I'd give it about a 6/10 for storyline etc, but the 3D... See it in 3D - I did and it definately went up to bout an 8/10 :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Lynne50
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I'd give it about a 6/10 for storyline etc, but the 3D... See it in 3D - I did and it definately went up to bout an 8/10 :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Lynne50
I enjoyed the new Sherlock Holmes - I like mysteries, and it's hard to do a film mystery that's compelling more than once with an ensemble of potential villains, so I suspect that having the villain be apparent from the beginning was arguably one of the most sensible approaches to take. Granted, there are elements of predictability, but I feel the film gets points for being well-acted, well-researched, and well-scored (in my opinion). 8/10.
The actual last movie I saw in theatres was Date Night, with Steve Carell and Tina Fey. A legitimate way to kill some time - not a particularly unique movie, but not the mindless date drivel the title might suggest. It's closer to a screwball comedy than a chick flick. 5/10.
District 9 --
Really, really liked it 8/10. How did this movie not get more acclaim last year? Well, maybe it did; I'm so out of the loop with this stuff. But if you want a unique sci-fi story that is well worth your time, check out this movie.
!!!!!! The novel is much better; it's even more political. :lol: But seriously, I can totally understand that someone going into Watchmen looking for a traditional superhero story (like Iron Man) would be disappointed. Watchmen is political, sexualized, polemic. . .yep.Quote:
Originally Posted by BienvenuJDC
The Battle of Algiers. 10/10
Fight Club - Rimbaud (litnet member, not writer lol) has been demanding that I watch this film forever. Now I have. Here's to you Rimbaud.
It is not very often that big-budget mainstream films are allowed or even dare to be as daring, stylish, violent and yes, outrageous as Fight Club. This film has influenced a whole decade of mainstream films. From Wanted to Secret Window to Saw, and yet it stands high above all of the rest of the copycats.
Fincher's style is extravigant, stylish and proudly show-off all of the money spent on the visual effects. And yet it works. Some of the images in this film have become semi-iconic and with good reason. Very few films in the 90's had as great an atmosphere as Fight Club. We open the film and there's an unnamed narrator who suffers from insomia, he's at work, the office mechanically moves around. And then on the screen for about half a second something flashes. It doesn't entirely matter what it is, but it tells the viewer that this is no ordinary film and that its level of subjectivity is to be great.
Hell just the begining premise would make a great film; the narrator, so detached from life and humanity that he cannot sleep, begins frequenting help-centers for people with diseases and pose as one of the many crying men with diseases like testicular cancer. These early scenes are cruelly and darkly funny. We see a man with giant breasts crying over the fact that he had his testicals cut off. This is terrible and yet it is a helplessly funny situation for the narrator.
These early scenes present a sense of brauva black comedy which is both daring, funny and heartless all at the same time.
Then Brad Pitt comes along and serves as a kind of bad-*** philosopher for our narrator who has sunk so low as to be faking to be a dying man just so that he can feel something. Pitt's ideas start off as somewhere between Nietzsche and Baudrillard but then as the movie progresses go into disturbing places to somewhere like the society Orwell presented in Animal Farm. In fact, I'm about certain that many of the scenes in the latter half of the film are hommages to Animal Farm.
Because Fincher is a director with such respect for detail and atmosphere, we (or at least me) are carried all the way through and begin to believe the more outrageous the story gets the more funny it is. And it is true. There seems to be a consistent undertone of balls being cut off and there is this one pay-off scene well near the climax in which the film is at its darkest point and yet provides a very weird and very hilarious comic relief that isn't really relief but just makes you more anxious and confused (this is not entirely a negative thing).
And then there are the fighting scenes which boarder on macho porn (to use Ebert's term). They are brutal and bloody and yet also liberating. The men go out and knock the **** out of each other, the others cheer on, and then they hug after being all bloodied up. The level of instinct and collective emotion is comparable to a daily religious experience for the men.
Pitt's character begins as a rebellious and yet inspiring character, despite his own pathology and masochism. His soliloquey's criticizing consumerist society (no matter how constructed the speeches might feel) are right on target. It is only once Fincher seems to purposely drive Pitt beyond the pale does he become alienating for both the viewer and the narrator.
