The Official Movie Thread

CASSETTEISGOD said:
These are the two I picked up yesterday, good to know you rate them highly! $12 well spent in that case.
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Two great choices. Hatchet is a really good serial killer flick, one of the best of its type to pull a bit from the Psycho playbook. It clearly had to be somewhat of an influence to American Psycho in some regards too. Lisa is full on illogical dream horror like the Italians do best. A masterpiece really. Did the version you get come with the alternate cut House of Exorcism? An interesting curio to say the least, but the original cut is in a league of its own.

Bava's Planet of the Vampires is also worth seeing, although it really should be called "Planet of the Zombies". Watch it back to back with Alien and the influence is obvious. I'll also give a recommendation for Roy Colt and Winchester Jack. Bava only did a few westerns and none are fan favorites as he more or less admitted to having no real interest in the genre and doing them for the paycheck but Roy Colt sticks out a bit because its a parody. Completely frivolous but a fun send-up nonetheless.
 
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you weren't asking me, but i've seen 19 so far and haven't disliked a single one. haven't seen most of his late period stuff though, some of which i suspect obmax will recommend - i own some of it but i've been saving it for a rainy day. i'm especially looking forward to THE WRONG MAN, MARNIE, THE BIRDS (which i saw when i was fairly young but barely remember), FRENZY and I CONFESS.

of those i have seen, i'd rank them thus (click the spoiler tags to read the capsules i wrote over on RYM, mostly just for early and less known ones - the top 6 i haven't written anything worthy on, though i plan to):

19) The Lodger: A Story of London Fog (1927)
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Hitchcock's early career is where he finds his footing as a technician, but also as a distinct auteur. Views may differ on where the Hitchcock we know and love really began, though he told Truffaut that THE LODGER was essentially his first film. The material is silly even by Hitchcock's standards and you could carve a candle out of some of the acting, but it features a primitive form of his "wrong man" plot device, and an array of his visual trademarks such as handcuffs, feet, clocks, and those enticing golden curls (oh how Hitchcock must've pined for colour). It's also an early demonstration of his capacity for building a mood to fever pitch, framing and lighting images in a way that enhances not only their menace but their beguiling, dreamlike quality--lessons learned from the German expressionists, no doubt. THE LODGER would doubtlessly have proved more interesting, and even more Hitchcockian, were it not for the somewhat inexplicable (or maybe I'm not cynical enough) studio interference on behalf of Ivor Norvello's crystal clean image - a film about the irresistable allure of the dark became a film about how appearances can be deceiving and jealousy even moreso.

18) Spellbound (1945)
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Typical of Hitchcock's lesser works in that despite being annoyingly literal, shamelessly pulpy and completely and utterly ludicrous, it's weird enough to be consistently fascinating anyway.

17) Young and Innocent (1937)
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YOUNG AND INNOCENT is a bit of a lark with barely any attempt to hide the plot contrivances (or blackface lel), but the script it works with is good fun, and it's the ultimate "wrong man" prototype (early on a character even uses the term). It's really most fascinating as a companion piece for REBECCA, featuring a prologue that may as well be introducing the latter as well.

16) Foreign Correspondent (1940)
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FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT is rightfully seen as something of a dry run for NORTH BY NORTHWEST in part, with a wisecracking protagonist pulled into a conspiracy of which he has no comprehension, including a scene in which he's lost amid a wide open field of creaking windmills, plane wheeling ominously overhead. Assassinations (including a startling POV headshot through a reporter's camera lens), druggings and torture abound, but the real shadow hanging over this 1940 production is inevitably the war, and the possibility of American intervention.

Not long before he's shot in the head (or is he?), a pacifist diplomat is asked for his feelings about the war, and his response is joltingly somber: "My boy, I feel very old, and sad, and helpless." The rest of the film, though not without numerous moments of levity (including one of Hitchcock's less convincing romances between Joel McCrea and Laraine Day, neither of whom were Hitchcock's first choices for the parts, nor proved as memorable as Herbert Marshall's complex villain), delves down into deeper shades of war-fraught dark, culminating with a plane crashing to the sea, a suicide and, ultimately, an apocalyptic fade to black.

