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Just watched "The Master" and wish I could have that 138 mins of my life back. Acting was great, cinematography & mis en scene, was what you'd expect from this director - but lacking any story, one would at least hope for a character study but I found myself knowing little (and caring less) about the characters or the point of making this film.
"12 Years a Slave"...HBO.
Good movie, very well acted...though I think Brad Pitt was miscast for his part.
Watching Lupita Nyong'o get brutally beaten upset the living shit outta me. It's goddamn heartbreaking. She's beautiful. You want to save her but you can't.
...probably need to lay off the weed a bit. I dunno.
"Snowpiercer"..Netflix.
With a different director, I believe, this could have been a very good movie. Maybe someone like Terry Gilliam (or those French directors - Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet). I'm normally a fan of Joon-Ho Bong...I loved "The Host" and "Mother". But even though the movie is a good idea...it doesn't quite work for me.
"The Lone Ranger"
Just saw that on netflix too, the ending didnt make any sense to me... but it was ok for what it was.Quote:
Originally Posted by fred41
A film I'm curious to see....
Snowpiercer: Set in a future where a failed climate-change experiment kills all life on the planet except for a lucky few who boarded the Snowpiercer, a train that travels around the globe, where a class system emerges.
Snowpiercer Official US Release Trailer #1 (2014) - Chris Evans Movie HD - YouTube
I watched Interstellar Wednesday evening, caught like 3/4ths of Die Hard 4 today and am watching Deja Vu right now.
Don't bother, it's shite.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
You'll never get those two hours back!
Interstellar (2014)
Christopher Nolan's movies are all about the premise. Start clever and then take the audience through a bunch of twists and turns until they reach a satisfactory ending. In some ways he is hobbled by his initial success because he'll probably never make a movie as good as Memento, at least as long as he sticks to the clever/twisty turny formula.
I liked Interstellar, though it's not nearly as affecting as last year's Gravity, which deserved the awards it received. And this is an interesting comparison as that one ran for a spare 91 minutes of edge of your seat action, and this one is nearly 3 hours. The few reviews I've read since seeing the movie make a big deal of how Nolan explores the affects of relativity theory but don't let that fool you. You're still going to have to suspend a whole lotta disbelief to get through this one. Anyway, I found it entertaining and not disastrously preposterous like some movies in this genre such as Ridley Scott's Prometheus.
Grooby - Thank You!!! everyone I know raves about 'The Master' and I thought it was a tedious pile of pretentious dog vomit. This film confirmed for me that Joaquin Phoenix is nothing more than a shitty mumbling no talent who somehow keeps landing roles in movies ( go watch Her or Walk The Line).
Has anyone seen 'Camp X-Ray' and is it worth checking out?
Same question for anyone who has seen 'Birdman'
Thanks for the heads-up....Quote:
Originally Posted by Jericho
THINGSTOCOME(1936) Once you boil away some of the futurism, i's amazing how close to the mark it comeshttp://www.yume.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/things-to-come.jpg
Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014).
There are times in this film when the chords masquerading as music being played over and over and over again are so loud it isn't possible to hear what people are saying. The sad fact is that even with an estimated budget of $125m, it doesn't matter. Like Nolan's other films this one fails to establish a strong story line or plot, the sub-plots are of little interest, the characters even less so. There is no real climax, as the ultimate scenes in the film make no sense, to me anyway, as indeed most of the 'science' seems to me to be deliberately confusing in case even someone like me can work out it is meaningless rubbish. and that is after you try to work out how climate change and soil erosion means the earth can only grow corn. Work that one out! There is a talking computer of course, though it must be a first to have one that looks like a cupboard; Michael Caine apparently wears the same shirt for 24 years, and one can only be relieved -or not- that Matt Damon is going to make a 4th Jason Bourne movie with Paul Greengrass, it can't be worse than this gargantuan mess of a film. I can't stop anyone from going to see it, but at over three hours, you might want to take a sleeping bag. Or better still, order a pizza half way through, at least you will then be given something useful to do, like eating.
Was in the mood for a special effects laden, visually beautiful film...so I rented "Maleficent" from Amazon. The movie was striking and so was Jolie as the title character.
Other than that, the film was a bit inconsistent and some of the characters were either not fleshed out well (Aurora) or, to me, totally miscast ( Sharlto Copley as the king/former love interest...meh).
..but it's a Disney film...it looked good on my screen... and I enjoyed it.
Interstellar
I agree with Stavros on this one. Big let down. If I had a degree in physics, maybe I would understand what the hell was going on for most of this movie.
