Movies at the Brattle

classicaljunkie and I caught a double feech at the Brattle two weekends ago: The Magnificent Seven followed by The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. We hadn't seen either before, and enjoyed both.

TMS seemed to be a restored print of some sort. The film looked bright, colorful and all-around excellent for being nearly 50 years old, but the moment there was any sort of visual transition (like a cross-dissolve from one scene to the next) it abruptly turned into murky crap. I wondered why the restoration techniques don't seem to work on the transitions, or maybe it was just like that all along.

I didn't know (until the instant I saw him) that Yul Brenner's killbot character in Westworld was clearly a parody of his own character in TMS. This made me kind of sad to know, even though I was a fan of Westworld when, like many college students in the 1990s, I thought the gawdawful media of the 1970s was the best ever. (Because it was very ironic to think that, and possession of a great deal of irony is very important at that age.)

I still don't understand the scene where the craaaaaazy kid (the Mifune stand-in) gets intel on the bandit gang by just wandering right into it and talking to their leader. At first I was like "uhh, what, so he's a spy for the bad guys?" But then he goes to to good guys and is like "o hai I just talked to the bandit leader." There's an implication that los banditos took him as one of their own because he had cleverly disguised himself by, er, wearing a sombero. But during that very same scene, one of the bandits is reeling off the names of gang members who got killed during a failed raid earlier that day, which itself would imply that they all know each other fairly well, which would seem to spoil that fairly weak excuse. Buh? I dunno.

TGTBATU was silly and enormously entertaining, though it was a recently assembled super-extendo cut that felt about a half an hour too long. I liked it more, though I have less to say about it. Can you believe I haven't seen the previous "Man with no name" films? Gotta go back and watch em now.

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We saw The Thomas Crown Affair last weekend. The 1990s remake is one of the junkie's favorite movies, so I'd seen that one, but neither of us had seen the original. It's... yeah, it's just not as cool, and it's clear why the remake kept the core interesting concept (the wonderfully perverse romance between the titular gentleman-thief and the insurance agent sent to investigate him) but ditched the particulars of the frame. The 1990s Crown is not just an art thief, he's also an art reverse-thief, and how cool is that? The 1960s Crown just hires a bunch of thugs to rob banks for him, and they do this through violence, waving guns at people. It's just brutal and uninteresting, by comparison.

I liked the comic-panel graphics and the music, though.