Movie Tab II

I feel exactly the same way. People round here will tell you different, but they're wrong. I'd probably give Date Night but only because it's an inoffensive nothingness of a film, it's short (yet still outlives it's welcome) and I have a thing for Tina Fey.

In The Electric Mist (2009, Bertrand Tavernier)

3/5

It's got a hokey detective story more at home in an episode of Frost.

It's had no discernible money spent on it (they couldn't even afford to hire a real sports car for the day and instead brought in this horrible kit car thing which kinda looks like a Ferrari. If you're four years old) and thus resembles a TV movie from the 80s.

It's directed with no style whatsoever. Had he not been involved in some decent films in the past I'd have suspected that old Bertrand was an accountant who'd either won a competition to helm the film or was one of the receivers desperately trying to claw some money back from the black hole that comes from hiring John Goodman. There's a difference between 'sparse', 'workmanlike' and 'flat'.



However...

I liked In The Electric Mist and was struggling to put my finger on quite why.

It's got a fantastic cast - Tommy Lee Jones, Peter Sarsgaard (worryingly channelling Robin Williams playing an alcoholic movie star - think how subtle that would be), the aforementioned Goodman, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Levon Helm (who probably lives in Tommy Lee's wardrobe), Kelly McDonald, Ned Beatty and Mary Steenburgen (who looks even more beautiful today than she did 20 years ago). It's even got John Sayles.

Of course, a great cast does not mean a great movie. Look at Magnolia...

Tommy Lee, as is his wont, holds the whole thing together with his patented gruffness but there's nothing here that we haven't seen from him countless times before. "So what?" I hear you mumble, and I suppose you're right. Were it not for TLJ's contribution I might not even have bothered watching the film.

Everyone else turns up, hits their marks and emotes in a professional manner. No one is memorable. No one is poor. Kelly McDonald is underused.

So why did I quite like In The Electric mist?

Even with the aforementioned deficiencies in the direction lack of direction, there's a nice feel to the film. The post-Katrina Louisiana setting and Jones' troubled detective (he's more of a gumshoe, truth be told, because we rarely see him in an actual police station) bring to mind the sweaty, jambalaya and bourbon infused scent of a cut-price Angel Heart. More than cut-price actually, more of a Poundland Angel Heart.

So it's the scenery and the cast, then? Nope, look at Rob Roy...

I really shouldn't like the movie at all - Remove a few cases of sweary behaviour and a couple of graphic fight scenes and the film is akin to an episode of Murder, She Wrote in both style and content. I'm not even going to touch on the primary school way in which the screenplay seems to have been adapted or the almost laughably incongruous supernatural shenanigans - but I do.

Sort of.... I dunno.

Nurse! NURSE!!!

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

+rep!

Sleezy!

Did you ever see/post thoughts on Kick Ass?

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I really enjoyed this movie! Spacey, I thought was great, as usual. I thought the supporting cast did a really good job as well. The characters were well written and made me empathize with most of them (the one exception being Robin Williams character). I felt even though it was a minor role, it felt a little out of place and I never really bought into his character. I loved the atmosphere and the multiple story lines. The score really added to the atmosphere of the film. I think this movie is generally underrated, mainly because I had not heard much buzz about this one, despite the strong cast, unless it's just me and I missed it. The pace may be considered slow by some, but I felt that it was just right. I would definitely recommend this film.

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"I know, honey. Look at the map. We go your way, that's about four inches. We go my way, it's an inch and a half. You wanna pay for the extra gas?"

The film starts off with some great character development. We can feel the romantic tension between Brick and Maggie right away. Newman and Taylor's chemistry was almost electric. Taylor's beautiful and frustrated Maggie "The Cat" is magnetic. Superb performances are the highlight to this movie with Newman and Ives in that category as well. The storyline dabbles into the mystery area when Brick's old friend Skipper is discussed (if you can call it that). The climax is powerful thanks to the emotional build-up felt since the beginning and some powerhouse acting. The screenplay had plenty of bright spots, but there wasn't much to say about it. The movie does have a "happy" ending as well.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof:

Ah, you know what the mystery area is? In the play, Skipper is gay and made advances to Brick (it's not totally clear whether Brick is gay or not). I'd be very happy at the ending if I was her

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You cannot have it both ways. A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love can never be a great dancer. Never. (The Red Shoes, 1948)

The Thief of Bagdad (Berger et al., 1940)

This is a messy epic with some pretty hokey special effects and a herky-jerky plot. That's not a really big mark against it but it's just nowhere near as visually arresting or fantastic as it aims to be, in spite of some cool decorating on the otherwise-stagy sets and a lively color sceme, and a huge scale in some places. The story has a lot of twists and turns such a king and his servant becoming a blind beggar and his dog and telling the first half of their story in flashback to an evil sorcerer's harem. You could imagine someone doing something with that story within a story structure but this movie just seems to flail around. If you need a fix of some classic film orientalism, check out The Adventures of Prince Achmed before this.

