A few films recently watched.

[kinski]

punch-drunk love - i'm not entirely sold on adam sandler actually trying to act (even though he's pretty much doing the usual sandler without silly voices), but this movie was so dark and weird it really got me. and emily watson is amazing. her eyes, wow. this kinda felt like sappy, loser version of american psycho at times. solid flick.

[Squee]

emily watson is amazing. her eyes, wow.

 

YES! Those blue eyes are so mesmerising.

[eugene]

sleepless night (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1683921) - 9/10 - fantastic action/crime/thriller one-location-one-night flick.

 

oh and it looks like hollywood is going to remake it already

[YEK]

just finished watching evangelion 2.22 . it never gets boring...

[Guest zaphod]

the game - 9/10

george washington - 9/10

the matrix - 9.5/10

the matrix reloaded - 8/10

the matrix revolutions - 5/10

 

all second (or third) viewings except for george washington, which i had never seen. that's a great movie. very malick influenced, but somehow a bit better.

[Atop]

My reaction to zaphod's scoring of the Matrix series.

 

[Guest zaphod]

the matrix is a great movie. it's a fact. the sequel is flawed but ambitious, has some nice set pieces and satisfies the anime/cyberpunk nerd in me. the third is completely mediocre and forgettable. i guess i can keep pretending i hate everything, if that's what you want to read.

[Guest Mirezzi]

The Game is so good. It both created and defined a genre at the same time.

[Guest zaphod]

it's my favorite fincher movie.

[Guest Mirezzi]

What I just wrote made no sense. I don't care.

 

Yeah, it's his best, undoubtedly.

[Guest zaphod]

i wasn't going to say anything, but i had no idea what you meant either.

[Guest RadarJammer]

The Flowers Of War nice sad movie. Christian Bale had a really weird style of line delivery here, almost like he was trying to copy the rhythm of English spoken by a Chinese person or something. Whatever he was trying to do he pulled it off and gave this movie a cool feel. 8/10

[lumpenprol]

The Game is a pretty good movie, no doubt, but you don't think it suffers like many Fincher flicks from boring-itis? I tried to rewatch it recently and got really bored about midway through (I remember watching a shot of cars pulling in and out of SF traffic and thinking "this is entirely unnecessary"). It bored the gf too. I do like how it stays barely within the bounds of plausibility, without resorting to any completely over-the-top setpieces.

 

I still think 7 is his best, followed possibly by Zodiac (which I should re-watch). Or maybe Zodiac and the Game are on the same level, they're both a bit boring. As is Alien 3. I couldn't even get through The Social Network. Fincher just massages the bored button in my brain...

[kinski]

no love for fight club, eh?

 

i think the game and zodiak both are good but suffer from the same flaw of not really sucking you into the story. it keeps you interested but never really makes you care.

[Squee]

The Zodiac is definitely his best. I knew nothing about the Zodiac killer going into the theatre and I wanted to know everything about him when I left the theatre. I even ended up reading the book by Robert Graysmith which was boring and confusing beyond belief.

And yes, Fight Club is still a great movie even though it's very pubescent and very 00s with all its over the top cinematography and zooming in and out of 3D trash cans and what not.

[lumpenprol]

mm, no real love for fight club, no. Saw it in the theaters, though, might like it more if I saw it again. I guess I didn't connect with the philosophy behind it, the main character's sense of anger and self-loathing. Plus Helena Bonham Carter was really annoying. I think it could have benefited from a more straight approach. I mean, Fincher is all about decaying buildings, bitch tits, ripping bags of human fat, raunchy head exit wounds...It's uniformly emotionally bleak and I think that's a turn-off. I think it might have been more effective if he showed the upside to the Fight Club first, played it almost more as an anarchistic comedy, before the gradual descent into (revealing of) madness (like Kubrick did so well in A Clockwork Orange). Instead he just keeps the tone of the blackest black comedy throughout, which just makes it dreary. Where is the excitement, the sense of transcendence that the Fight Club is supposed to embody? Just my opinion.

[Guest RadarJammer]

mm, no real love for fight club, no. Saw it in the theaters, though, might like it more if I saw it again. I guess I didn't connect with the philosophy behind it, the main character's sense of anger and self-loathing. Plus Helena Bonham Carter was really annoying. I think it could have benefited from a more straight approach. I mean, Fincher is all about decaying buildings, bitch tits, ripping bags of human fat, raunchy head exit wounds...It's uniformly emotionally bleak and I think that's a turn-off. I think it might have been more effective if he showed the upside to the Fight Club first, played it almost more as an anarchistic comedy, before the gradual descent into (revealing of) madness (like Kubrick did so well in A Clockwork Orange). Instead he just keeps the tone of the blackest black comedy throughout, which just makes it dreary. Where is the excitement, the sense of transcendence that the Fight Club is supposed to embody? Just my opinion.

 

Those ultra bleak movies are awesome. I love watching something that tears my spirit up and then right afterwords I watch something like Family Guy or South Park. Its like going from cold pool to hot tub and I think that is one of the best overall conflicts and attributes of being a media consumer.

[Squee]

The Red Chapel

If you're interested in North Korea then I would definitely recommend you this wonderful documentary. I found it on Netflix some time ago but never got around to watching it until just a couple of minutes ago. I've been watching lots of documentaries on North Korea lately and The Red Chapel has definitely been the best so far. It's about three people who travel to North Korea to perform a comedy show. It is as simple as it sounds - but there's more to it than that.

