HUGO (2011)
 
Pretty, but  sooooo  S-L-O-W.  There's more excitement watching a gallon of honey empty out of a jar with an opening the size of a penny

Been so busy I havn't been watching any movies.  I made some time and screened three in a marathon.
 
The Wild Bunch.  Find it and watch it.  This one of the greatest adventure films ever.  One that influenced everybody everywhere and nothing was ever the same again.  Great cast.
 
Duel in the Sun a very influential western that itself is rather lame.  Gregory Peck and Joseph Cotten as the Bad/good brothers and Jennifer Jones as the half-breed that comes between them. Damn she's hot.  And damn we have some poor casting and costuming choices and Linonel Barrymore doing his character from It's a Wonderful Life here is just out of place in a western and what is Walter Huston doing in there and why does this movie seem like it's parodying itself while taking itself seriously?  Magnificent and beautiful cinematography.
 
Forever Amber  Wonderful costume film about the woman that does it all for love and loses everything in the process (like Vanity Fair)  George Saunders as Charles II the part he was born to play!  Why are the backgrounds so monochromatic for a technicolor movie?  Because they were designed and painted to be filmed in Black and White. Good costume weeper and the screen lights up whenever Richard Greene shows up in a semi-comedic sidekick role. 

To get into the holiday feel, I decided to watch Miracle on 34th Street (the 1994 remake). I liked it way more than I remembered. It's probably my favorite Christmas movie. I should watch the original someday.

AlceX [..] wrote:
To get into the holiday feel, I decided to watch Miracle on 34th Street (the 1994 remake). I liked it way more than I remembered. It's probably my favorite Christmas movie. I should watch the original someday.

The original is way better.  Hard to beat Edmund Gwenn as St. Nick, Maureen O'Hara and the original Macy*s and Gimbals plotline. 

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK:  about an event that occurred in 1900 Australia
After I finished watching it, I picked up the slip the disk came in to ID the year because some of it was quite dated (1975) particularly the audio quality - and the pan flute.  But overall, solid film.  (eventhough the hair style of the head mistress character is 100% WTH)
 
really - I watched it last night and today bits of it continue to pop into my head.  haunting stuff.

Sherlock holmes: Game of shadows.
Really impressed to be honest, the first half seems like a bombastic, bigger better faster more sequel with a worse script than the first, but when it all comes together for the finale it really shines.

ayesinback wrote:
PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK:

 
 I've never actually seen that.... All I know is that a lot of people made their reputations on that film and went on to much bigger stuff in Hollywood, it's supposed to be based on a true story, and the style of the movie was based on the Pied-Piper- hence the pipes.
 
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I saw DOGS IN SPACE last night. It supposed to be a snapshot of the early 80's/late 70's  youth drug scene and punk music scene in Australia, with a staring role from INXS frontman Michael Hucthance.
It's really quite terribly awful. The only good parts were some of the songs and the scenes that illustrate someone experiencing a high- those were really pretty clever.
The rest of the movie was an unfocused audio cacophony of confusion and chaos, with lots of embarrassed bad acting thrown in for kicks.
 
Really, if you've ever seen the second Mad Max film, with those screeching, whining nasal voices that most of the minor actors put on: almost everyone in this film was like that, must have been some bad acting teachers in Melbourne at the time responsible for many examples of that same acting style.
 
The lifestyle it portrayed with student age people- would-be activists, artists, musicians, losers, living is utter squalor together, with nightly parties, drinking, destruction, drugs, sex, bad music etc was true to reality as far as it went, but also utterly unnotable. The reality of that scene isn't too interesting and this film version didn't add any flavour either- except for the drug trips.

Pale Rider.
 
This was a Clint Eastwood western from 1985.
 
Very well filmed! The cinematography was excellent, a real visual masterpiece! The colours, the beautiful mountain landscapes were all captured perfectly! The interiors were shot beautifully too, with lovely lighting and wonderful high contrast, lots of chiaroscuro. Those camera guys really knew what they were doing.
Sound was perfect too. The Foley guys really did their job well. Costumes, props and sets were great. All the other actors were good too, so really good performances from everyone. Even the history was good- giving us an insight into 1800's hydraulic mining techniques!
 
