Vic Sage

Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985) ET, The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) Tuff Turf (1985) Bicycle Dreams (2009) - PEE WEE: already listed above - ET: Not a cycling movie per se (not about bikes, or races, or racers), but there are some cycling scenes, and there is the iconic "bike across the moon" shot, so yeah, i guess if you want to push it; - TUFF TURF: Really? How so? I never saw it, but nothing in the description would lead one to guess cycling is critical to either its plot, imagery or themes; - BICYCLE DREAMS: I was just looking at features, but if you want to add documentaries, that opens a door to another 5-10 movies, probably, including -- Stars and Watercarriers (1974) The Impossible Hour (1974) A Sunday In Hell (1976) Hell on Wheels (2004) Overcoming (2005) Road To Roubaix (2008) Chasing Legends (2010) Ride the Divide (2010)

some others, too... A Boy, a Girl and a Bike (UK/1949) Jour de Fete (FR/1949) KEY EXCHANGE (1985) 2 SECONDS (Fr.CAN/1998) BEIJING BICYCLE (CHINA/2001) TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE (FR/2003) FLYING SCOTSMAN (UK/2006)

bike movies, eh? ... hmm. BICYCLE THIEF (IT/1948) BREAKING AWAY PREMIUM RUSH PEE WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE AND SOON THE DARKNESS (UK/1970) BMX BANDITS (AUS/1983) AMERICAN FLYERS (1985) QUICKSILVER (1986) DREAMRIDER (1993) a pretty short list.

WGA nominations announced -- adapted screenplay: "Lincoln" "Argo" ''Silver Linings Playbook" ''Life of Pi" "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" original screenplay: "Zero Dark Thirty" "Flight" ''Looper" ''The Master" "Moonrise Kingdom"

it was as crappy a year in cinemAH as i can recall.

finally saw it and liked it alot. Christoph Waltz is once again terrific and hilarious, with just a hint of poignant humanity, and Jamie Foxx is suitably iconic as he grows in power and stature throughout the story. QT again gets great little cameos from pop culture figures of the past (Franco Nero, Don Johnson, Michael "Billy Jack" Parks, Bruce Dern, James Remar, Tom Wopat, Dennis "Breaking Away" Christopher, Russ Tamblyn, Don Stroud, Robert Carradine, etc), and QT's customary cameo is satisfactorily short and he has the good taste to blow himself to bits. The film's action is silly, funny, cartoonish and over-the-top, even as its themes are intensely serious. Fat Jonah Hill co-stars with Don Johnson in the "Klansman" scene, which is absolutely hilarious. The problem is not just length, but pacing. I don't mind a long movie, if it has an arc that keeps you interested and pacing that suits the story. But here the story feels like a sequence of set pieces, one after another. We're supposed to care about Django finding his wife (which is the story's "through line"), but we've seen almost nothing of their relationship, nor much about who each of them is individually, so the "quest" is more an intellectual conceit than the emotional core of the story that the movie demands. Also, the movie introduces major characters and new conflicts about 1/2 way through, without ever establishing them in the first place, so it just feels like another chapter. The ending is then attenuated, going on about 1/2 hour longer than it should. Still, overall, an entertaining film. My Top 5 films written AND directed by Tarantino (in order): 1- KILL BILL 1,2 2- PULP FICTION 3- RESERVOIR DOGS 4- DJANGO UNCHAINED 5- INGLORIOUS BASTERDS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_in_film What i saw this year: [u:6d8shel9]liked so far:[/u:6d8shel9] THE AVENGERS THE CABIN IN THE WOODS THE DARK KNIGHT RISES DJANGO UNCHAINED THE GREY THE HUNGER GAMES JOHN CARTER LES MISERABLES LIFE OF PI LINCOLN SKYFALL TED [u:6d8shel9]eh:[/u:6d8shel9] ABRAHAM LINCOLN:VAMPIRE HUNTER AMAZING SPIDER-MAN BRAVE CHRONICLE DR. SEUSS'S THE LORAX DREDD DARK SHADOWS FRANKENWEENIE HOBBIT PROMETHEUS SNOW WHITE & THE HUNTSMAN TOTAL RECALL UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING [u:6d8shel9]hated:[/u:6d8shel9] 21 JUMP STREET BATTLESHIP GHOST RIDER 2 PROJECT X THREE STOOGES WRATH OF THE TITANS What i still intend to see: HAYWIRE MOONRISE KINGDOM SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD SAVAGES KILLER JOE BOURNE LEGACY ARBITRAGE THE MASTER LOOPER PARANORMAN ARGO 7 PSYCHOPATHS THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS WRECK-IT RALPH CLOUD ATLAS HITCHCOCK KILLING THEM SOFTLY ZERO DARK THIRTY JACK REACHER THE SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK The Perks of Being a Wallflower Flight Beasts of the Southern Wild Safety Not Guaranteed Ruby Sparks [u:6d8shel9]my current top 10:[/u:6d8shel9] LIFE OF PI LINCOLN DJANGO UNCHAINED THE AVENGERS THE DARK KNIGHT RISES THE GREY JOHN CARTER CABIN IN THE WOODS LES MISERABLES SKYFALL But based on what I've read and heard so far, I'd project my final top 10 will end up looking more like this: LIFE OF PI -ARGO LINCOLN -ZERO DARK THIRTY THE AVENGERS DJANGO UNCHAINED THE DARK KNIGHT RISES -MOONRISE KINGDOM -BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD -SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK

