Nights of Cabiria -OMG -Giulietta Masina's performance is the greatest ever. Those final few moments are some of the most beautiful, transcendent, ever filmed.
I’m sure I won’t be the only person to name The Crying Game. You think you’re watching an IRA movie, then you’re watching a movie about gender fluidity and the broad spectrum of human sexual orientation, then you realize you’re watching a movie about moral redemption. Brilliant.
My girlfriend insisted we see Pirates of the Caribbean and I went in expecting to see a cynical and boring Disney cash grab. Instead, after starting a bit slow, the movie surprised me at almost every turn. Jack Sparrow’s crappy sinking dinghy at the beginning? Good bit! Orlando Bloom as a lovesick doofus? Also funny! Even that parrot shitting on someone at the end was a good joke. And everyone takes it seriously, despite the absurd material.
I can see the holes now when I watch it, but it’s still a lot of fun. And I’ve got the memory of being surprised and delighted for almost all of it way back in 2003.
A wings, beer and movie rental night with a friend and his wife. We each picked a VHS. Being 20something guys, we reluctantly agreed to let the guuuuurl pick one. And, to keep the peace, we let her pick run second. It was ome vampire/teenagers/product placement dreck called, "The Lost Boys". About twenty minutes in, I went from polite to riveted. This was a case of the inmates taking over the asylum and turning a by-the-numbers genre-quickie into something subversive and funny as fuck.
I was abashed at my initial bad attitude. I can't clearly remember, but just maybe, I said something complimentary to her. That still counts, doesn't it?
Saw Peter Gabriel in 1978 in a college gym. One of the five or six great shows in my ticket stub collection. I distinctly remember the hip-twitching sax player. A friend told me that same show was one of the last nails in the coffin for her then-boyfriend. Poor guy couldn't deal with his special lady lusting after sexy sax guy.
I felt similarly about it. Thought my girl and I would enjoy something light, regardless of quality. It's nice to turn off one's critical sensibility and have the art itself turn it back on for you!
Oddly enough, Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven was one of those movies that had the lightbulb scene for me. When The Scofield Kid shows up to talk Bill Munny into going to kill the cowboys and Munny says "I ain't like that no more," it was clear this was going to be a very different kind of Western.
The other end of the spectrum: Jacksons' The Hobbit. After seeing what he'd accomplished with Lord of the Rings, I went in with great expectations of what The Hobbit would be. Saying the movie was based loosely on the book is far too generous--Jackson decided that Tolkein not only needed rewriting, but needed all kinds of bullshit additions to pad the thing out. Didn't even make it a third of the way through the first movie before it was clear to me the entire enterprise had gone completely off the rails.
Every chance I get I'm gonna recommend Lindsay Ellis's The Hobbit: A Long-Expected Autopsy on YouTube. It's a very deep dive (a 2-part that turned into a 3-part) into why it turned out the way it did (hint: one of the episodes is titled The Battle of 5 Studios). It starts slow but the payoff is worth it. And she is a treasure, IMHO.
When Kubrick changes everything with the click sound of a walk-in cooler door unlocking in The Shining -
One of my favorite film moments is in one of the seemingly endless series of hyper- violent yakuza movies by Takashi Miike, Dead or Alive. These are formula programmers - as predictable as a Rocky Jones western. Gangster kills Good Cop's family. Cop goes on hyper violent rampage. In the ending- cop and head gangster face of in a showdown. One or both die in bloody slow motion. There are I bet hundreds of these films. The showdown in Dead or Alive goes as expected. Then both protagonists stand, they face off and keep shooting one another in the chest, to no apparent effect. Then the cop pulls out a rather large rocket launcher,(from who knows where) and shoots the gangster. This results in a nuclear explosion which destroys Japan. You see it from space. A pretty great effect, actually. Fin.
Poor Margaux... Sort of one episode of family dysfunction too many for a single family that isn't the Kennedys (although maybe JFK Jr's death was that one too many, and now the RFK Jr anti-vax thing is beyond the pale...).
But as to the question of the day, best I can do -- because slippery, erratic memory -- first scene of No Time to Die gave me a bad feeling and had I but the time of the interest I could detail how completely awful it is. Once scene and a supporting performance encompasses all the good stuff. OTOH, I expect in my pulp entertainments that the bad guys get punished and well...
