Refn would beg to differ, but luckily Friedkin is on your side
Majority of viewers is on my side too.
Oh god, I watched that video now I know Refn is completely out of synch with reality.
I donāt get it eitherā¦ Vertigo is one of my favourite movies ever and I had very high expectations on Rear Wndow since Iāve heard people praising it over alot of Hitchocks other works from this period. But nah, It doesnāt come close for me.
At first I thought he was just taking the piss, and I really hope he is.
Itās frustrating because I love the premise, but the film just falls flat for me. Psycho is definitely my #1 Hitchcock.
Iām not a great fan of Hitchcock. Heās very skillful at manipulating viewers, but to me thatās one of the major problems: itās all too manipulative, lacks real depth (and in many cases: lacks any logic). I used to like him a bit more when I was younger and still like movies such as Vertigo, North by Nothwest, Dial M for Murder, The Birds, to mention a few. Other classics have lost their appeal to me: Rear window, Shadow of a Doubt, Psycho: whatever others say or think about them, to me theyāre rather pointless
A complaint which could of course be levelled at the entire spaghetti western genre.
Rear Window is a good picture, imo. Not quite as smart as it thinks it is, no, but as gimmick movies go itās probably more comfortably entertaining than itās credited with being.
Only God Forgives is okay, too. Wasnāt keen on it at all upon first viewing but it persisted.
Of course, but most spaghetti westerns are low-budget entertainment stuff, B-movies so to speak, Hitchcock is a highly regarded major director, an artist and auteur. Hitchcock is generally considered as one of the great directors in history, along with illustrious names such as Eisenstein, Chaplin, Ford, Fellini, Tati, Leone, Scorsese, Lynch, etc. Personally I donāt think heās in the same league. He made some very entertaining thrillers but he created very few memorable characters and most of his movies make little sense if you think about them. He was very capable at creating tension and had a special gift for voyeuristic scenes, but his work - even his later work - looks (and sounds) very dated today.
Only God Forgives is excellent.
Rear Window is not one of my favourite Hitchcocks, but I can easily understand why others think so.
Hitchcockās films dated? Not really. At least mostly less than most other films of their times. Hitchcock is surely overrated (Ford or Hawks also), but not in the way several of the last comments here suggest. He made enough more conventional films, but his narrative talent shines always through, and he made some real great films. Actually more than many other famous directors. More than Leone, who made 2 of this kind. And is meanwhile also kinda overrated.
As a director of thrillers Hitchcock is the lonely king.
I donāt think numbers count, artists are judged by their best work, whether they are painters, writers, poets, directors or whatever, so I donāt count those conventional movies. Some of the greatest artists werenāt too prolific, Vermeer, Gogol, Rimbaud, Tati to mention only a few. Hitchcockās best works are, imo, Vertigo and North by Northwest (others may have other favorites of course) and neither of the two is a true masterpiece.
No doubt the French New Waveās championing of him, the sensational nature of many of his films, the sheer number of them and his genius for publicity all contributed to Hitchcockās status as a top tier director. More than this though, I think his technique (and the box office success it brought) and his relentless focus on suspense as filmās primary motivator, impacted the evolution of mainstream cinema, Spielberg etc.
That said, like scherpschutter, Iām not a great admirer, and never have been, for similar reasons. Famously he treated his actors like puppets, and to a degree their performances reflect it. The hands of the misogynistic master manipulator are visible.
I was impressed by Psycho, back in the day, as an atmosphere piece, and would like to see it again. My favourites are also Vertigo and the more conventional DuMaurier adaptations, Rebecca and Jamaica Inn. To Catch a Thief still has charm I think.
I like Hitchockās films his great films are still great, and his more regular stuff like Marnie or Torn Curtain, are also enjoyable to watch to say the least.
Iām more on Stanton side in this one, canāt forget his TV Work also, the AH Presents short stories were among my favourite stuff to watch when I was a kid never lost an episode (among with The Twilight Zone).
Among other qualities Hitchocks capacity of placing a point of humour in his films, is legendary stuff, and h was a great actors director always took the best of his actors.
Of the ones considered among his best works the ones I like most are the Birds an Psycho, the one less appealing to me maybe Rear Window. One I really like is The Rope.
My one fault is that I havenāt seen much of pre Hollywood films of the 30ās and early 40ās
Orson Welles thought Hitchcock was overrated, but Iām pretty sure that was just him being jealous of Hitchās films actually making money and not being destroyed by studios, like his.
And Ingemar Bergman said of Citizen Kane āItās a total boreā¦ā
Last couple of weeks:
Pet Sematary (Lambert, 1989)
Peter Pan (Geronimi/Jackson/Luske, 1953)
Maniac (Khalfoun, 2012)
Leviathan (Zvyagintsev, 2014)
The Vengeful Beauty (Ho, 1978)
Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
Hereditary (Aster, 2018)
Demons (Bava, 1985)
Avengers: Infinity War (Russo/Russo, 2018)
Raising Cain (De Palma, 1992)
The Devilās Rejects (Zombie, 2005)
Dead or Alive (Miike, 1999)
Velvet Buzzsaw (Gilroy, 2019)
Wolf Guy (Yamaguchi, 1975)
The Mighty Peking Man (Ho, 1977)
The Burning (aka El Ardor) (Fendrik, 2014)
Dragged Across Concrete (Zahler, 2018)
Dead or Alive 2: Birds (Miike, 2000)
Murder by Numbers (2002, Barbet Schroeder)
Ā½
A little thriller, loosely based on the infamous Leopold & Loeb case. It stars a very young Ryan Gosling and a very fat Chris Penn (the pills and other stuff were definitely taking their toll by this time) and also features a bizarre scene with a baboon that seems to serve no real purpose at all.
