Last movie watched...

[Mattofthespurs]

Wolf of Wall Street.


Loved it. Thought it was brilliant. Loved it the first time around too when it was called "Goodfellas".

[CrazyFoxMachine]

Sin City

Contrary to my waffle on t'other thread me watching this was again was just coincidence!

"Big, dumb and misogynist as hell" is how I used to describe this - and that still holds true but let me pull it apart.

Big

Sin City is a stylistic mammoth - as it manages to bring Frank Miller's stark visual approach to screen with no small amount of courage and tenacity. It doesn't look like any other film and for that it should be remembered. Who knew copying comics panel-for-panel can sometimes pay off? The sprawling three-tiered anthology plot is appealingly inter-connected and the actors are at their best when they get the balance between scenery-chewing and ham just right. The brilliant Powers Boothe as the greasy big bad senator is absolute gold and the snarling Benicio Del Toro is brilliant - the late Brittany Murphy is also all cheese and fantastic for it.

Dumb

It dips from 'extreme & fun' into 'laughably stupid' far too many times - with its extensive bouncy CGI car-chases and cartoony wire-work explosions. It's more Looney Tunes than Howard Hawks. The stilted cringy melodramatic dialogue doesn't help either - but when its having fun its hard not to go along with it.

Misogynist as hell

Now we all know that Frank Miller ain't no jeeneeus - stylistically he may be a trailblazer but he's come out with some right dodgy shit in his time. The overbearing noir simplicity of Sin City suits his black-and-white violent-gold-hearted-crusader schtick perfectly ... as he says in a behind the scenes feature "I wrote Sin City because I like drawing guns, cars and hot chicks". That's as far as it goes. Looking deeper into the bloody stripper-laden vengeance porn is not advisable.

"What if I'm wrong? I've got a condition. I get confused sometimes. What if I've imagined all this? What if I've finally turned into what they've always said I would turn into? A maniac."

[Professor Bear]

Non-Stop with Liam Neeson - horse shit; it totally stopped after 100 minutes!

It's like Lionel Hutz' lawsuit against 'The Never Ending Story' all over again!

It was Ok but a poor man's 'Executive Decision'.

Executive Decision was a poor man's Executive Decision.
I thought Non Stop was alright, but it couldn't quite make up its mind if it wanted to be a serious locked room murder mystery or a ridiculous action film.  I think the bit with saving the little girl was too far into ridiculous territory not so much for the scenario playing out at the time as the idea that someone in a burning, crashing plane about to fall into a jet engine will look up and see Liam Neeson is coming for them too and then think "oh good."

[GrinningChimera]

Savages

So the trailers made this look like an action extravaganza. I figured being an Oliver Stone film there would be a fair bit of violence too, considering the R18 rating it came with.

To be fair, there was action and there was violence but because of the length of the thing it didn't feel like enough of it. The film clocks in at about 2 and a half hours. I think 90 minutes would have sufficed. I was excited to see this but after it finished I felt somewhat disappointed.

Save your money with this one. There are so many better films out there.

[Mattofthespurs]

Watched The Untouchables with Costner and directed by De Palma.

Worth it if only for the Morricone score which I think is beautiful.

[Professor Bear]

Testament - post-nuclear tv movie from the mid-80s after it sank in there wouldn't be any mutants, giant wildlife, or motorcycling bandits to worry about after WW3, we were just plain old going to die and the rest was a matter of where, when, and how slow and painful it would be until the sweet kiss of oblivion arrived.  It is not terribly jolly - even The Day After made the effort to lighten the tone by casting Steve Guttenberg - and it lacks any sense of the scale of the catastrophe or setpiece grisly scenes, though the funeral pyres that start springing up once the graveyard is full and the sudden pull-back-and-reveal shot of the main character stitching one of her kids into their burial shroud are both memorable in how mundane they seem given what we usually expect of these kinds of narratives.  It remains tightly focused on the one family over the course of the story to the point that we see nothing more of the apocalypse than a bright light out a window about twenty minutes in, so I can understand why it didn't achieve the status of something like the aforementioned The Day After or the later Threads, but it's easily up there with both.

[Frank]

Testament - post-nuclear tv movie from the mid-80s after it sank in there wouldn't be any mutants, giant wildlife, or motorcycling bandits to worry about after WW3 ... remains tightly focused on the one family over the course of the story

Missed a golden opportunity to remake The Waltons with mohawks, leather chaps, and extra fingers. There's nothing awful about Robocop 2014, but there's not much to recommend it either.  The only real criticism I can make of it is that it feels oddly weighted - there are a lot of characters played by recognisable faces, and they all get more or less the same amount of screen time and similar treatment.

There's nothing wrong with spending time with the bad guys or trying to portray them as more than 2D moustache twirlers, but none of the half dozen villains does anything particularly villainous. You know how in Star Wars Vader's wee vignettes are used like commercial breaks, punctuating the main action? Those interruptions are brilliant, because you know he's just going to fuck someone up, shout something memorable, and then flouncily exit stage left in a billow of black cape. Every time the screen wipes to Vader perk up because you know someone's going to get it tight and the scene will be over in two minutes.

