What is the last movie you saw? and rate it.

If, YesNo, The Homesman is playing in your mall spackled suburban environment, I recommend you see it. I saw it a couple of days ago, and it's remarkably good.

It's director and star is Tommy Lee Jones, and if your have seen "The Three Burial of Melquiades Estrada", you will know that he is a talented director as well as a good actor. His co-star is Hillary Swank. Together, they take on the responsibility of transporting three insane women from the wilds of 19th century Western Nebraska back to civilization in eastern Iowa.

The women are appropriately insane -- they can't talk. The bit players -- including John Lithgow and the omnipresent Meryl Streep -- are excellent. The story is harsh and dramatic. The acting is excellent.

Best of all, though, the photography is stunning. Nebraska is a bleak land that could drive anyone insane. The trip back east is a National Geographic expedition through strikingly barren beauty.

By way of example, the last shot in the movie is a direct copy of George Bingham's painting "The Jolly Flatboat Men". Here's a link (since I don't know how to insert a picture): http://www.artnet.com/artists/george...n3Ln2abw98Acw2

I'm not sure why more directors don't copy painting for their visuals. Terrence Malick copied many famous American paintings in "Days of Heaven", and it's still one of the most visually stunning films I've seen.

The theater we usually go to isn't showing "The Homesman", but it looks like one to rent when it gets out of the theaters and into the library.

We did see "The Theory of Everything" some time ago which we found enjoyable. Say, score 8/10.

"The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies" was OK, but it got tiring. Score: 6/10

My wish list includes "Interstellar", "Wild" and "Into the Woods".

Edit: Just adding a comment on the next scenes from Breaking Bad. The Whites are manipulating the owner of a car wash to sell. This seems in character for Skylar and Saul, but I am getting tired of these characters. It also confirms the stupidity of Walter, whatever character he is trying to represent. Hank's pettiness is tiring as well and I have never understood why his wife likes to steal things. I've reduced that score to 6/10.

Visually superb movies are still far better in the theater than on TV, despite the improvements in high definition TVs.

Infidelity is a theme that runs through Louis Malle's films like a thread, so it's no surprise that Damage , unusually filmed as an English story, concerns a Member of Parliament with a wealthy wife and two children who falls for his son's girlfriend. This initiates a passionate affair giving Malle a chance to show Jeremy Irons and Juliet Binoche thrashing around in the sack while his wife and son remain completely unaware of the affair. Given the athleticism of the guilty parties coupling, not to mention the frequency, it's a wonder nobody noticed the bruises. It would have been much improved if it had been cut from its two-and-a-half hours to 90 minutes but it comes across as another example of self-indulgent film making that palls about half-way through.

5/10

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Originally Posted by Ecurb

Visually superb movies are still far better in the theater than on TV, despite the improvements in high definition TVs.

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I dont see much difference between a theater and what we have for a tv. I tend to get hypnotzed by the story even if I view it on my phone, providing it is done well.

Regarding the movie "Damage", I think I saw it but can't remember enough about it to suggest a score, not that my scores mean much.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

I dont see much difference between a theater and what we have for a tv. I tend to get hypnotzed by the story even if I view it on my phone, providing it is done well.

Regarding the movie "Damage", I think I saw it but can't remember enough about it to suggest a score, not that my scores mean much.

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Well film scores are fairly arbitrary anyway and the fact that you don't remember much about it is a good indication of its lack of impact.
Repetitious sex scenes are no substitute for imaginative film making although, in this instance, the storyline wasn't that impressive either.

I saw "Into the Woods" last night. I love musicals -- both stage musicals and movie musicals. However, I haven't liked most of the big hit movie musicals in recent years. Les Miz -- which I loved on the stage -- was horrid. How Anne Hathaway won an Oscar for her embarrassing performance as Fantine is beyond me. Chicago -- which won best movie, I think -- was terrible. Richard Gere's attempts at dancing reminded my of how difficult it is. Instead of showing professional dancing, the camera swirled around the actors in an attempt to create an illusion of graceful movement. It didn't work.

