Another scene honoring an inductee into Bullz-Eye’s Director’s Hall of Fame, Class of 2010, this time looking at my one of my choices for Stanley Kubrick‘s greatest films, 1957’s “Paths of Glory.” One of the greatest visceral depictions of the horror of war ever made.
A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later. — Stanley Kubrick
In honor of the new class of fine filmmakers selected by the film writers of our mothership site, we start with a scene from the movie my colleague, Jason Zingale, accurately selected as Quentin Tarantino‘s most underrated.
Be forewarned that, typically enough for Mr. Tarantino, this scene — which features a brief appearance by the late Tony Curtis via TV — contains lots of NSFW language. In particular, Samuel L. Jackson as murderous arms dealer Ordell Robbie uses enough n-words here that some took umbrage — perhaps because it showed he hadn’t been dissuaded when Denzel Washington gave him a talking to about using the word on the set of 1995’s “Crimson Tide.” One difference: in Tarantino’s earlier films, he has low-life white criminals using the word, possibly accurate but definitely on the edge of acceptability in mainstream films, here he has low-life African-American crooks using the word, more or less de rigeur in the nineties. Personally, I doubt I could justify changing a single word here in any case.
Come to think of it, I don’t think there’s been a single n-word in a Tarantino film since 97’s “Jackie Brown.” Denzel Washington, however, did use the word repeatedly (though with an “a” instead of an “er” on the end) as an unsavory copper, and won an Oscar for it, in 2001’s “Training Day.”
A pretty effective mash-up of the “True Grit” trailer audio with “Toy Story 3.”
H/t Anne Thompson.
There really hasn’t been all that much interesting movie news this week, but things have definitely heated up just in the last few hours. Specifically…
* Via Quint at AICN, “The Hobbit” two-movie package has been officially greenlit, with Peter Jackson directing. It’s a good thing because I was really getting tired of those “it’s just about greenlit” “it’s almost greenlit” “no, it’s actually not quite greenlit because of MGM being on the block, nothing to see here” rinse-and-repeat stories. I don’t even care if Nikki Finke and Mike Fleming want to claim a “toldja” on this or how many casting rumors they’re repeating, just make the damn movies already.
Oh, but first, they’ve got to solve the previously reported issues with SAG and AFTRA. As a good liberal I’m very pro-union and I think that anyone who thinks we’d be better off without unions should be immediately transported to a smokey factory in 19th century London and asked to work a 72 hour week without overtime pay. However, like all the other geeks, I nevertheless think SAG and AFTRA are probably overreaching here and are singling out the movie because of its high profile.
* A related story is also a classic example of an unpleasant news item arriving late on a Friday night in an attempt to bury it. The highly regarded executive Mary Parent — beloved of Joss Whedon fans for giving both the “Buffy” TV and the “Serenity” movie gigs — is officially out at MGM.
* The king of the world is supposedly flirting with making a movie about the queen of the world — not Oprah, but Cleopatra. Angelina Jolie is already set to star in a project that’s already sounding to me as bloated as the wildly over budget 1963 production, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, that nearly bankrupted Fox — despite being the year’s most successful movie (despite being a movie that almost no one likes today).
* It always tempting to make jokes about the porn industry, but HIV is no joke and there’s been an outbreak of it, so far limited to one on-screen sex worker. Is the site of a condom really that much of a boner buzz-kill?
* David Chase is reuniting with musical genius Steven Van Zandt, who played helmet-haired Silvio Dante on “The Sopranos,” as his music supervisor and is taking on a cast of more-or-less unknowns on his planned feature musical drama. This one I’m looking forward to. Before getting his start writing some of the best episodes ever of “The Rockford Files,” Chase was and presumably still is influenced largely by European art films.
BTW, if you’ve never heard Van Zandt’s great radio show and you like rock and roll, you’re missing something. Also, Mr. Van Zandt should be remembered as a human rights hero for his involvement with this great piece of pop music protest.
Legendary critic Andrew Sarris has his pantheon, our esteemed mothership site, Bullz-Eye.com, has its Directors Hall of Fame. Admittedly, as a men’s magazine with a youngish readership, our leanings are populist, relatively recent, and male-friendly, so super-cinephile Ozu, Dreyer, Sirk, Flaherty, Murnau, and Bresson fans may have a very long wait — especially as our prior group of inductees was way back on 2007.
Still, each of the four director and one great directorial brother-act we’ve selected have made the kind of hugely entertaining and involving movies that turn casual viewers into fans and fans into filmmakers, and all have even made films that I’d argue are genuine works of art — yes, I consider “A Fistful of Yen” from “Kentucky Fried Movie” a genuine work of art. This year’s class was selected via a painstaking process akin to a virtual group knife-fight as several highly opinionated film fans, myself definitely included, bandied names about. (John Ford, Billy Wilder, Akira Kurosawa, and Howard Hawks, you’ll have your day yet!)
So, who made our list? Well, there’s a clue above and the picture below may also provide a small clue about one of them. But you can see all of them right here.
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