I have a hard time thinking of Chronicle as a "found footage" film because they didn't really go far enough to support that "Oh something happened and we found these tapes" conceit. Typical found footage stuff relies a lot more heavily on the viewer being just as uninformed as the characters. It seems like they were just trying to make a side point that everyone has a camera now, and it's causing us to become narcissists who emotionally detach from reality because we're constantly viewing it through that lens.
When did you think it became incoherent, and in what way? I ask because I really loved it throughout.
The synopsis tells me I missed the post-credits scene. That seems like the kind of thing you shouldn't put at the end of the damned credits. *I should also mention that I feel kind of bad for Tom Felton, who has not yet grown up enough to avoid having me see Draco Malfoy every time he's on screen.
My wife and I laughed at that part in the movie. I mean, why would you ever drop off your pet at a place run by Draco Malfoy and Hannibal Lecter? That said, I saw the movie long enough ago not to be able to respond directly to any of your spoiler-tag points. I will say that I had no issues following the plot when I did see it, and didn't have any problem following the action.
It wasn't that I was having trouble following the plot, it's that the later portions of the plot didn't make sense within the confines of the setup they created.
I saw...oh the name was unremarkable, was it...Lockout? Starring the action hero Guy Pearce and well, the girl who got kidnapped in Taken, who now gets kidnapped on a space station. Also has the annoying guy from Misfits as the bad guy, no, not the good one from the first season, the second one, who is less endearing and more annoying. It was a Luc Besson movie, which means the plot is stupid and full of holes. Sometimes that doesn't matter and the movie ends up being quite good anyway, like Fifth Element. Most of the time, it means the movie sucks and tries too hard to be stylistic. Lockout is the latter, and now I'm stuck trying to think of another Luc Besson movie that would actually belong in the first category, was B13 one of his?
It isn't. It's merely from his production company. Stephen St. Leger directed it, which admittedly totally sounds like a Luc Besson pseudonym but is apparently a different person. Besson produces tons of movies, but doesn't direct that many anymore.
You're right. It was co-written by Luc Besson, and the movie did a weird credit, "based on an idea by Luc Besson" or some such at the beginning. (Though a movie being lame is not all the writers' faults)
Same here, sorry for not being able to discuss them in detail. I do remember not being bothered by any specifics and being very pleasantly surprised with what kind of movie it ended up being. Also, most or all of your complaints are from the very end, so it's possible I was just still riding the high of the first 80-90% of the movie by that point.
Right, like I said, it's a perfectly fine movie up until then. Just made the last bit that much more bothersome for me.
I watched TRON Legacy. The music and production design were great, the CG was serviceable and the women in their costumes were sexy as hell. But the story and the direction were almost shockingly incompetent.
The only part of Tron: Legacy I actually liked was the insane bit in the bar, and that was only because Michael Sheen's club owner was so fucking awesome. I don't know who had the idea to turn Castor into some fucked up amalgam of Ziggy Stardust era Bowie, Riff Raff from Rocky Horror and Joel Grey from Cabaret, but kudos to you, sir. Olivia Wilde was indeed sexy as hell, though.
His name was Castor? I thought it was Zeus. To me that scene was just another example of "What? Why are they doing that? What point does this scene serve? Whose side is that person on? Why are those people fighting those other people?" Ugh. My favourite stupid thing was the introduction of Tron. Some random minion in an identical black helmet is supposed to be this big important character? Okay. Then he literally has three scenes where he's shown as being evil and then we get a big, cliched, "betrayal" scene where Tron switches sides and declares: "I fight for the users". You know what Tron? I don't know you well enough to care.
Just finished it. I really enjoyed it up until the final dialogue. It was so sneery and leaden after what was an otherwise arch and brutal comedy horror. It's threatening to sour me on the entire film. Make it banal, make it stupid, don't have two people smoking a joint and making idiotic, smart alec judgemental remarks about the entire endeavour. The rest of the film, great. Cut that dialogue, great. It just sits so uneasily in my head. It's actually and genuinely threatening to spoil the film for me. I can see the director, and he's masturbating so hard it's bleeding. The entire point of the thing was to have straightforward characters in a twisted setting, right? Run the you-know-more gambit in a genre exercise but give it a bit of a twist. Then Whedon decides that having the straight-woman-and-man make comments of that type, the almost-fourth-wall-breaking type, at the end so he can get it a completely leaden, trite and pointless piece of 'character development'. I can feel the creative team jamming themselves into the film really, really hard at that point. They're basically mugging to camera. I get that the entire film contains elements of that. I really do. Other, similar works like the Pegg/Frost/Wright deconstructions do the same thing. My problem is that that particular bit of the film just crosses a bit of a line from facetious homage to smugness. You know what's really sad? I actually, genuinely enjoyed the rest of the film. I'm happy to ignore plot holes and other issues (most of them relate to the facility). I thought it was a good film and all I'm going to remember is that final little scene. I would guess that I'm in the minority here, so feel free to take me to task.
