Last movie you saw?

[Heinrich]

Pon, how do you discover these movies?

[Mono no aware]

Pon, how do you discover these movies?

In the case of Lady Macbeth, it was recommended to me by an algorithm based on my ratings of other movies.  It had gotten some good reviews, but I wasn't expecting it to be as great as it was.  There's a famous book called "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," and its name comes from its thesis that those two movies roughly mark the beginning and the end of the "golden age" of cinema—essentially, the 1970s.  I tend to agree with that assessment, although I recognize that it would not be shared by most traditional Catholics, who would likely consider 70s cinema to be decadent and perverse; they would probably agree more with Anthony Esolen, the Thomas More College professor who thinks the golden age occurred during the studio system and Hays Code days of the 1940s and 50s.  Well, Lady Macbeth seems like it belongs to the 70s, and it has some similarities with two Thomas Hardy adaptations from opposite ends of that golden age: John Schlesinger's Far from the Madding Crowd and Roman Polanski's Tess, but it's really in a vein of its own, and in many respects it's more bleak and pessimistic and uncompromising.  There is barely even a musical score, and almost no expository dialogue.  It has a real harshness.

I had known about the Pope Michael documentary for a long time, but the air in the traditional Catholic scene had been so polluted by the idea that Pope Michael was just "some wacky nutter" that I had always supposed it would've been nothing more than an hour's worth of lunatic ramblings.  Fortunately it's not.  I can't deny that he's awkward and un-self-conscious, but I've come to see his papacy as a remarkable and salient statement.  I would recommend the film to all traditional Catholics, and I would only suggest that the viewer go into it charitably, giving Michael the benefit of the doubt.  He's not really the most articulate person, but he seems to have been someone who gave more thought to the crisis than perhaps most are willing to.  It's said (from the SSPX side) that he was kicked out of an SSPX seminary for being mentally imbalanced, but his own version of events rings truer: that he became disillusioned by the schizophrenia and paradox of the "recognize-&-resist" position.  He's no one's paragon of eloquence, but the way he puts it is refreshingly plain: "sometimes it seemed like they were with the Novus Ordo, and other times it seemed like they were against the Novus Ordo.  I couldn't figure them out or get a straight answer."  He's a simple and uncomplicated Midwesterner.  In a way, his half-assed conclavist papacy, however bizarre, is possibly the straightest answer of all.

[Jacob]

There's a famous book called "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," and its name comes from its thesis that those two movies roughly mark the beginning and the end of the "golden age" of cinema—essentially, the 1970s.  I tend to agree with that assessment, although I recognize that it would not be shared by most traditional Catholics, who would likely consider 70s cinema to be decadent and perverse; they would probably agree more with Anthony Esolen, the Thomas More College professor who thinks the golden age occurred during the studio system and Hays Code days of the 1940s and 50s.

I think New Hollywood is a bit overrated, but the so-called Golden Age back during the Hayes Code is as overrated in a way.  If one's only exposure to that earlier time period is watching classics on certain cable channels, then the person is having a curated experience that puts aside all the crap that got put out at the same time.  The same goes for New Hollywood.

I think it personally comes down to what one prefers as a moviegoer.  As PdR says, New Hollywood is raw and so on.  Or the Golden Age under the Code where subtlety and misdirection is key.

[Jacob]

Yesterday I watched The Winslow Boy, the version made in 1999.

[Larry]

I think the late silent period and the early thirties up until the Code was imposed is the Golden Age of Cinema. So many of the films were honest without being distasteful like most of what is created today. The post Code era also provided many classic films, but many of them are so cloying and phony. Frankly, I think the B films of the Post Code are better than many of the more lavish films. I'll take Edgar Ulmer's Detour or Robert Siodmak's Son of Dracula over Yankee Doodle Dandy or Mrs. Minever any day of the week.

And the last movie I watched was A Man For All Seasons, which is truly a film for all seasons.

[Mono no aware]

I think the late silent period and the early thirties up until the Code was imposed is the Golden Age of Cinema. So many of the films were honest without being distasteful like most of what is created today. The post Code era also provided many classic films, but many of them are so cloying and phony. Frankly, I think the B films of the Post Code are better than many of the more lavish films. I'll take Edgar Ulmer's Detour or Robert Siodmak's Son of Dracula over Yankee Doodle Dandy or Mrs. Minever any day of the week.

The silent era is very special.  Every period of movies eventually becomes dated, and even though the silents are the most dated films of all, the best of them really transcend it because the cinematic language was so unique.  I think the movies of the 40s and 50s date the worst, or at least the Hollywood productions do.  There is no sense of chiaroscuro and the lighting is just so harsh and completely bleached out, supposedly showing more but revealing only the stagey artificial sets.  I think The Godfather was, in part, such a landmark film because its cinematography was a deliberate reaction against all that.  Coppola and Scorsese were fond admirers of foreign directors like Bergman and Visconti. 

