20th Hall of Fame

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The thing isolated becomes incomprehensible
So happy to hear you enjoyed it. I feel exactly the same way about getting to have a rewatch for Phantom Thread -- thank YOU for nominating that one!
I'm glad you enjoyed it! I always feel that, as with most PTA films, Phantom Thread never got much attention, which is a shame, because I really look at it as with one of the best films of the last 20 years.



i have a ghostbusters review a few pages back that isn’t in the first post. i also just watched monsters inc. and will be posting my review in a bit. i’ll be watching one more tonight and the last two tomorrow
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Women will be your undoing, Pépé
I'm glad you enjoyed it! I always feel that, as with most PTA films, Phantom Thread never got much attention, which is a shame, because I really look at it as with one of the best films of the last 20 years.
I agree, I only heard a little regarding it when it came out and only saw it earlier this year.
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Women will be your undoing, Pépé



The Music Man

Marian Paroo: No, please, not tonight. Maybe tomorrow.
Harold Hill: Oh, my dear little librarian. You pile up enough tomorrows, and you'll find you've collected nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays. I don't know about you, but I'd like to make today worth remembering.

The con is on and the songs are fit to spiel.
Convincing a town that they have trouble and the only solution is they have a marching band, Professor Hill sweet talks/sings his way through the town and dodging The Committee intend on getting his references by tricking them into performing a barbershop quartet song at every turn.

Filled with colorful, bright clothing and a turn of the century sugar-coated simpler moral compass, we are treated to a song and dance and a little romance.

On a very small side note, I thought it rather amusing during little Ronny Howard's song on the porch with his sister and mom how he pointed to each woman for them to sing, I couldn't help but remark: "Aw, looks like somebody's got a taste for Directing early on, don't it?" lol

I haven't seen this since I was but a child and it was fun to revisit.



rewatched monsters inc. the other day. i hadn't seen most of it in at least 8 years, yet i watched it so much as a kid that every moment felt more familiar than if i were rewatching a film i saw yesterday. certain textures from the film are ingrained in my brain and would come rushing back to me 10 seconds before they occurred. stuff like mike wazowski getting his fingers smashed at the desk, sully's exercise's at the start of the film, the way the water in the toilet looks as sully fails to flush that stuff down, his reaction to watching what he thinks is boo going through the trash compactor, his face that terrifies boo, his face as invisible randall hits him with the battery, the pale look of randall's henchman after he's put through that machine, the way the snowcones hit sully's fur, the disturbing 23:19 scene. it was comforting to see that the film was exactly the same as i had left it as a kid. it might've been even better because now i can appreciate the message of how capitalism creates literal monsters, and there were definitely several jokes that never fully registered before. the character designs are maybe my favorite in any pixar film, and the voice acting is perfect. i'm pretty sure this film is the reason (along with his performance in soap) that i've always loved billy crystal even as it became obvious to me that he's one of the worst types of showbiz hacks, and john goodman is at his most lovable.

even as a kid, i'd always lumped this in with the 2nd tier of pixar, which is still high praise, but i think it deserves to be mentioned with the top tier. or at least like, tier 1-b.

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also watched elmer gantry last night and liked it alright. reminded me thematically of a serious, period-piece version of the righteous gemstones in the way it is an indictment of american protestantism and its central characters toe the line between con artists and true believers who just happen to be a little psychotic. i also appreciated the way it showed the more-sophisticated dean jagger's initial disapproval of elmer to ultimately be rooted purely in a lack of class rather than any substantive critique, and he is quickly won over and it becomes clear there was never very much separating the two except their manners. reminded me of the way trump revealed the republican establishment to be just as cruel as he is, but i digress. there are plenty of trump parallels and i'm sure somebody could write a great essay about that, but i probably wouldn't get around to reading it, i have better things to do.

lancaster and jones are great, and i think simmons might've been even better. i also really dig that handsome 1960s color aesthetic, where everything is sorta grey and brown yet it somehow still feels vibrant, but it also feels a little too neat in a way that keeps me at arm's length sometimes. the film didn't really come alive for me until the ending scene with the fire when everything starts to unravel both narratively and visually. on the whole, the film is perhaps a bit too literary and didactic for me to find it truly compelling and i was a bit tired when i watched it, but there's definitely a lot of interesting stuff here.

