1953

1969

Easy Rider

• I was surprised that Jack Nicholson was only in the movie for a fraction of the full running time.
• Nicholson's performance and character definitely are the highlight of the movie, I can see how this could launch a person's career.
• It was a weird movie because it wasn't totally clear to me what was going on with those guys; they never discuss their plans in-depth.

1973

Westworld

...

• "Shut it all down" - It's said in Westworld, and I vaguely remember it being said in Jurassic Park, although maybe it was another film.

...

• The portrayal of the menacing robot is very similar. Arnold said in an interview with Graham Besinger(?) that he was explicitly trying to emulate the performance that was given in Westworld. It wasn't explained how Arnold had come to watch Westworld: had someone in the film industry recommended it to prepare for the movie? Or had he just watched it randomly for fun?

...

I Vitelloni

• "The term vitellone was used in my day to define a young man from a modest family, perhaps a student – but one who had either already gone beyond the programmed schedule for his coursework, or one who did nothing all the time"
• It'd be worth it to go through the movie and extract all the flirtation scenes.
• The guy and his wife in the movie theater, and he flirts with the woman sitting next to him.
• It's very interesting to see what aspects of life were different and what were the same. For example, the loafer son is something I thought was unusual, but here you see it's actually common. Another interesting thing is that while people in the city don't know everyone around them, they do seem to have all of their friends and family in that city. So it's not like nowadays where you'll have people moving constantly, or even maybe 30-40 years ago where people would move across the country.

1954

Seven Samurai

• you'd think the bandits would stop attacking after losing like half their number without having inflicted a proportional number of casualties among their opponents.
  
  • Later: It's explained that the bandits *have* to attack, since they're running out of food. But it still seems to me that they'd very likely have easier targets somewhere else.
• saving private ryan definitely reaches levels of brutality that seven samurai doesn't.
• Maybe the best thing about seven samurai is that I love the seven samurai. I can't really say that about Yojimbo. All of the seven samurai are honest and brave, and each seems to embody a different likeable trait: 1) strategic knowledge (Kambei, the leader), 2) enthusiasm/eagerness to learn (Katsushiro, the young one), 3) humor/silliness/energeticness/resourcefulness (Kikuchiyo), etc.
• The first time I watched this movie, back in high school, I was spotting one idea after another that was reused in George Lucas' and Steven Spielberg's movies (Star Wars, Saving Private Ryan, etc.). When I rewatched it this time, I didn't really have anything like that jump out at me.

1957

Throne of Blood

• Seems like an earlier attempt at what he'd later do with Ran.

1961

Yojimbo

• The camera pans are jerky
• It feels a LOT like a Western in terms of how it's set up.
• The writing feels a lot like a play.
• The guy says "chop off one of their arms" to deal with bullies, which is exactly what happens in the Star Wars cantina scene.
• A lot of the characters are exaggerated, but it's pretty entertaining.
• Yojimbo's character reminds me a lot of Clint Eastwood's western characters.
• The "I'm a wanted fugitive. They'll crucify me if I'm caught" line is extremely close to what's said in the cantina.
• Cutting to the chopped-off arm is exactly the same as in the cantina. And the extremely-fast fight is exactly like in the cantina.
• Yojimbo's reserved demeanor also reminds me of Obi Wan. There's a kind of classiness that it adds to the film.
  
  • I'm reminded of what Larry David said about what's-her-name who plays Elaine: she added a certain patina(?) to Seinfeld. I think Ben Kanobi did the same for Star Wars.
• Kurosawa's good at depicting a kind of 'strong' female character who you wouldn't see in American cinema: someone who's ruthless. The wife is the one who suggests killing Yojimbo after he's helped.
• In Yojimbo, they show many characters being afraid of fighting. They dedicate screen time to that. It raises the stakes. Whereas in most American films I feel like they would never do that.
• It's always a pleasure to see the large groups of extras that Kurosawa puts together. They're always interesting to watch.
• The movie definitely has (suffers from?) the now-extreme tendency of Hollywood movies to have the main character's plans play out nicely.

1969

Easy Rider

• I was surprised that Jack Nicholson was only in the movie for a fraction of the full running time.
• Nicholson's performance and character definitely are the highlight of the movie, I can see how this could launch a person's career.
• It was a weird movie because it wasn't totally clear to me what was going on with those guys; they never discuss their plans in-depth.