a major disappointment. Tolkien's HOBBIT is a relatively gentle and charming fairy tale written for children. If Jackson had made a movie similarly filled with wonder, it could have been...well... wonderful. Instead he forged this bloated oaf of a movie, pointlessly and cynically extended with extraneous material to pad the story out to make another "trilogy". Unfortunately, the trilogy it is most emulating is not the original Star Wars trilogy but its subsequent and inferior prequel. There are some good things, to be sure. Andy Sirkus is still terrific as Gollum, as is Ian McCellan as Gandalf. And the battle with the goblins is impressive (if soulless). And there are nice tie-ins to the LotR story. I particularly liked Gandalf's use of the butterfly, which we see again in LotR:Two Towers. So its not without its own virtues. But, overall, i think fans will be unhappy with it and the uninitiated will wonder what the fuss is all about.

The aspect of OHMMSS that appeals to me the most is the fact it depicts Bond as a human being with frailties, rather than a superhero (something that wasn't seen again until LTK). yeah, that's part of my problem with it, as i alluded to in my discussion of SKYFALL. Realism is anathema to Bond. My point about Lazenby was that he was closer to the real Bond's appearance than any other actor -- somebody you wouldn't give a second glance to if you saw him in a bar per IF. That's fine, but i don't really care about the fidelity to the books. I'm looking at them purely as movies, standing on their own, and a Bond at whom you wouldn't give a second glance is not a Bond i'm particularly interested in watching. a great Bond movie is not the same thing as a great movie. I'll take a stab in the dark: The difference is the lack of a character arc of the central protagonist?

a great Bond movie is not the same thing as a great movie.

GOLDENEYE definitely gets bonus points for reviving the character after the aging, increasingly ridiculous Roger Moore and the utterly mediocre neutered charm of Tim Dalton ran the franchise into a ditch in the 1980s. And its the best of the Brosnan films, and certainly a good film overall. But the notion that one could make a list of top 5 Bond pictures without listing a single Connery movie seems to me willfully contrarian... not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. The plots of Connery's films were ridiculous? yes, but that is to damn water for being wet. All BOND movie plots are ridiculous. They're superhero movies. They were tedious? That's in the eye of the beholder. Certainly the level of craftsmanship available for action films from the 1960s was different than that of the 1980s-90s. And certainly the pacing of that era seems creaky compared to the ADD-addled/MTV-style editing of subsequent eras. But i find the latter aesthetic, endlessly recapitulating the formula that the Connery films established, to be more tedious by far. Certainly the various levels of mediocrity in the subsequent Bond portrayals, when compared to Connery's rendition, were utterly and consistently disappointing until the arrival of Daniel Craig, who is another honest-to-goodness actor. And whatever else Bond movies are about, they are about Bond. Without a great Bond, you can't have a great Bond movie. And ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE did not have a great Bond. Not even a good Bond. I would agree that it's a very good film overall, and underrated i think, and Diana Rigg is one of the best things to come out of the 1960s... but George Lazenby? Lazenby was a male model whose delivery of lines was so poor and with an aussie accent so thick he had some of his scenes dubbed. His post-Bond career was a joke, highlighted by an appearance in the soft-core Emmanuel. And he's going to be favorably compared to real actors like Connery and Craig? or even Dalton, Brosnan and Moore? Alright, but i respectfully, though adamantly, disagree.

