Some interesting Halloween choices out there:

Inside (Bustillo and Maury)
In the Mouth of Madness (Carpenter)
Pulse (Kurosawa)
Demons (Bava)
Trick R Treat (Daughtery)
House of the Devil (West)
The Changeling (Medak)

i will probably get around to seeing a second time eventually, i've gotten a little bit into sword and sandal pictures more recently so i might end up liking it now, although i remember struggling to make it to the end before

I watched Tim Burton's Dark Shadows, liked it, but not Burton's best.

Election

I never know what to make of this movie. I like it but not as much as I want to.



Leaving Las Vegas

I never really liked this when it first came out and this is only the second time I've watched it. Can't understand how I was so unimpressed the first time around. Brilliant film.

7/10

Re-watching Seijun Suzuki's "Branded To Kill."

Damn, I love this movie.

that's cuz you've probably never watched the insufferable "permanent vacation." ha ha, okay, maybe you have.

still, i just watched THE LIMITS OF CONTROL thanks you your post (so thanks for it). FUCKING BRILLIANT. i loved it. it's like a thing between EL TOPO and melville's LE SAMOURAI. I notice it's got a lot of bad reviews on IMDB but those people are FUCKING DOLTS> damn, i'm doing the ALL CAPS thing a lot today. don't know why. every day is different. christopher doyle's cinematography is something out of this fucking planet. anyway, i also saw this strange lovely thing this past weekend:



SUMMER HOURS.

i love how it seems to go nowhere and in the end you realize it's gone everywhere. fucking brilliant, and beautiful. a delicious movie.

Ocean's Twelve

I liked the first remake a lot but this is terrible. Although getting Julia Roberts to play a character pretending to be Julia Roberts was a fairly neat idea.

6.5/10

Geez. I think you, me and Jim are the only people who have ever seen that. I'm sure he wishes he never made it.


IF A TREE FALLS, a documentary about the "eco-terrorist" group Earth Liberation Front.

Highly recommended.

The Royal Tenenbaums

This left me cold. Maybe I just didn't get it.

I find it quite boring, to be honest. It has all the classic Bava ingredients but doesn't really hold together as a complete movie - which is itself arguably a key ingredient in a lot of Bava's Gialli. So while he's become largely synonymous with that genre and has mainly built his reputation on them, it's the stuff in other genres that I tend to be more into: stuff like Black Sunday, Lisa and the Devil, Danger: Diabolik, Rabid Dogs and the Doctor Goldfoot movies. I suppose that's about as perverse as someone saying they're a big Woody Allen fan but tend not to like his comedies.

Oceans 13

It took me less than 30 minutes to realise I didn't have a clue what was going on, but strangely watchable.

i watched it now too, pretty good movie, sad though

YES!!!!! Brilliant film! I've a feeling PTA himself isn't that big a fan, that it wasn't quite the film he wanted to make, but it's close to perfect for me. Philip Baker Hall and John Reilly are fantastic together. And I love Gwyneth Paltrow in it, too - although I'm becoming a bigger fan of her the more films I see her in (being largely put off in the beginning by stuff like Shakespeare in Love). I also just love the whole dead-end Vegas feel to it all. I've still yet to see The Master (not released here until next month) and would probably count Magnolia as his great artistic achievement but Hard Eight is the one I could watch over and over again just for the sheer pleasure of it. A mini masterpiece that, if I were to redo my all-time top ten, I'd be hard pressed not to include it. And while we all know how great an actor Philip Seymour Hoffman is, John Reilly is maybe my favourite working acting at the moment. He has a face I could watch forever. Either way, both of them are making a mockery of all those claims that 'they don't make 'em like that anymore'. Both of them would've been incredible in any era.

What a face

Buddha Mountain
a very emotional Chinese movie
7/10

Does everyone know Anderson wanted HARD EIGHT to be a three hour epic?

Studio execs intervened. It's a chamber piece after all.

Anderson was pissed, but he had no clout, so the little gem is what we got. The execs were right, I suspect.

What a fucking ego on that guy.

Yeah, I heard it was a massive compromise. Proof that you might not get what you want but you might just get what you need. God bless the suits.

okay, so, funny story, i tried watching this again, this time we weren't sleepy, but about an hour into the movie and with 20-some minutes to go i went "oh, im tired," and turned off the thing and went to sleep. yes i will finish watching it another time i'm sure, i am a curious person after all, and there were scenes and moments that were great here ( like that weird-ass boy in the beach) but in general the movie doesn't do it for me the way that i couldn't turn off "scenes from a marriage," for example (this movie reminded me of that tv series with the weird interaction of the couple).

Bloody girl. It's a good film but not that good.