Fuck 300, to me more than any other recent movie it marks the point of CGI overload. How can one derive entertainment from 1,000 people fighting, 10,000, 100,000, 1,000,000, or 1,000,000,000 if the whole thing is retarded and doesn't mean shit? Completely unconvincing, completely retarded, and having absolutely nothing to do with the source material (maybe a fault of Miller's, who knows).

An enlightening comparison to this movie I find, is Apocalypto: They actually went into the jungle and actually did the scenes and stunts, gravity behaves normally, people are sweaty and covered in muck as you'd expect, they even used subtitles, conveying willingness on the part of the director to make the audience compromise instead of compromising the material. Apocalypto may not have been historically accurate (I can't judge, knowing little about South American history), but compared to 300 it has such a different attitude towards filmmaking that I felt invested in the struggles of 10 people, wheras with 300 couldn't give a shit about the murder of millions.

Hollywood does a real disservice to humanity when it projects its tanned, oiled, hairless vision of reality onto any source material and one can't help but feel that the ignorance of the masses in general has been heaped upon by such profiteers. A certain amount of stupidity is going to be the standard, but it's decades of films exemplifying the tendencies that 300 gathers in one giant shitfest that are responsible for the ignorance of the average person, particularly in America. Unless it's something in the water, or the gene pool, one has to blame it on the culture.

Richard Dawkins (whom I previously didn't like, but am coming to appreciate more) commented on American stupidity, "These people have the vote and the rest of us must deal with the consequences." 

i love you guys 

I fucking liked it. 

it's a popcorn chewing Saturday Matin�e flick. You are taking it way too seriously. It is not G�tterd�mmerung, the Apocalypse, and the Decline of Western Civilization all wrapped in to one 90 minute spectacle, and it's inaccurate portrayal of history are no more important or damaging than the fictions Puzo built around the Italian mob or
Shakespeare likewise wrote about the British Aristocracy. 

even if my well water is contaminated with lead chips. 

alright maybe I overreacted, but the point was not that it's historically inaccurate, I don't care about that, it's just that it was so fake and dumb. I'm complaining not that they're spreading ignorance so much as that they may be spreading stupidity itself.

the whole epic thing has been so overdone it's starting to be sickening. Of all the post-LOTR epics I think only Troy was in any way decent. 

till you brought up Troy :)

Although i do plan to watch the extended director's cut over the next week or so, hoping it's better.

For my money, and this will be very hard to believe if you've actually seen the theatrical version, but the director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven is actually very very good. The 50 min of extra footage shows how easy it is to completely butcher a good film. 

I saw that in a theatre when it came out, and I do find that hard to believe. That is surprising to hear, the theatrical cut seemed to meander around without a point and felt way too long.

well I will have to check it out some time. 

I thought the theatrical edition was a piece of crap, but the extended cut is excellent. 

I don't care if you overreacted, if it gets you to write awesome monologues like that! 

Deliverance (1973) - rewatch, I was a bit harsh on this last time I saw it, incorrectly labelling it a one scene movie. It's beautifully shot, well acted and the direction is tense and natural. But having said that, I still find something not quite right about the movie as a whole, just cant put my finger on it. Either way, it is, at the very least, quite a good film with some standout sequences.

7/10 

Had potential to be utterly fantastic, but ended up being just mediocre. Too many people dying in stupid ways.
However: Incredible cinematography and set design, and Underworld's soundtrack is brilliant. 

oh man, great, great fun. can't remember when i last had this much fun with a movie.

That said, i have three points to critisize:
1) There's a totally weird 'film roll missing' cut in the middle that totally stunk. It cuts off a sex scene and then starts with all previous characters united at one place (that's suddenly burning down). (esp. as the big cut makes all character introduction unnecessary anyways.)
2) It's a tad too long. Some 'shoot another few zombies down' scenes could've been left out imho - i wasn't exactly bored, but it felt lengthy
3) i wouldn't normally pick on logic flaws, but this one is more of an inner logic error: The chick with the machine gun leg suddenly is invincible when she attacks the helis with the soldiers, and all other (as well as herself in pervious scenes) are quite careful and in fear f getting shot. kind of a break of the own rules.

oh, and it receives -1 each brainlessness and no message at all penalties

8/10 

now that i read it again, the "(esp. as the big cut makes all character introduction unnecessary anyways.)" should be at the end of point 2) 

also: gravity in sunshine = what 

This is a sci-fi after all.
However from the airlock scene we are led to believe that presence of air = gravity, and that is a wtf. If they had like a small monitor that said "local gravity field enabled" or something to that effect I would have been happier.
Overall I thought this was going to be a nice hard sci-fi but it wasn't. Disappointed I am.

Also Cillian Murphy is sooooooo creeeepyyyy, zooomggggggg!!! 

