He wrote the original story, wrote the screenplay, he produced it, he edited it and he directed at least the final twenty minutes of the film. He also funded it via Lightstorm. The film was Cameron’s in nearly every technical way. And it’s a masterpiece, but it flopped and is destined to become a lost classic.
Well I think it flopped because people just didnt understand it like they would today. Its somehow both ahead of its time and very anachronistic with the Year 2000 trope.
It was also delayed and the advertising sucked. It was set for a summer release and they pushed it to October and marketed it as a straight-up sci-fi-movie and it simply isn’t that. “Urban Noir Action-Thriller” is how I would describe it. It predicted VR would be the new rage (it wasn’t), that voyeurism would become an obsession (check) and that police would become pseudo-military (they have).
Yeah, I forgot about that whole thing. Im not sure why that was even a plot element. It would have made more sense that she was afraid of Buffalino if she had witnessed him committing a crime or something. It was just a really creepy interaction. I wonder of Scorsese was trying to recreate the type of scene he had in Taxi Driver where Bickle is buying black market guns in a hotel room. The dealer is all calm and cooler from Travis's perspective because he wants the guns but when he starts talking about other goods hes dealing, hes all frantic and creepy. I guess this could have been a similar thing of Frank's perspective of Buffalino vs a normal person's. Who knows.
I’ve been WAITING for someone to bring this up as I just saw this like a month ago. I honestly didn’t know how much material Quinton Tarantino lifts for content in his films. So that gun dealer from Taxi Driver was just this crazy guy Martin Scorsese knew. Scorsese did a whole documentary on him where he just interviewed him and had him talk non stop for 2 hours back in the 70s. In the doc the guy relates this story of how he brought his girlfriend out of an OD coma with a shot of adrenaline. Word for word, his mannerisms and everything were copied directly into the famous scene in Pulp Fiction. Eric Stultz basically replays the scene from the documentary. I mean I know he’s copied styles and remade scenes shot for shot cinematography wise but I didn’t know he lifted whole lines and ideas straight from other material.
You've never seen the documentary "Who Do You Think You're Fooling?", have you. Check it out; it's on YouTube.
That is literally your current avatar, because that face and line is BURNED into the minds of whoever watched it. I get a shudder from looking at it. Requiem is a movie everybody watched once, but not many watched twice. It belongs with movies like “Passion Of The Christ” and “Irreversible”.
Irreversible was pretty fucked up, but that was kind of the point, which makes it a little silly. It same thing with Man Bites Dog (which I think is worse) and other movies like that. The whole beating-with-a-fire-extinguisher scene was something I hadn’t really seen the likes of before, at least not until The Walking Dead.
Actually, for the longest time I thought 'Kahn's avatar was Robin Williams; he made that his avatar right around the time that he died, so I thought he did it to pay respect. Then one day a few months ago, I asked him about it, and he told me who it really was. I couldn't have been more wrong. That was a great movie; all of Aronofsky's work is on-point.
Man Bites Dog is a satire, I mean... it has to be. Either that, or it is the sickest joke that a filmmaker has ever played (the director played the film’s “subject”) because movies simply do not get more hardcore than that. It reinvented the wheel on “sensationalism” while driving spikes into it as well. A Serbian Film..., I cant rate that or classify it. It’s like “Pink Flamingos”, it’s not a movie, it’s a..... thing..... of some sorts. A thing that the people who have resisted watching should thank themselves for not doing so. Do NOT fucking watch it.
I dont get the "you don't watch Requiem more than once or twice" it's a really well done movie. A score that transcended the movie, visual style, and a multitude gem roles for great character actors and top billed alike. All the negative energy is around the ending sequence* seems to be it, even that I mean it crescendos beautifully even though it's deep on the dark side. Ive seen it at least half a dozen times. *The only part that bugs me is they use the Electric Shock Therapy in the negative movie trope. Never had it but apparently the real world version is a lot less dramatic and really beneficial in certain situations. They sedate the patient and Ive heard dont feel anything during the current.
