Ovation channel. Cabaret is on in a few minutes. Be there! Or be square. Word.

I've a high tolerance for nonsense but this was utter tripe.

Yeh, doesn't look as good as Cabaret.

it wasn't, which is really saying something, seeing as how much i fucking hate Cabaret.

EDIT: I overstated things with the word 'hate', but it's a film i really really don't like.

Back To The Future

just saw The Big Lebowski for the first time and now I'm watching NIRVANA: LIve at Reading

kids return which gets an 8/10
and ghost in the shell which ALSO gets an 8/10!

I can't say what the point was. Especially since it's the same exact thing. But truth be told, I liked the "remake" better.

I thought it was good, but... well, it wasn't really scary. And the acting was really bad. Like, I had trouble suspending disbelief during a lot of the dialogue cuz it felt like a script being read. But the low budget attack scenes at night did look cool. Oh well.

Really? Why? I suppose part of the appeal for me is the huge crush on Liza I got when I saw it when it came out. I was 17. The rest of the school year I chased one of my sister's friends who I thought looked like Liza.

But I came to appreciate much more about the movie. I normally don't like musicals at all, but I like how this one works. You have the Cabaret setting, which is the natural outlet for the movies music, and at the same time, the Cabaret setting mirrors what is happening on the outside, not only in the characters but also in Germany.

I dunno. I think Joel Grey's performance is genius, Liza is relatively stunning, and Michael York's performance is spot on. I also like the "feel" for Berlin in the 30s that the movie captures.

I think in my case it's more a result of personal circumstances: that I had a girlfriend who was obsessed with Cabaret and made me sit through it countless times while endlessly declaring her affections for Michael York, who I always felt looked like a bit of a ponce. Equally subjective but I've never understood the whole thing about Liza Minelli, either. Of course, this is coming from a man who wants to marry Illeana Douglas.

Well, that would kill it for anybody. I would never make somebody I loved sit through something just because I liked it, especially over and over.

I thought Liza was cute back then. Of course, she was a lot younger then, and I was a teenager with raging hormones.

As for York, I get the ponce. But I also think that's what makes him fit the role. Ever see anything on Christopher Isherwood? (York's character is modeled, of course, after the character in Isherwood's Berlin Stories, in which the character is very closely modeled on Isherwood, who even back in the 1930s was an uncloseted homosexual and rather ponce-like.)

Yeah, I can't diagree with any of that. I just have this unfortunate habit of letting things become tainted by association.

Anyway, I finally watched Quantum of Solace on Boxing day and was really disappointed. I'm just not feeling Daniel Craig as Bond at all.

That isn't a good Bond movie. Casino is worlds better. Craig is Bond, but Quantum sucked.

I've never read a Bond book. Are you saying Craig is Bond because he's closer to Fleming's original conception of him?

Perhaps. Though Fleming created Bond as a spoof originally. He's closer to the first Bond movie, and he's also better than that. Mostly it's that the movies are better--that is, they've done away with the outlandish gadgets, the supervillians, etc., and are making them grittier and more "real." There's much more emphasis on intrigue; Casino Royale would have made a good spy/mystery movie no matter if it was Bond or somebody else. Casino Royale is the ONLY Bond movie aside from From Russia with Love that I thoroughly enjoy from beginning to end. Quantum tried to follow this up but went way overboard on action.

Yeah, I suppose I just prefer Bond when it's a bit more tongue in cheek. Once it starts taking itself at all seriously it just seems all the more preposterous to me. I like the grittier side of espionage (Smiley, Harry Palmer, etc) but with Daniel Craig as bond (and the utterly annoying Judi Dench as M) it seems to be moving into a kind of no mans land, neither one thing nor the other.

