The Tax Collector ..... What An AWESOME Movie !!!
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The Tax Collector ..... What An AWESOME Movie !!!
Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)
If you are interested in challenges to the dominance of a linear concept of time, if you think time bends, that you may be able to move forward and backard in time, you will find in this film it is really not that cool. For all its philosophical pretensions, Tenet is a Palindrome, as a film, as the title sugests, reading the same forward as it does backward. And, with its silly James Bond style plot, complete with cardboard, vodka-drinking Russian Oligarch villain + trophy wife in white underwear, there are ten minutes to save the world, or more intriguingly, Ten + Ten minutes, hence tenet.
As is usually the case with Nolan's films, fabulous production cannot induce any empathy for the characters, so the film can seem like an essay in film by a conceited man convinced of his own skill and not bothered by much in the way of human emotion. Worst of all, is that I could not understand what the characters were saying which, in a film of this compexity contributed to my lack of interest. Lastly, I saw this in the cinema, with about 20 others, at a cost of £4.99 (about $6.58 ). I don't mind wearing a mask, but as I need to use spectacles in a cinema, they kept steaming up, not that it mattered much with this film.
Mandy (Panos Cosmatos, 2018 )
I won't be going to Crystal Lake on my holidays. Blame it on screaming Nicholas Cage, the weirdos and whatever they're smoking, and God.
Tenet, to me, was nearly identical to Interstellar.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
It was far more style over substance because Nolan clearly had a decent idea but as with Interstellar, had no good way to close the movie and as such, Tenet ended up being a train wreck. It was entirely predictable and in no way worthy of all the praise it is getting.
The first hour is confusing because Nolan tries to befuddle the viewer with time shifts and flashing in camera visuals that, while stunning as a piece of film making, do little to advance a good story. The moment that the protagonist and Neil invert themselves for Kat, the movie completely lost me and I was done with it. That it ends as it does shows me Nolan just needed to wrap it up and let them "live" happily ever after"
Nolan is a talented director and visionary when it comes to modern in-camera visual effects. His disdain for CGI is something I admire about him but ultimately, I believe he has now proven himself, between Interstellar, The Dark Knight Rises and now Tenet, that he is a poor story teller and writer.
I agree with you, Cereal Escapist, as this has been my reaction to the films of his I have seen, most, with the exceptions of Dunkirk and The Dark Knight. I think you might be wrong re CGI in the case of Inception and Interstellar, and though I am confused by his anthropology in the Alien series, I think a comparison with Ridley Scott shows that he also uses elaborate productions but with a deep enough meaning to reward repeated viewing. I think Blade Runner must now be a contemporary classic, and it is interesting from the DVD extras how much from the first film was incorporated by Denis Villeneuve in Blade Runner 2049. From this perspective, Nolan has a more limited vision. I am aso disappointed that the concept of linear time has not really been explored, but used merely as a plot device, and in Tenet, one that becomes irrlevant by the end when, as you say, the plot must be sealed and the story come to an end.
Monos (Alejandro Landes, 2019)
I bought this DVD not knowing anything other than the synopsis on the box, and before looking it up on imdb. As confirmed there, this is a Colombian version of Lord of the Flies with a difference. A group of male and female 'soldiers' are part of 'The Organization' charged with taking care of an American hostage, a doctor, and the film charts the disintegration of the group as they move from a secure base in the hills into the rain forest.
I have not seen any films from Colombia before, and while this is a well-told if predictable story and the landscape is fantastic, I had no interest in any of the characters. I would not recommend it, but it is not a bad film, some may appreciate it more than I did.
The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979 -Director's Cut, 2005)
I became a fan of Hill when The Driver was released in 1978 -it remains one the best films of the 1970s and with Bullitt (1968 ) and The French Connection (1971) has some of the best car chases ever seen on film, wth the additional argument that cars stand in for characters in The Driver.
