Running Scared (2006) - paul walker in semi decent performance in almost good movie shocker. This is junk, but it's classy junk. Wayne Kramer's film is an extremely over the top urban nightmare that keeps plumbing lower and lower depths of depravity in an effort to shock and entertain, and mostly it works.

Walker plays a low life criminal who basically stuffs up the hiding of a murder weapon and then has to retrieve it before he gets killed over it. Along the way, the movie runs into every clich� imaginable, backs up, and then runs into each one again at a higher speed. Walker is surprisngly watchable and Vera Farmiga is very good as his distraught wife that gets her own nice little subplot. It's not a great film by any means, but I did find all the excess surprisingly entertaining to a degree.

6/10


Troy (Director's cut) - With 30 min of extended footage, the new director's cut of Brad Pitt staring into the distance is an improvement, one that actually makes the film watchable if nothing more. The new footage cannot eradicate the bad dialogue or lack of any real substance in david benioff's script, but it does smooth out the some of the pacing and flow problems that were present in the orginal version. There is also noticeable changes in the visual and aural departments, both areas being improved. More screen time is also given to Peter O'Toole's character, which is a good thing because the great man outacts everything else on screen.

In short, it's not the drastic improvement over the original like the Kingdom of Heaven DC was, but it's noticeably better.

6/10 (compared to 4/10 for theatrical)



Exiles (2004) - An interesting, if not entirely successful, road movie by Tony Gatlif that has two characters embarking on what starts out to be a walking trip from France to Algeria in an effort to discover the country of their families' origin. Well shot, well acted and with an excellent music score that seems to combine techno, gypsy folk and algerian folk, Gatlif's movie is as meandering as most road films are, but also has a very strangely compelling last 10 min to finish off proceedings. There are a few issues along the way where scenes seem to go for longer than they should because of the lack of focus on narrative, but it's an interesting and unique watch on the whole.

6/10



Deadwood Season 3 - great finish to a great series, the 3rd season fixes the issues I had with (the still very very good) Season 2, and adds a couple of very interesting new characters. Most of the season is just a drawn out and slow burn exercise in suspense, but I found it fascinating, especially with the powerful George Hearst character being given centre stage and forcing memebers of the camp to think hard about how to combat his presence, whilst still maintaning or improving their own situations. The dialgoue is back to its glorious best, the acting is top notch as usual with the addition of Brian Cox a very welcome addition, and the finale is worth the wait. Too bad this is the end.

8.5/10 

Junebug (2005) - it's self consciously indie and also a little bit heavy handed, but otherwise it's very well written particularly in relation to character nuance and interaction. It's helped by 2 very good performances by Embeth Davidtz and Amy Adams, both of whom manage to play their characters really well when there was big scope for caricature.

The story's nothing to write home about, a big city businesswoman takes the opportunity to turn a business trip into a visit to her boyfriend's small town family, all of whom represent clich� characters. But, like I said before, the writing in the interactions of the character is first rate, and coupled with the performances by Davidtz who plays the businesswoman and Adams who plays the pregnant sister in law, actually makes this dramedy quite a good watch.

7/10 

RIP Deadwood

What pisses me off is that Season 3 _is_ such a slow burn, they clearly had to keep putting off the war with Hearst (awesome performance by McRaney), which was set up and could have happened anytime during the season (right after ep 5 for example, even after episode 1!). They spent all that time avoiding the climatic battle, for the reason that it very likely would have killed off most of the major characters and left very little story to tell afterwards - and now, it won't happen at all.

I can understand that HBO cancels stuff, but if only they had known that while Season 3 was still filming, the entire thing could have been wrapped up within season 3. 

City Hunter
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103950/
I'll just be lazy and quote from imdb:

Extremely silly comedy about a self-indulgent private investigator who winds up on a cruise ship full of rich patrons, gorgeous women, murderous terrorists, and scarce food.
-----
Jackie Chan plays a womanizing private eye known as City Hunter in this Wong Jing directed movie. The movie is played for surreal laughs part of the time. But with Wong Jing at the helm of this comic strip of a movie, that is no surprise. When you watch this movie, you realize that Jackie Chan knows how to pick stories and direct himself better than anyone else.