“…that moment in a movie when everything changes.” I confess I immediately went to a moment in a movie theater when everything changed, but you’re not here to hear about teenage sexual awakening, so I’ll say, instead, the botched ambush in “The Wild Bunch,” which I saw at a private showing in college with Sam Peckinpah which he introduced by talking about making an antiviolence film and I watched the paraders being shot down and thought, “Sam Peckinpah is full of shit.”
LOL he came to your college? Only big-time director I saw introduce his movie was Sam Fuller. The Public Theatre in New York ran a series -- a revelatory, brilliant series -- of his films and Fuller, sensing I'm sure the sheen such an event would add to his career, introduced Park Row, the opener, a picture he'd financed himself. I remember only the end of his short address: "Long story short, the picture got made and I lost my ass! Thank you!"
This movie is wack af -- but weirdest, most dizzing ending to a movie I remember was in Big Man Japan (2007, dir & starring Hitoshi Matsumoto). I dunno -- I saw it pre-medical MJ days & just... sat with it. Hard to explain.
It's just that it goes from basic realism to a cut-out 1950s Gojira set at an important moment & all the weird nostalgic feels come blazing back, a tribute to a past that BMJ has never been able to live up to. And then the very end... just kimd of unsettling, but uncannily comforting. 5/5 Would recommend.
Remembering back to what it was like to watch these Japanese monster movies as a kid, and I think it was the almost-realistic-but-not-real quality of the sets that really got me. Godzilla destroys a train, and you can see that it's obviously a model train, but it's the best damn model train set you've ever seen, and then it all goes smash. To a kid who built his own models, the really high-quality model-building on display (briefly, before its destruction) was the best part. Who builds models that good and then smashes them all up like that, and HOW CAN I GET IN ON THIS?
Absolutely !You- tube has several of the Honda directed Toho Kaiju films available right now. Super clean Janus film copies. Subtitles. The original Godzilla is a serious, thoughtful film.
When Elsa Lanchester appears about halfway through The Big Clock, and the whole things turns from noir thriller to comedy. I can't think of another example where a character actor so completely hijacks a film. Lanchester even gets the last line and the movie ends on a "Leave 'em laughing" note when we just saw Charles Laughton fall to his death down an elevator shaft. I suppose the fact that Laughton, the director, was also Lanchester's husband may have something to do with that?
Also, I was watching Winchester '73 a couple of nights ago, and man does Dan Duryea come out of nowhere and totally capture every bit of interest and attention you can give. Sorry, what was this about again, because could we just make it all about the story of Waco Johnny Dean instead?
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘉𝘪𝘨 𝘊𝘭𝘰𝘤𝘬—what a romp! The elevator scene alone, a single take with different sets on each “floor,” is worth the price of admission/rental/purchase/streaming service.
Two that caused me to say holy fuck in a good way: in Palm Springs, the first arrow shots by JK Simmons, and in Sorry to Bother You, the bathroom hybrid reveal.
"Z" made me go out and paint a great big Z on the garage door – somebody else's garage door – I was painting houses that high school summer...but when our film club chose it as the movie of the month last month I looked the thing up online and found a free version on google. That allowed me to watch it over and over again, stop rewind to freeze frame and look at details, that sort of thing, and dig the choreography of action scenes (and I discovered Costa-Gavras was a ballet dancer and producer!)
But what really got me was the interrogations scene at the end, when the Magistrate is grilling the cops, and the assistant is typing away frantically on one of those machines with the selectric ball, and the clatter of the machine dominates the room, and occasionally the typing stops for a moment and the camera rests on the works for maybe a second. That happens 2 or 3 times, and is so suggestive that I had to freeze frame and enlarge the image to see why C-G did that. Well, here's the deal – the ball stops EVERY time with the same letter right in the center of the screen – I bet I do not need to tell you what that letter is.
Made me think about movies and directors on another dimension entirely.
Funny thing about Z: Montand & Papas, the 2 biggest stars, were on screen for only a few minutes. And Papas, possibly the most recognizable Greek actor of the century, was likely cast primarily with the intent of sticking a thumb in the eye of the junta...