So I first saw The Warriors in a cinema in 1979 and the version I have seen since then is that one. The 2005 director's cut restores what Hill wanted which Paramount did not -introducing each chapter with a Comic Book frame. I don't mind it because the film has retained the flow that Hill was able to achieve in his early films, with some tight editing and a decent script. Not so much of it looks out of date, though I don't know how relevant to gang sub-culture it was even then. One point of interest is seeing the actors who appeared in this film and also 48 hours, David Kellly and James Remar, but sadly Hill did not maintain the quality of his early work with the films he made with Schwarzenegger and Sylvie Stallion (Bullet to the Head). I didn't know he was associated as Producer with the Alien films. A mercurial talent, like Michael Mann.
US (Jordan Peele. 2019)
Another film that begins with an intriguing premise that fails to deliver at its end. Although I made a guess in an early scene that turned out to be right, for most of the film I dismissed it, and it did not make sense when it happened. The word 'tethered' to me suggests coercion, but humaniity can also be united, which is positive. And the concept of the double is a useful tool in storytelling but tends to be used as a simplistic contrast between good and bad, even as it attempts to portray complexity in u as humans, with a duality of emotions, and so forth, so that the idea fails to get beyond these basic contrasts. It is a sort of enjoyable film until the later scenes when the need for the reveal to resolve the tensions resorts, as most Americans films seem to do, in violence, there being no other solution. It is a pity Peele relies on violence in his films, when the more complex reality would be to explore his themes of identity without it.
The Personal History of David Copperfield (Armando Ianucci, 2019)
Probably the worst adaptation of Dickens I have seen -trivial, silly, superficial, ill-conceived, badly-written. I have an ambiguous attitude to Dickens as a writer (like a lot of clever people he was a shit as a man), but I think one of his best novels either deserves better, or remain a reading pleasure.
Yes ,an interesting point about famous nasty people. Newton was a notorious 'prick'.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
Greyhound
Annihilation (Alex Gardland, 2018 )
At a time when our cells are being attacked by a novel Coronavirus, Annihilation might not be the most aappealing film to see, but it is quite clever, is visually outstanding, and has as its basic idea that if aliens come to Earth, they might want to become Humans in order to survive- or Tulips, or Bears. There are the usual plot holes, a lack of safety gear among explorers being one of them. Not sure if all the team need to be women, and the concluding shots are a bit predictable even if the preceding scene with Lena suggests otherwise -and the exchange with her husband. I recommend it, though it falls short in the end, Let's say 7/10?
I had a Netflix binge courtesy of a friend who has an account. We watched-
Bird Box (Susanne Bier, 2018 )
The Silence (John R. Leonetti, 2019)
Tau (Federico d’Alessandro, 2919)
Changeling (Clint Eastwood, 2008 ).
In the first two, a global catastrophe means that, to survive, people must either shield their eyes, or remain completely silent. It may not be Covid-19 and is more catastrophic, but the strategies of survival make for interesting films, with Sandra Bullock in Bird Box the best of the bunch.
Tau is the by now standard garbage about a lone trillionaire computing genius who uses his powers to refashion humanity into a supercomputer, before being felled, by a human, on this occasion, with tits.
Changeling is the true story of a serial killer in California in the 1920s, and is the kind of well crafted story Eastwood has been directing for decades- but removes the fact that in real life the boys were sexually molested, and that the killer’s mother was involved.
Premature Burial with Ray Milland directed by Roger Corman
Under The Skin w/Scarlett Johansson
I think I'm gonna need therapy after watching that.
Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)
I hated this film. It is superficial, and its attempt at satire failed to make me laugh at any time, or even smirk. It is not the worst film I have seen, and it has a 7.5 score on imdb so some people must like it.
The Invisible Man (Leigh Whannell, 2020)
In the original novel by HG Wells, Griffin is a science graduate whose experiments enable him to become invisible, but not to revert to being a normal human. It is later noted he was born Albino, the implication being that Griffin resented being ignored by society because of his looks, so believed being invisible was the logical solution, but it acts as a curse, and he becomes anti-social even murderous.