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King of Chess (Yim, 1991)

This is an interesting and ambitious Film Workshop feature, one of the many that it appears producer Tsui Hark took over from its initial director. It tells two major stories, one about an ad-man from Hong Kong trying to save his girlfriend's career as a flavor-of-the-week Taipei talk show hostess. They find a kid who appears to be a genius at games (they play a game called Xiangqi in the movie which is also known as "Chinese Chess", hence the title) until they find out he can predict the future. The actual power he has is poorly defined, at times he reads people's minds but he can also predict fluctuations in the stock market and "predicting the future" fits more with the films themes of melancholic, unpredictable fate, memory and being caught in history.

The second story is told in flashback about the ad-exec's experiences as a child on the Cultural-Revolutionary mainland and the fate of an actual "chess" genius he knew there. Like I said, interesting but I felt like it could have been done better.



Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (Tatopoulos, 2009)

This prequel in the series (I haven't seen either of the other two films) is kind of like Braveheart with werewolves in place of Scottish protonationalists and vampires instead of the British. The sets and effects are okay but there's nothing really original or fun in this. The plot and characters are of course completely run-of-the-mill.



My Man Godfrey (La Cava, 1936)

Very witty and novel depression-era comedy with a decent message. Everything about this movie right up to the last line - "It'll all be over in a moment." is just about perfect.

+

October (Eisenstein, 1928)

Influential, cinematically sophisticated "prole propaganda" that had me lost quite a bit as to who was who and what the history they were trying to "tell" was. Some of this is taken to incredible extremes of juxtaposition and metaphor, such as the "two Napoleans" sequence. Overall pretty interesting and watchable, though I kept the sound off because it was really getting to me. The images themselves are over-the-top as it is.



Surrogates (Mostow, 2009)

Pretty good sci-fi mystery that does a lot with the idea of external Avatar-bodies that you control from the comfort of your home and a weapon that kills when you look at it. You should be able to guess a large chunk of the who-done-it as soon as you see James Cromwell, typecast once again. Still, worth seeing.



Also watched these short films:

Fiddlesticks (1930)

Early color Ub Iwerks (The Skeleton Dance) cartoon after he left Disney. Mostly dialog-less with some music and a dancing frog in a forest "nightclub." Has some good animation and a Mickey Mouse lookalike on backing violin.



The Soup Song (1931)

Another Iwerks 'Flip the Frog' cartoon set in a dodgy animal-restaurant which is in Black and White. This one has Flip and a chorus of buddies "singing" a funny onomatopoeic number.





The Last Trick (Svankmajer, 1964)

Early Svankmajer short using a pair of guys with giant wooden heads who sit on a stage and take turns doing bizarre tricks, while an ever-present black beetle crawls around.

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A Ballad About Green Wood (Barta, 1983)

Okay short stop-action with autonomous wood splinters that for some reason look tasty to a bird. The strongest point about this film is that the eye takes two stances: flying and walking depending on the subject matter, but it wasn't all that effective for me.



Billion Dollar Limited (Fleischer, 1942)

Maybe someday I'll revisit the various incarnations of Superman. This cartoon version has some excellent animation. The big theme that I think runs throughout is the secret identity. It's kind of a reversal of an insecurity story, where the man pretends to be better than he actually is to impress a girl. The girl is still a dupe though, with Clark always winking at us. Into this scenario the Fleischer's would inject some sort of monster or cinematic disaster for Superman to solve, in this one it's a runaway trainload of gold.





The Arctic Giant (Fleischer, 1942)

The same "Lois is right, I might faint so I shouldn't go... but Superman never faints" idea as above, but this time he battles a massive dinosaur in downtown Metropolis.



I also wanted to go back to a couple that I posted earlier:



Late Spring (Ozu, 1949)

I found it sometimes very slow but overall liked the characters quite a bit. It's about a girl who doesn't want to get married and leave her father, so he fools her. Within that "play" there's a Noh performance that they attend that's somewhat hard to grasp but seems significant, so I'll try to describe it as best I can. There's a sort of triple play going on in this one scene: one in the performance of her father to get her to marry, another one on the stage that is comparatively very abstract and symbolic, and finally the show of devotion by the girl toward her father. The Noh play seems to be about earthly concerns, telling the story of the spirit of a Boddhisattva that appears in the form of a shobu iris (what they refer to as a "blue flag" in the movie's subtitles), but the shobu is also a Japanese symbol of late spring, being used in the Boys' festival in May. The nested structure of play and film is pretty clear and effective in how it gets mixed up in the Girl's own emotional story, even if the symbolism is far from accessible.