Oh, you have reminded me of "Missing" (1982, Costa-Gavras), with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. Lemmon's son has disappeared during the 1973 Chilean coup, and he joins his daughter-in-law, Sissy Spacek, to try to find him. It's been years since I've seen it, but I recall a white horse that's gotten loose one night during the coup, galloping down the city streets through the violence. (I guess it was obviously meant to be Allende, but it was eerie and moving.)
It was interesting seeing Lemmon and Spacek, whose politics were so opposite, beginning to understand each other. Also in one flashback, the missing guy, Charles Horman (played by John Shea) is going out to do some reporting or investigating right before the coup, and someone warns him it could be dangerous. He grins and says sardonically, "It's okay, I'm an Ammurican!"
I was reminded of that film during the Justine Sacco debacle - she got thoroughly canceled back in 2013 as she headed to her new job in Africa. She tweeted to her 200 followers "Going to Africa, hope I don't get AIDS! Just kidding, I'm white!", got on the airplane, and by the time she landed in Capetown, the whole thing had blown up and she got fired. (Later she said that "only an insane person would think white people don't get AIDS.") Her tweet struck me the same way as Charlie Horman's joke about how nothing could happen to him because "I'm an Ammurican!" - a sardonic throwaway line that became something else.
OK, so that was part of the story...We were painting the house while the family was outta town. It was Friday night and the job was almost done; the only thing left to paint was the garage. But I didn't have enough paint to finish it (and the paint store was closed by then), so I just did the Z and cleared out. Saturday, somebody in the sleepy little community noticed the garage and called the local community weekly paper. A reporter wandered out there and took a couple pics and wrote it up. It resulted in about 5 of my 15 minutes o'fame...because turns out the homeowner was the editor/publisher of the paper...
𝗖𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗲𝘅𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲: For most of its length I thought that 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘖𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴 was pitch-perfect, but in its closing minutes I was overtaken with a sense of dread that the writer/director was about to spoil everything that had gone before with a treacly, sentimental coda—and then he didn’t. On the contrary, he delivered in the dénouement the kind of satisfying emotional resolution, subtle and deft, that a lesser director would have attempted and utterly botched. I felt this tension-and-release so strongly that I even wondered whether the filmmakers had intended it.
In a distantly similar connection, as I sat through the David Fincher film 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘢𝘮𝘦 on its original release in 1997, I kept thinking that it was going to turn into a stupidly conventional thriller with all the tired old tropes, and at each such turn the production nimbly pulled those expectations from under me. Here, I’m pretty certain that this audience reaction was anticipated. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘢𝘮𝘦 is not a flick that takes any benefit from a rigorous examination of the plot on your way out of the theatre, but if the viewer is prepared to grant a willing suspension of disbelief for the duration, the film will pay back in honest coin the sort of gratification one experiences having watched a talented illusionist at work.
I dunno, I guess the acting was pretty good, but the makeup was extremely distracting and the way Spielberg always takes his earnestness to the edge of bathos…. I just shuddered.
Nights of Cabiria -OMG -Giulietta Masina's performance is the greatest ever. Those final few moments are some of the most beautiful, transcendent, ever filmed.
I’m sure I won’t be the only person to name The Crying Game. You think you’re watching an IRA movie, then you’re watching a movie about gender fluidity and the broad spectrum of human sexual orientation, then you realize you’re watching a movie about moral redemption. Brilliant.
So fucking GREAT!
And remember the days when people were cool and REFUSED to tell the “secret” no matter how hard-pressed they may have been?
I miss the past sometimes.
If there had been Twitter the spoilers would have been instantaneous, lmao. People can be such assholes.
I can't pinpoint a scene, but I found "At Eternity's Gate" transcendent.
My girlfriend insisted we see Pirates of the Caribbean and I went in expecting to see a cynical and boring Disney cash grab. Instead, after starting a bit slow, the movie surprised me at almost every turn. Jack Sparrow’s crappy sinking dinghy at the beginning? Good bit! Orlando Bloom as a lovesick doofus? Also funny! Even that parrot shitting on someone at the end was a good joke. And everyone takes it seriously, despite the absurd material.
