The Barry Levinson Poll

Voted for Diner obv, but Bugsy is better than you remember: his best hack-for-hire job.

you left off You Dont Know Jack!

you left off 'homicide: life on the street'

left off Liberty Heights too

and young sherlock holmes

Wag The Dog

thought that was pretty good back in theday

Young Sherlock Holmes... The Natural... that movie about wig salesmen...

have only seen Wag The Dog and thought it an adequate piece of satire that in retrospect was charmingly hamfisted

wag the dog gets a lot of hate, but i think i'd honestly pick it over the rest of this list

actually had to eject 'bugsy' it was so smarmy

also I can't think of many other US movies which so barefacedly savage the US media industry - it's no Network but then Network isn't so much a savage satire as an absolute fucken blast

This is the first time I have heard of both Barry Levinson and, indeed, all of these films.

Sorry about The Natural and Liberty Heights. Would anyone have voted for'em?

i might've voted for You Don't Know Jack.. and The Natural has a lot of fans!!!

Aaah, didn't notice Rain Man..of course I've seen that. What Just Happened, Toys and Sleepers ring a bell too.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_UVqSKpAJWW8/TEYv3zhdYHI/AAAAAAAAAGQ/va6EzU_G3MQ/s1600/bandits--img-m8a36381d617293b58e2e3c3bc12e0626.jpg

Looks like something I might find on the bottom shelf at my local Blockbusters, in the late 90s.

Loved Tin Men as a teenager, not sure if I want to see how it holds up. Also was into Bugsy and Wag The Dog, saw 'em both twice in the theater and not since.

Many of these I haven't seen...I'll vote for Rain Man (get out your UZIs, I can take it). Kael's line on Hoffman was great (from memory, "humping the same piano note for two hours"), but if you can approach the film as something that isn't profound and isn't going to make you a better person, I actually think it works quite well as a comedy. I love a lot of Hoffman's jibberish, and a friend and I used to crack each other up trading impressions: "I'm an excellent driver...definitely a good driver...yeah." I've taught three or four autistic kids over the years, from mild to more severe; none were like Hoffman, but I don't think the movie's an insult to autism. (As a supply teacher many years ago, though, I did come across an autistic kid who was amazingly good at multiplying two-digit numbers in his head--so it's not as far-fetched as you might think.) I also think there was a time when Tom Cruise was an excellent actor...definitely a good actor...yeah.

i have an autistic uncle and hoffman hit a lot of the right notes for me

rain man's a p entertaining movie and i wouldve considered voting for it if it wasn't for my protest vote for Toys

Fixating on certain expressions is very true to life. The one boy I had who was more severe would go out of his way to agitate his teaching assistant, just so he could say (with a big smile on his face) "Mrs. ________ is angry!" For a time, he was doing that every five or ten minutes.

I hold all his Baltimore films dear and in kind of a different category from the rest -- Diner's the easy favorite but maybe I'll throw a vote to Tin Men?

Toys was one of the single most dreadful experiences I've ever had in a theater, but my family still quotes LL Cool J's "I'm a military man, I need a military meal" spiel, so that's something.

You Don't Know Jack was pretty good, maybe even a return to form considering the quality of most of the other recent stuff. I'm pretty curious to see some of his recent documentaries, especially The Band That Wouldn't Die. really quite a lot of these I haven't seen, as many I should as I am happy to avoid, although it'd probably be interesting to watch all his movies in a row and try to reconcile how wildly inconsistent his body of work is.

With Levinson a defender can't pull the his-best-films-are-his-self-written because of the existence of, well, Toys and Jimmy Hollywood.

On the other hand all those mid nineties blockbusters were hits.

Diner easily. The Natural is a crime against Malamud and baseball.

Tin Men.

The Band That Wouldn't Die was quite good. One of the better 30 for 30s.