In the Shadow of the Moon?
Supposedly rocks.
Only available in USA in theaters, except perhaps some small film festivals elsewhere. :((( 

Sunshine - well you guys are right but you have to have some admiration for a movie that manages to incorporate <a>Alien, Solaris and 2001 successfully without really feeling like a rip off. Of course, it's unfortunate that it also chose to incorporate Event Horizon in its last act and although the idea for that part was interesting, the execution was poorly judged.

And yes, the visuals are outstanding (especially for that budget), but no one's mentioned the sound design yet. I thought it was great and added a lot to the atmosphere.

6.5/10 

Pitfall (1962) - Hirsohi Teshigahara's debut film is one of the most oddly unpredictable movies I have seen. The director has described it as a documentary-fantasy, and that is certainly a very apt description as the movie is part socio-realist critique, part ghost story and part existential drama. Every time you think you have it pinned as to where it is going next, it goes in a completely different direction.

For me, this strange melding of genres and ideas, as a murdered japanese miner returns as a ghost determined to find out the reason for his death, did not quite work in an overall sense. However, its rhtyhm is definitely strangely compelling and that in itself puts it ahead of most movies.

6/10


Smokin Aces - Joe Carnahan's followup to Narc is a big, loud, blood soaked mess, but it is a good mess. The pulpy, convoluted "story" about a range of parties converging at a hotel in an attempt to claim the bounty on a wanted man is overwrought in cliches, has too many unnecessary characters and plotlines and is really a big excuse for an extended action scene. But its reasonably well made as a non-serious and over the top action film, and the carnage unleashed near the end is very impressive. Pity that the denoument after this scene goes into lengthy exposition that belongs in a completely different movie.

6/10 

Twin Peaks : Fire Walk With Me - I have a lot of time for David Lynch but this is absolutely disgraceful. Not only is it a terrible movie on its own, it does its best to destroy the memory of the show. Atrociously made from start to finish, it relegates the best characters from the show to the background and kills all the mystery surrounding the laura palmer character. Her last 7 days, which essentially takes most of the running time of the film, is nowhere near as interesting when depicted in the manner shown here, and was much better off when left to the imagination. The movie also introduces events that seem to contradict character behaviour in the tv series.

Also missing is the trademark Lynch command of visuals and sound design to generate the atmosphere that is usually present in everything he makes. The end result is an extremely emabrassing effort.

0.5/10 

Despite having never read the book, and this movie being really hyped up by most people I know, I was still impressed with this. It's set around the second world war, and a situation in the grounds of a family estate where a young girl misconstrues a situation which sends the hero (played to James McAvoy) to jail for rape, where he makes the decision to go to war instead of doing the rest of his time.

The film is partly about the exploits of Robbie, the James McAvoy character, and Cecelia his love interest (played better than average by Keira Knightley), and also about Briony, they girl who mistakenly sent him to jail and her desire for atonement (ooh!) for what she did.

The film looks amazing, and while I felt the early pre-war section of the film is slightly too self-indulgent and artsy looking for it's own good, this doesn't take anything away, and the 2nd half of the film during the war is shot amazingly. There's an extremely long single-shot take which focuses on soldiers waiting to be evacuated from the beaches in France which has got a lot of attention from critics, and you have to watch it to see why. The way the sound design comes together in that moment with the orchestral score in the background and soldiers singing in choirs on the beach is dischordant and harmonious at the same time and is really incredible, my favourite part of the film.

My major reservation about this film is that it seemed to drag on a bit in the first section (pre-war) and ended rather abruptly. Also there's a semi-twist which breaks the narrative at the end which seemed a bit tacked-on and probably came together a bit better in the book. Generally it's a bit depressing, but I was expecting full-on harrowing from what people told me before i went to see it, so that was okay. So yeah, go see this. 

It's a prologue to the next Wes Anderson film, and I love Wes Anderson, so I'm pretty excited about that. Not much happens in this, it's all set in a hotel room and stars only Jason Schwarzman and Natalie Portman. There's a lot of little details to notice but don't expect to learn too much about the 'Darjeeling limited' (the full film). Generally well worth a watch, especially if you're so shallow you want to see Natalie Portman (briefly) naked. Oh Natalie.

Oh you can download it for free if you've got an american iTunes account, or it's probably on torrent sites now if you don't. 

saw death proof last night, comments later. 

Death Proof - I've always found Tarantino to be overly self indulgent, but despite that, having made generally entertaining films. And for the first half of his latest, it's more of the same, a well made throwaway piece of entertainment in the grindhouse style. Then, the grindhouse sensibility disappears, a whole new level of self indulgence kicks in and, most importantly, it becomes more cringe inducing than entertaining.

I'm sure someone out there appreciates what he's doing in the second half and finds it funny apart from Tarantino himself, but it wasn�t me. I would have preferred it if he kept the whole movie in line with the first half.

5.5/10 

Yeah, irritatingly stupid.

Most of the irritating is because it in no way had to be so dumb.