So it was with trepidation that I went to "Into the Woods", the fine Stephen Sondheim musical that I'd seen 3 times on various stages. Like other lousy musicals of recent years, it starred some non-singers and non-dancers -- like Meryl Streep as the witch and Johnny Depp as the Big Bad Wolf.

Not to fear! The movie was very good! True: Streep's big numbers ("It's the Last Midnight") were talked rather than sang -- but she has sufficient talent to pull it off, and played her role with a sense of humor. The filming was appropriately mystical; the princes appropriately conceited; the baker and his wife appropriately cute. The best numbers -- Into the Woods, You are Not Alone, Children will Listen -- were well done.

Careful the wish you make
Wishes are children
Careful the path they take
Wishes come true.....

The Hobbit Battle of the five armies (or something like that). Well I had to remind myself constantly that this is just a movie and as such I enjoyed it. A lot of new stuff was added and I felt the whimsical part of the Hobbit book was a bit lost. I liked Thranduil character, but maybe that is because I love Lee Pace.

It's a good movie if you try not to compare it to the book, but if you do then it's no good....

good entertainment but no masterpiece.

This film conforms generally to my recollection of E.M.Forster's novel that I read many years ago. The story is set in the fictional hill town of Monteriano in Italy in 1903 and relates the consternation of a widow's family and her inlaws when she decides to marry the unemployed son of an Italian dentist. Her first husband's son is sent to Italy to persuade the Italian to renounce the marriage by offering him money but is laughed at and told that the wedding has already taken place .
Having failed in their attempt to salvage what they perceive as their damaged reputation, they are further disconcerted by the news that the errant relative has died in childbirth; leaving the child in the charge of her husband.
Both families decide separately to 'rescue' the child from a life of semi-poverty and have him brought up in England as a gentleman, but their plans go awry and end in tragedy.
The culture clash is deftly handled by the director, and the Tuscan scenery shown to advantage while the cast manage to convey the stiffness of middle class Englishness with the free and easy lifestyle of the Italians. 9/10

It's surprising that, given the interest shown in English writers, that E.M. Forster, one of its foremost practitioners, is hardly mentioned on LitNet

I saw BBC documentary One Life last night and it was very entertaining. It is a collection of different scenes shot in exotic locations. And I loved the scenery. Some parts of the film were really awe-inspiring, like Komodo Dragon stalking a water buffalo. I also liked the music and Daniel Craig's narration.

Thanks for recommendation, Nikolai. It was great.


Watched Wag the Dog last week. It's a great political satire with biting humour. Very thoughtful film and it shows how the general public is easily fooled by politicians who are habitual liars. Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman were excellent throughout the film. Woody Harrelson (Old Shoe) was really funny.

Thanks for recommending it, Hawk. I enjoyed it.

Saw ANNIE with the wife and kids. Loved it.

Modern take on an old movie and done very well.

Jamie Fox played a great part but fame did not matter as all parts were owned by the actors/actresses (Cameron Diaz great) despite their tenure or status.

I recommend it.

I made the mistake of seeing "Wild" last night. I'd been warned. One of my backpacking buddies had already seen it, and warned me about it. However, I knew that he just disliked the movie because he couldn't handle the sheer incompetence at his favorite pastime on the part of the heroine. So I figured it might still be a good movie, and parts of it were filmed on sections of the Pacific Coast Trail on which my own boots had trodden (or something like that).

So I went. It's a chick flick -- not horrible, but self-obsessed and self-absorbed. Cheryl Strayed hikes the PCT to change her life, which has spiraled into heroin addiction and random sex (horrors!) after the early death of her mother. It works! She muddles through, failing to COMPLETELY kick the random sex habit on her adventure. I'll even grant that it probably WAS a life-changing experience for her -- nothing like 4 months of strenuous exercise with no access to heroin dealers to help ANY pretty young addict.

What annoyed me is the self-absorption -- her motive is to look within herself and find herself. But (as I wrote in another thread recently) it seems to me that we find ourselves by looking for something else. Of course Strayed does find something else -- a beautiful country, some interesting people -- but she's always looking within, surprisingly, given what's passing by without.

