There are some ManCards in need of revoking on this thread, fellas.

Next Hot Topic: Porno and Spagetti-Os.

if porn and spagettio's are the next Hot Topic...i WANT IN!!

great post everyone :)

Porno and spaghetti-o's?

OK I can handle that. : )~

Thank you Chantal!

Be on the lookout for Franco-American musings. : )

This aint half bad...for a girl!

Bah! Stand aside you perfumed hanky waving dandies and let a Big Bad Burly Manly Man tell you about movies! And I have the credentials. Why, I'm so manly I'm wearing a plaid shirt at this very moment, and not because I was attending a Fashion Tea at Banana republic, I can tell you! This Bad Boy was out tossing drywall panels around at 7AM with Framer Dave, another Big Burly 6 foot 2 big-framed weight-lifting martial-arts guy, 30ish with red hair and an infectuous smile that can make a woman swoon at 30 paces (now don't get any ideas about a Brokeback Moment here: we're Manly Men who punch each other in the shoulder, talk in deep somber voices about truck tires, and openly ogle the tall slender well-formed blonde who walked up to the counter at the lumber yard).

Movies are about PICTURES. They even call them "Moving Pictures". If you want words, read a book. Books are better at words. If you want emotion and sentiment read poetry. If you want words and sentiment read Steinbeck, etc. Plot? Who cares? If you've lived as long as this reviewer you've already had a surfeit of plot, what with all the wives, girlfriends, children, lawyers and business bozos. Plot is for the young and naive and those who've led very protected lives and need to get their 'plot' from safe sources: at a distance.

Pictures! And pictures that move to give the viewer that slight sense of movement that reveals life and vitality. That's what movies are about. For Manly Men that means beautiful and powerful outdoor scenes, usually of magnificent forest and mountain vistas in Montana, sweeping deserts in SW USA, etc., sea and forest interaction on the Maine coast, the incomparable blues of Carribean seas, the interplay of ocean and desert in the Greek Isles, etc. For Manly Men that means beautiful women, naked as appropriate (but not always, as the real admirer of female beauty knows). And NOT porn! Porn wastes too much effort on plot and dialogue. Frankly, to men, the stud is just a nuisance, provided to increase the plot-quotient for a mans girlfriend.

Strip all the superfluous dialogue and plot out of "High Sierra" or "Petrified Forest" and what do you have? A PBS documentary, that's what! And a damn good one if it's in HD, projected on an 8 foot screen by an HD projector. The movies I've kept on My Manly Mans PVR are PBS HDTV docs of Idaho, Utah, etc. Take any old John Wayne movie and split the sound and picture. Would you rather listen to the dialogue on the radio or watch the scenery, in silence, on a large screen?

How many of us men have slogged thru a million introspective Ingmar Bergman movies just so we could get a glimpse of Harriet Anderrsons marvelous beauty in "Naked Night"? How many sat thru the stupid drivel of Al Brooks "Modern Romance" to get a peep at the fabulous Kathryn Harold? Ah, but the rougher the path and more arduous the journey, the greater the triumph at reaching the prize!

The testosterone of that last comment knocked me out of my seat!

Certainly film is about visuals. But I think films unique ability to mix the visual with the aural that makes it so wonderful.

Mat: "But I think films unique ability to mix the visual with the aural that makes it so wonderful."

Yeah sure. Me too. Just don't stand in front of the visual when Sophia Loren gets on that tram in "Too Bad She's Bad". You're likely to hear some unpleasant aural instantiation approximating Italian that singes your delicate ears.

Now that's a MOVIE! And if you've never seen it I pity you.

Aw fuck. How can I be be a ManlyMan when Bliffle's in the house.

Great stuff Mary, Matt, Sir Duke, DJ, and Bliffle!

And All.

Bliffle says:Framer Dave, another Big Burly 6 foot 2 big-framed weight-lifting martial-arts guy

You had me at 'martial arts guy'Way cool.

And you have a good point about movies being about pictures and visuals. If they were just about words - we'd call them 'books'.

So, you get the right combination of the visual, aural - story, character-- and voila! Dosn't matter if it's exploding trucks and motorcyles or imploding relationships - is all good, yes?

So there's this Robert Rodriguez movie with Antonio Banderas that starts out with this great scene in a bar. Antonio is onstage playing some fantastic adrenaline-driving piece of Mexican music -- stuff the guys down in the Mission finally get around to playing once the supply of Aņejo is exhausted and the bartender has broken into the Reserva -- and he's all dressed in black with lovely long, black hair and dark eyes and the scene could have just stopped right there and still have been worth it. But over at the far end of the bar, there's some scumbag cowboy mistreating a lady. And Antonio sees this, climbs up on the bar, strides the length of the bar over to the altercation and just slams the offending pig of a pinche cabron cowboy up the side of the head with his guitar. And then Antonio goes back to performing the song!

Now there's a chick flick.

Miss Templeton -
Gotta love Rodriguez - though I've not seen the first two in this 'El Mariachi' trilogy - only Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Which I ABsolutely loved like crazy. The scene you describe sounds awesome - you going to see Banderas' new one - Take the Lead? Now, that seems very chick-flick-ery

Speaking of Rodriguez - I'm looking forward to seeing Sin City 2

Hello Mary K-After this thread, I ended up seeing Desparado again via the On Demand Free Movie channel. Paying attention to credits, I learned that the music is Los Lobos, which makes it all the better.

I haven't seen every Banderas movie, but I did think he was adorable as Puss in Shrek2!