I watched that on TV with my mother and sister several years ago.
My mom fell asleep 3/4 of the way through. (She can get to sleep
only when she wants to stay awake. Sound familiar?) Upon learning
that she missed the ending, she asked who dunnit. My sister and I
could only laugh and tell her we had no way of answering such a
question -- it just wasn't possible. I suspect that people who are
addicted to soap operas have a need to find out how things turn
out "in the end". Maybe they could just read the last page of all
those big novels they'd otherwise never get to.

This wasn't at all intended -- it's a moderately freaky coincidence --
but that reminded me that just a few weeks ago, Doctor Zhivago
was on TV while I was at my parents' home, and I watched it with
them. I'd never seen it before. My mom fell asleep. Doctor Zhivago
is the only novel that I know she has read. I think she read it before
the movie was made. I had no idea that it was a soap opera.

Without the soap, of course. They used real snow. (Well, I'm not
sure about inside the country house, but outside, for sure.)

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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"The other planets?
Well, they just happen to be there, but the point of rockets is to explore them!"
-- Kai Yeves

FYI, the "soap" in "soap opera" has nothing to do with fake snow. Those programs were called "soap operas" when they were on the radio, after all.

The name came from the inordinate number of soap commercials they aired (which, of course, came from the inordinate number of housewives amongst the audience).

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SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2007 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

Okay, I was going to ask, then decided not to, but Sean changed my mind
again: What would be a better term than "soap opera" to refer to that genre?
I hope there is something better than "melodrama".

I also happened to see Gone With the Wind for the first time (or at least a
big chunk of it. It came on and nobody turned it off, so I watched even
though I had no intention of doing so. Surprise! Another soap opera! One
soap opera set in the American Civil War, the other in the Russian Revolution.

At least I saw enough of GWtW to learn that Rhett Butler was a good guy
(never knew that before) and what is meant when someone is referred to
as having a personality like Scarlett O'Hara (as in Divine Secrets of the
Ya-Ya Sisterhood).

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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"The other planets?
Well, they just happen to be there, but the point of rockets is to explore them!"
-- Kai Yeves

That could certainly be the case. I just have to overcome my aversion and watch it again. This is harder than it sounds.

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Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Well, I hated the Salinger at seventeen myself. Most of my class was going on about how great it was and how it changed their lives, and I thought, "Gods, I can't stand that Holden Caulfield twit." One of my classmates later told me that he'd felt the same way, but he hadn't wanted to go against the rest of the class. I, as I'm sure you can imagine, didn't worry about it.

I saw about ten minutes of Eraserhead when I was in high school and haven't seen any of it since. (The people I was babysitting for came home.) Still, the library does have it, so I'll probably be getting to it some time in the next six months or so. I can't really say if I would've liked it or not. I'm fond of David Lynch, though you kind of have to reset your brain to watch most of his stuff. My sister's then-boyfriend adored it, I know, and he showed me the Cocteau and various other things, so I mostly trust his taste. To this day, I think of movies as things he would like, even though I haven't heard from him in something like ten years.

I'm watching Fellini's Amarcord right now, and all I can think is, "Those boys are really obnoxious; are we supposed to be on their side?" Still, it's well-filmed. There's a shot of a wheat field right now that's lovely, even if what's going on isn't, particularly. Maybe that's how Fellini works; it's the first movie of his that I've ever seen.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Fellini has great films. I'm not sure whether I'd recommend the Satyricon (an "easy" film, but with some shocking scenes) or Juliet of the Spirits (a more psychological film).

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Thanks for the reply, Musashi, but an actual answer to the question would be interesting...

I think Amarcord is supposed to be memory fragments, we're not supposed to be on anyones side since it's just something that happened, possibly with no reason for remembering any specific memory other than random association.
I could be wrong, as I have only read about it.

Fellini is one of those directors who have made lots of movies I want to see, but I never got around to most of them, Satyricon is one I've seen and remember enjoying, as I have a strong liking for the absurd.

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An emperor without enemies, a king without a kingdom, supported in life by the willing tribute of a free people.

Fellini's too much hard work. I watch movies to escape.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
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Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Rather depends on how you like to escape, I guess. The moment with the peacock flying in the snow was lovely. I also agree that it is clearly not intended to have much in the way of plot, but I did quite like it--despite never really liking anyone in it.

