Originally posted by scacchipazzo
In future you should type up your reviews and immediately save a copy on a word doc and file away. Did you ever review "The Cook, the thief, his wife, and her lover" one of all times' worst movies? BTW, I'm assuming you have cable/dish/something. I hate to sound archaic to the point of dinosaur, but TMC was doing films from the first era of film, ie, Ed ...[text shortened]... ubjects. They do these every few months. I'd love to see you review early films like these.
I've never seen said film, although I believe it stars Helen Mirren, a very popular figure here in Britain. I guess I won't be watching it any time soon. I have a subscription to Lovefilm (a DVD and Blu Ray disc rental service now run by Amazon, which is called something different in the US). I used imdb.com and other sources to build up a pending rental list of highly rated films (Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky wasn't on it, but I watched it because I had recently watched Coco Before Chanel). The subscription also includes a wide selection of films and TV shows I can stream from the Internet using my web-connected Blu Ray player.
The really early flicks I've enjoyed most have been Buster Keaton films, but I confess I haven't seen any films from the very first era. I've watched some Bergman, Eisenstein, Powell & Pressburger films and others such as All Quiet on the Western Front, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, To Have and Have Not, Sunset Boulevard, etc., but these were all made a long time after the first era. We have a famous comedian, Paul Merton, who is an expert on early film, but currently I see the very early stuff as academically interesting only rather than as pleasure-watching (and I do not consider myself I film academic). The language of film (I
think it's called semiotics) has evolved a long way since those times, although I also often prefer the straightforward storytelling and conspicuous lack of bombastic and unnecessary incidental music in earlier films. However, due to the deterioration of early film media or just the relatively primitive technology used, I often find watching early film somewhat difficult or even painful compared to modern movies. It's just such a pity that so much dross is produced today when we have all this wonderful technology at our disposal, yet some great stuff does appear quite often. Recently I've enjoyed
Source Code and
Inception, and television has taken the lead in quality in the last decade or two with shows such as
House M.D., the 'Nordic Noir' crime dramas,
30 Rock and many others being an absolute joy to watch.