I can see the holes now when I watch it, but it’s still a lot of fun. And I’ve got the memory of being surprised and delighted for almost all of it way back in 2003.
A wings, beer and movie rental night with a friend and his wife. We each picked a VHS. Being 20something guys, we reluctantly agreed to let the guuuuurl pick one. And, to keep the peace, we let her pick run second. It was ome vampire/teenagers/product placement dreck called, "The Lost Boys". About twenty minutes in, I went from polite to riveted. This was a case of the inmates taking over the asylum and turning a by-the-numbers genre-quickie into something subversive and funny as fuck.
I was abashed at my initial bad attitude. I can't clearly remember, but just maybe, I said something complimentary to her. That still counts, doesn't it?
Also Timmy Capello
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cappello
Saw Peter Gabriel in 1978 in a college gym. One of the five or six great shows in my ticket stub collection. I distinctly remember the hip-twitching sax player. A friend told me that same show was one of the last nails in the coffin for her then-boyfriend. Poor guy couldn't deal with his special lady lusting after sexy sax guy.
I felt similarly about it. Thought my girl and I would enjoy something light, regardless of quality. It's nice to turn off one's critical sensibility and have the art itself turn it back on for you!
Johnny Depp, slapstick comedian, was the eye opener for me.
Lovely movie.
Oddly enough, Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven was one of those movies that had the lightbulb scene for me. When The Scofield Kid shows up to talk Bill Munny into going to kill the cowboys and Munny says "I ain't like that no more," it was clear this was going to be a very different kind of Western.
The other end of the spectrum: Jacksons' The Hobbit. After seeing what he'd accomplished with Lord of the Rings, I went in with great expectations of what The Hobbit would be. Saying the movie was based loosely on the book is far too generous--Jackson decided that Tolkein not only needed rewriting, but needed all kinds of bullshit additions to pad the thing out. Didn't even make it a third of the way through the first movie before it was clear to me the entire enterprise had gone completely off the rails.
Every chance I get I'm gonna recommend Lindsay Ellis's The Hobbit: A Long-Expected Autopsy on YouTube. It's a very deep dive (a 2-part that turned into a 3-part) into why it turned out the way it did (hint: one of the episodes is titled The Battle of 5 Studios). It starts slow but the payoff is worth it. And she is a treasure, IMHO.
When Kubrick changes everything with the click sound of a walk-in cooler door unlocking in The Shining -
One of my favorite film moments is in one of the seemingly endless series of hyper- violent yakuza movies by Takashi Miike, Dead or Alive. These are formula programmers - as predictable as a Rocky Jones western. Gangster kills Good Cop's family. Cop goes on hyper violent rampage. In the ending- cop and head gangster face of in a showdown. One or both die in bloody slow motion. There are I bet hundreds of these films. The showdown in Dead or Alive goes as expected. Then both protagonists stand, they face off and keep shooting one another in the chest, to no apparent effect. Then the cop pulls out a rather large rocket launcher,(from who knows where) and shoots the gangster. This results in a nuclear explosion which destroys Japan. You see it from space. A pretty great effect, actually. Fin.
W.T.F.
OK, THAT'S impressive.
Dead Or Alive has been a fave-rave since the day it opened!
Well, there's a persuasive argument for gun control.
He was a cop though. They need weapons to keep us safe. I mean, he ended up killing all the criminals in Japan with one shot. That's Law and Order!
Poor Margaux... Sort of one episode of family dysfunction too many for a single family that isn't the Kennedys (although maybe JFK Jr's death was that one too many, and now the RFK Jr anti-vax thing is beyond the pale...).
But as to the question of the day, best I can do -- because slippery, erratic memory -- first scene of No Time to Die gave me a bad feeling and had I but the time of the interest I could detail how completely awful it is. Once scene and a supporting performance encompasses all the good stuff. OTOH, I expect in my pulp entertainments that the bad guys get punished and well...
“…that moment in a movie when everything changes.” I confess I immediately went to a moment in a movie theater when everything changed, but you’re not here to hear about teenage sexual awakening, so I’ll say, instead, the botched ambush in “The Wild Bunch,” which I saw at a private showing in college with Sam Peckinpah which he introduced by talking about making an antiviolence film and I watched the paraders being shot down and thought, “Sam Peckinpah is full of shit.”
