Comments on: 915. Le chagrin et la pitiÃ© / The Sorrow and the Pity (1969, Marcel Ophuls)

By: ridwanzero

ridwanzero — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 07:54:22 +0000

By that I mean latching on to this or that latest, most innovative idea that some self styled money making guru has put out in the hope it’ll go viral and make them a lot of money off the backs of all the headless chickens who will follow them blindly down a blind alley. Its a shame but a truism nonetheless that people will follow where someone they see as an expert leads. Even if they lead them to certain disaster, which is what most of the gurus tend to do to their flocks.
www.onlineuniversalwork.com

By: PharmaCosmetics

PharmaCosmetics — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 05:53:18 +0000

Thanks! Nice one.

By: Unlike Alvy, I watched it alone « Rightwing Film Geek

Unlike Alvy, I watched it alone « Rightwing Film Geek — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 13:26:52 +0000

[...] In other words, the film just seemed to be a collection of footage more than a film and thus became a bit tiring to watch, and would have been even at two hours. I always felt like I was trying to make sense of “what next” and “why this, now.” We hear at about the 180- or 200-minute mark that Clermont-Ferrand was liberated and go into some of the reprisals, against the Germans and collaborators, and I was asking myself — “how? by whom? with or without a fight? when during the broader war? … actually where the heck IS Clermont-Ferrand??” And the Maurice Chevalier bit at the end struck me as just … bizarre, both in its point (Ophuls’s point, that is, if any) and its pictorial quality. I realize that Ophuls was making the film for a French audience for whom the broadest outlines of history was universal knowledge, but … well … I’m me. (And also, one claim commonly made about the film was its groundbreaking muckraking and demythologizing, which rather suggests that some of this knowledge wasn’t so universal.) ——————————————— Photos from Kevin Lee of Shooting Down Pictures (his review of SORROW here). [...]

By: Shooting Down Pictures » Blog Archive » 916. Gregory’s Girl (1981, Bill Forsyth)

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 10:51:40 +0000

[...] I intend to keep this entry relatively brief, for several reasons. My last epic entry on The Sorrow and the Pity took a lot of hours and effort, so I could use a bit of a breather. Also, Gregory’s Girl was a bit of a letdown. Light and breezy, perhaps it suffers after being viewed right after a massive WWII documentary, but even on its own comic terms I was left a bit wanting. Placing film under the well-worn category of coming-of-age teen sex comedy, the best argument I can make for it was that it was a touchstone of the genre. Entering the market right before the genre exploded to dominate 80s’ Hollywood, I wonder just how much influence it had as an art-house import on the likes of John Hughes and some of the more humanistic entries in the genre. It seems like a refreshingly innocent counterpart to the hornier and more mean-spirited come-uppance games played by National Lampoon’s Animal House and Porky’s. On the other hand, there’s more than a few moments in this film that strike me as sweetly off-beat to the point of being simple minded, and eccentric to a fault. In this way it seems in today’s context to be all too related to much of the middling fare that comes to Sundance straining to be likeably off-center – call it Napoleon McDynamite. It’s literally up to its armpits in quirkiness: [...]