The bad-
The movie was as obvious as its title. The story was simplistic and formulaic- very, very much so. Clint Eastwood's acting was extremely wooden, stilted and halting, which is very surprising since by 1985 he'd been in the acting game for many, many years and he'd put in some good performances in previous films.
This could have been because he was dividing his time between direction as well and perhaps he just couldn't see how bad he was doing because of that, or maybe people were too intimidated to try and get a better performance from him, he was the director afterall...
 
So a bit of a flawed classic.

Going Postal.
  
This was a two part made for TV adaptation of the discworld book of the same name by Terry Prachett.
 Ihaven't read it, but I've read most of his books so I've an extremely good idea of the style and this represented it magnificently!
  
For amade for TV effort this was extremely good. Why kiddy stuff like Harry  Potter gets made into big budget films and Pratchett's work has only just now started to have some TV adaptions done (as well as some animations) has always baffled me... but enough about that.
 
Theonly other live action version of Prachett's work I've seen was The Colour of Magic/the Light Fantastic, which was ok, but as another TV production that time the small budget was quite evident. Those works were supposed to be more epic in scope and TV just couldn't do that.
 
Thistime however the product was a success! The actors were extremely high calibre, the sets, props and costumes so amazingly well put together! It's interesting that they chose to go with a more Victorian style to things, since the stories originally had a much more renaissance feel tothem with characters like Lord Vetinari clearly based on a Borgia  or Machiavellian archetype.  The level of technology clearly doesn't lend itself to a Victorian setting either, since that'd be relatively modern and fast paced and Ankh Morpork is anything but...
But NO-ONE does"Victorian" like the British! Their theatrical adaptions  with a Victorian setting are second to none. So given that experience and ability it worked very well in this instance.
  
This film was tight, very well scripted, humorous, with magnificent performances and characterisations by every actor.
 
Pratchett himself had a cameo n the end which was pretty good. You can recognise him ANYWHERE by his funny little gnomish voice. He had a Cameo in The Colour of Magic too... I don't know if there have been any other live action versions of his work, with him in it, but in this case it's a good mark of his confidence and approval of the film!

She's out of my league
 
This is a Jay Baruchel vehicle.
He played the beardy-weirdy one Canadian non-jew in Knocked up, and the archetypical weedy one jew platoon member in Tropic Thunder...
I bought this DVD on a whim while buying Christmas presents because I watched it on a flight to the US last year and found it one of the few watchable films.
 
It survived a second watching. It's not a clever film, but it's not stupid either. It was reasonably slick and well put together. Plus, I saw a lotta stuff I missed last time, as well as the fact that the female star's best freind is Jessie's girlfriend "Jane" from Breaking Bad.
 
Eh... it was decent. I think it's recommendable as a not bad comedy.

Season of the Witch:
Fairly watchable until the lump of CGI at the end. I say watchable, what I mean is .. put yourself through it then reedit in your mind afterwards replacing Nicholas Cage with 'any other' actor. (John Inman is my suggestion).

pale rider

Being a sequel/homage/continuation to "The Man with No Name" movies the character is exactly as wooden as it was always depicted.  Eastwood's portrayal is intentionally wooden.  Also like a lot of westerns there are conventions in the genre and storylines are often completely interchangeable with another movie/book and a story told a dozen dozen times.
 
The Libertine (2006) In between forgettable POTC movies Johnny Depp made this one based on a play about John Wilmot in the Restoration.  Great portrayal of Charles II and this very interesting person John Wilmot whose writing was frightenly modern for the 17th Century replete with "f**k" and "c**t"  Depp's characterization of this perpetually drunk character is similar to Jack Sparrow but makes it obvious that Jack Sparrow is a cartoon character and this is what the type would be in the real world especially with John Wilmot's death of advanced syphilis and a devastated liver at the age of 33.  In my opinion that makes it an interesting insight as having Johnny Depp playing him was a stroke of genius on John Malkovich's part.  And after seeing Forever Amber with George Saunders as Charles II  I had to see John Malkovich portray him so well.
 
 

Bravo wrote:
pale rider
  Being a sequel/homage/continuation to "The Man with No Name" movies the character is exactly as wooden as it was always depicted.  Eastwood's portrayal is intentionally wooden.  Also like a lot of westerns there are conventions in the genre and storylines are often completely interchangeable with another movie/book and a story told a dozen dozen times.

