Optimal Season Outcome... for UNC. (alt topic: John Wayne)

[DukieInKansas]

Should we do another poll? How about...

What calamity would you like to see happen in Chapel Hill?

• Michael Jordan's letter from Coach K spontaneously combusts (reducing the smugness in that town by 12.5%)
• A big snowfall causes the roof on the Dean Dome to collapse, ruining all 192 retired jerseys
• Helms Foundation rescinds the 1924 "championship" due to academic irregularities
• NCAA instructional video for referees released declaring 56% of Hansborough's points invalid because of charges, travels and over-the-back fouls not called
• Massive sewage backup in the Dean Dome lasts for the first month of practice
  
• Clemson wins in CH

I don't see this last option as a calamity.

[throatybeard]

He is running after Uncas, who is running after Alice Munro. Cora and Chingachook are behind and of course we know what the last of the Mohicans does to the Huron, Magua.

You're absolutely right.

I've never seen anything more beautiful in the history of homo sapiens than when Stowe looks at Duncan while DDL puts him out of his misery, and she turns and looks away floofing her hair, and then she looks back. This is pretty much my swing thought when I'm trying and failing to go to sleep at night.

Man, of all the movies that I know aren't superb works of art but I just love the hell out of, it's at the top of the list.

[throatybeard]

He is running after Uncas, who is running after Alice Munro. Cora and Chingachook are behind and of course we know what the last of the Mohicans does to the Huron, Magua.

[kAzE]

Should we do another poll? How about...

What calamity would you like to see happen in Chapel Hill?

• Michael Jordan's letter from Coach K spontaneously combusts (reducing the smugness in that town by 12.5%)
• A big snowfall causes the roof on the Dean Dome to collapse, ruining all 192 retired jerseys
• Helms Foundation rescinds the 1924 "championship" due to academic irregularities
• NCAA instructional video for referees released declaring 56% of Hansborough's points invalid because of charges, travels and over-the-back fouls not called
• Massive sewage backup in the Dean Dome lasts for the first month of practice
• Clemson wins in CH

Can we add the '05 AND '09 National Championships get vacated due to the academic ineligibility of the entirety of both rosters? I'd vote for that.

[OldPhiKap]

"Chancellor Mary Willingham met with head coach Rashad McCants today . . . ."

[NashvilleDevil]

Such a good movie and one of the great closing scenes.

[Olympic Fan]

The Quiet Man is a classic.

He is also great in The Longest a day although it is more cameo-esque than anything.

John Wayne benefited from his association with two of the great directors in film history, Howard Hawks and especially John Ford (IMO, American's greatest director).

Ford made Wayne a star in Stagecoach in 1939, rescuing him from B Movie obscurity. The problem was that Wayne's career was finally taking off when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. While many other Hollywood stars (including his mentor John Ford) were rushing to enlist, Wayne was doing everything possible to stay out of the draft. I know he was overage, but a lot of actors older than him (including Ford) didn't let that stop them. But to follow Wayne's efforts increasingly frantic efforts to avoid service is to make it impossible to take his hero image seriously.

That said, I still can't help admiring his body of work (thanks to Ford and Hawks). He was the No. 2 lead in the greatest WWII movie ever made (They Were Expendable). He was magnificent in Hawks' Red River. As OldPhiKap noted, he should have gotten an Oscar for The Quiet Man. To me, his best work was in Ford's cavalry trilogy: Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande: "Where ever they rode and whatever they fought for became the United States of America." Oh, I take that back ... his greatest performance -- and one of the great performances in screen history -- was Ethan Edwards in The Searchers.

And I much prefer the 1969 version of True Grit (directed by the great Henry Hathaway) to the Coen Brothers version (although I love the Coen Brothers). Agree that Kim Darby was so obnoxious that I too was rooting for the snakes at the bottom of the pit, but I also think that's how Charles Portis wrote the character.

[throatybeard]

Such a good movie and one of the great closing scenes.

Dante Spinotti (the DP) sure had a career month, didn't he?

[throatybeard]

One of the weirdest things about the 1969 True Grit to me is that Roger Ebert--usually rather measured and gentlemanly in his descriptions of women in film--totally perved on what's her face in his review.

When she was about 23 and playing a 14 year old kid.

It was utterly bizarre. I can't remember whether it was the original review, or (or or or, if there was one) a "Great Films" review later. I'm not going to go back and check because it really creeped me out. I don't even want to look her name up. It just, ugh. Also, sweetie, lose that hat. Please. 45 years later, I'm still suffering from that hat, and I'm 37.

To me, the beauty of Ebert's career can be summed up in three reviews. The original review of Bonnie and Clyde, which he got spectacularly right at the age of 26, while the establishment got it spectacularly wrong; his review of Aguirre, Der Zorn Gottes; and his spectacular, savage takedown of the steaming pile of poo that is Dead Poets' Society (while hardly anyone seems to understand that, 25 years later).

