Movie Tab II

Tools    






"When the warden comes into the cell the morning after the escape, the poster covering the hole is fastened down on all four corners - impossible to do after squeezing into that small hole." [On the DVD commentary, the director confirms that this was a movie "cheat".]

My faith in cinema is shaken to it's core. No more movies for me.
__________________
Letterboxd



2) I like all the good ratings/reviews The Double is receiving from MoFos! Is Richard Ayoade quietly becoming a new MoFo favorite?
I damn well hope so. Between this and Submarine, I think he's becoming a major voice in British cinema.

3) I see Skepsis is on a roll and is watching all kinds of great '70s films. It's time for me to do the same thing! I have a wide variation of VERY interesting '70s films ready to watch.
It appears I am. Still have buttloads I want to see before July, I know I'm never gonna get round to them all.



How come you didn't like Planet of the Apes all that much, BlueLion?
Oh, I definitely liked it. My ratings are pretty strict right now. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I enjoyed it. In fact, I considered it a
film initially but I decided to lower the rating because of its cheesiness. It's pretty hilarious in parts and I'm not sure if that was what the filmmakers were going for.

Perhaps I should stick to my initial rating after all.



Pitch Perfect - After much prodding from a few friends, I finally broke down and watched this one. Despite the film's obvious love for The Breakfast Club (a movie that I loathe and could rant about for hours), I had a good time watching it. Lots of funny lines, good music, and Rebel Wilson.


I also dislike The Breakfast Club. None of the characters are at all likeable; they're very self-centred, as I guess a lot of teenagers are.
__________________
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)




Only Lovers Left Alive
Jim Jarmusch, 2014

First let me identify myself as a Jarmusch fan. He is a droll and visual filmmaker who I have always liked, from Stranger Than Paradise onward. He's certainly not infallible, but even in his rare missteps, the biggest for me being Out of Control, I find so much beauty and wit on the screen, and when he's on target, I think he is just wonderful. Two of my favorites are Dead Man and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, which are ostensibly Jarmusch working in genre, specifically the Western and a Mob hitman actioner, but of course they are first and last Jarmuschian. So, why not Vampires?

Only Lovers Left Alive is sexy, subtly funny, often lovely, literate, and definitely Jarmusch. Tom Hiddleston (Thor's Loki) is Adam, a reclusive musician hold up in a dilapidated old house lost amidst the urban decay of 21st Century Detroit. He rarely ventures out into the world, his primary point of contact in the city being a young man he seems to trust to run strange errands and find rare instruments for him, played by Anton Yelchin (the Star Trek reboot's Chekov). And sometimes he'll stop by the hospital, unannounced in the middle of the night, to illegally purchase some O-negative blood from a doctor (the always welcome Jeffrey Wright). Adam is a Vampire, and has been for hundreds of years. He doesn't feed off of the regular humans anymore, who he dubs zombies, if he can help it, as our blood supply has become pretty contaminated and it can make him sick, or worse.

Adam has an Eve, played by Tilda Swinton, his wife and a Vampire even older than him, who turned him long ago. They love each other, but seem to do better primarily living apart. As the film opens, she is halfway around the world, in Tangier. Her main companion there is another Vampire, even older still, who they call "Kid", played by John Hurt, who is actually the Sixteenth Century author Christopher Marlowe, still bitter about Bill Shakespeare getting credit for his plays ("It was so political", he grumbles).

As it standard for a Jarmusch movie, there isn't much "plot" to speak of. Eve comes to visit Adam, and her reckless sister (Mia Wasikowska) comes unannounced, too. Also probably unsurprisingly, Jarmusch captures the tone of their immortality, bred of isolation and boredom, perfectly. And amusingly. The specifics of what these Vampires can or can't do is rarely examined. They can't go out in the sun and can move at superhuman speed, if necessary, and they must feed on blood regularly. But we don't need much more than that to get into the bizarre ennui and rhythms of the Jarmuschian undead.

For the uninitiated to the work of Jim Jarmusch, it's probably a good entry point, as long as you know going in you aren't getting Twilight or Interview with the Vampire. Which, of course, is its strength.




.
.
Attachments
Click image for larger version

Name:	Only Lovers.jpg
Views:	1323
Size:	146.6 KB
ID:	14531  
__________________
"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



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.