1973

Westworld

• Movies that seem to clearly draw from this film:
  • Jurassic Park
    • "Shut it all down" - It's said in Westworld, and I vaguely remember it being said in Jurassic Park, although maybe it was another film.
  • The Terminator
    • The portrayal of the menacing robot is very similar. Arnold said in an interview with Graham Besinger(?) that he was explicitly trying to emulate the performance that was given in Westworld. It wasn't explained how Arnold had come to watch Westworld: had someone in the film industry recommended it to prepare for the movie? Or had he just watched it randomly for fun?
  • The Truman Show
    • They share the two-sided story, where you see the person in the environment and the guys behind the scenes, directing everything.

1977

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

• close encounters is like jaws with aliens (and jaws was "duel" with a shark), and then ET is close encounters without the horror.
• it'd be interesting to catalogue all the ways that spielberg enhances scenes that would otherwise be kind of tame
  
  • He has a violent sandstorm in the opening scene.
  • He'll have crowds of extras watching what the main characters are doing.
  • He'll put the scene in a more-exotic set than is probably realistic
  • When the frenchman is presenting his results, it's in a huge stadium, but there are so few people present that it would be more realistic to have it in a board room.
  • He'll put something else interesting in the scene, either in the foreground or the background or to the side.
  • When Dreyfuss has the really big model and the camera pans to show it off, the scene would be kind of quiet, so Spielberg puts a TV in the foreground that's playing a soap opera.
  • He had a shot of Dreyfuss' truck making a turn off a highway, where the truck sideswipes the guardrail.
• spielberg uses the desert locations and extras that he'd later use for raiders of the lost ark
• the clouds effect he uses when the kid is kidnapped is something I believe he later uses in raiders of the lost ark.
• Reviewing it, I kind of agree that Richard Dreyfuss is maybe a little too comedic. But the script is also kind of written that way, unless those were ad-libs.
• Dreyfuss has to cry at the dinner scene where he's piling mashed potatoes. That's the part that I think made other actors turn down the part.
• The scene where the aliens go through the tollbooth is just ridiculous.
• I feel like cutting back and forth from the Dreyfuss story to the government officials doesn't give enough time to get into the emotional state that Dreyfuss' character is in, and it also takes away the mystery, because the audience knows what he doesn't know.
• The whole "let's meet at the Devil's Tower" contrivance(?) seems not-well-thought-out, because during the movie the aliens are established as being so powerful that they can abduct pretty much whoever they want.
  
  • Also, there's no way for Dreyfuss' character to know where to go if he hadn't seen the image on TV.
• There's a surprising number of product references. IDK if it was paid or not.
• It'd be interesting to catalogue all of the humor in the movie.
• The mother is terrified of the aliens when they show up, but also then seeks to go to the Devil's Tower. It's a little contradictory.

1980

The Blue Brothers

• The "list of items owned by the protagonist" comedy bit from Austin Powers may have been inspired by the one in the Blues Brothers.
• The movie starts out pretty slow.
• As of the first car chase this movie is seeming really stupid.
• The whole sequence is caused by their going through a red light; it doesn't seem to advance the story at all.
• Going through the mall seems totally unnecessary / unmotivated, and the actual sequence shows the cars going through shop windows to a gratuitous extent.
• There are shots that are dragged out to an unnecessary extent.
• The dialog is really flat.
• I stopped watching during the scene where they're eating at the expensive restaurant.

1985

• the music in this movie is amazing.
• the film is so realistic that the occasional exaggerated aggressive behavior is a bit hard to buy.
  
  • saburo being more aggressive than necessary in contradicting his father's idea.
  • taro grabbing more power
• Why does the gourd song make fun of taro?
• the movie feels like a play.
• the weird thing about the attack on hidetura in the third castle is that it's depicted as a huge battle, but he only had an escort of 30 men with him, and he had both taro's and ____'s troops against him.
• the killed soldiers have ridiculous numbers of arrows sticking out of them.
• does hidetura go crazy from smoke inhalation? Or is it just the stress of the attack on him? Because he seems to have a sudden transformation at the moment he tries to commit seppuku and can't find a blade. That seems to be the point at which he goes nuts. He then seems to regain his sanity briefly before going nuts again when he meets tsurumaru (the son whose eyes he had gouged out). And then he regains his sanity when saburo comes and gets him.
• The weird thing is that some of the dialog is very stylized, but most(?) of the dialog feels very realistic.
• By the halfway mark the sons have already attacked the castle.
• The ending is done very well. It's just one gut-punch after another in a very short span of time. The earlier parts are (understandably?) slower-paced, which I found made it harder to get emotional.
• I thought the movie did a great job of depicting (realistically or not) the terror of being in a castle that's being overrun.
• The 'prepare to die' line by Kurogane at the end is hard-core.

