[!@#$%!]

one thing i just remembered is that the paris guy works as a translator. which very much speaks to what you said.

that is also in the antonioni movie-- the college kids "playing" tennis. regardless of whether or not that is an oxbridge tradition-- where is the ball? and funniest yet-- why do you hear it?

maybe hearing a tennis ball that wasn't there is what inspired coppola, though from antagon's description that was more of a non-subtle movie.

[Toilet & Bowels]

Saw It Follows last weekend, I think it might be the best new horror film I've seen in 10 years.

Watch Journey to Italy today, I liked it but don't feel inclined to say much more than that.

I also watched this film yesterday, it's surprisingly decent for the sort of thing it is, small-time crime caper with heart that works well with limited means, a very solid 7/10:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2724236/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

[gmku]

 

LOVED it!

[Diesel]

Originally Posted by Toilet & Bowels

Saw It Follows last weekend, I think it might be the best new horror film I've seen in 10 years.[/url]

Reminds me so much of Carpenters classic work. Atmosphere, cinematography, constant sense of dread trademark and even the soundtrack. Needless to say I had a 90 minute boner for the duration.

Off to watch Shutter Island and some Japanese horror called lesson of evil. Frightfest - film 4 peeps.

[LifeDistortion]

 

This movie is possibly the funniest movie of the year.

[Severian]

Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous

I don't care what anyone says Inception was a masterpiece and now that Sev has compared Interstellar to it i am finally interested..

Sometimes people just don't frame movies well enough.. like with Birdman, if people would have told me it was an existentialist flick about the decline of Broadway theatre i would have been more interested but all the previews sincerely made it look like another one of these garbage superhero flicks..

Oh there's a lot the two movies have in common... Especially in the different or changing experiences of "reality" and time. In inception, the further "in" they go, the closer they come to being trapped in a DMT-coma, a life experiences in minutes but feeling like decades ... In Interstellar, the farther "out" they go the closer they get to stopping time or even transcending it. it's the effect of relativity on time making the experience of reality different for everyone involved. It's a beautiful line of inquiry for a film maker to focus on. And it makes for some truly incredible drama.

[noisereductions]

It Follows was great yeah.

Recommend Starry Eyes as well.

[!@#$%!]

 

INHERENT VICE (PTA, 2014)
- mostly it was very funny, with a twinge of paranoia and some minor brutality. i hand't realized where the movie was sourced, so i thought i was a great movie detective when i thought to myself "this reminds me of the crying of lot 49", which pony had just been reading, and i thought i'd bring it up in the book thread, and at the end i spot that it was based on a book by thomas pynchon ha ha ha. but i liked this movie better than i like pynchon (sorry fans). in any case beautifully shot. great cast and all. good paranoid plot. enjoyable all the way, except for a cringeworthy spanking scene and maybe the very end which i was like-- eh! it's not a better movie than there will be blood but i enjoyed it more than the master and i forget what else. watch it in a good screen.

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

 

This was surprisingly a really good 90s style thriller.. however the ending was just so absurd to almost ruin it all.

[Severian]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

 

INHERENT VICE (PTA, 2014)
- mostly it was very funny, with a twinge of paranoia and some minor brutality. i hand't realized where the movie was sourced, so i thought i was a great movie detective when i thought to myself "this reminds me of the crying of lot 49", which pony had just been reading, and i thought i'd bring it up in the book thread, and at the end i spot that it was based on a book by thomas pynchon ha ha ha. but i liked this movie better than i like pynchon (sorry fans). in any case beautifully shot. great cast and all. good paranoid plot. enjoyable all the way, except for a cringeworthy spanking scene and maybe the very end which i was like-- eh! it's not a better movie than there will be blood but i enjoyed it more than the master and i forget what else. watch it in a good screen.

Opposite response here. I'm familiar with the book, and I was really looking forward to this, although I (like many) did kind of wonder how the hell a film adaptation of this thing was going to turnout. It's about as adaptable as Catcher in the Rye or Finnegan's Wake. But I saw the previews and liked what I saw, and I think PTA is one of the best directors out there.