I'm watching Firestarter right now. Last movie I watched until completion was The Animatrix.
300: Rise Of An Empire
Just watched this, too. I liked it okay, but was pretty let down. Wish they would've made it more action-y. It was like a drama/thriller set in a SciFi setting, rather than a typical SciFi movieQuote:
Originally Posted by Yasmin Lee Fan
I was going to see Interstellar, but I saw Big Hero 6 instead. It was GREAT!Quote:
Originally Posted by KellyKlaymour
Disney's Big Hero 6 - Official US Trailer 1 - YouTube
Looks good !
This does look amazing:)Quote:
Originally Posted by crystalsopen
If I Stay.
The Lost Continent 1968
Dire, but fun when you're stoned.
Could be wrong, but i'm thinking, The Dark Crystal (skeksis), Predator (predator), and Starship Troopers (brain bug) all ripped their monster designs from this film.
It seems I am not the only person who can't hear the dialogue in Interstellar, and it seems it is deliberate on Nolan's part -there have been a lot of complaints, so much so that a chain of cinemas in the US has posted this notice in their theatres:
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/...n_3106688c.jpg
Link to the report is here
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/f...omplaints.html
I'm watching Starfight for the first time. So far I've seen Episode 1 and half of episode 2 Its actually pretty intertaining, especially when Luke Skywalker kills everylast alien in the little village. I cried when his mommy died in his arms =(
Can't wait to see what happens next - I wonder if he will join the Dark side!
Interstellar. Despite the worm holes, neutron stars, frozen-cloud-planets, mind boggling tesseracts and a multitude of other costly special effects, Machenzie Foy’s wide and joyous smile is the only wondrous thing in this film. Unfortunately, her character isn’t given many opportunities to smile.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
Yeah, the bkgrnd music was annoying, to be sure. The other spot in the movie I couldn't hear shit was when Michael Caine's character was dying and saying something to the redheaded chick. I couldn't tell if he was mumbling or talking in code or what. Could only piece it together later in the movie after several more scenes with the redhead where she recounted the conversation to others.
Animal Factory. Great cast, great performances and solid direction from the always good Steve Buscemi. Plus it has Mickey Rourke as one of the ugliest hung-angels you will ever see, and that is pre the facial surgery! And yes, his performance is fucking great as always. Worth a look
Just out of interest, Trish, do you have a particular favourite 'science fiction' film -broadly used to cover science and space -but also one that doesn't take such liberties with science as to be absurd?Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
For me, that movie would be Contact.
Any who, I saw Birdman last night. It was an amazing film. The style was unique and I especially loved the dialogue and cinematography. Oh and the drum score was wicked.
Nightcrawler
Thanks Instrumental, I have heard of the film but never seen it, so I shall, as you Americans say, 'check it out'.Quote:
Originally Posted by Instrumental
Mr Turner (Mike Leigh, 2014)
JMW Turner (1775-1851) is regarded as one of the greatest painters that Britain has produced, and Mike Leigh has given him two and half hours of loving attention with a film of exquisite beauty.
However, Leigh assumes that the audience is aware of Turner's status, but in making this assumption feeds the curious fact that the Turner so beloved of contemporary Britain (perhaps the world) is the Turner of the late paintings most of which were never seen in his lifetime, whereas Turner's reputation in his own time, was based on the paintings of his youth derived from classical and biblical subjects which are of little interest today. Such was the popularity of Turner that by the time he was 23 he had more orders for paintings than he could complete. He had learned his craft with Joseph Wyatt, yet did not create a studio to meet his customers' demand with an army of assistants but relied on his father's support and that of his housekeeper, Hannah Danby played with aching sympathy in the film by Dorothy Atkinson.
Turner was a working class lad born in Covent Garden in the centre of London to a barber and wigmaker; his mother was the daughter of a butcher. After giving birth to JMW, she produced a girl, who died, whereupon the mother went mad and was committed to an asylum. We don't really know if this accounts for JMW's appalling treatment of women, evident throughout the film most notably in the painter's indifference to the fate of the woman who bore him two girls, and the sister of Hanna Danby who in addition to her housekeeping provides him with occasional sexual relief.
The film is thus set between the 1830s and Turner's demise by which time the top ten hits of his youth had been replaced with what became Turner's obsession with light and colour, presented most often in seascapes for which he was widely ridiculed by the Royal Society of which he was considered an eccentric if gifted member, though there is a telling, if wordless performance in the film by Constable who clearly envied Turner's skills with light and colour. Look more closely and you will note that Turner had an aversion to the colour green (as, I believe, is true of Leonardo da Vinci).
