Just finished watching a movie called Paperboy with Nicole kidman and Zach Efron.
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Just finished watching a movie called Paperboy with Nicole kidman and Zach Efron.
Just finished watching The Hindenberg with George C Scott.
Pandorum.
Just recently saw "Silver Linings Playbook". Affable but largely unfunny comedy. It has some charm, but it is slight.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=Lj5_FhLaaQQ
Also saw the most recent Woody Allen film "To Rome with love." Pretty poor with a few funny moments though one of the cnetral set pieces, a man who can only produce a brilliant operatic performance when standing in a shower, was stolen from a rather obscure Chinese film called Xizao by the director Zhang yang. .
Shower (Xizao) - YouTube
Sadly Allen's genus fled him decades ago and now he is agradual European tour, offering the most liched images of every city he settles in to folk.
Finally I watched "The Pink panther" which i'd never seen before. Hard to believe this spaned the funny "A Shot In The Dark" for it is very dreary.
Agree with Stavros on Atom Egoyan, "The Sweet Hereafter" a brilliant film. But is earlier film "Exotica" was also wonderful - if less gruelling.
I took in 3 movies this weekend: Lincoln, Gangster Squad and Zero Dark Thirty.
Lincoln
1. Daniel Day Lewis was great as lincoln. He has certain idiosyncrasies in the role that make his performance nuanced and respectable. I see why he is nominated for awards.
2. The movie is too romantic. It presents Lincoln only as benevolent, something that we all (should) know was not true. Spielberg wusses out too often when he can be true to the man Lincoln was rather than the mystique. Also, the end is pretty bad because he tries and fails to represent the assassination tastefully.
3. Sally Field needs to retire. She might have been a good actress once but she gives a terrible performance in this movie. She is supposed to be the woman behind the man and show great strength at times and great vulnerability at others but just comes across as whiny all the time.
Zero Dark Thirty
1. Jessica Chastain does not deserve the GG for this performance nor the oscar nod. She is one-dimensional and just always uncomfortable. She is supposed to be a "killer" as she is introduced as such, but for 90% of the movie she is not very forceful nor is she convincing as a spy. She is only time she exudes any confidence is when she uses a dry erase marker.
2. The movie is well done and is a good artistic interpretation of what could have happened and is entertain albeit a bit too contrived because it places its characters at the heart of every step of the hunt for bin laden so it strains credibility there.
3. The movie suffers a bit from pacing because it is very much and "origin" story which really starts in 2003 so it takes a long time to get going.
Gangster Squad
1. This movie is the worst of the 3 movies I saw. Now, admittedly I saw this one predisposed to the fact that the producers pussied out in the wake of the Aurora shootings and changed the climactic scene from a theater shootout and while it is as action packed, i watched it knowing that it wasn't in the original edit and was reshot only because it might offend some retards that can't tell a movie from reality. This pissed me off going in.
2. The characters are so stereotypical and linear. There is no well-rounded and well-thought out character so it leaves a viewer to just fill in the hole from other similar gangster movies.
3. Predictable at every turn.
I would recommend the following order for entertainment value...Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln then Gangster Squad.
A bit too abstract for me...Quote:
Originally Posted by Prospero
Sorry Stavros and others... sloppy keyboarding. it should have read
"Sadly Allen's genius fled him decades ago and now he is on a gradual European tour, offering the most cliched images of every city he settles on to feature in his films.
Wagner (Tony Palmer, 1983)
All biographical films share the same problem -what to leave in and what to leave out? I understand Spielberg's Lincoln is a weeping willow of saccharine goodness that bears little comparison with Lincoln the man; whatever, this 'interpretation' (as Palmer would put it) of Wagner's life is a mess from start to finish; the link below claims to be the full version, the DVD set I have does not include some scenes which Palmer subsequently cut, not that it matters.
It is hard to believe that Wagner was a dynamic man, capable of tremendous love and generosity, that he inspired devotion in musicians, producers, indeed, ordinary people, when Palmer presents him as a sarcastic, surly, nasty person who, if indeed he were so, would never have got far in life. Richard Burton grumbles, mumbles and barks his way through an atrocious script; at 5' 11" (according to imdb) he would have towered over the real Wagner who was 5' 4" in heels; Cosima in real life was over 6' tall which makes her taller than Vanessa Redgrave. Having failed to explain why Wagner was such a failure in the first half of his life -because he music was crap- Palmer cannot explain the evolution of the extraordinary music from Tannhauser onwards (although only the second act works perfectly), cannot explain Wagner's astonishing gift with harmony, structure and the texture of music; he emphasises what in fact was a minor role Wagner played in the riots in Dresden in 1849, repeatedly showing footage of it throughout the film for no explicable reason, just as a dwarf in a wig repeatedly hammers on an anvil on which there aint nothing to hammer.
Wagner's first wife Minna was an actress who gave up a successful career to be the wife of this musical failure, and loathed the music that eventually was successful, just as she came to loathe him. She is shown dipping sugar cubes into laudanum when hubby is having an affair with Mathilde Wesendonck, as if it is some compensation for his absence, even though in real life her doctor prescribed laudanum for the heart ailment that would eventually kill her. She had numerous affairs with other men, and when she died was living with a postman. When King Ludwig stages a Lohengrin pageant in one of his fairy-tale castles, the music is from Parsifal; the court of Ludwig in Bavaria is dominated by John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, and Laurence Olivier all three of whom are a tiresome nuisance. Palmer presents Wagner's attitude to Wagner societies as pure sarcasm even though they were instrumental in raising the money for the first Ring Cycle at Bayreuth, Wagner also raised money from extensive concert tours which are not mentioned here. And so on and so on.
Maybe biographical films should be banned or restricted to a theme or moment in the life, Straub and Huillet's Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach being a modest success in this regard.
I don't think even a Wagner fanatic would be satisfied with this junk.
"WAGNER - THE COMPLETE EPIC" (as seen on TV) by Tony Palmer w/RICHARD BURTON - YouTube