A few films recently watched.

[cruising for burgers]

lolz

[Squee]

you never know with that area specific content these days..

 

"The content you're trying to watch cannot be accessed outside of Sweden"

It's not that often you see that message.

 

Anyway... movies, guys...

[data]

how the movie should've ended

 

[cruising for burgers]

oh my the tambourine i couldn't believe they stick with that

[chenGOD]

Just watched Countryman on netflix streaming. Can't believe I never saw this before. If you are a fan of Rockers, you will enjoy this. The lunch scene about 14min in is one of the greatest culinary exploits I've seen.

Also there is some very entertaining rasta lord of the rings stuff going on.

Countryman is great great stuff. Love the hell out of that film.

You might also like Smile Orange, another great film set in Jamaica.

 

 

recently watched: Rising Sun (again)

The first time I watched this, I was really high, and it was a good film.

It gets progressively worse.....Sunday night it got down to like a 5/10...

[gaarg]

Powaqqatsi: 8/10

 

Not really as good as the Koyaa one but still very nice. I might grow to like it's soundtrack in time even.

 

Anyone seen Powaqqatsi?

 

yeah, it's a good followup but i remember finding it very distracting that i had seen Truman Show first, and the music in the Truman Show uses pieces of the Glass soundtrack for Pow.

 

the opening scene/song with the gold mine in south america is one of the best scenes in any fo the 3 qatsi movies, its worth watching it for that alone. fuck i love that part

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoOdhKYj8Bc

 

This and some other scenes were good, but overall I thought Koyaanisqatsi had a better feel of what to show, a better combination of music and visuals and kinda made more sense as a whole. Still I'm definitely watching Powa again too.

[data]

 

not really as bad as i remembered it. of course it'd be a whole different movie if kubrick would've made it as originally intended, but taken for what it is, it was alright.

 

imdb trivia:

One of the reasons for Stanley Kubrick waiting so long to make the film, is that he wanted David (Haley Joel Osment) to be played by an actual robot.

 

haha! :D

[awepittance]

as much as i dont have good memories of that film (its been at least 10 years, i should give it another try) I must say the character of Teddy is a more memorable faux character in a film than anything i can remember in the last decade besides Gollum

[Guest Pennywise]

rescue dawn

 

i really enjoyed this yesterday but today the memory of it is less enjoyable. maybe it was the freeze frame ending.

 

I watched that. Did you know it is true story?

[data]

rescue dawn

 

i really enjoyed this yesterday but today the memory of it is less enjoyable. maybe it was the freeze frame ending.

 

I watched that. Did you know it is true story?

 

family members hating on the film

 

http://www.rescuedawnthetruth.com/

[dr lopez]

doesn't seem like they are dieter's friends at all. their claims seem to revolve around him hiding in bushes and being scared.

 

Maybe the answer is an obvious one, Herzog didn't want to make an honest movie, he wanted to make his film his way and the facts be damned.

 

wow way to hilariously undermine your whole argument ahaha clearly they've never seen a herzog film

[Guest boo]

they're too emotionally involved for me to trust them. not that i care though. the more fiction the better.

[Guest Blue Peter Cheat]

Take Shelter - great film, great acting. The ending was meh (i have nothing agaInst illogical and fantastic endings but i would have been a much happier costumer without the final scene) - 8.3/10

 

I agree. 7.5/10.

 

 

That last few minutes sent it down from an 8.5/10.

Devalued everything that went before.

 

I prefer Shotgun Stories, mainly due to the lack of bullshit sci-fi ending.

 

 

 

Alright, I think this is a common complaint and it was one for me too until I thought about it more closely. The ultimate narrative is about how mental illness is not an over-the-top Anthony Hopkins kind of situation. A "crazy" person does not become so in a vacuum; there are real stresses and fears that trigger the symptoms. Worse still, it's never all-or-nothing. There are always varying shades of how irrational a delusion might be or the appropriateness of the responses.

spoilers ahead

 

I happened to take the ending literally. When the Deepwater Horizon event went down in the Gulf, a hurricane developed soon after and there was a real fear that it would take up the oily waters and thrash coastal areas with oil. I don't know if this ever went down but it doesn't matter because the viciousness of mental illness is that it will take rational fears and explode them into the realm of the fantastic until they become paralytic. Tornadoes and "oily rain" were not impossible on Myrtle Beach at a time like that. The dividing lines between a nagging anxiety disorder and full-blown paranoid schizophrenia are much finer than people realize. So, when he looked to his wife and she nodded, she was signalling that it was not a hallucination and it became a metaphor for how chronic mental illness is dealt with. Recovery hinges on friends and family providing constant feedback so a sufferer knows where the disorder begins and ends.

 

Alas, I was profoundly moved by the whole movie and give it an easy 10/10 but that's because I'm "in the business" regarding psychiatry. If I were to view it through an objective lens, I'd probably call "bullshit" on the whole affair and, indeed, the same could be applied to my analysis. It was never going to be a cut-and-dry finish though see also: Sopranos series end

 

 

Thanks for the perspective...