I havenāt seen ROPE (which was also based on the case) in ages, so I canāt compare the two movies, but this one was much better than I had expected. Sandra Bullock is top-billed but the movie belongs to Michael Pitt and Ryan Gosling as the Leopold & Loeb wannabees who kill a girl in order to prove that they can get away with it. In real life the two young men were both highly intelligent and were like mirror images of each other, in the movie Pitt is the nerdy mastermind while Gosling is the ultra-cool guy, the type all peers look up to. Things lead to an inevitable climax, but thanks to a clever build-up we keep wondering what happened exactly, and who has been manipulating who.
Code 37 - De Film (Belgian - 2011, Jakob Verbruggen)
Ā½
A feature length movie, made immediately after the popular (at least in Belgium) Tv-series Code 37, about a vice squad in the city of Ghent. While investigating a vicious assault on a writer of detective stories who was doing some āresearchā in the red light district, the team leader (Veerle Baetens) starts receiving mysterious clues concerning the childhood trauma that made her want to become a police officer in the first place: as a girl she was forced to watch how her mother was raped during a home-jacking.
Beautifully made (it was compared to Fincherās Se7en) and well-acted, but suffering from a cluttered, overly busy script. Not bad, but could have been a lot better ā¦
Redbad (Dutch - 2018, Roel ReinƩ)
The movie tells the story of Frisian (pagan) King Radbad - in Dutch Radboud - and his wars against Pepin of Herstal, Lord of the (Christian) Franks. Redbad is presented as a warrior while in reality he was a calculating, authoritarian ruler who most probably never set foot on the battlefield (he died at old age from a disease). The movie was also criticized for the portrayal of missionary Willibrord (revered as a Saint by the Church) as a madman.
Redbad was not as bad as I feared after all those negative comments, but a Dutch Gladiator or Braveheart it aināt. Thereās some decent location work and the action scenes are appropriately bloody - but after the fourth or fifth battle scene things become so repetitive and mind-numbing that I donāt even remember who won the final battle. Well, maybe it was a draw.
Trance (2013, Danny Boyle)
As stylish as ever, but this late descendant of the directorās far superior Shallow Grave is a rather shallow affair. Again there are three leads (James McAvoy, Vincent Cassell and Rosario Dawson) but the convoluted story about a Goya painting, memory loss and the blurry lines between reality and fantasy promises a lot, but fails to come up with anything substantial. A major disappointment. Apparently the movie production was put on hold to give Boyle the chance to work on the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympics in London and picked up again afterwards. Things do feel a little crumby and fragmented
Started to watch it, didnāt finish.
Anyway, M. Night Shyamalan trio:
Unbreakable - 8/10
Split - 10/10
Glass - 6/10 - I was hoping for something really different to come out of this, and now Iām certain it was a bad idea to fuse the previous two movies. Yeah, we got a battle between good and evil in the final third: a guy in a hood fighting halfnaked lunatic supported by evil genius in a wheelchair. And thereās not one twist in the end, but three. Triple twist. Whoaaa! And every one of them sucks. But honestly, itās not that bad, 70% of the movie is very good until the final act.
- Reed: Leaving Neverland (Doc) 7/10
- Menzies: Invaders from Mars 5/10
- Reggio: Koyaanisqatsi 9/10
- Castle: The Tingler (cinema) 7/10
- Scott: Alien (cin) 8/10
- Pyun: Cyborg (cin) 6/10
- Honda: Rodan (cin) 4/10
- Blasco: Behind the Mask of Zorro 4/10
- Ebersole & Hughes: Mansfield 66/67 (doc) 7/10
- KaurismƤki: PidƤ huivista kiinni, Tatjana 10/10
SEARCHING (2018, Aneesh Aganty)
Ā½
A small independent thriller (it premiered on the Sundance Film festival), that became an unexpected critical and financial success, raising some $75 million on a $1 million budget. Basically itās a movie about an Asian-American father (John Cho) who doesnāt want to give up the search for his missing 16-year old daughter even when the authorities (and everybody else) tell him sheās dead ; what makes it so special, is that the story is shown entirely through computer screens and smartphones.
The concept may not be completely original (UNFRIENDED used a similar idea) but the movie still feels refreshingly different; unfortunately the plot becomes a little mechanical as the film progresses while the crucial twist towards the end is a typical thriller clichĆ©. You wouldnāt expect great performances within this concept, but John Cho is magnificent and itās actually his performance that makes it all click. Recommended
I think he made some ātrue masterpiecesā, the ones in which his style and themes were transferred in something extraordinary.
Notorious is his best for me, his most stylish film, closely followed by Psycho and North by Northwest. These are at least 10ers.
Vertigo is one which I more respect than admire, but it is easy to see why it is meanwhile considered by so many as his best film, even if I have no idea why it is also considered as one of the best films ever, if not the best.
There are more great films (like The Birds, The Man who Knew too Much (1934), Shadow of a Doubt), and actually I think that all of his films after 1934 are at least worth a 6/10 (with the dated Trouble with Harry being the one exception). That makes him a truly great director, but he shouldnāt be treated like a god.