LOL he came to your college? Only big-time director I saw introduce his movie was Sam Fuller. The Public Theatre in New York ran a series -- a revelatory, brilliant series -- of his films and Fuller, sensing I'm sure the sheen such an event would add to his career, introduced Park Row, the opener, a picture he'd financed himself. I remember only the end of his short address: "Long story short, the picture got made and I lost my ass! Thank you!"
Park Row is great! I envy you - That amazing set. And Gene Evans. Maybe my favorite Fuller Film. OK - Second favorite. After Forty Guns.
When they ate the rabbit in "Local Hero"
“Why’d you call it ‘Trudy’?”
This movie is wack af -- but weirdest, most dizzing ending to a movie I remember was in Big Man Japan (2007, dir & starring Hitoshi Matsumoto). I dunno -- I saw it pre-medical MJ days & just... sat with it. Hard to explain.
Big Man Japan is awesome! Highly recommended.
Ebert's review is pretty awesome too.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/big-man-japan-2009
Thank you guys, I was completely unaware of this and now I'm fascinated.
It's just that it goes from basic realism to a cut-out 1950s Gojira set at an important moment & all the weird nostalgic feels come blazing back, a tribute to a past that BMJ has never been able to live up to. And then the very end... just kimd of unsettling, but uncannily comforting. 5/5 Would recommend.
Did you see it in a theater? That would be badass.
Remembering back to what it was like to watch these Japanese monster movies as a kid, and I think it was the almost-realistic-but-not-real quality of the sets that really got me. Godzilla destroys a train, and you can see that it's obviously a model train, but it's the best damn model train set you've ever seen, and then it all goes smash. To a kid who built his own models, the really high-quality model-building on display (briefly, before its destruction) was the best part. Who builds models that good and then smashes them all up like that, and HOW CAN I GET IN ON THIS?
Absolutely !You- tube has several of the Honda directed Toho Kaiju films available right now. Super clean Janus film copies. Subtitles. The original Godzilla is a serious, thoughtful film.
The Walken-Hopper dialogue in True Romance really sent things over the top for me.
It was almost like a separate movie, it took me out so well!
When Elsa Lanchester appears about halfway through The Big Clock, and the whole things turns from noir thriller to comedy. I can't think of another example where a character actor so completely hijacks a film. Lanchester even gets the last line and the movie ends on a "Leave 'em laughing" note when we just saw Charles Laughton fall to his death down an elevator shaft. I suppose the fact that Laughton, the director, was also Lanchester's husband may have something to do with that?
Also, I was watching Winchester '73 a couple of nights ago, and man does Dan Duryea come out of nowhere and totally capture every bit of interest and attention you can give. Sorry, what was this about again, because could we just make it all about the story of Waco Johnny Dean instead?
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘉𝘪𝘨 𝘊𝘭𝘰𝘤𝘬—what a romp! The elevator scene alone, a single take with different sets on each “floor,” is worth the price of admission/rental/purchase/streaming service.
Wait... what? I never noticed that - how did they do it? Roll the sets in front of the elevator doors? Now I've got to go back a rewatch - thanks!
Granddaughter.
Oh, right! Fixing that now, thanks.
Two that caused me to say holy fuck in a good way: in Palm Springs, the first arrow shots by JK Simmons, and in Sorry to Bother You, the bathroom hybrid reveal.
Well maybe...
"Z" made me go out and paint a great big Z on the garage door – somebody else's garage door – I was painting houses that high school summer...but when our film club chose it as the movie of the month last month I looked the thing up online and found a free version on google. That allowed me to watch it over and over again, stop rewind to freeze frame and look at details, that sort of thing, and dig the choreography of action scenes (and I discovered Costa-Gavras was a ballet dancer and producer!)
But what really got me was the interrogations scene at the end, when the Magistrate is grilling the cops, and the assistant is typing away frantically on one of those machines with the selectric ball, and the clatter of the machine dominates the room, and occasionally the typing stops for a moment and the camera rests on the works for maybe a second. That happens 2 or 3 times, and is so suggestive that I had to freeze frame and enlarge the image to see why C-G did that. Well, here's the deal – the ball stops EVERY time with the same letter right in the center of the screen – I bet I do not need to tell you what that letter is.