The plane set piece is not only a tour de force of early disaster filmmaking but quite astonishingly bleak, as both the story and the music fade away to be replaced by the gnawing drone of engines, thunderous explosions, the voices and faces of terrified passengers dwarfed by first the metallic squeals of the dying aircraft, then the crashing of the ocean's seismic waves. The metaphor of a plane going down mid-way between the US and UK certainly wasn't lost on Hitchcock, just as the nonsensical confusion and violence of the overarching spy plot also mirrored the experience of being dragged into a war beyond one's control; the persuasive argument, aimed at American audiences, is that war is anathema to everything the United States stands for, and action must be taken before it swallows up all the light in the world. If the film wasn't among Hitchcock's most popular, it can only be because it proved too close for comfort, despairing at a time when the people longed for nuggets of hope and glory.

15) The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
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What Hitchcock mastered better than any other American filmmaker of the early sound period wasn't use of the sound itself, but the weight of the silence around it. He cited Fritz Lang's DESTINY as a formative influence, and when watching 1934's minor breakthrough THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH there's no doubt he kept an eye on Lang's progression into the sound era. A taut conspiracy thriller, THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH is notable for the intense Langian chill to its tone (complete with Peter Lorre of M fame, upstaging everyone to an almost embarrassing extent despite knowing no English whatsoever), with dialogue seeming to drift out into the night, small words amid a vast, overwhelming plot to which we are barely privy. A sung scene in a church is notable too as the first laugh-out-loud comic flourish in Hitchcock's oeuvre (that whole crazy sequence is dependent on plot points that Hitch allegedly, and hilariously, abandoned due to a lack of "plausibility"), and most of all an assassination sequence that rivals anything else in his entire career for sheer spellbinding tension, tick-tock inevitability and brutal poetry. It remains a little unsung, perhaps due to its ridiculously jumbled plot and awkward dialogue, or the fact that it's a film of ideas and scenes without a strong centre, but it's an essential transitional work, paving the way for an original voice to emerge. Not to mention that it's really fucking weird.

14) Suspicion (1941)
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It seems that with SUSPICION Hitchcock set out to right the romantic wrongs of FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT. This time he was allowed Joan Fontaine (his preferred heroine for FC), and matching her up with Cary Grant at first seems a stroke of genius, as the electric, ridiculous pair run away with the first act moreso than in any Hitch film to date, with the possible exception of the back end of THE 39 STEPS. At this point, there's no indication that the film has darkness on its mind, until Grant's rogueish charm starts to crack and a self-destructive, manipulative and borderline-abusive rat emerges. The terrific Grant is so adept at retaining his charm while simultaneously implying his own moral ambiguity that one is forced into Fontaine's shoes, questioning both prior perceptions and newfound doubts, sympathetic yet frustrated with her inability to challenge his bullshit. The quips keep on coming but they're increasingly less funny and more uneasy, as the narrative follows a similar path to many of real life's most broken relationships. Even the controversial finale - imposed upon Hitchcock by the studios but a lot better than the original, happier ending - is more of a foolish ray of hope in a doomed situation, although the script's suggestion that this whole thing is Fontaine's fault as much as Grant's is probably a reflection of Hitchcock's needy desire for women to support him despite his flaws, and seems absurd today. Nicholas Ray would make the best version of this film a decade later with masterpiece In A Lonely Place.

13) Strangers on a Train (1951)
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12) Sabotage (The Woman Alone) (1936)
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If THE 39 STEPS showed Hitchcock's comic prowess coming to the fore, SABOTAGE stooped into much darker territory and turned its humour inward. Although it pulls a final punch compared to its source material (Conrad's 'The Secret Agent', in which the grieving wife commits suicide), its "happy ending" remains stained with the pall of death, and the suspense in the meantime is nigh on unbearable. That's not to say that SABOTAGE isn't funny, but Hitchcock is in wryly self-reflexive mood; its principal terrorist owns a movie theatre and hides a bomb inside a film. Hitch may well have been anticipating the film's reception when a man tells the terrorist: "you must've been showing some funny sort of films, I dare day. Y'know, a bit too hot." In a more general way, it's clear at this point that Hitchcock understands the ways in which real life and cinematic narratives inform and illuminate one another. Let me cite two obvious and ingenious examples (spoiler warning):

1) A cop eavesdrops on his suspect from around the back of the theater, and we hear what sounds like some form of torture, until a cut reveals that what we were hearing was the film that's playing, and the suspect and friends are just lounging around.

2) A grieving sister's enjoyment of a cartoon turns to sadness as the song 'Who Killed Cock Robin?' reminds of her brother's death, compounded by the fact that our abiding memory of the brother is his interacting with a pair of caged birds, in a cage which turns out to be another bomb no less.

