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Crawdaddy's "Random Thoughts" about Home Video, Film & TV (3 Viewers)

Robert Crawford

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Robert Crawford

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My first bit of entertainment news is the following:

Turner Classic Movies launches Noir Alley, hosted by Eddie Muller:

Turner Classic Movies (TCM) is taking up permanent residence in the shadowy world of film noir with the launch of Noir Alley, a new programming franchise hosted by Eddie Muller, founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation. Known to classic film fans as “The Czar of Noir,” Muller will explore the genre from every angle as he introduces a different noir classic each week. Noir Alley will air Sundays at 10 a.m. (ET) starting March 5 with a screening of the movie widely credited as the first film noir, The Maltese Falcon (1941).

Film noir, with its gritty and dark style, was a favorite among 1940s and 1950s moviegoers and continues to be one of the most popular genres of classic film today. Noir Alley will showcase film noir's heavy hitters each week including the below March lineup:

  • March 5: The Maltese Falcon (1941), the unforgettable classic about "the stuff that dreams are made of," directed by first-time director John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet
  • March 12: Detour (1945), a remarkable and highly influential film directed on a shoestring budget by Edgar G. Ulmer and starring Tom Neal and Ann Savage
  • March 19: Act of Violence (1948), a revenge tale about WWII veterans directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Van Heflin and Robert Ryan
  • March 26: Tension (1949), an engrossing thriller about a would-be wife killer directed by John Berry and starring Richard Basehart and Audrey Totter

Read more at the following link: https://www.turner.com/pressroom/tc...ogramming-franchise-noir-alley#undefined.gbpl

https://www.hometheaterforum.com/community/posts/4464438/
 
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DavidJ

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What I think I'm going to do is record it every week. Watch Eddie Muller's segments then either watch the film he's showing or watch any disc I have of the Film Noir featured each week.

That sounds like a good plan and one I will probably try to follow.
 

Matt Hough

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Thanks for the tip on Noir Alley. I'll be interested in hearing his intros and postscripts as well. He's certainly an entertaining commentator on many disc releases.
 

Dave B Ferris

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Hopefully, for this new effort, Mr. Mueller has already worked behind-the-scenes to resolve the legal issues surrounding "Devil Thumbs a Ride". I would appreciate a TCM airing, and of course a <domestic> Blu or DVD.
 

Walter Kittel

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That is good news. I haven't been in much of a film viewing mood lately (for a variety of reasons) and perhaps this will give me a push.

- Walter.
 

Cranston37+

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What I think I'm going to do is record it every week. Watch Eddie Muller's segments then either watch the film he's showing or watch any disc I have of the Film Noir featured each week.

One tip for noir/Eddie Muller fans - the streaming service FilmStruck is a TCM partnership with Criterion and those movies appear on there with the Muller intros/outros...
 

Robert Crawford

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Two more Blu-ray viewings today. First up was "No Highway in the Sky" with terrific quirky performance by James Stewart. I always got a kick out of his role in this film. Furthermore, many years ago, I developed a crush on Glynis Johns from seeing her in this film. An enjoyable experience as I'm about to watch it again with the audio commentary in the next week or so.

My third viewing was "Nocturnal Animals", a strange film that has some really good acting performances. I hated the opening scene and have read different views as to what it represents or what the director, Tom Ford was trying to say with it. I didn't care for it and thought it was tasteless, but that's just me. I loved the ending though.
 

Robert Crawford

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Today is the Oscars ceremony so I decided to watch the Olive Signature BD release of "The Quiet Man". For some reason, I never got around to watching it beforehand. So in the early morning, a couple of hours before sunrise, I started playing that BD disc in my new HT setup of OLED64E6P/Oppo 203 combination. Wow! The video presentation was simply beautiful. Since, I know this film by heart, I watched it today with the Joseph McBride audio commentary which is a very good commentary compared to most such efforts. I learned a couple of things I never realized about the film and those that made it.

As to the film itself, it won John Ford his fourth Best Director Oscar and it's one of my favorite Ford films. So many of my favorite actors are in this film. John Wayne, of course.:) Maureen O'Hara was one beautiful woman and this film captured her beauty in its entirety. Just a great film! Parts of it will not match up with norms or sensibilities in today's society, but they don't bother me at all. Matter of fact, some of the non-PC stuff is some of the funniest scenes in this film. A highly recommend this film.
 

Scott Merryfield

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Robert, did you own the previous 60th Anniversary edition of The Quiet Man? If so, is the new Signature edition that big of an improvement? I just have the older version
 

Winston T. Boogie

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My third viewing was "Nocturnal Animals", a strange film that has some really good acting performances. I hated the opening scene and have read different views as to what it represents or what the director, Tom Ford was trying to say with it. I didn't care for it and thought it was tasteless, but that's just me. I loved the ending though.

Yes, I have read and seen Tom Ford talk about that opening scene and...well...I buy what he says it is supposed to represent in terms of Susan and why she created it. I don't really buy what he says about it personally. I can say I am with you, Robert, in that I did not really enjoy watching it. I will say though that the women that agreed to perform full frontal nudity in that scene were pretty brave. So, cheers to them for having the guts to literally show EVERYTHING off.

That said I feel that opening is meant to be very confrontational with the audience because quite obviously some people are going to have a really hard time with up close and personal nudity like that and those women wildly jiggling everything they have got.

My question is why does Ford start the film this way?

Those naked women really do not connect to anything else in the film except if Tom Ford's goal is...

...to portray all women in the film as grotesques. I mean all the women in the film with maybe the exception of the one woman that is sitting in the office with Amy Adams and asks her about if she has not been sleeping again are portrayed in rather lousy and garish ways. They are not helpful, they are victims, they create problems for the men in the film and they generally all seem like people the men in the film would be better off not being around at least in the scenes we see in the film. Now I don't know if that's what Ford was going for but it comes across like he was.
 

Greg Krewet

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Yes, I have read and seen Tom Ford talk about that opening scene and...well...I buy what he says it is supposed to represent in terms of Susan and why she created it. I don't really buy what he says about it personally. I can say I am with you, Robert, in that I did not really enjoy watching it. I will say though that the women that agreed to perform full frontal nudity in that scene were pretty brave. So, cheers to them for having the guts to literally show EVERYTHING off.

That said I feel that opening is meant to be very confrontational with the audience because quite obviously some people are going to have a really hard time with up close and personal nudity like that and those women wildly jiggling everything they have got.

My question is why does Ford start the film this way?

Those naked women really do not connect to anything else in the film except if Tom Ford's goal is...

...to portray all women in the film as grotesques. I mean all the women in the film with maybe the exception of the one woman that is sitting in the office with Amy Adams and asks her about if she has not been sleeping again are portrayed in rather lousy and garish ways. They are not helpful, they are victims, they create problems for the men in the film and they generally all seem like people the men in the film would be better off not being around at least in the scenes we see in the film. Now I don't know if that's what Ford was going for but it comes across like he was.
I also am not sure why that opening scene has no connection to the rest of the movie. I did notice that the same women used in the opening sequence show up briefly later in the film just sitting outside of a building in one of the Sw Texas sequences. Has anybody else noticed this?
 

Winston T. Boogie

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I did not notice them in that part of the film but she inserts things from her life into the way she imagines things in the novel. So if the naked women from the opening of the film are in the Texas set "novel" part of the film that is why.


Another good example of this is when Edward and Susan are having a break-up argument outside (the one where she is telling him she just can't do it anymore) the green car that is harassing the "novel" characters on the road is actually parked right behind them. So, as she reads she inserts bits and pieces from her real life into the way she imagines what is going on in Edward's novel.
 
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