A few films recently watched.

[Guest Coalbucket PI]

The Lovely Bones.

Not sure if that worked at all. Even if I didn't know there was a book of this I think I would be able to tell because it feels like a jumbled book adaptation from the start. The murderer guy is excellent though, really perfect balance of seeming nice but having something slightly off. I'm not sure what even happened, everyone was upset as you would expect, and then it ended as if something had been resolved, but it hadn't. Plus some weird scenes with the girl dancing on a record player in a magical death land and Susan Sarandon carousing around for no apparent reason. Still it was kind of watchable and unique. Whatever. Kind of annoying but alright really, wish I'd read the book instead.

[Cazador Mod Unit]

I changed my mind. The Tree of Life = Root of All Evil

[Guest Coalbucket PI]

i watched a dvdscr of driver and angelo badalamenti was on the soundtrack credits wtf

i also read that this version of the movie is missing some scenes and doesn't have the same sound editing...

 

apparently its a work print. yeah the sound is off which is a shame because the music in some of the scenes is so perfect.

I think I've got this screener... not sure whether I shouldn't watch it now, what do you think? I'm not going to be able to make it to a cinema so if it isn't anything too bad I probably will just watch it

[Silent Member]

Wait untill there is a good rip out...

[Chris Moss Acid]

spaceballs - turned it off after 10 minutes/10 just didnt find it funny, and the only bits ive seen which were cleaver was the renting spaceballs before it was released.. which i saw on youtube.

 

 

 

L.A Confidential - 10/10 - no idea why i always put this film off since i remember, thinking it'll be crap, Boy was i wrong. awesome film.. L.A Noire borrowed so much from it, but thats good.

 

 

 

tonight i'll watch tree of life and meloncolia

[Guest disparaissant]

i have the same screener and im holding off, the giant blur at the top of the screen is just a huge eyesore in what is very obviously a well shot film.

[Guest Benedict Cumberbatch]

The Tree Of Life (Terrence Malick)

Sean Penn remembers his childhood + history of planet Earth. The editing in this movie is next level, I guess I respect the religious stuff but eh...

 

i read somewhere that it was all edited "in camera" which sounds hard...

 

going to see it this week. excited!

[soundwave]

Perfume 7/10 = a very well made adaption of the book (which I haven't read) however I found the ending a little too 'fantastic' for the setting of the rest of the film but that's just me. If you've read the book then maybe you'll be able to swallow the ending a little better.

 

Ninja Assassin 7.5/10 = exactly what it says on the tin with amazing blood soaked action sequences akin to the old Shogun Assassin although I felt it was lacking a little something to make it a classic. One to appreciate on blu-ray I think as AVI didn't do it any justice.

[Cazador Mod Unit]

i read somewhere that it was all edited "in camera" which sounds hard...

 

going to see it this week. excited!

 

hmm Google doesn't know, maybe they meant some of the experimental sections? His cinematographer says they had 300 miles of footage and the first cut was eight hours long. I can't imagine doing this kind of work in camera?!

[Cazador Mod Unit]

Perfume 7/10 = a very well made adaption of the book (which I haven't read) however I found the ending a little too 'fantastic' for the setting of the rest of the film but that's just me. If you've read the book then maybe you'll be able to swallow the ending a little better. Ninja Assassin 7.5/10 = exactly what it says on the tin with amazing blood soaked action sequences akin to the old Shogun Assassin although I felt it was lacking a little something to make it a classic. One to appreciate on blu-ray I think as AVI didn't do it any justice.

 

I liked it but it was way too Hollywood and the protagonist too pretty.

 

I guess people wouldn't have paid to see an ugly actor starring a high profile movie but this is still stupid.

[Bubba69]

Yeah. I just got back from Drive. I thought it was a great movie but hardly a 10. it was a stylistic movie in the best way possible but the plot was pretty boring. I loved it but objectively I cannot rate it as highly a, for example, ffc's The Conversation. A film I think is a good example of a story following a man who is good at his job but ends up getting caught in something he wasn't supposed to. I have more to say but I'm posting from my phone and it is a pain on the ass

[Guest Coalbucket PI]

Battle Los angeles

weak, just the most terrifically generic soldier characters and dialogue and essentially disappointing aliens. Shaky camera through the whole film, very very annoying. A lot of loud guns and explosions when I didn’t really know where or who anyone was, what they were doing etc.

[eugene]

tree of life - i didn't care for the higher brow stuff like creation of the world and how it relates to everything else and that's perhaps missing the whole point of the movie but the "story" itself was simple and beautifully shot and conceived, so in general i really liked it.

 

oh and brad pitt was pretty good in it.

[Cazador Mod Unit]

yeah you can't separate the creation sequences from the family story, it's one and the same thing! I just noticed this from Film Quarterly and I think it's a brilliant twist on the pure evil behind this movie:

 

 

 

The Tree of Life is a masterpiece of ambiguity. Similar to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Terrence Malick’s film persistently plays with audience preconceptions about power in order, I think, to develop the theme of subtle, disguised manipulation.

 

Consider the much-discussed dinosaur sequence: a predator tramples on the face of a smaller creature that may have been trying to hide by lying flat on the riverbank. The larger animal pauses, relaxes, moves away. If we are to psychologize this scene, is it certain that we should infer compassion or at least forbearance? I hesitated. For a while I thought that the scene could just as easily be said to represent humiliation, an act of restraint whose purpose is to enact domination that continues into the future. I connected this prehistoric encounter to the later garden conversation between Mr. O’Brien and his eldest son Jack when the boy acknowledges his father’s authority, a meeting that can arguably be understood in terms of subjugation rather than benevolence. Yet I then turned again, dispensing with the binary of supremacy and subordination. Might it be a matter of reciprocity rather than hierarchy? Do these scenes both depict complicity?

