8198 replies to this topic

[Magnus Malcolm]

roman polanski: wanted and desired

while I knew some of the details in regards to this case. I never actually got all of the story and this doc makes for some very revealing facts and this will apparently be eligible for an academy nomination.

I'm very much looking forward to catching this.



Every time I watch this I'm always somewhat underwhelmed and disappointed, but not enough to stop me from watching it again a few years later.

[RadioHitchcock]

I am a David Lynch fan and I have never seen an episode of Twin Peaks, until now.
I'm through the first two discs of Season 1.

Cannot peel away from it.

Season 2 is in the queue and Fire Walk With Me is on deck.

[caley]

Boil Rice!

Branded to Kill: Well, it's original, I have to give it that. I adored Suzuki's Tokyo Drifter, one of my favourites from the 60s I've ever seen, but this alternately amazed/annoyed me. It's about the No. 3 Hired Killer in Japan, who gets hired for an assissination by a mysterious woman, and has the killing go awry when a butterfly lands on his gun as he shoots, making him a wanted man, and at the mercy of the No. 1 killer in Japan. It is beautifully-photographed, but it is weird. The protaganist, Hanada, becomes sexually aroused by sniffing boiled rice, and proceeds to have rough sex with his wife all over his house. Eventually, he falls for some woman, who is obsessed with death, even using a bird's corpse as a rearview mirror decoration. There is a particularly awesome shot where he shoots a woman in the head and she falls backward across the toilet, and he walks in to see her blood flushing down the toilet. It's well worth a watch, though I wouldn't say I loved it.

[TJENZ]

Watched Sweeney Todd at the weekend, Dreadful. Hated it.

Me too. Talk about the most overrated director ever. Ugh.

I turned it off after about 15 minutes

[TJENZ]

Semi-pro
Very hit or miss, mostly miss.
I liked this movie a LOT better when it was about hockey and called Slapshot

[Slackmo]

Semi-pro
Very hit or miss, mostly miss.
I liked this movie a LOT better when it was about hockey and called Slapshot

It doesn't need to be remotely compared to Slapshot. Just woeful.

[TJENZ]

Beowulf
Over the weekend, this was the best movie I saw.
Tells you a lot about how bad my weekend was

[red]

I sure was IN THE MOOD FOR LOVing this movie!

Seriously, though. Pretty good.

Definitely. Now see this one if you haven't:

Another gorgeous film by Wong Kar-Wai. As usual, everything about it is beautiful: the scenery, the music, the glamorous women. Even though it felt a little long towards the end I think this might be my favorite of his movies that I've seen.

I'm still waiting for a soundtrack that a certain special sombie offered/promised to me. jon, I'm looking at you.

[Magnus Malcolm]

Beowulf
Over the weekend, this was the best movie I saw.
Tells you a lot about how bad my weekend was

Until I read your second line I was pretty confused. Must've been some weekend. What a God awful film.

[Efrim]

Is on TV. Gotta say it was a favorite of mine as a real young kid. I also enjoyed Lionheart, which turns out to be the same movie really. Time to see if it holds up in terms of ironic enjoyment and fight scenes.

[Magnus Malcolm]

Watched this for the second time just now. Absorbed just as much as the first time through, in the earlier sequences of the film, when I'm just settling into the sense of despair, I'm surprised at how strictly glued to the screen the film manages to keep me. I swear the desperation and fear of the times just escape through the screen. IMO, one of the greatest Italian films. Also one of the greatest anywhere involving struggling and poverty. EDIT- Oh, Bloodsport. Caught it on TV a couple of years ago, but don't remember much about it aside from some of Damme's foes bizarre fighting styles.

[Pavement Ist Rad]

I just love The Bicycle Thief. Feels like a perfect film. Even with a lot of my most favorite films, I have to ask myself, "Where would I rank this?" and "To what degree do I really love this?" You know, questioning what it means for me to "enjoy" a particular piece of art. The Bicycle Thief, though. Shit, I don't really know what to say. I'll just say that the ending is one of the most powerful I've ever seen and that the whole thing is just phenomenal and it's just not the kind of movie that my place as a human being will ever drive me to fall out of love with.

Anybody who thinks that it's somehow "overrated" or whatever... seriously. The time has come for you to end it all.

[undo]

Everyone should see this.

[Pavement Ist Rad]

I'm going next week. Somebody else say something about how great it is so that I can be even more pumped than I already am.

[theremin]

I'm going next week.

Somebody else say something about how great it is so that I can be even more pumped than I already am.

How about Roger Ebert in his 4-star review?


// / May 29, 2008

By Roger Ebert

Tarsem's "The Fall" is a mad folly, an extravagant visual orgy, a free-fall from reality into uncharted realms. Surely it is one of the wildest indulgences a director has ever granted himself. Tarsem, for two decades a leading director of music videos and TV commercials, spent millions of his own money to finance "The Fall," filmed it for four years in 28 countries and has made a movie that you might want to see for no other reason than because it exists. There will never be another like it.

"The Fall" is so audacious that when Variety calls it a "vanity project," you can only admire the man vain enough to make it. It tells a simple story with vast romantic images so stunning I had to check twice, three times, to be sure the film actually claims to have absolutely no computer-generated imagery. None? What about the Labyrinth of Despair, with no exit? The intersecting walls of zig-zagging staircases? The man who emerges from the burning tree? Perhaps the key words are "computer-generated." Perhaps some of the images are created by more traditional kinds of special effects.

