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Nymphomaniac Vol1
Interesting movie in storytelling format. Can't quite see the tenuous link between sex and fly fishing. Straight over my head!
Must say though, it has certainly pushed the boundaries in explicit sex for a mainstream movie. Thought I was watching porn again.
The Grandmaster:
Yi dai zong shi (2013) - IMDb
I saw this last night and was enthralled. What an intelligent perceptive and moving film. it avoids all cliches and penetrated, as Stavros says to the heart of relationships where issues are skirted and where the past clings tenaciously to the present. Splendid. I re-post S's review bevause i agree with it wholeheartedly.
Oh and that teardrop. Wow...
And this was a review from The Guardian.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
The Past review – 'Its severity and cerebral force are beyond question'
A Separation director Asghar Farhadi confirms his place among cinema's true grown-ups with a pressure cooker of a relationship drama. Prepare yourself for post-film debate
Peter Bradshaw
The Guardian, Thursday 27 March 2014 14.59 GMT
Asghar Farhadi's complex, intricate drama is a tragedy of good intentions and bad beginnings and wrong decisions that seemed right at the time. Farhadi shows the desperation and anger involved in trying to annul incorrect life choices and defy the past. A brilliant opening vignette shows two people pranging their car while reversing. They are looking back, but failing to see the danger.
The Past is a film that announces this director's arrival in the rank of those film-makers like Kiarostami, Haneke and PT Anderson, directors who are intent on the unfashionable business of making morally serious films for adults. Very often, a certain type of movie is praised for being "immersive", for providing the longed-for sensual pleasure of pure cinema. Farhadi's kind of film is quite different, but just as valuable. You are not immersed; on the contrary, you are challenged, alienated, compelled to pay fierce attention to every line, every cutaway, every scene change, and then to question what you think you have learned. Having watched and rewatched The Past, I wonder if it is a little contrived, but its severity and cerebral force are beyond question, a pressure cooker of passion and anguish. Just as in his film A Separation, it is the agony of splitting that reveals the truth of a relationship most clearly; literally an analysis, a taking-apart.
This is a loss-of-love triangle. Bérénice Bejo plays Marie, a woman who works in a Paris pharmacy; Tahar Rahim plays Samir, who owns the dry cleaner just a few doors away. They have fallen in love, and Samir is now moving in to Marie's place, but such is the difficulty and pain of their situation that these characters never so much as smile at each other throughout the film.
Both are encumbered. Marie has been married twice, with two daughters from her first marriage; her current husband is Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) who deserted her and fled to his native Iran following a breakdown four years ago. Now he is returning to sign the divorce papers, to get closure, and simply to bid their shared past a civilised farewell.
Samir is married, too, with a little boy, but his situation is even more difficult: his wife is in hospital, in a coma. And Marie is saving up some news for Ahmad that he is not going to like.
Everywhere in this film there are crosscurrents of unspoken reproach, guilt and fear. From the very first, Ahmad resents the fact that Marie has not booked him a hotel, forcing him to stay at her messy and overcrowded place, and she has moreover chosen this moment to redecorate. (As in Farhadi's 2006 film Fireworks Wednesday, redecoration is a symptom of dysfunction.) Is it hate or love? Does she want him there to rub his nose in her new relationship and his desertion, or does she subconsciously wish to see him as the paterfamilias just once more, to measure Samir up against Ahmad? There is a brilliant moment when Ahmad is on the kitchen floor fixing a mucky, blocked sink just as Samir arrives to meet him. Excruciatingly, Ahmad smilingly declines to shake his hand, because his is too dirty – doing real man's work.
Marie gives Ahmad a more important job, a domestic task that instantly fills him with resentment and yet self-satisfaction that it is something important for which only he is competent. He must speak to Marie's elder daughter, Lucie (Pauline Burlet), and talk her out of her new, stroppy attitude and late nights. In discharging this new quasi-paternal responsibility, Ahmad stirs up even more of the destructive past and uncovers baffling layers of guilt and resentment.
Adroitly, incrementally, Farhadi's drama discloses the various solutions to the question of Samir's wife, and with each possibility, we bark our shins on the sheer frustration of not really knowing. Samir himself is worried by scratch-marks on his wife's stomach: could she have made them herself, and therefore be capable of entering into a semi-conscious state? The doctors are not sure, telling him only that new tests expose more "room for doubt". Farhadi's whole dramatic procedure is founded on exploring this room for doubt. The only alternative to doubt is to cut your losses and move on: a number of characters here advise each other to forget, to break the past's terrible grip. But it is not so easy. Forgetting the past means losing much of the present and much of oneself.
Sombre and difficult this movie may be, but it is exhilarating to watch something that makes you come out of the cinema not sated or torpid, but wanting to talk – to talk about what the film meant, and meant to you personally. It's a rare pleasure.
Thank you for the compliment Prospero, and an unusually perceptive review by Bradshaw.
I saw The Past last week and have nothing to add to what Prospero and Stavros have already said. If you want to see sensitive, intelligent and intensely moving cinema, you couldn't spend your money on anything better right now.
BRICK MANSIONS
paul walker's last completed film. There's an memorial Ob at the end of film
dedicated to Walker. the film itself is loaded with action that includes stunning acrobats and stunts hand-fights, car chases from begining to end, though
average in plot/characters.
Frankly it reminded me very much of District 12. i couldn't stand the
shaky-whirly camera work. Rza continues to prove he can't act to save his life.
Brick Mansions is above average- but not memorable. Nothing special
it's a popcorn flick film i can enjoy the day i see it but forgot about the
next day.
i just saw the mighty ducks for the first time in years. don't ask my why i stopped on it but for a campy kids sports movie, it is remarkably still entertaining.
Enders Game , was pretty mehhh, dull and predictable .. cool effects though
Now a great old film i watched recently was Trading Places :)
Last night. A documentary...
The Counsellor (Ridley Scott, 2013)
Ridley Scott makes some interesting films, and some terrible films. I was intrigued by The Counsellor because it had such terrible reviews. They were right. The script by Cormac McCarthy is bloated, obscure pretentious crap (or embarrassing, as in the first scene). I don't know how many more films can be made about a drug deal that goes wrong, they can't be much worse than this. But at least Natalie Dormer is in it, all to briefly, wearing one of those spray-on dresses that brings the best out of her derriere, inviting others to enter.
The Counsellor | Official Trailer #1 HD | 2013 - YouTube