In this version, we have, yet again, a millionaire or billionaire techno geek who lives in a remote super-tech house, and has problems with women, mostly a need to exert total control over them. Whereas in Wells Griffin terrorises villages in Sussex, in this film it is his girlfriend who is subjected to a sequence of nasty acts, though in this film there are two plot twists which depart from Wells which I won't give away as spoilers. Elizabeth Moss has become the go-to actor for the oppressed woman fighting back, but I don't find her sympathetic and hope I never see her in a film again. I can't say I liked the film but some people might.
Edge of Extinction (Andrew Gilbert, 2020)
Edge of credibility would be the more appropriate title. In spite of surviving a nuclear winter following a nuclear war, the water in the English countryside is still drinkable, the people desperate, the acting most of the time even more so. There are birds -pigeons- to be caught and eaten whereas for others, human flesh has become standard fare. One survivor has managed to find a storehouse of canned food that even when discovered by others is not ransacked. The drama pivots on a faded and jaded trope -the woman in distress who claims to be alone but has enough baggage to end civilization before it has barely (re-)started, though thankfully her name is not Eve. I can't recall how much I paid for the DVD, but it is probably not worth more than £1.
A Fantasic Woman (Sebastián Lelio, 2017)
This is a sensitive and beautifully crafted film about a transgendered woman in Santiago and what happens when her partner dies. Some peope might see standard stereotypes in the film, the bigotry of some, the sympathy of others, the prurient scene in which the main character is obliged to undress, for 'legal' and 'medical' reasons, but the film works because it appears to be authentic, and because of the acting skills of those involved. I actually saw this on tv in London at the apartment of a friend who had SRS a few years ago, and she refused to watch it, make of that what you will. But one of the best of its kind -compare it to the hysterical nonsense of The Crying Game- and you will see how such subjects can be done in the servicee of cinema, not to debase it.
Damn, Stavros.... I really enjoyed your reviews.... I was going to say I saw the re-make of Rebecca. It's horribly miscast. Armie Hammer is as stiff and dull as I would expect.... no way he could carry the film like Sir Laurence Olivier did almost 80 years ago with the masterful direction of Sir Alfred Hitchcock and also the so call antagonist of Ms. Danvers portrayed by Kristen Scott Thomas is just another bad decision in terms of casting. However the costume and set design are pretty good. The cinematography is not bad. But, this remake can't hold a candle to the original film version.
Thanks for the compliment. Not enough people review the films they have seen, but that is their chioice.
I haven't seen the new version of Rebecca, and I am not in a rush to either given the poor reviews in the press which match yours. I must also say I was stunned when you said the Hitchcock was 80 years old and had to check to see you are right. This link is to a brief but interesting introduction to the book, with some clips from both film versions. Joan Fontaine is one of Hollywood's most under-rated actors, with the ability to express so much from a facial gesture, and she had an angelic beauty, though I think her performance in Max Ophuls' Letter from an Unknown Woman is her best, being one of my favourite films, though I recommended it to someone who loathed it.
Climax (Gaspar Noé, 2018 )
From IMDB-
"In the mid 1990's, 20 French urban dancers join together for a three-day rehearsal in a closed-down boarding school located at the heart of a forest to share one last dance. They then make one last party around a large sangria bowl. Quickly, the atmosphere becomes charged and a strange madness will seize them the whole night. If it seems obvious to them that they have been drugged, they neither know by who nor why. And it's soon impossible for them to resist to their neuroses and psychoses, numbed by the hypnotic and the increasing electric rhythm of the music. While some feel in paradise, most of them plunge into hell."
