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Post by Vercetti on Feb 17, 2006 3:56:11 GMT
Un Flic - (Jean-Pierre Melville;1972;France/Italy) Four men rob a bank to finance a more intricate heist while being pursued by a cop who knows one of the robbers through a woman.Not as paced as Melville's other two films and I wish there was more of Delon's character, but it still turns out to be a great film. Again Melville's visuals give us another blue-ish/gray noir look, along with a lot of rainy atmosphere around outside shots. Alaine Delon and Richard Crenna are great in their roles, and the train heist is a wonderful scene. Overall a great crime film from a director who has climbed well into my top 5 favorite filmmakers.
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Omar
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Post by Omar on Feb 17, 2006 4:13:59 GMT
Thumbsucker(2005/Mike Mills) [First Viewing] A troubled teen goes through a series of addictions in his senior year of high school.Much better than I thought; a film that interestingly explores the isolation of teenagers, and is wonderfully supported by a great cast. It does tend to drag on here and there, and some of the subplots aren't as captivating as others. Still, I can't say I didn't enjoy it.
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Feb 17, 2006 21:43:56 GMT
I felt the same, it exists now only as a document of its own destruction, probably the most tragic example of art versus industry in cinema. The Lady from Shanghai might be number two.
My favourite moment was the very final shot, the camera talking into the microphone, "I'm Orson Welles. I wrote and directed this picture."
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Feb 17, 2006 22:29:43 GMT
My favourite moment was the very final shot, the camera talking into the microphone, "I'm Orson Welles. I wrote and directed this picture." Yeah, I loved it too. It's a shame that Welles didn't have the final say, though. That said, even with added footage, I can't see it being any better...
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Feb 17, 2006 22:39:25 GMT
Really? I think the flashes of genius that we do get indicate that it might've been Kane's equal. Some who saw it at the time ranked it as superior.
But imagine cutting away half of a 150 minute film, then getting hired hands to shoot quick, cheap 'continuity footage' and splicing the mess back together. It's a joke.
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Post by Mike Sullivan on Feb 18, 2006 6:22:52 GMT
Truth be told, I rank this film behind Kane and I highly regard it, even in it's buchared state. But christ, that ended... You could just feel how it was tacked on. Welles would never of allow it. The Wild Bunch (1969) First Viewing Directed by: Sam Peckinpah Rating: [/i] It's quite late... Rather tired.... First, I must comend the editing style on the film. There hadn't been such a revelation in editing since Eisenstein came up to plate i n the USSR, particularly, "The Battleship Potempkin".... Second, I must hail the direction. It's gritty. This isn't the noble west of John Wayne. Nor is it the spaghhetti western. This was the west. No noble gunmen here. These were men. They drank, they slept with whores, they'd take any job at the drop of a hat but the film isn't scared to also show you that they are human. The ylike a laugh, they have a bond. It all at once reminds me much of Howard Hawks. This is also a film about endings. It is Pekinpah's tribute to a gone era and also a tribute to himself, a man caught in essentially the wrong time for himself. Just thank god that he was in Hollywood at the time though to provide us such a deep work. The script is great, though diolouge isn't strong and yet it doens't need to be strong because the ensemble cast incluiding William Holden, Ernest Bognine & Warren Oates among others drive this film. I must comment on the nature of violence hich is explored in this film, et unlike with others films, i doesn't feel the need to preach. Violence in this film is raw. Tht's just how it was and Pekinpah doesn't seem to want to relent. That's hutzpah. But I look beyond that. As the film starts, the first battle sequence is revolutionary. Our jaws drop. we ask, "Can he do that" and we applaud him and cheer a ad bit, despite our horror. The final sequence in which the bunch meets their fate, the violence has lost it's original bite. It's becoming sickening to an extent. If our jaws drop here it is because of the sheer excess in which it's carried out and because of how horrible it's become. At least that's how I saw it. I'll re-watch this tomorow. My DVD player for some reason was bitchy towards the middle of the film and I needed to skip the final moments of battle of the bridge with the TNT. I've also been somewhat distracted. And yet despite that all ,I easily gives this the title of greatest western ever made, or at least the most truthful one. Even "Unforgiven" is sometimes a victim of sentment or at least preaching.
