Pollock in HD was an awesome experience.

I just purchased HARD BOILED on DVD. John Woo, Chow Yun Fat and a bodycount of 308 according to IMDB.com. An amazing Hong Kong action picture that is unequalled in the action, style and its wild to see how many films after it totally stole sequences.

The first action sequence is just so cool. Its a Chinese teahouse. Everone's got a gun and just what seems to be 20 min. of stuff- food- bodies flying all around. Just breathtaking.

I LOVELOVELOVE that movie! It's not a genre I generally like (or can even stomach) but Hard Boiled (and The Killers) are so over the top, it's all ok with me.

If you like Hard Boiled - you gotta see Bullet In The Head, one of my favorites.

I gotta agree with Matt - Bullet In The Head could be Woo's masterpiece. A lot darker than Hard Boiled and The Killer, and also unfortunately not in print in the US. Of the myriad versions of the movie on import DVD, I'd go for the Hong Kong one by a company called Joy Sales.

I had A Bullet In The Head a couple of years ago, and sold it on eBay during desperate times. Wish I hadn't done that.

We watched More (1969) last night. The biggest selling point for this movie is the Pink Floyd soundtrack.

What can I say about it. First off, it's a pretty sucky movie. The writing sucks, the acting sucks.

That said, I really enjoyed it. I think what did it the most for me was the international flair to it. A German guy meets a New York girl in Paris, then follows her to Ibiza, meeting people of all different nationalities in the process. The movie I think captured something of that 60s European youth culture, where it was easy to just hop on a steam ship and bounce around the continent.

It also does a pretty admirable, if oddly sanitized, job of portraying drug use. There were a few good lines. "People who use heroine are people who want an escape from life. People who use pot or acid want to intensify their lives." (or something very close to that, can't find the exact quote).

And the music of course was awesome...when it was there. That was one of the bigger disappointments. It's a 2 hour movie and the majority of it has no score whatsoever. Huge stretches of watching bad dialog being poorly acted without even mind-bending music to listen to.

Overall I'd give it somewhere between a 6 and a 7.

Sounds like a good cemetary movie (with pot and acid, of course)

I'm just so very glad I never went for the seriously addictive stuff.

Yeah, I'm glad I stayed away from hardcore drugs and went straight to cheddar cheese popcorn.

Who keeps letting Roland Emmerich make movies?
10,000 BC is at 12% on rottentomatoes.com.
It's early yet but I don't think it will improve much...

But, but, there's mastodons in ancient Egypt or something. What can be wrong with that?

I guess a lot. It's now at 8%.

Yet Variety is predicting it will be #1 at the box office this weekend.

True, but it is early March. This time of year you win that title with numbers that barely get you noticed three months from now. I think if mousepod charged every $10 for one of his living room screenings that movie would make the top 20 this time of year.

There's also a Raven/Martin Lawrence movie coming out, too. It may do well. It's going to be in a number of theatres. Not as many as 10,000 BC, though.

And if Tyler Perry releases two or three movies this week, they'll do well.
:D

I had to review College Road Trip (the Raven-Symone/Martin Lawrence movie) for MP. If you're watching it on TV for free it isn't actually horrible. But it is way to TV-ish and not nearly good enough to justify buying a ticket for it.

Do you think College Road Trip will be a close second? It has the whole family-oriented vibe.

A.O. Scott's review of 10,000 B.C. in today's New York Times made me laugh out loud.

a sample:

God, I LOVE A.O.

Here is where I'd quote my favorite A.O. review - if I hadn't just quoted it in conversation with Jesse all of two weeks ago.

Honestly I haven't a clue. I would never pay for it but I also don't have any sense on how hot the teen passion for Raven is. Five years ago I think it would have opened pretty big (when I saw her and the reaction the Princess Diaries 2 premiere I didn't even know she was still working) but I don't know any more.

She's pretty fun to watch, and it is great to see a normal body figure treated as that (as opposed to a normal body figure being presented as fat but ok). It's a good Disney channel movie (in terms of quality it reminded me of Saintly Switch if you ever saw that, which was a Disney Channel movie).

I kind of wondered if they planned it for TV but then got Lawrence to sign on and figured they might as well try something bigger.

TeeHee, I can't wait for the future casa de mousepod double feature of 10,0000 B.C. and Mysterious Island.



(But where does One Million Years B.C. with Raquel Welch fit in??)

...with Clan of the Cave Bear, of course. BTW, we'd have to watch the UK version of One Million Years BC - the US version was edited...


... wait, maybe instead of Clan we could have Caveman with Ringo Starr...

Zug zug!

I know we'll be going to it for sure. The boy still has a thing for Raven. I don't mind, she's a sweet girl with a great voice.

And at 22 she is a very attractive young woman. Particularly in the late scenes when she's dressed for an interview. She works professional attire very well.

Just watched Michael Clayton finally. Really enjoyed it. I was glad they didn't go in the direction I thought they would. The acting was great, even the guy from Caddyshack. Damn, he got old.

I think of him as "the guy who used to beat up Roseanne's sister."

Too long for me to catch up on this thread.... But....

I watched King of Kong last night. Excellent documentary for those who love video gaming and classic video games.

King of Kong is also an excellent documentary on a guy who won't stop playing a video game to go help his kid wipe up after going to the bathroom.

yeah, that was a classic moment. "Learn to play games from me, not how to parent"

I felt bad with that scene. I actually highly doubt the kid needed help wiping his butt - he just missed his father, who had been devoting so much of his time toward Donkey Kong. I think that moment was a revelation for Weibe, since he seemed to pay more attention to his kids and wife following that incident.

I'm trying to decide what film to watch tonight. I have a stack on the coffee table.

I just know that Gwendoline (a.k.a. Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak) is in that stack. Go for it!

I <3 Juno.

Who? What?

Suspicion
Belle de Jour
8 1/2
The Go-Between
Or, something from the Almodovar box set.

Don't forget Lawrence of Arabia and Bonnie and Clyde (both on the DVD in HD)

A movie sounds like an awesome idea. I need some serious sofa snuggle time. It's so nice having some quiet time away from worry! :)

We've yet to unwrap "Harry Potter: OOTP" from Christmas yet. I'm thinking this would be a good time to do so. I'd like to see the ending without the 3D "finale" we saw at the IMAX. I thought it was so overdone and reminded me of the final battle in the last "Matrix" film.

I saw Across the Universe at CoasterMatt's.
My reaction was... meh.

This weekend

The Laughing Policeman - Perhaps most misleading title ever. Gritty 1973 police drama starring a thoroughly dour Walter Matthau. Lots of nice street scenery of the San Francisco location but otherwise not a very interesting movie.

A Night at the Museum - Surprisingly not horrible. I don't ever need to see it again but it is harmless enough. Mizuo Peck, who played Sacajawea, is the hotness.

Double Indemnity - Brilliant as always.

The Bank Job - Wouldn't mind knowing more about which parts are true and which parts are poetic license. It's not going to set the world on fire and will be forgotten in a couple years but I enjoyed most of it.

I can't tell you how giddy this makes me. It is about 15 years too late but I saw the trailer before The Bank Job tonight and I went to martial art movie heaven for the brief seconds seen of Chan and Li fighting each other.

We watched a ton of movies this weekend - Bournes A and B (not yet C, it's on our payperview queue) which were full of action but couldn't quite hold my attention. Elizabeth (2, but not II) which was generally better than I'd been told. Michael Clayton again, which I liked better the second time (and I liked it pretty well the first time.) A really terrific American Experience about Buffalo Bill (this is going to spur another biopic screenplay on the Todi Mooers to-do list.) Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day, which was generally delightful but about the consistency of taffy. Penelope, which was very pretty eye-candy but hit-and-miss otherwise.

I caught Michael Clayton this weekend. It held my interest and I loved Tom Wilkinson (as always a fabulous performance). I love Tilda Swinton, but was her performance so subtle that I missed entirely why she won an Oscar for it? Not so much of her and not so much to do, maybe I need to see it again, but I thought she was much more expressive and commanding in Narnia I.

Anyway, I do not feel it was 2 hours wasted, but there were many points that really went nowhere in the plot and added to the initial confusion.

How was The Bank Job? It looks like it might be good. I do love me a good heist movie.

Fido - This was a Netflix recommendation (watched it online, connected to the TV. I can't get over how awesome that service is). Really enjoyed it. If you liked Sean of the Dead, and/or Idiocracy, you'll probably enjoy this movie. It falls a little flat, in the same way that Idiocracy does, and some of the acting is not the greatest, but the concept is hilarious and it's overall a good watch.

Mysterious Island - 1961 movie based (I don't know how faitfully) on a Jules Verne book and with Ray Harryhausen animation (sorry, Dynamation). It's exactly what you want out of the genre. Animation was of course great, story epic and cheesy.

Finally saw "From Here to Eternity."

Eh. Choppy.

I was also a tad deflated that 30 seconds after the big kiss in the waves, he was calling her a whore.

What if I loved Shawn of the Dead but despised Idiocracy not only for being unfunny and poorly made but also morally reprehensible in its presentment of the worst type of eugenics and biodeterminism?

Umm, then I guess you may or may not like Fido I suppose. Though it's probably got more in common with SotD than Idiocracy. I made the comparison because they're both "what if" type worlds, but definitely not the same sort of "what if".

Next up in the Netflix Queue

Lust Caution and some Miss Marple Mysteries

I heard that the Chinese government started censoring Lust Caution because people were injuring themselves imitating the sex scenes.

I'm sorry, I lauged so hard at that moment. My son watched that movie with me, and when the child was yelling, he was sitting there saying, Wipe your own butt, you're five!!!

Otherwise, we both enjoyed this movie. Though I had a hard time explaining to my son why the reigning champ was being such "a baby".

On another note, I watched Keeping Mum this weekend.
Maggie Smith is funny. really funny.

I didnt know Rowan Atkinson could play a straight role.

And that movie was totally not what I expected, but I still loved it.
And thats just wierd for a movie with a body count.

The sex scenes in Lust, Caution are just WHOA. Especially the first one. Sigh, I long to "imitate" that scene. Brutal hotness extraordinaire.


Ugh, sorry you were meh about Across the Universe, GC. I liked it a lot better the second time when I wasn't watching it as a "story," but merely as an operetta of Beatles numbers linked by the flimsiest plot that was cobbled together to fit the songs, and not the other way around.

We went and saw College Road Trip, which the boy loved as we knew he would. Raven is just cute and sweet. I love that she doesn't have to be stick thin to be a pretty role model.

We also saw Martian Child. It was slow moving but a touching story. The little boy was cute and it was fun to see the Cusack's playing brother and sister.

We passed a bit of a milestone. I took the kid to his first R-Rated movie: The Bank Job.

He liked it. I was less impressed.

Of course he liked it, there were naked boobies within the first 20 seconds.

Really, for many years that's all it took for me to consider a movie to be a classic.

In the same vein, I happened to catch the unrated version of American Pie: Beta House on TV the other night. I'd say it was the first vaguely mainstream movie I've seen featuring full frontal nudity involving a fully weed-whacked crotch (or whatever it is the girls do to themselves these days). Didn't look like I was watching a naked woman. I almost had to run out to rent a copy of Porky's to reorient myself.

But if I was 14, I know my head would have exploded.

So I've already stated here that I loved Persepolis.

I do not love the Studio Briefing news service which populates IMDb, among other things. Their headline: "French Animated Film Banned in Iraq." Their story:

Sorry, Lebanon /= Iraq.

We watched The Trouble With harry tonight. I had forgotten how good that movie is. So sweetly twisted.

The moral of Lust, Caution is

Those were hot scenes, and I'm not sure that was all acting.

My reaction to Across the Universe was a bit better than meh.

There are two sequences I love - I Want You (She's So Heavy) and Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite - I've watched the I Want You sequence 6 or 7 times now, and it's just too cool.

Caught Into the Wild last night.

Well worth watching, though not presented as a cautionary tale, more like the tale of an inspired youth in search of adventure and adventure within himself.

I remember reading the original story when it came out and thought, this fool should have feared to tread at least with a map and compass.

I've not read the book on which the film is based or the documentary, though I'd like to see that, too.

I Want You is definitely the best number in the show. I also love I Wanna Hold Your Hand as a plaintive ballad. And Bono's I Am the Walrus as a tribute to LSD. Joe Cocker's Come Together was also teh awesome. And Happiness is a Warm Gun (featuring Salma Hayeck as a quintet of naugthy nurses) was another standout.

My favorites were "I Want You" and "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." And not actually that much else.

I don't know the names of any of the songs for the most part so I can't say which were my favorites.

But I enjoyed several a lot. Several I enjoyed conceptually but thought they didn't work. And several more were duds.

By the end I had shifted the manner in which I was watching from being a single movie to being something like that something I remember for one of Michael Jackson's albums ("Dangerous"?) where all the videos were shown together with mild connections between thing he did where he strung the videos for all of the songs on the album into a single somewhat linked presentation (I don't know if that was an official thing or if one of the music channels did it on their own).

At the time I thought it might have worked better if Taymor had just given up any semblance of a single story arc (maybe each song being a vignette from the era) but having seen "Love" in Vegas since then I think I may no longer think that.

So we watched Nancy Drew last night. We did this for a number of reasons, including our fondness for genre pictures including both kids' movies and mysteries, my appreciation in youth of the pint-sized case-solver, and a fair number of good reviews.

But I have to say to the reviewers: I'm sorry, but retro styling and a young woman unwilling to compromise to fit in does not a good movie make. Better than Bratz? I certainly imagine so. But good? No.

Screenwriting lessons learned (or reinforced, if already understood)...

1) A "Mary Sue" character is written as the embodiment of perfection. She knows the answers to the universe and doles them out to everyone around her. Her face is flawless, her morality is flawless, her intelligence is flawless. She can perform an emergency tracheotomy even at age 16. She has near-super powers of strength. She is completely uninteresting.

2) The only thing worse than writing a Mary Sue is surrounding her with flat characters who fawn over her, and flat villains who dismiss her. I would say that about 95% of the other actors in the movie spend the whole time saying things like "wow, you're right." "You should write a book about that." "I don't know what we'd do without you." It doesn't make the Mary Sue seem any more brilliant, it just makes every other person in the film seem lifeless. And what joy is there in overcoming a villain who topples like a house of cards, 2D and without any strength whatsoever? Even Bruce Willis, in a cameo as himself, has only one thing to say in the film, and that is to tell Nancy that he thinks she should take over directing the movie she stumbles into.

