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Film Thread.
I thought a trio of themed threads about other entertainment media might be good. If you're not interested, please just ignore the thread and pick some threads that interest you from here: http://celephais.net/board/view_all_threads.php

Anyway, discuss films...
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Hollywood Doesn't Seem 
to know what to do with African characters. I found myself comparing this treatment with the Mr Ecko story arc from last season in Lost because of its fresh and somewhat twisted approach to standard African themes, ie. warlords, gun/drug running, and an impotent(or vital depending on the viewpoint of the narrative) church. I was curious what you thought of this, Nitin, given your review of the middle episode of season 2 ranked them a bit lower than the rest you may have different take. 
Mr Eko 
was by far the most interesting and well written character in season 2. So I think we are in agreement over that :) 
Last Night... 
...finally got around to viewing the Southpark WoW send up. What a hoot!

This was followed by a documentary I'd recorded on virtual gold mining... selling WoW gold for actual currency. Very interesting.

Then I stuffed up my night by watching Eragon. Shite! Even four vodka tonics under my belt couldn't save this poorly edited, atrociously acted, cliche ridden, two dimensional pile of... 
 
Bullitt (1968) - pretty good thriller/action film which is reasonably well written and directed and has Steve McQueen defining screen presence. It drags a bit, sometimes unnecssarily so, and none of the other characters are that interesting, but McQueen is magnetic and the action scenes, including the famous car chase, are good.

7/10


Doctor Zhivago (1965) - There's some frequent bad acting and bad dialogue, sometimes both within the same scene, but David Lean's storytelling skills and imperious direction along with Maurice Jarre's excellent score make up for the shortcomings on most occasions. The last 30 min or so don�t work for me as well as the rest of the movie but this is great stuff. Despite the long running time, it is very economical in its pacing and there's not much dead space. In a completely different league to most recent movies along similar lines.

8/10


In the Bedroom (2001) - generally well made and well written, and with phenomenal acting by all involved, this slow burn drama about the effect of a tragedy on a family is very interesting. There are flaws, the slow pacing is not a problem by itself but combined with the narrative stopping dead after a certain event in the film, it does become somewhat of an issue.

Todd Field displays an admirable restraint, never really letting this become the over the top melodrama that it could have become. But it's the perfromances that keep it going, tom wilkinson, sissy spacek, nick stahl and marisa tomei all putting in excellent work.

7/10


Last Year at Marienbad (1961) - Definitely a movie that many people will hate with a passion, Alain Resnais' out and out surrealist arthouse film is probably the most pretentious, indulgent, cold, distant and near incomprehensible thing I have ever seen. It makes David Lynch look like a straightforward storyteller. His previous movie, the great Hiroshima Mon Amour, displayed some of the same characterisitics and dealt with the same themes of memory but it was not as cold, distant or obscure and was much better for it.

The plot, if you can call it that as there is no temporal or spatial connection established between any of the scenes, revolves around the repetition of a series of events at a chateau between a man, a woman and another man. Anything more than that will be differently interpreted by everyone.

I have to say that despite all the negatives, I did find it fascinating to an extent mainly because Resnais's direction gives the impression that its made by someone who knows exactly what they are doing rather than by someone who is making it up as they go along. And I think I managed to piece enough of it together to get an idea of what he was going for.

6.5-7/10 
 
Eyes without a Face (1959) - classily made french film about a surgeon who abducts and operates on young women in order to try and restore the disfigured face of his daughter, who is forced to wear a mask in the meantime.

It doesnt go for the gore or exploitation angle, but is instead more of a gothic psychological thriller/drama with interesting characters, reasonably good acting and impressive direction.

There are some brilliant moments, especially when the daughter is on screen, but I did find that when the movie focuses on other things apart from the daughter, it isnt as involving.

7/10


The Man who shot Liberty Valance (1962) - one of the better films from John Ford that I have seen, although it still suffers from forced sentimentality and obtrusive and annoying comedy like his other movies.

James Stewart plays a senator in the american west who is known in history by the movie title and upon a revisit to the town where it all took place, he recounts his version of the story to a newspaper editor.