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr wrote: Vic Sage wrote: the medium is the message. The medium is, like, the same effects over and over, in slightly-different iterations of the same, shallow movie. Or am I missing something? Tell me what I'm missing. You may not be missing anything at all, and you are certainly not the only one to view Snyder's work that way. You either appreciate his aesthetic or you don't. I do. Why? Harder to say. Snyder didn't invent slo-mo action, nor did Sam Peckinpah for that matter, but they both have used it as a tool to extend and illustrate theme and character, rather than a just create a Michael Bey/JBruckheimer action moment. He places his hyperreal characters, generally warriors, in fantastical computer-generated landscapes (somewhere between a video game and Dali), that is simply unique. He is making comicbook movies better than anybody, in tone and style, with utter respect for the underlying work and an understanding of its particular strengths, and approaches it with a singular seriousness of purpose. There's no camp, or satire, or condescension. He has a greater focus on character, setting and theme than is typical in the genre, which otherwise tends towards fast-cutting action hyperactivity these days. He lets his stories breathe more (which critics take for a tedious languorish quality), which elevates them above the MTV aesthetic of his generation. Your mileage may vary.

Chuck, it always surprises me (and it shouldn't by now, of course) that, considering how closely our particular interests overlap and align, how diametrically opposed are our views and tastes with regard to those common interests. C'est la vie, as they say in Yiddish.

Lagares doesn't have nearly enough power to justify his K rates and BB/K ratios, nor enough OB% to complement his speed. He's also a 23 year-old Dominican turning 24 in the spring, which makes him a little old for AA, further discounting his recent production (and being from the DR, he may be 26 or 27, for all we know). plus, as a RHer, he fills the wrong end of a platoon. Unless this guy is a GG-level CFer, i don't see his value.

Edgy MD wrote: Jaws wasn't the villian, so much as the henchman/assassin. It was a theme in the earlier films to include an oddall assassin with a fetish for death and often a cartoonish M.O.: Kronstein, Oddjob, TeeHee, and Bambi and Thumper, among others. Jaws was part of a proud (though goofy) tradition. Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, the assassins from DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, were the model for Neil Gaiman's killers, Croup and Vandemar, in NEVERWHERE.

Is it weird that I liked LIVE AND LET DIE in part because of its terrible racism? It's campy and awful, and yet somehow stylish, and there's the song, and that's why it got one of my votes. The best Bond song ever, and that should matter. And the "terrible racism" was emblematic of the Blaxploitation films of the period. It was hip racism. ... the Sellers '67-model vehicle CASINO ROYALE Now THAT'S perverse. I liked it, too, though. Maybe not top 5, but i always had a fondness for it.

Dalton was strong, and looked the part, but had the sexuality of a bachelor uncle. he was a "Ken doll" Bond.

Dalton didn't do A VIEW TO A KILL. That was Roger Moore's last Bond movie, and it was one of the worst ever made. Dalton did 2 films, LIVING DAYLIGHTS and LICENSE TO KILL. Maybe you've confused the latter one for it.