SABOTAGE is littered with these kinds of connections between film and reality, and it emphasises the ways in which this film relates to *our* reality. In our age of rampant terrorism, somehow the film seems scarier and bolder than ever; a suspenseful comic thriller with the violent death of a central child character could not be made today. Sylvia Sydney is terrific as the lead female (although the way in which her character is kept quiet for her own good by John Loder's Ted is somewhat outdated), and the interaction between Oskar Homolka's low-key, heavily accented dialogue and his crazy eyebrows deserves a review all of its own (my favourite moment: when he throws out his hand and almost knocks a model yacht off the shelf, possibly an accident of the actor's rather than the character's, as he tells his wife "I know how you feel. You go to bed now, what you want is a good cry".)

11) The 39 Steps (1935)
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Unlike its predecessors, THE 39 STEPS isn't Lang's, nor is it Murnau's; it's Hitchcock's through and through. The plot is a wisp - a dime spy novel revolving around a vague whatchamacallit - but the journey is what matters. Robert Donat's everyman is mistaken for a murderer and so invents one for himself complete with a manufactured family history, he's mistaken for a diplomat and so unnecessarily offers a near-perfect impression for a receptive audience (it's us, of course), he and Madeleine Carroll's Pamela are mistaken for a married couple while handcuffed together against their will, and so they bicker and flirt like there's no tomorrow. The conservative desire to be freed into normalcy butting up against the erotic desire to be swept helplessly into danger; wish fulfillment fantasies made real time and again, indulging our naughtiest impulses. In the final shot, he takes her hand and the empty handcuff dangles between them like the promise of sex to come.

10) Rope (1948)
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long time since i've seen this, not confident in the placement. i recall it being an awesome black comedy until a rather annoyingly sanctimonious ending.

9) The Lady Vanishes
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THE LADY VANISHES is the penultimate, most successful, most acclaimed and, thankfully, best British Hitch film. It anticipates STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and perhaps even Mann's THE TALL TARGET in the way it utilises the sounds, movements and claustrophobic interiors of a moving train. It was his funniest to date (the pair of cricket-obsessed "fence sitting" stiff-upper-lip Brits are priceless), but its humour is anxious and vaguely surreal, particularly during a second act mystery viewed from an unreliable perspective and peppered with a host of highly amusing international caricatures as audience stand-ins ("my theory was a perfectly good one, the facts were misleading!"). This is a film that flaunts and probes its movie-ness, and that's a pertinent approach given its acknowledged proximity to WW2 and the Third Reich's manipulation of images for propagandistic purposes. By doubting the credibility of Margaret Lockwood's protagonist and anticipating the audience's array of responses to her, THE LADY VANISHES continually highlights the terrifying power of cinema's artificies and illusions and the madness inherent to suspending one's disbelief, never moreso than during a comic set piece in a magician's funhouse of sorts - a gleeful nod to Trick Film tradition.

8) Saboteur (1942)
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While it's often dismissed as another prototype for NORTH BY NORTHWEST, SABOTEUR a film with a cult appeal all its own. This strangest of all Hitchcock's early films not only openly affiliates itself with those on the margins (a band of moralistic eccentrics side with our protagonist while the upper class "law-abiding citizens" tend to be involved in nefarious activities) but seems the product of them, a Hollywood suspense film doubling almost as a slightly pretentious outsider road movie. A young factory worker (Robert Cummings) with "a saboteur's disposition" is framed for a crime of which he had no knowledge and flees across a California shot as a lunar landscape, encountering everything from a stubbornly moralistic (but a-legal) blind pianist to the ramshackle democracy of a circus troupe who understand all too well what it is to be abandoned, ostracised and harassed by the system. Cold silences result from Hitchcock reacquainting with his inner Lang; a villain digresses into a monologue about keeping his son's hair long because when he was a boy he had "beautiful golden curls".

The overwrought script - sometimes the bane of Hitchcock's work - only enhances the atmosphere of desperation and doom, perhaps because it's spoken by some of Hitchcock's most shaded, convincing characters. Similarly, a climax atop the Statue of Liberty which seems obvious on paper possesses a weird, sad intensity on the screen, and lends surprising resonance to the themes at play. Nobody would mistake SABOTEUR for one of Hitchcock's most accomplished or flawless films, but it's among his most idiosyncratic and otherworldly; a big-hearted gesture of cameraderie toward those who've slipped through society's cracks, and a savage fuck you to the country keeping them there.