I'm going to make an effort to watch Diner again. I very much disliked it when it came out, but I've softened over the years (I used to be like...a lot of the rest of you are now!) The one scene that stays in my mind is when Daniel Stern berates his fiancee about his record collection. He's grabbing records and chewing her out, and I remember being amazed by the fact that here was this supposedly hardcore record collector who tended to his records meticulously, and he was handling them in a way that no record collector ever would. A small point, I know, and I've opened myself up to the "you're taking this too seriously, Clemenza" line that's been directed at me three times in the past week. Am I remembering that scene correctly? There was lots else that bothered me at the time, but I will look at it again very soon (I bought a sale DVD a while back that's sitting on my shelf).

With Levinson a defender can't pull the his-best-films-are-his-self-written because of the existence of, well, Toys and Jimmy Hollywood.

On the other hand all those mid nineties blockbusters were hits.

― look at it, pwn3d, made u look at my peen/vadge (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, December 5, 2010 11:08 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

true, but i could also take the tack that his best films are the one with a personal/autobiographical element, and that the ones where he tried to dream up an original premise were just kind forced or out of his element. not that that's necessarily the case, but it's an argument i'm tempted to make.

Something I just remembered: I've been working my way through the Larry Sanders box set, and Levinson appeared on an early episode as himself. His bit at the couch wasn't especially funny--it was premised on the idea that he wasn't prepared to talk about his next film--but he did play a part in the first appearance of Bob Odenkirk, who makes a brief appearance as Levinson's agent Stevie Grant. The character later became Larry's agent and, I think, one of the show's most brilliant creations.

just noticed that What Just Happened is available on demand...somebody talk me into or out of watching it.

w/out looking up, he wrote for Carol Burnett on TV and Mel Brooks' movies, no?

i found myself really wanting to see What Just Happened when it came out, even though it looked really tired and lame

i didnt see it though

hah I just voted for Bugsy cause I thought it was the musical with kids in it. Guess I don't know that much about Barry Levinson.

Yes

(xpost to Morbz)

I've always loved Diner. I'll go so far as to say that I prefer it to I Vitelloni. Loving and unsentimental: even though he's the dullest character, Tim Daly adds the necessary detachment; you get the sense that he's sick of coming home every Xmas to hang out with people with whom he barely has anything in common, despite loving them.

Also: you know exactly which friends will lose touch with each other as the years pass, and which ones will go to Vietnam.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

faint praises but Envy is maybe the best movie Ben Stiller or Jack Black will ever make. It's not exactly good, but in a valuable way, like some expired medication you just found when you're too sick to refill your scrip.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

damn talk about a depressingly anemic turnout.

ended up watching What Just Happened and The Band That Wouldn't Die this week. the latter better but the former exceeded my low expectations.

What Just Happened looked kinda funny

you left off good morning vietnam!

I watched Diner again. I didn't dislike it as much as I did 30 years ago, but it's just not for me. I had the same basic problem second time around: it's a lot of comedy bits stitched together--Reiser's passivity, the scene with the records, the mom with the knife, the football quiz, Guttenberg's dance--and some seem forced to me, and some, like the record scene and the quiz, don't seem credible at all. I know there are films I like that are structured very similarly, so I guess it just comes down to whether you like the bits or not.

Two things I did like. Mickey Rourke was becoming a caricature by the time of In the Year of the Dragon and Angel Heart soon after, but he's very good here. And I really liked the part where the British woman leaves Rourke and Bacon dumbfounded the first time, and Bacon says, "Ever get the feeling there's stuff going on out there that you don't know about"? That's about how I feel when I hear "Like a G6."

What Just Happened was the first movie I streamed on Netflix. Forgettable, but not so bad.

ppl claim he has made a good horror film

http://www.fandor.com/blog/daily-nyff-2012-barry-levinsons-the-bay

anyone see it yet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkLds_Rpgm4

from producers of 'paranormal activity'... ehh :-/

liked The Band That Wouldn't Die and You Don't Know Jack and i will always root for the guy, so i at least like the idea of him not giving a fuck and making a sharp left turn into an unfamiliar genre

What Just Happened sucked

sucking just happened

a documentary of the actual incident of alec baldwin acting nuts would have been 100x more entertaining, that's for sure

Wag the Dog as a precursor to Argo:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112358/wag-dog-argo-nineties

Don't disagree with the premise, but from one viewing a few years ago, I think Thomson make WTD sound better than it actually is.

