Not a bad thought. If I can get even one smug film critic to watch -- nay, enjoy! -- Crank, the world will be a better place.

The broad in this was hot, and the criminal dude looked like Fred Durst.

All in all, the ending was awesome because they ended up in the desert like in Evil Dead 2.

Good luck with that--the producers (boneheadedly) decided against critics' screenings for this one. Seriously, though--put the Chinatown sequence on your scenes list even if you don't get a chance to see it.

Thanks for the cheat, but if I put anything from that movie on my list, I'll be forced to 'splain. In detail. So consider my queue Cranked. #1 with a bullet.

I'm rewatching as much of my top ten as possible before the ballots are due:



"You're my best friend, and I just need to get a picture of you."

Debbie Doebereiner breaks. my. heart. Seriously, she kills me. I love everything about this movie, from the bizarrely naturalistic acting to the ice sloshing noisily in their fast-food cups. And dolls. Creepy, creepy dolls.

Edited to agree with you, raumschwein. I posted the above too soon. I didn't remember my love falling off so drastically after the unfortunate incident, but alas, it does. Shame. It just fell a few places on my top 10. And this one...



...jumped right off. Why'd I dig it so much the first time?

^^^I actually just saw that for the first time the other night. The baby heads (and arms) are good 'n creepy, but it kind of lost me after the unfortunate incident. The interactions between the two main characters in the first half of the film were priceless, though.

just saw this at the cheap theater. Great movie for the first two thirds or so, but I can't decide if the end is a brutal cop-out or if it works.

Sidney Poitier is a badass

^^^
Guess Who's Coming To Dinner is a product of it's time, all so earnest and well-meaning and oh-so correct. Gimmee any early episode of "All In The Family" over that one.


The Illusionist---I fell asleep...Mrs. A. thought Edward Norton looked really cute in his goatee. Guess The Prestige will be more fun.

A Prairie Home Companion--a fitting end to Robert Altman's esteemed career...not a masterpiece, but a good bit of melancholy fun. I'm very familiar with the real-life radio show, so I wished more of it was referred to. I'm amazed Garrison Keillor could pull off a workable script, let alone act.

The Illusionist's just a boring love story. I fell asleep in the theater for probably 20 minutes. *yawn* The Prestige is a much more complex, interesting movie.

I preferred The Prestige to The Illusionist, but how anyone could fall asleep when Giamatti's one of the leads is beyond me.

Take a gander at his IMDb listing. It's not hard to imagine snoozing through at least 50%. Dude's got mad talent... just not for picking projects.

Dollars to donuts you've not seen that.

Wrong. I have nieces and nephews, you know.

Then you know that as kid fare goes, having P.G. show up is a boon. If you're going to pick a sordid title from his list, might as well go with Duets.

And of all the people to hold his coming-up-through-the-ranks past against him, you seemed the least likely. Everyone takes the roles they can get on the way up.

Okay, crabby, I'm not blaming the guy for taking crap for cash early on. I just couldn't find a funny still from Lady in the Water. C'mon, post-Sideways, his picks have been all over the place. I keep hoping he'll settle into a more interesting character groove a la Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Is there any part of you that thinks Hoffman wasn't up for Giamatti's role in The Illusionist?

Heh. Had he taken it, I'd still have slept.

No one who pimps Bubble and Lonesome Jim gets to talk about sleeping through anything.

Point taken.

billion dollar brain

The last and probably strangest of the three films in the Harry Palmer series.
Strange being the operative word given that I think this was the theatrical debut of Ken Russell.
Odd but enjoyable for all it's Iron Curtain/60's early computer revelery.. magnetic tapes..



i'll sleep when i'm dead

Michael Hodges was always this underdog director in my mind. He never gets much credit for the kind of pics he puts out but given the success of 'Croupier' I probably had more hope for this than the outcome provided. I really expected more along the lines of a badass revenge pic but even the crime in question is less than easily explained. I mean you see the crime occur but the explaination is so vague I just kinda shrugged as this as it puttered out.



munich

I kinda thought this was alright. I was a tad lost on the montage choices with the lead character daydreaming about the initial attack as if he were a witness to the atrocity.
Not to mention if you're having sex with your wife. I'm not getting the idea where someone is really thinking about hostages getting killed. I just don't get this as a real line of thought.

Additionally, if the dutch assassin was a pro (and I take it she was) she would have wasted those guys before they had time load those single shot pee shooters they were using. Eh, come to think of it, you might not be so pleased with the outcome of this particular Spielbergian episode... He really didn't pull at anyones heartstrings in this one... go fig.

I got the giggles at Giamatti trying to pull off whatever accent he was going for (as well as Norton) before I fell asleep.

Asterix & Cleopatra

For those that don't know the character, Asterix is sort of a Gallic Popeye, outwitting and outfighting the Roman Legions with the help a shot of "Magic Elixer" and of his best friend Obelix (the big, fat guy in the image above, who was accidentally dropped into a vat of the elixer as an infant). In this movie the pair, along with their friend the druid Getafix, parody the movie Cleopatra and defeat the Romans (again) while helping their friend Edifis the Architect build Cleopatra a new Palace in three months so she can win a bet with Caesar and prove that the Egyptians aren't totally decadent. The animation looks & sounds alot like the Early-'60s Tom & Jerry Cartoons that were made in Eastern Europe.