Michael Sheen will forever have my gratitude for perfectly delivering one of the funniest monologues ever written about Wesley Snipes. Last night I watched 50/50 with my wife, meeting dual goals of further purging the DVR (my goal) and watching a movie with Joseph Gordon-Levitt in it (her goal...oh fine, mine too, the guy's a good actor). My feeling about it is that it's a heart-wrenching and excellent movie about cancer that Seth Rogen works really hard to ruin. Everyone else in the movie is excellent, and it's just painful to watch them try to shoehorn in his "smoke weed and curse a lot" brand of comedy.
The best part of the TNG showing last night was the pair of 50-something Trekmoms who kept ooohing and aaahing to each other and making the most ridiculous hushed comments ("He can engage my warp engines anytime") over Patrick Stewart. That is almost as ridiculous as seeing Inglourious Basterds in an otherwise empty theater three weeks after release except for a bunch of ancient Jewish ladies (who all smiled knowingly at Kendra, who looks very ethnically ambiguous) and having the one who offered us candy yell "FUCK HIM UP" when they're murdering Hitler, but... well, not quite, eh? Anyway, back to Star Trek: ladies, I know why I find Captain Picard so sexy, but I'm dying to know: for you, is it the accent or the bald head? I love going to the movies.
I think it goes beyond just the baldness or the accent, it's also the confidence. A few years ago I saw a showing of The Man Who Would Be King, and Sean Connery came to introduce it. I was standing in a huge crowd of mostly women, and when he arrived on the red carpet, I heard a collective sigh/swoon all around me. I then turned around and asked "Ladies, if y'all don't mind me asking, if you had the chance, would you still sleep with that man?" And my god the chorus of yes answers was deafening. :) We had a good laugh over it, but seriously, the guy is in his 80's and women younger than me would still want to tap that.
Remember that Twilight Zone* episode where they guy has the watch that he can press at any time and freeze time so that he can live his one perfect moment forever except he never does because he's never sure if any given moment is the perfect one or not so he never ends up using it? If I was you, and I had that watch, I totally would have frozen time in that theatre. * Or maybe Outer Limits. Or One Step Beyond. Or possibly a short story I read in an Alfred Hitchcock magazine. Hey, remember short story magazines? Christ I'm old.
The found-footage framing was just thoroughly unnecessary in general for it, yeah. Though it made me giggle to consider that I did like how the climax sequence was put together though.
Just watched Lust, Caution and really loved it. Is that how good a director Ang Lee is? I haven't seen very many of his movies and I guess I should correct that.
And Lust, Caution is generally regarded as one of his weaker films. Which ones have you seen? I'm assuming Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger?
- Crouching Tiger, but that was long ago. - Sense and Sensibility. - About half of Hulk. I don't know why I've seen so few, but of the ones I've seen Lust, Caution is my clear favorite. Looking at some reviews, opinion seems more divided between "I loved this masterpiece" and "what an overlong turd this was" than a consensus "relatively weak." FWIW I'm willing to admit that a large part of why I liked it so much was that it just did certain things in ways I've never seen before that I found both very inventive and very effective, and I tend to maybe give movies more points for that than a lot of people do. As an aside, I really have to hand it to whoever made the decision to release it as an NC-17 rated film and take the lumps that go along with that. That's a seriously tough financial pill to swallow, but the movie (more than any other movie I've seen, probably) just wouldn't have worked if it had been bowdlerized down to an R.
I couldn't quite get into Anatolia for the reasons you mentioned: it's long and slow. It certainly is gorgeous, and individual scenes stand out, especially the one you mention. That scene had the feeling of an angel bestowing grace on wandering travelers. I also don't think I quite understand the last act of the film, both in why it was there, and what happened. If you like Anatolia and Boonmee, I bet you'll love Tropical Malady. Tonight I watched About Elly, from the director of A Separation. It covers similar issues to A Separation, like the autonomy of women in Iranian society; and it also hinges on a lie, and whether or not a character can withstand telling that lie. But it spends a large part of its run time resolving what happened during a first act incident which was initially suspenseful, but dragged on a bit. Certainly worth the time, however. Also of note, it features the father from A Separation who looks a LOT younger; and a game of Iranian charades which includes Iranian (?) TV shows like, "Long live the law school kids," and "Mother of the honey bee."
