the naked fight scene in eastern promises was intense

Dead Man

Great film. Johnny Depp is brilliant but Gary Farmer steals it for me as the Indian character 'Nobody'.

i looked it up and the aspect ratio is indeed 1.66. so in a typical wide screen tv (16:9 = 1.78) it should have black bars on the sides. in the old-tv screen it should have bars on top and bottom.

and it was shot on 35 mm, not 16mm (the usual 1.66 aspect ratio is for super-16) so it definitely warrants a blu-ray reissue.

plus the subtitles provided are burned on the video image not built into the dvd and they look terrible.

i was re-watching the first 45 minutes last night and counting the shots. i think it was 9 or 10 by the time we stopped (it was late). amazing movie, it's like nothing else i've seen. deliciously slow. and in spite of the bad transfer and image problems-- gorgeous.

That's maybe my favourite film ever.

finished watching werckmeister harmonies

it wasn't easy because it's possible to doze off during the very long takes.

but just because it wasn't easy it doesn't mean it wasn't great.

i agree. i had the best orgasm i had in ages :p

a movie I caught on netflix, indy movie
antiviral - celebrity obsessed fans get injections from a Clinic
which purchases viruses and other pathogens from celebrities who fall ill so the fans can feel a bond of their fav celeb odd but good flick

I love when a movie surprises me, recently I mentioned "Bullhead", and yesterday I saw "Headhunters". This movie is just a lot of fun. They really put the protagonist of the film through some shit. For "Game of Thrones" fans Nikolaj Coster-Waldau who plays Jamie Lannister on "Game of Thrones" is in it.

watched FEMALE TROUBLE, which led to PECKER, which who knows which one of his i will put on after.

Hayao Miyazaki to retire
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-23931145

that's terrible! sad news. of course he's an artist so he's not going to stop working, probably just retire from massive projects like this. i just hope his health is good and this is just a step back into a more personal phase and not something else.

The Tree of Life

You sat through the whole thing? I somehow watched part of it, but only by fastforwarding through most of it ;)

I felt the same way for the first half hour but then it started to grow on me. I'm still not sure if I really liked it though.

Also last night watched



Fistful of Dollars

Awaiting Suchfriends' reminder that Clint wasn't 'Clint' till the 80s.

here's a good coincidence-- i watched fistful of dollars 2 nights ago.

i liked it of course, but i would have like it more with the title they gave it in japan-- "the return of yojimbo".


haaa haaa haaaa

it only becomes annoying if you try to convince him otherwise

Haha, yeah. I'd actually forgotten how good it is. And they definitely don't make baddies as bad as Gian Mario Volonte anymore.

The first 45 minutes is most of what I skipped over, and then like you, felt conflicted about the remaining 30 minutes or so I watched that was condensed from the remaining hour and half ;)

Like you, I'm not sure I really liked it, in fact I didn't particularly like it at all, yet, I still watched at least a good portion of it, so I'm not sure exactly if I didn't like it.
As to Clint, he ain't jacko, Clint had some epic films in the 1970s. I'm sorry that y'all like the campy, soft-spoken, almost Jerry Lewis version of Jack Nicholson pre-1980 (China Town aside), Me, I prefer the curmudgeon billy bad a$$ version of later years.

It definitely looked beautiful and some of the acting was excellent but its message, or what I could make of it, didn't seem particularly original or interesting in the end.

I loved tree of life

I bumped up the playback speed on Tree of Life. Made it much less slow. Thanks VLC!

so how does it end? i don't mind the spoilers. ha ha ha.

ps- i watched the original scarface!!!



it was fucking great. it kind of skims trhough the plot turns, but that makes it quicker too. and unlike the depalma movie, it had a funny angle/character.

loved the quasi-german-expressionist look of it.

i realized yesterday de palma just made a carbon copy of the old movie, the fucker. my estimation for the guy has gone down significantly. okay, his film is more "realistic" and more stylized at the same time, it's not without merit, it's a classic of its era, but it's not the groundbreaking beast i always thought it was.

howard hughes FTW.

DePalma's version follows the Hawks' plot but it did break new ground in terms of violence shown in a mainstream Hollywood film. I think before that, the high (or for some people low) watermark was probably the Godfather or Bonnie and Clyde or The Wild Bunch. The 80s Scarface definitely upped the ante on any of those.

Either way, I much prefer Hawks' version. It's the film that got me into George Raft, who for me totally outshines Paul Muni as Tony's sidekick. And yeah, the quickness you mention, that's something I love about Hawks' films: there's never a second of padding. Compare him with so many of today's directors who seem to think they haven't made a 'proper' film unless it clocks in at at least 2 1/2 hours.

Watched this morning



The Claim

Enjoyable enough western-of-sorts.

On a beach

See, that is EXACTLY WHAT I DID. I watched most of at 4-6x fast forward. After all, they said play it really loud, meh, there weren't exactly explosions or shit like that, just a decent score, but really, it didn't matter. I think this movie was most VISUAL, the appearance, the setting, the facial gestures and miming, so you could have almost watched it all on mute and still got what was important.


The cinematography, setting, and delivery were perfect, and as you said, beautiful. Actually, it sort of proves Rob's point about Brad Pitt being better looking than an actor, and in Tree of Life that was true. The facial expressions, body posturing, gestures, and miming were more important than the script. So delivery trumped substance, and visual imagery trumped plot. That being said, I agree with evollove, watch it in fast forward for the most part, it was the only way I managed to sit through much of it, but I still enjoyed the view. Hence why I'm not sure if I liked it, but know for sure that I didn't not like it ;)

Something else I like about Brad Pitt is he's not afraid to play really unsympathetic almost pathetic characters. A lot of big name actors will only take roles that enhance their cool image. No way is that true of Brad Pitt in Tree of Life.

wtf - scarface was a remake?

this i have to see

Although I didn't really enjoy it, I can definitely see myself watching it again soon.

Thank you! Was beginning to think I was the only one. Sure it's slow and it has a MASSIVE scope but y'know? It ruled so piddle off.

Will Smith is the perfect example of douchetard actor who won't take roles that show him in a bad light. I thoght Tom Cruise showed some balls in doing Magnolia.

Totally agree about both of them. Wasn't there a story about Will Smith turning down some big role recently because of that? It was definitely him but I can't remember what the film was.

Yeah I think it was Django.

yes. don't be put off by the silent-movie style of acting-- some of them still "make faces"-- talkies were new back then.

but it's a good and lively film.

also, ignore the "alternate ending" which was made to please the fucking censors but never actually shown. it's for archaeological purposes only.

have fun with it!


is he tripping balls and the sun and meditating about the cosmos?

what ever happens to the douchy architect?

some son dies, doesn't it?

fuck if i can remember. meh, i really don't care ha ha ha. fuck those characters.

That's it! What a wanker.

At the end the Sean Penn character (the adult Jack) has some kind of vision where he's on a beach reunited with everyone he's known, including his parents and dead brother.

Orca with Bo Derek. Its Jaws, but a Killer Whale. He's pissed. He wants revenge. What is actually hilarious is they used natural orca habits as the schtick. The mechanical orca they had swimming around killing people like Jaws was doing things like isolating people on ice floats, then knocking them off. The whale killed the main character this way, but instead of eating him, he just "played" with him like they do seals, tossing him around, killing him. I thought that was an interesting caveat to an otherwise terrible movie. Like, "Ok, at least its scientifically accurate." ;)

I watched Orca tripping once and nearly joined Greenpeace.