Cool beans on that Asterix movie (I think there was 3 of them)! Those cartoons were mentioned often during my French class in high school. Since it is so franco-centric, some of the ancient history aspects are a bit satirical and might go over most folks' heads. Like, for example, Obelix's occupation is as a stone hauler for the druids. (Getafix! *giggle*)

I think there were 6 Cartoon movies released in the Late-'60s to Early-'70s, and 2 Live Action, with a third Live Action scheduled for next year with Gérard Depardieu to play Obelix! Plus, guest stars like Alain Delon (as Julius Caesar) , Claudia Cardinale , Jean-Claude Van Damme , David Beckam , & Michael Schumacher.

That is the 3rd live-action Asterix, all of which were made in the last 4 years. None of which are available in the U.S.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0250223/

such a shame.

Ultimately the biggest turn off of all. The soundtrack on those toons were always disturbing to me
but I am curious about the series none the less.

United 93

Before watching the movie, I really didn't understand why my fiance was dead set against watching it. I thought, "It's just a movie, we know how it ends."
It's a pretty powerful movie. There were several times as the tension built that I felt all the muscles in my body tense up.
This film does a nice job of suming up the confusion/terror of that day and showing us the desperate fight for life in the skies over Pennsylvania.

Classic sports book and short-lived series.

*Probably one of the best ten films of the last five years; a call to arms to every goofball and jackass.


*Shit, my buddy let me borrow this dvd, and I was amazed beyond belief with this feature. Even though I hate the music, the movie was quite interesting...Probably one of the better movies I saw this year...No Bullshit....

racism and beyond.

i could watch this every minute of every day. and still laugh on the seventh day.

Ridiculously terrifying and disturbing, though not for the reasons I was expecting at all. And yet... I don't know what my problem was with this but it now feels so inconsequential, and I'm not sure if I actually liked it or not. How can I explain why without giving anything away? Hmmm...

I'm having this experience more and more lately -- with Pan's Labyrinth and, right before that, Perfume. I'm totally engrossed as I'm sitting there, but the moment I leave the theater, it starts leaving my brain. Come the next morning, I'm not sure I liked it at all.

More fun times with the new big screen TV:


Yes, it's silly. Yes, it's fun. Yes, it's terrible. Yes, James Coburn is the bomb. Yes, I'm showing my age here...


The debate rages on: both are good, but I think I prefer the original.


I still say the first is the best, and the final 2 films get progressively worse. But man, that first one is extraordinary, I swear...


Movie's so-so, but the commentary + documentary are terrific.

More compelling and/or entertaining than I could've imagined. (Of course, I had some pretty spectacularly low expectations.) Glad I didn't see this on the big screen, though.

I'm stunned.

So, after waiting 45 minutes for the movie to actually start, I barely made it past (SPOILER ALERT) the drill bit. Did it get more entertaining from there?

Well...yeah.

More of an observation/reaction than any kind of implied recommendation.

Huh. Can you explain how someone so turned off by extreme, nonsensical violence was okay with that flick?

just got back from Pan's Labyrinth as well, and I'm not really sure if I liked it super alot either. I was really sucked in but it really didn't live up to the previews and reviews like I figured it would. it almost seemed as though there was a main story and it needed something to make it stand out so they threw in a side story. not too sure about it, I'll wait till it's on dvd and see it again.

Funny as hell, but I can't understand how Johnny Knoxville is still alive. Crazy bastard.

Coulda, shoulda been great, but wasn't. Fantastic art design, lousy music (with the exception of the Blue Man group background sounds) and zero chemistry with the characters (I mean, come on - Robin Williams + Mel Brooks together coulda, shoulda been the bomb, but nooOOOooo...). Robots was really more of an assemblage of really fun CGI shorts that got pieced together in order to pretend it's a movie.

Pixar still rules the CGI film world - even tho some of the music in Cars was a bit of a turn off as well.

I wonder if Monster House is any good?

Asterix rules. I've never seen the cartoons, though--just the comix. Is it in English? I've only read the comic in German and Saxon (that's sächsisch, the most reviled dialect Germany).

Must be the climate of the times, but I've been sensing a frighteningly oblivious attitude towards the increasing threat of nuclear war... Soooooo I decided to watch an old warning that has been semi-forgotten in our culture - but it's one that I feel should be required viewing to everyone in thie modern, jittery age:



If you're not either thoroughly depressed or weeping for humanity by the end credits then you're just not part of the solution, here.

I really enjoyed the first hour of this. Then the monsters showed up and it became painfully tedious.

Idiocracy
Some pretty funny bits, but over all, it just didn't work for me.

Wait for Cable

There's something so totally sexually wrong about that poster. Wow.



Even though Happy Feet IMHO outclassed all other CGI-animated films this year, it's worth seeing. It's darker than you'd think, however a little more than preposterous in some details. It's admirable that all of the character action was performed a la "motion capture" by all of the actors in addition to their voice acting (like Gollum in Lord of The Rings)

Oh, the first hour was riveting! Had the monsters never showed up, it might've been my #1 of the year.

Right? It doesn't even seem like it was the same movie. Total dissapointment. Biggest WTF I've seen in a while.