1992

Supercop

• The stunts really pick up in the last 20 minutes of the movie. That's where it gets to about the same level as a (modern?) James Bond movie's action sequence.

2000

Battle Royale

• The movie is well-made. The cinematography, acting, pacing, comedy, etc. is all well-done.
• The movie hilariously violates the expectation you have about how authority figures (teachers, soldiers) treat students. The played-totally-straight satire reminds me of Starship Troopers.
• I can totally get why Tarantino would wish that he'd made this movie more than any other movie since he's become a director. It's got that blend of humor and violence and surprise that he loves.
• This movie is really funny.
• The main guy starts with a pot lid as his weapon.
• "You never got to taste those cookies, did you?" And then it cuts to the teacher eating the cookies.
• Man, when they showed that map of the island, it's amazing how perfect OFP/Arma is for replicating that. It's exactly the same size, with the same idea of having many focal points (instead of a single major city or total wilderness).
• They have great characters who react in realistic ways.
  
  • The two people (maybe four, considering the hangings) who commit suicide rather than play.
  • The people with the megaphone who say "Let's all just meet up and think through this together"
• Having the romance talks ("Do you like ---?") with the typical background music juxtaposed against the theme of the movie makes for a pretty bizarre experience.
• The kitchen scene where the female friends all start distrusting each other made me think of Lord of the Flies.
• The little girl they got to play young Mitsuko really looks like the older Mitsuko.
• The wiki article says the director agreed to do the movie because the book reminded him of his experience as a 15yo working in a factory for the japanese during WW2. I *guess* the movie kind of succeeds at painting it as ridiculous for adults to send teenagers to their deaths, but the vast majority of the movie is just showing the teenagers dying in different ways. I guess you could say the movie is *also* showing the different reactions people can have to being put in that situation, but I'm not sure how realistic those reactions were (as in, what % reacted in each way), so I'm not sure what we're supposed to learn beyond "This is a way that people can react".

2011

Cowboys and Aliens

• Liked the fusion of genres: western, sci-fi, and a little horror (for the abduction flashbacks)
• I really liked when they played it straight and realistic; it felt very immersive.
• I got taken out of the immersion when I saw the cowboys do things that seemed to clearly be things that people wouldn't actually do, like not running away when facing a *clearly* superior force. And throughout the movie they continued to carry guns around like they were useful, when it became clear during the first encounter that guns don't do much damage.
• All the actors were good except for that one guy who played the bratty son. It may have just been the script, and it may have been because they put him right at the beginning of the movie, where everything up until then has been pretty realistic, but I remember watching his first scene and going "ugh". I feel like the guy from the hateful eight who was in this movie could've maybe played that part.

Check this out:
http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound ... directors/


Woody Allen (Annie Hall, Manhattan) - Top 10 favorite films
The 400 Blows (1959) – Francois Truffaut
8½ (1963) – Federico Fellini
Amarcord (1972) – Federico Fellini
The Bicycle Theives (1948) – Vittorio de Sica
Citizen Kane (1941) – Orson Welles
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) – Luis Bunel
La grand illusion (1937) – Jean Renoir
Paths of Glory (1957) – Stanley Kubrick
Rashomon (1950) – Akira Kurosawa
The Seventh Seal (1957) – Ingmar Bergman


Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill)
Apocalypse Now (1976) – Francis Ford Coppola
The Bad News Bears (1976) – Michael Ritchie
Carrie (1976) – Brian De Palma
Dazed and Confused (1993) – Richard Linklater
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) – Sergio Leone
The Great Escape (1963) – John Sturges
His Girl Friday (1939) – Howard Hawks
Jaws (1975) – Steven Spielberg
Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971) – Roger Vadium
Rolling Thunder (1997) – John Flynn
Sorcerer (1977) – William Friedkin
Taxi Driver (1976) – Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull, Goodfellas)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – Stanley Kubrick
8½ (1963) – Federico Fellini
Ashes and Diamonds (1958) – Andrzej Wajda
Citizen Kane (1941) – Orson Welles
The Leopard (1963) – Luchino Visconti
Paisa (1946) – Roberto Rossellini
The Red Shoes (1948) – Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger
The River (1951) – Jean Renoir
Salvatore Giuliano (1962) – Francesco Rosi
The Searchers (1956) – John Ford
Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) – Mizoguchi Kenji
Vertigo (1958) – Alfred Hitchcock

Read more at http://collider.com/sight-sound-directo ... XYr5Bbz.99
Read more at http://collider.com/sight-sound-directo ... XYr5Bbz.99
Read more at http://collider.com/sight-sound-directo ... XYr5Bbz.99