Made me think about movies and directors on another dimension entirely.
Good comment! Sleeping Car Murders is really great too.Montand, Signoret. B&W..
Does it get any better? I don't think so.!
Funny thing about Z: Montand & Papas, the 2 biggest stars, were on screen for only a few minutes. And Papas, possibly the most recognizable Greek actor of the century, was likely cast primarily with the intent of sticking a thumb in the eye of the junta...
Oh, you have reminded me of "Missing" (1982, Costa-Gavras), with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. Lemmon's son has disappeared during the 1973 Chilean coup, and he joins his daughter-in-law, Sissy Spacek, to try to find him. It's been years since I've seen it, but I recall a white horse that's gotten loose one night during the coup, galloping down the city streets through the violence. (I guess it was obviously meant to be Allende, but it was eerie and moving.)
It was interesting seeing Lemmon and Spacek, whose politics were so opposite, beginning to understand each other. Also in one flashback, the missing guy, Charles Horman (played by John Shea) is going out to do some reporting or investigating right before the coup, and someone warns him it could be dangerous. He grins and says sardonically, "It's okay, I'm an Ammurican!"
I was reminded of that film during the Justine Sacco debacle - she got thoroughly canceled back in 2013 as she headed to her new job in Africa. She tweeted to her 200 followers "Going to Africa, hope I don't get AIDS! Just kidding, I'm white!", got on the airplane, and by the time she landed in Capetown, the whole thing had blown up and she got fired. (Later she said that "only an insane person would think white people don't get AIDS.") Her tweet struck me the same way as Charlie Horman's joke about how nothing could happen to him because "I'm an Ammurican!" - a sardonic throwaway line that became something else.
"paint a great big Z on the garage door – somebody else's garage door" Good job!
OK, so that was part of the story...We were painting the house while the family was outta town. It was Friday night and the job was almost done; the only thing left to paint was the garage. But I didn't have enough paint to finish it (and the paint store was closed by then), so I just did the Z and cleared out. Saturday, somebody in the sleepy little community noticed the garage and called the local community weekly paper. A reporter wandered out there and took a couple pics and wrote it up. It resulted in about 5 of my 15 minutes o'fame...because turns out the homeowner was the editor/publisher of the paper...
You should ask what movies had an ending that spoiled it all?
Like Matt Damon imitating an old man at the cemetery in Saving Private Ryan.
𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘢𝘴𝘬 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘮𝘰𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘢𝘯 𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘱𝘰𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘵 𝘢𝘭𝘭?
𝗖𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗲𝘅𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲: For most of its length I thought that 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘖𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴 was pitch-perfect, but in its closing minutes I was overtaken with a sense of dread that the writer/director was about to spoil everything that had gone before with a treacly, sentimental coda—and then he didn’t. On the contrary, he delivered in the dénouement the kind of satisfying emotional resolution, subtle and deft, that a lesser director would have attempted and utterly botched. I felt this tension-and-release so strongly that I even wondered whether the filmmakers had intended it.
In a distantly similar connection, as I sat through the David Fincher film 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘢𝘮𝘦 on its original release in 1997, I kept thinking that it was going to turn into a stupidly conventional thriller with all the tired old tropes, and at each such turn the production nimbly pulled those expectations from under me. Here, I’m pretty certain that this audience reaction was anticipated. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘢𝘮𝘦 is not a flick that takes any benefit from a rigorous examination of the plot on your way out of the theatre, but if the viewer is prepared to grant a willing suspension of disbelief for the duration, the film will pay back in honest coin the sort of gratification one experiences having watched a talented illusionist at work.
Ditto on 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘖𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴 in all aspects. (I'm copy-pasting your italics since I have no idea how otherwise.)
The ending of Defending Your Life was really, really bad.
I take exception.
Really? I thought it undercut the whole premise. Still, the lobby sign reading: "Welcome Kiwanis Dead" is worth everything.
No scene featuring Rip Torn is ever bad.
I know,right? I hope he got paid in Bitcoins.
I thought he was good!
I dunno, I guess the acting was pretty good, but the makeup was extremely distracting and the way Spielberg always takes his earnestness to the edge of bathos…. I just shuddered.