He had some other amazing moments--Million Dollar Baby comes to mind, but those three are why I love him.

[sagegrouse]

To me, the beauty of Ebert's career can be summed up in three reviews. The original review of Bonnie and Clyde, which he got spectacularly right at the age of 26, while the establishment got it spectacularly wrong; .

Ah, yes! Bonnie and Clyde! The death of long-time NY Times film critic Bosley Crowther. He panned it, and the readership rose up in arms. He was toast.

"It is a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-ups in Thoroughly Modern Millie... [S]uch ridiculous, camp-tinctured travesties of the kind of people these desperadoes were and of the way people lived in the dusty Southwest back in those barren years..."

He was not alone, of course. Time Magazine had reviews on successive weeks by the same critic, the second one reversing the negative opinion of the first.

[throatybeard]

Yeah Sage, it's amazing.

I'm not saying it's the best film of all time, but I've never seen one young man (Ebert, at 26) get something so spectacularly right that just about everyone else established at the time got spectacularly wrong. It's nuts.

The film is also exceptional for barely escaping (time-wise) the Hays Code. Used to be, you had to have a jump cut between the discharge of a gun and the impact thereof on the victim. I think it's a rather hilarious document of this country's prudishness that Faye Dunaway spends the first three minutes of the film as naked as Eve, but we don't see her below-neck parts...but this film revolutionized how violence is given to the camera. Suddenly, with this, and Wild Bunch and G/B/U and a few other films in that era, lotsa Pechinpah and Leone, you could shoot a guy without a jump cut. I think a lot of the contemporary negative reviews were really reacting to that, without their realizing it. We entered the modern era of the aestheticization of violence. This is the seed that planted the master that is Mssr Tarantino. Whom I admire tremendously, but who mostly is still skittish about nudity

It's simultaneously beautiful and horrible to me. We're now honest about shooting a guy in the chest, suddenly in 1967. Okay. But Faye Dunaway's bosom is still some sort of horror that children need to be protected from. If that doesn't sum up the last... 47 years of media in the USA, I don't know what does.

[hurleyfor3]

Something else about Ebert. (And another attempt at thread drift.) His favorite restaurant in Chicago was Mia Francesa, at 3311 North Clark. Over the years it has become a national chain, but this is still the original restaurant. If you find yourself in Chicago with a girl you want to spend the rest of your life with, take her here.

Y'all can debate what he knows about movies, but I wouldn't get in the way of his knowledge of food.

[Duvall]

Ah, yes! Bonnie and Clyde! The death of long-time NY Times film critic Bosley Crowther. He panned it, and the readership rose up in arms. He was toast.



He was not alone, of course. Time Magazine had reviews on successive weeks by the same critic, the second one reversing the negative opinion of the first.

To be fair, Crowther may have just been old enough to recall that Parker and Barrow were a sleazy and moronic pair.

[throatybeard]

To be fair, Crowther may have just been old enough to recall that Parker and Barrow were a sleazy and moronic pair.

Sure, but that's completely irrelevant. Hitler may have been a lousy guy, but that doesn't make Der Untergang a bad film.

[CameronBornAndBred]

Bob Green started a John Wayne poll years ago (which is still open). Happily, he listed "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" as an option; I'm surprised y'all haven't talked about it.
http://forums.dukebasketballreport.c...yne-Movie-Poll

[throatybeard]

Bob Green started a John Wayne poll years ago (which is still open). Happily, he listed "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" as an option; I'm surprised y'all haven't talked about it.
http://forums.dukebasketballreport.c...yne-Movie-Poll

Why on earth did he leave The Shootist out?

[rasputin]

Why on earth did he leave The Shootist out?

I'm particularly partial to these, in no particular order:

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
The Shootist
The Quiet Man
The Searchers
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
Red River

honorable mention in the "guilty pleasure" category: Rio Bravo

[Olympic Fan]

I'm particularly partial to these, in no particular order:

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
The Shootist
The Quiet Man
The Searchers
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
Red River

honorable mention in the "guilty pleasure" category: Rio Bravo

In particular order:

1. The Searchers
2. Red River
3. The Quiet Man
4. They Were Expendable
5. She Wore A Yellow Ribbon
6. True Grit
7. The Man Who Show Liberty Valence
8. Stagecoach
9. Fort Apache
10. Sands of Iowa Jima (I know his Stryker is a cliché, but this is the character that CREATED the cliché)
11. Big Jake (the best of his late movies)
12. The Shootist

Guilty pleasure: In Harm's Way

7

[Bob Green]

Bob Green started a John Wayne poll years ago (which is still open). Happily, he listed "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" as an option; I'm surprised y'all haven't talked about it.
http://forums.dukebasketballreport.c...yne-Movie-Poll

I still like Donovan's Reef.

[CameronBornAndBred]

True Grit is on TV tonight. AMC I think.