 No, that's not right at all.
I can perfectly forgive intentionally or even an unintentionally taciturn performance. Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian for example was just right, but this was simply bad performance, nothing more.
 
It was "wooden" in the sense that, his responses to other character's lines were often miss-timed, or the emotion expressed came out as a non-sequitor... i.e. there wasn't a believable linguistic transition. Like I said, he was probably distracted by his direction duties and had no one senior enough to correct him.
 
For this story, normal interchangeability doesn't explain the problem. The issue was that they simply didn't embroider it enough with their own creative touches to make it stand out. 
The point of the film is to watch more of Eastwood's classic gun-slinger character kick-arse once more, and nothing else.

Easy Virtue-
 
This is a made for TV film set in the 1920s about an American widow who is also a racing car driver who marries a young Englishman. He takes her to his family's grand manor house... They all hate her apart from the father who doesn't car about anything anymore since he came back from the war.
 
There's a bit of comedy, but mostly it's all heavy cliches about the "brash" pretty, sassy, yank who cuts across class boundaries and shakes up the stuffy old Brits etc... And a bit about upper class pretensions and maintaining a front and old standards in the face of change, blah, blah, blah.
 
Basically it's another rehash of Noel Coward's "the Vortex", which wasn't that clever to begin with, but made a splash in the 20s because back  THEN it was new. Altman did the a similar thing with his extremely crude "Gosford Park" which was really a piece of shit (The Vortex crossed with a cheap Mrs Marple TV adaption)... Anyway, the only really notable thing in this case were the 80s pop songs they used in it, giving them a silly 20s sound.
 
The acting was great. The costumes, settings, props etc were all top notch. The direction was well handled. It's just a shame things were let down by the tiredness of the story.
Surely, you do not ALWAYS have to do the same story in this sort of setting?! The premise at the beginning was so promising- a female racing car driver! And then we get the same old crap...

ozoneocean [..]wrote:

Bravo wrote:pale rider  Being a sequel/homage/continuation to "The Man with No Name" movies the character is exactly as wooden as it was always depicted.  Eastwood's portrayal is intentionally wooden.     No, that's not right at all. The point of the film is to watch more of Eastwood's classic gun-slinger character kick-arse once more, and nothing else.

 It is just to bring back the "Man with No Name" even more laconic then before.  It was intentional but then that's only what Eastwood himself mentioned in an interview back when the movie came out when questioned about the connection to the Man with No Name films.
 
It has nothing to do with what you're thinking.  Eastwood's first movie as director was Firefox and his performance in that is nuanced and not at all wooden.  You're telling me he got worse?  In Pale Rider, the character is supposed to be distant and removed.  The audience is supposed to doubt whether he's even alive or some kind of revenant.  That segues into the legendary status of the character (and the story) as opposed to it being a flesh and blood person doing things in the real world.  It's supposed to have a mythic distance like that line from the Man who Shot Liberty Valance. "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. "
All of this was written about endlessly in newspaper reviews and magazine articles at the time the movie came out as well as a cable preview special.  It's also been mentioned in some more recent pieces on westerns that have appeared in the columns of various movie critics in local newspapers.   
 
 
 

skreem [..] wrote:
Season of the Witch:
Fairly watchable until the lump of CGI at the end. I say watchable, what I mean is .. put yourself through it then reedit in your mind afterwards replacing Nicholas Cage with 'any other' actor. (John Inman is my suggestion).

I watched it the other night, some opinion really.  some nice touches but nic cage was just wrong.
Also watched insidous which was an excellent horror.

Just watched The girl with the gragon tattoo.  us version.  haven't read the book or seen the other version but this was excellent.

we were Just talking about Dragon Tattoo at lunch yesterday.  3 of 4 read the books (not me). 3 of 4 saw the Swedish movie (I was one) and 1 of 4 saw the US movie.  Everybody liked everything they saw/read - with the proviso that the violence is strong - not for the weak-stomached.
 
Not really a film, but just started watching The Borgias (season 1).  
I'm liking it, especially the guy who plays Cesaro.  Jeremy Irons is good in his role, but I think the dude has to be very careful about not making a cartoon out of himself.  He waivers right on the edge of it.
 
