I think the only Newman performance I dislike is Exodus, because he bizarrely downplays his charisma so the movie can give Sal Mineo the juicier scenes.

Rampop II wrote:

crumbsroom wrote:

And then I took mushrooms and watched it, thinking that would be wonderful, and everything about it just seemed obvious and lame.  

Funny what psychedelics will unexpectedly do to a beloved movie.  Star Wars on acid: ridiculous. The Shining on mushrooms: profoundly amazing. 

On the other hand they can turn horrible movies into a knee–slapping good time. Freddy's Dead and Cool World are undeniable stinkers, but on acid they were heehee–larrrious! 

crumbsroom wrote:

I will also say, that it was the directors cut that pushed me in the 'zzzzzz' direction. It's amazing that just a little too much when everything is already precariously too much by design, can destroy something. 

I also prefer the theatrical version and felt like the director's cut was overkill, but I figure I can never be free of the bias of having seen (and been blown away by) the theatrical version first.

Dark Crystal on mushrooms is life changing.

Hard Day's Night? Horrible.

crumbsroom wrote:

Dark Crystal on mushrooms is life changing.

Yes it is.  I once ate a mushroom that looked like Aughra.  Worlds were whirring.

I watch this lefty podcast with Sam Seder, and he has a co-host Emma Vigeland (I admit that I'm crushing for despite her Marxist wiles) who one day divulged her own story with mushrooms, which proved unfortunate.  Her story involved taking the shrooms, and then a "friend" recommended that they watch a movie.  That movie?  This site doesn't have spoilers but I want you to imagine some of the worst possible choices, and even then I'm certain that the truth will give you a gag reflex.  It was The Purge.  Some fucking friend to have for your first shroom trip.  Emma started crying, thinking the whole world was awful.

She says she's still willing to try again, but she'll need a good Janson to guide her and light up her day.

Last edited by Jinnistan (6/12/2022 12:08 pm)

crumbsroom wrote:

Scorsese has obviously always been a director with a lot of flash and who likes to show it off. But usually he incorporates it so well into what his films are doing and saying, that his camera movement, musical cues, deliberate editing choices, become poetic by nature. With Dead though, it just jangles and jars on the surface. Yes, I get it is an attempt to mimic the frantic pace of Cage going about his paramedic duties. But it just feels so empty and forced.

Well, we're getting into something now.  I also felt that tension of emptiness and force, but felt it was deliberate.  There's the desperation of it that comes through saturation.  Not like Wolf of Wall Street exactly but a similar parallel between excess and exhaustion.  I imagine that he would have gone further but the budget seems modest (comparatively).  I kinda like that it doesn't really know what to do with itself, it's flailing. struggling.  After his technical virtuosity of his earlier 90s decade, he drives right into the gutter without a net or coherent metaphor.  I have a similar affinity for Spike Lee's Summer of Sam, around the same time, messy and electric, not nearly his best but there's that wtf are we doing? energy that makes it threaten to collapse.  It's Scorsese's Lodger.

Jinnistan wrote:

crumbsroom wrote:

Scorsese has obviously always been a director with a lot of flash and who likes to show it off. But usually he incorporates it so well into what his films are doing and saying, that his camera movement, musical cues, deliberate editing choices, become poetic by nature. With Dead though, it just jangles and jars on the surface. Yes, I get it is an attempt to mimic the frantic pace of Cage going about his paramedic duties. But it just feels so empty and forced.

Well, we're getting into something now.  I also felt that tension of emptiness and force, but felt it was deliberate.  There's the desperation of it that comes through saturation.  Not like Wolf of Wall Street exactly but a similar parallel between excess and exhaustion.  I imagine that he would have gone further but the budget seems modest (comparatively).  I kinda like that it doesn't really know what to do with itself, it's flailing. struggling.  After his technical virtuosity of his earlier 90s decade, he drives right into the gutter without a net or coherent metaphor.  I have a similar affinity for Spike Lee's Summer of Sam, around the same time, messy and electric, not nearly his best but there's that wtf are we doing? energy that makes it threaten to collapse.  It's Scorsese's Lodger.

I can see a bit of a psychic connection between it and Summer of Sam, a movie I also similarly disliked the first time I saw it. But a second watch of SoS seemed to unlock a lot of the more subtle details that lived beneath all the goofy nonsense like a pointy haired Adrian Brody Pete Townshending away in his bedroom. Maybe a second watch of this would do similar things. Probably.