I liked this but for now I'm going to recommend seeing the more accessible later Ozu film, Floating Weeds, which features a similar play-within-a-film.

+



The Outlaw (Hughes, 1943)

I really enjoyed this campy western, shot by Gregg Toland for Howard Hughes. There's some camp humor but also some real oddness going on here, including a busty Jane Russel who secretly (even to the groom) marries the irresponsible Billy the Kid while he's asleep. Russel, it turns out, was the girlfriend of Doc Holiday (played by Walter Huston) first, and the two thereafter keep trying to trade the girl for a horse and be done with all the trouble. The whole thing has that odd misunderstood feel you get when seeing something that is so ridiculously cliched that it somehow becomes original, for example in the completely over-the-top musical cues (including gratuitous wah-wah-wah horns of course.) Another part that really gets me is the almost erotic fatherly "friendship" between Billy and Doc, which culminates in by far the most violent and disturbing scene of the film.

I originally gave this + but after thinking about it some more I think I have to raise it to a .

Lastly I watched a couple episodes of one of the 90s Cutie Honey series...

Of Human Bondage (1934)

Hey man! Yeah, sure did. Pretty fun flick. Had to dig up the post.

Not surprised you liked it, too. This is what I said back in May:

Also, if you liked the film and find yourself with some free time, the graphic novel (Mark Millar!) is a quick read and well worth your attention. John Romita Jr.'s art still sucks, though.

Red Cliff Parts 1 & 2 - 5/5
Once I finally sat down and watched these films (or rather, had my arm twisted), I couldnt help wondering why I had put it off so long. If you are into bloody war epics, honor and political intrigue, these films will be a great addition to your collection - with the added benefit that the visual landscape and cinematography are quite compelling. So, too, are the male leads! ooooh la! la!



I was never a Chinese history buff, but their envisioning of that time was at minimum a compelling story, and inspired quite the google search - we discovered a lot more about old Cao Cao - in fact, when I gifted my The Art of War book to a friend last week, I flipped thru and found passages from Cao Cao in there as well. Now, rather than dubbing someone "rich as Croesus" I'm making real effort here to say, "rich as Cao Cao." (See history? See multiculturalism? I do my part. ) A definite must watch, and there's even the love triangle in there for those who only deal in chick flick type films.

The Warlords - 3/5
Ok. Saw this one tonight at the behest of a friend, and was willing to give it a whirl after Redcliff. Shallow/Vapid Point of the Day: Jet Li is one awfully unattractive man. I love the guy - I do. But after the visual beauty of Redcliff (and by that I mean by the clothes / customs of the time), swallowing the look of that particular era (half-shaved heads with long braids and muted armor) was a turnoff. But Im convinced they cast one of the male leads from Redcliff, and the other guy in the movie for the sole purpose of giving us girls a reason to keep watching.



Vanity aside, this film was darker, and more gritty/bloody than Redcliff. The underlining theme, like the ending - like life? - was not a happy one, tho the telling of this story by one of the same narrators of Redcliff, was fascinating. Not necessarily a must watch, but watchable, if you get my drift.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid - 5/5
I had to give this one a 5, because it was so cute. This one is a great family film, and will have you laughing and cringing. I was shocked by the fact that the mother looked like she was about 38yrs - and I cant even imagine staring up at a teenage son. Time flies.

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something witty goes here......

Are these the new 16:9 posts I've been hearing about ?

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They need some spaces between the images.

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

Went on a silent horror binge last week:

Destiny (1921) – +
After an ominous stranger arrives in a small town, we get to watch the mysterious nature of the stranger build for fifteen minutes, only to watch the film take a 180 into an early anthology piece depicting a woman attempting to save her lover in three different expressionistic settings.

The first and second part of the anthology compliment the film’s vision fine, but it loses track around the third, getting a little too fantastic. Nevertheless, the film has a strong opening and a powerful ending.

Faust (1926) –
One of the best things about the silent era (especially in the fantasy and horror realm) is that much of its grandeur relies on atmosphere. Faust is a gleaming example of that. It’s also exemplary of imagination, and an excellent composition of fantasy, melodrama, horror, Grand Guignol, expressionism and even a slight mix of comedy.