Perfect fun for a sunday with headache. A quite awesome martial arts fight at the end and that famous Street Fighter scene for fans of that. And Jackie Chan's silly acting is great. A bit like japanese Austin Powers with less "hollywood-professionalism" and an extra portion silly.
*Ciiity Hunter* 

To Kill a Mockingbird - had been putting this off for a while because, well, the accents annoyed me whenever I tried to watch it :)

This time I wasn�t so bothered, maybe because I watched The Grapes of Wrath recently, or maybe because I was in a more forgiving mood. Anyway, this rightly deserves its reputation, its definitely a classic piece of moviemaking that hits all the right notes. I don�t really care for Gregory Peck but this is a tremendous performance and although I was more interested in the children's actions than the trial, Peck ensured those scenes were still worthwhile.

Other memorable things were the very well integrated score from Elmer Bernstien and Robert Duvall in his cameo as Boo Radley.

8.5/10


Mysterious Skin (2004) - hmm, it's not a bad movie by any means, but there is something definitely missing from Greg Arrakis' movie about the effects and trauma of uncle stevie behaviour on two kids from the same baseball team. There's a lot to like, the performances are very good, particularly Joseph-Gordon Levitt (who between this, Brick and The Lookout has all but erased his 3rd rock from the sun image) as the older version of one of the kids who becomes some sort of disconnected g@y hustler. Then there's the side characters, who are quite well defined despite not really having any story arcs of their own, and are still quite important to the overall context of the story.

But to counter all that, the tone seems completely off and I think the biggest problem is that even though Arrakis lingers unflinchingly on the horrors of his subject matter, it seems to be the only way that he can make an impact on the viewer because at all times the movie seems more concerned with the characters' actions rather than with the characters themselves. So while it's not a bad film, it's not a particularly good one either.

5.5-6/10



The Lookout (2007) - fairly decent crime drama/thriller by Scott Frank, the writer of Get Shorty and Out of Sight. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is again very good as a mentally impaired janitor at a small time bank who unwittingly becomes involved in a heist plan by some local criminals. Jeff Daniels is also quite good as his blind roommate, even though his role is underwritten.

Frank's script is quite slick and smooth but importantly spends a lot of time in getting us to sympathise with Gordon-Levitt's character, which is a good thing because otherwise the general plot's fairly derivative and unoriginal (in fact there's more than a couple of occasions where it's very similar to Memento).

7/10



The Palm Beach Story (1944) - again, not a bad film, but not a particularly good one either. I liked the central concept but felt that Preston Sturges could have extracted a lot more humour from it than he did. I also found the slapstick and zany support characters to not work and whilst Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea did well with what they had, the script lacked bite. And the ending's a serious copout and felt extremely tacked on.

5/10 

is pretty ridiculous even for an early(ish) Jackie Chan film. Doesn't he skateboard everywhere in it? Also, the real life street fighter fight of course. Wasn't Guile asian? 

State and Main (2000) - fairly entertaining but lightweight movie by David Mamet about the problems and impact a movie crew have while trying to shoot their movie in a small american town, after they are forced to go there due to a lack of money to shoot elsewhere.

It's very similar, but inferior, to Francois Truffaut's Day for Night, mainly because its too tongue in cheek for its own good. But the dialgoue is excellent and the ensemble cast including William H Macy, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Alec Baldwin and Sarah Jessica Parker lap it up to good effect.

6.5/10 

Michael Clayton - quite an impressive debut by Tony Gilroy, writer of the Bourne films, even though it's very obviously a writer's film rather than an experienced director's. It's a fairly densely plotted drama/thriller but thankfully most of it is quite intelligently written (there's a handful of plotting errors, nothing too glaring that detracts from the overall experience, but big enough to draw me out of the movie when they happened).

It's helped by some very fine acting, George Clooney does a reasonable job as the title character, a 'fixer' at a large law firm, but it's the supporting performances of Sydney Pollack and particularly Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton that really make the movie. Both of them aren't on the screen for a whole lot of the time but they make quite an impact, in their own contrasting styles.

Definitely worth watching.