3) If you're going to build your movie around a Mary Sue, and surround her with cardboard characters, don't then undermine her character with flawed information that is accepted by everyone around her. I don't mean flawed information as in "one can investigate 20 people with the same name on different sides of Los Angeles in one day," I mean "one saves someone from choking by doing CPR." In order to set up a flimsy plot point, the snotty 2D mean-girls overhear Nancy saying she knows CPR, so they set her up, making a sidekick pretend to choke so she'll have to perform mouth-to-mouth. Apparently neither Nancy, the villains, or the rest of the basketball stadium knows about the Heimlich. This is not a very big problem to correct; instead of "knows CPR" all they had to write was "knows emergency medical training... CPR... Heimlich... you name it, I can do it!" This would be preferable to teaching scads of untrained kids that one is supposed to push on a choking person's heart.

And, it generally seemed that ALL of their screenwriting mistakes could be easily swapped out with some intelligent script-doctoring. It's not that hard. Or, apparently, it is. But it certainly makes me ever more fervent to finish this slew of screenplays partly-completed, because I really, really believe that aiming for "better than Bratz" just isn't high enough, isn't respectful of your audience - who, believe it or not, are pretty smart - and isn't going to make you as much money as a movie that is appealing AND smart AND avoids condescending to its characters or its audience.

So I learned; Don't stay up late watching freaky movies on the Movie Channel and expect to be able to sleep before 4AM:D

I can't wait to see some of LSPoorEeyorick's movies!!!

Aww. I cannot giveth you thanks-for-your-support mojo, so I've no choice but to give you XOXOXOX here.

We watched Rope tonight. I'm ashamed to say I've never seen it. It was very good!

I watched the Criterion remaster of Sweet Movie last night.

A very interesting flick. This version is uncensored, in the original languages and is a much better print than the bootlegs that were floating around for the last decade. Still... it's a beautiful mess (if you're in the right mood and have a relatively strong stomach).

I finally saw Beowulf, and there's something I find very interesting about it.

As a live-action film, I would judge it a cornball failure ... yet as a cartoon, I deem it pretty much a rousing success.

As such, I'll grant it the benefit and consider it an animated tale. The characters pretty much look like the humans in Shrek, so I can go with the animated angle - even though the humans were crafted by scanning the movements of live actors and not by artisans of any kind "drawing" the animation. But there were plenty of creatures and locations that were traditionally animated ... hahaha, in the sense that computer animation has now become "traditional."

Some of the main characters look pretty photo-realistic, but they've still got that Shrek-ish feelling about them, and they move in a vaguely animated way. The background characters, and even some of the character roles, are completely Shrek-like. So it really comes off as an animated movie ... in which the somewhat cornball telling of the Beowulf tale fits just fine.

Oddly, while some of the characters look nothing like the actors who provide their voices (as would be typical for an animated film), a few are disconcertingly designed to look just like the actors who portray them ... further blurring the line between live-action and animation.


It's that blur that makes this an interesting movie for me. I'm fascinated that I apparently have widely different criteria for a successful live-actioner than I do a cartoon.

Also, though I'm certainly no Beowulf expert ... it appears they did a very good job in adapting the tale to movie form. Kudos for that.


Overall - - surprisingly not bad. Oh and Ray Winstone (who plays Beowulf) has a fantastic voice. Love the way he says 'Monsta." ;)

We watched Poor Cow last night furthering our exploration of 1960's British cinema. While certainly flawed, I was still captivated by this film and it's stark tale of working class life and message that we are all bent. Not sure I'd recommend this to anyone, but it has me wanting to see more of what was coming out of England during this time.

I watched Frankenstein Unbound last night. In HD.

Best line of the whole movie - "Meet... My Monster!"

I didn't read IsM's feeling about the animated as being a negative feature of the film. am I worng? He called the movements animated, and ABG called them stilted and awkward.

My feeling is somewhere in the middle. Like IsM, I grant Beowulf the benefit of being an animated film. I also feel that the video capture elements were a little "too" real, a little lacking in the somewhat exagerated tradition of animation - be it 2-D or 3-D. The Final Fantasy movie, and lo, it's earlier video games cousins suffered from the same issues. The more surrent FF video games seem to have resolved most of the awkwardness of having photo-real animated characters moving "too" realistically, but I think that the strange quality of video capture is part and parcel to the technique.

Actors used to use posing as part of acting, and it was over the course of decades that the traditions of acting changed to become more realistic in execution. Animation, particularly the photo-real variety, has seen a very sudden change in its psychosymbolic language. The video cpatue technique is a big part of that sudden change, and it does come with advantages as well as the obivous drawback of awkwardness. Either we will get used to the rather eerie reality, or filmmakers will develop techniques for animating photo-real characters which have more elegant motion.

I think the adaptation was decent, though it was certainly about as true to the original story as "300" is true to the oldest versions of that tale. It's a modern re-creation of an old story. I do like that in this case Beowulf's mother is a creature of cruel beauty, not a hag. We, as a modern audience, can better understand the failure of a king if he is seduced by Angelina Jolie than by a grotesque hag, no matter how terrible her power. It just translates better to film.

I loved Beowulf the first time I saw it. I fell asleep the second.

Apparently novelty was a big part of what I liked.

Kind of off topic but - Can anyone tell me the name of the movie that we watched at NA's home on New Year's Day? I can't think of the name and it is driving me crazy! :)

CQ?

That would be it! Thank you so much!!!

Just to clarify, I thought the animated feeling of the character movement in Beowulf was a positive. Anything that leaned toward it being an animated movie made it a better film in my eyes.

I love the adaptations to the story the filmmakers made, and I don't think it took things too far off. It was clear that Grendil's Mother could appear as a beauty, but that it was not her natural form (which seemed to be more a lizard-creature than a hag ... but i think the point being that she could appear as many things). The only bit I absolute hated about her appearance as a luscious siren were the stilletto heels she was sporting to aid the look. I couldn't help but think that, like Merlin in Disney's The Sword in the Stone, Grendil's Mother was a time traveler who visited the 20th century for fashion tips before heading back to the 4th century to seduce Beowulf. Ugh.


I thought the biggest change ... moving the third act from back in Beowulf's native Sweden to the Denmark of the earlier acts ... was spot-on brilliant. It let the tale keep the same set of characters (adding only Beowulf's yummy new concubine) and, for a movie, I thought that was clearly the best choice -- certainly warranting a departure from the version of the tale best known.

Keeping in mind, of course, that the written poem was set down centuries after the tale had been part of oral tradition for hundreds of years. I think it's safe to say the famous poem can not be considered the one, true version of the tale.

And though historians believe many of the characters are based on actual people, the tale of Ogres and Witches and Dragons clearly has fictional elements galore. Changing elements of Beowulf, then, is somewhat different an adaptation puzzle than 300 vs. historical fact.

Had Glory Road on my DVR, finally watched last night. Great film, awe inspiring.
Sports film.

Sports films. Meh. Hate that genre, sorry.


* * * *

I would have preferred Beowulf as straight animation. It seems like a lazy short-cut to scan human movement to create animation. If you can't draw it, don't do it.

I don't know exactly what technique they used in Beowulf, but if you're knocking motion capture, you might have to never watch anything ever again to get away from it.

If you're talking about the age old practice of taking film and copying it to make animation...


Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds in Yellow Submarine


Waking Life

Waking Life gave me motion sickness. Good film, but I yaked.
:)


I'm watching GoodFellas right now. Uh, why didn't this movie win Best Picture? Love this film.

That is probably my favorite mafia film, GC. I like it even better than the Godfather series. Ray Liotta was awesome, as was Lorraine Bracco. Great cast, great score, great editing, etc. :snap:

Goodfellas was about 45 min. too long. All that stuff with the drugs and helicopters just dragged the film down. The first half is good but the just bores me to death.

I thought it did a fantastic job of capturing the drugged-out paranoid state, and then it turns out he was right to be paranoid! I don't know; I suppose my life in the Eighties wasn't too far removed from his, so I appreciated things on a different level. (As far as drugs and such go- I only had casual acquaintances with some minor league mafioso. Spokane is a favorite repository of Henry Hill-types for the Witness Protection Program, after all.)

The Seventies and Eighties were wild. It's a wonder any of us survived, let alone reasonably intact.

Two quick suggestions (posting from the airport):

€uro: check out Soderbergh's The Limey, if you haven't already. He uses Poor Cow for the flashback sequences. Pretty neat.

iSm: Can you imagine an early 80s punk band featuring members of the Sex Pistols on guitar and drums, a guy from The Clash on bass and Beowulf singing lead? Come to our next movie night, and prepare to be amazed.

One of Bogdonovich's best (Last Picture Show being first best and then Paper Moon or What's Up Doc)

What's Up Doc is the best nod to 1930's era screwball comedy. Madeline Kahn, fabulous!

I love, love, love this film. Like WB, this is my favorite modern gangster film. Well cast, in fact, perfect casting.

I love Godfather I & II for a period piece, Godfather III was so terribly bad and I cheered (literally) when Sofia was shot on the steps of La Scala and secretly wished that the entire cast and director had been mowed down by tommy guns for making III, P.U.

Always. Loved her.

Add me. Goodfellas is by far my favorite. Scorsese is a favorite of mine anyway.

I can't even hear the song Layla without thinking of Goodfellas. Perfectly haunting, in the best possible way.

I'm right there with you, Wendybeth. I thought it was more deserving of the Oscar than his win for The Departed.

Sometimes, to amuse myself, I try to say "Karen" the way Ray Liotta says it.

I just watched the scene again where Henry takes Karen into the club through the kitchen. All in one shot. It's an amazing shot. Imagine how much prepping they had to do and how many rehearsals it took. Truly a classic film.
:)
Here's the shot

More on GF:
There's a reason Pesci won Best Sup Actor for this film. It's not only the "you think I'm funny scene" it's way more than that. The scene where he's beating the crap out of the shine-box guy with De Niro, there's a close-up of him that is amazing. "I didn't want to get blood on your floor." His face is doing so many things it's a great moment to watch. He's angry, he's upset, he's panicked, he knows he's out of control, he know he's going mad, he's fond of his friend Henry... Man! It's a wonderful moment.

BTW, the Goodfellas special edition (I think) DVD is on sale at amazon right now. I do need to buy this film!

oh, i'm so tempted. But while I loved the movie, mafia films disturb me greatly and i tend not to watch them again. I've only seen Goodfellas once.


I grew up with mafioso and knew many of their kids. The entire subject matter bothers me, and the genre bugs me. But, hmmmm, I am a huge Sopranos fan. Go figure.

Well, don't devastate your life by watching a movie, iSm. Sheesh!
It's all make-believe, don't forget...

:D

It's been way too long since I last saw GF...

Um, except that it's not make-believe, G.C.

I know you were kidding around, but Goodfellas tells a true story. (Though of course it takes dramatic license)

Perhaps that's why I like The Sopranos, but can't stand to watch Goodfellas or The Godfather. Ugh, I hated constantly driving through through those tollbooths where Sonny was gunned down. Yuck.

Oy, lighten up, dear.
No one's making you watch anything.

Ugh, I hate the internet. You mistake my tone, sweetie-darling.


It's the damn Quick Reply feature. It's so convenient, but doesn't offer smileys. But the time I type stuff and then realize a smiley might be appropriate, I'm too lazy to "Go Advanced."



But, um, yeah, those are true stories. The Godfather stories in particular, well, I knew relatives of some of those people. And yeah, those tollbooths were a constant drive-thru.


For perspective though, there's a certain tunnel on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad that scares me every time I go thru it. And I squeal with a combination of fear and delight. And it remains one of my favorite rides.


It's all relative.



Still, I'm not a big fan of mafia movies. For repeat viewings that is. Pfft, I wish I never purchased Schindler's List. Great film, but am I ever in the mood to watch it. Um, No.

That's an outright falsehood, you fvcking troll.

:D - posted via quick reply.

Just in case it wasn't obvious, I'd like to add: ;)

:iSm: <-------posted via quick reply lol!

:):cool::blush::(:D

All that and more via Quick Reply. ;)

I get what you are getting at, though, iSm. However, I'm a big fan of the genre. Oddly, J doesn't seem to be - at least not as much. He has yet to see the Godfather series in any part, and I'm sure there's a bunch of other stuff he missed. I'm not even sure if we own Goodfellas, though I have a feeling we do. I can't wait to catalogue his DVDs.

Oh, there's a smiley pull-down that I never noticed.:blush:


Woot! Ah, but if G.C. had never perceived me as cranky, I would never have had the smilavailability pointed out to me. Huzzah.

I'm not a fan of the genre, which is why the sheer excellence of Goodfellas really stands out for me. I've never watched The Godfather. I did watch the first season of The Sopranos, because it was a satire. I think it began to veer away from that in the 2nd, and so lost interest in the show.

Oh, uh, to re-focus the thread on movie musings.

I'm amused that Paramount is going to take another shot of adapting Dune into a movie.

And bemused that Sam Raimi will direct an attempted revival of the Jack Ryan franchise (which will likely take the Bond route of a just-getting-started Ryan in a present-day adventure).



:iSm: - but, God, that makes me so happy! :)


Where's the Total Serious Happy Thread?

I actually think that Godfather I, and to a lesser degree Godfather II are above the 'genre' as it were. While it is definitely a 'mobster' flick, I really felt that the films were about the drama of a family, and the surrounding people, being pulled apart at the seams.

I'm not generally a fan of the mafia oeuvre, either. I can see the quality of the films but I don't typically enjoy them. For me, however, it's the first Godfather that stands out as the one I will watch and re-watch. I really think it might be the best-filmed film ever. The quality of light? The shadows? I'm a sucker for something that good-looking. I'm also a sucker for ironic voiceover: boy howdy does the baptism at the end get me every time.

ETA: Erica, jinx!

Your sentiments are mine, in terms of the beauty as well. Ditto that for the ironic voiceover. I just need to sucker J into watching it. He knows my enthusiasm, and he wants it, too. I am not spoiling it with a marathon.

