Movie Tab II

Oh how I do so love this film. It's just so good on so many levels. The main reason for me is the family connections in this film. There are 3 generations living under one roof in this movie and I think it's more than a little sad how this today just isn't the case anymore. I, as some of you know have my father living with me and as far as I'm concerned it will stay that way until he dies. He's 60 now and it not only would be next to impossible for him to live by himself, he just doesn't have anyone else. So he is going to stay with me and I hope to be able to provide him comfort.

Which is why I love this film, when Loretta (played by Cher who won an Oscar for her performance) tells her mother Rose (Olympia Dukakis who also won an Oscar in this film) that she is getting married one of the first things Rose asks Loretta is if they are going to live in the house with the rest of the family. I love that. Apparently that is a very Italian trademark. I wonder in today's ever changing world if it is still that way. Even Nicholas Cage, who I know a lot of people can't stand is quite good for how young he was in this film.

I highly recommend this movie if you haven't had the pleasure yet. The man who wrote this screenplay grew up in New York around Italian families and it shows (he also won an Oscar for his screenplay) in the film. The funny thing is, he's Irish and as he was growing up he says he started looking around the neighborhood and he started noticing these Italian families and they way they treated each other so he started spending as much time with them as he could. And this is the result of that. In closing I'll just tell you that this film is on the lists for a reason and I hope you love it as much as I do.

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We are both the source of the problem and the solution, yet we do not see ourselves in this light...

The Devil-Doll (1936)

I decided to check out some more of Tod Browning's films after seeing Freaks. This is a later one and similarly weird but not as good. The parts that work - the scenes of shrunken automaton people lurking about amazingly scaled domestic sets - work really well, and the parts that don't are really so strange and daft that they're still pretty interesting. It's about a couple of escaped convicts - a mad scientist and a framed ex-banker - who go back to the scientists swamp lair, where his wife has been carrying on his shrinking experiments in his absence. Apparently they wanted to shrink people and animals to save the world from overconsumption of food, but the problem is that shrinking people causes them to lose their will and identity, and they become receptors that people can control with their minds by remote. The scientist dies and his wife joins forces with the ex-banker to use shrunken people in revenge on the bankers crooked partners, but for some reason the wife still plans to shrink the world(!) There are some glaring plot holes besides the machinations of the scientist's wife, one of which is that at the end nobody recognizes the banker even though his face has been plastered all over the city on wanted posters. Not great, but worth watching none-the-less, with some good special fx, even while some of it is pretty dated.

The Ruins

Vantage Point(Pete Travis 2008)-

Paris,Texas(Wim Wenders 1984)-

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I'm in movie heaven

Clerks-

Clerks 2-

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I used to be addicted to crystal meth, now I'm just addicted to Breaking Bad.

Fletch (Michael Ritchie, 1985)


Fletch's homage to Audrey Hepburn

Crazyman screenwriter Andrew Bergman (The In-Laws, Blazing Saddles) contributes another set of one-liners and zany situations, and director Michael Ritchie and star Chevy Chase are certainly the right people to translate it to the screen. Although the film works well enough as a legit mystery, it's the non-stop zingers delivered by Chase, who is basically playing a reporter who thinks he's found corruption in high places. The thing which makes Fletch different from most mysteries is that most of the time he is posing as some other character and/or using disguises to try to figure out why a millionaire wants to pay him (or the beach bum he pretends he is) $50,000 to kill him. But, don't worry about why; just go along for the wild ride with Gordon Liddy, Ted Nugent, John Cocktosten, Mr. Poon, Don Corleone, Harry S. Truman, Dr. Rosenpenis, and all of Fletch's other aliases.