I completely agree, Anatolia is not a film for everyone simply because of the length of it. It falls into a bit of an 'arthouse' trap there. I happen to think it needs to be that long, but I can understand if people feel it's too long or too slow. The best reading of the final act I've seen is that it's about loss of innocence for the men involved. They've spent time in the wilderness being men and grasping at their ideals, and they return to civilisation in that act. There they all find themselves shocked, and their ideas and their innocence shaken by what happens (the murderer, the doctor, the state prosecutor). That's the easiest reading, I think, and it makes sense to me. I have A Separation queued up to watch at some point soon and it sounds like I should take a dive into his back catalogue at some point. I'll also queue up Tropical Malady. I've had an eye on him since I read some articles about his stuff maybe six months before Uncle Boonmee. I've also seen his latest work, Hotel Mekong- I wouldn't rush out and see it but if you have an interest in his work then it's maybe worth seeking. Especially if it comes packaged with a film called Mother by another Thai director.
So, uh, I just saw Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain. For the first time. Uh. Guys? this movie's fucking *good*. wow.
Wow, indeed, that I now know someone who hadn't seen it already. I watched Bronson, which was a touching romantic comedy about a man trying to make a name for himself and his wang in late 20th century England. Enjoyable as a character study and Hardy really gives it his all.
Really? Everyone you know has seen that film already? I envy your circle of friends! I watched Sinister, a surprisingly competent horror yarn - at least for the bulk of the film. Then it rushes to explain everything and concludes with bullshit - albeit creepy bullshit.
Got the first part of my latest half-off Criterion bluray order yesterday - Quadrophenia, In The Mood For Love and Rosemary's Baby. For some crazy reason, I had never made my wife watch Rosemary's Baby before, which means I have failed her as a person and a husband. Luckily, that egregious error was corrected last night. And goddamn, Rosemary's Baby is still a fucking great movie. Polanski is pretty much the definition of hit-or-miss, but when he hits he's almost preternaturally good. It's also loads of fun to watch Rosemary's Baby now (as opposed to when I first saw it as a kid way, way too young to have been watching it) because it's an almost unique example of a wildly talented filmmaker who was able to take his personal obsessions and auteurist tendencies and put them at the service of a mainstream piece of entertainment. Rosemary's Baby isn't all that far removed from Repulsion or even Knife In The Water, except it had a bigger budget. And thematically it slots in terrifically with his "apartment" trilogy of The Tenant and Repulsion, while also being (like Repulsion, again) a strong indictment of the incredibly restrictive roles given to women in America at the time. Because here's the great thing about Rosemary's Baby: The horror isn't that she got raped by Satan, although I'm sure that wasn't a walk in the park. The real horror is that her husband was completely willing to allow it happen. We're not privy to his motivations at any point, but it's clear that he only really understands her in relation to himself. She is there to help him, and in return she gets a handful of flowers every now and then when he remembers she's there. Her own desires or dreams are never taken into consideration for a second. But the REAL horror is saved right for the very end. Because after the big "Check out your awesome demon baby!" reveal - and kudos, by the way, to Polanski for very deliberately NOT showing the baby, instead allowing Mia Farrow's utterly horrifying reaction say everything that needs to be said - she goes into shock for a while. Because, you know, fair enough. But eventually, the baby starts crying, and she tells one of the witches to stop rocking him so hard. Now, here's the way to tell if you're an optimist or a pessimist: Is that motherly instinct kicking in... or is it her possibly subconscious realization that after a lifetime of filling the roles handed to her by men, that caring for a demon baby is the path of least resistance? After all, that IS a pretty sweet apartment.
Yeah; Rosemary's totally, helplessly enmeshed in the system that hubby's really only the main face of for most of the running length. The futility of her situation's at such a level that her very best struggle and effort is only sufficient to fully reveal to her how powerless she is and will ever be. Therefore: surrender. And it's a surrender obviously capping off a lifetime of smaller surrenders, each of which were the gate into greater helplessness, because clearly each of them were the more comfortable choice in the short-term. Until eventually it was simply too late.
I know, right? Say what you want about Sting as an actor - or, really, as a human being - but he is perfectly cast as Ace Face.
Also, you can take that mail, and that franking machine, and all of that other rubbish I 'ave to go about wiv and you shove them right up your arse.
It probably helps that he only has two lines or something. If even - he says 'cheque do ya?' to the Judge but I can't remember whether or not he says anything to the hotel guest later on.
