Last movie you saw?

The 50's were a golden age of film from my perspective. Kurosawa, Bergman, Ozu, Mizoguchi, De Sica, Wilder, Godard, Kazan, Fellini, Kubrick, Hitchcock, ect. Too many to name, really.

 

Different people will have different tastes. I just find a lot of the stuff from old Hollywood boring, sterile, and wooden.

Around the early 70s, Scorsese, Coppola and others started making grittier films that are more to my tastes. Kubrick would be an exception, because he was around in the old Hollywood days, but his stuff has always been dark and gritty.

Alterego loves that old Hollywood stuff, so of course he's going to have a meltdown when I say it's not my thing.

 

And, of course, that's because you haven't really watched much of it. Saying that the 1970's was the birth of "gritty" filmmaking, or that Kubrick was some sort of exception when it comes to darker content...that says it all.

 

Give me an example of something prior to 1970 that's as gritty and dark as Taxi Driver.

 

Night of the Living Dead.

/thread

 

Hardly. Night of the living dead would be a PG or PG-13 (and that's really a stretch) by modern standards.

The kind of hard R movies I like were just not made prior to the 1970s.

It really all goes back to the Hays Code. Movies prior to the 70s were shitty because they were being censored.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code

You basically couldn't show anything. Which is why old movies are such fucking snoozefests for the most part. No violence. No sex. No cursing. What's the fucking point?

Old Hollywood is like what you would get if you had Mormons making movies.

 

i think NOTLD is the only movie i've ever watched that was prior to 1970..

 

I like how you're constantly moving the goalposts around. You make reference to "personal tastes", then use your own personal taste like it's the accepted standard. You need to define what it is about Taxi Driver that you think makes it so "dark and gritty" compared to other films.

For example, here's an excerpt from the Wiki about The Virgin Spring directed by Ingmar Bergman:

Rape. Nihilism. Murder. Occult. Evil. You can easily make the case that it's a "dark, gritty" film that has an emotional impact on par with Taxi Driver. But Bergman is never going to be associated with Scorcese due to the style, which is what you're really talking about...not the actual mood or message of the film.

 

It's also a Swedish film that wasn't made under the strict censorship of old Hollywood.

 

So this is about censorship now? I still don't see the point you're trying to make with Taxi Driver. What exactly is it about that film that makes it the gold standard for "dark/gritty"? Whether or not directors were allowed to have more graphic depictions of the situations in the film is fairly superficial in my view when it comes to whether it's "dark" or not. The idea is always the same, regardless of whether it's left up to the imagination or not.

 

Virgin Spring isn't even that gritty or dark. It barely shows anything, and most of the film is pretty dull. Last House on the Left takes the same premise and does a lot more with it.

 

I guess that depends on your idea of "a lot more". Using the criteria that you're talking about here, Taxi Driver isn't gritty or dark relative to anything that simply uses more graphic means to tell a story. You could pick any contemporary gore movie with a mentally unbalanced character and claim that it makes Taxi Driver look like a Saturday morning cartoon. So what though?

Last House on the Left distills Virgin Spring down into the revenge story. It doesn't really attempt anything other than that. Is it more graphic? Yes. Is it darker? Not really.

 

Mission Impossible 4. Overall I found it enjoyable, but I didn't like his new noob team, the team he had in MI:3 was much better (characters + actors). This new team had a crybaby girl, and a emo douche and both of their back-stories were a pointless 20 minute deviation. I did like Shaun of the dead having a more prominent role. Still worth a watch, in my opinion.

 

They had a movie inside the movie? Movieception!

 

Personality disorder. Strong narcissistic and antisocial features. Daniel Plainview would be diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder if he was evaluated (in this era at least).

 

Safe House

Ryan Reynolds professes his gayness and runs away with a sexy black man named Denzel.

This movie could have been an okay spy movie if they had cast a real actor in the lead instead of Ryan The Homo Reynolds. His acting range consists of doing a worried look and doing the douche face. It's a shame because Denzel was actually decent in his role, but sissy boy drags down the whole movie.

 

Dude denzel always delivers. But i didn't want to pay to see ryan fuckin reynolds. What the fuck were they thinking.

 

Xmen origins: wolverine.

Pretty solid action flick with great pacing. Ryan reynolds is in it though.