Requiem for a Heavyweight - 1962

A gritty noir-type film about a washed up boxer. The kind of thing you would watch at two in the morning (like I just did)...



If interested, check out the opening sequence featuring Cassius Clay, who has just pounded "Mountain Rivera" (Anthony Quinn). Great POV style shooting..

http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/2...p-Opening.html

Risky Business

so many great quotes and scenes.

Pain and Gain

I have a soft spot for Michael Bay films, but only when I'm not watching them. The one thing that gets left off most attacks on his films and which always strikes me about halfway into almost any of them is how boring they are. I'm excluding the Rock and Days of Thunder which are probably the reasons for my soft spot to begin with.



Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Not as good as the first one but OK.



White House Down

Really enjoyed it.

i rewatched la grande bellezza and then i watched the interviews with the director, the lead actor and the other screenwriter.

the other screenwriter (an older guy, i forget his name) was the more revealing in the connections with la dolce vita-- he compared it to the odyssey in that it's more than just a story, but a kind of ever-present referent for people who tell a certain kind of story (as the odyssey is to travel).

god damn i haven't gotten this much pleasure from a movie in ages

turns out the director wanted to be a writer. this is an instance in which this works really well. he really knows how to tell a story with lots and lots of nuance. no "goodies vs. baddies" here. not even a hint.

WOLF OF WALL STREET

it was okay.

yes yes sure, it's scorsese, the man is brilliant, but this was goodfellas all over again so it was quite predictable. also it went on too long. when dicrabio was making his hitleresque speeches about being rich he put a good performance but i was as bored as if i was watching the dull military parades in triumph of the will (because, admit it, triumph of the will may have made film history but it's just a bunch of military goose-stepping bullshit that puts one to sleep).

anyway, wolf was good movie and all, and great little performance by mcconaughey, but after having watched the great beauty twice in a row, and with it being so fresh in my mind, this really suffers by comparison. american movies have no heart--they're all about morality or something. "baddie gets comeuppance". zzzzzz.

earlier today also watched

fellini's INTERVISTA

definitely a minor fellini movie, a kind of reminiscence before death i suppose, and it's certainly no amarcord, but it was nice, and sweet, and a little bit sad, and nice to watch all over, and funny and clever, even though the transfer was quite crap (koch lorber really puts out crappy dvds). but shit, it had more heart and more human emotion than the wolf of wall street which was about… gold watches, or something? i don't know not a single likeable character that i can remember. 'MERICA! oh yes, another nice/smart thing about intervista is that it's one interview inside another inside trying to make franz kafka's amerika (which i should read) into a movie… really, a minor film, but if you're a fellini fan you'll love it anyway as well as many of its characters (and scorsese is a huge fellini fan, he bought and restored la dolce vita).

i enjoyed the hell out of Wolf of Wall Street. a little overbearing but that's what i expected.

Walt Disney's Cinderella (9/10)

Saw this with my girlfriend last night, I expected to enjoy it but was somewhat taken aback by how good it really was. Highly recommended (if it's playing near you)
8/10


Been going through this boxset. I'm 10 movies in and I'm I love.

I enjoyed the Campaign. It could have been a bit beefier, but it was comical.

The Godfather of Asian Action flicks. Just fucking excellent

 

So good!

Zulu Dawn - a really impressive epic film, depicts the utter massacre of british military in zululand in 1879 when a few thousand troops took on the 30 or 60K man Zulu army - the Brits attacked the Zulus who were only defending their territory. Later more brits came and eventually deposed the Zulu king and repressed the tribe. The movie must have been made with 10,000 extras, they didn't have CGI to fake the crowds like they do now.

the fucking english were the global plague of the XIX century

even worse than contemporary america, because in those days violence and militarism were more glorified and celebrated than today, and white supremacy was the politically correct rationalization at the time.

of course they didn't have daisy cutters. but if they did…!

Yeah, I wasn't expecting that much but it still felt like a bit of a missed opportunity in the end. A great idea that never really went anywhere.

Haha.

Zulu Dawn is good but the first one, Zulu, (Zulu Dawn is a prequel) is one of my all-time fave war film. It was actually quite progressive for its time and certainly wasn't the jingoistic 'Britain vs the savages' propaganda some now dismiss it as. The irony is that Zulu Dawn was apparently made to correct Zulu's supposed racism but what its producers didn't realise was that it wasn't a pro-British film at all so much as a kind of tribute to the idea of the soldier in both cultures. And still has perhaps the greatest final battle sequence ever filmed. Highly recommended.

i've watched zulu a couple of times, great war movie, i like it, starts alfie, whatsisname, michael something, but i liked the movie more the first time, so when i got it again, all excited, i realized the zulus were faceless creatures. literally, a mass of spear-wielding negros that chant and play drums in the distance, putting fear into the mind of whitey-- but no personalities that i recall. i think it's racist in that sense-- in that the zulus are subordinate and accessory to the british story. you could have replaced the zulu army with a plague of locust or a wildebeest stampede and it would have been the same-- english heroics vs. "an overpowering force of nature." so yes, the english are humans and the zulus are nature.

ALL ANAL TEEN ORGY 7

I know, I know. "Watch them in order." Everyone says that.

But this is all the video store had available, and I figured something was better than nothing.

Pretty good. I was a little lost at first, not having seen the previous six, but Hillary Wank gives such a moving performance in the opening scene that I was immediately drawn into her plight, which is that she needs all her holes stuffed. See, she's just turned eighteen. So, of course, she wants to celebrate.

But the plot isn't the main point of the film. Character is. The way the actors move from wound up and horny to orgasmed-out and satiated is quite believable. The acting is best described as "minimalist," reminding me a bit of Bresson's work. The dialogue is deliciously subtle and complex. "Fuck me, baby. Fuck my ass wide open. Goddamn," says Ally McFeel while getting DPed by Bohah Hill and James Wanko, which of course echoes the famous scene from Richard III, while borrowing a little from Friedrich von Schiller's later work. Clever! The color palate is a tad boring, but the direction is unfussy and the editing tight. The set designs are excellent. It really looks like a cheap motel room!

All in all I found this a well-made, if not entirely original, piece of work. I'm certainly going to go back and watch earlier volumes.

lol