A lot of the films works. The beginning undoubtedly. The fight scenes, yes. The scenes when Pitt and Norton (the narrator) live together in what is undertoned as a homoerotic relationship also with some Oedipal tones, yes. Even as the film becomes much darker and themes of Stalinist communism begin to come into play, yes if you want. But there is one surprise near the end, a twist, that just had me thinking "say it ain't so Joe".
After that point the film inter-changed between a brilliant practice in surrealist humour and just plain silly. Now like I said, Fincher is above making a truly silly and outrageous film and Fight Club is so original that to call it silly or outrageous is undeserved, but it is certainly not a perfect film. Fight Club no matter what its flaws is above all an experience. 7/10
*Suggestion for first-time viewers of this film: View this film as a very serious film on the edge of total comedy.
I have to watch all the new rentals that come out because of my job. Here's what I had this week:
Peacock - 4/10. It was filmed well, but by the end it honestly creeped me out.
The Lovely Bones - 5/10. They glossed right over the whole "brutal rape" part, which I've always thought is a slap in the face to rape victims. They didn't follow her sister very much, and the script was pretty cliche and sappy. Her heaven was pretty though... very liquid.
New York, I Love You - 6/10. This one is hard to rate, because it was a film of about twelve stories that took place in New York and a couple of them were quite good, a couple sucked, and the rest were in the middle. Out of all of the ones that I watched this week, this one was the only one worth watching.
Including the ones that go in the vault?? :eek2:Quote:
Originally Posted by JuniperWoolf
Omg serious?!?!? YOU have the GREATEST job in the world.Quote:
Originally Posted by JuniperWoolf
^Seconded. I'm jealous.
Haha, no but my manager does because he has to make sure that there's nothing illegal on them (he's found quite a bit of bestiality, actually).Quote:
Originally Posted by Basil
And yeah, my job is sweet. :p
All porn in Canada is supposed to have that little sticker that says it's been approved by the censors. Because Canadian law forbids bestiality, pedophilia, simulated rape, and violence in porn.Quote:
Originally Posted by JuniperWoolf
My brother used to work for a distributor here in Montreal and it was a big hassle for all the porn produced in the US to be approved for sale in Canada.
Omg I seriously thought that you had said "he's quite fond of bestiality" so I was like WTF?!Quote:
Originally Posted by JuniperWoolf
:lol:
I'm trying to discipline myself by keeping my reivews brief. Here it goes:
World's Greatest Dad - My sister was watching this, I saw Robin Williams in it and despite the fact that I am a great fan of his stand-up comedic work, one out of every five films he's done I've disliked (yes Mrs.Doubtfire is totally one of them). That said, he has a magnificent edge for dark comedies and this film is perfect for him, as he has proven himself on those uncommon but special occasions to be just as good a comedic actor as a dramatic one.
Despite the misleading and unlikable title, this mercilessly dark satire about a divorced father who lives with his distinctively child-from-hell teenager son who is (even for a fifteen year old) grossly obsessed with sex and is a compulsive erotic asphyxiate.
I must first give a great bravo to Daryl Sabara who plays the piece of **** son with an intensity and disturbingness rarely seen in mainstream films. This kid clearly has major problems, as evidenced by his semi-sociopathy, his utter misogyny among many things.
But everything changes when the father finds his son dead as a result of accidental suffocation while masturbating, the father out of shame of people knowing the perversity of his son, discards of all of the evidence to make it look like a suicide and from then on literatley re-creates the memory of his son into a lonley, confused and yet greatly intelligent young man.
From this point on the film goes into a dark satire on not only our obsessions with the memories of the deceased, but also our willingness to project the ideal unto reality.
The film has the potential for a truly great film but meanders here and there, making unnecessary moments to the point that by the end of the film everything seems too lopsided. Indeed it has moments of a true gem, but the disturbing realism of the first half is contrasted too heavily with the satire of the second and comes out uneven.
Both ways this is a fine film, deserving to be seen merely for the first act. 7/10
Barry Lyndon - The best three hours you can spend at the movies. A great and unique film by Stanley Kubrick which is as eloquently satirical as it is sad and sublime. A poetic masterpiece that flows like music and the picturesque images presented in just about every shot. 10/10
I just got home from watching a Canadian independent film about LARPing called Wild Hunt. It was a pretty decent movie, an interesting premise and I enjoyed it. The movie will probably be seen by only a handful of people though lol.
