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You seen Chopper(2000/Australia)?Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
Chopper (2000) - IMDb@@AMEPARAM@@http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BNTc5Mzc3Njc4M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwODg1MTA5._V1._ SX99_SY140_.jpg@@AMEPARAM@@BNTc5Mzc3Njc4M15BMl5Ban BnXkFtZTYwODg1MTA5@@AMEPARAM@@SX99@@AMEPARAM@@SY14 0
http://cf2.imgobject.com/t/p/origina...gQ3jbk8fub.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDz-7aTo0f4
I've never heard of it. However, one of my favorite flicks is Australian...Quote:
Originally Posted by Dino Velvet
Mad Max 1 & 2 are great but Beyond Thunderdome is horrible crapola. Almost as disappointing a sequel as Henry, Portrait Of A Serial Killer Part 2.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
Agreed.... Love 1 and 2.... Didn't like 3 at all.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dino Velvet
The Life of Pi (Ang Lee, 2012)
I saw this in 3D and it was visually superb; unfortunately I didn't care about the victims of the shipwreck- real, allegorical, all-made-up, whatever. A pity because while it looks so good, if there is no substantial story or connection with the characters, it just seems underwhelming. Also not sure why Rafe Spall needs to pretend to have an American accent when he is in Montreal, and an Englishman...!
Life Of Pi - Official Trailer - YouTube
Django Unchained it was a fun movie. Jamie Foxx and Samuel L Jackson characters were good. The plot was a typical revenge western but with a black slave.
Roberto Rossellini's The Taking of Power By Louis XIV
last movie I seen was super 8 it's about six friends that are filming a super 8 movie when they witness a train wreck. The crazy thing about the train wreck is what's on the train that gets loose when it crashes a must see if you like adventure with a little slice of horror
Watched Dredd this morning and zero dark thirty last night.
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
Limitless
cool movie about a drugs that makes you genius
Most biographical films should be banned Stavros, old fellow? I think that's a step too far. i think YOU should be banned from seeing them. A better solution. lol
As for your remarks about Lincoln perhaps you should go see it first, eh? I know you loath the lead actor, but he actually turns in a fantastic performance. And it based on a powerful book about the subject. And yes it has it's saccharine moments, but is far better than that. Far better.
Fair enough, but it hasn't opened here yet. And I don't think I will ever be satisfied with biographical films if I know something about the subject, but you don't answer the question yourself. Anyway Lincoln hasn't opened here yet, and I will reserve my judgement until I have seen it. Until then it looks like Les Mis will have to step in for consolation, although I have been told people in the cinemas are singing all the way through it, hmmm....
The House I Live in (Eugene Jarecki, 2012)
Saw this on tv this evening; powerful, and profound in every sense of the word, and also depressing. If it lacked one component it is the explosion of drug trafficking that took place in the 1980s when the Reagan presidency was financing the war against the USSR in Afghanistan, and when the supply of cocaine from South America also exploded. Coincidence?
The House I Live In - Official Trailer (In Theaters Now) - YouTube
Brave
Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
There are special showings of The Sound of Music in which people dress up as characters and sing along with the songs. My idea of hell.
Total Recall..
Now I can watch the new one and compare
Quote:
Originally Posted by robertlouis
Rab doth protest too much! :hide-1:
I saw Zero Dark Thirsty over the weekend. It was awesome.
Project X
Freudian slipQuote:
Originally Posted by prettyboy5
I think singalongaLesMis would be even worse than the sound of music. There isn't a decent tune in the whole thing as far as i can discern. I have an advance DVD and will be (gritting my teeth) and watching it soon.
Oh and Stavros - what was the question? That biopics should be banned? Of course not. But I'd agree that most should not be made. Except of course the one i am developing presently lol
To return to Stavros and the issue of biopics. I think they almost always fail because, as Stavros demonstrates with his remarks about Wagner, those who are familiar with the real biographies of the subject will always pick holes in the dramatic simplifications inevitable in a film portrayal. Naming a single really terrific biopic is hard to do. Perhaps Ivan Rublev by Tarkovsky? But both are dealing more in the myth of a figure rather than the actual details of a life. Nothing Hollywood produces is truly great though, like Lincoln, it can contain a great performance.
The problems are twofold. Life is messy with loose ends. Popular entertainment (and Hollywood films especially) tries to tie them up. And to try to contain a life to a short film is impossible with gross distortion or simplification. The best biopics, I'd argue, choose an event or an episode - and use that to suggest the nature of its character. Lincoln, while flawed by many things, works reasonably well because of 1. A terific series of performances and 2. Because it limits ambitions to a brief part of Lincoln's life. It is weakest when it falls pry to Spielberg's constant need to sentimentalise things (the Gettysburg address business at the front, the sequence where he quotes from Hamlet, the postscript and the decision to feature Lincoln's death (wholly unnecessary)
Silver Lining Playbook--excellent movie.
Reacherround, er, i mean, Reacher.
Not as bad as i expected it to be! :shrug
Jericho in shock change of avatar. You look younger now
What can i say...I've found god! :shrug
The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I think that is where the rot set in. Unbearable.Quote:
Originally Posted by robertlouis
I once had to reprimand a man at Covent Garden who mistakenly assumed he was allowed to singalong with Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera; and almost died laughing while watching the philosopher Bryan Magee get out of his seat during a performance of Die Walkure to virtually thump a man in the back who had developed a minor cough...one must retain standards.
Do you do singalong, happy-clappy songs with your devoted audience, RobertLouis?
Exellent points in biography and film; but why does Spielberg have such a desperate need to make people want to cry at his movies?Quote:
Originally Posted by Prospero