Rampop II wrote:

I don't think we even made the decision until we arrived at the theater.

The film had been on my radar, and I knew it was a Tarantino film.  This was the season where there was a lot of hype for Pulp Fiction coming out of Cannes and this was when Reservoir Dogs and True Romance were still hot.  I was familiar with the film and knew it had controversy attached to it.  I wasn't quite prepared to see Stone place his meticulous JFK metamedia construct (recently Oscar annointed, btw) into a late-night grindhouse blender.  But it smelled right.

Rampop II wrote:

I hope she kicked that guy in the pussy for doing that.

I don't know if it was a 'guy' or not.  Emma's very sweet.  Don't be mean.

Rampop II wrote:

Was U–Turn the last good thing he did?  I guess his American History doc has value.

U-Turn is right up there in being a nasty slice of spite.  Again, I think that this gristly undercurrent of Stone's energy is probably best infused into these kinds of primal, instinctual displays of raw consumption.  The problem back in the 90s, with echos into today, is that we thought Stone was political more than his savage appetite let on.  The best thing to do to his filmography is to strip all of that political pretension and just shave the beast for what it is.  So, sure, after all of that, what do we have?  Any Given Sunday?  A terrifically teste-steeped aperitif? 

I mean, it's downhill from there, but his American History doc, in particular, I can only see in hindsight.  It's Cold War coverage is very apologetic towards Stalin and Mao, and there are many kinks of American history that need to be combed through, but it wasn't until about 2014 when I started to understand the larger issues regarding why certain legacy sources (FAIR, The Nation) were saying that Obama was in charge of ISIS or denying that the Russians had invaded Ukraine and shot down MH17.  I had to untangle all of that RT-America shit, what Seymour Hersh was unironically invoking Orwell by calling the "New Truth".  So in the context of the global developments of the past decade, Stone's History doc looks a lot like he's trying to be Putin's Tom Paine.

And now Oliver Stone is just a fat face.  His best work, obviously his tremendous scripts under masculinely sympathetic sponsors like Midnight Express, Scarface, Conan the Barbarian, from Salvador to Wall Street to Talk Radio, I think it is best to view Stone as a remarkably accomplished filmmaker whose primary virtue is his huge pungent balls.  The respectable facade fades, but the odor is an acquired taste.
 

Rampop II wrote:

The Shout

I was going to ask about that avatar.

Crumbs knows.  I love The Shout quite a bit.  As an interesting side bit of trivia, in 1978 in England, whilst Kubrick's Shining production was underway, nearby was the simultaneous production of Alien.  Jack Nicholson and Harry Dean Stanton are long-time friends (Harry was Jack's best man at his first wedding), and hung out during these shoots, and John Hurt had invited members of both crews, including Kubrick, to a screening of The Shout.

I don't have anything else.  That set up just kind of writes its own little story, doesn't it?

Last edited by Jinnistan (6/12/2022 4:36 pm)

You people and your drugs. The only narcotic I've ever tried was the one time I had an edible.

Awful. I didn't get high at all but had a brutally dry mouth for like two hours. I'll stick with booze (and I'm not even much of a drinker).

Rock wrote:

I'm not gonna lie, I pretty much hated U-Turn outside of Nick Nolte's performance. I was close to turning it off every time Billy Bob Thornton appeared on screen. I don't think it helps that the movie is a relatively straightforward neonoir plot, but I do think Stone miscalculates on the feverish delivery.

I took it more as a comedy, whether intentional or not, or half-heartedly so like maybe he gave up somewhere in the filming and chose to veer hard into the ludicrosity.  Yes, the story, as such, is standard stale noir.  (I remember that Stone was made at writer John Ridley for giving spoilers in an interview, haha, hell of a diff?)  So I just laughed at most of it, but it was still pretty fun.  Including Billy Bob, "you just can't help yourself, can ya?"  Oh, and Jennifer Lopez.  Mmm.  Between this, Blood and Wine and Out of Sight she was on fire at the time.

Rock wrote:

On paper I'm not sure Natural Born Killers is much less shrill, but I think the tone better suits the material. The style feels like flipping through all the channels on TV and being hit with the most pungent highlights. I'm not sure how cogent the movie is. (there are times when it switches film stock, lighting or framing choices and sidesteps what might be the logical beat, especially during the Dangerfield sitcom sequence.) But there's no denying it hits on a gut level, especially as Stone knows how to deliver violence energetically and subvert the expected thrills.