Haxan (1922) – +
The somewhat rare genre hybrid of documentary and drama rarely gets as weird as it does here. For a film made almost a hundred years ago, the effects work remarkably well, and some of its dark imagery most likely served as a major inspiration for many horror films made afterward. The true to life story that it details is just as chilling as the fantastic one it depicts.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) – +
I’m not sure if it’s technically accurate, but Quasimodo is almost universally regarded as the first Universal Monster, and he’s certainly up there with Frankenstein and The Wolfman as the most sentimental.

To most, it may not be as good or emotionally involving as the 1939 version, but it definitely has the dark edge in the thrill department. It also seems very ahead of its time. If it weren’t for the dialogue cards popping up, it almost wouldn’t feel like a silent film.

The Penalty (1920) –
Seven years before Lon Chaney played a perverse, desperate amputee in The Unknown, he portrayed a similar mad, power-hungry amputee in The Penalty, and he did it to perfection. As a ruthlessly dominant mobster that feeds upon others’ fear, Chaney’s character is shown attempting to wreak vengeance upon the man that needlessly amputated his legs in childhood.

Regardless of its early spook show & mystery clichés (such as trap doors and hidden passageways), it’s still one hell of a film, and though the plot doesn’t quite match the label that this is often tagged with, some of Chaney’s raving facial expressions alone make it one of the creepiest films of the 1920’s.

Waxworks (1924) –
It’s a two part anthology piece that, as a single film, doesn’t quite stand up strait enough. The expressionism may elevate the second part’s eeriness, but it hinders the first part, thus making half of the film plainly uninteresting to watch. Nonetheless, a great ladder half, depicting a fictional story of Ivan the Terrible, makes it worth the time.

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I finally watched this... and really liked it. Thanks for the recommendation. I kept thinking... I know where that is... or they look familiar... and a few scenes even had me thinking... welcome to my world (especially when he was driving in the fog)... which is why I'll probably rate it a wee bit higher than you did. Truthfully I don't know a lot I could add to what you've already said other than In the Electric Mist had one of the best lines I've heard in a while...

"We used to have bats but the mosquitoes ate them."

That is soooo Louisiana....


In the Electric Mist (2009)

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Now, Voyager (1942)

Glad I gave you the heads-up, Caity. Films like this often go up a few notches when you've got some sort of personal investment.

Don't Bother To Knock (1952)


this was early Marilyn Monroe in a very unconventional role. it wasn't what i expected at all, either. i was pleasantly surprised.

Two films starring Rupert Graves, in very different roles. I'll post the second review later but here's the first:

Intimate Relations



Note- the film is in colour but I could only find a black and white picture. Typing 'Intimate Relations' into Google Images is understandably risky.

Could this be the bizarrest film ever? It's a black comedy based on a real-life murder in the 1950's. Marjorie Beasley (Julie Walters) is repulsed by her invalid husband Stanley. When a handsome young lodger called Harold Guppy (Rupert Graves) comes to stay, she finds a nice outlet for all those pesky frustrations. Unfortunately her fourteen-year-old daughter Joyce (Laura Sadler) quite fancies Harold too, and he is chased by mother and daughter.

For about the first half-hour, you start to wonder whether it is a comedy. After all, they're participating in a quasi-incestuous triangle with some rather creepy moments. But then the film's intentions slowly become clear- the scandal/perversity of the affair is contrasted with jolly 1950's nostalgia. It's a look at sexual frustration/attitudes to sex in the fifties and bizarrely the choice to make it a black comedy works (there's a great bit where Marjorie has just been arguing with Harold about the affair and then she makes him some sandwiches with the crusts cut off). Julie Walters is very good as mumsy/predatory Marjorie and she creates a good balance between the two, thus making it more creepy. Laura Sadler is suitably schoolgirlish as Joyce and Rupert Graves is very good as Harold, who is frustrated at the surburban coyness and bemused as to why he is in this situation. Although this is rather a shallow observation, he is suitably attractive to make Marjorie turn crazy.

The majority of people will either shy away from this film or totally condemn it. Everybody will gasp at at least some of it. But for those who love a black comedy, this is about as black a comedy as you can get. If you want a challenging provocative film, watch this.

Don't know what to give Paranormal Entity. Let's just say it sucked as of right now.

Here's my second review:


Different for Girls

In this one, Rupert Graves plays Prentice, a friendly but immature blokey man, who bumps into a sophisticated woman called Kim (Steven Mackintosh) who used to be his schoolmate Karl. As Prentice tries to understand, he begins to fall in love in his own clumsy way. Instead of being a 'gross out' comedy, this is a quirky rom-com about gender and identity. Great acting from the two leads (although would a transgender woman have a muscular back?)- I would have liked a little more on their relationship as schoolboys but I suppose the film's about embracing the new. This is a challenging but enjoyable rom-com and it manages to avoid being really coy or exploitively explicit.