Kings of the Road
Still have some Wim Wenders classics to catch up on.
Paris, Texas is in my top 10. I liked this. Pace could be a bit too slow for some but I like how it takes it's time (3 hours in total) to gently reveal (and many times not reveal) it's chracters. Pure '70s character based cinema. Very low key and understated even in comparison to some of the other Wenders stuff I've seen but I liked it. I felt I was getting a little worn out by the last hour as it dipped a bit so I need to rewatch but cool stuff.....seems like it had a big influence on Jarmusch. The b+w cinemtrography was ill and the Americana score was beautiful.
Blow Out
I've really come to appreciate Brian De Palma this past year. I wrote him off as a hack previously but I've been watching a lot of his earlier stuff from the 70s and early 80s and mang I love it. It's tacky and derrivative and he consistently steals from the masters (Hitchcock especially,) but it's so god damn enjoyable. I dunno if it's trash cinema dressed up as art cinema or art cinema dressed up as trash cinema....it's like the perfect meeting point between those two styles. He takes on a lot of Hitchcock's themes, throws the subtetly out the window then double downs on the fukkery
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This film is basically Antoinoni's Blow Up meets The Conversation. The thing with De Palma is even at his worst this mutherfukka could pull off the most immaculate set pieces ever. On just a pure technical level this might be one of the best directed films I've ever seen. So many beautifully constructed sequences. This is also probably Travolta's best performance after Pulp Fiction. Great fukking movie.
Once Upon a Time in America
First I've seen it in a few years. An amazing experience as always. It really sits on it's own in terms of gangster films of the 70s and 80s. There's a sadness here that's missing from even a film as dark and sombre as The Godfather Pt II. Arguably the most ambitious crime film ever made. One of the few crimes films that truly doesn't romanticise the gangsters. Noodles has to be one of the inscrutable characters in the history of cinema. He's the films (anti) "hero" but takes part in one of the most horrible, unwatchable (well they're all unwatchable) rape scenes in the history of cinema. And that ain't even his first rape scene in the film
![mindblown :mindblown: :mindblown:](https://www.thecoli.com/styles/default/xenforo/smilies/mindblown.png)
Insane. It makes me sad we didn't get one or two more classics from Leone working outside the spaghetti western. The Battle of Stalingrad film he had planned with De Niro would've been
![whew :whew: :whew:](https://www.thecoli.com/styles/default/xenforo/smilies/whew.png)