I love mountaineering and adventure literature. Perhaps the greatest polar adventure book is "The Worst Journey in the World" by Apsley Cherry-Gerrard. It tells the story of the ill-fated Scott expedition to the South Pole. However, the titular "worst journey" takes place in the winter prior to Scott's dash for the pole. Gerrard and one companion trek in search of the roosting grounds of the Emperor Penguin -- never before seen by humans. They journey is "only" 150 miles or so, but the weather is far worse than it is in the summer -- -80F, intense winds, etc. Anyway -- it's a great story.

Gerrard concludes his book with this famous paragraph, In which his attitude compares with Strayed's.

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“And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore.

If you are a brave man you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, “What is the use?” for we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year.

And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin’s egg.”

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I've completed a review on another thread of "The Rum Diary". Here's a snippet of director Bruce Robinson's 1987 cult classic, "Withnail and I". Both films have much in common:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0DytHBjGTQ

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lcm50m82oi4

Hilarious!

Grandma's Boy: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0456554/

This came in a rated and unrated version. Since I don't want to miss anything, I always pick the unrated version.

It is about a brilliant but nerdy and dishonest video game creator, a set of video game testers who don't like him, their new age boss and a beautiful female project manager who comes in to make sure the next game release occurs on time. Considering how everyone is behaving this project manager is definitely needed, but being a beautiful female with everyone else being male virgins focused on video games the context for the conflict is set up. Additionally, the lead tester, in his thirties, is living with his grandmother and two other elderly women.

The crucial problem is who will get the girl, the nerdy but dishonest genius or the likable head tester. It is a comedy so you know who wins, but how he actually wins her is what makes this worth a score of 10/10.

Joseph Losey is a director I can take or leave. An escapee from the Un American Activities Committee, he made most of his films in Europe and specifically England. His off-beat approach to directing lead to some very patchy films but The Intimate Stranger isn't one of them.
Staring the reliable Richard Basehart as the lead in the role of an American expat film producer who has married the daughter of the head of a major British studio, he starts receiving letters from a woman claiming a romantic liaison with him although he has never heard of her.
Because he had to leave Hollywood over a sex scandal, he has great difficulty convincing his wife and her father that he isn't lying but the mysterious woman is convincing and knows things about him that only a close confidant could know.
This leads to his wife leaving him and her father taking him off a big production he Is working on.
Although everything looks stacked against him, a stroke of luck reveals that he isn't going mad, as he had begun to think, but is the victim of a plot get him removed from the studio by another executive who wants to step into his shoes.


8/10

The Tale of Princess Kaguya - Isao Takahata

Beautiful animation and story... 8.5/10

We're in season four of "Breaking Bad". It seems there is another scene with Walter White in his underwear. We stopped for the evening with Skylar telling Walter that she gave the money to Ted.

So far, I like Saul and Gus the best. Walter is getting on my nerves. Skylar has been on my nerves for some time. Jesse is starting to show promise. Mike is showing he can get shot and Ted is getting a taste of the real Skylar.

Score: 5/10

Fanny and Alexander - Ingmar Bergman

I didn't realize this thing was nearly five hours long so when I found out I was a little apprehensive as to whether I could actually handle four and a half hours of consecutive Bergman. It was amazing though, eveything about it. I was very surprised by the supernatural elements and enjoyed them very much. The scene in the attic with the ghosts of the bishops two girls puts most horror movies to shame.

10/10

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Originally Posted by Clopin

Fanny and Alexander - Ingmar Bergman

I didn't realize this thing was nearly five hours long so when I found out I was a little apprehensive as to whether I could actually handle four and a half hours of consective Bergman. It was amazing though, eveything about it. I was very surprised by the supernatural elements and enjoyed them very much. The scene in the attic with the ghosts of the bishops two girls puts most horror movies to shame.

10/10

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I strongly recommend Through a Glass Darkly, if you haven't seen it already.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

Fanny and Alexander - Ingmar Bergman

I didn't realize this thing was nearly five hours long so when I found out I was a little apprehensive as to whether I could actually handle four and a half hours of consective Bergman. It was amazing though, eveything about it. I was very surprised by the supernatural elements and enjoyed them very much. The scene in the attic with the ghosts of the bishops two girls puts most horror movies to shame.