I just saw the movie "Ordinary People" on Sunday (best picture from 1981 I think), which was REALLY good. I guess it seemed really progressive at the time for its positive portrayal of psychiatry when going to therapy was a stigma and therapists were mostly seen as quacks. It was good to see Mary Tyler Moore in a non stereotypical "cold hearted bitch" role... :) Timothy Hutton was actually kinda adorable too (oh man did I identify with him), whereas now I see him as creepy lol.

My primary thought while watching was that I felt like a voyeur to the real life of this family, totally deserving of the award.

Did Gemini Cricket instigate that viewing??

Whose, mine? No, I actually had it from netflix. GC and I played Super Smash Bros. Brawl for 4 hours and never watched a movie :)

Oh, because he insists that film is a biography of HIS family.

It is. It truly is.
Without the suicide attempt.
I'm Timothy Hutton, my dad's Donald Sutherland and my mom's Mary Tyler Moore. There also have been a ton of Judd Hirsches in my life.
:)

I thought that was my family. Or maybe that's Interiors.

Dear, your family is Aristocats combined with Born Free.

:D

Nooooo, not my CHOSEN family, my other, non-chosen family.

Ping-PONG?

I got a kick out of the movie, too...

They have a Peppermill in Wendover and I giggled.

Elizabeth: the Golden Age
I am 15 minutes in and all I have to say is: ick!
The screenplay is far too choppy, the characters are introduced quickly without even getting to know them and Elizabeth has been portrayed so far as some sort of winky supermodel. Ick.
The editing is by far some of the worst editing I have ever seen in a film. You can barely breathe watching this MTV video style cutting. It's almost flickering in places because the cuts are so quick. I know there is a lot of ground to cover, but a well told story can take its time and hold its audience...
The only reason I don't press eject is because I adore Blanchett and Owen so much.
Ick.

That's harsh.


The first 15 minutes is practically a montage. It's a stylistic hook. It's a set-up. Sheesh.


Warning: The last half-an-hour is very stylistic, too. It's supposed to be operatic, according to the director, Shekhur Kapur.

In between, the pace and styling is more mainstream, but still with plenty of what came to be known as Kurpurisms ... stylish camera moves and angles and fancy editing for stylistic effect.

You might not like the stylisticness. But that's precisely what it is.


I found the Kapur stylings far less sophisticated in Golden Age than they were in Elizabeth, but I enjoyed them nonetheless.


To be sure, an inferior film in every way to the original .... but I happen to like Kapurisms and Kapuristic styles, so Liz II seems an interesting failure to me.



Ok, what about those costumes, G.C.? Did you like them at least?!?

If a film does not grab you within the first ten minutes or at the very least the first twenty minutes, it never will.

This film is dung.

Elizabeth has been reduced to some sort of Harlequin Romance Novel heroine. It's detestable. She was not a giddy starlet fawning for Raleigh. Her greatest romances were with Dudley and Essex. Raleigh was a favorite but not a love interest as was portrayed here. And what ever became of Dudley? Disappeared. He was a huge influence on her until the day he died. But there's no sign of him. Ugh!

Elizabeth has been reduced to some sort of powerless bimbo in this movie. She was not.

God's Death!* What a hideous film.

Costumes and makeup do not a movie make. It's beautiful if only the shot would stay long enough for us to enjoy them.

His editing is erratic not stylish. It flaws the entire film.

And might I add, there is an air that there's some sort of lesbian relationship between Elizabeth and Bess. Wrong!


*One of Elizabeth's favorite exclamations. ;)

Might I also add that there are age problems in this film.

During the time the film takes place, Elizabeth would have been in her fifties. The suitors were presented to her when she was in her twenties. 50's would be past her childbearing time.

Also, Blanchett does not look like she's in her 50's.

Also, Mary Queen of Scots was 44 or 45 when she died. She was old and grey (well, you know, for those days). The actress cast in her role was in her twenties. Also, with MQofS, it took 3 strikes to cut her head off. And they cut the best part. When she was beheaded, the executioner picked up her head and her wig came off showing everyone that she was as grey as an old, old lady. AND when her head was held aloft, her lips were still moving in prayer. Why on earth would any director leave that out? It's as cinematic as can be.

AND

SWR didn't command a ship. He was an adviser only. Not only that, but Bess gave birth 3 years after the war with the Spanish not before.

Historical accuracy? Is that your gripe? Hahahahahaha.


Your other criticisms are well-founded ... but I don't find perfect adherence to historical accuracy to be a requirement of a costume drama.

In fact, though, Elizabeth reaching older age was a pretty strong theme in this film ... and good use was made of having the same actress play the role 10 years later.


Sorry if it wasn't 30, G.C. But, Sylvester Stallone aside, it's pretty rare an actor revisits a role 10 years later.







Oh, er ... Indy.

And Jack Lemmon/Walter Mathau with The Odd Couple (30 years). And Brude Willis with 19 years between the first and last Die Hard (and 12 years between the last two). And Schwarzenegger with 19 years between first and last Terminator (and 12 years between the last two). And Sharon Stone returning to Basic Instinct after 14 years. And Dan Ayckroyd with 18 years before being Elwood Blues again. Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley spanned 18 years. Paul Newman's Eddie Felson saw 27 years of life fly by between The Hustler and The Color of Money.

Only 9 years for Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Of course, a whole mess of people got to watch their characters age in the 16 years between The Godfather, Part II, and The Godfather, Part III.

My favorite, Patrick Swayze waited 17 years to reprise his character form Dirty Dancing in Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights - which was technically a prequel.



All of that means nothing and has nothing to do with the topic at hand. It was just fun to think up the list. On topic, I'm closer to GC on this one. It was booooooooring enough that I barely paid enough attention to have an opinion on costuming.



ETA: Forgot about 13 years for Linda Kozlowski and Paul Hogan between Crocodile Dundee II and Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles. I'm probably going to spend the whole night have others pop into my head.

ETA2: And there are rumors floating that Eastwood's next movie, Gran Torino, is going to be a "Dirty Harry returns as washed up retired detective" movie, which would be 21 years since the last Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool. But I really hope that rumor is wrong.

ETA3: See, my mind is going crazy now. Also later this year, early next we have the return of Fox and Mulder after a decade.

ETA4: ****, three other obvious ones. Anthony Perkins, 23 years between Psycho and Psycho II. Jack Nicholson with 16 years between Chinatown and The Two Jakes (and if, as has been rumored he tries it a third time it would be another 18 years since that second one). 29 years between The Last Picture Show and Texasville with many cast members returning (including Jeff and Beau Bridges, Cloris Leachman, and Cybil Shepherd). Ok, I promise to stop now. Unless I can't help myself.

I think I may have liked Across the Universe more tham most, as I thought more than a couple of numbers that stood out. As a whole, the character development was kind of shoddy, but I found myself relying on the music to stir my emotions (which, when it's a musical, I don't mind a bit), and so by the end I was kind of a happy, blubbering mess. Of course, some of that is probably PMS. Heh.

What the film accomplished for me, and which I wasn't expecting, was a stirred up and renewed appreciation for the Beatles. Not since Roxeanne's makeover in M.R. has the use of popular music been reimagined so well on film. I found myself paying a great deal more attention to the lyrics, and I really *liked* the versions of these songs very, very much. I found them all effective and moving in their own way.

Definitely there were problems, but by the time "All You Need is Love" started playing, I found myself believing it. I only wish I saw it on the big screen, because the visuals were most impressive and I probably would have gotten more out of it had they filled my range of vision. Surround sound would have been nice, too.

If anyone ever asks me to recommend a flawed movie worth watching, this would be on the list.

I've finished the film Elizabeth: TGA and nothing redeems it. This take on Elizabeth's is tarnished.
I hereby decree that this film be banished to the White Tower and never released. The editor of this film will also enter through Traitor's Gate as a traitor to good film making and also sent to the tower where he will be fated to watch this tripe on a continual loop for the rest of his years. Ms. Blanchett and Mr. Owen shall be spared my anger. For their past efforts which outclass this one, they are forgiven. Mr. Kapur will be denied an audience from me henceforth. If there is to be a third installment of the Elizabeth tale, I shall weep five hundred year old tears.

As for you, Mr. Spaceman, this queen demands historical accuracy for a film portraying my most cherished historical figure and leader. You may find it laughable, but I do not. What does attribute to folly is your famously bad taste in films. For that, you will be sent to the rack... my rack of DVDs for a collection of truly great films for you to reference.*

HRH Crickebeth the First





*For those not familiar with humor, this take on Steve is in jest and in jest only.

It's a movie, G.C. Get over it. By definition, it cannot be historically accurate. I happen to prefer when it's more so than less so, and I regret this one was very much less so.

I also regret it portrayed Elizabeth as a lovesick teenager obsessed with menopause. Bah. And I hated the portrayal of Walter Raleigh as Stock Debonnaire Adventurer.

But I liked the art direction, and the directorial stylisticness. I agree, a poor film. But, to me at least, an interesting failure.

I'm with you on most of the critiscims, G.C. .... but please show me an historically accurate history movie or two. Alex was prolific with decades-later role revisitings; surely you can provide a handful of historically accurate, non-documentary films.


* * * * * *

EH1812 - right on, sista, about Across the Universe. The vividly and imaginatively re-worked covers of Beatles tunes revitalized my interest in their music.

Interestingly, I ran right out and bought the Across the Universe CD ... but found the songs were lame without their visuals. Not lame, exactly, but not a one where I preferred the cover to the original. Yet, in the film, I find most of the covers absolutely brilliant.

They work for their medium. I like that. And yes, the characters are weakly drawn and rely on the music to propel their meager arcs and the minor story. But it's an operetta, after all, with barely 20 minutes of dialogue. And, as I've mentioned before, major points for non-lip-synching 90% of the time. Live singing captured on film. Name me the musical that's done that before.


Alex???

iSM, which version of the CD Soundtrack did you get?

The single disc. I was going to nab the other tracks from the 2-disc set from some kind soul ... but I was not really inspired to. I was so surprised to be "meh" about the songs out of their context. And yet, even when I watch the movie now, I love the numbers musically as well as visually.

Well, I've been watching my favorite bits from the movie over, and I've got the soundtrack on my iPod - they DEFINITELY need the visuals.

I was meh with the movie on first viewing, now it's kind of grown on me.

I watched One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest this morning, and now The Wild Bunch is on - Damn you HDMovies for stealing my day ;)

At Long Last Love - Peter Bogdanovich's disastrous 1975 musical starring Burt Reynolds, Cybil Sheppard and Madeline Khan singing Cole Porter standards. The singing was performed live on set, which was highly touted in the film's publicity. The result was apparently so awful, and the reviews so scathing, that Bogdanovich ran an apology ad in the papers.

I caught a little bit of At Long Last Love on TV back in maybe 1982, and it did look pretty bad, but I'd happily watch the whole thing given the chance. It's never been released on video, but perhaps it turns up on AMC or something now and again. Anyone have it?

I just watched Sicko by Michael Moore. I didn't see it in the theatres.
A very interesting documentary. I really, really liked it.
It's astounding how bad our health care system is.
Yes, that whole Cuba scene was dorky and clunky, but the rest brought up very interesting questions that need to be answered.

CoasterMatt, madmonkeygirl and I watched Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band at their abode.
It was... well it was what it was.
For me, it was one of those movies that are so bad that it's good.
Loved Aerosmith and Earth Wind & Fire in this one.
Man, there must have been Costco-sized hairspray cans all over the set just for Barry Gibbs' do alone.
It made me long for the Beatles' versions of their songs.

Let's just say that this movie made Across the Universe look like Casa-freakin-blanca.
:D

It was hideous, but Peter Frampton was pretty darned cute.


(And Gibbs looks like an Aqua-net extra firm rock hard insoluble polymer kind of guy).

We watched August Rush the other night. I wanted to shoot myself. (That is generally a bad sign.) It didn't suck as badly as The Holiday, but it was close. I really hate movies that lack subtlety and beat the absolute **** out of you with their horrid dialog and one-trick-pony premises. A client made me watch Holiday because she wanted her hair cut like Cameron Diaz's, and she's lucky I like her because I seriously considered giving her Jude Law's do instead.

I finally got around to watching it. I avoided it in theaters and have had it from Netflix, sitting next to my TV since before the Oscars.

I loved it. I completely understand why the people who don't like it, don't like it. And it wouldn't have taken much to push me into that camp. But I'm thoroughly in the camp of those who loved it.

I didn't notice Garret Dillahunt but the stunt casting that really was a poor choice was in using James Carville (yes, the political consultant) as the governor of Missouri. Took me right out of the movie for several minutes.

I'd like to see this, because I'm intrigued by the subject matter, ands I really like The Long Riders, a movie about the James gang that is nothing but stunt casting. (If I'm not mistaken, I wrote this movie up much earlier in this very thread.)

I thought the cast was made up of real life actor brothers?

Yeah, that's what I meant by stunt casting. (In that it was a gimmick, but one that worked.) The DVD can easily be found for under 10 bucks, so you can't go wrong.

D'oh. Sorry. I thought you meant only stuntmen were cast. Like, you know, to do mega-stunts while also acting...
Nevermind.
:D

Based on the comments from when mousepod showed it, and a general curiosity about Javier Bardem I put Perdito Durango at the top of my Netflix queue.

Watched it yesterday.

Maybe it is a good crowd movie but I watched it by myself. Someone please tell me how I can get those two hours back.

Awwww! I really loved Perdita Durango. I actually liked it as much as No Country for Old Men.

I certainly did not.

Javier Bardem was actually fine. James Gandolfini showed more of Tony Soprano than any other pre-Sopranos role I've seen from him. But considering all the action it somehow felt like it was just moseying along doing nothing. Rosie Perez was awful. The two teenagers were worse than Perez. It had the "enjoying rape" cliche.

I should have given up on it but it was the only Netflix movie I had at the moment and I kept telling myself "it has to get better, there must be a point made eventually, redemption is around the corner..." and then it ended.

Heh - yeah

I did see something called "the Director's Cut" and I know it was probably edited differently than original release so I'll just decide that it was destroyed in the version I saw and consider it my bad luck.

Maybe if Tommy Lee Jones had been there to create a context.