7.5/10


Far From Heaven (2002) - Todd Haynes' homage to Douglas Sirk goes beyond mere imitation and is quite a good movie in its own right. Its very confidently made, there's not one scene really out of place in this variation on the very 50's melodramatic story of a bored upper class housewife who has an affair with her gardener.

It's beautifully shot and features one amazing piece of acting from Julianne Moore which, unfortunately, is also the movie's weakness. Moore is so good that the other main actors (who do a reasonable job) never look like matching her and she completely dominates all her scenes with them, which is kind of out of place with her character. It's a strange nitpick, but it did distract me from an otherwise fine film.

7/10


Miracle on 34th Street (1947) - I was pleasantly surprised. I was expecting some sort of oversentimental and preachy movie about the spirit of christmas but instead got a reasonably amusing movie with good characterisations that doesn�t really get oversentimental till the very end. Its preposterously unbelievable in parts, but I think that's the point, the movie playing out like a fantasy that it wants its audience to go along with.

7/10


Noise (2007) - fairly decent aussie movie from earlier in the year that is pretty well made, with lots of emphasis on character. It has kind of a weird balance, emphasising scenes and plot points that are not taken anywhere whilst glossing over others even though the movie keeps returning to them.

The title refers to the constant ringing (Tinnitus) in the main character's ear, a policeman who is relegated to light night duty after his diagnosis. His story mixes with that of a witness to the murderer of 7 people on a local train who lives in the area that the policeman is appointed to for night duty. It shard to pin what this movie is about, but it works to an extent, although I have to say the ending just completely left me puzzled.

6.5/10 

I didn't have much expectations but it had rather good stuff. I could push aside a lot of the fantasy elements... maybe it has aged rather well? Think of the fall of the Berlin wall, the Ukrainian Orange Revolution etc... I think these are interesting themes to explore the power vs the people, perhaps someone could do a more serious fiction movie about this stuff.

The next paragraphs will contain spoilers.

I also noted how we were left in the shadow of what really was the truth, through the Finch police chief character. Everybody's trying to pull the wool over his eyes. In the end we don't know for sure if st Mary really was a government plot or not, for example...

I found some of the "you can die for your ideas" stuff pretty strong too. People have to some degree done that throughout history.

I don't know if any of you have been in any mass demonstrations. I've seen some small scale stuff from pretty close, with riot police etc. though no tear gas.

There were some small and medium stupidities here and there... (and btw is Stephen Fry limited to gay roles? :) )

Maybe it helped that I didn't have so much expectations for the movie, that usually tends to do them good. :)

I'd say it stands out from the mass of movies. It actually had some more interesting overarching themes and not the usual "baddies are threatening my family/the city/the country", although the execution was cheesy at times... 

I should really try that again, I absolutely hated it when I saw it :) 

Does melodrama quite well... it's galvanizing if you let it suck you in. 

I recall Kinn not liking Portman's 50's
style English accent. I say that just made me want to bend her over the table
even more! Her American accent can sound prep school at times too so maybe she should do a few Wes Anderson films. 

it IS generic in a way, it's the baddies who are destroying the country, just that they are already in power and have already done it. :) 

Ok, V for Vendetta, was crap. I don't know if I disliked it as much as 300, maybe they're about equal, but I disliked V for Vendetta for different reasons. It sucks in different ways.

If they would have just stuck with action sequences, and made it a "The Crow" type revenge flick set in a stylized city, that would be OK. As it is, they throw in all kinds of stuff that makes it nice and retarded.

First, the love story. This isn't a huuge gripe, but it's cheesily done, predictable, lame, and cliched. The angry guy on a mission and the woman trying to be let in and explore his pain. Please.

That's nothing compared to the politics though. My god. The movie is an example of the kind of mindset that makes people think that liberals are idiots. Don't get me wrong, I'm more to the left than to the right, but this was absolutely ridiculous. Anyone who has actually read 1984, will recognize this film as a cheap attempt to imitate Orwell's political nightmare. It only takes the superficial elements from Orwell's system, and clearly has no idea what 1984 was actually about. Furthermore, they paste apparent Bush-administration issues on to this shallow veneer. The Bush Administration may be a lot of bad things, but fascists they are not. It is so utterly ideologically blind and irresponsible to portray this world "just around the corner" where gay people sitting in their own houses have their doors kicked down and are arrested for being gay. Please! Even if the Democrats were out of power for the next 30 years such a thing would never happen. And the guy who is arrested for HAVING A COPY OF THE KORAN. Wtf, come on. Furthermore how could he even make fun of the government on the air, if it really is a fascist system?

