QUICK FILM PLUG: 1969

For those post related to Burt Reynolds and throwing balls.

QUICK FILM PLUG: 1969

Postby mach1 » Thu Nov 18, 2004 6:16 am

1969

1989 - USA - Period Film/Anti - War Film/Coming - of - Age

Reviewed by Janet Maslin

Type: Features
Distributor: Atlantic Entertainment Group
Rating: NR (Violence/Nudity/Questionable for Children/Adult Language)
Running Time: 96 minutes
Starring: Bruce Dern, Robert Downey, Jr., Mariette Hartley, Winona Ryder, Kiefer Sutherland

Directed by: Ernest Thompson

PLOT DESCRIPTION

Ernest Thompson, the playwright responsible for the Pulitzer Prize winning On Golden Pond, makes his directorial debut with 1969. Kiefer Sutherland plays a draft-age youth who undergoes an epiphany when one of his friends is killed in Vietnam. Sutherland's subsequent antiwar stance causes a great deal of tension within his own family, though his mother, Mariette Hartley, tries her best to understand. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

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This film kinda scored with me because it looks a layer beneath the surface of war, at the war at home, societal pressures, the way families can be united or divided, relationships can spoil or blossom....

The films' soundtrack is a definite winner...

. All Along the Watchtower - Jimi Hendrix
2. White Room - Cream
3. When I Was Young - The Animals
4. Green River - Creedence Clearwater Revival
5. Going Up the Country - Canned Heat
6. Time of the Season - The Zombies
7. Get Together - Jesse Colin Young
8. Can't Find My Way Home - Blind Faith
9. Tuesday Afternoon (Forever Afternoon) - The Moody Blues
10. Wooden Ships - Crosby, Stills & Nash
11. Windows of the World - The Pretenders
12. Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In [*] - The 5th Dimension


Listen to Samples





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Actually now if I think about this movie kinda sucked...but like one arm chair reveiwer noted at

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094594/

what film has ever accurately portrayed a slice of American PIe
while the Viet War was raging..almost all films have been in the same vein as Apocolypse Now and Platoon
mach1
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Posts: 2663
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Postby need mine back » Thu Nov 18, 2004 4:05 pm

1969 was lame.
need mine back
 
Posts: 95
Joined: Wed Sep 01, 2004 10:21 pm

Postby mach1 » Fri Nov 19, 2004 9:18 pm

ok im 1 for 2 now.. Chris Menges ("Killing Fields") was DOP

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Dirty Pretty Things (2002)
Reviewed by Jason Best
Updated 12 December 2002


Some 17 years after "My Beautiful Laundrette",
director Stephen Frears gives us another stunning
cinematic portrait of London.

And it's not one that any tourist - or Hollywood
studio - would recognise.

Frears' film focuses on the usually unseen world
of the capital's illegal immigrants, the invisible
people who keep its economy running smoothly.

Chiwetel Ejiofor's Nigerian exile Okwe is one
such person. By day he drives a minicab; at night
he's a porter in a hotel that's home to some shady
goings-on.

When Okwe stumbles upon the hotel's dirty secret,
he is placed in an impossible dilemma. A decent
man, how can he do the right thing - given his
precarious status - and still protect the people he
cares about?

Scripted by first-time screenwriter Steve Knight
(one of the creators, incidentally, of TV quiz show
Who Wants to be a Millionaire?), "Dirty Pretty Things"
works on one level as a gripping urban thriller.

What lifts the film out of the generic rut, however,
is its political intelligence and compassion.

Frears has these qualities in spades. Unsurprisingly,
he brings the best out of an outstanding
multinational cast.

Admittedly, it's a bit disconcerting at first to see
"Amelie" star Audrey Tautou as a Turkish asylum
seeker (Okwe's best friend), but her unaffected
performance soon wins us over.

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Sergi López as the hotel's ruthless, scheming head
porter, and Sophie Okonedo as a street-smart Image
hooker, Imageare also impressive.

But it's Ejiofor's subtle, understated portrayal of the
dignified Okwe that ultimately holds the film together.

"How come I've never seen you before?" asks one
of the few native British characters in the film.
"Because we are the people you never see,"
replies Okwe.

"Dirty Pretty Things" opens our eyes.


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It is really starting to get annoying how
studios are promoting every movie that
Audrey Tautou is in.
Yes, she was charming in Amelie. And yes,
she was the star of He Love Me, He Loves
Me Not. However, along came a nice small
movie called L'Auberge Espagnole, and
Tautou's name was all over the place. She
had the smallest main role in the film. Yet,
because of Amelie, they want to drag in as
many people as possible to see the film. It's
a disingenuous way to do it, but on the flip
side, L'Auberge Espagnole got additional
publicity it otherwise would not have. Still,
it's not a great thing to do, and will be
especially glaring if Tautou guests
in a stinker.
Dirty Pretty Things is not a stinker.
And Tautou is not the star, although she is
the only person who appears in the
promotional posters.

