A few films recently watched.

[awepittance]

where are you guys just now seeing A Serious Man ? i can't find a torrent anywhere and it's not in theatres here or out on DVD yet

[Guest Z_B_Z]

i just finished downloading a serious man via the pirate bay

[data]

Creation

 

7/10

 

i just wish it had been less about family life and more of his works.

 

[karmakramer]

Do anyone of you feel there is any risk in downloading from the pirate bay? I thought they got shut down or something...

[Guest futuregirlfriend]

http://www.news.astraweb.com/specials/kleverig-11.html

[AJW]

 

Breaking the Waves, The idiots and Dancer in the Dark

 

god i hated the idiots. haven't seen breaking the waves but dancer is amazing.

 

Ah, I missed the Idiots! Breaking the waves is imo superior to dancer, but I haven't seen either in a while. But this whole "golden heart" thing, it sounds like something marketers came up with...is it actually what von trier calls it?

[/quote

 

Try 'The Kingdom' didn't like Antichrist either, thought the story was brilliant but do we have to see a woman cutting off her own clit with a old pair of scissors?

[lumpenprol]

yes, yes we do.

 

The Kingdom (Riget) I and II are very good. I love the ending. Some of Von Trier's best work in there, to be sure.

 

I just re-watched:

 

The Devil's Advocate: There's something praiseworthy about really well made B movies that don't even seem to know they are B movies, like The Good Son, Fatal Attraction, etc. This is one of those flicks. It has strong performances from Keanu Reeves, Al Pacino (one of the few times I think his weirdness fits the role) and Charlize Theron in all her early baby-fat beauty. A guilty pleasure. 7.5/10

 

Unforgiven: I felt the same way about this that I felt when I saw it originally in theaters. A bit overrated. There's something about Eastwood-directed films I'm not too keen on, and it's hard to put my finger on it exactly. I guess it's because they seem to decry violence, but often end up with some stoic guy killing/being killed at the end. At least if the stoic guy is played by Eastwood. He seems to want to have his cake and eat it too; he toys with his mythic "man with no name" badass image, but ultimately ends up affirming it. Good performance by Hackman; Eastwood and Morgan Freeman are just so-so. 7.5/10

[kokoon]

they actually call it his "golden heart trilogy"? Bleaaach. What's the third one? Dogville? That wouldn't really count.

 

Breaking the Waves, The idiots and Dancer in the Dark

 

god i hated the idiots. haven't seen breaking the waves but dancer is amazing.

how can you hate the idiots??? how can you not LOVE that movie?

[sneaksta303]

and Charlize Theron in all her early baby-fat beauty

 

oh how I love it

[keltoi]

they actually call it his "golden heart trilogy"? Bleaaach. What's the third one? Dogville? That wouldn't really count.

 

Breaking the Waves, The idiots and Dancer in the Dark

 

god i hated the idiots. haven't seen breaking the waves but dancer is amazing.

how can you hate the idiots??? how can you not LOVE that movie?

 

dunno man it didn't arouse me in any way.

[gaarg]

I thought Idiots was special. In a very good way.

[Squee]

LOL!

 

Roger Ebert's Review of The Lovely Bones

 

"The Lovely Bones" is a deplorable film with this message: If you're a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to. You can get together in heaven with the other teenage victims of the same killer, and gaze down in benevolence upon your family members as they mourn you and realize what a wonderful person you were. Sure, you miss your friends, but your fellow fatalities come dancing to greet you in a meadow of wildflowers, and how cool is that?

 

The makers of this film seem to have given slight thought to the psychology of teenage girls, less to the possibility that there is no heaven, and none at all to the likelihood that if there is one, it will not resemble a happy gathering of new Facebook friends. In its version of the events, the serial killer can almost be seen as a hero for liberating these girls from the tiresome ordeal of growing up and dispatching them directly to the Elysian Fields. The film's primary effect was to make me squirmy.

 

It's based on the best-seller by Alice Sebold that everybody seemed to be reading a couple of years ago. I hope it's not faithful to the book; if it is, millions of Americans are scary. The murder of a young person is a tragedy, the murderer is a monster, and making the victim a sweet, poetic narrator is creepy. This movie sells the philosophy that even evil things are God's will, and their victims are happier now. Isn't it nice to think so. I think it's best if they don't happen at all. But if they do, why pretend they don't hurt? Those girls are dead.

 

I'm assured, however, that Sebold's novel is well-written and sensitive. I presume the director, Peter Jackson, has distorted elements to fit his own "vision," which involves nearly as many special effects in some sequences as his "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. A more useful way to deal with this material would be with observant, subtle performances in a thoughtful screenplay. It's not a feel-good story. Perhaps Jackson's team made the mistake of fearing the novel was too dark. But its millions of readers must know it's not like this. The target audience might be doom-besotted teenage girls -- the "Twilight" crowd.

 

The owner of the lovely bones is named Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan, a very good young actress, who cannot be faulted here). The heaven Susie occupies looks a little like a Flower Power world in the kind of fantasy that, murdered in 1973, she might have imagined. Seems to me that heaven, by definition outside time and space, would have neither colors nor a lack of colors -- would be a state with no sensations. Nor would there be thinking there, let alone narration. In an eternity spent in the presence of infinite goodness, you don't go around thinking, "Man! Is this great!" You simply are. I have a lot of theologians on my side here.