 

Speaking of power-sharing, each time I watched The Tree of Life, Mr. O’Brien—failed musician and lover of Brahms, patent-owner and advocate of entrepreneurial self-sufficiency, occasional stickler—seemed kinder and less fearsome. His ineffectiveness as a disciplinarian becomes increasingly apparent: he is too fond of kisses and on the one occasion when he shows real anger he ends up sitting morosely alone at the supper table. Later he tries to blame his wife for his outburst: “You turn my own kids against me. You undermine everything I do.” He puts his arms around her; she resists, very upset, but then relents, and the tightly framed image of their briefly struggling arms encapsulates the success of their marriage and the depth of their intimacy. His allegation is farfetched but it contains a measure of truth: her quiet, tender, unpunishing rapport with the three boys is a very strong kind of influence. And it is one that stretches beyond the confines of fictionalized Waco. For, on a first viewing at least, Mrs. O’Brien’s dreamy mystical musings (“love everyone, every leaf, every ray of light”) seem to preside over the film’s cosmic and zoological sequences.

 

Yet is she truly the chief personality? Who is The Tree of Life‘s storyteller, its presumed central consciousness? The answer must surely be that it is grownup Jack, played by Sean Penn. Sharp-suited and dour, he is like a character from The Fountainhead with a penchant for self-help ideas (“I feel like I’m bumping into walls,” he says early on). In a late scene this affluent, middle-aged corporate architect steps through a doorframe incongruously erected in the desert and I speculated that he has gone to an expensive holistic retreat for arcane, stepping-across-thresholds therapy. This interpretation would make sense of some otherwise baffling aspects of the film’s closing section: Jack’s excursion with his younger self and, in particular, the fact that on the heavenly beach where the entire O’Brien family and their Waco neighbors congregate again Jack has grown older at a different rate than everyone else. But if he is indeed our storyteller, then the possibility arises that we have been watching not flashbacks supplemented by picturesque widescreen homilies, but the neurotic, oceanically narcissistic, and delirious fantasies of a man suffering midlife breakdown.

 

 

Maybe it is worse than neurosis. During a sermon about Job, the local Texas preacher poses an ominous question: “Is there some fraud in the scheme of the universe?” (Shortly afterwards, Mr. O’Brien adds: “the world lives by trickery.”) From time to time sinister images corrupt the world of The Tree of Life as if to make that fraud known. The most obvious is the mosquito-control truck that sprays pretty clouds of DDT over cavorting boys, but there is also an inserted illustration of a praying mantis; a freaky underwater sequence featuring pulsating vegetal globs as well as bizarre screw-shaped organisms that whizz in the direction of the surface; two shrouded corpses on the outskirts of a scorched pueblo; a carnival mask cast into the sea. What are we to make of these horrible apparitions?

 

Eventually I pondered another interpretation of the dinosaur sequence—that in some way the prostrate beast has power over its seeming oppressor. In one of the Waco scenes, Mr. O’Brien is playing the piano while his second son is sitting on the porch accompanying on guitar. Beyond them, tracing a peripheral ring around the house, is young Jack, his face cold and resentful. In narrative terms too it is Jack who is outermost to the film, orchestrating or imagining it. In the last shot of him a blankly malign expression has returned to his adult visage and finally it occurred to me that the sinister images are not aberrations—that The Tree of Life is the devil’s own fiction.

 

 

To be honest I am speechless, it's like when you watch Triumph of the Will and you feel like the spawn of Satan because you like it, it pushes certain buttons ... but at least you know the nazis were the bad guys, here it is so well disguised it's just too fucking scary. Like Obama or something.

[Cazador Mod Unit]

should I get a subscription to Film Quarterly y/n ?

[Bob Dylan]

If The Tree of Life and Lubezki doesn't get best cinematography at the Oscars, something is wrong with the world (but I also said the same thing for a lot of other movies LOL). But then again he should have won it twice already.

[awesomeperson]

The Wild Bunch (1969) - Brilliant

The Great Silence (1968) - Brilliant

[fenton]

Red State - Very shit / 10

[Guest Benedict Cumberbatch]

Red State - Very shit / 10

 

its getting good reviews from people who took a shit on 'cop out', mostly due to the fact that its not 'cop out'

[Bubba69]

has anyone here seen "The American"(2010)? Just wondering if it is worth watching. One of those movies with mixed reviews where half of the people are stupid or have bad taste but I cannot tell which half.

[Cazador Mod Unit]

I have the same problem haha

[Cazador Mod Unit]

ok I took another look and Senses of Cinema has 2800 words about it, this means I will watch The American in a day or two.

[vamos scorcho]

I wish I'd never discovered that Contact was directed by the same guy that did Forrest Gump.

 

MEN IN BLACK!!!!!!!!!!!!! I've been thinking about this movie again for a few weeks. I loved it as a kid and I want to see it again. I have a feeling it's a legitimately good film that has been kind of forgotten.

[vamos scorcho]

[Bubba69]

ok I took another look and Senses of Cinema has 2800 words about it, this means I will watch The American in a day or two.

 

 

Just watched it. I'm too tired to say anything more than to give it perhaps a 7/10. George Clooney felt miscast as he was devoid of any compelling qualities in this role. The movie was filled with a constant aire of gloom and paranoia. Pacing was slow and bit hitchcockian. The acting wasn't great, but wasn't bad. The cinematography was good. The story itself was slow but decent, unremarkably decent. The main perks were the constant tension of not understanding exactly what is going on and why. I didn't really get anything from the movie as a whole, but the ending was strangely satisfying. Better than some stuff and I can see what it was trying to acomplish, nothing special though.