I was bored. It wasn't bad, and I definitely liked parts of it, but I was ready for it to wrap much sooner than it actually did.

The first 30 minutes are boring - I've been watching minimalist films for a month now, and this time, it felt like a misguided detour into a dead end. Well, in terms of the style and what it's trying to say, the rest of the film isn't a complete success, but it's creepy as hell. Not "this will scare the bejeezus out of you" creepy ("terrifying" my ass, Rosenbaum), but "if you watch this with your kid, don't expect eye contact for a week" creepy.

I used to say that Ethan Hawke was underrated, until he went and got himself an Academy Award Nomination.
Now he's just good. Gattaca, Before Sunrise, and A Midnight Clear just kill me.

I liked this.

A very enjoyable film, although it meanders slightly in the middle.


Linklater = boss.



I laughed, I cried. Pretty spectacular all around.

We watched Woody Allen's 'Match Point' over the weekend. While it was enjoyable and didn't seem at all like a Woody Allen flick, neither of us thought it merited the praise it had gotten. Well acted, however. And great scenery (high-rent London).

I'd never seen it before. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford are amazing. I didn't really buy into the rest of the film, though.

Crawford & Davis are pretty spectacular going toe to toe
I first saw that movie when I was around 9 years old. It was the creepiest thing I'd ever seen.
Saw it on cable again, over the summer, I still like it a lot.

3 days of the Condor

To my memory, I always enjoyed this film but recalled it being really dated. Still, I couldn't pass up seeing it again and while some aspects of it are old in terms of technology-it still holds up. It's especially amusing to hear Pollock's voice this time around and actually recognized it this time.




Girl On A Motorcycle

I was rather enticed by the video cover years ago but never had the nerve to bother renting it given the rating for this turkey was zero stars. Well it was on the other night and I actually bothered to sit thru it...Spare yourselves. There's nothing to see here.Seriously.



Deadlier Than The Male

This mid-sixties response to James Bond is pretty odd but entertaining I guess.
Especially this life-sized battle on a chess board. Elke Sommer also stars in this.


I also read that they're screening both El Topo & Holy Mountain at the NY Film Fest...




The musical starts on broadway in October...




Although this is really a tv show. I've just finished watching the second season of 'The Closer' from TNT. They had a marathon on last weekend and I've been getting a kick out of this show. I'll have to rent the first season to catch up altogether.

What a wierd, terrifying, twisted movie. Amazing soundtrack, too. I really want to get it.

I still have no desire to see the remake that's out right now, but I can say that there's no way that it could possibly stay true to the original. Too many unspoken rules of big-budget filmmaking would have to be broken. It couldn't possibly be done.

caught parts of this on WTTW/pbs last night:


no words i can write would do it justice. read the synopsis on the pbs website. young inner city boys in troubled baltimore communities are given the chance to attend an experimental boarding school in kenya. great documentary.

"It was both exhilarating and sobering to follow these kids through a couple of years of grappling with one of the best breaks they may ever have," says co-director/producer Heidi Ewing. "The film zeroes in on kids that society has given up on — boys with every disadvantage — but who refuse to be 'throw-aways,'"

I caught it also. Very moving (most of all the scene in which the family members had videotaped christmas greetings to the kids...i lost it).

That said, I was mildly disappointed/surprised that the stay in Nairobi was seemingly as insulated as it was from local culture. It sort of seemed like Outward Bound in Africa. Maybe the hopeless liberal in me was hoping that their was going to be an element of cultural self-discovery to this (i.e., these are my people, great civilization, we are not a culture lost, etc. etc.). But I did that I'd catch myself from overcommitting to the story whenever I saw the familiar storyline--mostly white folks bestowing their generosity on poor black folks--play out. That's not to take anything away from the story--the power is in telling it. But it did leave a bit of an aftertaste that, say, Hoop Dreams (the nearest analog in my mind) didn't.

absolutely

In the words of Johnny Rotten: "Did you ever get the feeling you'd been cheated?"

Classic!

