A few films recently watched.

[jeremymacgregor87]

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

 

if the articles tend to be of this calibre, I would..

 

 

great read. Felt the same - the dinosaur scene was striking for me, not just for "wow omg, there's a dinosaur scene", but the restraint shown bla bla blaaa

 

ugh, must watch this again

[Guest Coalbucket PI]

Tropic Thunder. Robert Downey Jr was really funny throughout, generally some really good gags but didn't quite come together. Possibly needed to be a bit more straightforward and spend less time on the plot and more time on the banter.

[Cazador Mod Unit]

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

 

if the articles tend to be of this calibre, I would..

 

 

great read. Felt the same - the dinosaur scene was striking for me, not just for "wow omg, there's a dinosaur scene", but the restraint shown bla bla blaaa

 

ugh, must watch this again

 

 

I did!

 

I have been searching a long time for a magazine to subscribe to but they are so expensive... Anyway, I felt in love with the guy after reading that (he's the editor) and took the jump, they offer an electronic version for $20 a year with the entire archive since 2001 or something.

 

ps. the dinosaurs looked terrible.

[Squee]

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.

 

It's great. It's like watching a James Bond movie if it was made by a French dude.

[Guest Benedict Cumberbatch]

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.

 

it was ok. mixed reviews usually means something is passable if you don't overthink it/expect too much

 

 

 

 

going to a triple feature on friday:

goonies

the hole

gremlins 2

 

 

 

the hole seems out of place but whatever i haven't seen it. any good?

[Guest boo]

i saw goonies recently for the first time in a long time and it was weird. it's so hectic.

 

if you play another wrong note we'll all be flat

[cruising for burgers]

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.

would you care to elaborate a bit more? please

 

you mean, Jack is a "bad guy"???

i also sensed that "darkness" during the movie, but when he hurts is brother shooting his finger, looks like something changes him, making him become a "good guy", he starts placing his hand on other's shoulders trying to comfort them, and he also reconciles with his dad.

are we on the same track here???

[cruising for burgers]

the tree of life (2nd viewing) - 7,5/10

melancholia - 7,5/10

terri - 6,5/10

attack the block - 7/10

[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.

 

it was ok. mixed reviews usually means something is passable if you don't overthink it/expect too much

 

yeah, but sometimes there are some movies that people just plain don't like or don't understand. I know some people who absolutely despise molholland dr. but it is one of my favorite movies.

[Capsaicin]

There Will Be Blood - 8.5/10

[cruising for burgers]

the conversation - 7/10

[Redruth]

5/10

 

 

 

[Cazador Mod Unit]

would you care to elaborate a bit more? please

 

 

you mean, Jack is a "bad guy"???

i also sensed that "darkness" during the movie, but when he hurts is brother shooting his finger, looks like something changes him, making him become a "good guy", he starts placing his hand on other's shoulders trying to comfort them, and he also reconciles with his dad.

are we on the same track here???

 

The film is overwhelmingly obsessed with beauty and perfection to a level I have never experienced before (save for maybe the Nazi movie) and I like all that stuff so very much that I didn't care for the constant references to light, blind reverence to the father, God, awe at the impossible mystery of EVERYTHING ... This man is an artist of such exquisite level that you don't realize the harm he's doing until it's basically too late because you ate the whole thing (poison) without protest. I mean, the film won the Palm D'Or at Cannes ffs. Have you read the hysteric reviews it got? It is being used to teach Christianity as we speak. It is a return to obscurantism. Cue Heidegger references but I'm not cool enough to make a decent analysis on that matter.

 

 

 

The article alerted me to the fact that the kid IS evil, he never changes! That's the scariest thing about the film. I will watch again once I build some psychological defenses but I distinctly remember the last shots before the insulting / ridiculous ending sequence and man, ... That stare ... I spent most of the movie afraid he was going to kill Jesus, eh I meant, the blonde kid. And we will never know for sure because Terrence Malick does not give interviews.

 

 

[Redruth]

what harm is malick doing? i very much enjoyed what you have written above m u st co n t r ol t h o 4, especially the spoiler bit

[cruising for burgers]

would you care to elaborate a bit more? please

 

 

you mean, Jack is a "bad guy"???

i also sensed that "darkness" during the movie, but when he hurts is brother shooting his finger, looks like something changes him, making him become a "good guy", he starts placing his hand on other's shoulders trying to comfort them, and he also reconciles with his dad.

are we on the same track here???

 

The film is overwhelmingly obsessed with beauty and perfection to a level I have never experienced before (save for maybe the Nazi movie) and I like all that stuff so very much that I didn't care for the constant references to light, blind reverence to the father, God, awe at the impossible mystery of EVERYTHING ... This man is an artist of such exquisite level that you don't realize the harm he's doing until it's basically too late because you ate the whole thing (poison) without protest. I mean, the film won the Palm D'Or at Cannes ffs. Have you read the hysteric reviews it got? It is being used to teach Christianity as we speak. It is a return to obscurantism. Cue Heidegger references but I'm not cool enough to make a decent analysis on that matter.