10/10

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MY FAVORITE MOVIE. Though I watched the film version - sounds like you watched the TV version.

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Originally Posted by Pompey Bum

I strongly recommend Through a Glass Darkly, if you haven't seen it already.

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As do I, my favourite Bergman film.

Through A Glass Darkly was my favorite Bergman before I saw Fanny and Alexander. Still love it though, of course. And while we're recommending Bergman films, if you're ready for a couple hours of emotional agony, try Cries and Whispers on for size.

It's funny how people always talk about Bergman movies like spicy food: awesome if you can stand it. It's usually true, though.

Yeh I've seen Through a Glass Darkly, it's great, just behind Wild Strawberries for me. I've been sick this entire week and I watched pretty much every episode of Seinfeld in that time haha, the other movie thread made me remember that I wanted to watch more movies.

Persona - Ingmar Bergman

So many top lists and crtics rank this as one of, if not the best, Bergman film.... I was uh, underwhelmed for sure. The opening collage of imagery seemed to me like a bad cliche of what an 'art house' film looks like, and this same feeling cropped up a few times during the viewing. Overall I liked it, but not overly much.

6.5/10

I'm going to have to watch some Bergman movies. I've seen some decades ago. Maybe today I'll understand them.

We finished season four of Breaking Bad last night. It looks like Walt and Skylar are getting back on the same page. Score: 6/10

To wash down Breaking Bad, I watched "Stretch": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2494280/

This is a movie about fate and finding your true love even though you are in a relationship. Luckily for fate, your girl friend dumps you freeing you for the unknown. After realizing you can't end up like your suicidal imaginary friend you face the reality of your situation that your gambling debts have been called to be paid tonight. If you don't pay, suicide will be the least of your worries. You are hoping the tip from a wealthy outlaw the FBI is chasing will be enough to pay off those debts if you can dodge the rival limo gang you've ticked off earlier by stealing one of their clients who left his gun in the limo. Then you have to get even with your ex-girlfriend, since you ran into her, chase your limo as it is being towed, convince some navigation system to let the engine start.

But it all works out in the end. Fate always wins.

Score: 8/10

Scenes From a Marriage - Ingmar Bergman

Very real. I've never been married but I have been in a long term relationship and while it wasn't exactly the same (I'm nothing like Johan), a lot of the generalities were pretty close. I was sort of waiting for Marianne to lose her mind and have some sort of intense existential, psychoactive experience or something but I'm glad that didn't happen and the movie stuck to stark realism.

9/10

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Originally Posted by Clopin

Scenes From a Marriage - Ingmar Bergman

Very real. I've never been married but I have been in a long term relationship and while it wasn't exactly the same (I'm nothing like Johan), a lot of the generalities were pretty close. I was sort of waiting for Marianne to lose her mind and have some sort of intense existential, psychoactive experience or something but I'm glad that didn't happen and the movie stuck to stark realism.

9/10

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Scenes from a Marriage is one of the few artworks that I think follows the rule wherein more life experience brings you a greater appreciation for it. I watched it, and while I could see the intensity, it didn't really hit home for me in a coherent way. I saw the power of the individual pieces, but I couldn't make emotional sense of them. My dad however, who has been divorced twice, could.

I've decided to finish the Bergman films I have on my list of movies to watch, while I remain sick. We'll see if I can do the ten I have left in the next four or so days... Summer with Monika is next anyway.

Summer with Monika - Ingmar Bergman

I hated Monika, but I liked the movie.

