The Last Movie You Saw On DVD or VHS or TV.

I'm sure you felt your statement was full of gravitas but it wasn't well thought out and it was patently untrue.
I'm not pickin' on you, just trying to get you to think before you post.

HEY GUYS!!!!!! I've got a great idea, lets talk about movies.

AT THE MOVIES

When the French writer Gustav Flaubert was asked whether he wanted his novel Madame Bovary illustrated, he said: "No, on no account; everybody will lose their individual picture of her." I think the same would be true if my autobiography was ever made into a film. At the same time, I've always had a certain sympathy for people who don't read or read very little. And there are millions of such people now, people who watch 30 plus hours of TV every week. Their time with print is a very few number of hours and usually with newspapers, magazines and pulp fiction. I’d certainly like to reach as large an audience as possible. For these millions, exposure to my autobiographer could only be done through the medium of cinema.

Novelists, autobiographers, writers in various genres, fantasise about their work transferred to film. Most writers are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. I’m certainly not; I’m not really interested in doing so. I’m a writer not a film maker.

“Novelists make their own movie when they write,” said John Le Carre. “They're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.”1 This is partly true of me and what I write, but not in the detailed way that Le Carre describes here for novelists. For the most part, I have not had my mind on some visual narrative while I have been writing. -Ron Price with thanks to 1John Le Carre in “John le Carré at the NFT,” Adrian Wootton, Guardian Unlimited, October 5, 2002

Can we find the creative fact,
the fertile fact, the suggestive,
engendering fact, the brightness,
the special flavour, the scientific
spirit, the conversational catalyst,
the significant relationships, truth
in symbolic, poetic form, a certain
hyperactuality, heightened import
intensified real-life? Can we?

Can private, inner, mental, life
be described and set in time,
in history’s whole? Can the story
of my listless will, indolence,
sluggish ease, care on care,
black melancholy and my seeking
of a lonely bed which sooths
my languid head, can it be told
while reason’s feeble light shoots
a pale glimmer in the gloom of night.1

1 Samuel Johnson, Poems, quoted in Richard B. Schwartz, Boswell’s Johnson: A Preface to the Life, University of Wisconson Press, Madison, 1978, p.80.

Ron Price
November 14th 2005

Somebody got their nose out of joint on another thread?

Watched "Inside Man" last night, a 2006 movie starring Denzel Washington , Jodie Foster and Christopher Plummer(ideally suited to play a Nazi sympathizer).
Great story and plot. Highly recommended.

Indeed, "let's talk about movies."-Ron
-------------------------
A REMAKE

The year I became a Baha’i, 1959, a Richard Condon published a novel called The Manchurian Candidate. It was made into a film by the same name in 1962, the year my travelling-pioneering life began. However much the film was based on Cold War themes, the story itself was utterly implausible. But the narrative is conveyed with such speed, with a heightened visual style, with humour and conviction, with a twisting, surrealistic and fragmented plot, with stars like Angela Lansbury and Frank Sinatra who said he was at the height of his acting career in 1962, and with such a delightful and sophisticated satire that the movie leaves one wondering that, however implausible the story may be, day-to-day politics is even more implausible and no one should take the world of partisan politics at all seriously.-Ron Price with thanks to Roger Ebert, “The Manchurian Candidate,” Chicago Sun-Times.com, December 7, 2003.

No brainwashed sleeper was I
back in ’62 in some vicious satire,
political thriller for the big-screen.
There were few laughs then trying
as I was to get my unscripted, flawed
and utterly plausible life programmed
into life’s great complex story.

They remade that thriller,1 though,
and by 2004 I too had been remade,
not with a new 5.1 Dolby sound mix
and anamorphic widescreen transfer,2
but with life’s inexorable bone-shifting
moves: two marriages, breakdowns,
thirty years teaching thousands:
Eskimos, Aboriginals and people
whose lives were also shifting
like sand under their feet as they
tried to get a fix on existence.

And so my life, not reissued by MGM
on DVD with Denzel Washington,
but reconstituted, this time with
the high tension and drama softened
with age, with my Cold War behind me
and a new terror, for the most part,
only watched on TV and part of a process
which all the events of our history, our time,
were giving rise to: the transformation
of society far beyond our present capacity
to ever understand its twistings and turnings.

1 The film The Manchurian Candidate(1962) was remade in 2004.
2 See The Manchurian Candidate, Special Edition, 1962, Amazon.com:DVD

Ron Price
17/12/'04 to 18/1/'14.

Wha the hell you talking about?. Whothe hell "Streams" VHS??
(even if they did(Damn cheap cable company),"Streaming" doesn't need to worry about the format in which they send the flick over the wires.

I think germlat stocked up on a whole bunch of unused VHS tapes at some yard sale.

I found a VHS player in the closet...it's goin out with the trash...

We watched DESPICABLE ME II last night. It was cute and clever enough for adults to appreciate.

We usually watch Midsomer Murders on PBS on Friday evenings but both our PBS stations are in the middle of one of their biqeekly fund raisers and during which they only show these really dumass "self help" sessions with some doctor who tries to convince you to eat turnip leaves to protect your aging brain.
I cannot figure out how PBS works its fund raising. Were I in charge, Id trot our some of my best stuff from past years or classic shows that would guarantee to DRAW in audiences while the station grovels for cash. Instead, they show **** (mostly) and Im sure their choices are lft up to some station executive who was made the station president cause they've failed in the outside world .

My parents live just outside Midsomer Norton in Somerset. It's absolutely nothing like the TV programme.


I've just seen Peaky Blinders, brilliant. I would say it's like a Brummie version of Boardwalk Empire only it's not, even though both are set just after WW1 and deal with organised crime.

please translate.

As far as the real Midsomer, I like the greenery strewn TV version better. Its gotten a bit formulaic so I hope they end it this season.(A Midsomer murders Episode, usually always has 4 relatively civilized
murders). The lessons learned is that "covering up" the first murder usually results in an ascending body count until the magic number of 4 is reached.
Then there is some offscreen piece of dubious logic that has to be trotted out so the damn show can end within the allotted time. I hated it when they did that in "Monk" but its almost an asset to "Midsomer"

Not that theres anything wrong with that.

If that was in Taipei, wed be looking at the open channels of the city's combined sewers

That's Norton's main selling point to tourists, "No open sewers here."

Well Panzade, what I actually meant is that wether you stream a movie, watch on VHS , or whatever it is only the media that changes. The content of the documentary, movie or series doesn't. Know as far as the visual or audio quality...obviously that definitely changes.

A Brummie is someone from Birmingham, (not the one in Alabama.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brummie

Instead of the word over, I should have typed versus. Maybe you'll see what I meant. I'm not a native speaker. My husband and son still sometimes giggle at certain things I say. I don't take it personally. And I haven't used VHS in decades and loathe yard sales.

You're doing just fine.

Tip 'O The Hat...and carry on.

We have boxes full of DVD and vhs movies that I'm slowly re-seeing, but don't have the heart to throw them out! I had Mako sign my vhs co er of Sand Pebbles.

We're watching "The Seven Year Itch" with Marilyn Monroe on Netflix, then aunt Isabel is coming over to babysit so we can take a taxi to meet friends for cocktails.