1970 HATEWATCH -- Love Story -- she's such a bitch and he's such a douche-- I just want both of them to die. MASTERPIECES:: Dog Day Afternoon, Network, Rocky 2.
Hehe Thank you...it's just so shocking to rewatch it now and try to comprehend the #feelz...because they are just both so appalling. Nice Boston visages and famous song though..lol
Great decade! How about Chinatown, Godfather 1 and 2, and The Conversation, Last Picture Show?Also please discuss why Harrison Ford became a star and Paul LeMat didn’t. I need to know.
I saw “Foul Play” at much too young an age and it was never properly explained to me so I had reoccurring nightmares from this film that chased me into my teenage years!
I have “encouraged” my children to watch some of my favorite flicks from the 70s but we’ve had mixed results. Many of them did they describe as “too creepy” (Willy Wonka) but we have Freaky Friday and Escape to Witch Mountain on deck.
You can’t beat that era of movies in my humble opinion. Network, Chinatown, China Syndrome, Midnight Cowboy, The Deerhunter, etc, etc. Will add your faves to my list!
I love your project! My degree's in literature, but my college advisor loved films, and fashioned classes within the literature department that took advantage of our proximity to the campus-adjacent Pacific Film Archive. She would show a film, we'd have a round table with the director, or someone else affiliated with the film, and then we'd write a paper. Literary criticism. Thus the film and literature tie-in. My favorite film was Love Affair, Or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator, which opened my eyes to a lot of things about European filmmaking and European life. The director, Dušan Makavejev, couldn't join us either because he couldn't leave Communist Yugoslavia, or had left Yugoslavia, but couldn't cross a border to the US in the late 1970's—I'm a bit hazy as to where he was—so his female assistant joined us. My advisor is now a professor emeritus, but she's still offering film classes. After reading the Rolling Stone 100 Best Movies of the 1970s list I have a nomination for a film I saw only because I bought Criterion Collection's streaming service when it was first offered—highly recommended, I love it, it's where I watched the devastating Jeanne Dielman, 32 Quai des Commerce after it was recommended by Sight and Sound in 2022—which is Claudia Weill's Girlfriend's. Look at its Wikipedia entry. The male reviewers takes on it are patronizing and miss the mark except for the one by Susan Champlin's discerning dad Charles Champlin. (I love him.) The film is extraordinary for a number of reasons, but the things you mention in your introduction to this piece are all present. When I watched it I was enchanted by the story, the settings, the talented cast, but most of all because it shows so clearly where we thought we were going in 1978, as opposed to where we are now. The natural nudity in the film shown as part of a relationship between Melanie Mayron and Christopher Guest (contrasted with today's scene's of women waking up in bed in full makeup, with a bra on, and with both participants tripping around wrapped in sheets to avoid revealing any skin after supposedly having a night of intimacy), the mention of an abortion as a woman's choice, the conversational pacing that matched our actual days, I love it all. If you haven't seen it please do. After all the dunderheaded, damned-by-faint-praise American male reviewers, it's a pleasure to know what Stanley Kubrick said of Girlfriends. It's also a pleasure to note he brought up a film by a woman when prompted with an all male list of creators. Heh.
"Stanley Kubrick brought up the film in 1980 when being interviewed by Vicente Molina Foix at Kubrick's house:
Foix: Are you interested in the new paths or trends within current Hollywood production being tried by people like Coppola, Schrader, Spielberg, Scorsese or DePalma?
Kubrick: "I think one of the most interesting Hollywood films, well not Hollywood -- American films -- that I've seen in a long time is Claudia Weill's Girlfriends. That film, I thought, was one of the very rare American films that I would compare with the serious, intelligent, sensitive writing and filmmaking that you find in the best directors in Europe. It wasn't a success, I don't know why; it should have been. Certainly I thought it was a wonderful film. It seemed to make no compromise to the inner truth of the story, you know, the theme and everything else...
The great problem is that the films cost so much now; in America it's almost impossible to make a good film -- which means you have to spend a certain amount of time on it, and have good technicians and good actors -- that aren't very, very expensive. This film that Claudia Weill did, I think she did on an amateur basis; she shot it for about a year, two or three days a week. Of course she had a great advantage, because she had all the time she needed to think about it, to see what she had done. I thought she made the film extremely well."
The Rolling Stone list had one of my favorite films, Being There. "Life is a state of mind."
I'm in the opposite space, people-wise - my husband just started a new job and is commuting to Tennessee, my college kiddo is working a full-time, 9-6 job and so isn't around much except to run in and ask when dinner is, and my 17yo is at summer camp. It's me, the dog, the Texas-sized mosquitos, and the heat. (And she isn't friendly so, no, I don't want to get up early with the other exercise fanatics and "beat the heat", either.)
Oh and this might be the summer to introduce my teen to "classics" like The Jerk and Young Frankenstein and Smokey and the Bandit. Because we're classy and shit...
1970 HATEWATCH -- Love Story -- she's such a bitch and he's such a douche-- I just want both of them to die. MASTERPIECES:: Dog Day Afternoon, Network, Rocky 2.
I don't think I've ever seen Love Story, but now I have to watch. And LOVE Dog Day Afternoon.