I'm almost always watching something-or-other when I'm posting. (Currently season one of Rocky and Bullwinkle, but close enough.) I generally go through a dozen or more movies a week, minimum. It's only challenging to watch and post at the same time if there are subtitles; it takes me much longer to get through the board that way.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Gillianren

Rotten Tomatoes has no alphabetical list of movies reviewed? I can't find one. Could some geek arrange for the computer to make one?
Have you reviewed the French/Polish trio of films , Bleu, Blanc, Rouge ?
Or the recent English, Death at the Funeral?
Polansky's Frantic ?
The low-budget Go! ?

I saw 2001 when I was a kid. I was enchanted. Seeing it as an adult was incredibly boring.

Perhaps that's why I enjoyed Transformers, because it has as much action in your average 5-second clip as 2001 did during the entire movie.

But way too much action for my taste. Definately experienced sensory overload on that one...

I liked 2010 much better. Better storyline, plot, pace, acting, etc.

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WIKIPEDIA and GOOGLE are your friends! But only if you use them.

Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often, not a very good one at that.

Perception is what happens between the senses and consciousness. Reality is what happened before that. If you think the two are equivalent, you've never heard of Von Claustwicz, Sun Tsu, or street magicians.

Formal Logical Fallacy List

Gillian - you've got quite the collection of reviews there. I'm impressed.

You're impressed ? I AM AMAZED !!!

Hats off to you Gillianren !!!

2001 was shown in high-def just the other day on one of the cable channels. I hadn't seen it in ages, and I fell in love with it all over again.

It was the first movie I ever saw more than once in the theater (in Cinerama, no less, on its first release). I was around 15 when it came out, saw it first with my parents, then went back the next day to see it again on my own. It was fascinating, amazing, ambiguous, and challenging. It was the first time I saw a movie that really made me think.

Even today, I don't think there's been another movie like it. It's a shame it had the time line so wrong, though. Where's my moon base and commercial passenger service to orbit?

By the way, the new high-def print was great visually, but they really need to do some work on restoring the sound track. There's no bottom end, and believe me there should be (especially on the Also Sprach Zarathustra theme, with its 20-foot organ pipe notes).

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Bring back Firefly!

"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

The site itself? I have no idea. I would imagine it's for the same reason that IMDB doesn't do a list of the movies on its site, either. They both have perfectly workable search functions. If you mean my journal, as I said, go to Ratings, then click Title, and the results will sort into alphabetical order. (Tediously, it doesn't leave off articles as it should, so the two longest sections will inevitably be "a" and "t.") Either way, I have no control over site design other than picking my preferred skin for my own journal and a few other similarly basic layout decisions, again for my own journal.

I don't think the library has the first one, or if it does, it has them under something other than the expected. I may add them to my Netflix list. I haven't done Death at a Funeral; the library definitely doesn't have it, as I'm in the middle of the dead/deadly/death movies right now, and it isn't there. I haven't done Frantic--I haven't done much Polanski at all--but I'll get to it sooner or later, provided the library has it or I remember to add it to my Netflix. Go! is in my Netflix queue (I love that word!), but so are about 200 other things, so it'll be a while.

The thing is, a movie or three a day adds up after a while. I promise you that I've watched far more movies than that 650 or so in the years since I started the journal. I only started the one a day thing after Graham went away on leave. It gives me a definite structure to my days, and as I've said, I love watching movies. I love reading, too, probably more, but I go through movies faster. After all, it's hard to get through a Stephen King or an adult nonfiction book in the two hours or less that most movies take.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Thanks Gillian. Just read your post at #27 too. Guess should read things before asking. Thanks for taking the time to reply to a dummy !!

Bleu etc is cute, minor or even crowd characters in Bleu become main characters In Blanc and so on to Rouge. But each film stands on its own as a completely independent work. ie Blanc & Rouge are not sequels to Bleu.

Frantic I thought was one of the best films I have ever seen (i am not much of a filmgoer) Saw it three times & enjoyed it for a different reason each time. The only other film that did this for me was A Fish Called Wanda.

Go! is an absolute scream if you have a sick sense of humour like mine. Same goes for the much more polished & very English Death at the Funeral.

I took a peek at your reviews, and noticed you have a section for musicals. You should see Chicago, if you haven't already.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Recently re-watched The Last Mimzy. It starts out super-good and compelling, but the end is only average-good. They don't really explain what the Tibetan symbols, Intel chip or palm-reading features have to do with the scientist in the future. Other that that, it was a very good movie.

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Well, the best way to find out is to go there and, find out. - Raven's Cry
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