MOVIES!

o yeah i should have added royal tenenbaums - quit after 10 minutes what is this

/grandma

scott walker: 30 century man (dope)

and really surprising considering his rep. he seems like such a nice, decent dude and one who is very forthright about his career.

whoa milton thx 4 fassbinder

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll - Andy Serkis is an ugly bugger. Some good performances (I liked the flashback scenes with Ray Winstone as Ian Dury's Dad, and the girl playing Dury's mistress was cute), but this film didn't work. Not a Telstar like disaster, but scrappy as hell.

Adventureland - Oh good another awkward indie dweeb meets more sexually confident, cool but kooky girl flick. Oddly unsympathetic lead character. A few lols. Not hateful like Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist.

Wolfman - Not quite as bad as I'd feared, not as good as I'd secretly hoped. Watchable. Hopkins phones it in and is the best thing in it. Sounded like they autotuned the Awooos as well. Inert.

Daybreakers - Can't remember. A bit shit.

Avatar - Like a kid's Saturday morning cartoon made with bleeding-edge technology and a titanic load of money. Every bit as good/bad as that sounds.

Up In the Air - Don't get the hate, but thought this was, ultimately, just a bit ho-hum. Though she had a more unsympathetic role, I liked Anna Kendrick more than Vera Farmiga. Clooney was Clooney.

The New Barbarians - A cautionary tale: A drunken evening adding titles to my Lovefilm high priority list results in them sending me this. Which I last watched back in the early days of VHS rental - golden years. As with me, time has not been kind to the Italian-made b-movie, set in a post-Mad Max apocalypse in the far flung year 2019 ("the Earth has died - it raped itself"). Thrilling 30mph chases in rickerty future-cars! So bad it's actually... just bad. Saying that, it's not often you get a sci-fi film where the bad guy actually sodomises the good guy. It may have happened in Attack of the Clones though, can't remember.

Gamer (ouchy contradictions sink the kitsch fun, falls all over itself to be very *now* about the net and gaming)
Pontypool (pretentious but I really loved it, end cops out but *amazing* weirdness inside, Trojan horse of a fake zombie movie)
Silk Stockings (kinda Oedipal and eww to see a 57 year old Fred Astaire making out with Cyd Charisse here, tbh)
I Know Where I'm Going! (Powell Pressburger comedy, weird that a body double was used for every outdoor shot for the male lead- good fun)
Sunset Boulevard (watched on British Airways flight, hadn't seen it in forever, duh great)

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done - (much weirder than 'Bad Lieutenant poc:no', if a lot more self-conscious / pretentious. much more Herzog-per-second, but it's also a weird Lynch-Herzog mashup, especially with Grace Zabriskie walking around and being incredible every second she's on the screen. second half is a little auto-pilot but if you like Herzog you won't mind much. in hindsight his Bad Lieutenant actually comes off as the stranger film, because the occasional gator-cam and spontaneous shaving moments pop out at you more)

man i just watched the special-features from the frost/nixon film, with the actors, directors and production crew heaping praise on frank langella as nixon. i know langella got equal praise for his stage portrayal of nixon in the frost/nixon play.

i don't get it. i understand that he wasn't going for a mere impersonation of nixon, and i'm glad he didn't. but langella played nixon like a doddering, kindly grandfather, a portrayal that's worlds-away from the ruthless, calculating, openly-hardman political operator that nixon was. and that isn't just an overall assessment; you can see it in the actual frost/nixon interviews.

i mean, it's fine to locate the humanity in a villain-like historical character, but i think langella missed the mark in accurately drawing-out nixon's humanity (what there was of it) in the context of the real historical figure.

The Loves Of Sumako The Actress (Not my fave ever Mizoguchi though still excellent. Kinuyo Tanaka is the GOAT)
Le Voleur (Beautiful but a little overlong Malle period piece with Belmondo as an 1890s Parisian burglar/thief. Great cast.)
Kapurush ( Satyajit Ray. Not sure about this one - may be my least fave by Ray so far but need to watch again.)
The Voice Of the Moon (Fellini's last film. Kinda restrained yet lovely. Didn't mind Benigni in this.)

berlinale special:

Howl: was dreading a hollywood biopic of a writer/poem i don't really like/get, but it was actually very enjoyable. franco was really, really great, wonderfully charismatic. animation that forms a big part of the poetry reading looked kind of cheap at first but turns out to pretty effective. recommended.