This is absolutely hysterical:





...Especially if you've read the original book. I didn't think this was too bad, altho the director of photography seemed to have issues with the director. For example - for every great shot in the film (say, when V arrives at the broadcast studio all wired up with explosives) there's a bunch of lousy shots (likesay, every time V is talking, you can see Hugo is trying to act thru a mask, and is using exaggerated body language to communicate emotion - soooooo why did they keep using close-ups of the mask? All that effort on ol' Hugo's part - completely wasted. Pfft. Stupid, stupid, stupid on the part of whomever shot those scenes.)

However, it was still miles above + beyond Matrix 2, which was so bad I will never bother seeing 3.

This guy nails VFV...


As we all know by now, the Kerry 2004 campaign failed when it came to delivering a compelling message that really resonated with voters. Personally I think he should have tried: "Vote for me, or endure four more years of simpleminded dystopian art." Now, I haven't yet seen Mike Judge's Idiocracy (currently being flushed by Warner Brothers) or Richard Kelly's much-maligned Southland Tales (currently, it seems, being shorn of an entire hour by Warners, and sure to receive a half-assed rollout, if it sees theatres at all), but I'm prepared to go out on a limb here. Judge and Kelly are intelligent artists whose visions simply cannot be any less valid than that of the men who made V for Vendetta, a preposterous corporate turd that Fox, a segment of the critical community, and a sizable segment of the filmgoing public appear to have taken quite seriously. I can only assume that Vendetta's success is due to its florid flattery of the target audience. The film seems designed to serve as a totem object for armchair pseudo- revolutionaries, the sort who exist across the political spectrum (who doesn't feel pushed around by The Government?) and are all too willing to conflate the viewing of a semi-competent action film with the actual changing of the world. McTeigue and the Wachowski brothers (who wrote and produced) have fashioned a film that hails its viewer as a dissident intellectual, and even prompts us to fantasize about how we, too, would fight the power if we found ourselves in the characters' shoes. (Ah, but could we ever truly be so cool?) Playing the future as a meaningless mash-up of the past (Orwellian Third Reich vs. retro-heroics out of Hugo and Dumas), V for Vendetta triangulates itself through your own personal interpretation of the present, whatever that may be, just so long as it smacks of restlessness and dissatisfaction. We aren't an audience. We're dot-connectors. Just as they did with The Matrix -- can't virtually any allegory be squared within its appearance vs. reality template? -- Team Vendetta evacuate all specific content, shine on a few glossy signifiers, and call it a "mythology." No dice.

I really have the hardest time taking someone seriously when they can't figure out how to use IMDB to look up what studio is putting out a film.

Uuum he didn't say he didn't know who was putting it out just that Warners was flushing it.

Turner Classic Movies is showing short films by Scorcese, Polanski, the Scott brothers, Jane Campion, Truffaut, Kubrick, and a couple others tonight. I don't know if any of these are worth the time, but I thought I'd point them out as a psa.

I glowed about this a bit a few pages back after renting it from Netflix. I just bought it from them for under $11, including shipping. I've had luck with the used flicks I've bought from them before (Oldboy, Howl's Moving Castle), and can't pass up both the price and convenience.

My rental of Lucky Number Slevin is arriving tomorrow, and I've already got Kicking and Screaming (Baumbach) and Rize from 'em. Should probably watch one or two of those this weekend.

I hadn't heard about that, but I'd love to see it. Now that I've seen the film, it was cinema verite, and interesting, although a little repetitive. Kind of a character and relationship study. It was 1975, though, so I'd love to see what happened to the two Edies.


I think I saw that one . . . the one where they almost got rescued?

Just a comment that after reading through this thread, I've added about 10 movies to my Netflix queue including (insert whatever you mentioned, because I probably did).

Warner's had never had anything to do with Idiocracy. Judge is with Fox.

Oh yeah, I use this thread for Netflix recommendations too. SOMBies have good taste in films, though I'm not always interested in everything mentioned.

Definitely check out Brick if you haven't already. I'm not sure how the end-of-the-year polling is set up, but if I can vote, Brick should definitely be in my top three for the year.

How were they?

Devlin reminded me of Frank Drebin for some reason.

Was this viewing a result of your TV on DVD thread?

I only watched the Ridley Scott one so far, but it felt like a student film. A really good student, but a student film nonetheless. I'll update you on the others after I catch up on them.

Why, yes... yes, it was. Both you + MitchellStirling pointed that one out to my attention. These past few weeks have been dominated by British television. There's a few things I wish were still in print over here, and I have been wondering about purchasing a region-free player in order to get my hands on material that's simply not available over here. Any advice on a good model?