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Ranking the Bond films - I've arranged the 25 films to date (not including the `67 CASINO ROYALE spoof) into 3 groups, based on the "rotten tomatoes" %ranking (it aggregates critic response), and the IMDB rating (from fans), and then I've adjusted based on my own preferences. Since my basic assessment of a Bond film is primarily (but not exclusively) affected by who is playing Bond, my Bond actor ranking should be considered first: * Connery * Craig * Moore (when he's good) * Brosnan * Dalton * Lazenby * Moore (when he's bad) That being said (ranked in descending order): top 10: *Goldfinger (1964) - Sean Connery / 96% rotten tomatoes ranking (52 reviews) / 7.8 imdb rating * From Russia with Love (1963) - Sean Connery / 96% (48 reviews) / 7.5 *Casino Royale (2006) - Daniel Craig / 95% (220 reviews) / 7.9 *Dr. No (1962) - Sean Connery / 98% (45 reviews) / 7.3 *Skyfall (2012) - Daniel Craig / 92% (278 reviews) / 8.1 *Thunderball (1965) - Sean Connery / 85% (39 reviews) / 7.0 *You Only Live Twice (1967) - Sean Connery /71% (38 reviews) / 6.9 *GoldenEye (1995) - Pierce Brosnan / 82% (49 reviews) 7.2 * The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) - Roger Moore / 78% (41 reviews) / 7.1 * On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) - George Lazenby / 81% (43 reviews) / 6.8 watchable: * For Your Eyes Only (1981) - Roger Moore / 73% (40 reviews) / 6.8 * Live and Let Die (1973) - Roger Moore /65% (40 reviews) / 6.8 * The Living Daylights (1987) - Timothy Dalton / 75% (36 reviews) / 6.7 * Licence to Kill (1989) - Timothy Dalton / 74% (38 reviews) / 6.5 * Diamonds Are Forever (1971) - Sean Connery / 64% (39 reviews) / 6.7 * Quantum of Solace (2008) - Daniel Craig / 64% (244 reviews) / 6.7 * SPECTRE (2015) - Daniel Craig / 64% (288 reviews) /6.9 * Never Say Never Again (1983) - Sean Connery / 59% / 6.1 unwatchable: * Moonraker (1979)- Roger Moore /62% (39 reviews) / 6.2 * The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) - Roger Moore / 46% / 6.7 * Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) - Pierce Brosnan / 57% (63 reviews) / 6.4 * Die Another Day (2002) - Pierce Brosnan / 57% (197 reviews) / 6.0 * The World Is Not Enough (1999) - Pierce Brosnan /51% (120 reviews) / 6.3 * Octopussy (1983) - Roger Moore / 43% (35 reviews) / 6.6 * A View to a Kill (1985) - Roger Moore / 36% (44 reviews) / 6.2

A BOND filmography? hmm....

This 23rd installment of the franchise is not the "best bond ever", as some critics have trumpeted, but it has a distinct POV and look, and it is well worth seeing. SKYFALL is a sleek, beautifully shot action film with perfectly executed set pieces, with all kinds of vehicles chasing each other and blowing up all over the globe. It's got an enjoyably over-the-top villain played by Javier Bardem as a mincing cyber terrorist-for-hire with his own island, army, and obsessive mommy issues. The film has got some beautiful (albeit anonymous) women for Bond to bed or banter with (or both), and it even carries on the tradition of great Bond theme songs, this one written and performed by Adele over a visually arresting and evocatively Bondian title sequence. Mostly, it's got the current Bond himself, the excellent Daniel Craig, playing Bond with a depth and psychological realism that is largely absent from the character's history. Putting Craig's Bond in context with the gallery of Bonds over the years, different actors have brought different elements to the character: * Roger Moore's urbane, witty Bond was always believable falling into bed or throwing off a quip, but less so when killing the bad guys... you just didn't buy that he'd be willing to stain his tux; * Timothy Dalton was more brutish than Moore, but lacked charm and sexuality, despite matinee looks; * Pierce Brosnan had the charm and sex appeal, and was believably (and surprisingly) sadistic, but lacked gravitas (substituting, instead, a morose stiffness); and * Daniel Craig looks like he kills people for a living. Somewhat light on charm, he has just about everything else. BUT Connery had it all. Connery's Bond was a sadistic animal in a fine tux who appreciated a good martini, a great car, a beautiful woman, and a reliable pistol. When taking off a woman's bikini top, he was as likely to strangle her with it as kiss her. He enjoyed killing and fucking and driving fast and living well, and every man wanted to be him and every woman wanted to be with him. He was superhuman, you see, and Bond movies were FANTASIES... high-tech (for their day) wish fulfillment fantasies for boys, like superhero comic books were. And this is the problem with SKYFALL. Director Sam Mendes (an excellent stage director, with a few good films to his credit, particularly AMERICAN BEAUTY) has taken the franchise down into the muck of realism, developing a freudian backstory for Bond, investigating the roots of his murderous tendencies, literally taking him all the way home to find out what makes him tick. The triangular relationship between Bond and M and the villain, Silva, represent a familial nightmare of dysfunction. In the end, the STRAW DOGS-style payoff in which Bond defends his surrogate mommy & daddy at his ancestral home from his symbolic brother/villain is the stuff of Greek Drama, but it imposes a moroseness and dire quality symptomatic of the whole film. Even Q, who often provided Bond with his fun spy toys, is a victim of realism. Here he gives Bond only a gun and a radio transmitter. "What did you expect, an exploding pen? We don't go in for that type of thing anymore." Apparently not. From a purely narrative perspective, the villain's "want" is surprisingly small. He just wants to kill one person, for personal reasons. *** SPOILER *** (he ends up succeeding, with Bond failing to protect her.) *** END OF SPOILER *** Now a Bond villain usually wants to take over the world or destroy it, or something consistent with the fantasy basis of the franchise. So, the stakes end up being surprisingly low, even if consistent with the more realistic and psychological approach to the material being offered by Mendes. But the story does do a nice job of taking us full circle to leave us at the beginning of the Bond legend, setting up characters that would be seen from DR. NO on, performing a narrative ju jitsu of sorts that works surprisingly well and, of course, sets us up for further sequels. But a realistic Bond is not an ideal Bond and ignores the character's fundamental nature. A "realistic" Bond would in the real world be a murderous, imperious, sociopathic ass, abusive to women and condescending to all; that's why he was a "fantasy" Bond in the first place. So its a very good film, but not the best one by a large margin, and one decidedly misguided in its overall approach.