8/10

This film has the impossibly beautiful Janet Munro playing the lead in a cautionary
tale of the dangers of falling for the chimera known as glamour.
As a young girl from a defunct mining town who loses her virginity to a slick
business man and ends up in London with nowhere to go, she is befriended by a
young man who works as a barman and takes pity on her. He takes her into his
lodgings and tells her he will think of some way to help her. She is so taken by his
respect and genuineness that she tells him that she is in love with him and they set up
a conjugal home in a larger part of the house.
It is at this point that she starts to think of the opportunities that London has to offer
a beautiful young woman and begins to get ideas of becoming a fashion model.
This leads to friction when she gets an invite to a smart party by an elderly actor who
lives in the same house and comes into contact with a swinging crowd of poseurs
who are very different to the young man.
She eventually leaves him and is taken up by a rich middle-aged wheeler dealer and
from there to numerous liaisons with other men before killing herself with sleeping
pills. Janet Munro gives a superb performance and is ably assisted by the rest of the
cast of seasoned actors. She died tragically at the age of 39 from a heart condition
aggravated by alcoholism.

9/10

I saw Bergman's "Through a Glass Darkly" and looked at the following to try to make sense of it:

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/gr...ss-darkly-1961
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through...kly_%28film%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia

What I understand is Karin is believed by the three members of her family who are with her to be suffering from some mental illness and there is at least one doctor who diagnosed her with something. Her behavior estranges her from the three males currently with her.

(1) She refuses to have sex with her husband, Martin.
(2) She sexually teases her brother, Minus.
(3) She looks for reasons to justify a feeling of grievance against her father, David, who's wife, her mother, died of some mental illness.

If one views God as a male, which Karin does, we could add a fourth male to the set. She thinks she hears God in a closet and demands that he show himself. The door opens and she screams. She claims that God is a spider wanting to have sex with her. The fact that she has this experience makes me think she is not totally imagining this. Everyone does see the door open.

She agrees to be taken to a hospital. It is like an admission of her failure to establish relationship.

Of all the characters, her father seems to understand best what is going on. He recently attempted suicide, so his mental health may be in doubt as well, but at the moment he does not seem to want anything from Karin except to understand and perhaps write about her illness to further his understanding. This acceptance gives him an edge. He is also blamed by the other three for not being around, for writing in his journal, for writing novels, for giving them gifts they devalue. He doesn't blame anyone. He becomes a sort of God-figure for his son Minus when he explains to Minus how he approaches Karin at the end. Minus is surprised that his father spoke to him. What should have really surprised Minus is this is the first time Minus actually listened to him without judgement.

Anyway, that's what I found out about the movie and my current views of it. I originally saw it when I was an undergraduate as part of some watered-down "existentialist" course to fulfill some cultural requirement for graduation.

I'm pretty sure Minus and Karin have sex in some form in the boat when they are alone together; also, speaking of incest...

Saraband - Ingmar Bergman

So I'm correct in thinking that Karin and Henrik are involved in some sort of very bizarre incestual relationship right? My reasons for believing this are, they sleep in the same bed, she takes her top off right in front of him before going to bed and there's a very un father-daughter like kiss which takes place around two thirds of the way through the film. I read that Bergman was somewhat preoccupied with incest and it crops up in a few of his other movies so I think it's an open and shut case. All this considered I actually liked Henrik (more than Johan at least) and felt pretty bad for him.

I liked how the movie ended especially, with the suicide attempt and Marianne looking at the photographs. The audience is left unaware of what is going to happen to Henrik, Karin, Johan, etc next, but it almost definitely won't be good. Bergman was 86 when he made the movie and I think it's important to know that before watching the film.

10/10

I think Minus tried to kiss his sister, Karin, but she rejected the kiss. Robert Ebert mentioned incest also, but I don't think that occurred.

I had two reasons for referencing someone like Ebert. I wanted to know what I missed that I could look for the next time I saw the movie and I wanted to look for divergence between Ebert's description and what I actually saw. Ebert would be presenting an authoritative version that might need to be rejected in part.

One of the divergences is that Ebert assumed Karin was schizophrenic. I think it is more interesting to see her as not. Her brother admitted that he did not think she was mentally ill and neither did she. Most important, the closet door clearly opened making one wonder if what she was experiencing was a delusion or not.

Yeh but Karin and Minus both act very strangely after the boat scene. Karin suggests that something serious has happened, starts crying and laments what she has 'done' to Minus; and later when David calls Minus to talk to him he's running around and hiding (lol, the scene was I think, unitentionally, humorous). It could be what you think though, it's ambiguous.

As for the door, a helicoptor goes by the house when it opens, maybe it just blows open.