The Reivers (Mark Rydell, 1969)



William Faulkner's coming-of-age novel, set circa 1910 in Mississippi and Mempnis, focuses on a few days in the life of 11-year-old Lucius (Mitch Vogel), who, along with his family's handyman Boon (Steve McQueen) and his mulatto cousin Ned (Rupert Crosse), sneaks off in the brand new car which belongs to Lucius' grandfather (Will Geer) while the rest of the family attends a funeral. The story is narrated by the much-older Lucius (voice of Burgess Meredith) who fully understands how significant those days were when he learned quite a few important truths about life. The film mostly plays out as a comedy, with McQueen and Crosse (Oscar nomed for Best Supporting Actor) making a good team, but especially near the end, there are several touching moments which raise the film up a notch.

In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis, 2007)



This is a serious rumination on war, and the current Iraq war in particular, which was unfairly neglected upon its release last year. Inspired by a true story, the film follows a father/husband (Tommy Lee Jones) who tries to find out what happened to his son when he disappears shortly after returning to the U.S. from his tour in Iraq. The father is an ex-MP, so he's familiar with both the military and investigation techniques, and, as it turns out, he does more to solve the case than both the Army and the local New Mexico police authorities. He is aided though by a single police detective mother (Charlize Theron). What happened to his son is learned soon enough, but it's much harder to determine the why. The film is compelling in and of itself, but when thought of as a sort of companion piece to No Country For Old Men, a film it shares several actors, DP Roger Deakins, and a theme or two, it takes on even more interest.

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

The Big Sleep - loved it but its so confusing and hard to keep track of the action

Dark Passage - i love bogie and bacall together so much, my fave hollywood couple. v gd film.

Citizen kane - bored of it this time around but still a gd film

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Undercoverlovers 100 REDUX

Mr. Moto's Last Warning (1939)

This is a Peter Lorre film, it says these are mysteries on the box but this was more of a thriller to me. Good stuff.

Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

I'd never had the pleasure of see this in its entirety. I really enjoyed it.

The Descent (Marshall, 2005)

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The Orphanage

Amazing.

Son of Rambow

Beautiful little British indie comedy.

Rushmore

Oh, man. This if the most perfect film I've ever seen. Tenenbaums is my favourite Wes, but man... Rushmore is phenomenal.

"Well, I gave it to a friend."

Last couple days:
Mad Love (1935)
This is an old movie that I think has aged okay but I still didn't fully enjoy it. It uses the ol' play within a play device, with the added twist that the villian is an audience member who gets obsessed with a dark beauty from the play within. That's the main story, which is otherwise not all that interesting. There are scenes that are meant to show the pathos and madness of Peter Lorre's obsessed doctor but are too stagy to work (Lorre talking to himself in the mirror), or maybe it's just that as written these monologues aren't that great and don't have much value outside of exposition. Overall why do I rate this half a point lower than Devil-Doll (which shares the same dvd), which is similarly cheesy and probably a clumsier story? I think the premise in that one is more unusual and therefore more intriguing, and also there are a couple scenes in that movie that are really cinematic and suspenseful whereas in this one all the opportunities for suspense are more dramatic in nature (there's a scene where the heroine is trapped in the mad doctor's lair and has to impersonate a wax statue of herself while he monologues at her) and didn't quite give me that sense of wonderment.

I give it the lowest "worth watching" grade I can but I still think it is an OK movie. One thing that is interesting in the acting is the portrayal of multiple nationalities. The story is set in Paris and Lorre plays (I think) an Eastern European scientist. A couple of the actors may be British but I think most are American, yet only two of the actual characters are. They're both played in (I'm only guessing) a deliberately exaggerated way, while the "French" actors are more normal and bland and say "Madam" (with stress on the second syllable) every once in a while.

I really liked the end of the climax and the whole "My new hands (which formerly belonged to a knife-throwing circus performer) have a will of their own, and they thirst for blood!" subplot.

