MOVIES!

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

bird with the crystal plumage

A whole lot of Raul Ruiz lately. Kind of obsessed.

Cela S'appelle l'aurore - pretty straight yet entertaining Buñuel set in some backwatery French island. The straightforwardness makes the occasional Surrealist touches that much more intense.

Dr.M - Weird 90's Chabrol take on "Dr. Mabuse" with Jennifer Beals, Alan Bates, some hammy German actors and Andrew McCarthy in an awesome cameo. Pretty rad if u stick with it.

Les Noces Rouge (sp?) - Early 70's Chabrol with Piccoli and Audran gettin' all amor fou n' shit. Excellent.

Persecution (Chereau)
Tearoom; Massillon; Finished; v.o. (Wm E Jones)
Hausu (blah, too cute)
The Runaways
Anvil: The Story of Anvil
Generale Della Rovere (Rossellini, 1959)
Lonelyhearts (M Clift)
La Captive (Akerman)
The Prowler (Losey)

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

― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Saturday, March 27, 2010 1:12 AM (19 hours ago) Bookmark

it was so participatory; while there was this beeline towards an inevitable dreyer moment, in the back of your mind you were separating out all the stratas of pilgrims, deserving and undeserving, reverent or misguided, etc, correlating the different connections between people and events. i feel like the main story made it seem one dimensional, but it was so communicative. seemed like a french analogue for recent 'world' stuff too; relatively strict like 4 months, calm and ambiguous like martel.

also i did not recognise elina lowensohn.

La Captive (Akerman)

how was this?

just watched mirror

I liked La Captive -- it reminded me in its dreamlike ambience and sneaky humor of Eyes Wide Shut, which C.A. mentioned in an interview on the disc. (modern adap of Proust vs Schnitzler)

i love you phillip morris ~ gay romcom by luc besson & the bad santa authors, starring jim carrey & ewan mcgregor. entertaining, even amusing imo. cant wait to hear the resident film snobs take on this ; o

been looking fwd to that since I saw the trailer, like, a year and a half ago.

just saw diary of a wimpy kid with my daughter and her cousin. my wife loved it. i was . . . less impressed. the main character was a vain, social-climbing jerk who had virtually no regard for his best-friend. eventually, he supposedly redeems himself, but it felt like too little, too late. also, i guess there are some kids that could endure that kind of social abuse and keep coming back like the lead-character here, but it didn't ring true to me. (n.1)

___________________________________
(n.1) as i told my wife when we left the movie, in jr. high and HS, i was a toxic combination of Rowley's looks and demeanor, and Greg's luck. probably not much better now, but there you have it.

http://www.musicomh.com/films/images/cracks.jpg

Cracks - the debut film by Jordan Scott. It reminded me an awful lot of the French film, Innocence, as well as just about every other gals at boarding school movie.
Eva Green somewhat over-eggs her portrayal as an exotic, boho teacher (who doesn't appear to actually 'teach' anything, unless you count getting her class high-diving into the lake at any given opportunity, and telling romantic tales of her travels), she looks great though. As does everything else - especially the Spanish actress who plays the new girl.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Observer/Pix/pictures/2009/12/4/1259933629728/cracks-girls-valverde-001.jpg

The whole thing is a bit silly and predictible, but not a bad contribution to the haunting, dreamlike, sexual and otherwise awakening of lissom school-girls sub-genre.

i liked the white ribbon quite a bit