When we were growing up and saw a Ray Harryhausen movie, we were interested in how it was done. But thank God we got to go through the magic of seeing it before we knew how it was done. You were able to get this beautiful, pure, visceral response to something without knowing too much about it.
--Tim Burton
It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.
--Anthony Burgess
I don't think you go to a play to forget, or to a movie to be distracted. I think life generally is a distraction and that going to a movie is a way to get back, not go away.
--Tom Noonan
That [The Wizard of Oz] was my one big Hollywood hit, but, in a way, it hurt my picture career. After that, I was typecast as a lion, and there just weren't many parts for lions.
--Bert Lahr
Several tons of dynamite are set off in this picture--none of it under the right people.
--James Agee (Sorry, don't know the exact picture he's talking about, but there are no shortage of examples, including some made long after Mr. Agee passed on--KJ)
It seems James Agee and I have much in common !
ReplyDeleteWhat I think is funny or wonderful ? is when I watch old Black and White movies, when there is a great story, writing, directing and costumes I never miss the color.
cheers, parsnip
I love the illusions movies provide for us. Somehow life does seem more real when edited and viewed on a screen.
ReplyDelete@angryparsnip--There was real poetry in much of that black-and-white cinamatography that color has rarely equaled.
ReplyDeleteKass--First off, welcome back. Long time, no see. You're looking pretty good judging by the photo. I sometimes think the real magic in movies is not when a man in a cape and long underwear is shown flying through the sky or some other impossibility, but when the familiar, the possible, the real, is brought into deeper focus. I thinking of movies like Splendor in the Grass, or The Graduate, or Nashville. In the black-and-white era it would have been such movies as The Time of Their Lives or To Kill a Mockingbird. Somebody--Kurt Vonnegut?--once said movies were real life with the boring parts edited out.
That should movies ARE real life with the boring parts edited out.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of editing...
More editing: That should be The Time of OUR Lives. My apologies to William Wyler.
ReplyDelete