Iraq in Fragments
I might see this again, I was somewhat tired when I watched it. I think what they were going for was simply putting the camera into the fray to give a little glimpse at some attitudes of ordinary Iraqis (with chapters on Sunnis, Shias and Kurds) without giving too much deliberate shape beyond picking a subject and following it doggedly. The photography is lovely but I really need to see it again to say whether or not I liked the documentary approach. For now I'll say its worth seeing for it's subject and images.

The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1935)

Not bad, this is a little hard to make out as the quality of the sound was a little scratchy but overall it was a pretty good movie.


Shriek in the Night (1933)

Ginger Rogers is in this one. Pretty good also.

Dogma (1999- Kevin Smith)

Where do I start? Oh where do I start? How about pre-Dogma well, first I love Kevin Smith, his movies are either made directly for you or directly against you. Chasing Amy, Clerks, Clerks II, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back are some of my favorite movies


I also like a certain story with this movie I learned from director Kevin Smith's Q & A from An Evening with Kevin Smith. I can't speak for if it was true or not, but if it is then the truth is funnier than fiction.


Now for the quality of the movie. I guess I most loved the characters, to me Jay & Silent Bob are two of the greatest characters in movies today. I loved the fact that they are prophets considering they are pretty much as "sinful" as you can get. Plus, there is Buddy Christ, who if were real, I would attend mass a lot more. Bartleby and Loki are great fallen angels and Azrael is great as a "****ing demon." For god sakes, there is a giant poop monster!


I secondly love this movies story, it is so simple yet so complex. On paper it sounds easy "angels who were fallen try to go to New Jersey to a church to get back into heaven." It is much more complex as you get to meet several other interesting characters along the way, which keeps you watching and entertained, whole way out.


This movies script is also very well done. As many of you know, that while I watched it while I read the script, let me tell you it was a great experience and added to the movie. Even the stuff they left out, was hilarious. Don't believe me? read it


Another thing I liked about the script was that sometimes it can give you good advice. Like Van Wilder it provides some thoughtfulness. My favorite is "She told me that faith is like a glass of water. When you're young, the glass is full, and it's easy to fill up. But the older you get, the bigger the glass gets, and the same amount of water doesn't fill the glass anymore. Periodically, the glass has to be refilled."


The casting is also top-notch; Jason Lee was born to play Azrael and I can't picture anyone playing the character. Kevin Smith casting himself as Silent Bob is one of the greatest casting decisions of man-kind. Plus, Alanis Morissette as God, you can't beat it.


Finally, the acting, Everyone is totally believable, partially Jason Lee. This is probably his best performance. Life-long hetro mates Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes do very well as they do in every movie. Also, Alan Rickman and Chris Rock have great timing. Great chemistry all around.



Rating: Thank you Jesus,

Dogma is my favourite Kevin smith film, Chasing Amy is his best.

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"A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it's the only weapon we have."

Suspect's Reviews

Redacted
Brian De Palma's new film is a weird one. The story is about several soldiers guarding a check point in Iraq. After they accidentally shoot a pregnant woman whose husband tries to get through too fast insurgents get one of their comrades. A couple of the soldiers decide to take out their frustration on the 15 year old daughter of a civilian they arrested earlier, rape her and kill her family.

It's not presented in anything like a normal film narrative, it's split up between various media such as a video diary from one of the soldiers, mini-camera footage from his helmet, various sorts of surveilance, a French documentary, youtube-style video websites (including an anti-American rant by an anonymous activist and a terrorist website), an Iraqi (?) news show and probably a couple others that I'm forgetting.

For all of this found film-style storytelling, it's never fully believable (I don't think I've ever found a De Palma film "believable" in a naturalistic/real-world sense) which I'm sure is intentional. Everything is given a sort of easy to signify stylization so that you know which of the films you're in. The video diary has cheesy "in-camera" (?) wipe transitions between scenes, the French documentary has melodramatic classical music over earnest narration, you can hear the terrorist cameraman praising Allah in the background and so on.