I haven't seen either version, but mousepod made a grand point of saying the edited, U.S.-release version, which is the one available via Netflix I presume, was pure crap.


so when i sadly I missed the screening, I knew there was no way to see the same version of Perdita Durango which screened at la casa (much less one with the customized subtitled care of senor mousepod).


Le sigh.

What I saw was the "unrated director's cut" not the US theatrical version.

According to comments on IMDb what was cut was mostly Rosie Perez nudity and rights-difficult TV and movie clips.

I don't know what was happening during that nudity and I've read how Vera Cruz was involved. Somehow I don't think that seeing her boobs would have made Perez any more palatable but as with fried pork penis, I won't say I didn't like it until I've had it; but I'm not going to go out of my way.

So, in the version you saw, was the film Vera Cruz featured twice? (I especially want to know if it appeared at the end of the film.)

Here's a listing of all of the cuts.


We watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest tonight. I haven't seen that film since the late 70's. It is amazing how it holds up to time and is still such a great film!

No, Vera Cruz was cut from the end as that page described. Of all the cuts listed that is the only one I see possibly having a huge impact on the film. Somehow not seeing the dad watching Mary Tyler Moore or an extra shot of Perez's boob doesn't seem significant.

Did I mention that Rosie Perez was really, horribly awful? Whenever she was off screen for a few minutes I felt myself warming up to things a bit. But then back she'd come.

Yeah, it was that last use of Vera Cruz that really sold the film for me. Very, very important to appreciation of the whole thing.

I'll just have to take your word for it. I don't see how it could be (especially since I've never seen Vera Cruz) though. A payoff in the final 2 minutes doesn't really help with being bored silly for the first 119.

Two films by Wong Kar Wai last nite:

Happy Together - 1997 movie about a dysfunctional Chinese gay couple stranded in Argentina. OMG, botched mess of bad editing, script, cinematography and concept. The fuctupness of the two guys and their on-again-off-again lives together and not was relentlessly distressing. But Tony Leung is a total cutie as the more sympathetic of the two lovers.

-and-

In the Mood for Love - beautiful but sad film about neighbors in 1962 Shanghai who find their respective spouses (his wife, her husband) are having an affair. They start spending a lot of time together, fall deeply in love, but refuse to carry on like the spouses they are so upset with ... and never fulfill the promise of their romance.

I found it astonishing that, in 2000, just 3 years later, the same director and cinematographer created this work of stunning beauty. Gorgeous cinammontography, assured editing, stylish directing, fantastic use of music. Evocative and moody, but not a downer until near the end when you realize the two lovesters will never be lovers. They are played by the yummy Tony Leung (a little older than he was in Happy Together, but still so handsome) and the unbelievably gorgeous Maggie Cheung.

It took me a while to remember where I'd seen them as a couple before ... and it was in Yimou Zhang's stunning 2002 film Hero (which I also hearily recommend if you haven't seen it).

Wong Kar Wai is one I generally don't see the appeal of but I really did enjoy In the Mood for Love.

Tony Leung is so frellin' gorgeous in Mood. I love this movie so much. I've avoided the "quasi-sequel", 2046. Even though he's supposed to be just an echo of the character he played in Mood, I rather like how the other film ended. How he was left. I'll probably watch it eventually.

Amazon description of 2045, behind a spoiler tag because it's lengthy.

It took me almost a week to watch 2046 on DVD. Every single time I started it I would be asleep within 15 minutes. Seriously, the most powerful sleeping aid I've ever experienced.

Really? Though I'm usually so skeptical of sequels, I rather like those that use a small connection to go off in a different direction and a different tone.

Maybe I'll rent 2046 and keep it handy for a sleepless night.

I tend to agree. But part of what I liked about him was that he wasn't a ladies man. I know I'll watch this eventually, though. Would help if someone watched it first and posted a review. :)

But what if he felt he could never love another? And so decided to just use his incredible good looks to bed countless women in meaninglessness, to feed his broken heart and fulfill his twisted destiny to never again know romantic love until the day someone unplugs that obsure hole in a crumbling temple in Angor Watt and releases the echo of his secret.

Until then, he sits holed up in the hotel room where he wrote stories with his true love, and writes and writes and writes. He never sleeps with his token women in that room. But that is where he creates and feels joy and the shadow of love.




Hmmm, maybe I should rent it just to see if I'm close. ;)

I think you are very, very close, actually. Huzzah!

Just saw 21.

It wasn't horrible but it wasn't great. Definitely suffered from too much familiarity with the geography of Vegas. It kind of ruined the moment of cool they were going for when I realized the slow escalator rise of the main character would, in reality, be bringing him out of the Spice Market Buffet at Planet Hollywood.

Or when someone was asked up to the comped suite at Planet Hollywood and it was obvious that the room was in Paris. Or the Friday evening drive down the Strip with no traffic.

Plus, the blackjack wasn't well explained. They made it look like when you have a positive count you win every hand.

Plus, the way the kid gains Kevin Spacey's respect and attention was by knowing the answer to the Monty Hall problem, something I learned in the ninth grade (back before Marilyn vos Savant made it famous; and though a lot of kids never did quite grasp why the answer was correct, it is definitely not senior year MIT subject matter).

Plus, it telegraphed the ending to an unforgivable degree.


Wait, now I'm talking myself into it being horrible. Guess I'll see how I feel about it in the morning.

Count me as a big Wong Kar Wai fan. Unfortunately, my favorite of his films, Ashes Of Time, is not available as a watchable DVD anywhere. The original Hong Kong release is a straight copy of the laserdisc (i.e. not anamorphic, with English and Chinese subs burned-in), the American DVD takes the HK release and blocks out the subs with a huge black bar (and obscures a huge chunk of picture) and then adds a different set of burned-in English subs. There's a French DVD that came out a couple of years ago (with no English subs - but that's fixable), which has a beautiful audio and video transfer - but unfortunately contains a new edit of the movie as done by WKW. If you think Star Wars got screwed around by Lucas, you should see how much the new "Director's cut" changed this masterpiece...

Ooooh, i smell double feature. Beautiful craptastic director's cut and craptastic-looking original masterwork.

:iSm:

We watched The Departed last night. Great movie, but I have to take points off for the final shot.

Saw Leatherheads today. It was mostly innocuous. Parts of it were amusing. Two things that bugged me: 1) the gag before the fight at the railroad tracks went on too long. Once through the body parts = mildly amusing. Twice? Painfully awkward. 2) in our introduction to the heroine, she waltzes through the newsroom with a dozen comments on her hat. Goes into the editor's office and takes off the chapeau. Gets her assignment. Leaves - without the hat. That she made a big deal about. It bugged me for the rest of the movie.

In other news:

Please please please let the Get Smart movie be funny. In a non-sucky way.

I saw Leatherheads today as well. I do enjoy watching George Clooney on screen. And I liked the idea behind what he was doing.

But it just didn't work. Zellweger gets Rosalind Russell's lines but nobody gets Cary Grants so she just stuck out like a sore thumb. They handled Clooney being way too old for his role, but not the fact that John Krasinky is also way too old for who he was playing. Either that or I missed something. It is mentioned a couple times that at 31 Zellweger's character it too old for Krasinky's, and it is said he is 23 years old. But he fought in WWI, it is 1925, and he has four years of college under his belt. The math doesn't work. Plus, the movie is set at a time when the NFL has already been established. The football scenery was more like the 1900s or 1910s but then Zellweger's character probably wouldn't have been possible in the same way.

And the fact that I was thinking about that shows how little I was caring about the actual movie.

I watched No Country for Old Men this weekend. I think this is my favorite Coen Bros. film. I loved it and Bardem was very creepy!

I actually did not buy There Will Be Blood today on DVD because of its packaging. The case was made from thin cardboard. There was barely a spine visible with the movie's title. Cheap-o, cheap-o.

Eric rented Nancy Drew- I fled the room after the first four minutes. The critiques I've read were spot on: one giant suckfest of a movie. Well, the first four minutes, anyway. I've no intention of going back in that room until the movie is over.

I have to agree with you. Zach rented it at Redbox and thankfully it quit working after 15 minutes or so. They gave us a code for 2 rentals so now he wants Chipmunks!

Heheh, sounds like out of the frying pan and into the fire!


* * * *

I'm surprised there's such cheap packaging for a prestige pic like There Will Be Blood. Hmmph. That won't stop me from buying it though, since I am purchasing ... to my mind ... the movie I want to watch and not the box for my nearly useless collection of movies on the shelf.


Hmmm, maybe I'll Netflix it after all. :iSm:

Lol- that's funny....We rented (well, Eric did, so it's his fault) both ND and AATC at the same time. The chipmunks were cute, but not cute enough to hold my attention for longer than 1/2 hour.

My ND review is northwards in this thread... but my AATC review is only this: woe to the execs who made me listen to "Funkytown" every day for four months.

Then you missed the heart of the movie.

Sadly, I think I'm going to have to sit through both ND and AATC tonight. I wonder if alcohol will make it less painful? It could just make it worse though. Good thing I get to torture him with sheperds pie for dinner!

Perhaps, because plastic is derived from oil, there was a message behind the choice of packaging. Paul Thomas Anderson probably wouldn't have made the movie if he didn't have strong feelings on the subject.

Meh. I'm still not buying it. There are ways to do packaging without it looking like that. Have you seen it in person?
The same reason I didn't buy An Inconvenient Truth. (That and it's price $24.95.) I have several DVDs that are made from cardboard. TWBB's packaging makes it look like a pamphlet.

Good friend as he is, I think I will buy TWBB to counter GC's (imo) insipid consumer argument. I'll stop short of buying movies with blatent product placement for the same semi-spiteful rationale, however.:p

DVD cases don't even remain in sight. As soon as I get them home the DVD goes into a small jewel case for cramming more storage into my TV cupbard. The actual DVD box gets stored out in the storage closet on our patio.

It would save me space and be better for me if they just sold the DVDs in Netflix-style envelopes (but I feel compelled to keep the boxes in case I ever want to sell or dispose of them).

Speaking of product placement, I was surprised by how much product placement was slipped into both Nim's Island and Leatherheads, two genre pics where it stood out a bit.

Interesting that you would buy it for that reason even without seeing it in person. iSm: the merry Mary who's quite contrary...
:D

I stand by my position of product placement in movies. It's an eyesore.

No of course I won't buy it for that reason. But I do want it, so I'm going to examine the packaging carefully.

I remember being upset that the Simpson's Heads packaging was so shoddy it would fall apart after opening twice. If this appears to be the same, it likely would indeed affect my consumer decision.

The Simpsons offered regular packaging as an alternative, btw. A reasonable compromise, imo.

Okay, I have not gone back and read previous postings on There Will Be Blood. Thanks to Netflix I saw it last night.

Let me preface, I loved Paul Dano and Daniel Day Lewis. I did not love the film. I really thought it was a colassal bore. I did not get the EPIC nature of the film at all.

I loved the nuance at the very end in DDL's cry I'm Finished (in more ways than one). Paul Dano was, I think, creepier than Javiar Bardem in NCFM (which I loved as a film and will buy on DVD)

What am I missing here?

I think you're missing, perhaps, seeing it in a theater. Ugh, I miss too many movies that way ... and I know they suffer for it.

Or, it may not be your cup of tea.


Or, you may have really poor taste. :p




I don't think there was necessarily anything "epic" about it. It was just about some good themes of greed and vengeance and human personality disorders and the oil business of nastiness and the religion business of hokum and freakiness.

I thought it explored those themes with some facsinating, well-played characters, and interesting situations.

End.


Sorry you didn't get it. Eh, it just didn't work for you.

Too bad. Great film. Worthy of the many Oscar nominations it received and the critical raves it garnered.


In my most humble opinion.

Ohhh goodie goodie gumdrops.

I loved the theme of conflict between religion and capitalism for control of society. I love that capitalism won and it wasn't shown as a gentle "good" victory.

I loved the performance from Day-Lewis. I loved the cinematography.


I did not love the Paul Dano performance. I thought it was really weak, especially when being forced to go toe-to-toe with Day-Lewis. I did not like the length, feeling it meandered too much and undercut its own story with a languid pace. Despite providing the resolution of the greater conflict, I though the final act was too over the top and too odd when viewed from the personal character perspective.

The end result for me was a lot of respect for Paul Thomas Anderson's vision as a filmmaker, amazement he got it made, and regret that he doesn't seem to have a filter on the worst of his excesses. In the end I left feeling "meh."

It has settled on me over the moths and I think my memory of it now is better than my experience of it was then.

Heh, you're prolly right.

I got all the themes, I thought the performances were top notch and I'll go on the limb, I loved bardem in NFOM, but I think I would have loved to see Dano get the nod at the Kodak, he truly deserved it. Then again, so did Tommy Lee Jones and Bardem (so a tough year). But, I still thought the whole thing was a bore. Meh, so I save myself a few bucks not buying, it's okay!

If Snowflake didn't like the film, I say she has excellent taste. I saw it in the theater and it did nothing for me aside from making me acknowledge once again that Day-Lewis is a good actor. That is, until Mousepod nudged me about the whole "John Huston" thing, and that pretty much ruined the only thing I liked about this film.

Thanks LSPE.

Alex, I did not love the cinematography nearly as much as NCFOM (which had real sweep and beauty to me) but I can appreciate your thoughts on it, and the film.

I also did not find Dano weak. You're right, weak against Day-Lewis, but I think a very respectable (if) over the top performace at the end. I do feel like the red-herring of his character dissapearing and then coming in at the end for a hand out kind of a lame plot twist.

That said, I have not read the original novel, either.

Oh, I wasn't comparing TWBB with NCFOM. The latter is far superior in my opinion and that includes cinematography.

My understanding is that TWBB really was "inspired" by Sinclair's Oil and that they are pretty divergent.

It's an adaptation of a single chapter in Sinclair's "Oil," but I've no idea if it's otherwise divergent of the contents of that chapter.


To each his own, my friends. I LOVED There Will Be Blood and I was hardly alone. I was only kidding when I put Snowflake down for poor taste (but never kidding when I do the same to Gemini Cricket, heheh) :p


VIVA LA DIFFERENCE!

Indeed! I still loved iSm when he professed his love for Crash. I just knew we were never, ever going to agree on Oscar movies. (Still, he makes for wonderful Oscar night company.) (And, sometimes, we do agree. When are we going to watch The Orphanage!?!?)

mousepod has it scheduled for soon after the BluRay is released. Eh, perfectionist.

