JCC Amph The JCC's Top 100 Films of All Time Part II: Street Fighter Boogaloo (Now Complete)

Somewhere along the line somebody really needs to set up watch parties.

 

He’s a very minor element.

 

I wouldn't worry about it. I don't recall the kid ever becoming a particularly big deal in them.

 

Funny thing is that line is cut out of the director's cut. Instead he says something like "I knew your mother" to Balian.

We have these. Just for bad movies though. (@JoinTheSchwarz when next movie night??)

 

Agreed. I also enjoy how Schultz savors teaching Calvin about Dumas and exposing Calvin's ignorance. It is the very thing that leads to his death. Calvin is humiliated and makes a fatal attempt at regaining the upper hand after losing face.

Full Metal Jacket suffers from losing the two best characters of the first half. Ermey is terrific and rehashing the same character he played in "The Boys in Company C" but he's so good at it. Like a number of Kubrick's films Modine doesn't have the charisma to be the lead. Apparently Kubrick talked to Anthony Michael Hall for the part but they had a falling out and Kubrick settled on Modine. Hall is a better actor than Modine and it could have led Hall in a whole new direction.

Witness was during a time when Ford was branching out in different directions. Here and The Mosquito Coast, Presumed Innocent & even Working Girl show off his acting chops. He could have been more than just the grumpy action hero had he wanted.

Seen: 9/100
Thumbs Up (recommend): 9

 

I haven’t seen any of the sequels but I’d like it if in one of them the dog gets taken and Nick and Nora have to use their special set of skills to find and rescue it but then decide no they can’t be bothered.

 

As someone who obviously cares very much about history, I am in the middle on historical accuracy. Accuracy in general, whether to history, technical details, visuals, whatever, is generally beneficial and increases immersion, and there’s always someone out there who knows the details and will be bothered by unnecessary errors or changes. There’s not really any downside to getting it right, and a lot of issues with perpetuating genuinely harmful fictional conventions (a classic example is people genuinely believing in the real world that “shoot them in the knee” is a real thing people can and should do). I’m generally in favor of accuracy. But there is also something to be said for a good story, and sometimes the pressures of fiction militate towards compression, simplification, composite characters, etc. And sometimes you just want to tell an adventure story with history as a background.

In general, I think a lot depends on what kind of film it is. If it’s purporting to be the true depiction of a little-known story, one where people are likely to take the film at face value, there is a correspondingly increased responsibility to present the facts as accurately as they can. You can point to something like Michael Oher having to deal with The Blind Side turning his life, as a living person, into a convenient little fairy-tale story to see the issues with fictionalizing a story that will be taken seriously. On that score, I don’t see many people being likely to take the obviously gussied-up adventure story Kingdom of Heaven as the gospel on the Crusades, even if it is built around real people and real events. It’s only a few steps up from something like Hugo that is openly conscripting a real historical figure into a fantasy tribute-story. What bugs me more is the kind of changes that are made. It’s not just about rearranging characters or events or creating simplified hero-villain dynamics, but injecting this very silly sort of anachronistic, ahistoric vein of twentieth-century liberal humanism into the story, something Scott is almost universally guilty of. It’s at its silliest in Gladiator, where this bizarre fantasy of returning the Roman Empire to republicanism plays out, a completely ludicrous modern projection that rather transparently tries to transplant modern values back into history to pander to modern audiences. It’s very silly and really quite unnecessary. All of Scott’s protagonists have to be these modern men transplanted back into history to prevent audiences from having to grapple with actual history, which can be a very deleterious form of distortion. The director’s cut of KOH goes a good way to tempering the theatrical cut’s greater emphasis on injecting a guy into a vast sequence of religious wars to go “who really cares about religion, why don’t we all coexist?” [audience cheers], but it’s still got a kind of dopily modernist thrust. I like the movie a lot, I own the blu-ray, but it is a movie that tends to reinforce my general preference for historical accuracy even if I’m hardly a stickler for it.

