Movie Tab II

Yeah, I'll echo that sentiment. Sugarland Express is still one of my favorite Spielberg movies and Patch Adams is the worst kind of insulting hokum Hollywood produces.

But, to each their own!

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"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

I'm going in a little different direction with my short write ups.

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Terminator 2: Judgement Day: Extended Edition (1991)


The Exorcist (1973)

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"George, this is a little too much for me. Escaped convicts, fugitive sex... I've got a cockfight to focus on."

Hulk (2003, Ang Lee)


I quite liked it and it's way of conveying it's story. Not a very good action film, but a very good drama about a man who unleashes his inner aggression through an alter ego.

The last couple of weeks I watched...

Chikamatsu Monogatari (1954, Kenji Mizoguchi)

The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971, Elio Petri)

Juvenile Court (1973, Frederick Wiseman)

Tron: Legacy (2010, Joseph Kosinski)

Violence at Noon (1966, Nagisa Oshima)

Give Us This Day (1949, Edward Dmytryk)

O-Bi, O-Ba - The End of Civilization (1985, Piotr Szulkin)

Harlan County, USA (1976, Barbara Kopple)

Black God, White Devil (1964, Glauber Rocha)

Tierra (1996, Julio Medem)

In the Year of the Pig (1968, Emile de Antonio)

No Fear, No Die (1990, Claire Denis)

I Even Met Happy Gypsies (1967, Aleksandar Petrovic)

Mind Game (2004, Masaaki Yuasa)

Sound and Fury (1988, Jean-Claude Brisseau)

The Harder The Come (1972, Perry Henzell)

Cat People (1942, Jacques Tourneur)

The Blood of a Poet (1930, Jean Cocteau)

Two-Lane Blacktop (1971, Monte Hellman)

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"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Mindgame blew me away in every sense.

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"Loves them? They need them, like they need the air."

I think I even thought while watching it: "I bet PN loves this film". I liked it, and was impressed with the animation...still couldn't help being a little annoyed though.

Yeah, the ceaseless energy and repetitiveness was hard to know how to take, but THE GUY USED A MOLECULE AS A STEP. That's pretty much how I would sum up that film in its entirety.

Plus I thought it was brilliant how they used music and our experiences through the film to reshape our perceptions of the bookend montages.

Away We Go Sam Mendes



Away We Go has been criticized for being quirky or trendy or what have you, but all I see here is great chemistry, surprising performances, and an overall heartfelt and funny story. One of the best reflections on family and relationships I have ever seen. Loved everything about this one. The content. Krasinski. Rudolph. All incredible. Another Mendes flick that I instantly love. I am looking forward to a second viewing to see if the perfect score stands, but given the content and execution I don't see it falling.




This quick scene had me literally laughing out loud. It's a quick one, but there is harsh language so NSFW.

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If I had a dollar for every existential crisis I've ever had, does money really even matter?

The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)

Fascinating story about a disenchanted secret police agent in the waning days of the DDR. Really excellent with some fairly complex characters and subtle humor.



White Squall (Ridley Scott, 1996)

Disappointing fictionalized "true story" about a group of misfit boys whose parents send them to school at sea in order to learn about discipline and teamwork. The cinematography is excellent and there are some exciting high seas adventures, but the corny life lessons are so heavily stressed throughout that it felt completely sophomoric and unconvincing.

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Tarzan and His Mate (Cedric Gibbons, 1934) -
The American (Anton Corbijn, 2010)
Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest (Gore Verbinski, 2006)
Police Story (Jackie Chan, 1985)
Dragons Forever (Sammo Hung, 1988) +
Rango (Gore Verbinski, 2011)
Ivan the Terrible (Sergei Eisenstein, 1944) -
The Next Three Days (Paul Haggis, 2010)
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Edgar Wright, 2010)

Get Him to the Greek (Stoller, 2010)



Completely forgettable. I chuckled here and there, but overall...DUD.

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P. Diddy was pretty funny though.

Ah, I thought it was one of the better comedies of 2010 and I don't even like Russell Brand. I was in tears from "the jimmy" (I think that is what that drug cocktail was named) scene through the car ride after.

Ping Pong Playa - 5/5

This film was a ridiculously funny indie family comedy from the Asian-American perspective, and it really is a must see if you are in the least, most microscopic way an American minority or have friends who are American minorities, like such, and are from suburbia. OMG. I watched this with my sister and (wait for it...) my mom, and we were HOWLING through this film. Nail on the head outlook and shamelessly forthright. Family friendly, save for some cursing, but oh, so worth it.