As you would expect from Noé, the aim is to shock, but as you would expect from Noé, it fails because it is so contrived. It may be that members of the cast were genuinely drunk, and that in a later part of the film the sexual intercourse glimpsed in passing is real, but I doubt even Noé would have drugged a child for cinematic effect. The dance routine at the start of the film is actually rather good, and would probably have won Britain's Got Talent as they seem to like that sort of thing. And there is some clever filming towards the end when, with their world turned upside down, the cast appear like bats hanging from the ceiling. That said, in the end this film is about a collective united by dance, that falls apart owing to their sexual preference, their desire/lust, their attitude towards women, or, in a nutshell, the lack of solidarity provoked by their good and bad trips. Does it mean we would be better off it if we were not 'intoxicated' by external forces imploding inside us? Or are we always doomed to be individuals first and last? I don't think Noé has the answer to these questions, and the 'chapter' headings, made up of pop psychology or just pop the weasel, don't help.
Final note, I think one of the cast, Gazelle/Giselle Palmer, is transgendered, but I can't be sure.
Watching the new miniseries ,"The Queens Gambit" ,it is quite good .I understand that it has spawned a new 'chess boom' with sales of chess sets and books 'through the roof'. The last great chess boom was in the 1770's with Bobbie Fisher ,in which I participated .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Qu...t_(miniseries)
In Vegas last week. Wanted to see a movie on the big screen. Covid be damned.
Saw the Last Vermeer. A World War II art forgery legal case. Guy Pearce was good as the forgerer.
Hmmm, fascinating scoop from the archives -do you think George Washington asked Fischer for advice on strategy? Perhaps this was the one time when a Pawn took a King?Quote:
Originally Posted by sukumvit boy
LOL,sorry about that . I meant the 1970's of course.
Tenet...confusing. Might be a little too smart for its own good.
Crazy Rich Asians (Jon M. Chu, 2018 )
I went to a VIP dinner in the Raffles Hotel ten or so years ago, sharing a table with three people from Singapore -two lawyers (female) and a banker (of Indian descent), an elderly Australian who made a fortune cleaning office buildings, and the beauty queen I was with who flunked out after the fish course much to my annoyance. What struck me that evening was just how dull Singapore Chinese seemed to be. You can see some svelte, well-heeled Chinese 20-somethings at Clarke Quay most nights, but my guess is that the super-rich would never go to places like that when they can buy private spaces -rather like the people in this film, which is unoriginal, and though reasonably well acted is, with a bland script, like 'Jane Austen with Chinese characteristics'.
Much as I admire Raffles, and their Singapore Sling is worth trying, next time I go I shall probably head in the opposite direction of the awful people in this film, and try those 'four floors of whores' in Orchard Towers. If we learned anything from 2020, it is that time is short, and not be wasted on dramas featuring pearl earrings, perfectly made dumplings, and a Singapore stripped of its Filipino maids, its forests of tower blocks where most people live.
Most interesting,pardon my curiosity but just what do you mean by "flunked out" ? After 15 years of traveling back and fourth to SE Asia each year for a month at a time I'm ashamed to say I never made it to Singapore but I remember hearing about the "four floors of whores " and thinking I should definitely add that to my list of destinations. Then again it seems like most of those SE Asian travel destinations have their "floors of whores" like the "three floors of whores " at Nana Plaza in Bangkok,LOL.
I would definitely love to go to Raffles Hotel though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sukumvit boy
She flunked out because there were too many stuffed shirts, preferring stuffing of a different kind. Her ego, mostly.
BBC 2 showed The Godfather Part One last night, the only thing I can say about this classic, is that the print quality was superior to the one I have on the 'Coppola Restoration' set of DVDs that I have been watching, mostly interesting for Coppola's audio commentary.
"The Silk Road" 2019 miniseries ,very good.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12064332/
Hustlers (Lorene Scafaria, 2019)
This is the sort of eye-candy that could lead to diabetes, so its just as well the story is tedious, though based on real events, and presented in a pre-packaged format so that each chapter is fairly predictable. It is not as bad as Showgirls (1995), which some valiant, but mis-guided journalists have recently attempted to rescue from the dustbin of film history.