When it's not going along the comedy and sentimentality route, it is a pretty impressive western with James Stewart, John Wayne and Vera Miles all in top form.

6.5/10


Broadway Danny Rose (1984) - Not vintage Woody Allen, but it still has its moments thanks to Allen's skill as a writer.

He plays Danny Rose, a theatrical manager of some really bad acts who gets involved in all sorts of trouble when he goes on an errand for one of his more famous acts.

It starts off well enough, with Mia Farrow almost unrecognisable as a bimbo, but like some of his more recent output, the Allen schtick is a bit too overdone, overwhelming and annoying.

Still, worth a wach for some moments of sheer genius and hilarity.

6.5/10 
Sunshine 
Can't really be bothered with a big review, but I was really shocked with how impressive it looked, especially for a british film (a high budget one at that)... it has a really classy style of scifi technology which reminded me of 2001, and the lighting and the general look and colour is really impressive.

I liked the way the scope is pretty narrow, they never really tell you anything about the characters before you see them in the few days in which the movie takes place.

Overall it holds your attention quite well for a while, but as Text_Fish said in his review earlier it all goes to shit quite unexplicably later on. It seems like the guys at Fox turned up and said NO NO NO we need a BAD GUY and some FIGHTING and space danger and MONSTERS and you better add it the next 20 minutes or I'm gonna throw my tequila in your face. But it's worth seeing anyway, more power to the british film industry. 
Sunshine 
Agreed, silly premise and scientific liberties aside, the first half of the film was quite good, too bad it kind of became a stupid horror movie towards the end. =\ 
Bullitt 
Nitin's review reminded me... i happened to sit through "Dukes of Hazzard" recently (don't bother,) and I noticed that that movie had a Charger vs. Mustang chase... I wonder if the choice of Mustang was inspired by Bullitt. (I have read that the original choice of the Charger in the TV show was due to Bullitt.) 
Gonna Check This Out 
Oh I Have Heard Crazy Shit About Inland Empire 
but then again what do you expect from Mr Lynch?

pope, please post your thoughts if you see it.

Last night I watched Requiem for a Dream and was a little disappointed given how much I'd heard about it.

It's a definite case of style over substance and I found Darren Aronofsky's take on addiction a suprisingly empty film beneath all the flashiness.

Aronofsky employs every trick in the book, and a thousand others that arent, to hide the lack of depth in his material, but it's not quite enough. What does give it power though is the extraordinary performance by Ellen Burstyn and an amazing score by the Kronos quartet. Decent, but I didn�t find it to be any more than that.

6.5-7/10 
Nitin 
did you ever see the fountain? I agree with you on the lack of substance in Requiem for a dream, but the fountain baffled me so much that i couldn't possibly comment on whether it had any depth at all or it was just style over substance taken to a whole new extreme. What the hell happened? 
Starbuck 
i'm getting it this month, so I'll post when I see it. 
More Impotantly 
has anyone seen spidey3 yet? spidey 2 rocked and I hope this is of a similar level. 
Spidey3 
Would like to. I did enjoy 2 a lot. I think it really got the 'comic book villains are great yet tortured people' thing down in a way the batman movies basically crapped out of. And the central theme about the ordinary versus the heroic - the original premise of the spiderman character - was played out seriously enough to inspire thought and feeling, but not so it plodded into pomposity
And the almost-silent shot of spidey swinging across frame in front of the lit up empire state is the most tactful response to 9/11 I've ever seen.

The combination of villains in 3 is interesting. Sandy bloke I really don't know much about. AFAIR he's a rather secondary henchman type thug. Hope I'm wrong.
The conclusion of the goblin arc - nicely tying the three movies together - could be dramatic or could just turn into angsty rubbish.

The black costume, however, interests me for a more particular reason. It was a story arc concluded in the only Marvel comic I actually ever bought as a kid. I wasn't really as interested in spidey as the other strip in the comic, but it's odd to see it in a movie now, compared to all the other pop culture icons that have been mercilessly cinematised over recent years which I didn't give a shit about the first time round. 
 
kell,

exactly. Every scene felt like a comic book, which I think is very hard to do, from the speeches to the fight scenes to the humour.