Ever since I have been an adult I am just flummoxed how it was the quintessential tear jerker when both mains are SO insufferable. 🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️
That is the best and most accurate review of Love Story I’ve ever read.
That is the best view of Love Story. I’ve ever read.
Hehe Thank you...it's just so shocking to rewatch it now and try to comprehend the #feelz...because they are just both so appalling. Nice Boston visages and famous song though..lol
They are the worst. And I don’t think they even like each other very much. It’s a very unconvincing film.
Except the song and again the lovely cinematography ...I find it mind-boggling that it got nominated for so many Oscars.
Great decade! How about Chinatown, Godfather 1 and 2, and The Conversation, Last Picture Show?Also please discuss why Harrison Ford became a star and Paul LeMat didn’t. I need to know.
On the list! And no kidding. He has Melvin & Howard at least.
I saw “Foul Play” at much too young an age and it was never properly explained to me so I had reoccurring nightmares from this film that chased me into my teenage years!
I have “encouraged” my children to watch some of my favorite flicks from the 70s but we’ve had mixed results. Many of them did they describe as “too creepy” (Willy Wonka) but we have Freaky Friday and Escape to Witch Mountain on deck.
You can’t beat that era of movies in my humble opinion. Network, Chinatown, China Syndrome, Midnight Cowboy, The Deerhunter, etc, etc. Will add your faves to my list!
I love your project! My degree's in literature, but my college advisor loved films, and fashioned classes within the literature department that took advantage of our proximity to the campus-adjacent Pacific Film Archive. She would show a film, we'd have a round table with the director, or someone else affiliated with the film, and then we'd write a paper. Literary criticism. Thus the film and literature tie-in. My favorite film was Love Affair, Or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator, which opened my eyes to a lot of things about European filmmaking and European life. The director, Dušan Makavejev, couldn't join us either because he couldn't leave Communist Yugoslavia, or had left Yugoslavia, but couldn't cross a border to the US in the late 1970's—I'm a bit hazy as to where he was—so his female assistant joined us. My advisor is now a professor emeritus, but she's still offering film classes. After reading the Rolling Stone 100 Best Movies of the 1970s list I have a nomination for a film I saw only because I bought Criterion Collection's streaming service when it was first offered—highly recommended, I love it, it's where I watched the devastating Jeanne Dielman, 32 Quai des Commerce after it was recommended by Sight and Sound in 2022—which is Claudia Weill's Girlfriend's. Look at its Wikipedia entry. The male reviewers takes on it are patronizing and miss the mark except for the one by Susan Champlin's discerning dad Charles Champlin. (I love him.) The film is extraordinary for a number of reasons, but the things you mention in your introduction to this piece are all present. When I watched it I was enchanted by the story, the settings, the talented cast, but most of all because it shows so clearly where we thought we were going in 1978, as opposed to where we are now. The natural nudity in the film shown as part of a relationship between Melanie Mayron and Christopher Guest (contrasted with today's scene's of women waking up in bed in full makeup, with a bra on, and with both participants tripping around wrapped in sheets to avoid revealing any skin after supposedly having a night of intimacy), the mention of an abortion as a woman's choice, the conversational pacing that matched our actual days, I love it all. If you haven't seen it please do. After all the dunderheaded, damned-by-faint-praise American male reviewers, it's a pleasure to know what Stanley Kubrick said of Girlfriends. It's also a pleasure to note he brought up a film by a woman when prompted with an all male list of creators. Heh.
"Stanley Kubrick brought up the film in 1980 when being interviewed by Vicente Molina Foix at Kubrick's house:
Foix: Are you interested in the new paths or trends within current Hollywood production being tried by people like Coppola, Schrader, Spielberg, Scorsese or DePalma?
Kubrick: "I think one of the most interesting Hollywood films, well not Hollywood -- American films -- that I've seen in a long time is Claudia Weill's Girlfriends. That film, I thought, was one of the very rare American films that I would compare with the serious, intelligent, sensitive writing and filmmaking that you find in the best directors in Europe. It wasn't a success, I don't know why; it should have been. Certainly I thought it was a wonderful film. It seemed to make no compromise to the inner truth of the story, you know, the theme and everything else...
The great problem is that the films cost so much now; in America it's almost impossible to make a good film -- which means you have to spend a certain amount of time on it, and have good technicians and good actors -- that aren't very, very expensive. This film that Claudia Weill did, I think she did on an amateur basis; she shot it for about a year, two or three days a week. Of course she had a great advantage, because she had all the time she needed to think about it, to see what she had done. I thought she made the film extremely well."
The Rolling Stone list had one of my favorite films, Being There. "Life is a state of mind."
Ooh, sounds like a plan!
I'm in the opposite space, people-wise - my husband just started a new job and is commuting to Tennessee, my college kiddo is working a full-time, 9-6 job and so isn't around much except to run in and ask when dinner is, and my 17yo is at summer camp. It's me, the dog, the Texas-sized mosquitos, and the heat. (And she isn't friendly so, no, I don't want to get up early with the other exercise fanatics and "beat the heat", either.)
Maybe I'll ACTUALLY write.
Oh and this might be the summer to introduce my teen to "classics" like The Jerk and Young Frankenstein and Smokey and the Bandit. Because we're classy and shit...
Young Frankenstein is one of my all time favorites.
What's Up Doc? is brilliant!