The helicopter might have opened the door. I will watch the movie again to see if that was possible.

The pattern I see is Karin's successful rejection of sexual advances. That is why I don't think she and Minus actually had an incestuous relationship. Even the rejection of the present her father gave her seemed to fit as a rejection of a sexual advance. It seemed to me that Karin was in control throughout from the very first where she gets her way to the end where she wants to go back to the hospital.

The linking of sex with spirituality is however key. I think that may have been Bergman's intent, but I do not know enough about him. I will probably have to watch some of the other films, especially, Winter Light and The Silence.

Yeh possibly, I didn't consider the repeated rejections of sexual advances, but now that you mention it, it strikes me as pretty relevant. Karin won't have sex with her husband while she is 'ill' and she rejects God himself!

Also regarding the door opening. Once I was discussing Kafka online with someone who drew a humorous diagram or graph in paint which plotted characters in The Metamorphosis alongside their level of 'buggyness' and was accompanied with the argument that Kafka envisioned a world in which human life could be explained through the binaries of 'buggy' and 'not buggy' and considering this he stressed the possibility that really Gregor's parents are the ones who woke up changed... who woke up less buggy. It was defintely a joke, sort of a stab at literary criticism in general and Kafka analysis in particular. How that relates to the door, well... okay.

So I think the general interpretation of Through a Glass Darkly is the more literal one, that Karin has schizophrenia or something like schizophrenia and is uncurable. However your suggestion that there is no illness would mean what? Well that she's suffering from life? Or a spiritual strugglers? That makes a lot of sense to me given Bergmans oeuvre and the themes he chooses to tackle repeatedly in his films. He touches on mental illness a lot, but not nearly as much as he contemplates the silence of God, or (damn this word) existentialism, and you can also assume perhaps that mental illness isn't just mental illness when it crops up in his movies. So really then Karin is just suffering from a spiritual crisis of a much stronger magnitude than anyone else, but as you can see, every character is struggling in their own way and perhaps it's only a matter of degree separating Karin from everyone else instead of Karin being 'sick' and others being 'well'.

That could explain why everyone sees the door open at the same time becsuse every character is sick in the same way as Karin is, but maybe it's just not as pronounced, or they don't notice it all the time.

The door is opened by the spider god so that he can rape Karin. It is also blown open by the helicopter coming to the island so that she can be forcibly committed to an institution. The silhouette of the helicopter is the image of the spider god coming for her. It is also the thing itself. They are analogous, but they are the same thing (Karin's her mind, and in the reality of the film). That is the power and horror of the scene. She has been waiting for God to come and redeem her from the schizophrenia that she inherited from her mother and that had led her to seduce her childish and needy brother. But instead of the forgiving and redeeming God she seeks, she gets a god of sickness, the spider god, an image Bergman takes from Nietzsche's critique of the Christian God in The Anti-Christ.

Woah, maybe I'll go rewatch it right now.

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Originally Posted by Pompey Bum

The door is opened by the spider god so that he can rape her. It is also blown open by the helicopter so that she can be forcibly committed to an institution. The shadow of the helicopter is the image of the spider god coming for her. It is also the helicopter itself coming for her. They are analogous, but they are also the same thing. That is the power and horror of the scene. Karin has been waiting for God to come and redeem her from the schizophrenia that she inherited from her mother and that led her to seduce her childish and needy brother. But instead of the forgiving and redeeming God she seeks, she gets a god of sickness, the spider god, an image Bergman takes from Nietzsche's critique of the Christian God in The Anti-Christ.

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I searched and found one reference to "spider" in Nietzsche's The AntiChrist: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/19322/pg19322.txt

"the priest himself is seen as he actually is--as the most dangerous form of parasite, as the venomous spider of creation...."

I'll have to watch this again to see how the helicopter and its shadow are presented.

She perceived the spider as wanting to have sex with her, but I don't think she saw it as attempting rape. I will have to pay attention to that as well. Also, at one point she agreed to go to the hospital. However, there is the scene where she is given a drug to calm her after the spider incident. I will have to see to what extent she is forced to go to the hospital.