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Post by Mike Sullivan on Feb 18, 2006 18:59:23 GMT
Well then. Does this get your vote for best film of last year, Capo?
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Post by Vercetti on Feb 18, 2006 19:45:50 GMT
He updated his list in the 2005 thread, which is the 5th or 6th best on his list.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Feb 18, 2006 21:01:39 GMT
The Elephant Man David Lynch 1980 US 2nd time; DVD A doctor rescues a severely deformed man from a freak show in Victorian London. Lynch's most commercial film is peppered with horrific, genuinely frightening undertones, full of the same fearful sounds which made Eraserhead. Finely acted, with a wonderful feel for pace and structure, and the final moments are almost excruciating to watch; deeply moving.And yeah, Good Night, and Good Luck. is definitely getting nominated in the awards from me.
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Post by Vercetti on Feb 19, 2006 1:27:36 GMT
Capo, is The Elephant Man more commercial then Dune?
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Feb 19, 2006 1:30:44 GMT
I'd say so, yeah. Not sure about at the time, however. I think Dune was always more catered to the cult following of the original novel.
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Omar
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Post by Omar on Feb 19, 2006 3:45:33 GMT
Firewall(2006/Richard Loncraine) [First Viewing] After his family is held for ransom, a security specialist must rob the bank he protects.With it's cliches and it's by-the-numbers plot elements, this movie manages to piss the viewer off so much, that by the time Harrison Ford starts killing people, you're glad that someone's getting their ass kicked. The film does nothing for cinema as an art-form, but when you're having a bad day, and rain prevents you from filming, this is the kind of film that puts a smile on your face. Plus, it's the flaws in films like this that help me appreciate "A History of Violence" even more. Oh, and did I mention I got in for free?
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Post by Vercetti on Feb 19, 2006 4:28:29 GMT
Flightplan - (Robert Schwentke;2005;USA) A recent widow and her child board a plane, her daughter vanishes and no one can remember even seeing her.This felt like Panic Room 2 with it's camera work floating around the airplane. The CGI is overused as expected (does a hose really need to be CGI?). The only good things in this film are Foster, Sarsgaard, and Bean. Otherwise we have a pathetic attempt at a thriller that is ridiculously predictable. Seriously, everything about this is boring and uncreative. The IMDB plot even has the audacity to call this "Hitchcockian."
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Feb 19, 2006 16:55:37 GMT
Syriana Stephen Gaghan 2005, USA[/color] 1st viewing; big screen- Increasingly easy editing techniques have realised a new kind of filmmaking. Syriana, despite its tagline 'Everything is connected', is not about the fact of its characters connections, it's ostensibly about internatinal relations and the oil crisis. But there's 8 or 9 central figures, commanding only as much screen time as the events they exist in service of require, so the characters are narrative puppets, to the point that the death of a child is reduced to a plot device. Fair enough. So what about the filmmaking? The image is incidental, a gateway to a story full of these cyphers. Shoot a hundred hours of footage and find the most efficient ones in the editing room. It's an economical way to work, in terms of both time and money. The Constant Gardener was the same. Ultimately, though, you end up with bland political rhetoric and absolutely nothing else.[/size] MirrorMask Dave McKean 2005, UK / USA[/color] 1st viewing; big screen- So disappointing. I have three points of contention here. #1) The visuals. McKean is a graphic artist and MirrorMask is a very visual experience. The problems are that he's fallen into the Terry Gilliam trap of endless upstaging. Every set-piece has to surpass the previous one, and he seems to think this is merely a matter of increasing the scale and noise. Contrast this with Svankmajer's Alice, which is also a series of set-pieces, but where the ideas are individually strong enough to speak for themselves. Granted, Svankmajer had the benefit of structuring his film in a labyrinth of identical rooms, whereas McKean needs to create a fluid world, but his approach doesn't work, the effect is exhausting and numbing. He's also succumbed to something Sin City narrowly avoided in all but a handful of scenes: stage-bound artificiality. He's framed most of the shots as tableaux, so the camera never really enters the world and the perspective becomes distancing and overtly fake. Other than that, though, he does do some very interesting things with computer graphics, overlaying text and illustrations in the Greenaway