. Two of my assistants, Peck Prior and Adam Bernardi and another editor Andrew London. So we got the cut together. The studio is going nuts because we are booked into 4000 theaters for November 9th. It’s a Thanksgiving theme movie and we have to meet the deadline. So now we’re in July, and we have to be mixing in October, right?

 

HULLFISH: Yes.

 

HIRSCH: So, John comes back from vacation and we sit down at the KEM and we start going through it. He says, “Okay let’s take this out. Let’s take this out.” He had obviously given it some thought. There was a whole subplot we dropped about Steve’s wife not believing that he was really with Candy. She thought he was carousing with women.

 

HULLFISH: I was going to ask you about that exact thing. Because there are shots of the wife that are still in the movie that made me think that there was more to her story.

 

HIRSCH: There were scenes of her and her mother talking about the marriage. I went through this with John and he was like, “Take it out. Take it out. Take it out.” And we got through one pass on the KEM and now we’re down to two and a half hours. We took out a third of the movie in one pass.

 

HULLFISH: Wow.

 

HIRSCH: I turned to John and said, “You know, we just cut out 28 days of shooting.” He just shrugged. What are you going to do? So we keep cutting and we get it down to two hours around Labor Day. We go for our first preview and I am supremely confident. I am sky high, thinking this is one of the funniest movies ever made. And people started walking out of the screening! I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. I was completely blindsided and I thought, “How could this be?” We regrouped and we took some time out and screened it again.

Now we’re in the first week of September. To make a long story short, we previewed nine times in the month of September, turning around twice a week. This was on film with a new mix for each preview. And it wasn’t till the fourth preview that we figured out what the problem was, which was that we’d thrown out a subplot about Candy’s and Steve’s credit cards getting mixed up. We thought it was too complicated so we just got rid of all of it. Without that, the audience thought that Candy was using Steve — getting him to pay for everything. He was a freeloader so they started hating him. They hated Steve for being so easily manipulated. So they soured on both characters. So we found a moment at one of the train stations where Candy tells Steve, “Give me your address and I’ll send you some money.” When we put that back in, that was it. It just turned everything around. They stopped hating Candy and they stopped hating Steve.

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12 minutes ago, General Dryness said:

Yeah it was news to me too. Heres the link if you want to have a watch.

 

 

It was nearly four hours long! Lord of the rings style. 

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Frozen 2 

 

What the fuck are we doing to the next generation? We babysat her niece and nephew last night and this morning they’ve got frozen 2 on. For a start Elsa has got serious abandonment and character issues. If that’s the impression we are giving our kids then now wonder mental health problems amongst kids is at an all time night. She’s a narcissist with extreme anger issues but switches to a semi-recluse in a heartbeat. Plus her ginger mate is easily the fitter of the two. Oh and since when do we teach our kids that snowmen are cunts? -5/10 

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Muscle - 8/10

 

I'm a big fan of Gerard Johnson for several reasons, mainly that his elder brother is Matt Johnson of The The, who's music i have loved since i was a teenager. The other being that his other films, Tony and Hyaena are both gritty little tension filled masterpieces that deserved a much wider audience. 

 

His latest film is Muscle, which has just gone on release to selected cinemas and on demand services (i watched it on Amazon Prime). The basic premise of Muscle is a disgruntled an unhappy telesales worker (Clavan Cerkin) seeks to improve himself (and his life) by joining a gym. Once at the gym he meets a personal trainer (Craig Fairbrass) and whilst initially this goes well, gradually his life starts to unravel. 

 

The film is beautifully shot in black and white and the acting from the main two characters is fantastic. Fairbrass in particular is a revelation. What i've never seen in a mainstream film though is absolutely full blown (pardon the pun) orgy scenes where its clear that its not being simulated at all. Very eye opening.

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3 hours ago, Total Longo said:

Muscle - 8/10

 

I'm a big fan of Gerard Johnson for several reasons, mainly that his elder brother is Matt Johnson of The The, who's music i have loved since i was a teenager. The other being that his other films, Tony and Hyaena are both gritty little tension filled masterpieces that deserved a much wider audience. 

 

His latest film is Muscle, which has just gone on release to selected cinemas and on demand services (i watched it on Amazon Prime). The basic premise of Muscle is a disgruntled an unhappy telesales worker (Clavan Cerkin) seeks to improve himself (and his life) by joining a gym. Once at the gym he meets a personal trainer (Craig Fairbrass) and whilst initially this goes well, gradually his life starts to unravel. 

 

The film is beautifully shot in black and white and the acting from the main two characters is fantastic. Fairbrass in particular is a revelation. What i've never seen in a mainstream film though is absolutely full blown (pardon the pun) orgy scenes where its clear that its not being simulated at all. Very eye opening.

Fairbrass was interviewed in the Indy or Guardian and said they  got themselves invited to a proper orgy and just filmed around it.

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4 minutes ago, sir roger said:

Fairbrass was interviewed in the Indy or Guardian and said they  got themselves invited to a proper orgy and just filmed around it.

Yeah i read that, he said it took him a few days to get his head around it. I wasn't expecting it to be as explicit as it was. 

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14 hours ago, Pidge said:

Falling Down - 9/10

 

Great film, if this was made today there would be such a shitstorm. Shame really, I feel the alienation of Foster is a really relevant theme, more so than in the early 90s.

I don't think modern "woke/cancel culture" is any different from the "PC gone mad" culture of the era in which this was made.  As I recall, a lot of the reviewers in the most pompously right-on media loved it as an allegory of US foreign policy.   ("I'm the bad guy?  How'd that happen?")

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