Does anybody else think of Boris Karloff when they see the current Jeremy Irons?
 
---  also just started watching Warehouse 13, which I like a lot.

Genejoke [..] wrote:
Just watched The girl with the gragon tattoo.  us version.  haven't read the book or seen the other version but this was excellent.

   

I saw the Swedish version from 2009 for the first time the other day. It's pretty good and it's very faithful to the novel.
.
On the other hand, the American version is also pretty good and very faithful to the novel. So, if you've seen one it's pretty redundant to see the other one.

.

To be fair, the American version has a bigger budget and more atmospheric direction. Also, that Trent Reznor/Karen O version of "Immigrant Song" is insane.

@Bravo-
You'd really better watch the film again. Your glasses are tinted rose. ;)
Like I said- his lines were MISS-timed. Most of the time the clear intent was to be naturalistic, but he flubbed it. There is "playing the strong man", laconic, taciturn, and all that sort of thing, and then there are bad performances that aren't well intergrated into a scene. This was the latter and it's very, very easy to tell.
I was trying to be foroving, which is why I mentioned his directing... But then maybe he was going solo this time when before he'd had assistance? You never know.
 
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Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone
 
This was a Scifi from 1983.
Three pretty maidens in golden spacesuits hop in a space liferaft when the space-liner they're in explodes. They crash-land on a horrible planet infested with plague mutants... It's the job of Wolf the bounty-hunter and his attractive female android assistant to bring them back alive!
 
Starring Peter Strauss as the dashing Wolf, Michael Ironside as the evil Overdog and Molly Ringwald as the plucky Nicky Twister (Wolf's replacement when his android gets fried).
This was a cash-in on the Star Wars driven SciFi craze of the early 80s. This is a B movie, which you can tell from the title... but that's "B" for bad.
It didn't even have the saving grace of a few bare boobs...
 
 The acting was generally ok, it's just that the story was so amazingly formulaic and dull. It wasn't very well filmed either, it even had day-for-night scenes (they use a dark lens to fake a night scene) out doors, which never work with a blue sky.
 The characters were also thin and formulaic, mos of them having almost nothing to them at all.
 
 Molly Ringwald did a very good job playing Nicky Twister, she gave her a lot of humanity and pathos and she was very good as the comedy relief. Peter Strauss's dashing hero was ok, but nothing special, just a cookie-cutter performance for a cookie-cutter role. Michael Ironside was as good as he always is as a villain, even when wearing very heavy make-up and stupidly huge cyborg prosthetics.
 
The spaceship props were shocking; plastic crap. But the vehicles were pretty decent, including a massive landship train. The best of the bunch was a nightmarinsh tractor with a huge snow-plow blade on the front. It was a true deisel-punk masterpiece of heavy brutish steel and belching exhaust-pipes.
 
The music was a mix of a Star Wars pastiche, Buck Rogers, and Western.
The Western influnce extended to a formula scene where Wolf dumps Nicky in a pool (because she stinks), and comically forces her to wash herself while she struggles... -That's a %100 fully clothed scene mind you, proper clothes, not strategically tight revealing stuff, so it wasn't done for pervy purposes, just the typical comic-relief scene stolen from a hundred Westerns.
 
 So what did a successful SciFi  film like Star Wars have that a failed pulp B-movie like this didn't? Why did that succeed when this didn't? -Much more arty, clever shots and film technique, a more thoughtful story, more background details and research, bigger ideas (the "force" etc), better costume, set, and prop design... and a better budget.
 
This film would've made a prefect episode for LEXX... except in the end all the dashing heroes would die, with only dead Kai, sexy Xev, and poor frustrated ugly Stanley left as they flew away from the doomed planet in a zombie moth-ship... Then their humongous wingless dragonfly shaped ship LEXX would slowly turn in space, the music would start ticking away gradually building up as all the multifaceted eye-lenses switch around one by one, sparkling with power, converging on the mouth parts, which would then cough out a gracefully spinning swathe of destructive energy... and then planet would erupt.
The end.

Oz: sometimes things are precisely what they are because that's the way the artist intends them to be.  To repeat myself in interviews and the like Eastwood said it was intentional and for this filmgoer (as well as any number of critics at the time) it worked as intended. 
 
