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

[formality hater]

Sleepy Hollow
3/10

There was nothing new about it but was good for killing time.

[Shalot]

I saw Zombieland - it was much better than I thought it was going to be.

I also watched Sex Drive and Ms. March...these were my husband's choices. They were both pretty stupid.

[Silverblue]

"Dressed to kill" by B. de Palma.... not his best but there are some nice moments.

[DanielBenoit]

The Birth of a Nation - Well, after a few weeks of being away from the silver screen, I decided to return for a brief period of time yesterday to re-watch D.W. Griffith's controversial and influencial epic masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation. It's somewhat funny what a great contradiction this movie is, for right up to the hour and thirty minute mark, the film is a masterpiece of its time and a powerful work of art, making the famous James Agee quote not too far-fethced: "[D.W. Griffith] achieved what no other known man has achieved. To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence, coordination and first eloquence of language; the birth of an art: and to realize that this is all the work of one man." Oh how these words ring true in the esquisitley epic first half of this film, even with its racial undertones (which become extreme overtones in the second half). The first half of the film, taking place in the south before and during the Civil War in which two families from opposite sides befriend and fight each other in war. As almost any cinemaphile knows, this film was revolutionary in its filming techniques and along with Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, virtually defined film grammer. There are some moments of such mastery and such historicity, such as the infamous battlefield charge sequence, which, despite being filmed almost a century ago, is unlike anything I've ever seen. There is also a particular shot on the eve of the war in which many of the characters are in a dance hall, and the camera looms out from the middle of the floor into a great long dancing crane shot. To the average viewer this shot is nothing very special, but to one who knows the near-impossibility of a shot with that movement and held that long with those heavy primitive cameras, one cannot help but be left in awe.

Not only is the technique masterful, but one actually cares for the characters, and there is a sense of total epiphany when a wounded confederate soldier coincidentially meets the girl whom he's been in love with for so many years, and yet has only seen her picture.

All of this, all of this supreme work is thrown away exactly at the hour and a half mark in which the narrative turns to the Reconstruction era in which Griffith makes one of the most extreme perversions of history and paints the south as a landscape terrorized by newly freed slaves. At this point the tone of the film changes completely. From great and sophisticated historical epic, to close-to-unbearable racial slur in the style of a vile minstrel show. We go from supreme epic and historical events, such as the masterfully directed and edited re-visioning of the night Lincoln was killed, to a disguising anti-abolitionist vaudeville. The characters which I so cared for in the first part, I hate in the second for there racial intolerance, portrayed heroically by Griffith. More sickening than anything else, is that African Americans are portrayed as friendly helpless teddy bears when slaves, and yet turn into savage sexually-charged animals when free. The portrayals are almost sickening. I find it funny how Griffith didn't use a single black actor in the film, instead putting white actors in blackface, for what self-respecting African American would reduce himself to such a sick film?

The first time I saw this film, I was able to watch it all the way through. That may be because I was a little indifferent towards the first half, and then paradoxically was able to tolerate the second half. But on this viewing, after being so awed by the supreme art of the first half, it felt like a spit in the face to watch the sickeningly amateurish and dull second half, which admittingly did have some of the technical mastery the first half did, but whose content was so immature, so disguising, that it just seeped into the art of the film and lowered it down into a sick piece of white supremacy. Eventually, the sickening racism became so unbearable and made me feel so unclean, that I just had to turn it off for the sake of my stomach. This is the most racist film I have ever seen.

