Last movie watched...

[ming]

Room 237 is great, and I heartily recommend it to each and every one of you.  However, for me it was less about explaining The Shining* and more about all the people with far too much time on their hands that read far, far too much into things.  Anyway, fascinating.



* The Shining represents one of my favourite Norwegian manglings of perfectly good film titles... "Hotel of Evil", anyone?

[Ghost MacRoth]

I was more fascinated with the idea of Kubrick's experiments in subliminal messaging!  Film is riddled with them.

[JamesC]

The Blues Brothers

Still great fun although I hadn't realised how slight the story is (not that it really matters).

[NapalmKev]

The Blues Brothers

Still great fun although I hadn't realised how slight the story is (not that it really matters).

Great film. Far better than the piss-poor sequel!


Yesterday on Movie Mix it was an 80's Hulkfest.

Return of Hulk - Hilarious. I really enjoyed it.

Death of Hulk - a bit crap to be fair, although there is one good scene where the Hulk actually manages to run through some walls.

Cheers

[Daveycandlish]

Bit harsh to Blues Brothers 2000 there Kev - the music is just as good, as are the cameos. The story is just as slight. The only real difference is having John Goodman instead of Belushi.



I'm watching 70's Doc Savage right now (starring Ron Ely) and loving it!

[NapalmKev]

Bit harsh to Blues Brothers 2000 there Kev - the music is just as good, as are the cameos. The story is just as slight. The only real difference is having John Goodman instead of Belushi.

Twas a bit harsh I suppose. My main gripe with the film is the near identical plot to the first film, but with profoundly less laughs IMO.

I thought John Goodman wasn't that bad, but he ain't no Belushi!

Cheers

[I, Cosh]

I'd been keen to see Cockfighter since I heard it described as "like a regular movie but with chickens fighting" so I was pleased to see it was on as part of a Monte Hellman season at the Stadtkino.

No problems with subtitles as Warren Oates plays a man who took a vow of silence after his big mouth cost him the Cockfighter of the Year medal two years before. His woman doesn't understand him but it seems his gamecocks do. Harry Dean Stanton is the arch-rival in a typically great supporting role which sees him one again sporting any number of wonderfully outrageous suits.

Overall, it's a short and very strange slice of 70s Americana. A standard sports movie structure built around something much seamier than baseball or boxing. The vow of silence part gives our man an ultra-laconic presence and it's hard to say how much of the washed out look is down to the age of the print.

[CrazyFoxMachine]

Led Zeppelin: The Song Remains the Same

A likeable shambles of a concert film - a lot of the performances mimed at Shepperton studios several years after the fact. It's the height of 70s rock excess, the utterly self-indulgent filmed sequences are baffling as they are oddly endearing. The star is, and will always be, the music which is great. The Rain Song/Robert Plant medieval thing is probably the highlight for me - as it goes quite well together. Bonzo's down-to-earth "here is my cow, now I'm having a pint" segment is also brilliant.

[SIP]

winter soldier
Thought it was average.

crash (with Don Cheadle, Sandra Bullocks etc....)
Thought it was very good.

wolf of wall street
Really enjoyed it.....watched it in two parts which helped fight of the "its too long" issue. Didn't have the conflict with its alleged one sided depiction criticism that it appears to have received elsewhere.

in bruges

Thought it was great. Fantastic script and Colin Farrell was very good.

American hustle
Also enjoyed. Not Christian bales biggest fan, but he did a very good job in this.

[The Bissler]

The Woman In Black: dull as dishwater and while it made me jump a few times I didn't feel it was frightening at all.  It does get points for emotionally scarring a lot of kids though.

Trance: Dredd's own Anthony Dodd Mantle was responsible for a lot of beautiful imagery in this film, and that's the best I can say about it.  I was confused as to who the main character was, but found myself not caring by the end as all the characters were equally unpleasant.  Plus I guessed what the twist was about 35 mins in.  Contains one scene of a fully shaved Rosario Dawson in the buff...no further comment to make.

[GrinningChimera]

Contains one scene of a fully shaved Rosario Dawson in the buff...no further comment to make.

Trance was a bit of a let down. But you did get to see McAvoys arse. Much to the delight of my girlfriend.

[Jim_Campbell]

Lockout...

That was pants. Oddly, there's a much better movie in there trying to get out. Given that Guy Pearce is a decent actor who tends to make pretty good choices of role, and Luc Besson's name is normally indicative of competent-and-at-least-mildly-entertaining action fare, I'm not sure what went wrong.

Pearce is certainly too good an actor for the fact that Snow is an utterly unlikeable dick to be anything other than a conscious choice. Add to that any number of odd narrative decisions: [spoiler]setting up the Glaswegian nutter for an entire movie and then putting him up against the lead for about ten seconds before disposing of him off-camera; rather anticlimactically blowing up the space station and then spending a good fifteen minutes at the end of the movie resolving a plot thread that no one cared about because it was obviously just a macguffin to set the plot in motion... Then there's the oddly inconsistent tech: the first time we see people going into orbit, they require a very C20th looking space shuttle arrangement, but by the end of the film there's a whole fleet of space fighters appeared from... somewhere.[/spoiler]

Non-spoilery verdict: disappointing.

Cheers

Jim

[Keef Monkey]

Odd Thomas - Huge fan of the book and as an adaptation this got a lot of things right. The casting of Odd in particular is bang on and the Odd/Stormy relationship works well. The bodachs look great too, and there were some sequences that were so close to how the book played out in my head that I was very happy with it.

Like with all book to film adaptations I found myself getting a little irked that certain elements were missing or some characters were underdeveloped (wondering if there were legal reasons Elvis isn't involved at all), and at 90mins the film has to rattle through things pretty quickly which means the whole thing can seem a little manic and messy. It's a very entertaining adventure though, and I reckon they did a really good job with it. An extra half hour to let the whole thing catch a breath now and then might have been good though.
The book is still better though. Obviously.

[Recrewt]

Lockout...

That was pants. Oddly, there's a much better movie in there trying to get out. Given that Guy Pearce is a decent actor who tends to make pretty good choices of role, and Luc Besson's name is normally indicative of competent-and-at-least-mildly-entertaining action fare, I'm not sure what went wrong.

I really wanted to like Lockout a lot more than I did.  It is hard to tell exactly what is wrong - Snow was a bit of an odd character and for every funny quip there were many more misses.  I thought that chap from Emmerdale was great as an over-the-top baddie.  Some of the special effects were far below standard, especially the bike chase at the start.

It also got a bit messy near the end - in the regular cut [spoiler]Begbie gets killed on the space station but in the extras it shows some deleted scenes where he also gets into one of those suits and has a mid-air fight with Snow.  Again, the effects are not the best but at least is gives a more suitable end to the character so it seems strange they cut it out.   [/spoiler]

[Moggot Lover]

A bit late, but managed to get round to watching Batman 'Dark knight rises' over the weekend.
Such an underwhelming film. Fight scenes were laughable. Lack of chemistry between Batman and Cat women and pretty much the rest of the cast. I did like Bane and story/plot was a little different (hmm not that much) to the other films, but alias it was very very predictable to what was going to happen next. Shame really so glad I didn't go to the cinema to watch it.