tradition. #2) The humour is unbearably bad. Every joke is a cliché. It should have been a much more serious, or subversively humourous, film. I kept thinking of The Company of Wolves, which shares the theme of transition to adulthood via a dream, and how effectively the tone was balanced between sexuality and innocence. There's none of that here. Instead we get great gags like "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" "Yeah! (insert something absurdly irrelevent and scatterbrained)!" #3) The narrative. Okay, so the story doesn't matter. It's basically about a girl whose parents run a circus, at which she performs as a juggler, who enters the dreamworld of her own drawings when her mother develops a brain tumour. After that it's The Wizard of Oz. But the actual narrative has such potential. We have a girl entering her own drawings, looking through windows in the dreamworld and seeing into her bedroom, where her alterego (or older self) has replaced her. We have a book that guides her through the dreamworld, a world where everybody wears masks ("How else would I know if I was happy or sad?"), we have the implication that it may be a tumour-induced hallucination of her mother's, we have two mother-figures in the dream, one good and one evil, we have some mythological references and we have the framing device of the circus and the search for a mirror. Why is next to nothing done with these? Why aren't they shuffled or interlaced at all? The world operates according to a cartoon logic, it's not chaotic like Alice's. So McKean thinks his film should be about Helena's search for the mask? Who cares about that? I've heard that story a hundred times in a hundred guises: "Important quest in a mildly threatening fantasy world ruled by a dark queen, thank heavens for my helpful and comedic guide." Why, for instance, has the dreamworld not taken on circus-like qualities? Why doesn't she do any further drawing within the dream? The layering should have actively continued throughout, not just been presented 'as is' to facilitate the dull yarn. And why has McKean chickened out on the same issues Jordan stepped up to for Wolves? He, disturbingly, ingeniously, sexualised a 12 year-old girl in that film, McKean casts a 20 year-old as the adolescent. Very safe, and a wasted opportunity. I think that's all I wanted to say about it. Worth watching. I'd like to hear others' opinions.[/size]
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Feb 19, 2006 18:39:13 GMT
Too bad about Syriana. I'm still looking forward to it, though. Walk the Line James Mangold 2005 US 1st time; big screen The life of Johnny Cash, from his early days to 1968. You can't help but think this was a cash-in on the success of last year's Ray; the result is a biopic which goes down the path of a star whose troubles stem from one childhood memory he'd rather forget. Phoenix and Witherspoon are both electric, and Mangold has enough sense to keep the narrative driven by the music, like Altman's Nashville, and thankfully, the coda is brief.
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Post by Vercetti on Feb 20, 2006 2:07:14 GMT
The Legend of Zorro - (Martin Campbell;2005;USA) After Zorro's marriage fails, he is soon drawn into another conspiracy.Whoever wrote this film is horrible. Seriously, the divorce looked at in the film feels like a modern Hollywood divorce. In fact, the 1850's feel like modern times with the lack of technology. The last film managed to be a good, charming film. This is simply ridiculous, filled with child-ish humor. This movie felt like a Disney family movie. The CGI was also overused way too much. The plot is laughable, and Rufus Sewell's overacting was pitiful to the point where I wanted to jump in the movie and pin a mustache on him to twirl. Banderas was ok, but lacked the presence he had in the last film.
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Omar
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Post by Omar on Feb 21, 2006 0:56:35 GMT
The New World(2005/Terrence Malick) [First Viewing] English settlers attempt to establish a settlement in 1607 Jamestown.If I were to pick one of the many aspects about this film that makes it a masterpiece, it would be the musical score, which drives the film in so many ways. Not many films are made like this, but in a year that is being called one of the worst in cinematic history, my faith is restored when watching a film like "The New World". The cinematography is beautiful, and the best of last year. Malick's understanding of Native American culture helps him in his direction mix nature with the natives so that they become one. The camera movements are interesting throughout, and give you the feeling of a sailing ship in uncharted waters. And then there are the incredible performances by the A-list cast. The final scene between 'Rebecca' and John Smith is so moving. A truly hypnotic and mesmerizing film.
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