But what is The Birth of a Nation today? Was Griffith's choice in cutting the vile latter half of the film in its re-release a good idea? Well no, because the film is what it is, and to hide what is already in it is just an act of dishonesty. But what are we to make of a film like this today? Yes the first half alone ranks it among one of the greatest films ever made, but the second half tugs it down to a work of out-dated silent cinema. If the second half was the film on its own, I would gladly call it one of the worst films I had ever seen. But what of it? Battleship Potemkin and October are far more than bearable and are masterpieces I enjoy watching again and again, despite the fact that they are works of Soviet propiganda. Why are these films tolerable? Because of the way they are directed. Because of the fact that if we treat them as "movies" they become supreme and powerful works of art. But Griffith's film, for my tastes that is, is far too explicit in its bigotry to be bearable, it openly embraces racism and portrays the Klu-Klux-Klan as cinematic heros. The thing that divides the mastery of Griffith's film and Eisenstein's propaganda pieces is that the immorality of the work is so explicitly there, that it destroys any merits the films may have. Whilst watching Battleship Potemkin one isn't all that much aware that one is watching a film displaying the heroism of Leninism in so much as we are thinking "what a great and powerful film this is!" The Birth of a Nation brings itself down to the level of the ideas it expresses, and thus does not hide its sins. 5/10

[DanielBenoit]

Also, here's one of Godard's best films, a cinematic poem of post-WWII.

Short Film

[Pryderi Agni]

Ultraviolet: 8/10.

Milla Jovovich is superb, both as kick-*** assassin babe and as caring mother.

[manolia]

I watched "Shutter island" yesterday at the theater. Didn't like it much. I have seen this plot so many times. I also think it lacked atmosphere.
However there was some good acting.

[sixsmith]

I watched "Shutter island" yesterday at the theater. Didn't like it much. I have seen this plot so many times. I also think it lacked atmosphere.
However there was some good acting.

I disagree. Thought it was a very fine noir horror/thriller. 8/10.

[Jackiemaggio]

I saw "The Hurt Locker" yesterday, I thought it was really good actually. 8/10 I'd say.

[byquist]

"Bella" -- Rotten Tomatoes gives it 45% - insane. This is a really fine film -- only about 4-5 plots/themes; characters with real problems. Very subtle film, very sensitive. Apparently, RT reviewers show that they have lost the ability to feel anything.

[Mariner]

Hopefully my opinion of the film didn't bias you

Pulp Fiction! Pulp Fiction mademmoiselle!

My favorite movie! It's the best.


I just watched The Hangover. I saw it on the big screen but it was just as funny the second time around. Great story, great acting, just all-around funny, fresh, and original. I couldn't ask for a better comedy. 9/10

[DanielBenoit]

I just recently re-watched Casablanca for maybe the millionth time. Here's a review I posted a while back and one that I'm quite proud of.

Casablanca. Oh how those syllables seem to echo throughout the collective memory of film audiences. Its lines, phrases and characters have become virtually commonplace and this work of art is just as likely to settle into the collective unconscious of Western civilization just as Hamlet or The Sistine Chapel has. Let's admit it, this is one of the most popular movies of all time, so popular and so well loved, that it has become almost a cliche to call it the greatest film ever made. Every filmgoer who has seen it, loves it, and we all know that it is one of the three or four greatest films ever made, what's the point of even stating something that is common knowledge?

But Casablanca is more than just some great film. It's passion and love is unlike anything ever made in Hollywood, or anywhere for that matter, all thanks to the two immortal performances of two immortal actors, backed up by probably the finest cast of all time along with The Godfather and Citizen Kane. Every inch of this film is perfect.

I probably won't even bother with a synopsis because this film is like a piece of music that we've all heard and look upon with memory. It's like whistling the opening chords of Beethoven's 5th, it resonates inside every filmgoers head.

Now I could waste an entire review saying how great everything about it is, when I can just say what everyone else has said in a single sentence: This is a perfect film, perfect script, perfect acting, perfect atmosphere. Done.

There are just so many characters to love, down to the corrupt French police offical Captian Renault, who's probably the most lovable. His subtle bisexuality and amorality is so amusing that he seems to steal every non-serious scene in the movie. Bergmen and Bogart's performances are both great, and probably the greatest to ever be found in a Hollywood romance, or any film for that matter. Sam is the wonderfully charming piano player, who, despite his minor performance, made Casablanca what it was with the perfect pitch of jazzy music. Paul Henried as the heroic Victor Laszlo is probably the most stiff romantic hero of all time, but who's banality sets just the right tone so that his political heroism doesn't outshine the far more interesting and troubled Rick.

