Comments for we like to watch

Comment on Heaven’s Gate (1980) by mauer

mauer — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:26:30 +0000

well, both. I knew you were kidding regarding the comments, but thought your out-of-ass arguments were good critiques… And as I was anxious to have a discussion about the movie thought I’d go with it anyway.

I am not a natural fan of westerns, but having just seen Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and a couple of Sam Fuller westerns (Baron of Arizona and The Man Who Shot Jesse James), Days of Heaven, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller… I have also loved the recent movies The Proposition and The Assassination of Jesse James, so I am feeling myself drawn to the genre for the first time since college (having watched a lot of John Ford there).

By the way,this thread is now the number one link for google seraches of “Joe Queenan” and “fuckwit.”

http://www.google.com/search?q=joe+queenan+fuckwit

Comment on Heaven’s Gate (1980) by john

john — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:18:37 +0000

mauer, I was pulling that out of my ass. I was just making fun of the fact that all that junk about embedding video distracted us from your initial question about the two films.

or did you know that and are playing me right now…

d’oh!

Comment on Heaven’s Gate (1980) by mauer

mauer — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:34:42 +0000

John, Heaven’s Gate didn’t really strike me as particularly excessive. At least compared against a similar film of its time: McCabe and Mrs. Miller. In that movie, they build a freaking town. And Malick’s film strives to be simple… it was a story of individuals and not a big historical event that resulted in the deaths of many people.

In Heaven’s Gate, there are several crowd scenes, usually populated by the immigrants, which granted does not show them in a very positive way (cock fighting, arguing about the death-list, posing for the photographer, and of course the rollerskating…) But every one of these worked for me. There are so many other scenes that are just one-on-one: Walken shooting a rustler, Nate sitting next to the drunk-passed out Jim and trying on his hat, Bridges (which is Jeff Bridges’ character’s name) re-filling Jim’s booze, and Nate trying to propose to Ella, while she still demands payment from him for sex. None of these moments seem excessive to me, and they are as important to the story as the war itself.

The most excessive moment of the film for me is the Harvard commencement at the beginning. Apparently in the theaters, there were subtitles for the immigrants and some narration near the beginning by Jim, explaining his move west. The DVD version I watched contained neither of these things, probably a good thing.

Comment on Heaven’s Gate (1980) by john

john — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:01:17 +0000

I think mauer makes an interesting point in comment #4. Malick’s film, though extraordinarily beautiful, lacks the iconic punch of Cimino’s imagined American landscape. But arnab makes an interesting point as well, in comment #2: Malick’s film, which is late-frontier, avoids the pat conventions of the Western: the barn dances, the half-built churches, etc. Malick’s film has a simplicity to it that, when judged next to Cimino’s film, makes the latter seem plagued by excess, abstraction, and heavy-handedness.

Comment on Heaven’s Gate (1980) by reynolds

reynolds — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:59:13 +0000

The above didn’t work. From firefox, couldn’t embed Walken’s evolution. Which proves that Mauer owes me a beer.

Comment on Heaven’s Gate (1980) by reynolds

reynolds — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:58:33 +0000

Walken’s evolution in this film struck me funny.

If the above worked, then it proves that Mauer owes me a beer.

Oh: and I recall liking Heaven’s Gate a lot more than I’d expected, and I’d love a chance to see it again–maybe even to do a head-to-head with Days of Heaven, which I haven’t seen in a couple of years either.

Comment on Heaven’s Gate (1980) by arnab

arnab — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:21:23 +0000

you’ve been able to embed them before, right? so shouldn’t be a permissions issue. can someone else please try and help diagnose the problem.

Comment on Heaven’s Gate (1980) by mauer

mauer — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:09:23 +0000

Yes, I tried putting it in both comments and in the post, and I was not using other tags (though I tried some anyway to see if they’d work, like the “code” tag. They didn’t).

Maybe a permissions problem? Are you a super-user? Or - actually - it might be a browser problem. I will try it in Safari rather than Firefox.

In any case thanks for posting the other clip.

(edit).

Hmm. Nope, same problem in Safari. (Feel free to delete all of these technical posts if you want).

Comment on Heaven’s Gate (1980) by arnab

arnab — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 02:24:54 +0000

are you placing the embed code within some other tags or just pasting it in as is? the latter is what you should be doing. i'm not sure why it would work for me but not you. unless for some reason it works in comments but not posts. have you tried embedding in a comment?

Comment on Heaven’s Gate (1980) by mauer

mauer — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 02:16:58 +0000

I was using the embed code from YouTube… Every time I save it, it disappears. I tried again, same thing - including taking your exact comment above from the source code. Same thing.