Movies That Didn’t Actually Happen • Page 70

Good or not, it's still kinda forgotten, but I'm gonna have to re-watch it.

 

Probably been posted before? Maybe even by me lol. But I totally saw this in theaters and don't remember a damn thing

 

Role Models exists but falls into the category of movies that I enjoy but do forget exists until I see it / hear it mentioned and then remember how good it is

 

Just goes to show how many decent films from the past 20 years there are that came and went, are not well remembered (in some cases, known about at the time), etc

 

Anyone watch this? This is a movie that almost literally doesn't exist (it had a very short run in few theaters, no streaming or digital version as far as I know, and only saw bluray release in a few countries)

 

Hunting this down was one of the most annoying treasure hunts in my entire film watching life.

 

When I worked at a theater we kept this movie for a week

 

The Japanese bluray is either region free or region A and has gone down in price a lot - it's on ebay for
30 bones now. I've got one and the image quality seems to hold up well on my projector. I assume you have a copy now.

It's a shame it only includes the Life's Journey cut of the film and not any of the other two or three (assuming there won't be more - supposedly none of those are in line with the original vision, which was supposed to skip narration altogether from what I read)

Do you think there will be a Criterion release at some point?

 

I forget if I saw the Pitt or Blanchett version. I remember trying to find the other one for a while and gave up.

I don't know if it will ever get another release. It had almost no attention when it came out. Maybe as part of a bigger Malick collection.

 

this makes me wonder if way back when movies were first getting made and there was so many less of them did people love/hate things more and how much more impactful were those feelings. Like if you only had 4 film options to watch maybe you saw all four and had really strong opinions about them because those were the only four for awhile and so everyone saw them and everyone talked about them so I wonder what the reactions and feelings over time were like.

I like to imagine a world where The Dark Knight, a movie that was huge even in the busy world of a million things being released and before social media really took off and had super obsessed fan base, was released in like 1945 how many more people would be obsessed with it because there only a few things to watch lol

(strange, I know!)

 

Before home video and television the only way a movie could stay in the cultural consciousness was by staying in theaters. Some stuff would last for years even as new films came out. It is why Gone With the Wind, adjusted for inflation, is the highest grossing film ever made even though the population was much smaller.

 

E.T. remained in the weekly top 10 box office movies for a year.

 

There is also the fact that home formats were so inferior. You had VHS tapes with the sides cut off or grainy TV broadcasts filled with commercials. Even as late as Titanic I remember our family going to see it again months after it came out.

 

Maybe a lot of Orson Welles buffs back then were as fanatical as Nolan's were in the mid 2000's or more? Lol so much has changed as far as subject matter of what generally gets made over time that it can be difficult to take on the headspace of the average moviegoer in much earlier generations.

Even some fairly recent older stuff in my collection I'll revisit - whether it's Rachel Getting Married, Better Luck Tomorrow, Red Eye, Slam, Mister Foe, Unleashed, Nasty Baby, Disconnect, Good Dick, Brother (Takeshi Kitano), etc - and I think to myself "these movies could be made better...but do they actually suck? Why were/are they overlooked and, in some cases, critically panned? It feels like a lot of the stuff getting made now isn't as good." Maybe it's the boomer in me though.

 

Titanic came out in December 1997 and released on double VHS in August 1998 and even then it was still playing in theaters around the country.

 

Films were generally seen as more disposable back then. Without television or home video, the only way they can make money is through theaters, which would lead to the widely popular ones getting re-released over and over again while almost everything else was forgotten. If you go back to the silent era, many studios just threw them away because they saw no purpose in keeping them around.

In regards to Welles, there sort of were Welles buffs. The Cahiers du Cinema crowd were responsible for hyping up a lot of films that would get more appreciation over time. Citizen Kane actually faded a bit after its immediate release until the French rebuilt its reputation. The idea of the director of an artist at all comes from the French word auteur and their celebration of filmmakers like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock.

 

I don’t even know when there started being movie theaters with multiple theaters. The 80s? The idea of your local theater playing the same movie for months if not years over and over seems like torture

At the same time, it is strange to me that movie theaters now don’t do more “classic movie” nights like I know some have done over covid. Tons of people would pay to watch old classics/blockbusters in a theater again/for the first time

 

I went to Jurassic Park and Pulp Fiction and they were mostly empty. They did rerun all the original Fast and the Furious movies, but even on a Friday night those were almost empty too.

 

yeah dude it’s covid lol

 

The same thing happened when I went to see The Godfather Part II in 2010.

 

I saw The 40th anniversaries of Jaws in 2015 and Apocalypse Now Redux in 2019 in theaters. Both independent and chain movie theaters have been doing this for years.

 

yeah on relatively rare/special occasions, not as a regular part of their schedules

 

I did a drive in double feature of Jaws and Jurassic Park last summer and it was awesome.

 

I remember reading about some of this years ago, definitely interesting.

Hate to say it, but I don't think I've watched an Orson Welle's film yet! It's usually difficult for me to get into most of what I've seen pre-seventies, but I'd imagine Citizen Kane holds up better than most of that stuff

 

Rewatched Jurassic Park in theaters during it's 3D re-release and was genuinely floored by how good it still is. The dialogue/performances have so much life to it, and even several CGI shots held up better than expected. Somehow the dinos in the original remain more convincing than the hyperdetailed movie monsters in the Jurassic World films. Far as I can tell the main thing aging it to any noticeable degree is paleontology.