 

I just like the scale of the film. There aren't a lot of movies that convey a sense of big world big events as well as KoH. The absurdity of the son of the looters and most recent occupiers asking "why can't we all just get along" for me just emphasizes the epic scale of the misadventure. Not as well as this:

 

Well said.

But sadly again, to get a broad audience, the film must be entertaining first, and educational in the periphery.

I think most people would be genuinely uncomfortable to the point of disgusted if the film depicted era-appropriate mindsets, mannerisms, and morals.

At best, you get an audience who recognize the authenticity, but don't really invest in the film because there are no characters for them to empathize or identify with.

Same reason movies about prison almost always have either a wrongfully imprisoned character, or one who the audience believe to be genuinely reformed.

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That said, I would be curious to see a studio, perhaps in conjunction with a university or historical body, attempt to create as historically accurate a re-enactment as possible for some event. I doubt very much it would be successful financially, but if might become a time capsule of sorts, both for getting close to the realism of that era, and what our current interpretation of that era was.

Perceptions in history ride trends. You can see it in historians of the Late 20th century v historians of the early 20th or late 19th or earlier.

Every generation thinks they know better. Even people devoted to truly revealing the past.

 

yeah I'm probably being a bit unfair, its just he always seems to do that grimace and over-ennunciates . But most actors have certain expressions or things they repeat, Robert Redford always does double-takes to indicate surprise.

 

At last, I have found my long-lost twin brother!

You rang?

IMO, Master & Commander is the closest we've seen to that recently. While it is a work of fiction, it was inspired by many RL incidents and people, and the book's author and the script writers both chose to keep the characters' attitudes and values true to their era.

 

Is 20 years ago recently

 

Yes.

 

Im surprised the books haven’t been adapted into a big budget prestige TV series.

Maybe it’s the ocean setting that’s too daunting. Or the books aren’t available.

 

The general consensus among fans is that the movie didn't make enough profit for a big budget TV show to seem like a wise investment.

 

Especially as Russell Crowe was a big paycheck at the time.

I also read once he was not a fan of sequels.

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I worked at the theater when it was released. It did not draw well.

It straddles the action/adventure/war market and the sensitive/introspective/period drama market...which makes fans of either none too happy.

Now, if you are a fan of both markets, or movies in general...it is just awesome.

Only problem with that movie is the sound mixer should be arrested...It was a constant argument with customers about the film being far too quiet in the soft spoken scenes, and ear bleeding loud in the storm/battle scenes.

By the end of the run, we had a projectionist sitting at the volume dial turning it up and down 4 or 5 times through the course of a showing.

 

This is exactly what I mean. Well-put.

Except for the enemy being French instead of Americans like in the novel

Anyway, I think Apollo 13 might be a good candidate for the grand prize for accuracy in a historical film... if 1969/1970 counts as ancient history.

 

Crowe has said he would happily return to play Jack Aubrey again. Of course he'd have to play him at a much later stage of his career, but with all the books that have been written, that's not an obstacle.

As for the sound, I believe the film won an award for sound effects. It sure sounded real to me.

 

It does not.

Time changes many things. I never thought I'd see Harrison Ford in another Star Wars movie, and he showed up in 2!

You can have great sound effects, and still screw up the levels. Watching the film at home, there is certainly a range of volume, but it doesn't seem to be the issue it was in the theater. So either they fixed it for media release, or the problem is entirely within the full 7.1 DTS surround sound, which I don't play at home.

 

Master & Commander does so many things right. It’s what you get when everything about the movie comes together to serve a solid, entertaining narrative. It may be 20 years old but it wouldn’t look any better if had been made last week at twice the budget. They might have had to find someone else to play Russell Crowe. The movie is basically timeless. It will look good 50 years from now.

 

20 years ago I was in high school

and so, 20 years ago I might've joined a Master & Commander crew, but who knows...if given the opportunity today I might still join lol