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The thing isolated becomes incomprehensible
The Music Man (1962)

So, left this movie for last cause I wasn't really anxious to watch it, to be honest. Musicals are not usually my thing, especially the Broadway ones.
With that being said, there were some (a lot) awful moments, that I was expecting, some good ones that surprised me and especially some that spoke to me in a very personal way.
I explain: Bands kind of similar to the one of this film are a strong tradition in the North of Portugal. We even have one of the best in the world, Banda Sinfónica Portuguesa. It's the place where many many kids learn music for the first time, some of them becoming professionals later. I was one of those kids. When I was 8, I started playing trombone in a philarmonic band (how we call it). Over the next 10 years I played in some different bands, made some money, lots of friends and even more memories. I eventually left that world to study opera singing, but there's some of that past that always stayed with me.

So, to see a song I always cherished and played tons of times like "76 Trombones", it's quite special, mainly cause I wasn't really expecting it. There's also a version of one of my favourite opera singers that you might enjoy:



That was the special part of the film to me, the theme as a whole.

I also liked some of the humour, especially when they were not singing and the energy of Robert Preston is amazing which makes every interaction he has with the other characters quite interesting. Shirley Jones is not bad too, though I liked her better in Elmer Gantry.

Now, I absolutely hated the rest of the songs, especially if the choir was in them. Uninteresting arrangements, stiff acting, lack of musical sense and almost nobody could actually sing (which could be useful in a musical, maybe, I don't know)... Everytime a song started I was like: oh god, here we go. Because this film has A LOT of them, I eventually started looking at the run time too often, and boy is this big...

There's really not else I can say about this, the story telling is pretty straight forward, with no real character development. I feel a better movie could be made out of this by having a quarter of the songs (or no songs at all?) and more character depth.

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i watched the music man (pretty good) and rewatched blood simple (very good) today, but i'm high and not at my laptop rn so the reviews are gonna have to wait until tomorrow. i'm sending in my list now so everybody doesn't have to wait and i don't accidentally forget to submit before the deadline.



Wonderful news! Neiba and Frightened Inmate have sent in their voting list and I'm ready to tally the points.
Very excited!



The thing isolated becomes incomprehensible
Never saw Neibas High Noon review so look forward to that.
I thought I had written it, sorry!

High Noon

This movie is part of my Top 100, and I'm happy to say that after this rewatch it will keep that way. It's probably my favorite non-spaghetti Western.

I still like the same things I did when I watched it for the first time but now I noticed some different things too.
The pacing is still very very good, making it intense and fun to watch at the same time.
Gary Cooper looks amazing on this, the rest of the cast is ok, though I think Grace Kelly has much better films.
The cinematography is gorgeous, I love this black and white, it's kind of different than most black and white films, it looks contrasting and crispy, which goes really well with the mood of the film.
Now, the thing I noticed this time around was how Zinnemann uses music. The shooting scene, which is really well prepared, is especially mesmerizing. We have music non stop for like 10 minutes with a very similar theme being repeated but changing slightly depending on what's happening on screen. I love that as soon as Cooper wins the shootout and he comes together with Kelly the same team just naturally appears but in a tender and slower way, it's like you can finally breathe again! It's the one element that keeps that entire scene together and it's not something very common to find.

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Sorry if I missed it, but is there a timeframe for the unveil @Citizen Rules ?
I think he said whenever people are online basically. Sometime today at least.



My prediction is a win for Cool Hand Luke. But like I said I think Rear Window would have won.
Yeah Rear Window would have, I’m thinking Elmer Gantry has a shot.