Caltrops - Orbitor 1





	[quote name="Brody Wilder"]Here's all the Powell and Pressburger movies I've seen in the last year or so, ranked from best to worst: 1. Black Narcissus (1947) 2. The Spy in Black (1939) 3. A Matter of Life and Death (1946) 4. The Red Shoes (1948) 5. Gone to Earth (1950) 6. A Canterbury Tale (1944) 7. One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942) 8. 49th Parallel (1941) 9. The Edge of the World (1937) 10. I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) 11. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) 12. The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) I only really liked the top two. :( I had a tough time taking The Red Shoes seriously. She spent the whole movie torn between two possessive assholes, each one representing only half a life - one love, the other career - and finally extricates herself from this predicament by spoiler alert dancing off a fucking cliff. I can't remember if she hung in the air for a while first like Wile E. Coyote but I wouldn't put it past her. I think she landed on some train tracks and got run over by a train. I know it was based on a children's story but they didn't have to make a cartoon out of it. At least in Gone to Earth, she made up her mind about which asshole to settle for (sexual fulfillment guy or emotional fulfillment guy) before ACCIDENTALLY falling down a hole. Then they had to go and ruin it by screaming the title: she's GONE TO EARTH!! because she literally fell down a hole into the earth and died. I remember when they introduced the hole in act one, I was like how has that been there for decades and no one's put up a sign yet? Black Narcissus was awesome because she had the whole two guys choice (one of the guys was Jesus and the other was that Magnum PI colonial agent representing THE FLESH which is why his shorts were so short and his shirt was so open), but when it came time to fall off a cliff she actually showed some problem solving skills. Shit turned into Predator with nuns but she clung fast to her faith and more importantly a rope. Then she rode off into the sunset alone on a mule, but not before she turned to Magnum and said "why don't you tend the grave of that woman I just killed, you've got nothing better to do". I think she even flipped her habit like it was hair. BAD. ASS. As for Colonel Blimp, I liked the parts with Anton Walbrook in them, but that was like 45 minutes out of three hours. I think they were trying to make the point that Colonel Blimp was just as much a victim of his own bad choices as all those people and exotic animals he killed, but they also made a victim out of me the audience by deciding to keep all the killing offscreen and instead focus on Colonel Blimp creeping on like six generations of Deborah Kerrs. I don't think they were supposed to be related, I think it was just supposed to represent how he objectified women. I would've liked them to do the same thing with one brown guy playing all the brown guys he slaughtered, but that would've required showing a slaughter or two and they already used all their budget on three hours of colour film stock of an increasingly old man not understanding things. The Spy in Black was just a really good Hitchcockian thriller, better than anything Hitch himself had done up to that point. Some people don't consider it a real Powell and Pressburger movie because instead of symbolism it has a motorcycle, a submarine, etc. It's not like their WWII propaganda films either, it's worth watching.[/quote]