Dirty Pretty Things takes place in London,
but can just as take place in New York,
Los Angeles, or any other city with a large
immigrant population. They are a necessary
part of each city's work force, taking the
work and low wages that other people will
not. Chiwetel Ejiofor is Okwe, an African
immigrant who works at a hotel and as a
driver. He has medical training, but does
not practice, and is elusive when questioned
about his past. He lives on the couch of
Senay (Tautou), and illegal Turkish immigrant.
She works at the same hotel, and although
the two are friends, she is a strict Muslim
and insists that the two are not in Senay's
apartment at the same time. During a shift
at the hotel, Okwe discovers a human heart
clogging a toilet, and brings it to the
attention of Senor Juan (Sergi Lopez, Jet Lag,
With a Friend Like Harry), the hotel manager
, who refuses to do anything about it. He
volunteers Okwe to call the police, but Okwe
is in the country illegally, so that is not an
option.

This discovery sets events in motion that
will drastically change Senay and Okwe's
lives. Okwe's conscience forces him to
begin investigating where the heart came
from, which leads to another horrifying
discovery. What's fascinating about Steve
Knight's (Gypsy Woman) script is how
Okwe and Senay seem to live in a
different world. All of the people they
encounter daily are like them, trying as hard
as they can just to eke out a living. Knight
is also able to infuse a surprising amount
of extremely black comedy into the mix,
making the script more complex.

The best thing is that Okwe and Senay are
basically smart people.

Image

Director Stephen Frears (Liam, High Fidelity)
forces the two
to face impossible choices that tests the
core of their personalities. Okwe and
Senay must make choose between
betraying
their religion and values else face deportation
or even death. Ejiofor and Tautou give nuanced
performances, good enough that at no time
is it evident what they will do. Frears and
Knight also throw in a wonderfully ingenious
ending where people get exactly what they
deserve. It is nice seeing English
performances from Tautou and Lopez, who is
able to still seem
extremely creepy when he smiles. Still, Dirty Pretty
Things belongs to Ejiofor, whose performance is the
emotional core of the film.

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Mongoose Rates It: Pretty Good.
1 hour, 47 minutes, Rated R for sexual content, disturbing images, and language.


http://www.haro-online.com/movies/dirty ... hings.html
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DIRTY PRETTY THINGS
Written by Steven Knight

ACADEMY AWARDS HISTORY
This is the first Academy Award nomination for Steven Knight.

FILM SYNOPSIS
Okwe is an illegal Nigerian immigrant living in London, where he works as a cab driver by day and a hotel clerk by night. When he stumbles upon a dangerous black market passport scheme, his own safety and that of a young Turkish woman he has befriended are suddenly in jeopardy.

ALSO NOMINATED IN THIS CATEGORY
THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS
FINDING NEMO
IN AMERICA
LOST IN TRANSLATION


http://www.oscar.com/nominees/nom_33083.html

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Movie Review
by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

Dirty Pretty Things
Stephen Frears
Buena Vista Home Entertainment 07/03 VHS/DVD
R - sexual content, disturbing images, language

"For you and I, there is only survival," says Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a Nigerian doctor living illegally in London, to his friend Senay (Audrey Tautou), a Turk who works as a chambermaid at the Hotel Baltic in violation of her status as a political refugee. With no other family or relatives, they trust each other. He sleeps on her couch in between his day job driving a minivan and his night job as a receptionist at the hotel. Out of the kindness of his heart, Okwe dispenses some medicine to his boss and coworkers at the cab company who have sexually transmitted infections.

One evening, Okwe is sent to a room where a toilet is overflowing. He discovers an obstruction has been caused by a discarded human heart. Later, he meets a Somali in agony after a botched operation to remove his kidney. It turns out that Sneaky ( Sergi Lopez), manager at the Baltic, is running a profitable trade in human organs out of the hotel. He wants Okwe to do the next operation in exchange for a visa.

Things get even more complicated when Senay, who is being hounded by immigration officers, seems willing to risk everything in order to get a ticket to New York. She is astonished to learn that Okwe has already been there. "You were in New York and you came back?" she asks. "It is an African story," he answers.

Dirty Pretty Things is an amazingly gritty and compelling English film directed by Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette) from a screenplay by Steven Knight. The crisp photography by Chris Menges (Killing Fields, The Mission) vividly conveys the many moods of London as a multicultural urban center. The performances are all superb right down to minor ones by Benedict Wong as a Chinese employee in a hospital mortuary who is Okwe’s chess partner, and Sophie Okonedo as a prostitute with many talents.

While watching a well-realized drama like this one unfold, we see how invisible these immigrants really are in a world built upon money, power, and status. Okwe and Senay struggle for dignity when the society treats them like nobodies. Frears makes it possible for us to briefly take a step outside our internal gated communities and empathize with these cultural strangers.

"It is a miracle," African-American theologian Howard Thurman once wrote, "when one person, standing in his place, is able, while remaining there, to put himself in another person’s place, to send his imagination forth to establish a beachhead in another person’s spirit, and from that vantage point so to blend with the other’s landscape that what he sees and feels is authentic . . . To experience this is to be rocked to one’s foundations." Dirty Pretty Things is the kind of movie that only comes along once in a while. It will rock you to your foundations if you just come to it with an open heart.


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The DVD has an audio track commentary by director Stephen Fears as well as a brief behind-the-scenes feature.


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mach1
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