Talk About Movies: Part 4

lol My older cousin took me to see Animal House...I was 15. I had never enjoyed a movie so much up until then. Did not know they could DO those things in a movie

What do these directors all have in common:

Michael Mann
Alfred Hitchcock
Arthur Penn
Sergio Leone
Akira Kurosawa
Sidney Lumet
Ridley Scott
Spike Lee
Orson Welles
Paul Thomas Anderson
Stanley Kubrick
Federico Fellini
Howard Hawkes
Quentin Tarrantino
Ingmar Bergman
Sofia Coppolla
David Lynch
Stanley Kramer
Robert Altman

They’ve never been in my kitchen?

No Oscar?

Just finished Mel Brooks' autobiography, All About Me!

Just a delight...he's such a great storyteller. What a marvelous man.

Not sure I ever told the story about the time Mel Brooks called me on the phone.

Back in late 70s/early 80s, my parents would take a two week vacation to the Caribbean every year...to get away from NJ winters and us kids. Well, on their first trip (I think it was Caneel Bay in the Virgin Islands), they happened to meet Mel and his wife Anne Bancroft, and they became vacation buddies. all four were big tennis fans and they played lots of tennis and had dinner together every night.

This went on for a few years, The Brooks' and my parents would meet up in the Caribbean every year for fun and laughs.

I never got to go with them then, so I never got to meet the two movies stars. I was quite jealous. Before they went on one such trip, I asked my Dad to get something signed by them for me, at least, since I was going to be stuck in cold and snowy New Jersey. Instead, I got a phone call:

"Hello?"

"Is this Dominic? I'm Mel Brooks. Your father said you were a big fan."

"I am! Hello, Mr. Brooks!" oh my god I had so many questions

"I just have one thing to tell you, are you ready?"

"Yes!"

"Your father wanted to remind you to shovel the driveway. So get off your ass. Bye!"

And he hung up.

That would be a good thread, real life run-ins with Hollywood ppl/musicians etc

I met a few semi-famous TV people playing poker. I never knew who they were. They would get up and disappear from the table once in awhile, and everyone else would be like, "you know that's so-and-so?" And I would always be like, "no, who's that?" And, "what's that?"

Reality TV and streaming really diluted the celebrity gene-pool.

The only ones I knew were the brother from Everybody loves Raymond and the guy who married Zhang Ziyi.

I'm like Esteban. On the rare occasion I come across somebody "known", it's always a few minutes later that it strikes me: "Hey that was...."

On the movie subject, saw a few minutes of a doc on Blake Edwards on PBS this afternoon. Most of what I saw was around the Pink Panther series, and of course they showed clips. Good times.

< Ozu

in beijing poker scene there'd often be times where someone who was a huge celebrity would join our games and none of the expats (80% of the pool) had any idea - definitely think they really enjoyed just being able to sit down with others for a few hours and be treated like just another dude

inevitably, after they leave, one of the locals would point out that such and such is so famous but again because we still had no idea who they were (expat bubble) it was more of an "oh neat" rather than "oh that's who that was" because you still hadn't seen any of their movies nor listened to any of their music anyway

makes sense though, one of those games literally ran around a chinese movie producer

I'm like the Woody Allen character in Zelig. I have had lots of unlikely encounters with celebrities for some reason.

Add Fincher to the list.

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Hit Man - the reviews for this are over the top. It's good but hardly brilliant. and if Glen Powell is a mild mannered college professor, I'm the Pope.

I just watched Remembering Gene Wilder on Netflix and it’s fantastic. A ton of Mel Brooks obviously. Young Frankenstein is just so ****ing good.

I tried to watch it and gave up after less than 30 minutes. I guess I'll go back and watch it while multi-tasking to try and get through it to see if it gets better.

I've been meaning to get around to this one for a while. Expectations are high. A handful of Eastwood's movies are mediocre, but his good stuff is really good, and there's a lot of it. He deserves to be in the conversation alongside Scorsese and Spielberg when it comes to the greatest American film directors of the past however-many-years. Unforgiven, A Perfect World, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino are some of the highest quality dramas I've ever seen.

The Insider... Michael Mann is simply a great solid film maker.

I watched it for only the second time last night when I came to the realization that the movie isn't about an insider from the Tobacco industry... it's a critical narrative about an insider from the Journalistic industry, and it does so beautifully.

unforgiven is one of the greatest movies ever and mystic river was very entertaining but man gran torino was one of the worst things I've ever seen.

Are you high? Gran Torino was awesome.

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I’m with RBK, Gran Torino was shite.

I'm halfway thru The Emperor Jones, starring the great Paul Robeson. It's quite extraordinary in about 17 ways. Didn't even know it was based on a Eugene O'Neill play that came first! And where is that great biopic blockbuster movie about Robeson anyway, long overdue.