Holy Sh*t!...i...ummm...I don't even...I mean, Holy Sh*t!...errr...better than the Matrix...but...uhhh...and...better than Memento...I don't know...the Prestige...brain overloaded...I may have just seen a perfect movie...
__________________ If I had a dollar for every existential crisis I've ever had, does money really even matter?
Holy Sh*t!...i...ummm...I don't even...I mean, Holy Sh*t!...errr...better than the Matrix...but...uhhh...and...better than Memento...I don't know...the Prestige...brain overloaded...I may have just seen a perfect movie...
I knew you wrote that a couple of weeks ago... such as it is.
i watched Hangover last sunday its very funny movie. i like it
Last Sunday you watched The Hangover in the theatre? Where do you live, Fiji?
__________________
"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra
Had a big non-festival-related movie watching day yesterday...
Micmacs à Tire-Larigot Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Jeunet truffle about a young man named Bazil (Dany Boon) who as a boy loses his father to a landmine in the Sahara and as an adult is accidentally shot in the head as street violence randomly finds him as a target. The bullet remains lodged in his skull, and after he gets out of the hospital he finds he has lost his apartment, all of his possessions and his job. He takes to the streets and winds up with a band of glorious misfits, including an acrobat, a math wiz, and a daredevil, who have a subterranean hive in a junkyard where they commune. They accept Bazil as one of their own, and after he finds that the rival arms manufacturers responsible for his bullet and his father's mine are on the same street, he enlists the merry band of outcasts to help exact his revenge on the warmongers. Patented Jeunet visual gymnastics ensue as the ragtag band of good-hearted losers manage to confound the well-oiled warmachine, pitting one against the other.
Owes much more to Jeunet's first two films with his former collaborator Marc Caro, Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, than his last two efforts Amélie or A Very Long Engagement. As a satire it's not terribly pointed, but as a fast-paced, offbeat comedy it's a blast. A dark yet cheerful fable populated with many of the familiar Jeunet stock company, including Dominique Pinon (of course). Artistically it's perhaps not as ambitious as Jeunet's last two acclaimed movies, but it is full of energy and laughs, a sort of Modern Times for modern times.
GRADE: B+
Please Give Nicole Holofcener
Latest dramedy from Holofcener that completes a sort of triptych, with Lovely & Amazing (2001) and Friends with Money (2006), about the ups and downs, mostly self-inflicted, of upper middle class Americans. It stars her muse, Catherine Keener, who has headlined all four of her feature films thus far (her debut being Walking & Talking back in 1996). This time Keener is married, to Oliver Platt. They have a successful business in midtown Manhattan which consists almost entirely of finding mid-century modern furniture in the apartments of the recently deceased and buying them for much less than they're worth from uncaring and clueless relatives who just view the leftovers as junk and a burden.
They have a teenaged daughter, played by Sarah Steele (Spanglish), and they've turned their business eye toward their next door neighbor, a cranky and altogether unpleasant 90-year-old who they humor to get in her good graces (assuming she has some). They aren't interested in her decor, but in acquiring her apartment once she finally dies, so that they can knock down the walls and expand their own. The cranky woman has two thirtysomething granddaughters who look after her, one a saintly medical technician (Rebecca Hall) and the other callous facial esthetician (Amanda Peet) in a Spa. While waiting for the old lady to finally kick, the two families become intertwined.
The acting is uniformly good, especially Platt (always effortlessly magnetic on screen), Hall (quickly becoming one of my favorites) and Keener. Catherine's character is really the heart of the movie, a woman who is consumed with worry and guilt and therefore has an impulse to "help" in some nebulous way, but also lacks the constitution or character to follow through in any meaningful way with that compulsion. Overall it's more engaging than Friends with Money but not quite as consistent as Lovely & Amazing. However, the cast definitely carries the day and makes these slightly damaged and slightly privileged White folks worth peeking in on for a couple hours.