Daniel Craig returns as Bond, James Bond... secret agent 007.

If you're talking about its length, yeah, it's epic. But what about the actual scale makes KB epic for you? It's a straightforward, straightmoving revenge flick with a handful of temporal digressions to flesh out secondary characters. The actors do good work, but the characters are pretty damn flat/small. Hell, even the majority of the battles-- Crazy 88s aside-- are small. I go: 1) PF 2) RD 3) KB 4) IB 5) Jackie Brown And scriptwise, it's his... but "True Romance" isn't entirely a Tarantino film, is it? (I'd slot it at 2.5 if it were.) I have no quarrel with your ranking; it's your ranking, and it seems entirely reasonable to me. As for TRUE ROMANCE, no it's not entirely a Tarantino film, but it is SO like the rest of his films, and so UNLIKE the entirety of Tony Scott's career, that I've necessarily included it within TQ's canon. And of course you can like, love or hate KILL BILL as you choose, and i won't say "boo" about it. But please don't tell me what it is or isn't. My reading of KB reveals a mythopoetic tale of archtypal characters out of legend. It's not epic? It's fucking biblical. A pregnant bride and all who care about her are slaughtered at a wedding by her former lover and fellow assassins (who all go by code names). Years later, she rises from death as a white spirit of vengeance (so nameless as to have her named bleeped when spoken aloud). She obtains a weapon of great significance which is crafted especially for her vengeance quest... a quest which takes her around the world, to overcome overwhelming odds, then to confront a woman of such power and evil that her motivations can only be described through animation (realism isnt' adequate). The confrontation is a quiet samurai battle in the snow, it's whiteness defiled by blood. There, the Bride learns that her quest will lead her to a daughter she thought murdered. She is now a warrior/earth mother questing not only for vengeance but for her own child. She returns to her home in pursuit, killing off her own fellow assassins along the way. One catches her and imprisons her in a coffin beneath the earth. In a "temporal digression to flesh out a secondary character", we learn of her prior life and her training by a Chinese Master, the archtypal wiseman/shaman whose death she must also avenge, and whose training allows her to emerge from the trap. Crawling out of the earth as if reborn, covered in blood and earth (blood of the warrior, earth of the mother), she is a twice-killed twice risen figure out of myth. Ultimately, she must use the secret teachings of her dead master (the exploding heart technique) to defeat her enemy and reclaim her child and her soul. It's Joseph Campbell and LADY SNOWBIRD; it's the Bible and asian cinema, It's BEOWULF and FISTFUL OF DOLLARS. It's everything QT has ever loved or thought about films packed into 4 funny, violent, poignant hours. Does it have thousands of Romans attacking the Gauls? No. And if that's your definition of "epic", then i guess its not. But i think that's too narrow a construction of the term. KB 1+2 is epic in its themes, in its scope, in its aspiration. That's enough for me.

i think most folks would rate PULP FICTION first among his films, and KILL BILL 2nd or even lower, preferring RESERVOIR DOGS or even BASTERDS (maybe even DJANGO now). It's just my take on it. KB is epic in a way none of his other films are; its scale and aspirations are grander. I like that. I like that alot.