"Shrill" is what Stone does.  "Heavy-handed" might be his most common description.  Man is not subtle.  But that's why I think the bolded is essential to his overall milieu, and what I meant by saying that he's best on the more primal, or bestial level, and that when we look past the apparent Oscar prestige of Platoon, Wall Street or JFK, we can see that those films also tend to work best on very base instincts.  Simply, Stone's intellectual pretense has been, and should be, discarded, and what remains to admire is a very elemental but highly effective approach to filmmaking.  NBK is definitely the sharpest edge in his toolbox, but even that has dulled with time and imitation.  It's intelligent in its conceit, but in execution, it purely works on base instinct and on the basest instincts of the audience.  The "nitwits in zombieland".  (And can we get a shoutout for RDJ?  I'm not sure if he's ever been better.)

Rock wrote:

Also, I'm not proud at how hot I found Juliette Lewis in this, but the heart wants what it wants.

Born bad, it's such a sin.

Rock wrote:

I was listening to a lefty podcast (one of the hosts also does another movie podcast I quite like, where he seems to exhibit a level of thoughtfulness and nuance often missing in this one) where they took the movie to task for not indicting capitalism thoroughly enough

That wasn't Ben Mankiewicz was it?  What did they want, an Odessa Step Sequence?

The only issue I ever had with the film is Charlie Sheen.  Just not a strong actor imo.  I can imagine if someone like Tom Cruise or Sean Penn, James Spader or John Cusack, Kiefer Sutherland or Eric Stoltz in the role.  Or even (don't laugh) Michael J. Fox, who was considered but they thought that his prior Secret of My Success would give audiences the wrong idea.  But Fox has dramatic chops.  Charlie Sheen?  Empty bro.  He was the Miles Teller of the 80s.

I think it is his heavy handedness that has pushed Stone away from me as I've gotten older. I don't disagree that his movies can pack a wallop, and I think maybe my distancing has as much to do with me trying to get away from the heavy handed teenage soul that admired him. A good example would be The Doors, which was great for a brain that at the time was a rookie when it came to experimentalism, drugs, subversion, poetry and hippy stink. Few movies capture teenage idol worship better than it. Almost so perfectly that one can now only cringe in revisiting it with adult eyes and seeing it holds all the embarrassments of youth. It's a really bad movie and it seems only to understand everything it explores in the dumbest of ways (which, is also, kind of The Doors in a nutshell, as well as Val Kilmer)

For me Stone never bettered Platoon and JFK. Platoon has that raw power that maintains long beyond its simplified allegory of good and evil. And JFK is the perfect film for him to expunge every absurd nook and cranny of his conspiracy addled coke brain. While I don't think there is any doubt that NBK is just about as prescient as any film comes, it often feels to me like it was so ahead of the curve that it is being delivered in the guise of one of the many pale immitations that would soon copy its go for broke style. It almost dated itself immediately, as I already saw it as a self parody within a year or two of coming out.

I've never loved Wall Street, and I think Jinnistan may have hit the nail on the head as to my problem. Charlie Sheen. It never occurred to me before, weirdly, but he can't act. I was trying to rebut the claim when I realized it was pointless. And I know that ever time he would come on screen my interest in the film would plummet. Douglas is, of course, magnetic.

Now I just got to get around to watchin The Hand one of these days. It still contains one of the formative images of all cinema for me, which I glimpsed at through the backwindow of my mothers car as we sat in a drive in watching History of the World. The screen behind us was playing (The Hand, as long as Happy Birthday to Me) and I kept peeking for updates. Not even Mel Brooks could keep my attention away from second (or third) rate horror at such a young age.
 

I like Charlie Sheen in Wall Street, but I think Stone gets good mileage out of his impressionable qualities and especially his real life relationship with Martin Sheen. I don't know how good an actor he is (never watched his sitcom aside from the odd episode, liked him enough in Major League AKA he people's Bull Durham), but I think Stone knows how to use him well.

As for Miles Teller, I liked him enough in Top Gun: Maverick, although the movie cheats to make him likable by having Glen Powell play an even bigger douchebag. He seems closer to a young Sean Penn than how Anthony Edwards played his father in the original.