You were expecting maybe James Cameron?

i watched Dinosaurs....Nuts On War...k, that's my favorite episode.

Even the attempts at stylization felt aggresively cheapo. It just felt a bit heavy and didn't have the sense of a free spirit at play the way Joe Dante's satirical films do.

"Sanjuro" is totally my favourite of Kurosawa's samurai movies (Yup, even more than Seven Samurai). I like the way it almost borders on comedy at times with the bumbling group of samurai constantly screwing things up, yet all of sudden has this graphic, bloody climax. It's actually a pseudo-sequel to Yojimbo, so I think you might enjoy that next, though the tone is quite different.

i ordered "yojimbo" from amazon yesterday. criterion release. and someone had it pretty cheap. too bad that version is the old one without additional features/commentaries and such. but the price was right.

i also noticed that comedy element, which was rather surprising for me. the whole story reminded me of those moralistic fables. for me the funnies part was with the hostage guy, who turnes on the good samurai's side. he's helping them. cheering with them, but always has to go back to the wadrobe.

Heh. Wanna see some cut-rate Cameron, pre-Terminator? Check out the effects + art direction of:



... Don't say I didn't warn youuuuuuuuuu....

Ah yes, a classic! With the participation of Sayles & Horner, no less. (Corman has done more for Hollywood than anyone gives him credit for...)

"One of the most erotic movies ever made"...and it sucked

horrible
i feel like some 70 year old lady who just sat through a 400 series soap opera

Never saw the movie, but it's a world-class poster.

this felt like a very long film. although it was rather good.
very interesting soundtrack to it. i heard some russian choir singing. i think it was some prokofiev's opera.

question: does anyone know why there were instances of unclear shots? when the camera was moving from place to place, the movement was kept out of foculs, untill it got to a person or a bigger scene.

Sherry Baby
very solid movie
Maggie Gylinhallllll, as always, makes it tough to take your eyes off of her. The amount of nude scenes she has helps.

rent this flick!

i suppose i can understand now why some people here said that this film wasn't his best.

i wonder...is that metaphor of real live escape from death = spiritual salvation? wouldn't it be too early for bergman to give into that idea? i'm probably misinterpreting it a little bit

Does Verhoeven ever have chutzpah! The usually austere context of Holocaust and WW2 Resistance stories are used for an in-your-face exercise in moral ambiguity and expectation reversal. Unlike The Departed, all the double crosses actually mean something and don't leave you with a 'well then who-gives-a-damn?' aftertaste. 'The leading actress was topless so many times that I lost count but will not complain. No, I will not. And its effing Grade A filmmaking by a guy who has a fantastic eye and sense of the frame

I enjoyed it too. Although Maggie's nude scenes in this movie aren't always the most flattering.

Yeah, this is next on my list.
You just never know what Verhoeven will do next! He's really all over the place.

i can see why people would be throwing cakes at godard's face

i dunno

on the one hand it feels like a good movie. you think like you get a very simple point behind all the unnecessary dialogue. but then there's also godard who just wouldn't give up on his whole "ah, americans. you don't have history. look at us french people quoting obscure writers and talking about the futility of existence". and you really just wanna go: "shut the fuck up, godard! god damn it."

Gave a second view of Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind the other night. It makes more sense this time than the first viewing.

I highly recommend any couple to watch this after they've had a really bad fight.

i really don't understand why people like that movie. i don't think it's a bad movie. but it's just way too sappy.

Cache

Volver

Hot Fuzz

and The US Versus John Lennon

All I have to say is, Hot Fuzz was awesome hilarity, go see it now.

VOLVER. This might just be my favorite movie of the decade so far.

I thought Hot Fuzz was 70% alright and 30% incredible.

Which is an okay ratio, but Shaun of the Dead is a much better film.

Maybe my expectations were too high.

We are months behind as far as movies go.

dude...

Night of the Hunter: I heard this was great and bought it like 2-3 years ago when I found it for cheap, finally watched it on Saturday night and it's just about as good as everyone says. While all I ever heard about it is how chilling it is and how good Mitchum is in the lead as the evil preacher, nobody ever told me about how beautiful the cinematography is. It's an absolutely gorgeous film to look at, especially as the children travel down-river on the run from the preacher.