Killer Inside Me: awful, childish and morally idiotic film that presents sexual violence as welcome and humorous. taleban recruitment advert. the world is a worse place with this film in it. unlike coen stuff, which it's initially reminiscent of and not just because of the setting, it actually deserves the nihilist tag, but it is also very very stupid. many walk outs. several boos. casey affleck fantastic as a psychopath, for what it's worth, although the character is totally empty.

Making The Boys: solid doc about the play/film The Boys in The Room. Didn't know much about that or the debate surrounding it beforehand, so much of it perhaps lost on me.

Killer Inside Me: awful, childish and morally idiotic film that presents sexual violence as welcome and humorous. taleban recruitment advert. the world is a worse place with this film in it. unlike coen stuff, which it's initially reminiscent of and not just because of the setting, it actually deserves the nihilist tag, but it is also very very stupid. many walk outs. several boos. casey affleck fantastic as a psychopath, for what it's worth, although the character is totally empty.

i've been hating on winterbottom for years and although he's done a few decent films, he really is a tool. just really thick.

the worst thing is this film is going to get an awful lot of attention because in addition to being "problematic" in a media-friendly and no doubt intentional way, it's got an accessible plot (not conceptual, totally mainstream-audience-friendly in that sense) and a star lead cast (and solid ensemble) who turn in good to great performances. but it's a fucking retarded, thoughtless film that makes the world a dumber place : (

but it's a fucking retarded, thoughtless film that makes the world a dumber place

we have a lot of these ;_;

ay. like 'the white ribbon'.

very long rough cut trailer for festivals/distributors here btw: http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/article/promo-trailer-for-winterbottoms-the-killer-inside-me

i only watched the first couple of minutes up to the first sex scene because i got the impression spoilers we coming, so beware if that sort of thing bothers you.

stoked for the thread though.

fragments (aka winged creatures) - bullshit. seems to be a 'crash' ripoff, but never having seen all of 'crash' i can't attest to that. it's about what happens to various folks who survive a shooting in a diner. features another bizarre forest whitaker performance. avoid like the plague.

into great silence - dope documentary about monks at a monastery in the french alps

that's a beautiful movie

taking of pelham 123 (2009) - saw it two hours ago, forgot already. but not that bad.

City Of Pirates - Raul Ruiz is a god among men.
Three Lives And Only One Death - ditto
Inglourious Bastards - Even better the second time around.

caek, do you like Jim Thompson books, or is the problem Winterbottom?

I was gonna ask the same thing. I remember Killer Inside Me as being a pretty good read ... don't recall much sex stuff in it specifically, although I can imagine if some of Thompson's 1950s sensibilities were put onscreen verbatim it could be trouble. (There's one pretty fucked up sex scene in "The Alcoholics" that essentially would be "presenting sexual violence as welcome and humorous" if you filmed it)

going to see Alice in Wonderland tomorrow morning!

caek, do you like Jim Thompson books, or is the problem Winterbottom?

― Fusty Moralizer (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, February 24, 2010 5:42 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I haven't read any Jim Thompson, so I couldn't say whose fault the film is. I did see the Winterbottom quote saying he just shot the line "her face looked like hamburger meat" as written.

i'm paraphrasing him innacurately there. here's where i read that: http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/2010/02/23/berlinale_60_day_nine_en_familie_the_killer_inside_me_rock_hudson_-_dark_an/.

Affleck’s lack of affect (rhyme intentional) works fine for me, but the tone of the movie doesn’t. And I question my response to the beating scenes. I’m generally a fan of violence in movies – where it belongs, as opposed to real life – but I never got around to seeing Antichrist last year, having never missed a Lars von Trier movie before, even after years of disappointment. Maybe I’m getting soft. Even though I know that the scenes are completely justified by what’s in the book (Winterbottom said, defensively, at a q’n’a in Sundance that one of the women was described by Thompson as having a “face like hamburger meat”), it’s a question of degree. When you read, of course, you make up your own images, and don’t pause to savor a woman’s beating for minutes. Or anyway I don’t. (At the end of the day, when I run across this in my bedtime reading of The Talented Miss Highsmith in reference to Mickey Spillane – “I always say never hit a woman when you can kick her” – it brings the uneasy question up all over again.)

"don't recall much sex stuff in it specifically"

You've forgotten then. There is plenty.