Damnation - This is as terrifying and dark a film about modern industrial life as ever I did see. Its merciless and grotesque landscape replicates nothing less than a Dantesque Hell. Dreary and desolate the landscape it. Almost every shot of this film is filled with an atmosphere of the hopelessness. And yet there live people under this fog and music too. It is all the more terrifying. There is a certain scene in this film in which two of its main chatacters are making love to the background of the noise of industry, and it is as grotesque and mechanical a sex scene as ever I have seen.
Tarr's camera slowly pans the texture of this hell. All seem to be stuck there, as if in an endless time continuum. Dogs wander the streets, scavengers for scraps of food. But worse, men sit and discover how empty the time is.
Under this physical landscape is something much worse and more nihilistic. It's main character Karrer, obsessed with memories of his past lover, gradually comes to the realization of how empty his life and everything around him is.
There is a certain scene here in which a man tap dances in a puddle of water. This isn't joy, it is as terrifying a mechanicality as the factory machines. 9/10
Now on a lighter note I am going to examine two recent mainstream comedies and examine why one works and one doesn't.
Pinnapple Express - Okay this film has every reason not to work. It's immature, has a lot of action scenes, is ridiculously absurd and is pretty much all about two stoners freaking out as they run away from a bunch of drug lords. Not only that but it is also one of the funniest comedies I've seen for a long time. James Franco's performance is pitch perfect as the one of the stoners (who's also a pot dealer) and the script which indulges in Beckettian digression constantly, makes use of the most immature, absurd and obscene situations and makes them totally ****ing hilarious. 8.5/10
Step Brothers - I'm willing to submit and say that Pineapple Express most likely has just as much violence and obscene language (though definitley not drug content, that's for sure lol) as Step Brothers, and yet one of them is deemed to be a classic while another is somewhere next to an utterly depressing experience.
So what is it that makes Step Brothers different from the brilliance of Pineapple Express? Well it's not that the word "****" is said hundreds of times in both movies, but because one of them was approached and done in a well thought-out and funny way. The script of Step Brothers pretty much just sounds like a bunch of wildly immature men got together and wrote down as many obscenities as they could and put them into violent situations.
It's hard to explain without having seen the movies side by side but because of the context and situation that memorable phrases from Pineapple Express like "it smells like God's vagina" or "you're as high as a ****ing kite" which make them so funny. Step Brothers just throws pointless and unfunny stuff at you that may be amusing to a twelve year old and that's about it. That said Step Brothers does have its laugh out loud moments (the scene when they make a bunk-bed) but other than that it is nothing more than a cruel and mean-spirited comedy. 3/10
Being John Malkovitch - My God, Charlie Kauffman I think has very well proven himself to be the first writer auteur we've had in a long time. Never before have so many films have so consistently had so much in common even if they were directed by different people, because in reality all of these great films are Kauffman films.
Being John Malkovitch is Kauffman's first success and is a moving, absurd, funny, sad, weird and beautiful film about three lonely souls whose lives are changed once they find a portal into the head of John Malkovitch in a filing room where they work on the 7 1/2 floor. Soon enough they start a business selling 15 minutes into Malkovitch's brain for $200.
This movie has so many brilliant ideas which come in layer after layer, though despite that, it is never overwhelming.
What this film is about is our sense of a longing for completeness, for otherness, for love and for eternity. What many of the characters do in this film are terribly wrong, but in some very absurd way in this alternate universe we can understand their human needs. There is a great performance in here by Cameron Diaz (with an exceptionally modest physical appearence) who discovers that she wants to be a transexual after discovering what it is like to have sex with a woman whilst inside Malkovitch's head. The scene of this realization (filmed almost entirely through the POV of Malkovitch/Diaz) is frankly the most beautiful, weird and moving of the whole film.
Then there's Malkovitch himself who took considerable guts to star in the film, with even more guts by Kauffman to write a script about people traveling inside a renouned actor's head.
Kauffman is truly the wonder-boy of today's cinema. His films are beyond description. They can be deleriously funny and sad in the very same moments, fantastical and yet truthful, satirical and yet moving. And more than anything, Kauffman is a philosopher of the human spirit. 9.5/10