Although I like Batman Begins just as much, its almost for the exact opposite reasons. But those two by far are top of the comic book pil for me. 
 
Science of Sleep - I personally regard Eternal Sunhine as one of the best movies of the last decade and its obvious while watching this that Charlie Kaufman was a major contributor to making that what it was.

Michael Gondry indulges in some impressive off the cuff visuals, and he gets a committed and goofy perfromance out of Gael Garcia Bernal but it felt too much like someone knowing what they wanted to but not knowing how to do it.

Frequently hilarious, but as a whole, it didnt quite work.

6.5/10 
Science Of Sleep... 
One of the things I liked about it, besides the humor and imaginitiveness of it, was the way the "tone" of the movie kept changing. Especially near the end of the movie, it seemed to shift smoothly from moment to moment between a the tone of a comedy about a quirky guy, to the tone of a drama about a mentally unstable guy.

The treatment of dreams were well executed, I thought. It's hard to put something on the screen and not have the clarity of the photographic image work against the goal of presenting a dream world full of symbols instead of objects. But I think this movie succeed in that regard. Also in terms of the constantly shifting narrative of dreams, where elements, locations, and people persist even as the underlying story of the dream reforms itself moment to moment, I thought the movie captured that feeling well.

So in conclusion, I guess the "feel" of the movie worked for me, even if the execution faltered in other ways. 
Let's Go To Prison 
Normally these type of movies aren't my cup of tea, but this one is pretty charming and funny. Nice to watch while you're sitting at the pc and doing stuff. shake your body!

6/10 
 
The Haunting (1963) - Decent old fashioned horror movie but some dodgy acting and scripting lets it down somewhat. The impressive cinematography and atmosphere result in some nice eerie moments later on and a couple of the characterisations are very interesting. In the end though, it does feel like a similar but inferior version of The Innocents.

6.5/10



Brute Force (1949) - Jules Dassin is one of the forgotten great directors and this is another quality film from him. A pessimistic and bleak prison drama with Burt Lancaster and Hume Cronyn as standouts, it�s a very good example of how Dassin turned predictable, cliched material into genuinely involving stuff. Helped along by the excellent cinematography and a good, if overwritten, script by Richard Brooks, Dassin builds to a tight climax that is probably better than the whole season of Prison Break. It's slightly let down by some unnecessary flashbacks, which very much come across as something the studio got involved in, but overall it's on the same level as Dassin's other movies from the same period.

7.5/10 
 
Walkabout (1971) - Nicolas Roeg's debut has the tagline "Probably the most different movie you will ever see". That's an apt description but it is also probably the best australian movie not made by an Australian. It's not for everyone, a lot of people will most likely find the lack of any plot, narrative or resolution a big hurdle. But if you're open to something different and don�t mind the lack of narrative, it's quite a worthwhile watch.

Its basically about the journey of two british children lost in the outback and their attempts to get back to civilization with the help of a young aborigine boy on his Walkabout (the aboriginal rite of passage that a young boy takes before entering manhood). Roeg uses that to create an interesting portrait of the differences between civilizations, the ability of youth to overcome those differences but not really understand them, and the feeling of being 'lost' no matter where you are. Its mainly a very visual film, with little or no dialogue, Roeg using his trademark editing technique to good effect. Its not on the same level as Don�t Look Now, as that was a lot more focused, but it has the same disctinct style.

7/10 
Good review, yes there is a real sense of being lost in Walkabout, it's all a bit bleak in a way.

But more importantly jenny agutter is a total hottie, go see it. 
She Sure Is 
 
Blinkende Lygter 
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0236027/

If you like De grønne slagtere (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0342492/ ) then you will also like this. I watched it danish with english subtitles, was ok. The actors are so great and the humor really dark. 
Hmmm... 
...showing my age, but I saw Walkabout during it's original release period (regional). My first real movie experience. Two scenes are still clear in my mind. Of course I didn't realise what a hottie Jenny Agutter was at that stage, that realisation didn't come till Logan's Run :o) Must revisit Walkabout, thanks for reminding me nitin. 
Distrans 
out of interest, which ones ? 
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