One thing I always like about De Palma (even in his cheesiest movies, like Mission to Mars) is how he stages scenes to capture all sorts of simultaneous little goings-on. Often this is with elaborate tracking shots which would obviously be out of place here. This movie's thematic predecessor, Casualties of War opens with a shot of a soldier in a Vietnamese jungle falling into a Vietcong tunnel so that his legs are trapped with his upper half sticking out of the ground. As he frantically calls for help the camera pans underground to capture hidden assailants creeping towards his legs in the tunnel. This movie can't afford virtuoso touches like that but there is a similarly powerful scene that is recorded by (and cuts between) two simultaneous cameramen on opposite sites of the conflict.

I've heard complaints of exploitation leveled at Redacted, I think because the focus on styled camera work is seen as detached from "human" values such as multifaceted, realistically written characters played by actors capable of expressing raw emotion. I have two problems with this: for one thing I don't think detachment is necessarily a bad thing but I have a more specific disagreement with people who thought this movie was detached and exploitative. I think it's trying to express all the possible motives and self-rationalizations of the people behind the camera, something De Palma does uniquely well here and is just as important as showing the motives and rationalizations that happen in front of it (and in the cutting room).

Suddenly, Last Summer
I hope someday I'll see a good movie based on a Tennessee Williams play (so far I've only seen this and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). I didn't hate this and didn't find it boring but boy is it a lesson in patience in watching vain attempts to stir up my feelings. I think when I read his plays, no matter how convincingly pitiful, vengeful or just generally emotional the characters get I always see some bit of biting, impersonal survival-instinct coldness in their shadow. Both have to be here. It may be an age thing. I've heard lots of praise for Katherine Hepburn from people I respect but I've never seen her as anything more than a self-styled orator. Instead of emotion all I see is mugging and instead of survival-instinct all I see is a grubby sort of careerist passion.

A curious effect when seeing this on (vintage) film is how far mores have shifted. Much is made in one scene about a titillating swim suit (and for what it's worth, I did find Liz Taylor plenty fetching), but it's not at all as risqué as I had imagined it while reading the play. I couldn't tell if it was supposed to be risqué for 1959 (when the film was made) or 1936 (when the film was set). I think that's the overall impact this movie had on me, more like something I'd see in a pop-culture museum than something I'd bring home to live with (bad analogy...).

Still, like I said, I didn't hate it. The long monologues don't really work but I don't really grudge the makers their attempt to wedge in more of a love angle between Taylor and Clift and can see why they needed to break it up into more scenes. It's by far the wordiest (not the longest, but with a lot of long monologues), and also probably the least comprehensible 10 Williams play I've read. The ending doesn't work largely because of Elizabeth Taylors histrionics but the imagery is still weirdly nightmarish.

Kicked in the Head
This isn't fantastic but it's witty and has some good comic acting (the characters are pretty much just collections of recognizable mannerisms). Maybe in another 40 years it'll just seem quaint but I sure hope not.

Out of Africa 4.5/5 - i loved this, but i love anything with Meryl Streep in. not only because she gives mind-blowing performances, but she sort of looks like my Mom. [well, when my Mom was younger]

Meryl Streep in Out of Africa

my Mom, circa 1981

Something the Lord Made 3/5 [i wasn't able to watch the last two minutes of this movie because my DVD player starting skipping so bad it started to piss me off, but i don't think i really missed anything. it seemed sort of like an ending that dragged on and on. or maybe it just felt that way because of all the skipping].

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letterboxd

OK, break out the tar and feathers.

Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)



This long, sometimes hypnotic film is more of a meditation on humankind's yearning to be connected to something than a sci-fi film. True, it involves aliens on a space station, but based on this movie (not the novel), I still don't even know what or where Solaris is, and I watched it three times. The film involves lonely astronaut Kris (Donatas Banionis) who goes to the space station to determine if the Solaris project is worth continuing. Almost all of the people who have been on the station have died or seemed to have suffered some major delusions. Shortly after Kris arrives, he finds his wife Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk). The problem is that she died on Earth much earlier.