BTW - Current favorite of the week:



Absolutely brilliant political commentary!

Blech, its reputation is deserved

Topaz is even worse.

I have mixed feelings about this one. While watching, I had assumed that this movie was based on Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" as the story and philosophical/psychological themes were very similar. As it turns out, the film was based on Imre Kertesz' novel of the same name. Regardless, those who have read Frankl's account will recognize the same story and themes in "Fateless".

The film was wonderfully acted and compelling throughout. However, I had one problem with the film. The cinematography was about as stunning as any film i've seen in 10 years. However, the film was SO visually striking, SO beautiful that I thought it undermined the real horror and tragedies of the concentration camp.

It seems contradictory for me to say that this was a beautifully shot film about a concentration camp, but that's exactly what i thought.

Gosling gives much more to this film then it gives back. There ain't much there. Seems to end about six different times.

I was watching Ebert and Roeper when they reviewed this, and they both positively jizzed their pants over it, claiming it was like the best movie of the year or something. I haven't seen it yet. Gosling's performance looked great but the story seemed a little ridiculous on paper. I had it in mind to go see it but promptly forgot about it.

It was actually Kevin Smith and Roeper. Smith said it was one of the best films he's seen in the last 10 years.

Shows up on many a critic's list of "great movies". This is a fine example of a silly film story overshadowed by the classiness of its telling. Nuns attempting to set up a successful abbey in Calcutta in the sensual world of India...you might not believe this was made by Britain in 1947, on the Pinewood Studios set. Legendary, Oscar-winning cinematography from Jack Cardiff.

Accept nothing less than the Criterion Collection edition which includes commentary by Martin Scorsese and co-director Michael Powell, and a documentary focusing on Cardiff's work.

oh yeah, my bad.

This fawking rawks. The Powell Pressburger Technicolor films are magical. see also The Red Shoes. Tales of Hoffman just came out on Criterion as well.

Those last shots of Sister Ruth approaching D. Kerr at the bell...damn.

Fantastic Four

I wonder if Stan Lee will successfully transform every Marvel comic into a hollywood film before he croaks?. This was OK for your comic fan at best. I think it works because the CGI's are up to snuff to pull it off. Nothing else stood out other than the pyrotechnics.

I'm a comic fan & I thought this was pretty awful.
For the sequel, they're introducing the Silver Surfer.

Well then its not OK. Avoid at all costs.

I actually feel the reverse of the original comment. The less of a comic book reader you are, the more you'll enjoy it. Everything in it sucked as much as the suckiest comic book adaptations in there, except the special effects. They were pretty good. So many of these things have bad dialogue, directing, acting AND action...at least this did one of them right.

i saw zatoichi: the blind swordsman the other night and it was a very good samurai flick

Jules et Jim.

Holy crap, was I ever disappointed. Granted, the story is based on a supposedly autobiographical novel, but the plot thread was too screwy for me to stay with it...and since there was virtually no character development or reason to even care about these characters, plus the direction just looked like total crap to me, I actually got pissed off by this supposedly "classic" canonical Truffaut film.

Meh x2.

ha, that made me think of this perry bible fellowship comic:

Deadwood down under.

Bought this at Best Buy for $40. They had a special edition of it that actually included the season 1 DVD for just $10 more (total =$50). Earlier this spring, I paid $30 for that 6-episode DVD. Thanks, Borders.

I probably don't need to say this is great. Tonight I finally saw the episode with the now-immortal line "I want people to be afraid of how much they love me." I've been seeing that on the etc board all year, and finally, now I know.

Unfortunately, NBC had to show a promo a few weeks ago where they showed what happens at the end of season 2. So while I'm still loving this and think it's genius at times, all of the anticipation and suspense surrounding the central conflict of the show is gone for me. Thanks, NBC.

I just finished watching the first season DVD, and now will trudge through season two (I also need to watch all of season two of Veronica Mars, and that should be a higher priority for me). I'm DVR'ing the new stuff so I can watch when I'm ready.



Poor editing, little continuity... but Tony Jaa is a fucking badass. I'll see any movie with this dude. In one scene, he breaks at least one limb of about fifty people in rapid succession. Sick.