Week End: Two years back, when I actually had limitless access to a goodly number of films, I finally got around to seeing some Godard (Breathless, My Life to Live, and Pierrot Le Fou). Seeing as the latter was my favourite, I thought it would be a good idea to head toward Godard's more surreal late 60s output. But, where Pierrot was fun in that, even when you didn't really understand what was going on you could still enjoy the scenery, Week End is just plain baffling. A recap of the plot would go something like "Rich couple try to go away for the weekend, ostensibly to off her rich mother, they come across a massive traffic jam/accidents. Things gradually deteriorate into murder, rape, cannibalism". Yet, it still somehow fails to be interesting. A sample scene would be towards the end, where a man plays the drums in the middle of a field while a man with a boring voice reads some sort of manifesto. I get that it's an attack on the bourgeoisie, but couldn't it be at least an interesting attack on the bourgeoisie?


Warm Water Under a Red Bridge: Hey, when people recommended this as a great film they never said this was a great film about excessive vaginal ejaculation; I totally would've seen it earlier, had I known! Seriously, though, if you read the write-up for this, it sounds awful, but it's a surprisingly affecting, sweet-natured adult fairy tale, about life and its meanings. An unemployed businessman goes to a small town to search for a treasure, at the behest of his now dead drifter of a friend. There, he meets a girl with a most unusual, uh, disorder/talent. Gradually, he begins to adjust to smalltown life, but what about the treasure? It's erotic, startlingly funny, and slightly sad. I'm excited to see a lot more Imamura after this one.

The folklore narrative along with Almodovar's vision makes it all thrilling, it's just beautiful. I even found Penelope Cruz bearable, for once.

Awesome. Gorgeous, perverse and decades ahead of its time. Shame that Charles Laughton never made another movie.

Yeah, this is a great film.

this is the only almadovar film i saw, but the feeling i got after watching it was like some 70 year old lady sitting through 500 series of soap opera. i bet my grand mother would like it.

but it's cool
whatever

Bodou Saved From Drowning
Jean Renoir
1932

just ok. not all that funny.


Dolls
Takeshi Kitano
2003

this one was beautiful. loved it. so peaceful. deep and fragile. probably in my top 5 films of this decade.


Pickpocket
Robert Bresson
1959

rather good. cool thief's tricks and all that, but i didn't really belive into that whole "love forgives everything" idea that i thought director was trying to push. yeah, a good guy left a girl on her own with a newly born baby. but the other guy was still a criminal, even though he decided to help the girl in the end.


Pickpocket
Jia Zhang-Ke
1999


Unknown Pleasures
Jia Zhang-Ke
2002

funny that i got two films by with the same title but with a 50 or so year difference between them. and as i understood, Bresson's "pickpocket" was an inspiration/a model for Zhang-Ke's "pickpocket".
"pickpocket" didn't impress me that much. i think it could have been maybe 10-25 minutes shorter, but for a debut film it was good. especially the final scene where the thief is handcuffed outside on the street and everyone's gathering around him, just starring at him. very powerful ending.
"unknow pleasure" on the other hand was great. loved it.



and now exams time is coming up and i won't be able to borrow movies from the library for some time

He draws influence off his childhood onto his films. In this occasion, this is what it was like being raised by women in a Spanish home. It's the opposite end of the spectrum in a male influenced world. Yeah, it does play out like a soap opera, but I can't help but feel the experience these women have, and to even think there's a small truth to it all.

If you didn't enjoy Volver, I doubt you'd like the rest of his work.

i was talking about "volver" to my flatmate, who's a bit more knowledgable in films than me. he studied under the guy who writes scripts for inurittu, actually. but he had a similar view of the film as i did. he recommended me to check out some of the earlier alamdovar's films.

i don't know about the male/female spectrum. i was raised in a kind of female environment myself, always surrounded by grand mothers. but probably it's also a cultural thing.

Fabulous movie. The first time I saw it, I saw it fresh off having seen all of Kitano's violent yakuza stuff so this was a bit of a head-scracther for me, but as time went on, I found myself replaying parts of it over and over in my brain, and sought it out again whereupon I fell absolutely in love with it.