Tarkovsky is certainly a cult director, and I've seen many of his films praised here and elsewhere. He just doesn't strike me as a director who is very inviting. Even though his films present the human condition, the talkiness and extreme length tend to make me feel icy toward him. It's funny because many people feel that Kubrick is a cold director, and he occasionally may be, but he seems warmer to my sensibility. My fave Tarkovsky films are among his earliest (The Steamroller and the Violin, My Name is Ivan), but since they are less-experimental, they are undoubtedly less-personal.



Although I do find Solaris exhausting, I also find several unique scenes. The opening in the water-filled countryside is evocative, and then the scenes showing what happened to an earlier Solaris astronaut add some mystery. The scene involving fast driving on a freeway is very trippy, and many of the scenes on the station, especially between Kris and "Hari", even I would consider moving. Then there's the ending, which can be interpreted more than one way, and which I might even consider to make the film cyclical and all a flashback. So, yes, I recommend it, especially to many people here, but somehow the entire 168 minutes just doesn't need to be there. It probably just went over my head or maybe it is a case of overkill in the totality of my acceptance of pregnant pauses. I mean, I did invest about eight-and-one-half hours in viewing it during the last month.

Shame (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)



This is one of Bergman's more visceral films with many scenes of wartime horror which have been duplicated in later films such as Open Your Eyes and many Viet Nam movies. The film is set on a remote island (Gotland?) at an unnamed time. What is important is that a married couple, Eva (Liv Ullmann) and Jan (Max von Sydow), both former classical musicians, live a simple life until it's shattered by the escalation of a longtime war. The film implies it's a civil war, but that's not even mentioned. Part of the scariness involved is that these two people have no real understanding of what's occurring due to very little contact with the outside world. However, there are radio snippets in what seem to be many different languages of the world mentioning the war over the opening credits.



Besides the striking imagery, the film is impressive for showing the dehumanization and distintegration of the couple, as well as the way friends can become enemies in the blink of an eye. This is really a unique Bergman film because although he had earlier dealt with violence, he never really had before using modern warfare as the Angel of Death. My use of the term "dehumanization" reminds me again of Kubrick since that is his major theme and concern of his films.



The film's finale probably tops everything which has gone before. A few people have escaped the island in a small boat with inadequate provisions and no clearcut plan. This includes Eva and Jan. Some of the images, especially the last few, will chill anyone and give people nightmares similar to the one which Eva tells to her husband at the end. Bergman's use of fadeouts during this final sequence is eloquent, almost as much as his use of silence. It adds up to a powerful metaphor on the inhumanity of war and the Viet Nam War in particular, long before almost any other filmmaker touched the subject.

Castaway

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Seemed to have switched from old Sci-fi to old Mystery classics for some reason. Oh well, it's all relative.

A Scream in the Night (1935)

Lon Chaney Jr. was in this one. He actually played 2 parts in the film and for being during the 30's they did a pretty good job of splicing the film together when he had a scene with himself. He also was doing his own makeup during the movie which I thought was pretty interesting.



Murder by Television (1935)

Another Bela Lugosi flick, this time he plays an FBI agent. I just love listening to the guy talk. Not a very good flick but he is enjoyable.




Terror By Night (1946)

A Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movie. I think Basil is my favorite Sherlock although Reginald Owen who is in the next one I watched was pretty good too. Anyway, I loved the movie.




A Study in Scarlet (1933)

A Reginald Owen Sherlock Holmes movie. These are pretty damn cool old flicks. Some aren't that good but they are also pretty short. About 60 minutes on average.



Also watched Breakfast at Tiffany's which was absolutely fantastic! I don't really need to rate that one do I?

Perhaps I'm mistaken and the son inherited his father's nickname, but the original "man of 1000 faces" was Lon Chaney Sr. who died in 1930.

I may have to rent this just based on the title.