Hmm, see I think the opposite, that with Craig, the Bond movies are moving into that grittier side. Though I have to be careful to qualify that it's not Craig necessarily but the storylines and the way the films are being made. Far as I'm concerned, you could put anyone who looks halfway good in there and these would still work. Craig has the advantage of being muscular and tough looking, and he can manage a sort of coldhearted look, enough that you believe he really could kill someone with his hands. And Craig is just an actor who seems more willing to get dirty than previous Bonds. Pierce was way too much of a dandy.

See Brosnan was maybe my favourite Bond of them all, largely because of his aloof knowingness throughout the whole thing. I suppose it all ultimately comes down to what Bond actually means to a given person. I suppose in that sense, the genius of the Bond franchise is its ability to accomadate so many different interpretations. As such, the fact that some might favour one interpretation over the other becomes ultimately beside the point. Bond endures, regardless.

Delicatessen, by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Such a great movie, both funny and bizarre, with these incredible characters. Great movie, and it looks fabulous as well!

Because your average American couldn't be bothered with subtitles.
I refuse to watch the remake.

Saw Vantage Point. Quite shit.

watched irreversible the other day and it was pretty hard going but i loved the way it was shot, the nightmarish spinning camera and glimpses of things happening that where so visceral. proof that cinema can still shock me.

i also watched the hangover which was pretty funny.

It was all about product placement when Brosnan was Bond, and the reason he was sacked, which clearly pissed him off, was because he was a cunt.

I didn't like it too much. and actually this was the only movie in which I actually thought the acting was bad....

What a glossy turd.

Well, I still need to see the remake but since it's exactly the same thing but with better actors, I guess (Michael Pitt and Tim Roth ftw), I can understand why you think it's better. And, judging from the trailer, the remake looks classier...

I agree with GMKU the grittiness that Craig brings to the role makes it much more palatable to watch. Before Casino Royale my favorite Bond was Thunderball. Still though without a doubt Pussy Galore was my favorite villianess followed closely by Fatime Blush

Naomi Watts ftw too!

I thought George Lazenby made a great Bond, but because he was such a cunt, he was fired after just making one movie.

Have you guys seen the cast list for the Spielberg directed "The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn"? Jamie Bell is playing Tintin, Daniel Craig is playing Red Rackham, and Andy Serkis is playing Captain Haddock. The rest of the list is here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0983193/

That may well be the case. At the end of the day though, I'm a far bigger fan of Roger Moore's Bond than i am of Sean Connery's. Brosnan clearly followed the Moore line while Craig, I suppose, is more Connery-like.


Edit:

On another note, entirely unrelated to who's actually playing Bond, one of the things I think has marked the decline of the whole series in recent years is the way in which its traditional focus on exotic locations has been undercut by a general increase in travel, since circa the 1980s. There's simply not the same excitement in 2009 in watching Bond's adventures in a country like Bolivia that there might've been, say, thirty years ago when the idea of travelling to such places was highly unlikely (beyond being involved with some kind of military service). Now a place like Bolivia is just a backpack excursion away. As such, I think Bond has lost that sense of geographical mystery that it relied on so much for its success early on. I remember being fascinated, watching Octopussy, of its visions of India, a country that, at the time, I had little hope of ever seeing. If anything, Bond is now a victim of the world becoming a lot smaller than it was during its heyday.

Not necessarily a big deal, but I'm drunk and it's a point that seems important to me right now.

and marc caro!!! yes! what an amazing sex scene of great hilarity as well as the most elaborately botched suicides... small canisters that go 'moo' and smoke filled bubbles, yes, yes! i'm going to eat my roommate now.

it was on pbs. interesting enough to not shut the tv off......... hooray.

In a way, I prefer the original for that reason, that it's actors aren't as well known. It kinda fits the movie. But the remake is good as well, they are indeed basically the exact same thing.

5/10 because I didn't like it or hate it, I'm just not part of the target audience (14 years old girls). But I still need to say that some of the effects were really awful, and the acting was kinda terrible.

I'd say 6/10 because of Kristen Stewart's panties.

even that didn't save me for giving a 4/10

Groundhog Day