[kinski]

a scanner darkly - i just finished the novel and decided to give this a go (reeves, downey jr, harrelson and ryder sound like a fine cast, plus director linklater's slacker is one of my fav movies), and i guess at heart it's not bad, but why oh why is this animated in such an annoying fashion? all movie i wondered how it looked without all the things on it. it felt like the little vignettes from driver game. also it rips some scenes in half and i can't really believe most of this makes sense without knowing the book. like the road trip when the car brokes down. i guess it was meant to be even more fragmented and confusing than the novel, but it ended up being just a weird mush of things. a huge miss of a great opportunity to make something remarkable.

[Atop]

the matrix is a great movie. it's a fact. the sequel is flawed but ambitious, has some nice set pieces and satisfies the anime/cyberpunk nerd in me. the third is completely mediocre and forgettable. i guess i can keep pretending i hate everything, if that's what you want to read.

 

no, keep enjoying things and sharing. I agree with you on your ratings of the films. I think I get you, Mr Salads and Mirezzi mixed up in my head and cannot remember who actually enjoys things in life. Now I have it straight.

 

jk Mirezzi, I know somethings that you love.

[Guest Mirezzi]

The Game isn't meant to be watched more than once, right? I mean, it's still enjoyable but, like The Usual Suspects, its power lies in first viewing, spoilers-free.

 

I reserve high praise for Zodiac, too. It was smart, deeply unnerving at times, and generally quite clever although 15-20 minutes too long.

 

Fight Club can never escape its petulant source material, no matter how "important" it seemed to Ed Norton types 20 years ago. Of course, it doesn't help that the movie itself sucks.

 

Overall, Fincher has one or two films of genuine quality and the rest are, let's be honest, Director-for-hire. Benjamin Button, Girl w/ Dargon Tattoo, and even The Social Network. They all could have been directed by Barry Levinson for all that it really mattered.

 

Other than the gross-out gritty factor, I'll never understand the love of Se7en. It's like Fight Club and Se7ven...hmm, they're like the bastard lovechild twins of an orgy involvingSlipknot and Brett Easton Ellis.

 

I've yet to see Alien3 and who knows, maybe upon 2nd viewing, I'd find more to like about Panic Room? I was bored watching it in the theater.

[Guest Mirezzi]

the matrix is a great movie. it's a fact. the sequel is flawed but ambitious, has some nice set pieces and satisfies the anime/cyberpunk nerd in me. the third is completely mediocre and forgettable. i guess i can keep pretending i hate everything, if that's what you want to read.

 

no, keep enjoying things and sharing. I agree with you on your ratings of the films. I think I get you, Mr Salads and Mirezzi mixed up in my head and cannot remember who actually enjoys things in life. Now I have it straight.

 

jk Mirezzi, I know somethings that you love.

 

The Matrix and, let's say, Blade II, know exactly what they're doing. They're taking banal, trivially interesting sci-fi and fantasy and having fun with the possibilities of fashion, choreography, and violence.

 

The contemporary equivalent, Inception (or just about anything else by Nolan), does the converse. It believes that trivially interesting plots should become two hour screenwriting workshops punctuated by gimmicky, unsatisfying men-in-armani shootouts in skyscrapers.

[Guest zaphod]

The Game isn't meant to be watched more than once, right? I mean, it's still enjoyable but, like The Usual Suspects, its power lies in first viewing, spoilers-free.

 

I reserve high praise for Zodiac, too. It was smart, deeply unnerving at times, and generally quite clever although 15-20 minutes too long.

 

Fight Club can never escape its petulant source material, no matter how "important" it seemed to Ed Norton types 20 years ago. Of course, it doesn't help that the movie itself sucks.

 

Overall, Fincher has one or two films of genuine quality and the rest are, let's be honest, Director-for-hire. Benjamin Button, Girl w/ Dargon Tattoo, and even The Social Network. They all could have been directed by Barry Levinson for all that it really mattered.

 

Other than the gross-out gritty factor, I'll never understand the love of Se7en. It's like Fight Club and Se7ven...hmm, they're like the bastard lovechild twins of an orgy involvingSlipknot and Brett Easton Ellis.

 

I've yet to see Alien3 and who knows, maybe upon 2nd viewing, I'd find more to like about Panic Room? I was bored watching it in the theater.

 

i should watch zodiac again. i fell asleep midway through it the first time. bored the shit out of me. fincher's style is so purposeful and sterile that he seems to drain any energy straight out of his films. the editing is really the only thing that saves him. girl with the dragon tattoo is perhaps the biggest offender, where every shot has been digitally steadied and altered for maximum smoothness. i still think a fincher neuromancer or dracula would be pretty cool. he can probably do genre better than anyone working right now, but for the moment he seems to be working with screenwriters of varying quality on inconsequential projects.

 

alien 3 is underrated. it's extremely flawed but there's a kind of operatic gothic melancholy at work that i like. for me it's the final alien film. i don't really need another one.

 

i guess i would rate fincher's films as follows:

 

the game (best)

alien 3

fight club (really only for the editing, the concept is idiotic)

the social network

 

and then everything else is either needing a second viewing or wasn't good. se7en was something i liked when i was younger, but upon watching it again i found it was very one note and puerile. same with fight club. panic room is just a genre exercise and seems to exist solely to develop some shot techniques that he never really used again, although maybe some of that digital sweeping camera stuff is in zodiac.

[Atop]

I want a Fincher 'Rendezvous with Rama'.

[Guest zaphod]

i'd take that. really any straight science fiction would probably work well with his style and sensibility.