Watching Michael Keaton, Jackie Earl Haley, and their pals mumbling interminably about their share price and product launch deadlines is like watching The Apprentice (uncut), and they never do anything particularly villainous. Whenever Sam Jackson turns up as an unambiguously cuntish Bill O'Reilly (cutting folk off and ostentatiously perverting the truth) the film comes to life for a few minutes. Lack of a clear narrative and strong characterisation means everything feels bland and porridgy; there are far too many plot points and reversals in Murphy's relationship with his family and rediscovering his humanity that it's impossible to care about any of it.

The film offers a neat interpretation of the illusion of free will that's in line with current thinking on the subconscious; if they'd made that their central conceit, dropped the family, and made a fast paced action revenge thriller with the cast of Sam Jackson's virtual newsroom popping up like a Greek chorus in short bursts of sardonic humour, I think I'd have enjoyed it much more.

[CrazyFoxMachine]

...ahem... back to silly things...

Harry Potter and the Tree of Nothing: Part 1

After seeing Order of the Phoenix again and realising I'd never actually seen the end of the film saga that I had followed for so long I decided to get in on the last two after four years of avoiding it...

This first part shows off both the biggest plusses and the biggest negatives of the screen versions of the franchise. Everything is gorgeous and the ensemble cast are fantastic (with the exception of some angsty scenery chewing from Watson & Radcliffe) - the animated segment as well is an extraordinary moment and a classy experiment. The division of this last part allows the plot a little more room to breathe leading to some genuinely good character moments and a few very satisfying callbacks - but some plot-points are awkwardly and messily jammed in and non-book readers will be overwhelmed by the occasional heaps of sudden exposition. If they'd thought to have introduced some characters briefly in earlier films first then surely this could have been avoided but "thinking" and "blockbuster film making" rarely mix....

All in all - a nicely dark start to the final filmic chapter of the franchise and I kind of feel I was unjustified in leaving it so long as it does a good job of reminding me why I enjoyed them in the first place - but its jarring brevity in some parts is also why I dreaded it. ...so many more pointless deaths to come...

[Hawkmumbler]

Worth it just to see Neville Longbottom decapitate a snake in slow motion.

[HdE]

Saw R.I.P.D. last night, and found it quite amusing. Nice to see James Hong again!

[TordelBack]

...non-book readers will be overwhelmed by the occasional heaps of sudden exposition.

Just wait til you get to Part 2!  "Here's everyone's motivations from the start, and why everything happened the way it did across 8 films, and we'll try to confine it to a 3 minute montage in the third act, mmmkay?"

Actually I rather like the Deathly Hallows movies.  As the book is one of the shorter ones and is particularly short on incident (instead favouring extended periods of misery and befuddlement), splitting it across two parts allows for more character stuff for the main three than any of the other films, and this pays off well in terms of viewer involvement in the high stakes.  The final battle is way too generic for my liking, ignoring the visual (and tactical) possibilities of a war between hundreds of wizards in favour of the compulsory post-LotR charging armies and zap-zap-boom-crash, and some of the important characters don't really get their due (Dumbledore for a start), but all in all it's a sustained and reasonably heartfelt capstone to the series.

And as CFM says, the Brothers animation sequence is nothing short of brilliant.

[CrazyFoxMachine]

I'm waiting for the inevitable seven-season TV series myself... with occasional cameos from Dan Radcliffe as Harry's dad.

[TordelBack]

I'm waiting for the inevitable seven-season TV series myself... with occasional cameos from Dan Radcliffe as Harry's dad.

I'd go for that meself. As long as HBO aren't involved.

[CrazyFoxMachine]

It'll be called "That Cunt Voldemort" aimed at the adults who were kids when the books came out it'll detail the staff-room antics of Hogwarts staff and it'll be BLOODY FILTHY.

Professor Flitwick indeed.

Nobutseriously I do think with the current trend for milking former things into series I'd rather see a book whose world didn't get a lot of screen time than say, another self-contained film from the last thirty years getting stretched oot into a series..

Talking of - and I know TB and DarkJimbo (the real one) may agree, that would be a tolerable screen fate for Master & Commander eh what. Would just be rather expensive.

[TordelBack]

It'll be called "That Cunt Voldemort" aimed at the adults who were kids when the books came out it'll detail the staff-room antics of Hogwarts staff and it'll be BLOODY FILTHY.

They could legitimately do a Hannibal-meets-Band-of-Brothers prequel series 'Albus Dumbledore and the Wizarding War', with its cool 40's wartime setting, lots of witches in jackboots, werewolves storming the beaches, and hot Dumbledore/Grindelwald wand-on-wand rumpy. 

Actually I'd probably watch that too.

In the meantime, an Aubrey/Maturin HBO series would indeed be ace.  Eva Green for Diana?