Val Lewton is another B-movie horror director from that period whose work stands the test of the time better than the big bonanzas.  I suspect Mel Gibson likes silent films.  I once read where he originally wanted to have The Passion of the Christ without any subtitles.  That's a real confidence in visual storytelling.

[Larry]

I watched The Shape of Water. A very strange film filled with things that are troubling to the Catholic conscience, but it does have moments of transcendence and is very well acted, and beautifully photographed. One thing this movie has been accused of is bestiality, but the woman who falls for the Creature of the Black Lagoon inspired character turns out to be of his species. Still, the film has problems, and I can't recommend it even though it's technically excellent.

[Mono no aware]

The last movie I saw was I, Tonya (2017).  It was very good.  It received a lot of critical praise and it deserved all it got.  It has an unconventional and complicated story to tell, but it tells it with confidence and verve.  All the narrative risks it takes are successful, and there's a terrific attention to detail in recreating the era.  It's a real piece of Americana.

[Maximilian]

In this Corner of the World
  - available on Netflix.

Very beautiful and moving. A lot like "Grave of the Fireflies," but even sadder in some parts.



The art is not as professional and perfect as "Grave of the Fireflies," but it has its own distinct charm.



The images like the ones above that come up in a google search don't give you a very good understanding of what the movie is really about, however. Here is a better representation:

[Heinrich]

10 minutes of Last Flag Flying. Looked promising, but the blasphemous language was too much.

[Non Nobis]

The last movie I saw was I, Tonya (2017).  It was very good.  It received a lot of critical praise and it deserved all it got.  It has an unconventional and complicated story to tell, but it tells it with confidence and verve.  All the narrative risks it takes are successful, and there's a terrific attention to detail in recreating the era.  It's a real piece of Americana.

Since I've always loved women's figure skating and remember Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding and the big scandal at the 1994 Olympics very well, I thought I would watch this.  It didn't reveal anything that was too surprising, but did give me a little more compassion for Tonya. What a rough life; she sure got in with the wrong crowd (starting with her mother, if she was really like that). She turned out very rough too; became a woman boxer afterwards!  Not my cup of tea.

I don't tolerate foul language very well, and there was sure a lot of that.  Blasphemy?  I don't recall much if any, but definitely very foul.  I watched it through, but wasn't entirely happy with myself for doing so.

I just read that Tonya is now in Dancing with the Stars.  I don't get TV now, but admit I got a kick out of shows like that when I did.  She was a good skater.

[Mono no aware]

After I watched it, I read some of the reviews, and there seemed to be two main strands of criticism.  The first was that it took a flippant attitude towards child and spousal abuse.  At one point, an aging chain-smoking Tonya is giving an interview from her kitchen, and she rolls her eyes and snorts something like, "Nancy gets hit once, and the whole world goes crazy.  Well, I got hit a lot more than once."  It's definitely very cynical and "darkly comical" on that point, but I am a misanthrope so it didn't rub me the wrong way. 

The second was that it looked down on working class people, offering nothing but caricatures instead of characters.  I disagree with that one.  I thought it was an honest treatment of class in America, and I think it's an ivory tower criticism that would prefer to see Rocky-style working class heroes, or perhaps Tarantino fantasies where thugs and goons offer rich quips and long eloquently trashy monologues.  This movie was aiming for more verisimilitude than that.  Lots of people really are just dim.  At one point there's a reporter from Hard Copy who says of the hit men, "these were two of the dumbest boobs in the history of dumb boobs," and he laughs at the parking lot camera footage that indicted them, moving their car every fifteen minutes because "they didn't want to attract attention."  And in the interviews from the real-life characters that run during the credits, it's clear that Tonya's bodyguard was just as self-delusional as he was portrayed.

I didn't know anything about figure skating going into the movie.  It never interested me.  When I was a youngster my mom would watch it, and even then, seeing the glitzy sequined outfits, I knew it wasn't my kind of thing.  But I, Tonya goes into that.  She really was a talented skater, but she came from the wrong background, and it proved to be her undoing.  It's a genuine tragedy.  Even as it shows her getting her start, it's clear that she's not quite a fit.  Her outfits were sewn by her mother, and she didn't like skating to hoity classical music.  I kind of knew it was going to be a treat of a movie when she's at some early competition, and she goes out onto the ice and the announcer comes on and says, "next up is Tonya Harding, skating to 'Sleeping Bag' by ZZ Top."  Oh man.  I "LOL"ed.  Turns out it's true: she really did have "Sleeping Bag" as her skating music.  80s-synth-era ZZ Top!  You can't make this stuff up.