 

 

I had read allusions to your explanation in reviews before watching but to be honest I just didn't get a strong enough message from the film. However, none of the reviews mentioned the Gulf oil leak or the fears of an oily hurricane. Instead they were either pretty general or heavy on recession type disaster. I also don't have much knowledge of serious mental disorders.

I just took it as a fairly straight up portrayal about the onset of mental ill health. As simply that I thought it was superb. Shannon was, again, excellent and I really liked Chastain's performance too. I've had a couple of experiences involving mental ill health but for different reasons they're predominantly shadows in my memory. Despite this I found myself getting quite emotional. At first with the fear and confusion suffered by Shannon's character and then later the fear and helplessness felt by Chastain.

So anyway, I suppose I got a little too close to it, and when added to the lack of a Gulf/oil background made me a big bit pissed off at the end.

Thanks a lot for your analysis! I appeciate/understand it more now.

 

[Guest boo]

SHAME

 

better than i expected. i liked it a lot.

[Guest iep]

The Rum Diary

 

again an awesome Depp role in a early-gonzo era film. it was sweaty and chaotic and also massively flawed but i liked it.

[cloud capture]

just found a doc new to netflix, "ingredients". Good passionate approach to farm to table eating. But really makes me miss Portland. Inparticular, a dog park in Lake Oswego I used to take my dog to almost daily. Nice to see they put communal gardens there.

[Guest iep]

.

[lumpenprol]

Drive

 

I didn't care for any of these characters, maybe I wasn't supposed to. The movie looked really slick and I guess the music was pretty good, but I was left feeling that the whole thing was a real waste of time. I mean I enjoyed the style of it about as much as I'd enjoy browsing an ikea catalogue or watching showroom footage. Not sure this movie knows what it is.

 

Yeah, the cartoony violence took me out completely. Not because it made me queasy, because it didn't, but rather because it was really fucking stupid.

 

I think the filmmaker was aiming for Kenneth Anger (Scorpio Rising most obviously) meets Taxi Driver and ended up with neither. He even channeled Wes Anderson a bit with meticulously sterile sets, blocking, camera movement. All of it felt incredibly labored for a story that bored the shit out of me. When it comes to artsy, ploddingly slow takes on this genre, I prefer Ghost Dog.

 

Bravo you guys. After all the early hype I was so stoked to watch Drive, watched it last night with the gf and...it was exactly what I would have expected from Mr. Winding Refn, based on Valhalla Rising: nicely filmed, well-acted, has potential, but makes some big missteps. The build up at the start was great, I was completely in lock-step with the film all the way through the first violent confrontation in the hotel room, when lovely Christina Hendrick's brains hit the wall. But after that it just got more and more far-fetched, Ryan Gosling got more and more superhuman, and the whole thing got really formulaic. I thought the mobsters were actually a bit poorly acted...and the whole thing was so cartoonish, I mean you can't just slash someone's wrist open through their clothing and have them bleed to death in a space of minutes...throat yes, but not wrist, and it wouldn't burst out like a sprinkler...besides dude could have just walked over and called 911 with his good hand. Lots of wtf moments like that. I really don't expect anything impressive from this director in the future, I think this film was a fluke that fooled a bunch of folks...

[awepittance]

fooled as fuck/10

[lumpenprol]

Lol that was condescending of me to say…what I meant was I think it’s one of those films where, after the surface slickness wears off, your opinion of it steadily declines.

I did really like the build up at the start, the romance between Gosling and the chick was well done…before it became all Hong Kong/Korean action flick style…

[Guest boo]

take shelter

 

lots of good things about it but ultimately pissed me off and was draining rather than engaging or something, tree of life style (same actress being similar might have added to that).

[Guest W32MyDoom]

I thought Michael Shannon was great in Take Shelter, best part of the film imo.

[Guest Z_B_Z]

I really don't expect anything impressive from this director in the future, I think this film was a fluke that fooled a bunch of folks...

 

'bronson' was good.. the guy isnt untalented..

[Guest boo]

I thought Michael Shannon was great in Take Shelter, best part of the film imo.

yeah i agree

[awepittance]

I really don't expect anything impressive from this director in the future, I think this film was a fluke that fooled a bunch of folks...

 

'bronson' was good.. the guy isnt untalented..

 

and as far as it being his first American movie i think he made the trnasition rather well compared to many other imported directors to hollywood over the last few years

 

and when lumpenprol says 'when you strip away the facade' or something like that, i dont think you can do that with Drive. Its kind of like saying if you 'took away all the forced noir' in the movie Brick. It would probably not be a very good movie. Sometimes even if a story is weak or simplistic it's the aesthetics, mood, score, visuals and editing style that makes the movie for me, actually often this is the case.