Operation: Endgame - 3.5/5

I actually liked the execution of the film and the acting, though the storyline and preachiness was odd. I sat down sure that this was a comedy, but if so, it was the unfunniest comedy I've ever seen. Not saying it was serious. In fact, I was watching it thinking that it HAD to be a shout out to those old 80's assasssins-get-locked-up-together-for-a-fight-to-the-death movies (I think I watched a couple with Christopher Lambert - you know you did too! ), and if that's the case, they did a good job. If not, they sucked, because at the end of the film, quite a few puzzles refuse to gel, as if they think they locked the story up quite nicely, but if everything happened as they say, the actions of the characters dont make sense. Point: there is a "mystery" to be solved, but I think that if I went back and watched the movie from the beginning, KNOWING the answer, the actors and story writing would still not give away clues as to the solution. That feels like cheating - as if they just decided on a tidy solution that the characters didnt necessarily act for, and tied it together with a bow. The Bush/Obama thing is also getting kind of old, as well. Other than that, a great waste of time!

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something witty goes here......

I have been busy watching a T.V Series from start to finish but this is what I have fit in lately.
Wizard Of Oz (1939)



The Philadelphia Story (1940)



The Wild Bunch (1969)



X Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

The Concert for Bangladesh (Saul Swimmer, 1972)



One of the better concert films of all-time has a dynamic array of talent coming together to try to raise money to help the starving refugees from Bangladesh in 1971. Ravi Shankar and fellow Indian musicians begin the show with a brief but riveting set of intense Indian music where the raga actually comes across as something resembling a rock jam. There is a cute moment where Ravi's band tunes their instruments for 15 seconds and the crowd at Madison Square Garden applauds. Ravi then says that if you all liked the tuning that much, we hope you enjoy the actual music.



The next set begins with concert organizer George Harrison singing selections from his epic All Things Must Pass with a band consisting of Eric Clapton, Jesse Ed Davis and Don Preston also on guitar, Klaus Voormann on bass, Billy Preston on piano, Leon Russell on organ, Ringo Starr and Jim Keltner on drums, Badfinger on acousic guitars and percussion, Jim Horn and the Hollywood Horns and a bevy of backing singers.



Highlights include Preston doing "That's the Way God Planned It", Ringo singing "It Don't Come Easy", Leon interpreting "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Youngblood" and of course, versions of "Something', "Here Comes the Sun" and the rollicking "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" where Clapton and Harrison play dueling solos to close out the song.



Bob Dylan comes out to perform a set which in the film consists of four songs: "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall", "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry", "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Just Like a Woman". My mind is also blowin' in the wind during this stuff.



The direction is very intense with both wide shots of the entire stage and close-ups of individuals when they're singing or performing some musical highlights. Of course, the sound quality is perfect. The only complaint I have is that it could have been longer. 102 minutes is a fair amount of time but there are a few songs which are on the album which had to be cut for the film for whatever reason. I'd love to see those restored songs which include Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Love Minus Zero"/"No Limit", Leon Russell's cover of Robert Johnson's "Come on into My Kitchen" and Dylan and Harrison doing a version of "If Not for You" during a soundcheck (it's on YouTube). Apparently some of those songs are available on a more recent version of the DVD than the one I watched.

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

I'll definitely be checking that out, Mark. Thanks.

Finished my year-long, personal Brian De Palma retrospective with four films last week. (at least until I find a couple of obscure, out-of-print films from the 70s and late 60s)



Carrie (1976)
Outstanding, stylish and highly emotional thriller that borrows noticeably from Hitchcock but really does its own thing for the most part, including some fun moments of split-screen. One of my favorites.
+



Mission: Impossible (1996)
Hollywood blockbuster as a collection of set pieces connected by a fun but not-particularly original plot about espionage and elaborate deception. Probably best remembered for the bullet train and Langley-infiltration scenes but I found the early heist set in Prague much more atmospheric and memorable.

+



Redacted (2007)
Still a fascinating (and somewhat incendiary) experiment of a low budget anti-war film for the 2000s. Besides being very heavy-handed, it feels somewhat repetitive and the acting is amateurish even by De Palma's usual standards. Still well worth watching on its own merits and as a companion piece to the excellent Casualties of War.





Mission to Mars (2000)

A lot of people see Brian De Palma as a shameless rip-off artist, and I suppose he's fair game since the plotting and character values are usually the weakest elements in any of his films, so he can come across as merely a collector of scenes and nods. I've gotten a lot more out of his films than that over the last year -- particularly in his extremely individualistic use of the camera where he seems to want to convey intense personal emotions as well as self-awareness and irony all in one frame -- but I'll think about why it might be that I enjoy De Palma's films a lot more than most people I know as I continue to revisit my favorites.

Here he tries to one-up Kubrick and at least in terms of exploiting three-dimensional space and space-ship architecture, I think it's a pretty honorable and successful film. The space wheel is one of the best elaborate tracking shots that I've seen and for the most part the rest of the film looks fantastic. It's fun to imagine this movie as being viewed by the newly enhanced perception of Dave from 2001 but I really wish we had a character as compelling and interesting as Hal. It's good but it could have been great.

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Going soft in your old age?

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"Like all dreamers, Steven mistook disenchantment for truth."