By that time, his thread for that event series should return from seder and boob talk.

We watched I Am Legend tonight.





I'm sleeping with the lights on.... :eek:

Won't they find you if the lights are on? I mean, sunlight was a pretty effective deterrent, but by the end of the movie the scary people didn't seem to mind electric light. Better keep a grenade or two under your pillow.

I saw Superhero Movie! and it's hard to believe someone directed this. Had some funny moments - most of them in the trailer but the worst part about it was during the credits the played "cut" scenes which were actually funnier than most of the film. It's like "stay and watch our names and we'll show you all the funny parts we could figure out where to edit into the film."

I hope there is a "unrated" version on DVD. Hmmmmmm....

Watched Halloween and parts of Cars in BluRay at Cherny's and Gn2Dlnd's. Pretty cool indeed.
Halloween is a great film. In the horror genre it's one of the best. The use of suspense in this films is terrific. I like it when horror movies use suspense rather than gore to entertain.

Tired and stuck in my chair, I watched Peter Jackson's "King Kong" again last night. I don't think there was a single scene, fight, gesture, look between characters, pause before speaking, etc., that was not two to three times longer than it needed to be.

We rented it this weekend and Gary let the boy watch it too. I was concerned because he's already not sleeping but I guess it gave him something different to be worried about:rolleyes:

I liked it more than I thought I would. I was sad about the dog though:(

I'm just back from seeing "Forbidden Kingdom"

AKA - Jackie Chan and Jet Li do "Lord Of the Rings", Badly.

There were a few fun moments, and the Witch was hot. Overall a definite 1/2 Meh.

I took Moonie Junior who ever since the X-men movies always asks "Is there anything after the credits?"

My reply? Naw, not on this movie, let's go. I was about half way down the exit ramp when it hit me: DOH! This is a Jackie Chan Movie! The guy who pretty much invented the after movie outtakes.

So back into the theater we went, and here is what we saw:

The next Star Trek movie was being filmed in Kern County over the last few weeks. They did some shooting at Fort Tejon and then spent a week out at Buena Vista lakes. It was supposed to be kept hushed, but word did make it out. I heard that Winona Rider is in it.

She plays Spock's mother.

I feel old. :(

Don't feel too old, (or so I've been told).

Very late to the party, but I watched Juno last night. I really loved it, a very sweet film.

King Kong, ugh I paid money to see that with a friend. I think I posted here, I want those endless hours of my life back. I much prefer the 1933 version, Kong had heart and pathos in 1933.

I'm thinking Burt Reynolds, Smokey and the Bandit. Now that there's some good outtaking.

I haven't thought about those movies in forever! I admit I enjoyed watching them. How could you not love Sally Field going from a flying nun, then Sybil, to this wacky sexy lady! A true blast from the past

Snowflake, maybe if you get a chance you can see this for me this weekend:

"Walt & El Grupo"

It's playing at the San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24-May 8

The movie Dazed & Confused is 15 years old. Tonight, I watched it for the first time. Cool movie. Great cast.

It was a double feature with Cheech & Chong's Up in Smoke. Dumb movie. A couple of laughs here and there, though.

Up in smoke is best watched in altered states.

Both of those are.


Speaking of which, some friends want me to go out with them tonite to see Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantonamo Bay ... but I hear it's a kinda lame sequel.

When I was in high school, I took my girlfriend in the station wagon to a drive-in double feature of Airplane and Up In Smoke. I folded down the rear seat, and we settled in to "watch the movie." But with Airplane I was "Wait a minute, stop, this is funny. Cut that out. This is funny." "Up In Smoke" posed no such distractions.

At least Dazed and Confused works fine whether the viewer is baked or not. Up In Smoke is pretty lame by itself. (I remember going to see this with my older brother back in the day. I was probably fourteen or so. We went to see it at a theater called Don Pancho's, an independent in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The movie screen was shrouded in a white haze, which was pretty common when seeing movies at that venue. Does that happen anywhere anymore? Not that I want it to, since I detest the smell of cannabis, but it seems remarkable to me that just a couple of decades ago, thsi happened so frequently and so casually.)

Been a long time since I smelled pot at a movie theater but I went to a Warriors game (NBA basketball) earlier this year and was surprised that I was smelling it constantly through the entire evening.

Were they playing Portland?

I know a ton has been said about Cloverfield, but gosh I love this film. The intensity of the acting was just right and the effects were great. The pay off wasn't great, but it was decent.
Love this film.
:)

I watched "History of the World, Part I" tonight.

My favorite part is still "Jews In Space" :D

I watched Ratatouille with two Ratatouille virgins tonight. They loved it. I did too. It's like my 7th time watching it. Love it.

Something I noticed that I hadn't before was that Anton Ego's typewriter from the back looks like a skull. Very cool.
:)

I like Ratatouille, I just can't stand the animation of the people.

I came up with one theory tonight. When animators try to make people look like people, the result is creepy and wrong. ie. Polar Express, Final Fantasy and Beowulf (all humans looked weird with dead eyes).

Yep, Beowulf / Shrek people are creepy.

Bambi notwithstanding, the point of character animation is not to duplicate the look of actual creatures. (Even Bambi's animals were highly stylized).


* * * *

I think I'll watch Cloverfield tonight and see if the jittery camerawork holds up on the small screen.


Heheh, I also just bought There Will Be Blood ... mostly to piss off Gemini Cricket.

:evil:


I actually didn't buy the cheapy slimline package, which I agree is craptacular. I wonder if GC has the same opinion of the 2 disc set, which is also less lasting cardboard instead of plastic. I compared it with my other purchase, the Cloverfield disc ... which used the standard plastic DVD case with a simple cover insert. The end.

The Blood packaging, on the other hand, featured nice art direction, a fold-out package with imagery from the film on multiple panels. Yes, the materials were more flimsy. But I'd rather have packaging that has some design intention, rather than the slapped together DVD case I can make at home.


Sorry, G.C. :blush:

Buy it, watch it, stick it up your vagina... who cares?! lol :D All I was complaining about was the crappy packaging of the single disc DVD. The 2 disc set is adequate.

That would be AWESOME to see on the jacket of a DVD :D

I just read that Dubya is a big fan of the Austin Powers movies.... :rolleyes:

Cloverfield is brilliant.



On a hunch, i decided to listen to the commentary track first, which I only do if I expect a story of quite unusual movie making ... and I was not disappointed.

Getting the verisimilitude of the hand-held disaster film was tricky business, and fascinating. The film was shot in something like 36 nights. How they achieved all they did on the rush, on the cheap, is a great story of a most uniquely made studio movie.




Watch it twice, 'cause the commentary track is almost as interesting as the film. Which, by the way, is a surprisingly terrific monster movie.

I just got home from an awesome totally non-related double feature.

First up - "Shine A Light"
The Rolling Stones in IMAX by Martin Scorsese - Absolutely brilliant, incredible visuals, concert volume sound, a couple of good guest appearances, and even Keith getting to do lead vocals for a few songs.

then, I hurried down the hill to meet up with mousepod, and to a screening of "Colossus: The Forbin Project" - excellent movie, so nice to see it on a big screen, with an appreciative audience.

It's been a looong time since I last saw Colossus: The Forbin Project, but I remember being amused that this powerful uber-computer


Is this on DVD? I'd love to see it again.

Unfortunately, the current US DVD release is full frame, not widescreen :(
The movie makes GREAT use of all the screen real estate, as I witnessed tonight.

There's a widescreen special edition dvd coming to Region 2, May 26.

I have to publicly thank CoasterMatt for the heads-up about Colossus, and second his comments.

Paranoid American sci-fi movies made in the late 60s-early 70s are rarely bad. This one is particularly fun.

BTW... Sunday night, 9pm at the Steve Allen Theatre on Sunset: WESTWORLD!

Why oh why can't I live closer to the cool stuff:( As long as I've had a dvr I have searched for that movie. I found Futureworld and forced the boy to watch it with me but West is the best! Darn

So, tonight, as part of my convalescence, I watched the classic Spanish film The Spirit of the Beehive. I've read a lot about this one over the years, and I went in with lots of expectations, so I'm sad to report that the experience was often a slow, excruciating one. I don't blame the film. It's me. I've been poisoned by several decades of fast-cut, all questions answered, no subtlety storytelling. This movie is quiet, reflective, VERY deliberately paced. There were some haunting moments, including a very effective ending, but I was sad to find myself so impatient with a movie I was supposed to, and was prepared to, be knocked out by. (I found myself mentally writing dialogue for the long scenes in which nobody spoke.) It was a tedious enough experience that I'll be disinclined to revisit it anytime soon, but I feel bad about it. I know a few scenes will stick with me, and the young girl who gives its central performance is flawless.

In spite of that, I'd be curious to know what others make of it, and I can see where it would have been an influence on Sr. Del Toro and his ilk.

Flippy, like you, the gap between knowing about Spirit of The Beehive and actually seeing it was years. After seeing (and falling in love with) Pan's Labyrinth, I finally sat down with Heather and watched it...

...and I loved it.

Admittedly, it was slow, but it was slow in the Picnic at Hanging Rock sort of way, as opposed to the Hail Mary way. Clearly, it's an "art" film... but I found that the exploration of innocence against the backdrop of post-Civil War Spain was perfect. The cinematography, the spare script, and the acting... oh the acting.

I will certainly revisit the film. Perhaps when the lure of LA is too much for you to bear, we'll watch it together.

I'd like to see Spirit of the Beehive, and I have no idea what it is.

I've always tended to like movies that other people told me were "slow" or "pointless".

Since I adore Picnic at Hanging Rock, I'll commit to giving Beehive another chance, and la casa de mousepod would be an ideal venue, I'm sure.

Oh, and while I'm thinking of it, did any of you, way back in elementary school, learn a song about Senor Don Gato? (Oh, Senor Don Gato was a cat, on a high red roof Don Gato sat, he was there to read a letter - meow meow meow, where the reading light was better - meow meow meow) Well, chances are some of you are now humming the tune. Anyhow, my point is, this very tune shows up in Spirit of the Beehive, played on a guitar, no singing. I'm going to guess it's a traditional Spanish melody, and the silly Don Gato lyrics were added by elementary music textbook publishers. but it means that at a particularly lyrical moment in the film, I was singing to myself - "Oh Don Gato jumped so happily, he fell off the roof and broke his knee, broke his bones and all his whiskers - meow meow meow, and his little solar plexus - meow meow meow, Ay Caramba cried Don Gato." I've got to guess this was not what the filmmaker had in mind.

We started watching the Indy films last night in preparation for Indy 4 (or whatever the name is). I just adore that first film. I'm in love with the sets and settings. Maybe tonight will be film #2.

Raiders of the Lost Ark is by far my favorite of the three. It seemed to be much more gritty looking than the others. A lot of it seemed to be shot on location. The other two, I don't know. They seemed to be shot on a lot of sound stages and the lighting was brighter. Can't really explain it but the first one looked more real. If that makes any sense.
:)

And it was brilliantly plotted and scripted and directed and acted while the other ones were comparatively lame in every such department. Especially the scripts, which were clearly of sequel quality.


I watched Temple of Doom over the weekend, because mousepod says it's an homage to Gunga Din. Sure, I've always appreciated some of the elements ... they are serial chapter fun ... but they are assembled into a piece of crap.


There's only two minutes of actual plot ... where Indy is taken over by the Evil Twin spell / potion. The rest of the movie is moving from room-to-room inside Pankot Palace and having a set-piece occur in each room, with a thrill ride rollercoaster in a great room, and a cool swinging bridge bit in the back-yard. It's a theme park experience, and not a movie.

Yes, and as GC points out, the lighting and cinematography are all bright and crystal clear, so it looks 100% soundstage (which it is), and totally fake (which is fitting).


The Children-Are-The-Real-Stars sentimentality was pure anti-Raiders sickeningness. Kate Capshaw was supposed to be an annoying ditzy blonde, but she annoyed the hell out of anyone who saw the movie, and everyone wanted her to die. When people razz Indy for saving the girl, that's not a good sign.


The jeuvenilization of the humor in the 2nd movie is pure George Lucas M.O. Gak. I want to be ill.

There are great little parts. Short Round is a great little character. The movie completely sucks.


The third movie was better only in that it didn't completely suck. I was relieved. But it's almost unwatchable today. It's a pale shadow of Raiders of the Lost Ark ... which is still emminently watchable 27 years later, and I daresay will remain so forever.


It's a fantastic classic, one of my favorite movies of all time. I saw it 80 times in theaters during its unbelievable 18 months in initial release.

Find a movie nowadays that's in release for over 18 weeks. Most don't last 18 days.


It's my love of the first movie that has me lining up for all the sequels. I love Indiana Jones, and enjoy at least parts and bits of all the movies. At least the new one still stars Harrison Ford, so it's got a leg up over the cautionary tale of the horrid Star Wars "prequels" also released decades after the originals.

But George Lucas is still involved, and Spielberg has some horrible instincts that he can succomb to. The chances of this movie sucking are very high, but I remain retardedly optimistic and very excited.


I just don't know why.

My biggest gripe with Last Crusade was how Sallah and whatshisface (Denholm Elliott's character) were both downgraded to stupid sidekicks. Yikes. And the film had the worst looking greenscreen blimp ever in it. AND the female lead was completely unlikable. Yeah, even Willie Scott was likable compared to her.

It's been so long since I've seen these films that I forget what they were like. I don't think I've ever watching them all in a row.

I was contemplating watching all of them in preparation (I think I watched Ark when we bought the box set and then I never got around to the other two) but when we moved all of the DVDs ended up jumbled up in a drawer of the entertainment center and I can't find the energy to actually paw through them to find a specific movie.

But I have five days to find the energy.

Don't forget that LSPE and I are screening the first three this Sunday for the general LoT public. Don't everyone go watching them on your own when you can watch them with fellow swanksters.

Raiders was a blast to see again, I was instantly transported to when I saw the movie for the first time and sat at the edge of my seat from the opening practically through the credits. We'll see how the other's fare...

I have been avoiding them for this very reason. And I didn't so much watch Temple of Doom as have it on in the background.