Now for a film that is truly magnificent: 1961's Pit and the Pendulum.  Floyd Crosby director of photography and Roger Corman directing.  Floyd Crosby was the guy responsible for the great look and feel of man of Corman's Poe movies.  Vincent Price gives a brauva performance.   Saw it as part of a Vincent Price boxed set so it's in widescreen and it's full beauty can be appreciated.  For a low budget feature the attention to set detail is amazing and the film is worth watching for the sets and atmosphere alone.

The hangover part two
A rehash of the first in a different setting, the story beats are near identical.  While a lazt sequel it's good enough that it just about gets away with it.

Genejoke [..] wrote:
The hangover part two
A rehash of the first in a different setting, the story beats are near identical.  While a lazt sequel it's good enough that it just about gets away with it.

Sounds like Home Alone 2.  "Let's do the same exact everything, but in a different city."

Pretty much excactly like that.

Grey Lady Down.  (1977) Charleton Heston, Ronny Cox, Stacey Keach, David Carradine in an advertisement for the US submarine service and the DSRV.  No, it's another one of those tense submarine rescue films made super awesome by the US Navy letting them play with all the real stuff.
 
Battle Hymn (1957) True story of a USAF pilot who founded an orphanage for Korean kids.  Great aircraft scenes with Air Guard F-51s as the ROK AF.  Seems all war movies done in the 1950s had to have Don DeFore in them.

Kung Fu Panda 2
I'm a huge animation buff and love this movie.  I thought it was better that the first one as it had a better story to it. It was probably one of my favorite animated films of the year and for the second year in a row Dreamworks made a better film than Pixar (nothing against TS3, but How to Train Your Dragon, I felt, was better).
I really need to get around to go watch Tin Tin.  I grew up with it and want to see what Spielberg and Jackson did with it.

bravo1102 [..] wrote:
Oz: sometimes things are precisely what they are because that's the way the artist intends them to be.  To repeat myself in interviews and the like Eastwood said it was intentional and for this filmgoer (as well as any number of critics at the time) it worked as intended.  

And sometimes they're like they are because they were done poorly. Watch it again without the rose tinted specs man.
I don't think we'll ever agree on this one. Suffice to say, when I watched it, it was pretty obvious- and that was mainly because there were better performances to compare it with. Although no one was steller in there. It was not one of his better cowboy films generally.
 
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I saw "Just one of the guys" a while ago.
It wasn;t as bad, or as sexy as I thought it'd be...
It's about a highschool girl in her senior year, she wants a job over the summer as an intern at an important Newspaper, but can't get a recomendation for her articles, she thinks it's probably sexisim, so decides to come to another school disgused as a boy to test this theory...

I'm not smart or have good tast in moves so I just watched Hobo with a shotgun

The Raven (1963)  Probably the best of Corman's adaptations of Poe and certainly one of the funniest.  A really witty script by Richard Matheson make this one a must-see.  Once I was walking past a literature class watching the movie on my way back to my Business English class and I had to stop and sit in the back of the class because it is such a pleasure to watch.  Who needed Business English anyway?
 
Just seeing it for the pleasure of hearing Vincent Price read the poem is enough to get one into the film.  But once Peter Lorre's voice is heard coming out of that raven I'm hooked. 

My dad got me two movies on DVD for Christmas: The Hangover 1 and The Hangover 2.
 
I saw one yesterday and it was lame. It was boooooring. I got bored, bored, bored watching it. It wasn't very funny, the guys didn't do anything particularly crazy or mad or exciting, it was just a real doze.
 
I was at least expecting something sleazy due to the R rating- The Aussie R rating means no one under 18 is allowed to watch, similar to the USA NC17 ratings.
Anyway, they ONLY put that there purely for about 3 still pics at the very, very end of the film, that show that bearded actor (Zac Galafathingo...) with a fake penis sticking out of his pants while it looks like someone is giving him a BJ.
 
I image the distributors knew the film was so bad and dull that they didn't expect the higher rating would decrease their audience by any significant amount... maybe it'd help increase it? Either way, they didn't care enough to cut out those 3 still images.
 
 I remember these sorts of bachelor party type films being a lot more funny and a lot more over-the-top, especially the 80's ones. WTF happened?
 
I still have the next one to see... D: