Citizen Kane is soooo unbelievably boring. I would rather watch one of the Matrix sequals again, and those sucked. I have rented all the classic movies I wanted to watch, and Kane was the biggest dissapointment to me.
I have never seen Gone With The Wind. Not really on my list, but someday.... I am looking forward to seeing The Third Man sometime. Its currently #20 on my Netflix list.
I know! I've seen a lot of these "classics" like: Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Apocalypse Now, 2001, etc.. and while I can appreciate them in the artistic sense, they are not movies I would just watch for fun. Anyways, these are my classics: Aliens Silence of the Lambs Raiders of the Lost Ark Empire Strikes Back Ghostbusters The Shining
After watching the IFC documentary Decade Under the Influence, I've been trying to watch a lot more movies made from the late 60s on to the mid-late 70s. My Netflix queue is full of them.
Seems like we have similar tastes and views of what consitutes a "classic" film Ottomaton. I've seen pretty much all of the classic movies that I want to see. Just about all of the AFI top 100 films, the most famous works (and some not so famous) of directors like Hitchcock, Capra, Hawkes (Except for the westerns. I just don't like Westers), Sturges, Ford (I've actually seen a couple of his Westerns), Wilder, Kurosawa. Approximately every movie that featured Powell and Loy, Astaire and Rogers, Bogart and Bacall, Grant, Hepburn (both of them), Stewart and some more of my favorite actors that I can't remember off the top of my head. Also whole bunch of misc Screwball Comedies from the era which is by far my favorite genre. The only classic films from the Golden Age of Hollywood, that i want to see are the rest of Preston Sturges films that I haven't gotten to: All Hail the Conquering Hero, the Palm Beach Story, The Great McGinty. And some of the lesser works of some of my favorite screen couples: James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan in Shopworn Angel and The Mortal Storm along with Barabra Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in The Mad Miss Manton. I also want to see Stanwyck and Cooper in Ball of Fire, some of Lubitsch's earlier works, a couple of Wilder's films that I've missed, and some of Yasujiro Ozu's stuff. I've heard great things about Ozu but have never seen any of his films.
The Thin Man series (including the first one) is way overrated. There's a reason 90% of people recognize Jimmy Stewart or Clark Gable but not William Powell. Most of William Powell's movies do not age well with time (like My Man Godfrey). My favorites: Hitchcock - almost everything is great, including Mr. and Mrs. Smith - a rare Hitchcock comedy. John Huston/Bogart Shop Around the Corner - Jimmy Stewart's all-time underrated movie Zorro - Tyronne Power Robin Hood - Errol Flynn Spartacus - K. Douglas Giant - James Dean/E. Taylor/R. Hudson High Noon - Gary Cooper The Best Years of Our Lives - Myrna Loy/Dana Andrews
IF you haven't seen these, they are pretty darn good. Try : the Awful Truth with Cary Grant, MLoy - genius. also : Every Girl Should be Married with CG - brilliant Try : Hired Wife with B. Stanwyck. Great. If you have wit, you'll go crazy with these. If you don't, well, you suck. Pillow Talk is another really fun movie, if you know the truth. Great date movie. Really great. It Happened One Night with C Colbert and Big Ears is really nice dialogue. Very snappy.
Wow. I am surprised that you felt that way. I think "Citizen Kane" is not only a great movie, but is also really, really entertaining and fast paced. The camera work, cinematography, dialogue and acting were so exuberant to me. The story is wonderful, too: it's a classic American story of great success and failure and everything in between. I can watch this movie over and over again and still get something new. Joseph Cotton is *so* great as Kane's old friend-turned enemy. The montage scene showing the dissolution of Kane's marriage showing a series of increasingly cold and distant breakfasts together was awesome. I could go on and on....but I'll stop. To each his own! I am woefully lacking in the western genre, aside from a couple of John Ford classics like "The Searchers" and "My Darling Clementine." Howard Hawkes, John Ford...those sorts of people. I also am flat-out ignorant of modern indie directors like Hal Hartley. Need to check him out. I want to get into all of that, as well as more Asian cinema from all eras. My favorite film from 2004 was a Korean movie called "Old Boy" by Chan Wook Park. The sheer directorial muscle and daring of this movie reminded me of Scorsese at his best (like "Taxi Driver," for example : ). I want to check out more of his stuff. Incidentally, the BBS has some bad-ass tastes in music and film...word on Preston Sturges. He ruled!
We watched this movie in AP English 12 this year once we finished studying "Heart of Darkness." It's a great movie if you parellel it with that book. It's good otherwise, too.
Apocalyopse Now is sort of my Catcher in the Rye of cinema. Some others...Casablanca Key Largo Cat On A Hot Tin Roof Sunset Boulevard Some Like It Hot Philadelphia Story
Hey...Its a rare Hangout appearance by Hardwood! How's it going? Yeah the real difference between a Casablanca or a To Catch a Thief and something that would come out today is the crispness and cleverness of the dialog. I think todays writers/directors err horribly when they try to make everything sound like "real" conversation. When you watch a classic movie you know for a fact you are going to hear more clever lines in the first 20 minutes than you will hear in a month of movies coming out today.
Hey Major, Yeah,that snappy,crisp dialogue has gone the way of the DoDo.So many flicks rely on special effects or animation these days that it's sadly become a lost art. Whaddya think of those intros and that halftime show?I haven't laughed this hard in quite awhile. Call me
call me and leave your #...you know I can't hold on to a phone # for longer than a half hour...its like my curse. But yeah...Star Wars and Jaws were terriffic movies...but terrible for movies in general..cause ever since..all studios want is the 300 million blockbuster. Its getting to where I would almost rather watch a chick flick...at least they are dialog rather than explosion driven.
Scarface. you hear about it so much and hear quotes from it and how much other people like it, but somehow i've never seen it and i never see it come on any channel, hbo or regular cable. gotta see it one day.