I spent the entire week constructing a FrankenBox to ship my Giant Raiders of the Lost Ark 3-D Promotional Display in. The lucky ebay winner bid $25 over my asking price of $1,500. I'm giving the Good-Reputation Seller a cut, ebay takes a cut, shipping and insurance will be more than I asked the buyer for, and I'm going to tip the participants of the photo shoot. I'll net maybe $1,200.

Sigh. The day the sale went thru, I get a notice from the IRS saying they changed my income tax return, and I now owe them $1,200. I hate the way the universe works, but am amazed nonetheless.

Anyway, it took the wind of my FrankenBox construction sails. To keep me in the mood, I had the John Williams Raiders soundtrack playing in the background while I built it .... for 3 nights. For the final session, I couldn't stand that anymore ... and put the DVD of Temple of Doom on in the background.


But I swear I barely watched it. And that's good news for Tom and Heidi's upcoming marathon. The bad news is, I can barely bear to watch it. I hate that movie with such a passion, but if I'm allowed to laugh at it, I won't go out to the lobby for 20 cigarettes while it's playing.


What time does the marathon start? Are you going to have mousepod-style intermissions lasting hours? If so, how many days are you alloting for the Indiana Jones trilogy?? ;)





oh, maybe this entire line of tangent should be moved over to the Indy thread.

We haven't set a starting time yet. We were thinking of perhaps starting about noonish, but we have no other commitments that day, so if attendees desire something different, they need only speak (or type).

And I don't think we will have Mousepod-style intermissions. Among other reasons, we don't have as many things to entertain you with between movies. But maybe we'll try to pull up a couple of musical numbers, and we can have quick sing-a-longs during the intermissions.

Hahaha, many swankers are familiar with "Happy Birthday" sung to the tune of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I'm just the happiest bear in the whole WORLD at the moment.

I got "The Long Long Trailer" on DVD finally.

It came with "Forever Darling" as well.

I shared "Gimme the Mermaid" with a few coworkers today.

One guy said it was the greatest, most mindfvcking thing he'd ever seen.

One girl said "Matthew, don't EVER share your crazy ass psychotic noise AGAIN"

Just wait until she hears my sound governor in person :evil:

Just saw Temple of Doom - I had to check every few moments to see if I hadn't accidentally slipped in the Pirates Sequel - Holy Cliché Adventure Batman!

Gunga Din was better.
:)

I need to finish the Fritz Lang Indian Epic

Well, I didn't know about the marathon and I'm 2/3 of the way through the 3. Also, I now have absolutely NO desire to see Temple of Doom again....ever. No amount of haystacks could take away the bad taste in my mouth. Maybe I should go watch the original Batman movie because it was better and all of the tricks used in ToD were created by Batman.

I love Temple of Doom...

but not the way I love Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Um, Batman was made many years after Temple of Doom.


That doesn't make any less a piece of filth.

Pssst - I think she means the Adam West Batman ;)

Oh, hahahahaha!

Spain + Penelope Cruiz + Scarlett Johansson + making out + directed by Woody Allen = most anticipated movie ever.

http://www.slashfilm.com/2008/05/13/...ina-barcelona/

Take out "Woody Allen" and I might agree with you. Actually, Cruz doesn't really do it for me, but I understand her appeal, at least.

I finally watched There Will Be Blood. After the first hour passed, I thought, "Why were so many of my friends disappointed? This is GREAT!" And then the next hour passed, and I thought, "Okay, it's starting to flounder a bit, but I'll keep heart and maybe he will rein it in during the 3rd act."

And then..... Well, honestly, it was like watching a brilliant mind deteriorate. I felt like I was actually watching a friend I love go mad towards the end of his life. I'm not talking about Plainview's deterioration, mind. I'm personifying the movie. I really do think it had a brilliant start. I was completely riveted, and then I was completely let down.

And that final scene? Some of the worst overacting I've seen from a truly gifted actor in a long time. As for Dano's performance, I wasn't keen on it for most of the picture, so was less disappointed when he too floundered in the last 15 minutes.

Ah, well. I still have Magnolia and Punch Drunk Love to turn to.

Everyone has such a different take on this film, which is maybe the most interesting thing about the movie, the first hour excepted (because I loved it so much).

I actually didn't care for Dano, and most people seemed to. Times I liked him, times I thought his performance was terrible.

And though I also think DDL overdid the last 15 or 20 minutes, I also very much like his delivery of that final line. That was, as you said, nuanced.

Well, when I watched it again ... I was suprised to realize IT'S A COMEDY.


Seriously, I laughed all the way through it. Not AT it. With it. The final scene when Plainview is an adle-brained, drunken old coot is only overacting if you don't see his behaviour when he's younger and more sane.

Every scene with him and Paul Dano is a laugh riot. The scene in the restaurant with his son and the guys from Union Oil has me in stitches. And the bowling scene finale is simply icing on an already preposterious character's cake (or milkshake, as the case may be).


Comedy, Comedy, Comedy .... looked at from that angle, There Will Be Blood is pure black gold ... and Daniel Day deserved the Oscar he got (before they were warned how he'd dress for the ceremony).

I think I should have read your post first before writing mine, and just responded, "What he said," to this and the rest.

I enjoyed the film's black humor, though I wouldn't categorize it as a comedy, or even a Black Comedy. There were scenes where I laughed, and I think I was meant to laugh.

But that doesn't change how I felt about the piece as a whole. If it's a masterpiece I've misunderstood I'm cool with that, and there's a someecard to back me up. :)

Love the card EH1812. Brilliant!

iSm, I got the humor, but I'm still meh on the movie. Overlong and over tedious. I did find the restairant scene funny.

Ugh.

Werner Herzog is going to remake Bad Lieutenant with Nic Cage in the Harvey Keitel role.

I'm not one to immediately reject remakes, but Bad Lieutenant?

I really liked The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The extras on the DVD are very good as well.

Finally watched The Commitments last night. After seeing Once last year, Lani asked me to get The Commitments from Netflix since it also has Glen Hansard in it. Well, after six months of waiting for her to finally watch it, I finally said "I'm watching it tonight and sending it back. You can't really complain I didn't give you enough time."

Now, while Lani was just interested in seeing more of Hansard, I actually read the book years ago and loved it. In fact I love the whole Barrytown Trilogy from Roddy Doyle. They're near perfection and it is really too bad that I haven't cared for much that he's written since then (The Woman Who Walked Into Doors was fine but the rest I haven't even finished).

Anyway, so I actually had a fair bit of interest in watching the movie. Unfortunately, I can't say I was too thrilled by it. Nothing really bad about it but the soul-singing Irish band was an idea that played much more humorously in print than in reality. It was too much just a concert film, and a concert film of quality Motown covers at that.

So, no complaints that I can really make but I'd have been happy sticking with just the book.

I loved the movie long ago (I still adore the soundtrack) but I agree, the book was more compelling.

Saw Indian Jones and the last crusade last night and found it an enjoyable romp and not nearly as painful as Temple of Doom, at least these leaves me with some hope that this upcomming one won't suck.

Raising Arizona is one of those iconic movies that you just somehow go through life having missed. Over the years my respect for the Coen Brothers has grown immensely.

So it pains me to say that Raising Arizona is complete ****. Getting to see Holly Hunter's face barely provides any redemption. I don't think the corner of my mouth so much as twitched once in amusement. Nicolas Cage, as he pretty much was in every early performance, was awful. The story was awful.

Suck, suck, suck, fail.

Raising Arizona is not one of my favorite Cohen movies either. I tend to get bored with the "high jinks" genre.

However, Indy 3 was thoroughly enjoyable. I really had no complaints about the film at all. Hopefully the next film will be as fun.

I haven't watched it in quite a while, but Raising Arizona was a great one, to my memory. It's only been about a decade, not something from childhood. So I'll stand by its goofball, screwy comedy. Nicholas Cage was great, and so was everyone else. It's wacky fun, well-written, well-directed and well-performed. Comedy Gold Classic.


Alex is just pain wrong. :p


* * * *

As for Indiana Jones 3, yes it's not nearly as painful to watch as Indy 2 Temple of Crap. That's why I considered it a "success" when it was released. But it's barely watchable now. Pleasant enough? Perhaps. A trifle. "Doesn't.Completely.Suck" was good enough for a Temple of Doom follow-up ... but NOT for a Raiders of the Lost Ark sequel.


My high hopes for the 4th one, with a sequel/prequel track record of "MEH" ... ride on the fact that they rejected a bunch of scripts and waited till Harrison Ford had one foot in the grave before finding the script they liked. Not that I trust half of Spielberg's instincts or any of George Lucas's ... but at least it's an indication of care that portends less slapped-together than Temple of Doom or Last Crusade.



Oooooh, Indy Marathon tomorrow at LSP and Tom's. Three viewings of Indy 4 by a week from today! Including the opening midnight show in Westwood and the LoT Swanktacular viewing at the Dome for the prime Saturday night screening.

I'm excited.

:iSm:

Please don't suck. Please don't suck. Please don't suck.

Now that I've got the bluray drive in the ACBF, I can definitely say that I won't be needing my Across the Universe DVD anymore :)

I saw Dan in Real Life last night and liked it. I thought it was a decent film. The happy-go-lucky family kind of drove me nuts and I thought Dan should have put his foot down with his daughters a bit at the end... but all in all I liked it.

I loved Dan in Real Life. I loved the way he treated his daughters. It bugged me that he was willing to give up the woman he loved, but self-sacrifice always gives me the heeby jeebies. I'm a sucker for cute and sappy movies as long as they're relatively well done. I hated all of them working out on the lawn. Who does that?

Apparently, there is going to be 3 new Terminator movies starring Christian Bale as John Connor. Interesting. No word yet on if the Governator is going to reprise his role.

Oh, and Jake Gyllenhaal is playing the lead role in the film Prince of Persia that is based on the video game of the same name.

Wow, they remade The Andromeda Strain and I didn't even know it. It's a two-part TV movie premiering Memorial Day on A&E.


I love the 70's original. It's a must see in widescreen, because of all the split-screen madness that's always been removed in the Pan&Scan versions shown on TV through the years.

I'm anxious to see the remake. It's a great story.

I never saw the movie version, but I HATED the book. And the commercial we saw for the A&E version looked awful.

Really? I love the book. You, Sir, are WRONG. :p

Crichton's worst ending. And that's a pretty lofty prize.

Beat only by Stephen King's. Way to ruin almost every book he's ever written.

Iron Man was a ton of fun.

Best Stan Lee cameo yet.

I could take issue with that... ;)

ooh, the Clay Theater will be showing Rosemary's Baby begining on June 5th. I've never seen it in the theater. This movie is such a hoot!

Um, Snowflake? Want company? I have never seen this in a theater either.

I've actually never seen it at all.

I think I missed it...where was he?

His back to the camera, he appeared as "Hef", surrounded by women. He turned ... and the audience (in our theater, at least), broke into laughter and applause.

It was the funniest cameo of the bunch, but I really wish they'd stop doing them.

Noooooooooo!
It's really happening!
The Women remake
There are production stills and everything!
Noooo! I'm melting... what a world what a world....

Maybe I should try to slog through the original.

Oh, my, the amount of plastic surgery evidenced on the imdb gallery photos from that remake is outstanding.

Steve, you ignorant slut.
Of course you should slog through it!
It's fun.
:D


ETA... Waitaminute, didn't someone cool and awesome buy that for you for Hannukah?
;)

The Key Art Awards nominations are out. They're like Oscars for movie marketing. I'd like to note that we've snagged our first nomination ever, for Superbad. Snaps to EH, who headed up that project (and to our very cool team.)

We have one super heavyweight fellow nominee, and they totally deserve to win (but it's totally an honor to be nominated)

Congratulations.


(Though I really didn't care for that movie)




* * * *

And yes, GC, I'm more than cognizant that The Women was a gift from you, and that I'm not really gay until I watch it. Maybe that's why I don't want to finish it. I have issues with my homosexuality.


Or maybe it was just incredibly unentertaining.


Sigh, I'll try again.

I live across the street (literally) from a 20 screen (plus IMAX) multiplex.

I'm sitting here a little bit bored. My Netflix movies aren't appealing at the moment so I figure "might as well walk across the street, they must be showing some second- or third-choice movie that I can sit in the dark for.

Remember, 21 screens.

Right now on these 21 screens they are showing The Chronicles of Narnia on 5 screens. Indiana Jones on 6 screens. Iron Man 4 screens. Speed Racer on 3 screens. What Happens in Vegas and Made of Honor each get a screen and then Harold & Kumar, Baby Mama, and Sarah Marshall are all sharing the last screen.


21 screens and 18 of them are dedicated to four movies. How annoying.

I believe this is how the 500 channels of cable TV panned out too

I don't think Multi-Plexes were designed to offer a wide selection of films to suit any taste, but rather a wide-selection of showtimes to suit any schedule.

Augh..................


Eva Mendes ... Crystal Allen
Meg Ryan ... Mary Haines - WTF? I'm sorry, not acceptable casting to me UGH
Carrie Fisher ... Nancy Blake - Okay
Candice Bergen ... Catherine Frazier
Jada Pinkett Smith ... Miriam Aarons
Debra Messing ... Edith Potter
Annette Bening ... Sylvia Fowler - Okay
Bette Midler ... Flora DeLave - She'll be a hoot, not Mary Boland, but still a hoot
Cloris Leachman ... Maggie - See above and sub Marjorie Main for Mary Boland
Debi Mazar ... Olga
Keegan Connor Tracy ... Dolly Dupuyster
Joanna Gleason ... Barbara Delacorte - I love Joanna Gleason

WHO will do the clothes? I do not know who the listed wardrobe guy is.

Augh! I will go see it, of course, but AUGH just the same.

He has a fairly decent list of costumes under his belt including some great retro productions: Mad Men, Factory Girl, Notorious Bettie Page. I have no idea what time frame this remake will be set in.

Seems present-day, from the gallery of botox horrors.