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTpeiTQoWIA[/yt]

[Gerard]

..... and she didn't like skating to hoity classical music. ....

Amazing in that pop music's predominant characteristic is to be hoity whereas what is termed "classical" music is genuinely better, healthier and more profound. 

That attitude is such a shame among many in the working classes and much of the middle and upper classes.  A good number of the greatest composers were from peasant stock.  Beethoven in particular was known to have suffered mightily at the hands of his abusive father.  It's essentially snobbery by the lower classes against their own kind simply because people of a different class saw what was beautiful. 

[Mono no aware]

Amazing in that pop music's predominant characteristic is to be hoity whereas what is termed "classical" music is genuinely better, healthier and more profound. 

That attitude is such a shame among many in the working classes and much of the middle and upper classes.  A good number of the greatest composers were from peasant stock.  Beethoven in particular was known to have suffered mightily at the hands of his abusive father.  It's essentially snobbery by the lower classes against their own kind simply because people of a different class saw what was beautiful.

I think our disagreement here is over the word "hoity."  I meant it in the sense of "haughty," but you read it in terms of "frivolous."

What's the meaning of the phrase 'Hoity-toity'?

Pretentiously self-important, haughty or pompous.

What's the origin of the phrase 'Hoity-toity'?

Many dictionaries also give a second meaning, that is, given to frivolity, silliness or riotousness. That was the original meaning of this term, but has now almost completely died out. Our view of what is hoity-toity now is defined by the 'looking down the nose' manner adopted by characters like Lady Bracknell, as performed by Dame Edith Evans, in the stage and film versions of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.

I don't doubt that some of the great composers rose up from humble beginnings, but at the same time I don't think too many people in rural villages had access to orchestral music.  I would imagine that in the days before recorded music, the peasantry would've been more familiar with things like the jigs and reels and murder ballads they heard at the public houses, because where was a symphony orchestra going to set up?  In the movie Barry Lyndon, the main character is an 18th century commoner who manages his way into the upper classes, whereupon he finally acquires the money to hire his own chamber orchestra.  So even three hundred years ago it was a mark of refinement.  "Folk music" denotes "the music of the people;" the "popular" music.

In this day and age I think a lot of classical music comes as a challenge to many ears (and this is excluding the obvious pieces that transcend the barrier, things like the "Ode to Joy," "Ave Maria," and "Canon in D").  In the early nineties, a nineteen-year-old working-class girl from Oregon was just not likely to appreciate Beethoven's late string quartets over ZZ Top.  And I don't think it would've been snobbery on her part.  I think she could honestly say of a string quartet, "this is boring," and of ZZ Top, "this is awesome."

[Gerard]

I would attribute the challenge people of of today have with classical music is the fact that classical music and folk music (which inspired many of the great composers,  Brahms' Hungarian Dances,  Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies which were really Gypsy folk tunes) literally is too rich for the ear of modern listeners.  I think the peasants of the past with a rich folk tradition were probably more aurally prepared for great compositions when musicians would tour the countryside and perform concerts in solo or small ensembles.  Liszt introduced the peasantry to symphonies and operas  by way of his marvelous transcriptions. Also the Church music traditions had not degraded in any way comparable with today's "worship" music. Virtually everyone had to have some rudimentary knowledge of singing and dancing and playing an instrument or there would be no musical entertainment in the house at all.     

Nowadays, it's like someone who is so used to processed sugar and twinkles, disliking a cake that is less cloyingly sweet because they've been desensitized to what sweetness really is.  I once attended a concert in the 1980s of Howard Jones and being a people watcher, I noticed the crowd which was rhythmically jumping up and down to rhythms that were in cut time or common time, come to a complete standstill when a waltz rhythm was introduced.  Peasants could dance in cut time and common time as well as waltz "broken" time.  Even with the distinctions between accents used in things like mazurkas, polkas or the Viennese waltzes. 

And I think it has gotten worse, a basic unvariagated rhythm is the only thing people are able to comprehend.  Even the pop/rock music of the 1970s is too complex, drawn out and "boring."  You can detect in rap, much of the rhythm of baroque counterpoint minus the melody, theme and variation, musical meaning etc.  But they won't notice that and enrich themselves by exploring more deeply because the 'showbiz' is the big distraction to the bankruptcy of musical ideas.  ZZ Top is exciting more for their beards and videos than they were for the actual music.  Those extramusical ideas made the music seem more exciting. 

Is it any wonder that brides do want Pachelbel's Canon at their weddings?  It's the only four chords they've heard their entire lives in pop music. 

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM[/yt]