Aside from the nonsense about the Devil, the film has endured well and remains a compelling watch.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fitzcarraldo
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Aside from the nonsense about the Devil, the film has endured well and remains a compelling watch.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fitzcarraldo
I was not that impressed by The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) when I first saw it, but I now think it is Wes Anderson's second best film, after Isle of Dogs. What it shares with Asteroid City (2023) is a familiar trope: the film about a film, or a film about a play, or a film about method acting, or a film with 'layers of meaning' or overlapping narratives that move forward and backwards in time. If pastel colours dominate TGBH, Asteroid City is mostly Pink, a Sandy Pink, as the US desert location of the story/play was actually filmed at Chichon in Spain, the Cacti being plastic imports, indeed, rather a lot of plastic in this film if you want to be critical/sarcastic.
I think this is the point, but is it Satire or Comedy? I fancy this is the kind of film that would have absorbed many hours of barely comprehensible scribblings in the now defunct Monthly Film Bulletin, which in the 1980s was taken over by Neo-Marxists, Post-Structuralists, Post-Modernists, and Post-It Notes obsessed with 'narrative structures', 'elision', 'vertical displacement' and so on, in the process alienating readers from the film being reviewed.
Asteroid City, with by now its roster of well-known actors/The Anderson Troupe -do they take a pay cut to be on screen for, like two minutes?- is whimsical, even frivolous, but whereas TGBH does at least evoke a past that has been submerged by defeat in war and modernization, and as a result has a melancholic tone, Asteroid City doesn't seem to be about much when the most interesting scenes involve an alien, and by the standards of contemporary cinema, a very plausible one too.
As for The Darjeeling Express (2007), 'Let's make an agreement' -to never see this film again.
Friedkin was a masterful director.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
I agree, with regard to the two permanent classics, The French Connection, and The Exorcist. He made two films of plays, The Boys in the Band (1970) which seems tame now, but was considered edgy when it was on the London stage, and even when the film was released. Friedkin's film of Pinter's play The Birthday Party (1968 ) is superior to the TV film directed by Kenneth Ives in 1987 where Pinter plays Goldberg -this version has the execrable Joan Plowright making a dog's dinner of Meg, a role for which she was not suited, given she can't act.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fitzcarraldo
I have only seen Cruising (1980) once, when it was released, and am not keen on To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) which a lot of people like, and as for Killer Joe (2011), let's just say you might not want to handle a chicken drumstick (let alone eat one) for a while after seeing it, deliciously wedgie though the film is, and maybe Matthew McConaughey's best film.
He also directed Sonny and Cher's movie Good Times. There's a great biography of him titled Hurricane Billy.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts.
The Double w/ Jesse Eisenberg...
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Upgrade .One of the best that most people haven't heard of Logan Marshall-Green is brilliant and should be the next Bond if they can find a Daniel Craig dream sequence.
I just saw the Director's Cut of "Kingdom of Heaven" on DVD. It is very good. When it came out, it was poorly received, but 20+ years on, I think it is a classic.
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part One (Christopher McQuarrie, 2023)
Or: MI Greatest Hits. A re-hash of what we have seen in MI 1-6.
The only real talking point is that it is in sync with the panic over sentient AI, and the continuing development of invisible war machines (mostly airborne, but no reason for it not to be a sub).
I actually became confused as to who the characters were, and frankly, didn't care. Entertaining, that's as much as I can say,