The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulhu (Henry Saine, 2009)

Baby Geniuses (Bob Clark, 1999)
-
Critical Care (Sidney Lumet, 1997)

The Joker Is Wild (Charles Vidor, 1957)


Singer/comedian Joe E. Lewis (Frank Sinatra) suffers from alcoholism and gambling problems which ruin his personal life.
The Smart Set (Jack Conway, 1928)

The Cracked Iceman (Eddie Dunn, 1934)

Just My Luck (Donald Petrie, 2006)

Silent Movie (Mel Brooks, 1976)


Dom DeLuise, Marty Feldman & Mel Brooks look for Hollywood stars to be in their silent movie.
Railroaded! (Anthony Mann, 1947)
-
Dead Man on Campus (Alan Cohn, 1998)
+
The Watcher (Joe Charbanic, 2000)

Tatsumi (Eric Khoo, 2011)


Yoshihiro Tatsumi courts his soon-to-be wife while developing and perfecting his gekiga in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.
House of Wax (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2005)

The I Don't Care Girl (Lloyd Bacon, 1953)

Big Momma's House 2 (John Whitesell, 2006)
+
Iron Man Three (Shane Black, 2013)


Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) tries out his new suit and its embellishments.
Golden Girl (Lloyd Bacon, 1951)

One Day (Lone Scherfig, 2011)
+
In Good Company (Paul Weitz, 2004)

Snake Eyes (Brian De Palma, 1998)
+

At a heavyweight championship fight, corrupt cop Nicolas Cage and his friend and security agent Gary Sinise become involved in an assassination.
__________________
It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page



A system of cells interlinked
Meatwad rules, you guys...catch up!

Also @ Raul:

You have it backwards, dude. Gattaca is clearly at least a
or maybe a
and Shawshank ReDUMBtion is an overrated manipulative turd sitting at
. I like Morgan Freeman well enough, but the guy does NOTHING to create a character here - he's just Morgan Freeman, doing the Morgan Freeman voiceover thing. As a jailbreak film, it's sappy and way too sentimental, and isn't as good as other, better jailbreak films. As a character study, it's meandering and unfocused, unsure of which character is actually getting redeemed here. Andy gets redeemed, you say? Looks like revenge to me - revenge is not redemption. Hard to tell who gets redeemed when the entire cast of prisoners doesn't seem have a bad person among them. Is this a prison movie or a film about a bunch of waxy old bastards coming out of a midlife crisis? Any surprises in the film? Nope - plays out exactly as you would suspect if asked to guess the end after watching the first 30 minutes. Rife with cliches and obviousness, I think it is one of the most predictable film endings ever transferred to a final reel. Pretty sure Tim Robbins himself crapped all over this thing, right after he crawled through crap making it.

Get busy living? get busy watching better movies, mister!
__________________
“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” ― Thomas Sowell



Yesterday Jack gives Star Wars a 3/5. Today Sedai rants about how bad Shawshank is. Is there a MoFo conspiracy to try and make me cry myself to sleep I should know about?



I don't think Shawshank Redemption is "bad", but I do not think it is anything close to a masterpiece, I think the level of praise it gets is sometimes baffling, and I rank other prison flicks like Cool Hand Luke and Escape from Alcatraz far above it.

But, to each their own. That's what makes the world and MoFo go 'round.



Shawshank ReDUMBtion
I don't see what you did here.

I like Morgan Freeman well enough, but the guy does NOTHING to create a character here - he's just Morgan Freeman, doing the Morgan Freeman voiceover thing.
Counterpoint: this is where the "Morgan Freeman voiceover thing" comes from.

Andy gets redeemed, you say? Looks like revenge to me - revenge is not redemption. Hard to tell who gets redeemed when the entire cast of prisoners doesn't seem have a bad person among them.
Well, redemption can mean two things--either correcting/acknowledging a mistake, or simply being saved from something. Both apply. Andy comes to recognize that he was a cold, terrible husband to his wife (even though he didn't kill her), and he takes back the freedom that was wrongly denied him. Two redemptions for the price of one!

I'm pretty stumped on the other two words of the title, though, but I assume they apply in some way I haven't thought of.

Is this a prison movie or a film about a bunch of waxy old bastards coming out of a midlife crisis?
It can't be both?

Any surprises in the film? Nope - plays out exactly as you would suspect if asked to guess the end after watching the first 30 minutes.
Well, strictly speaking the overwhelming majority of movies aren't surprising on that level, either, and don't really have to be to be good. But you might just be savvier to this sort of thing, because given how darn bleak most of the film was I had no trouble taking the film's feint towards Andy's suicide seriously.

Pretty sure Tim Robbins himself crapped all over this thing, right after he crawled through crap making it.
Solid.



One thing I will add is that so-called "sappy" films seem to be among the most polarizing. There's sort of an all-or-nothing quality to sentimentality. If you buy into it, everything has an additional resonance. If you don't, everything feels goofy and overwrought. I'm not sure what makes someone go one way or the other, but it seems like often the things one side won't like about a "sappy" film are the exact same things others love.

I assume we all agree the film's beyond reproach on a technical level, at least, yeah?



Shawshank might not be the greatest achievement in the history of cinema but it's far from dumb. To call it dumb imo is stupid because the film never tries to come off as too smart and it doesn't feel heavy-handed at all, although I haven't seen it in years.

A rather humble, honest film in my book. But hey, it's #1 on IMDb and extremely mainstream so it must be sh*t, right?