GRADE: B-
The City of Your Final Destination James Ivory
The first Mercahnt Ivory movie without Ismael Merchant (who died in 2005), and a screenplay from their most frequent and successful collaborator Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. This drama concerns a literature professor and would-be biographer (Omar Metwally) who travels to Uruguay in hopes of acquiring legal permission and perhaps even blessings to write a bio of a dead author, who published one dazzling novel and later killed himself. The executors of his will all live together on a sprawling but stagnate estate: his wife (Laura Linney), his mistress (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and their young daughter, and his older brother (Anthony Hopkins) with his longtime companion (Hiroyuki Sanada). In a very literary convention, they live together without living at all, as if time has stopped and they are but ghosts wandering the grounds. When the young and hopeful writer arrives, he infuses life back into the family, forcing them to confront the situation they have been passively embracing.
The cast is quite good, naturally given the talent involved, and while as a viewer I was seduced by the place and people the way the main character is, ultimately it doesn't go much of anywhere and the conclusion is quite anti-climactic, all things considered. Like too many of the Merchant Ivory productions over the years, it is populated by great actors but as a narrative it is more dead than alive, and more pedestrian than haunting
Sarah saw Micmacs three or four months ago at USC. I told her to write something up, but she never did. In fact, she saw a half-dozen films released well in advance, often with a discussion with the filmmakers, but she didn't share with anybody.
Fast-paced actioner that is The Bourne Identity meets The Manchurian Candidate, almost literally. Jolie has headlined adventure movies before, and while there are times it does accidentally slam over into the Tomb Raider style of cartoonish exploits, in general it tries to keep the spectacle grounded in at least a little credible reality - or at least as much credibility as Damon's Bourne or Craig's Bond. There's an able supporting cast around Angelina, especially Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor, but little acting is required for this mission from Moscow. Australian director Phillip Noyce has helmed some spy material before, with both of the Harrison Ford Jack Ryans (Patriot Games, Clear & Present Danger), the mangled would-be franchise launch of Val Kilmer as The Saint, and Michael Caine doing Graham Greene in The Quiet American. While more competent than the Kilmer dud, it certainly owes more of its tone and style to The Saint than either Clancy's reluctant analyst or certainly Greene's cynical reporter.
Once the ball gets rolling in Salt there are dozens of action and escape sequences, with the spine of a tale holding them together some claptrap about Soviet-era sleeper spies being awoken in the present-day U.S. to perform an assassination or two while building to an even bigger objective. There aren't many plausibilities on this ride, but you could probably guess that from the trailer and should have an inkling of what kind of ticket you are getting punched here. For me it sucks what little bit of mystery there is by tipping a couple of its "twists" a bit early, but if you put your brain on cruise control and are in the mood for plenty of running and jumping and kicking and bang-bang-powing, you can do worse than Salt. Of course, you can do better. I think I've qualified that properly, Comrades.
Winter's Bone, a movie/novel about a teenage girl, Ree Dolly, whose father pals around with bad company, is involved in a meth-cooking lab business, and is ultimately dead, and whose mother is catatonic, is forced to risk her life by violating the existing code of silence and even take a severe beating from members of her own Ozark woods family for searching the truth about her father's whereabouts and ends up digging up his bones from the lake, chainsaawing the hands off, and taking them to a forensic scientist for proof of identification of her father's hands, and ultimately ends up saving their property, which Ree and her younger siblings (who she's raising by herself), came close to losing, after the law hunts after her dad, who fails to show up in court, but is proven to be dead.
__________________
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)
Inception and Shutter Island before that and Where The Wild Things Are before that. I ******* hate films that come out wide-release in theaters and I ******* hate even more watching films with other people. Inception was bad in that aspect. I saw it the second time with my friend and he was like "ohhhhh so they were in another dream ohhhhhh shiiiiit".
Always watch films alone, folks. It's like reading a book.
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bizarre, I just read the sentence and 'my exact words being repeated by another user' never occurred to me. 