The men don't emerge from this with any credit, for what's worth, and one does wonder how much surgeon-general Lopez pays to maintain that perfectly shaped, but iron-hard set of buttocks. Note that for the most part, this is a nipple-free zone, so Constance Wu, who was in the Crazy Rich Asians film, is as it were, 'tastefully undressed', so don't get your hopes up.
What I want to see is the uncensored, transgendered version, but without the music of Chopin, which, must as it can often please, is out of place in this story and any other like it.
Since "hustling" unfortunately often becomes a necessary part of transgender life for some I'm surprised there aren't more films about it.
Uncle Vanya (Gregory Mosher, 1992)
This aired on TV in the Performance series of filmed plays in the 1990s. It is a fine performance of Chekhov's play, with David Warner at his irritating best as the depressed Vanya, and David Mamet's wife, Rebecca Pidgeon as his niece, who has the last lines in the play that confirm the genius of Chekhov, the greatest European playwright after Shakespeare -I just can't decide if he is better than Ibsen- and also a writer of superb stories, making him for me one of Russia's finest, and along with Turgenev, Bulgakov and Pasternak a preferable read than either Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy. Ian Holm is brilliant as the Doctor, but at the age of 60 was too old, as Asrov is assumed to be 37 years old.
Chekhov is one of the few writers who offers deeply thought stories in which money is at the core of the woes of the central chacters, but often with another -usually not a relative- benefiting from them, or having the means to survive when the principal family is in trouble, one thinks of Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, and Trigorin in The Seagull.
A more recent tv version with Toby Jones was so marred by four-letter words that are utterly remote from Chekhov I turned it off.
Sicilian Ghost Story (Fabio Grassadonia and Antonia Piazza, 2017)
This aired on Channel 4 a few nights ago.
A love-sick 12 year old pines for, and goes in search of the classmate who has disappeared, becoming a rebel in her small family, and taking many risks. He appears for real, and as a ghost in this sensitive film derived in part from the true story, which I shall not spoil for those who don't know it. It is not really a ghost story as such, as the use of the 'Ghost' is suggestive of those things in Siciy that people neither want to see or hear, though they are all around them.
Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992)
I hated this film when it came out, and decided I did not like David Mamet either, though I did like House of Games (1987). Seeing this again has not completely flipped my view, but it is a 'tour de force' with a superb cast, and I can appreciate Mamet's craft, and also see how he influenced Tarantino, for one. The film differs from the play as he included a new scene featuring the speech the Alec Baldwin character (Blake) makes near the beginning. Rather like the films of Takashi Miike in which crime families fall apart through greed, the film is about a cohort of men, none of whom are likeable, turn on each other in an attempt to score more contracts, rather than co-operate with each other to achieve the same ends. The language is, to put it mildly, 'robust', but serves as weapons rather than the dealers choosing swords or guns. Al Pacino is particularly fine, and while this is a grim story about ruthless competition in which there are, in the end, no winners, it is a gripping film of the play to watch, and there are some alternatives on YouTube though they fail to match this version.
"The Spy" new Netflix miniseries with Sacha Baron Cohen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB1JWP7nRpM
Ransom (Ron Howard, 1996)
I don't usually like Mel Gibson films, but this is a well-made thriller in the safe hands of Ron Howard which, though it has the standard format -the crime group that fails as it falls apart from within- is good throughout and has that peculiar twist with the ransom money. I know Delroy Lindo is highly regarded, but this London-born actor I find wooden in most of the things I have seen him in, but it doesn't mess up the film. Gary Sinise is particularly nasty in this film, he even looks it too, though I understand he has done a lot for veterans.
https://time.com/5542632/gary-sinise...eful-american/
News of the World with Tom Hanks.
Bit slow but heartwarming enough.
The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil (Won-Tae Lee, 2019)
This aired on tv a few nights ago.
A serial killer makes the mistake of attacking a crime boss who survives to team up with a rule-brreaking cop to hunt down the 'devil'. Mildly comic, sort of interesting to pass the time.