But what is it that draws us to it? Why is it so well loved? It is, in my opinion, along with Singing in the Rain, the greatest thing Hollywood has ever produced. Now of course Hollywood produced Citizen Kane and The Third Man, but those were films made by directors more free from the constraints of the studio system. They are works by their directors; Casablanca is not. It is a purely studio production if there ever was one, and it is an achievement on their part.

What I must say, upon many viewings from over the years, the explanaition of Casablanca's effect sinks in with time. The movie is about time and memory, and the love which seems to go along with it. Observe the nostaligc flashbacks of Paris and the end result; what we see is love, innocence and joy, pitted against the modern world, however can two lovers keep their innocence in a bloodstained world, seems to be what the film asks. Out of this comes Rick's despiar; nostaliga, apathy, memory. And yet, how beautiful it is, that through Paris to Casablanca, that we still hear Sam play "As Time Goes By", strumming the keys as if winding a clock. 10/10


Also, I just re-watched Persona for the third time and still feel as if I'm not worthy enough to review such a great and mysterious film. If anything it is a masterpiece of cryptic modernism in film. One of the all time greats, and Bergman's finest.

Speaking of Bergman (the Swedish director not the actress, lol), here's a review that I attempted to write when I first saw Cries and Whispers. It was just too hard for me to go on, because even words do injustice to the film and trivialize it.

However, I did finish it, but it is terribly unorganized and not one of my best at all:

Clocks tick away in a silent house in early morning. A women awakes in great pain. We can almost hear the sounds of her insides. She takes a glass of water and it harshly goes down.


Cries and Whispers - Taking place at the turn-of-the-century this film inhibits the most deepest, darkest and most intense array of human emotion between three sisters. Each one seems to have done little with their life, and have begun to loathe themselves for it. One of them is in the final stages of cancer, leading to the most painful death scene I have ever seen. We can hear sounds from her stomach, her breathing becomes intensely acute and her voice sounds animalistic and humanly unrecognizable. Ingmar Bergman presents death, in contrast to his most famous masterpiece The Seventh Seal, not in an abstract or theatrical way, but in a cruelly physical and naturalistic way. He presents it as the death of the body. The sister's inevidible death forces us to turn to the other two sisters, as well as the servant as they prepare the funeral.

Flashbacks are shown of the other two sister's life. The two flashbacks further present the extremes of human emotion and how these two women became who they are today. This film isn't a decent into despair, in so much as it is an atmosphere of despair, that is, these induviduals are already wounded in one way or another.

But in a film so filled with narcissism, cruelty and coldness from its characters, there is the greatest love to be found in the servant Ana, who has been treated as a sister and is the one who comes to the dying sister's side when she is screaming in pain and lays her next to her breast like a mother calming her sick child. Bergman films this like a Reinissance painter, so spiritually, so painfully. There is one particular shot in here of Ana holding the dying sister that is so powerful and so heartbreaking, that it is without a doubt one the best in all of cinema.

The two sisters don't know how to express emotion, and in a scene of the most deepest and stunning emotional intensity that the cinema has ever seen (you will know it when you see it, for it is beyond words) their most deepest personal insecurities and insticts all come out.

In the end, what Bergman presents in the final heartbreakingly beautiful scene, is that life is dark, short, tortuous, deceptive, indifferent and infinitley cruel. But there are those moments, just those little moments of joy, that make it all worth it. To quote Dostoyevsky; "My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for one man's life?"

[BienvenuJDC]

Knowing with Nicholas Cage
Rather disappointing...predictable ending.

4/10 (and I'm being generous)

[TheFifthElement]

District 9

10/10 - brilliant, brilliant movie.

[paradoxical]

Gran Torino - 9/10

Gripping storyline and great performance by Clint Eastwood.