The story framework for the imagery is straightforward. In Los Angeles, circa 1915, a silent movie stunt man has his legs paralyzed while performing a reckless stunt. He convalesces in a half-deserted hospital, its corridors of cream and lime stretching from ward to ward of mostly empty beds, their pillows and sheets awaiting the harvest of World War I. The stunt man is Roy (Lee Pace), pleasant in appearance, confiding in speech, happy to make a new friend of a little girl named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru).

Roy tells a story to Alexandria, involving adventurers who change appearance as quickly as a child's imagination can do its work. We see the process. He tells her of an "Indian" who has a wigwam and a squaw. She does not know these words, and envisions an Indian from a land of palaces, turbans and swamis. The verbal story is input from Roy; the visual story is output from Alexandria.

The story involves Roy (playing the Black Bandit) and his friends: a bomb-throwing Italian anarchist, an escaped African slave, an Indian (from India), and Charles Darwin and his pet monkey, Otis. Their sworn enemy, Governor Odious, has stranded them on a desert island, but they come ashore (riding swimming elephants, of course) and wage war on him.

Roy draws out the story for a personal motive; after Alexandria brings him some communion wafers from the hospital chapel, he persuades her to steal some morphine tablets from the dispensary. Paralyzed and having lost his great love (she is the Princess in his story), he hopes to kill himself. There is a wonderful scene of the little girl trying to draw him back to life.

Either you are drawn into the world of this movie or you are not. It is preposterous, of course, but I vote with Werner Herzog, who says if we do not find new images, we will perish. Here a line of bowmen shoot hundreds of arrows into the air. So many of them fall into the back of the escaped slave that he falls backward and the weight of his body is supported by them, as on a bed of nails with dozens of foot-long arrows. There is scene of the monkey Otis chasing a butterfly through impossible architecture.

At this point in reviews of movies like "The Fall" (not that there are any), I usually announce that I have accomplished my work. I have described what the movie does, how it looks while it is doing it, and what the director has achieved. Well, what has he achieved? "The Fall" is beautiful for its own sake. And there is the sweet charm of the young Romanian actress Catinca Untaru, who may have been dubbed for all I know, but speaks with the innocence of childhood, working her way through tangles of words. She regards with equal wonder the reality she lives in, and the fantasy she pretends to. It is her imagination that creates the images of Roy's story, and they have a purity and power beyond all calculation. Roy is her perfect storyteller, she is his perfect listener, and together they build a world.

Ebert notes: The movie's R rating should not dissuade bright teenagers from this celebration of the imagination.





Undo: would you back my opinion that this is in no way overly artsy-fartsy or experimental?

[undo]

Undo: would you back my opinion that this is in no way overly artsy-fartsy or experimental?

It's got an unconventional style that's different from anything I've ever seen but it's definitely not experimental in a Brakhage/Warhol sense. Watch an hour of television and you'll see five or six commercials striving for the sort of obnoxious artistic pretension that some people are unfortunately going to accuse this film of.

It's a lazy comparison but I'll even go so far as to say that this is a more accessible film than Pan's Labyrinth, and could get a following if it's given a chance. I mean, I just watched this in Warrenville at the AMC. Anything is possible.

[Agrimorfee]

Season 2 is in the queue and Fire Walk With Me is on deck.

Welcome to the monkey house, Radio. Be prepared to be disappointed about halfway into Season 2, but the last few eps will indeed blow your skull away...and so wil FWWM. If you have the Gold box, be sure to check out the special features disc, worth every moment.

[Bob Loblaw]

Semi-pro
Very hit or miss, mostly miss.
I liked this movie a LOT better when it was about hockey and called Slapshot

It doesn't need to be remotely compared to Slapshot. Just woeful.

He wasn't far off. Slap Slot 2 is a fair comparison.

[Magnus Malcolm]

I just love The Bicycle Thief. Feels like a perfect film. Even with a lot of my most favorite films, I have to ask myself, "Where would I rank this?" and "To what degree do I really love this?" You know, questioning what it means for me to "enjoy" a particular piece of art. The Bicycle Thief, though. Shit, I don't really know what to say. I'll just say that the ending is one of the most powerful I've ever seen and that the whole thing is just phenomenal and it's just not the kind of movie that my place as a human being will ever drive me to fall out of love with.

Anybody who thinks that it's somehow "overrated" or whatever... seriously. The time has come for you to end it all.

I couldn't agree more. The end hit me just as hard as the first time around, the pure look of devastation Antonio's face, and all the while, his son...extremely powerful.

I sympathize with the ranking attempts, I tried to create a list of my top 100 films not long ago, it was more or less a disaster.

[held]

I sympathize with the ranking attempts, I tried to create a list of my top 100 films not long ago, it was more or less a disaster.

ranked 130th in the somb 499 I didn't list it in mine but that's cause I knew others would and it is harder to break it down to that many. I'm still trying to sort through the 1000 list.. I don't know if I've even got half of those under my belt but I'd agree with both of you in that DeSica's 'Bicycle Thief' is a masterpiece. I'd also highly recommend you see 'Umberto D' & 'Two Women' if you haven't.