Hadn't seen Bugsy since it came out, found a two-disc DVD on sale last week. (Which, typically, I discovered I'd already bought...) Thought it was rather bland at the time. It seemed a little better this time, but that same blandness was there. You can see specifically where Levinson is imitating GoodFellas and Raging Bull, and where he's trying for The Godfather.

Beatty's wrong, and Bening's all over the place. Some really good supporting performances, though. Bill Graham jumped out at me as being surprisingly good 20 years ago, and after spending most of the film wondering what I'd been thinking of, he finally had his two big scenes and was still impressive. Ditto Ben Kingsley and Harvey Keitel.

I get the sense that Levinson had no clue what to do with Bening and her character.

"Say 'fuck' a lot, Annette--Barbara Stanwyck never got to say 'fuck' in a movie."

I remember really liking Bugsy at the time though it was probably because I perceived it, hilariously, as something like the acceptable midpoint between the kiddieness Dick Tracy (which 11-year-old me adored) and the sophistication and nuance of The Godfather (which I didn't fully come to love til I was older). Also, far less traumatizing than Goodfellas, which I'd convinced my mother to let me rent around the same time.

Haven't seen Bugsy since, though; guess I should take a fresh look at it.

based on the roth novel f/ pacino, gerwig, & wiest and shot in ~20 days; betting they aren't faithful to the end of the novel but we'll see

http://www.thehumblingmovie.com/

this is p solid fyi, changed from the novel, but some Roth def comes thru so well done there; obv are each going for diff ends but is a more interesting take on the aging, delusional stage actor than birdman imo; pacino and gerwig work together & her casting & perf nicely places it in modern day

His son sounds like a treat: https://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2021/02/malcolm-marie.html

I googled the title and I can't remember the last time I saw such uniformly vitriolic reviews.

lol maybe this will make critics realize that his TV show is ass too but i'm not holding my breath on that

I'm on a zoomer discord server where everyone loves euphoria and I have to keep restraining my schadenfreude at these reviews

"zoomer discord server" sorry but what do these words even mean

I'll let you know as soon as I figure it out myself

Much as I was tempted to change my display name to "Partying Maskless with Rudy Giuliani and Vanilla Ice" a month ago, "I'm on a Zoomer Discord Server Where Everyone Loves Euphoria" has me feeling that itch once more.

Zendaya as Rue Bennett, a recovering teenage drug addict struggling to find her place in the world
Maude Apatow as Lexi Howard, Rue's childhood best friend, and Cassie's younger sister
Angus Cloud as Fezco, a local drug dealer with a close relationship to Rue
Eric Dane as Cal Jacobs, Nate's father who is hiding secrets from his family
Alexa Demie as Madeline "Maddy" Perez, Nate's on-again and off-again girlfriend
Jacob Elordi as Nathaniel "Nate" Jacobs, a high school athlete whose anger issues mask his sexual insecurities
Barbie Ferreira as Katherine "Kat" Hernandez, a body-conscious teen exploring her sexuality
Nika King as Leslie Bennett, Rue and Gia's mother
Storm Reid as Gia Bennett, Rue's younger sister
Hunter Schafer as Jules Vaughn, a transgender girl who quickly befriends Rue after moving into town
Algee Smith as Christopher McKay, a young football player and Cassie's boyfriend who is having difficulties adjusting to college
Sydney Sweeney as Cassie Howard, Lexi's older sister and McKay's girlfriend with an infamous sexual past that continues to affect her life
Colman Domingo as Ali ("Trouble Don't Last Always"; recurring season 1), a man in recovery from substance use disorder who often speaks at Rue's Narcotics Anonymous meetings and eventually becomes her sponsor[8]

This really does sound dire, though if Jules Vaughn chose her name as an homage to Jules Verne and is constantly dropping 100,000 Leagues Under the Sea references in an exaggerated French accent and pretending Rue Bennett is a street I guess I might watch it