This is a pretty great little film that no one seems to pimp, although that might be on account of the "unconventional" nature of the two lead's relationship.

"unconventinal"?

Doh!

I confused this with the film "Moonlight Whispers" which is definitely an unconventional relationship as the male lead tape-records the female lead using the bathroom, she then forces him to watch her have sex with another man. Honestly, though, it's quite good!

See the Dictionary of Agrimorfee: "un-'con-vent-in-al, Adj., unable to become a nun."

"Last King of Scotland" is really fucking good. No surprise to me, that Forrest won an oscar for his performance.

Excellent soundtrack, or 'score', to boot. It's kind of like funky African tribal music.

Eve and the Fire Horse: What a fabulous little movie this is! A Chinese immigrant family in Vancouver is visited by tragedy, and the two young daughters respond by converting to catholicism. The mother is okay with it because, as she puts it "I think it's better to have two Gods in one house." It's a combination of a children growing up movie mixed with sudden bursts of magic realism. Seeing as the majority of its release dates occured in 2006, I'm going to be putting this in the mix on my mid-year correction. You should definitely see this.

Recent:

Bonnie & Clyde
The Graduate
Happiness
Man Bites Dog

Great performances.
Pretty hard to take all of the flowery, pretentious praise thrown at Cohen by Bono & The Edge though.

This may start me on a Leonard bender.

Jigoku

Directed by Nubuo Nakagawa. Quite possibly the first Japanese "splatter" movie, although you have to wait until the second half of the movie to get to the nasty stuff. A young man hits a drunk with his car, and thereafter everyone he knows either dies or indulges in the sins of evil. Then, everyone goes to Hell and atones for their sins--quite literally, in amazing and grotesque imagery. From there it's an Asian "What Dreams May Come", (without the pretty colors and Robin Williams or Cuba Gooding Jr and loads of blood). You have to consider the fact that the film was made in 1960, and most Japanese filmgoers weren't quite used to the gory and unsettling images of writhing naked bodies, rivers of blood, and flayed corpses. It looks kind of cheesy today, but still it's eerie in its bluntness.

Criterion as usual sweetens the deal with a nice documentary about the making of the film, giving some insights into the history of Japanese horror cinema.

I disagree slightly. There's more heartache and confusion than eroticism.
Bottom line is she's hot no matter what..

[spoiler]i love this spoiler function, now i can say what reallly bothered me with this movie. i hated the fact that the movie made sure we knew sherry was a trouble(d) maker etc, but when it came down to some of the reasons why she is this type of person the film fails to explore such monumental events such as her father fucking the shit out of her since she was a child. how do you drop something like this, even go so far as the brother finding out about it, and choose to surface dwell the topic?[/spoiler]

Irène Jacob is naked twice in this thing. You get to see her tits and her pubes, it rules.



THIS IS SO BOSS, OH GOD. Too righteous.

The Lake House: I'll be honest, I've been kind of interested in seeing this ever since it came out last summer. If you don't know the story, it's based on a Korean movie "Il Mare", and it's about a couple who communicate through a magical mail box. She is alive and living in 2006, while he's still in 2004. They write letters to each other, share a dog, and fall in love with each other. I'd say this is a little more fleshed-out than the Korean one, but the Korean one has a tad more magic to it (Which I would chalk up to the fact that the two do not meet in the first one [spoiler]until the very end[/spoiler] whereas in this one, they share a moment together at a party). Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves are both dreamy but accessible enough that it's completely believable that either is worth going to all this trouble to be with them. The biggest problem with this movie, is getting your brain on just the right level to watch it. You have to have it turned on, to make sense of the couple's communication and the events occuring in two different time periods, but you can't think too hard on it, or the plot starts to unravel (So, if he plants that tree there so that it appears outside her window in her time, how come no one else questions why a tree shows up on their lawn over night?). It's decent, though, well worth a watch on TV.

How William Shatner Changed the World

Great fun!

Sort of for class, starring my husband, this movie ate my soul to pieces.

I've been watching a ton of early Woody Allen movies lately and have loved every second of it.

"i was soo good last night, she sure is a lucky girl" ha..
funny dude, shame he likes fucking his daughter soo much.