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Originally Posted by Spiwak
Nah. I never liked David Lean movies, honestly. I always get bored, and not simply because they're old. There's not enough visually stimulating in his movies to keep me interested.
Yojimbo was really the closest thing to a Western Kurosawa made (I think) and I think it worked better as a samurai flick than what it would have been if he directed Fistful of Dollars, say. Kurosawa was a great swordsman director.
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Some people who aren't big fans of Lean's epics, wrong as they may be
, do tend to enjoy his earlier, smaller films like Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and Brief Encounter. In fact, there was a Top 100 British Films list done recently and at #2 was Brief Encounter, before Lawrence of Arabia, Kwai, or Zhivago.
I must say though, anyone who thinks Lean's films aren't visually stimulating has generally not seen them the way they are meant to be seen. I'm not trying to be an ass, but there is a correlation. Pan and scan, hell no. Widescreen? It maintains the original aspect ratio, but the result is a picture that is too small on any 4:3 screen, and still too small on the vast majority of 16 : 9 screens. The way to see Lawrence of Arabia, for instance, is at a theater showing a 70mm print. The region 2 Superbit DVD is pretty damn good (HD DVD would be amazing for this movie), but only if you can watch it on a huge 16 : 9 screen, and I'm talking over 100".
I'm speaking from personal experience as well. The first time I saw this film it was on a 30" screen. I didn't know what the hell the hype was all about. I watched it again on a 61" TV...I was still baffled by the film's reputation. It wasn't until I watched it on a huge theater screen that I understood, and now I think it's one of the 50 best films ever made.
I realize I always seem to quote Roger Ebert, but it's because he says things sometimes that I find to be so accurate. So here we go again:
"This sequence builds up to the shot in which the shimmering heat of the desert reluctantly yields the speck that becomes a man - a shot that is held for a long time before we can even begin to see the tiny figure. On television, this shot doesn't work at all - nothing can be seen. In a movie theater, looking at the stark clarity of a 70mm print, we lean forward and strain to bring a detail out of the waves of heat, and for a moment we experience some of the actual vastness of the desert and its unforgiving harshness."
"I've noticed that when people remember "Lawrence of Arabia," they don't talk about the plot. They get a certain look in their eye, as if they are remembering the whole experience and have never quite been able to put it into words. Although it seems to be a traditional narrative film - like "Bridge on the River Kwai," which Lean made just before it, or "Doctor Zhivago," which he made just after - it actually has more in common with such essentially visual epics as Kubrick's "2001" or Eisenstein's "Alexander Nevsky." It is spectacle and experience, and its ideas are about things you can see or feel, not things you can say. Much of its appeal is based on the fact that it does not contain a complex story with a lot of dialogue; we remember the quiet, empty passages, the sun rising across the desert, the intricate lines traced by the wind in the sand."
I believe it's a very visual film, but unlike those others, it loses almost everything when screened at small dimensions.