I think it definitely satirizes the charismatic serial killer trope. The whole point of it is to manipulate the audience into thinking he's funny and charming in the beginning and then make you feel sick to your stomach by the end. I think it probably also is a critique on how the media can sometimes transcend reporting into encouraging and creating things that happen. I have seen the main character in other things before, and he's really good (and a fairly popular actor in Belgium). I would say, content aside, its a really good film. Its post-modernism to the extreme. Serbian Film, Salo, Begotten, etc. are all art projects from directors who aren't really good at what they do. Those fall into a different bucket for me. Just gratuitous trash. Yeah, no shit. shock therapy is legitimately used all the time. I have a psychiatrist friend who said its used more than people think, its pretty safe and patients are unconscious when they get it. That movie is extremely heavy-handed, but still really good. And yeah, the score makes the whole thing. One of the best ever.
Any “real movie fan” loves Requiem. But the people who simply demand entertainment, who want happy endings and not close-ups of injections into infections—- DO NOT like that movie. I personally love it when movies end the way that it did. That’s LIFE, motherfuckers: If dreams came true there wouldn’t be so many Pontiac Sunfires on the road. Another reason people don’t like it is how uncomfortably real things are in it. It is an epic of Rock Bottom and people who have been there say the film gets under their skin to a frightening degree.
I've been watching episodes of the original The Twilight Zone. What a great, great show, decades ahead of its time...if any similar anthology series had ever achieved that level of quality. But none ever has. Hell, this show is more memorable and creative in its 30-second Season 1 intro than entire shows from start to finish. At first glance, it's just a plain black-and-white landscape drawing, a few cheap effects, and then the title card accompanied by Rod Serling's slick narration. But there is much more to it than that! You see, the hills and rocks of the landscape call to mind the eerie paintings of the Russian mystic Nicholas Roerich (surname pronounced "Re-rih"). Take a look at one of his pieces and tell me there isn't a resemblance; Moreover, this is likely a deliberate allusion. For you see, Roerich's paintings are referenced repeatedly in describing the titular glaciars in HP Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, and is indeed how I first learned about the great Russian mystic. In consider this one of Lovecraft's weaker works, but its description of the icy mountains is both highly evocative and memorable, and its ending a great glimpse of the limitless, unknowable horrors of a vast and terrible universe. It's impossible to look at Roerich's paintings without connecting them to the story. Given how well-read Rod Serling was, the obvious influence of Lovecraft's series on The Twilight Zone, and Serling directly adapting a few Lovecraft stories for his late anthology The Night Gallery, I am sure the title drawing is no accident. For a simple intro to evoke so many thoughts and connections is masterful. And we haven't even gotten to the stories themselves! So far I have seen 20 episodes, and with one exception, The Fever, about a killer slot machine, all are at least decent, above-average tales. Some are more humorus, others more serious, but all have ideas and solid writing behind them. Many have predictable twists, especially for those who have read and seen many such works, but are still pulled off in an interesting, satisfying manner. Rod Serling was an absolute writing machine, being involved in the creation of 17 of the 20 episodes. However, the famous science fiction and fantasy writer Richard Matheson, many of whose works were adapted, and who wrote the original script for The Last Flight, is no slouch. And interestingly, it's a script penned by Charles Beamount, Perchance to Dream, that is my favorite of the bunch thus far and a true gem, one of the best half hour episodes of anything that I've seen in my life. It's a series that has also aged well, with themes of isolation, paranoia, and a desire to return to a simpler, happier time more prevalent than ever. Highly recommended.
The Fever is probably the silliest episode of the first season, and is kind of a preview of what the later seasons turn into. My favorite episodes are: The Obsolete Man The Shelter The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street It's a Good Life Kick the Can
I love The Midnight Sun, Walking Distance and The Eye Of The Beholder. Probably the best TV show of all time.