Preview looks like the book scene for scene, word for word, which could be a good or bad thing depending.

"casey affleck fantastic as a psychopath, for what it's worth, although the character is totally empty."

Sort of missing the point, I think.

i didn't say it was a bad thing that the character was empty

It is a very nihilistic book btw and the violence in it is quite often grisly and occassionally played for "laughs" so I am not surprised that people would object to a faithful and graphic adaptation of it just for that.

I've never seen the Keach/Tyrell version btw, but Coup De Torchon (based on the very similarly constructed Pop 1280) is quite good and pretty faithful (minus the setting obv)--albeit less graphically violent IIRC.

i would like to see a film of thompson's 'south of heaven', mostly because it's kind of unusual and more like 'the wages of fear' crossed with noir and set on an oil pipeline.

Thanks, I didn't realise it was quite as straightforward an adaptation as it sounds like it is.

To me it seemed banal, crude and relentlessly unpleasant, but above all _pointless_. If that's the point then I don't get it.

p.s. I do think a nihilisitcally violent book is one thing, but a nihilistically violent film is another, both in terms of impact on the reader/viewer and the # of people who read/see it, and film-makers rightly have to walk a finer line. Not saying I would find the book harmless, but if it's projected at 20mx8m in an extremely uncomfortable cinema with people yelling "fuck you" at the screen, when you see and hear women get beaten to death for the lols in THX, and you just don't care what the point is because maybe you're not smart enough but you're fucked if you can tell what it is, the effect is memorable. so basically i'm happy to blame winterbottom.

xp btw

p.s. 4 morbs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY2D51MPs10

i think in a lot of cases film violence is more unsettling and helpful to the story when it's deployed subtly. in some other cases, i think seeing the brutality is kinda key as well (spielberg and scorsese are pretty good with this) but in some other cases i've seen films where it was just almost immature with how pointless the in-your-face grisliness was.

just watched the hurt locker. not sure how i feel about it, tbh. it was certainly a well-directed, smart movie. i flipped over to the metacritic page, just to see what the critical reception was, and i was struck by the discrepency between the critics' rating (94) and the readers' ratings (7.9). i bypassed the critical reviews and began digging-down into the reader reviews, and was amazed to see so many people giving the film a zero. many of them claim to have combat experience in iraq, and were complaining that the film was unrealistic.

I am pretty sure I would have liked Alice in Wonderland more if it hadn't been in 3D :/

Need to watch the Hurt Locker again. Also I don't think it was meant to be an authentic portrayal... Yes it's set during war, but moreso than being about realities of war, it's just a well-realized movie about a certain character and how he puts himself in, deals with, and partly creates, situations of extreme intensity.

But I guess that's for the hurt locker thread...

redbelt - pretty cool, though there was shit left unexplained at the end that i wish had been.

Shutter Island - Enjoyed. First Scorsese in years I can say that about.
7 Women - Very strange final John Ford but compact and excellent.

Body Double - not what I expected, did not realize it was so wacky and wtf

duh, it's de palma!

de, it's duh palma!

Supposedly he's in the running to direct Paranormal Activity 2. No joke!

No joke!

Good, cause I'm not laughing. (Though I guess I hope he could make an interesting movie out of the second one, I'm also sure TPTB would be standing in the way of that happening.)

But I guess that's for the hurt locker thread...

there's a hurt locker thread? i didn't see it via the search engine.

the kathryn bigelow poll thread iirc

lourdes is great.

It was good. I liked the "vacation" joke.

Hurt Locker - kind of ridiculous? watched last 2/3rds at 8x speed and didn't feel like I missed a thing.

The Comedian - from the Criterion Golden Age of TV box - late 50's, directed by John Frankenheimer from a Rod Serling screenplay, sort of cliched play with Mickey Rooney as a ruthless comedy star & his production cast preparing for a big national broadcast in a TV studio -- but the fact that the whole thing was acted & televised in real time (fake studio in a real studio) makes it sort of fascinatingly meta, some of the cameras aren't props, lots of five minute long shots & the acting stays really intense because no one ever yells 'cut'

Survive Style 5+ - very surreal, slightly emo j-film. Almost thought for sure it was directed by one of the people who did 'Funky Forest', but if you did like that & 'The Taste of Tea' then this one's prolly worth seeing. the main story about the wife who keeps reincarnating, by the end I was all aw <3