The Resident Bitch's Movie Log

→ in
Tools    





None of her images are working. Probably 'cause the site was just down?



Working here. But only the one for the last review.
That's the only one that will be working for a bit. Stupid Lycos is doing an "upgrade" so the space where I normally host images is going to be down for awhile.



Soon. I've got my 100 picked out, it's just a matter of finalizing the order and figuring out what I want to say about each one.
I love seeing this. Looking forward to it, MV.
__________________
5-time MoFo Award winner.



Women will be your undoing, Pépé
image IS working and it looks pretty delightful! Just requested it at my library and reading your review that Whitaker voices the bear I just may have to set the audio for English on this one (or maybe watch it twice; once in French, once in English)
THANKS Vicky





Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1998)
Imdb

Date Watched:10/29/16
Cinema or Home: Home
Reason For Watching: Rewatch for the Sci-Fi Countdown
Rewatch: Yes

I originally saw this film during its theatrical run and it has been in my movie collection for quite some time, but I can’t recall when I last watched it and that goldfish was the only detail I could remember about it before tonight.

If I’m being perfectly honest, the movie is pretty close to pure Sci-Fi, which makes it pretty far from my usual taste. Also – at nearly twenty years old – some of the effects look a bit dated, but I enjoyed it anyway.

Though it is yet another alien abduction/experimentation film, its premise is different and interesting enough to set it apart from other such films. The humans here are essentially rats trapped in a maze but they don’t know it and the obstacles are not really the walls, pathways and dead-ends of their city but the fabricated “memories” imprinted in their minds, traded from one person to the next with each “tuning.” But they are oblivious to what’s happening and unaware of the presence of the “strangers” – white skinned beings that use human corpses as “vessels” so that they may take a tangible form.

But something goes wrong during one imprinting and one human – John Murdoch – not only develops a resistance to the strangers’ powers but the ability to use them himself. This makes him a threat and a target to the strangers.

Rufus Sewell (as Murdoch), Jennifer Connelly (as his “wife” Emma), Kiefer Sutherland (as Dr. Shreber, a man who has betrayed his own kind to assist the strangers with their experiments), and William Hurt (as a detective following the case of a string of murdered prostitutes for which Murdoch is the prime suspect) all turn in solid performances. They really help to keep the film engaging, even when some scenes begin to cross the line to a level of absurdity more appropriate to a superhero film than to the Sci-Fi thriller it aims to be, especially during the final showdown between Murdoch and the strangers.

But - a few silly scenes aside - the film is thick with atmosphere and tension and at a little more than an hour and a half in length, it doesn’t really lag anywhere.


+



Love Dark City - great film up until the showdown which also feels a disappointment after what has gone before for me.



Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
Ernest and Celestine Better than any anime.
__________________
Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.



Miss Vicky's Loyal and Willing Slave
You've been on a nice little tear over the last few days MV. Coincidentally I also just watched Dark City a couple of days ago. I'd seen it before a number of years ago but had been left rather unmoved by it. However this time I thought it was great. The atmosphere is excellent and I loved the look of the film; the visuals and architecture were really imposing and expressionistic. While that obviously goes all the way back to German flicks like Metropolis and Cabinet of Dr Cagliari, for me it most readily evoked the likes of Batman Returns.

I felt like the only thing that stopped me from truly loving it was Rufus Sewell. I don't think his performance was poor or anything but there was just something off-putting and cold about him; he didn't really engage me.





The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013)
Imdb

Date Watched:10/30/16
Cinema or Home: Home
Reason For Watching: No particular reason
Rewatch: Yes

Before 2013, a three hour long Martin Scorsese comedy about a real-life crook on Wall Street seemed like a bizarre concept that could never work. But it really does.

Leonardo DiCaprio pulls out all the stops in his performance as Jordan Belfort, bringing to the film some really impressive comedic chops, including physical comedy I never expected him to be capable of pulling off. Despicable though his character may be, he is absolutely mesmerizing to watch. The scene at the country club and the fight in the kitchen afterwards - both involving the delayed effects of some expired Lemmon 714's - is particularly hysterical and is probably the biggest highlight in a film full of great scenes.

But DiCaprio does not carry the film entirely on his shoulders, though close to it. Jonah Hill is also surprisingly great as Donnie Azoff, Belfort's friend and second in command and Matthew McConaughey is pretty memorable in his brief performance as Belfort's mentor Mark Hanna. Margot Robbie is impressive too, though more for her stunning looks than for her solid but unremarkable performance.

The Wolf of Wall Street has been criticized by many for its celebration of the crimes of Belfort and his comrades and of the debauched lifestyle that they led. The real Jordan Belfort also profited from the film itself, which is adapted from his memoir of the same name, and he even appears in a small role in the film. The Wolf of Wall Street also put his name in the spotlight and landed him interviews on several prominent television programs.

Personally I don't think it's the duty of filmmakers to side-step stories like this simply because their nefarious subjects might benefit from them. Rather it is their duty to find or create intriguing stories and present them to viewers in a creative and engaging way. To that end, Scorsese and company succeeded admirably.

+





Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha: The Movie 2nd A’s (Mah ô shôjo lyrical Nanoha)
(Unknown Director, 2012)
Imdb

Date Watched: Started late 10/31/16, Finished 11/1/16
Cinema or Home: Home
Reason For Watching: Guaporense’s (Disqualified) Nomination for the MoFo Animation Hall of Fame
Rewatch: No

This "retelling" barely qualifies as a movie – if I understand correctly, it’s really just a bunch of television episodes edited together to create a “film.” It doesn’t even have an IMDb page. The link above is for the anime T.V. series. As a stand-alone movie, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha: The Movie 2nd A’s (a ****ing sequel to something I’ve never seen or heard of) fails. Character development – and story development for that matter - within the “movie” is seriously lacking. I had a lot of trouble following the movie or even telling one character apart from another which left me completely detached from them and feeling nothing in scenes that – judging by the score – were supposed to have been deeply emotional. What little exposition we do get is in the form of flashbacks that don’t provide enough context to fully understand the relationships between the various characters (of which there are quite a few, making it even more difficult to keep track of them) or the “whys” of what was happening. I assume it would make more sense if I’d seen the television program or watched the first “movie” beforehand but this (fragment of a story) is what was nominated, this is what I watched, and I’m judging this by its own merits. Or lack thereof.

As to the characters themselves, I found the voices of the main characters to be incredibly shrill and irritating. I also didn’t like the look of them, especially when compared to everything else in the film. Some of the lesser characters' faces seemed fairly detailed in design and the backgrounds and inanimate objects were drawn with a decent amount of detail as well (and some of it was actually quite beautiful to look at, though certainly not on par with the likes of someone like Makoto Shinkai), but the central characters were drawn in a way that was at once overly exaggerated and infuriatingly simple. Gigantic eyes. A dot or simple v in place of a nose. Impossibly long and skinny legs. Pointy chins. Wild, crazily colored hair. Cutesy little outfits. Big t!ts. Animal ears and tails. Give me a f*cking break.

Combine the irritating voices, lack of development (from what little I could gather), and ugly characters with a story (or, rather, part of a story) that is very, very heavy on fantasy, and what you get is a Resident Bitch who is confused, annoyed as hell, disinterested in the “film,” and glancing at the clock every couple of minutes wishing the damn thing would just end already.

-



Looks like you just got a new sworn enemy - Guap.


We were never on good terms anyway and the guy's a troll, at least as far as the HOFs are concerned.



Was it worse than K On or PMMM
Yes. As much as I disliked them, both of those work as stand-alone films. K-On seems to be a separate story from the show and PMMM had enough contextual clues that I was never confused by it.