And the way this was all portrayed was so wishy-washy and melodramatic, that even if I did believe in this exact liberal bullshit, that the Bush administration is a bigger threat to western values than Islam, and that the family values crowd really wants to send the FBI door to door looking for gays, I still wouldn't have been able to buy into it in the movie.

I thought the Wachowskis were overrated after Matrix 1, which was a decent movie, with a marketing campaign that pissed me off. The sequels convinced me that their talent was shaky. This film has now convinced me that they're assholes. Not quite M Night Shamylan caliber, but still.

Don't get me wrong, I think terrorism is a cool subject, and a film with a protagonist terrorist is something I _WOULD_ find fascinating if it wasn't dog shit. 

This movie I was dragged along to and did not personally pick. Like Transformers and 300, which I also hated. 

The Crow. Made no sense.
I also hated Izo. (A japanese revenge sword perforation flick)
And Kill Bill made no sense either.

Maybe it's a different tone in TV, the action sequences and the sounds aren't so overwhelming and it's more about the plot...
(Btw I did search the thread for earlier reviews and saw you hated VforV passionately. :) ) 

my main problem with it was that it was basically what should have been a straightforward action film parading around as pseudo-intellectual fluff (like the 2 matrix sequels).

He's a freedom fighter and not a terrorist because he only blows up empty buildings and doesnt actually kill innocent people. Right...

Oh, and Portman was the best thing about the movie. 

never tries to be anything more than it is (till kill bill 2 comes along but that's another story). 

have you ever heard what it was like in Stalin's Russia. People did just disappear, and you could be arrested for having some book, and shot, or sometimes even for no reason just to fill up some quota.

You have chosen to take a view and think that it's Bush etc etc... (and maybe the film makers thought so too), so then it makes the more fascinating points about totalitarian control by accident.

These things have happened in human history. And there are things happening elsewhere than just USA and Britain and Australia and general western world at the moment... I wonder what it's like in North Korea. I've read one book by a former North Korean agent, an extremely fascinating read.
Just a short while ago there was a wave of revolutions in eastern Europe ffs. I remember watching in TV the body of Ceausescu (or was it his wife?), the former tyrant of Romania, shot on the street. 

I've taken Russian history. I realize what Stalinism was like, and I realize that that's what 1984 is about. "V" did not represent that kind of society effectively. I understand Stalinism: the filmmakers do not.

There could be no free media in a Stalinist system. There would be no game shows live, on the air. In 1984 everything is retrospectively edited, and freedom of speech doesn't exist. The world of "V" shows the superficial aspects of the 1984 system (columns of soldiers in the streets, omnipresent screens, angry authority figures) without grasping the actual structure behind it. In such a system, Western-style life, as it is portrayed in the film, would be completely impossible. People going about their jobs would be completely different. It wouldn't be a few thugs trying to rape people after curfew, oh no.

I don't like Bush, but the filmmakers were clearly targeting his government, the radio guy that's killed is Rush Limbaugh (no fan of that fat asshole am I), and so forth. If someone made a mainstream film that was as far biased to the right, as that is to the left, it would be called propaganda. And that's what "V" is.

And yes, the cast was pretty good. So was the visual style.

Bambuz: Revenge flicks, well what about Payback? Or Braveheart, or the Patriot, or Apocalypto, or anything else Mel Gibson's ever made? Lol. 

that from a standpoint of pure operatic melodrama, V for Vendetta works. As for the politics, I'm use to ignoring Hollywood's politics and just turning the old brain off for the show. It's show business.

There are a few movies that are political and don't really insult the intelligence all that much, Beaty's Reds, with its interviews with disillusioned ex revolutionaries (funny how the Social Democrats in these revolutions, from Russia to Cuba and so on always find themselves at the wrong end of the barrel of their Communist brethren), but I don't expect much from Hollywood.