Using Snowflake's list:

Eva Mendes ... Crystal Allen - no idea who EM is...
Meg Ryan ... Mary Haines - WTF X2. Meg Ryan... she's all gums when she smiles. Can't stand her.
Carrie Fisher ... Nancy Blake - I actally like this casting. It could have been Lilly Tomlin, too. ;)
Candice Bergen ... Catherine Frazier - Who the heck is Catherine Frazier?
Jada Pinkett Smith ... Miriam Aarons - No. JPS looks like she's mad all the time. Miriam should have been someone hotter and nicer.
Debra Messing ... Edith Potter - Really?! No no no no. Edith should have been played by someone feisty who can act.
Annette Bening ... Sylvia Fowler - Foul indeed. UGH! Can't stand Bening. I only liked her in American Beauty. We'll see what she does wit this cherry of a role.
Bette Midler ... Flora DeLave - That could work... But Every movie that Midler had been in lately has tanked. She's bad luck or something.
Cloris Leachman ... Maggie - I love her.
Debi Mazar ... Olga - I could see that.
Keegan Connor Tracy ... Dolly Dupuyster - No idea.
Joanna Gleason ... Barbara Delacorte - Not sure who she is...


All of this makes me sad. But at least the original is still there for all of us to enjoy.

More to add...

I just looked at the pictures.
Canoes?!

And Dianne English has never directed before. Can she do it?

True, and I understand why they do it (and how the changing technology behind the scenes allows for it).

Doesn't make it any less annoying.

Okay, I wish I'd thought of Lily Tomlin. My God, why isn't she in this? She'd work as Nancy.

Bette can be so over the top, but I think she'll be funny as hell as the Countess.

I'd better bone up on the play now, GC! ;-)

I wonder if Charlie Kaufman actually wants people to see his new movie. I suspect a fair number of people will avoid it just because of its title:

Synecdoche, New York

First, the title is a bit of a pun/play of words off of Schenectady, New York. Second synecdoche is a word that 99% won't know the meaning of (I knew, but wasn't confident enough that I was right so looked it up anyway). And of the 1% of people who know what it means, half of them probably won't know how to pronounce it.

sih-neck-do-key, right?

si-neck-duh-key (no sure how you were pronouncing the "do" syllable.

But past experience tells me that a very many people will think it is pronounced "sigh-neck-doe(sh)." At the post-screening press conference at Cannes yesterday, Kaufman had to explain to an audience of writers how to pronounce the title of the movie.

And I'm sure viewers will then launch into a discussion of the fine distinction between synecdoche and metonymy.


The dangers of trying to discuss the movie by name remind me of the pitfall of reading Hamlet out loud in my high school English class. I knew perfectly well the meaning of "melancholy" (both the modern meaning and the slightly different meaning 400 years ago). But I had never heard the word said out loud. Sadly for my easily embarrassed (back then) ego, the proper pronunciation was not the first that came to mind.

On the last point, by playing off "Schenectady", people have a better chance of pronouncing it right.

And I knew at one point what it meant, but couldn't dredge up the definition so I had to look it up.

I wonder though. If you don't already know how the word is pronounced then the play on Schenectady is not so obvious.

Plus, I suspect a decent number of people also don't know how to pronounce Schenectady.

I'm just being nitpicky though. It's a Charlie Kaufman movie, so regardless of title not many people will be seeing it (I love his movies, but they aren't really commercial). I just think it is an overly artsy title, even from an artsy director/writer.

I totally agree. Awful title. (only because I don't know the word, couldn't pronounce it, and the link to Skin-Necked-Lady, NY didn't occur to me)

WTF? Why is he referencing Schenectady?

BTW it's Ska-NECK-ta-dee

I have this sense that he came up with the title and built a movie around it. I'll probably see it, but I think his ideas run out of steam long before the movies end. "Eternal Sunshine" was my favorite because it had a strong emotional core amidst the high concept.

Well, Schenectady is. But synecdoche isn't.

I actually think the title's pretty funny because it sneaks up on you.

Lies I tell you lies!

In the theater, waiting for Indy, they were showing those movie trivia/advertising slides. Two of them grabbed my attention:

1. In Silence of the Lambs - Anthony Hopkins never blinks.
It happened to be on today. They lie. He blinked at a more or less normal rate.

2. The loudest movie ever made is: Close Encounters Of the Third Kind?
WTF? Did these people never see Tommy? Terminator-2? I have trouble accepting this one.

I remember those "facts", too Moony. There was another one that was a total lie, but I can't remember it right now.

A little late to the party, but we finally got around to seeing 'Ironman'.


It totally rocked. I'm sure with successive viewings I could find things to pick apart but I don't want to. It is easily my favorite comic book movie, by far. Never have been a Batman/Superman/Spideyman type (although the previews of 'Dark Knight' lead me to believe that may change) and I have never read the series this movie is based on, but on it's own it was great. I'm so glad RDJ got off the shyt and back into life- he really made this movie what it is.

I agree with you, WB! RDJ did do a great job, and I hope he can keep things together and do some sequils.

Ugh.

I just saw they are working on Beverly Hills Cop IV. Regardless of the recent record of resuming movies series after long layoffs (Rocky Balboa was decent, Rambo was awful, Indiana Jones and Die Hard were fun enough for single viewings) I'm not always opposed to it. But it is hard to think of a big '80s-'90s series that was more creatively dead by the end than Beverly Hills Cop.

At least Judge Reinhold get to be in one more movie.

And it is a good thing that Gibson has blacklisted himself and Danny Glover looks 80 years old (though he's only 64) or I think we'd be soon subject to Lethal Weapon V.

I officially predict that they aren't going to let any of that stop them.

Actually, for the sake of more craptastic sequels to good movies remaining unmade, I hope to find him naked all cracked out on the floor behind my local motel sometime before production begins on any of those.




And, um, what the hell is "loudest" movie??? WTF? Close Encounters is many "ests" of cinema, but not the loudest.

Off the top of my head, I'd nominate Top Gun.

And also for the gayest (mainstream) movie.

Saw two older movies this week:

The Piano - Much that I liked about the movie. Wish they'd not had the Holly Hunter voice over and let her truly be mute through the whole movie. She had conveyed things just fine without the exposition. Didn't care for Sam Neil's performance though, thought he threw the whole endeavor off.

Machine Gun Kelly - Charles Bronson's first leading role (so I read) and the 20th directorial effort from Roger Corman (which is a lot since his first job directing was just three years earlier). Boy howdy did it suck. And not in a good Roger Cormanish campy way. Just suck. But then I've never really seen much evidence that Bronson deserved his film career (but admittedly I haven't seen a lot of it).

Not that many here will be reading this and heading to movies this weekend but here's my review of Kung Fu Panda.

I really enjoyed it quite a bit. Now I do have a fondness for the martial arts genre and so if they do absolutely nothing for you I can see this falling flat but it is strong with the animation, strong with the humor, and strong with the martial arts.

Thanks for that Alex. I have a group of boys from karate class dying to go first thing tomorrow.

Thanks Alex. I read it last night and it looks like I'll be going to see Kung Fu Panda. I was kind of surprised that you liked it so much, maybe I will too!

I was surprised I liked it too. Lani didn't even want to go with me but decided to when it turned out the screening was at the theater across the street from us on a Saturday morning (so she didn't really have anything else to do anyway). And she really liked it as well.

Any good suggestions?

I need the perfect DVD for Headliner and I to watch on the flight down to WDW. For last years trip to DLR we of course picked Nemo, but I can't come up with a good tie in movie for this trip.

We never saw Dinosaur but I don't think the ride has much if anything to do with the movie. We will also be visiting Universal so that could be another source of options or perhaps something with a Florida theme.

Trailer for The Women (the mishmash)
 

Not for the faint of heart:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWxjeFPS8DI

Snow White, of course!

Errr, I'm hoping that was not a response to my preceding post. :eek:

That one's down but this one's still up.
http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809926850/trailer

And, seriously. If I can see the botox in the blurry, fuzzy, badly-encoded trailer above, that is TOO MUCH BOTOX.

Nah, it's still there, just a little thingie in front of the actual trailer. Anyway, I agree, too much botox and not enough Claire Booth Luce!

Nope, not at all!

I watched The Bridge last night. Thought-provoking film. I can't believe they got all that on film. I should look up how they filmed it. I am guessing they had people monitoring the cameras for just about the entire year in 2004.

Yes. They had permission from the bridge authorities to film a "Nature documentary". As I heard it, there was a bit of a stir when the true nature of the film came out.

Still overall I like the attitude that the bridge authority takes for the Golden Gate. Which in short sums up as "If you jump, it ain't our job to stop you". They still allow pedestrians access and don't try to jumper proof the bridge with a lot of unsightly chin link and such.

I don't know how old Headliner is but there is:

Cat in the Hat
Jurassic Park
( both kind of a Universal tie in)

My boy says Ratatouille for an Epcot tie in.

That's all I got, sorry.

Ugh.
Presenting... the trailer for The Women remake. Click.

:rolleyes:

Duuude! Like, all of four posts north!

I can't figure out who is botoxed and who is not.

Oops.
:D

I hate this movie already.

I know - me too!

Yeech. The Alvin and the Chipmunks treatment?? They looked so scary. I can only imagine what kind of horror a 3D, CG Smurf would be.

Awwwww....
I finally watched the trailer. I dont hate it, its not perfect, but it cant be.
They are remaking perfection.

Its cute, it will more than likely make money. And money from me.

This is not directed at you.
But Hollywood has run out of ideas and is too chicken to take risks. They saw a movie that had a fan base and thought by making a remake it would get money from those built in fans. It happens a lot.
They should be making perfect movies and not trying to exploit perfect movies of the past.
I expect a remake of Auntie Mame or Mame soon. Starring Beyonce as the main character. Bleh.
:D

Well, if they knew the movie had a fan base, then they knew WHAT the movies fan base was made up of.

So hire an indy person, and re-make The Women with gay men and fag hag roles.

Then at least we'd have something to relate to. :P

Now there's an idea! Hire that girl right now, Smitty!
:D

On that same note, I have always wanted to see a version of Auntie Mame or Mame with a drag queen as Mame. I think it would be fabulous and would add an extra twist to the whole story.

BITE YOUR TONGUE MISTER! :eek:
Auntie Mame with Roz* is absolute perfection! We don't need any Hollywood dipsh¡ts getting wind of that idea. :rolleyes:
Now that could actually be enjoyable on a campy level, but there's a fine, easily crossed line that the makers would have to walk to make it work.



*(We do not discuss Mame with Lucy.)

*However, we do discuss the vaseline on the lens* ;)

Beyonce would be a perfect little Gloria Upson.

Hey!

While I don't love Lucy in it particularly, I LOVE the musical play.

And Bea Arthur is wonderful. I still lament it was not Angela Lansbury as Mame, it shoulda been!

Now with live action Azreal and Gargamel!

It still is, on my original Broadway cast soundtrack... sigh...

I think M. Night's career is basically over.


The Happining has a neat and disturbing premise, and then manages to be really kinda awful.


Too bad. I like his first four films a lot.


Good Night M. Night.

I won't post much about the new Adam Sandler movie (we saw it last night), other than to say I don't normally find his movies consistently good and this was no exception.

Punch Drunk Love was the exception. I know he has it in him. Too many penis jokes in this one...

I too thought The Happening was pretty bad. However, assuming that iSm begins counting with The Sixth Sense and not wide awake, that suggests that you thought The Village was good. I don't get that at all (though I'm ok with a divergent opinion, I loved Lady in the Water).

Zohan is stupid Sandler. But, I did find myself laughing a fair amount. The last half hour, however, is beyond bad and the introduction to Zohan on vacation was nearly as awful. Some funny stuff in the middle.

However, any movie that can put Mrs. Garrett (Charlotte Rae; yes, that one) in a sex scene with Adam Sandler gets some bonus points for trying hard.

Yeah, my count starts with The Sixth Sense. Shows what I know.


I can appreciate how some people really dig Lady in the Water. I just don't happen to be one of them, and I can also completely understand why it was a great big bomb.

And I surely understand why most people did not like The Village.

I just don't happen to be one of them.





I just watched Signs, to take the bad Happening taste out of my mouth. Similar premise of an end-of-the-world scenario Hitchcockianish / WarOftheWorldsely told via a micro story of a small and isolated group.

And while Signs is not my personal favorite of M. Night's work ... I think it is one of those rare, perfectly crafted and constructed films. And I can see why it was his biggest mainstream hit. And I love it.



I think I'm gonna watch some more of his movies, and then wonder what went wrong.


Damn talent arc.

I'm hoping he'll pull back and make someone else's script. He knows how to make a movie, but he can't live with the pressure of having a career's-worth of great original ideas.

As usual, I'm way behind the curve in catching up with acclaimed movies. Anyhow, last night I watched JUNO, and I was pretty charmed. Emily Watson's performance is practically the whole movie, though the supporting cast is well chosen. It's pretty slight, fluffy stuff but I enjoyed it.

However, I have a question for those of you who have seen this - What's the deal with the twee, folksy songs on the soundtrack!?! Is this an actual genre? What is it called? Why does it exist?! The movie was punctuated by a number of quirky tunes, accompanied by guitar, and though the songs themselves were sort of funny and cute, the style of singing has me completely baffled. I can only describe it as a kind of indifferent, sluggish and off-key chanting. The credits indicate that a number of artists contributed, which is why I wonder if this is a category unto itself - whispy little tunes performed by non-singers who sound like they are waking up from a long nap. The effect is precious to the point of being agonizing. It fit the mood of the film okay, but the main character, Juno, kept talking about how much she loved punk bands of the late seventies. Why didn't we get to hear them instead?

It's Anti-Folk, my friend.

Interesting. Most of the video examples I checked out on that site were more polished and accomplished than what I heard during Juno, but I could tell they were cut from similar cloth. I'm glad I have this board to keep me at least tenuously hooked into what's new.

EDITED TO ADD: Well, not so new. I've been listening to Ani DeFranco, Michelle Shocked and Nellie McKay for quiet a while without knowing that they were antifolk. Still, I wouldn't have thought of them in comparison with the odd singers heard in Juno. Guess it's best to ignore labels and just enjoy what I enjoy and disregard the rest.

Over the weekend we stayed in a Mammoth Lakes motel and one of the channels was Showtime Extreme. Showtime Extreme apparently is a channel devoted to showing incredibly bad action movies.

UKM: Ultimate Killing Machine was an incredibly bad action movie. I'm sure it was straight to video and the only recognizable actor was Michael Madsen. I'm sure that nobody will ever see this movie.