 

 

 

The article alerted me to the fact that the kid IS evil, he never changes! That's the scariest thing about the film. I will watch again once I build some psychological defenses but I distinctly remember the last shots before the insulting / ridiculous ending sequence and man, ... That stare ... I spent most of the movie afraid he was going to kill Jesus, eh I meant, the blonde kid. And we will never know for sure because Terrence Malick does not give interviews.

 

 

 

looks like God died when he was 19, and if the past time that was presented to us was in fact true (and not some lunatic flashbacks), looks like he died in war...

so what you stand by is that this movie is about pure evil but most of people were made to believe that it was about goodness? is that the harm that Mallick is doing???

 

[vamos scorcho]

I watched the movie Naked. I thought it was decent. Might watch again someday. It's growing on me now that I'm done viewing it but while watching it I found it to be pretty overrated.

[blackdust]

set-up: 0/10

 

didn't finish watching this one.

 

I did wish I hadn't. Worst film I've seen in a long time

 

[Cazador Mod Unit]

God = Brad Pitt. Jesus != God. The blonde kid as Jesus comment was a joke.

 

The Catholicism I learned in school made some space for science and reason. The version of Christianity promoted by this film is pure darkness. The movie is not about evil (you could argue that too but I don't think it is so), it IS evil itself.

 

And troon, IMHO we are instructed to worship celebrities / money as our new Gods but some people resist that idea, some even find it repugnant but the sad fact is that there is no one and nothing to emulate or follow these days. We all live in a desert of meaning. Someone is sooner or later going to fill this void but I don't want THAT to do it. Terrence Malick is in a privileged position to guide people with his art and THIS what he offers? Fuck him.

[Redruth]

there are some things we don't want to see or know even tho they are true

[lumpenprol]

Wait what, lol?!

 

I just bought this today because of your rambling [edit: responding to mustcontroltho4]. I find it hard to believe Malick would consciously make a film about evil, let alone a film that embodies evil. Are we talking about the same Malick, the guy who is a tone-poet idiot savant man-child, the guy who indulges every long-winded philosophical rambling while seemingly not understanding that when people think about sex, they don't picture a curtain blowing in the breeze?

 

I won't lie, I enjoy me some Malick in doses (well, really I only enjoy the Thin Red Line once in a while), but this film seems the logical extension of his world view. I mean I have to say when I saw the previews I actually cracked a smile when Sean Penn's self-important voiceover intoned "Mother, father, always warring inside me..." or something like that. I mean dude is an adult and he seemingly hasn't escaped from some little memory-nest of his childhood. Is he even married? Has he successfully procreated? I have no idea. But I think Malick has already expressed his sentiment on evil in Thin Red Line, which was something like "the foolishness of mortals, what they won't do to their fellow man, in their blindness." He doesn't have a caustic, black humor bone in his body (ie., he's the anti-Von Trier). So that guy's analysis (and yours by extension) seems suspect. I may eat my words but I get a very strong vibe from the flick that "what you see is what you get" - typical Malick - nature and childhood is good and pure, adults are confused, damaged, rootless, self-sacrifice and abandoning yourself to existential cosmic wonder is the highest calling, yada yada (well I actually kind of like some of these ideas but anyway...)

[Guest Benedict Cumberbatch]

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.

 

it was ok. mixed reviews usually means something is passable if you don't overthink it/expect too much

 

yeah, but sometimes there are some movies that people just plain don't like or don't understand. I know some people who absolutely despise molholland dr. but it is one of my favorite movies.

 

yeah i think some movies are love or hate. which isn't mixed its one extreme or the other. maybe?

 

I watched the movie Naked. I thought it was decent. Might watch again someday. It's growing on me now that I'm done viewing it but while watching it I found it to be pretty overrated.

 

did you watch it naked?

[Atop]

Melancholia - 7/10 - somehow Lars knows what scares me and puts it into all of his films. I might need therapy after watching this.

 

Dear Atmosphere,

 

please stay on earth, we would miss you if you were gone.

 

sincerely,

 

MCM

[MAXIMUS MISCHIEF]

why did you give it a 7? what was wrong with it

[cruising for burgers]

could have been better

[Cazador Mod Unit]

The American was sooo cool. Like Squee said it's a superspy movie directed by Anton Corbijn, I found it pretty much perfect for what it is, it reminded me of a Ghost Writer without the comedy. Perhaps you could recommend someone who does this in a better way? I really like James Bond type stuff if it's done with such class.

 

lumpenprol I (used to) love Malick and Days of Heaven is one of my favorite movies but the world ends next year, occupy Wall Street, global revolution next saturday, Lars Von Trier is done with trolling due to the absolute stupidity of plebs etc the time has come to take sides : D