Even their own story gets distorted and get the Clooney pat on back treatment. Here I'm talking about the history behind the Hollywood Red scare. What they wont tell you is the fact these purges were self inflicted and intercine. In the late 1930's there were two camps controling the actor and screenwriter guilds, Stalinist and Trotskyites.

When the US aligned with Uncle Joe, the Stalinist purged Trotskyites from important positions.
At the end of the war and the start of the Cold War(Truman didn't take to Stalin like the fawning idiot FDR), Trotskyites got their revenge and purged the Stalinist. The ComIntern types are quite brilliant though. They got a few doofus Conservatives in Congress like Tail Gunner Joe to do their dirty work for them.

It's interesting stuff but don't expect Hollywood to ever tell that story. BTW, I learned about this through independent research. I found
an old pamphleteer type booklet in a political book shop in Georgetown written by Trotsky's prot�g� James Burnham who learned early on that to accomplish what you are after get the enemy to do your work for you.

Still a great lesson I see in practice to this day. 

Interesting post HT. Hindsight's 20/20 but it's amazing still that westerners could think Stalin (or even Lenin) was in any way good. I understand that you're never going to get much out of Hollywood, in terms of, well, anything.

I guess the basic point here (in case it wasn't already obvious) is that, in this matter at least, I'm still an idealist. I know that television and hollywood is 99% bullshit, in more ways than it's possible to describe, but I just find that hard to accept. We have an open society, with free speech and individual freedom, and an economy that is so far above subsistence that it can support stories that cost hundreds of millions to produce. Is this really the best we can do?

I'm aware of plenty of decent counterarguments, such as: 1) Idiots enjoy idiot entertainment just as much as smart people enjoy smart people entertainment: what's the difference. 2) Smart people are only smart genetically, or possibly through their educational opportunities, and have no superiority over idiots. 3) Smart people may tell themselves that stupidity is enforced or produced by the media, because they are emotionally invested in thinking that everyone would agree with them and be like them if it wasn't for X enemy, onto which they project all of their anti-idiot frustration.

Basically, the point is, illegitimate and unrealistic as my point of view may be, I won't give it up, because I can't. As Dostoyevsky said (horrible midnight paraphrase) "Just because I'm faced with a wall that is indestructable, does not mean I will not bang my head against it." 

but I completely disagree with his use of the liberal/conservative dichotomy. We all know how imprecise and thus, mostly useless, that is. I suspect you guys know what I think about that, so I'll let it rest :)

The movie didn't directly promote the idea of anarchism (a type of societal organization based on maximal citizen participation) like the comics did, but the film did promote the idea of personal empowerment. This is far more useful than most movies, that focus on symptoms of whatever problems dominate our lives, yet ignore the causes of those problems.*

The film worked for me because it did justice to how ordinary people turn into activists: an angry person is one thing, but educating that person how to use their passion to fight against that which makes he or she angry is something else altogether. It is very, very rewarding to see that change happen, both in oneself and in others.

* By symptoms vs. problems, I am referring to the difference between cause and effect. Examples:
1) huge gaps in wealth between communities (and countries) vs. private ownership of capital (a probable cause);
2) weird and bad love/romance type stuff vs. patriarchy and gender roles;
3) war vs. incentives for politicians to stay in power;
3) mafia violence and drugs vs. widespread dissatisfaction with politics' response to community needs;
4) et cetera. 

Basically, the point is, illegitimate and unrealistic as my point of view may be

I enjoyed reading your post and I didn't find it illegitimate at all. Orwell is a tremendous influence on me as well. I've recently reread Homage to Catalonia and he was one of those disillusioned Social Democrats who find his presumed allies to be even more criminal than the enemy he was fighting.

I'd recommend reading F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom as it was on Orwell's mind when he wrote 1984. When I finally got around to reading it, it occurred to me, 'hey, there is Blair and his Nanny-Cam state!'. It is about the subtle relinquishment of liberties usually brought about to make government processes more efficient.

Hayek's influence on Libertarians is well known but his influence on civil liberty oriented liberals was very strong as well. 

then that's what they should have done.

But they didnt. And if you're going to go down the path, do it right.

And for what it's it worth, I thought Good night and Good Luck was awesome, it may not be the perfect history lesson, but that knows what it wants to be and never goes for anything else.