 

But no. From her movie-set Valhalla, Susie gazes down as her mother (Rachel Weisz) grieves and her father (Mark Wahlberg) tries to solve the case himself. There's not much of a case to solve; we know who the killer is almost from the get-go, and, under the Law of Economy of Characters that's who he has to be, because (a) he's played by an otherwise unnecessary movie star, and (b) there's no one else in the movie it could be.

 

Here's something bittersweet. Weisz and Wahlberg are effective as the parents. Because the pyrotechnics are mostly upstairs with the special effects, all they need to be are convincing parents who have lost their daughter. This they do with touching subtlety. We also meet one of Susie's grandmothers (Susan Sarandon), an unwise drinker who comes on to provide hard-boiled comic relief, in the Shakespearean tradition that every tragedy needs its clown. Well, she's good, too. This whole film is Jackson's fault.

 

It doesn't fail simply because I suspect its message. It fails on its own terms. It isn't emotionally convincing that this girl, having had these experiences and destined apparently to be 14 forever (although cleaned up and with a new wardrobe), would produce this heavenly creature. What's left for us to pity? We should all end up like her, and the sooner the better; preferably not after being raped and murdered.

[Guest Mirezzi]

Well done, Ebert. That's the proper way to own Peter Jackson types. lol

[lumpenprol]

the mistake he makes is assuming the book is any better

[Guest Super lurker ultra V12]

Был месяц май - 7.3/10

Кукушка - 8/10

[Guest zaphod]

god bless roger ebert. that's exactly what i thought of the book, and it looks like the film followed that path.

although, yeah, looks like he makes the mistake of thinking the book is different. the book was completely fucking atrocious, the cherry on top of a pile of shit writing currently coming out of the mcsweeney's all-life-is-wondrous willfully naive school of thought.

[lumpenprol]

I heard a rumor (didn't bother to follow it up) that the author Alice Seybold was a rape survivor. If so that adds an interesting wrinkle to the book, that in addition to being a pile of trash it may be a sublimation of her anger, self-loathing, and desire for revenge into this bizarre, escapist fantasy tale of forgiveness and the afterlife. I hope that's the case, as it puts it more in the category of clinical artifact than literature.

[Guest ataraxy2]

I agree with everything you people have said. I haven't seen the film but there's no way it could possibly be good after how awful (what I read of) the book was.

[Guest zaphod]

it really is baffling that the book is such a bestseller. i wonder if that's mainly among women of a certain age who were recommended the book, or what? i know it was pretty well reviewed. it really is one of the worst books i've ever read.

[Guest zaphod]

The novel draws from the author's personal experiences from when she was raped during her freshman year at Syracuse University. In Lucky, Sebold's 1999 memoir of the event and its aftermath, she describes how it transformed her life, especially after learning that the rapist's previous victim had died. After later seeing the rapist on the street, she reported him to the police and eventually testified against him. He was convicted and received the maximum sentence.

 

She began the novel in the early 1990s as an outgrowth of those events. However, she fiercely resists suggestions that it had anything to do with the aftermath of the rape:

“First of all, therapy is for therapy. Leave it there. Second, because you're a rape victim, everyone wants to turn everything you do into something "therapeutic" — oh, I understand, going to the bathroom must be so therapeutic for you!"

 

eeeewww

[lumpenprol]

she couldn't be more wrong - going to the bathroom is therapeutic, just ask watmm

[jules]

moon was a good trip to the cinema

 

 

i know im late to the party, but i watched this tonight and loved it. clint mansell's theme work was nice too. thought the movie was different in a good way. not incredible, but vry very cool

[Guest A/D]

The Book Of Eli - 6.5/10.

 

enjoyable as predicted, plenty of silliness. i often felt like the environment was the goal of the movie and the story was kind of tacked on. mila kunis for some reason always convinced me best on family guy (although her writing sucked so what can you do). everyone else looked like they were in the apocalypse, but she looked like she was walking down bleecker st in nyc the whole time (until the end). good performance from mr. washington, it's a tough role to sell. gary oldman's part's writing sucked, not his fault. some good comedy in the middle. pretty decent score.

[Atop]

fuck the Lovely Bones via Oprah's ass......

[Guest zaphod]

the road

 

much better than i was expecting. it looked exactly how it needed to, with that pennsylvania in winter look, and viggo is a fine choice for the man. my issue with it was that it lacked much imagination, and revered the book. the book is very flawed. i recently read it again and the writing is cornball at times, almost always monotonous and allows very little room for the reader to engage in the characters. the movie was actually more effective in its bleakness, but i still think it's too monotone to be considered great. calling the road bleak is probably like saying schindler's list is a bit of a downer, but you can make a movie about the end of the world and still display some variance in tone. this is probably the best adaptation they were going to make, and i'm impressed just how bleak it actually is. but the source is flawed and so something this faithful was bound to be flawed as well. i want a riddley walker movie. that's a book with something to say about life.