7) Rebecca (1940)
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In 1939, Hitchcock gathered his things and shipped off to Hollywood, beginning what would prove to be a turbulent relationship with stingy, controlling producer David O. Selznick, who had signed him on a seven year contract around the same time he produced the (inflation-adjusted) highest grossing film of all time, GONE WITH THE WIND. Nevertheless, Hitchcock hit the ground running, bringing Selznick his second success (and second Best Picture Oscar) in as many years with REBECCA, a gothic fever dream based on Daphne Du Maurier's classic novel. It is a film which precedes PSYCHO in its association of women with water (and then fire), both ways in which men can drown, and anticipates VERTIGO in how its lead female is a projection of the lead male's desire, to be moulded as he pleases. Word has it that Selznick tweaked the final product significantly and that Hitchcock may have desired the film to be less accessible, but it is nevertheless a deeply perturbing psychological drama, a leap forward in stylistic confidence which oozes disquiet from every pore.

The plot is simple; a naive young woman (Joan Fontaine) becomes smitten with a rich man (Laurence Olivier, outstanding) who's recently lost his wife (washed up on a beach, they say, like the victim in YOUNG AND INNOCENT), and they wed and live together in his mansion. Maxim will later admit that the dead woman he identified as his wife was actually "some unknown woman, unclaimed, belonging nowhere", but he may as well be talking about the unnamed protagonist, another convenient, more malleable and domesticised replacement for the wife over whom he had no power or control. Fontaine's protagonist is not only nameless but identified solely via the needs and expectations of others, endlessly haunted by the unseen spectre of the seemingly all-powerful woman she's been chosen to replace, and by the ocean into which Manderley sometimes seems submerged. We never see the late, titular ex-wife in the flesh, and yet there's no doubt this is her story; nothing happens that isn't shaped by the suffocating presence of her absence, eating at these characters as though it were a cancer--of course, cancer is revealed to be the indirect cause of Rebecca's death. Fittingly, Rebecca is not to be denied, and the final sequence is not a cathartic purging of the lead pair's anxieties but a frightening visualisation of their inability to conquer them. Not unlike the other film Hitchcock made in 1940, REBECCA is even darker than it may first appear.

6) Notorious (1946)
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5) Psycho (1960)
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4) Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
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3) North by Northwest (1959)
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2) Rear Window
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1) Vertigo (1958)
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CASSETTEISGOD said:
Yes it did, is it genuinely worth watching?

Thanks for the recommendations man. Speaking of Hitchcock and besides Psycho, which of his films would you say are the best in your opinion?
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I suppose as a good example of how the film industry is quick to cash in on trends then House of Exorcism is worth one watch. Its basically Lisa and the Devil re-edited with additional Exorcist type scenes woven in.

As for Hitchcock, I'll echo all the films no country mentioned, with special emphasis on Shadow of a Doubt (my favorite of his), Vertigo, Spellbound, Rebecca and Rope. Also:

Blackmail (1929)
Murder! (1930)
Lifeboat (1944)
The Paradine Case (1947) *Ridiculously underrated!
Stage Fright (1950)
I Confess (1951)
Dial M for Murder (1954)
The Trouble With Harry (1955)
The Birds (1963)
Marnie (1964)
Torn Curtain (1966)
Frenzy (1972)
Family Plot (1976)
 
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Cape Fear. Martin Scorses movie, familiar with some of his stuff, could use some more.

Like them or not, you can't deny the greatness of older Steven Seagal action movies(Out for Justice,Under Siege,Above The Law,etc...), some of the best along with Die Hard.

Shaft
Dog Day Afternoon, Al Pacino robbing a bank, can we get a helicopter up in here and some pizza's.

some horror stuff.

The House by the Cemetary(add to some of my Lucio Fulci stuff).
Night of The Creeps.
Basket Case. What's in the Basket ?
They Live. John Carpenter.
Salem's Lot, blu-ray.
 
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CASSETTEISGOD said:
Putting both responses side-by-side I realise I really should just buy all of his movies. :lol:
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Good idea. Even the films that are considered "minor" or "lesser" are better than most. A lot of the early British films can often be found in those multi-film packs for real cheap. Granted the print quality isn't the best, but for the price those sets go for you can't beat it. Of course a lot have also been given quality releases too.
 
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Went to see Transformers, there's Marvel movies left and right. There's this movie coming out with Charlize Theron called Atomic Blonde, deff going to see that!
 
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