But in trying to track down its title for my movie watching log, I saw that, per IMDb, Michael Madsen is appearing in 18 movies this year. He's not a great actor, but he's not a horrible one either. So it is kind of sad to see him taking every straight-to-video dollar he can get.

Finally saw Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. Great film that I found hard to watch. Two hapless brothers (Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke) hatch an ill-advised crime scheme that results in both their lives getting progressively and excruciately destroyed. Great performances and a good script, a lot of time shifting (which I love), and it was wonderfully directed by the not-dead-yet Sidney Lumet.

I didn't realize Elliott Smith was Anti-Folk. (I'm very fond of his music, I'm still mourning his untimely departure.)

Sh*t - I cannot read, obviously, nevermind...

Watched Crank last night. I was prepared for a stupid popcorn movie. Surprisingly, I enjoyed it much more than that.

Someone set out to make a live action video game, and they nailed it. This is an absolutely archetypal video game plot from beginning to end. They committed to it 100%.

Unfortunately it does suffer from a really poorly written love interest with an even worse actress. It wouldn't have been so bad, but there's a huge chunk of movie that gets completely dragged down by her. It definitely hurts the overall movie.

But if you're in the mood for highly stylized, ultra-cartoony action, it's a good ride.

Apparently I mostly agree. Though two years on all I remember is the premise of the movie and the public sex scene in front of the tour bus.

What's really bizarre is that one of the DVD "extras" is a "Family Friendly Audio" track. :confused: The audio is the most family friendly part of the movie. No amount of bleeping is going to cover the murders, boobs, drug use, consensual public rape, and blatant disregard for the law.

I say it loudly and proudly: I LOVED CRANK! A friend dragged me into the theater practically kicking and screaming. "Really, Colleen? Really?!" I think I laughed the entire movie, not at it...with it. So much fun.

I didn't mind the love interest. I minded even less one of the most balls out hilarious sex scenes I've ever seen on film. Sweet mercy, it was funny.

Convinced. Queued.

Finally got around to watching Cloverfield. I can say with a certain amount of certainty that I would have hated the movie if I'd seen it in theaters because it would have made me stick to my stomach. I am very glad that I watched it on TV, because I really loved how it was made. A nice contemporary homage to H.P. Lovecraft told from the victims perspective. I was expecting it to be a montage of various video footage taken during the time of the attack, so the continuity was unexpected but not disappointing. It's different but in the same class of film as The Host, I think. And as was the filmmakers' intent, I'm glad we have a monster of our own here in the States. Fun, fun.

The sex scene certainly helped soften the blow, so to speak, but the first few scenes with her sucked the air right out of the movie. Other than that, I was completely onboard.

And to bounce back and forth, one of my favorite things about seeing Cloverfield in a theater was the huge, headless Statue of Liberty set up in the Chinese Theater forecourt ... which, from the far northwest corner, you could line-up perfectly with the giant movie billboard atop a building across the street.


TeeHee.

The funniest sex scene I ever saw was in the Jeff Goldblum movie The Tall Guy. He and Emma Thompson wreak havoc on that bedroom!

Ah yes, I did love The Tall Guy, and that scene was certainly memorable.

Also watched Gone Baby Gone. Ben Affleck, no more leading roles for you! Either you're behind the camera working hard boiled magic as a director, or you shine briefly like a shooting star in a small supporting role. Continue to let your brother take the lead, because clearly directing is your calling.

Maybe your first attempt at directing a feature length film wouldn't have been as successful if you hadn't starred in all those pieces of poop in which you were also poop. And though I'd like to be a big enough person to forgive you the poop, I cannot. I just cannot forgive you. But I will likely pay to see your next movie in theaters.

About the end of Gone Baby Gone.

Sadly, nobody I knew at the time had seen Gone Baby Gone so I couldn't discuss it the way I wanted to then. So I made Lani listen me take both sides on a long drive (she hadn't seen it).

Love Guru - 17% on rottentomatoes.com
Bomb!
But it may be #1 this weekend. They threw a lot of money into advertising.

from A.O. Scott (my favorite critic):

The full review.

gee...ya think?


didnt they already do this schtick?

I hear Get Smart really underwhelms also. Bad weekend for major comedy releases.


Too bad, though. I was looking forward to Get Smart.

Sadly, he still possesses the ability to be funny. They did a Mike Myers best-of SNL show last weekend which he hosted and did a few new bits. And the new bits were actually funny, I was shocked. It was really sad to see that he can still do actual comedy but chooses instead to pump out his crappy movies.

Although watching the best-of, it's really no surprise that he became completely full of himself. I mean think about it. He had one goal in life, to be cool enough to hang out with Aerosmith. He not only achieved that seemingly ridiculous goal, he exceeded it by actually getting to PLAY with Aerosmith. Oh, and by the way, he also made out with Madonna. If you actually achieved your lifelong childhood fantasy, wouldn't you feel pretty damn full of yourself? Not to say it isn't obnoxious that he's such a douche, but it certainly was pretty understandable how he got there.

If Get Smart isn't funny I'll probably end up loving it. It was my Dad's favorite show and one we always watched together (with popcorn and soda).

Ebert liked Get Smart and hated Love Guru.

These days Ebert seems to be such a softy that I take his 1-star for Love Guru to be at very good sign of just how bad is must be.

OMG! The Love God? is must viewing! It's got to be the only Don Knott's sex comedy, though it is pretty chaste, but an amusing satire of the whole Playboy philosophy, and Knotts gets to do some hilarious bird calls. Add it to your queue right away!

I am still looking forward to it. I loved that show, still make references to it. When the kids were little my sis and I used to have to find a 'cone of silence' to talk around them. That meant it was just for us.

I don't know how many times I said 'Would you believe....'


I still haven't taken the Boy to see 'Kung Fu Panda', he really wants to see it. We went to see 'The Incredible Hulk' Fathers Day and 'Iron Man' before that. I liked RDJ more than the Hulk but I think the story with the Hulk was maybe better. I don't know, not really my type of movie but I did enjoy them.

As far as DVD, has it been discussed here, 'There Will Be Blood'?

Oh yes, we were all over that, Gemini Crickett and I. Alex, too, I think.


I love. They hate.

iSm, that would be TWBB?

I just need to understand more about why, why, why?????

My son loved it, said he wants to be just like DDLs' character when he grows up. :eek:

Well, as I've said before in this thread ... the second time I watched it, the film played more like a comedy to me. So many of the scenes and characters are very broad, and really, really funny.


DDL's character is a complete, soulless, heartless bastard. But a fascinating one. However, if your boy wants to be just like him .... send him to Military School right now.

I should search that and read what you all have said...

Yes, the movie was very good. I just couldn't get over that soulless heartless bastard. {a very good description!}

Yeah, I don't know about my son, I don't know if he is messing with me or what. I just told him not to practice such behaviour on his little brother. :mad:

There Will Be Blood is a movie that is settling in memory better than it was experienced.

I believe my comments after initial viewing were that I admired it, loved what he was trying to do, but I thought it went off the rails by the end.

The ending did leave me with my jaw dropped. I was a little p'oed that I'd stayed up until midnight to finish it.

I loved the area shots. I loved when they showed the coast. I told my son, when they showed the one young man in the house, I guess it was his grandfather who was gone? I told my son that is exactly how it must have been in the day. That is so interesting to me.

Ditto. I was right along with it for a while, and did indeed see the humor through it, but it just never seemed to completely gel into anything more than an interesting concept.

Just watched No Country For Old Men, and then rewatched the last half hour or so of it, because it definitely threw me the first time around. I'm sure I saw it discussed here long ago, but the search function won't grab it because so many of the words in that title (no, for, old) are too common. Anyhow, after a day's reflection, I think this one is going to stick with me for a while. Did others here love or hate it?

There Will Be Blood is tonight's viewing for me. (I'm only a year or so behind.)

I didn't love it ... but I couldn't stop thinking about it for about two weeks ... which led me to consider it a much better film than the one I thought I'd watched.



I thought TWB Blood was a much better movie, but it didn't leave me constantly thinking about it for a fortnight. (Though I would hardly call it a film that left my mind as soon as I left the theater.)

Love it. As a piece of craft the best I saw last year (for simple joy of watching it was surpassed by Once).

It took me awhile to ponder it, because I so enjoyed it for the majority of the movie, but the end so threw me that I didn't know what I thought about it until I saw TWBB. By comparison I think I loved NCFOM a lot because I disliked TWBB so.

I just watched DOA: Dead or Alive last night.

Lame plot. Terrible script. Bad acting.

Super yummy hot chicks. Very very nice T&A. Lots of fun fight sequences. And the humor is surprisingly funny (considering the bad writing every where else in the movie).

I loved it! :D

sex, lies, and videotape - I put this off for a long time. All because of a misconception about what kind of movie it was. I don't mind movies about sex, but generally I'm bored by movies that contain a lot of it. So it was a surprise to watch it and find that sex is never presented on screen in the entire movie. Also: Andie MacDowell; who the hell goes out of their way to watch a movie with her in it? Anyway, I enjoyed it.

Get Smart - A heat avoidance selection. Didn't hate it. Didn't love it. Will have mostly forgotten it in 2 weeks. Solidly in the I Spy category of not-embarrassing but doesn't add anything TV remakes. It did get off to a slow start until I was able to shake off the "Michael Scott becomes a spy" feeling.

I was in the mood to watch musicals so I watched The Sound of Music and West Side Story back to back. Say what you will about the corniness of both (I can't help but chuckle at the dancing scenes at the beginning of WSS), but they are both solid films. There is some really cool cinematography in both. And there are some wonderful performances in both (Andrews and Moreno specifically). And "America" is still one of my very favorite musical numbers on film. The use of full shots were brilliant.
:)

Far from chuckling, I find the dancing at the beginning of (and throughout) West Side Story to be thrilling. But, I'm a huge sucker for this kind of thing. I guess the fact that the dancing begins after a very photo-realistic view of the grungy city is kind of a surprising juxtaposition. But, the entire opening is one of my favorites ever.

The hilltop opening of Sound of Music also gives me chills every single time. (I love Sound of Music on the non-ironic, sappiest level. I suppose I should feel kind of goofy about that fact, but I'm unapologetic. It makes me happy.) The only moment in SoM that doesn't work is at the end of "So Long, Farewell," when all the party guests sing 'goodnight." That's a real cringer.

I've been on a Rodgers and Hammerstein kick recently. I watched Carousel, Oklahoma, The King and I and State Fair all in one week. I had never seen State Fair before, and WOW! did I ever fall in love with leading lady Jeanne Craine! And the whole movie is a charmer, as cornpone as it gets, but still more sophisticated than so much of what passes for entertainment these days. (I haven't seen the much-dissed sixties remake of State Fair, but I'm sure to give it a whirl soon.)

I HATE The Sound of Music, but West Side Story is brilliant. Yeah, um, the juxtaposition of the realistic setting and the impressionistic dance is the point.




But I'm glad GC watched the Bette Davis Special Salute to Robert Wise.




Bette Davis at the 1989 Oscars, just before they killed her mike:And Mr. Wise is the winner of two Oscars himself. The Sooooound of Muusic. West Side Story.

I was at a meeting a few weeks ago where I just wasn't in a pleasant mood and wasn't about to take any crap from managers who like to give out too much work and not enough time to do it. Anyway, after the meeting someone said, "Ain't nobody pushing around my boy Bill."

I responded, "There's a song about that." Which only got me blank stares. So I said, "Please tell me you've all seen Carousel." More blank stares.

What's wrong with people?

<blank stare>

I love Carousel.




Then again, I'm gay as a gaytor.

I grew up with my older siblings constantly listening to the soundtracks from The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Carousel, Oklahoma, The King and I, Brigadoon, South Pacific, etc. So, naturally, I've seen the movies (multiple times).

I wouldn't say I love the movies, but I do like them.

must be time to go home. I swear I read

yeah. homeward bound it is

Can't stand Carousel (boooring), Oklahoma! (yes, even with cowboys, it stinks) and South Pacific (such horrible color filters throughout - bleh). I thought Brigadoon and the King and I were okay.

I simply love the Sound of Music. I grew up watching it over and over and it is tied to too many good memories to ever hate it. Christopher Plummer was one of my first childhood crushes. He is so very handsome in this film and, might I add imho, very gay. My biggest qualm with the film is something they changed when they translated it from the stage play. At the end of the play, Rolfe saves the day by not letting the family get caught because of his love for Liesel. That plays much better than what happened in the film, but I do understand the director not wanting the audience to have an ounce of love for any Nazi in the film.

Watching the making of West Side Story, I was surprised to find out that Wood and Beymer hated each other. I mean, how could you hate Beymer? He was one hunkadola I tells ya.

What Flippy said. I love both of those musicals. Grew up on them. I don't think they're silly at all. I laugh, I cry, I marvel at the fantastic cinematography and choreography. They're exactly what they need to be.

Oklahoma is teh awesome.

I was noticing the directors' use of color in WSS. Lots of primary colors, lots of red.

Oh and the full shots for the Dance at the Gym scene were primo also.
:)

Okay, but admit that the ballet in the middle is just a TAD too long, yes?

Something I loved about Twin Peaks - seeing Tony and Riff singing a duet (albeit a drunken one).

Yes, middle ballet is too long. It's always too long in just about every film that had the misfortune to include a ballet interlude. Dumb relic of its time.

Oh goody! Musicals! I just adore a good musical!

Love WSS, Brigadoon, Oklahomo, Sound of Music, Thoroughly Modern Millie (Raspberries!), Seven Brides for Seven Hunks... er...Brothers, Music Man, King and I...

I also find Carousel boring.

Oooo... How could I forget Singing in the Rain, American in Paris, and Kiss Me Kate!

Just watched King of Kong, the documentary about the hard-core classic gaming community and a scandal in their midst.

I'd say this is mandatory viewing for anybody who has spent much time in small ultra-niche groups who can find themselves taking things way more seriously than necessary.

Also, while watching things like this (and Hands on the Hard Body and others of the ilk) I can't help but try to imagine something similar being made about MouseAdventure and how everybody would come across.

PUERTO RICO. My HEARTS devotion. Let it Sink BACK in the OCEAN.
Always a hurricane blowing.
Always the pop-u-la-tion growing
And the sunlight streaming
and the natives screaming.......

I like the island Manhattan (I know you do)