In the film, Turner rents a room in Margate and having bedded the landlady, decides to buy a house for them both in Chelsea, while maintaining his other house and Ms Darby. In reality, Turner did not rent but purchased at least four houses on the Thames to indulge his obsession with sunrise and sunset.
Indeed, Leigh's strength is in presenting a man utterly consumed by painting, it was in truth the only thing that mattered to him. Leigh passes over Turner's youth, his passion for the poetry of his contemporaries such as Wordsworth, Byron and Goethe whose Theory of Colour fascinated him. He does not touch on the French Revolution, Napoleon or the Wars which prevented Turner form travelling in Europe until 1819 when he made a profoundly important journey through France and Switzerland to Italy -some of Turner's watercolours of Venice are amongst his finest works. Leigh also fails to register that Turner's fabulous painting, The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her berth to be broken up (1839, and Turner was famous for his long titles), and also Rain, Steam and Speed (1844) depict Turner's loathing of the industrial revolution, they were not endorsements of it.
Leigh does not present Turner as a modernist, but a traditionalist, and I think this is correct. Turner was obsessed with light which is why so much of his later work looks abstract, but is not -form is not abandoned, it is absorbed by light. Thus Leigh reproduced Turner's (allegedly) last words: The sun is god.
For all its faults, and assumptions, this is a beautiful film, driven by character rather than plot -there is no narrative as such- -which in spite of Timothy Spall's spellbinding performance, fails to confirm that it is possible to make a truly great feature film about an artist as there have not been any so far. I recommend the film, but with the warning that is is rather long, the music is mostly a whining oboe one can do without, but with superb photography.
Contact is interesting in that it questions some of the basic assumptions of what’s taken to be scientific methodology. It points out that not all experience is open to public inspection and that some experiments are so costly they can only be performed once.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
My favorite is 2001, basically for its optimism about the future of humankind, and the infinitude of the universe. However this doesn’t meet your absurdity avoidance criteria.
I’m not sure there are many that meet that criteria. Perhaps Europa Report, which I streamed about a year ago. My memory of it is that it wasn’t absurd, but it wasn’t a transformative work of fiction either.
Most fiction, and most of all science fiction, requires some suspension of disbelief. Some of the things in Interstellar that might strike one as absurd are not; e.g. the time-dilation the astronauts experienced on the planet with a low orbit around a spinning, massive black-hole. What was absurd (among other things) was the idea that is would be easier to terraform any one of those unfriendly planets than to rescue Earth from climate catastrophe.
Absurd science fiction films (not necessarily about space and time) that I like include
The Day the Earth Caught Fire
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Blade Runner,
Matrix (the first one)
Jurassic Park
Alien (the first one)
Evolution (the amusing one with David Duchovny)
"Metro Manila"...on Netflix.
I thought this was a very good movie about desperation.
Thanks for the review, Stavros. I try to catch most of Mike Leigh's movies. It's interesting when he strays from his modern english drama/comedy stories to ones outside this genre, like Topsy Turvy. I'll be looking for this one in the theatres.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
I watched First Blood last night. To me this is the best of the Rambo movies. After this one they turned him into a superhero. The scenes where he takes out all those guys in the woods was very well done and has been copied by everybody since. Most recently in The Equalizer.
Kubrick was a pessimist, I am surprised you cannot see this, as he loads every film with his one-dimensional loathing of the human race, seeing it as a machine that lies, robs and kills, that is incapable of love and compassion- two feelings that are banned from his films. The closing scene of the film is one of the lowest points in cinema: the bleak image of a foetus travelling back to earth to begin yet again life's utterly pointless journey through time, with the opening of Also Sprach Zarathrustra played yet again to emphasise that nothing has changed since the ridiculous and insulting episode The Dawn of Man that begins the film. One passes over with as little comment as is needed on his collaboration with that disgusting pederast, Arthur C. Clarke.Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
Kubrick's main interest in film was in the technology, and it shows in some his films which are technologically outstanding, Barry Lyndon being his best film, if you can take the relentless sarcasm and the view that humans only exist to hurt each other. Kubrick may be the most over-rated 'great director'.
For the record, my favourite film in which people travel into space is Danny Boyle's Sunshine, even with its hysterical ending. Superior to the turkeys on your list. And a Happy Thanskgiving to you too!!