But I thought it dragged and stuttered and was an overall disappointment. I think Jaquin Phoenix did a mostly great job as doc: his walk, his presence etc. but something about his delivery was offbeat in a literal way. Like, out of synch somehow. It got aggravating. Joanna Newsom was the best part. Brolin was ok, but there were some missed would-be great moments for his Bigfoot.

All in all, it probably shouldn't have been made. I did not dig.

[Rob Instigator]

 

Even when the filmmakers make it easy for Jolie, she still has a hard time actually acting out any emotional reaction other than slight amusement and slight annoyance.

[Severian]

 

This was not at all what I was expecting, but I think it may have been brilliant.
Ok, so the first ⅓ was exactly what I was expecting from a crime noir starring Ryan Gosling about a motorcyclist who robs banks to provide for his son, with music by Mike Patton and choice cuts by Suicide and others. It was Drive reminiscent. It was heartbreaking. It was brutally intense and sad and Gosling once again acted the shit out of the place.

But the rest of the film took unexpected turns to say the least. Like something written for a '30s pulp fiction short story collection, lives intertwine and stories overlap and everything unravels in all directions, with brief moments of salvation/redemption that, upon further reflection, become just unfinished tales of more unraveling.

Full of excellent performances (even by Eva Mendes), this film has a great deal of heart. It's so ambitious that I can't believe it all worked out so well. But despite how good it was, I longed for that first ⅓ to resolve and right itself, and get deeper and darker and grittier. If you're anything like me, you'll walk away with Gosling's performance and the devastating first third buried in your psyche.

Recommended. But don't expect another Drive.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Severian

Opposite response here. I'm familiar with the book, and I was really looking forward to this, although I (like many) did kind of wonder how the hell a film adaptation of this thing was going to turnout. It's about as adaptable as Catcher in the Rye or Finnegan's Wake. But I saw the previews and liked what I saw, and I think PTA is one of the best directors out there.

But I thought it dragged and stuttered and was an overall disappointment. I think Jaquin Phoenix did a mostly great job as doc: his walk, his presence etc. but something about his delivery was offbeat in a literal way. Like, out of synch somehow. It got aggravating. Joanna Newsom was the best part. Brolin was ok, but there were some missed would-be great moments for his Bigfoot.

All in all, it probably shouldn't have been made. I did not dig.

yeah, whenever someone tries to make a movie about a book i love it's a massive disappointment. or almost-- i know there are exceptions but i can't recall what they are at the moment.

but since i don't really love pynchon, i saw this purely as a film-- and as such, it works really well. i do not worship in the cult of PTA, so i have no positive bias towards him, but i agree with most critics this is a very good movie--81% favorable on metacritic is no small feat, even in the face of marketing machineries. i don't mean to make an appeal to authority as a valid argument, but it has to count for something as in "i don't think i'm totally off the mark here."

though i get your personal view as well-- you already had pictures in your mind the movie had to live up to, and books are made of words, no movie can live up to that to that challenge.

i thought joaquín is pretty great, don't know what out of sync means. as for moments brolin missed, i suppose you mean abridgements in the plot-- but those are indispensable in film adaptations.

serial formats like TV are best to bring novels to the screen, whereas feature films are closer in structure to the short story or at most the novella. that is the one fundamental problem of book adaptations to feature films-- extreme time compression requires major butchery.

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

 

Even when the filmmakers make it easy for Jolie, she still has a hard time actually acting out any emotional reaction other than slight amusement and slight annoyance.

Yeah she played this role like it was a character in Fight Club..

[demonrail666]

 

Raging Bull

Probably a good film to watch if you kind of remember DeNiro as a pretty good actor but have forgotten just how good, after watching him more recently.

[Severian]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

 

Raging Bull

Probably a good film to watch if you kind of remember DeNiro as a pretty good actor but have forgotten just how good, after watching him more recently.

Oh God yeah... Also one of the single most depressing films ever made. I tend to think of Taxi Driver and Godfather II as DeNiro's defining moments, but Raging Bull never fails.

As for recent DeNiro (more than just "recent" ... more like post-Casino DeNiro) it's true that his work has gone to shit. I'm trying to think of his last great role, and all I have is Jackie Brown. I honestly think Meet The Parents might have been his signature cinematic moment of the 2000's. Yeesh.

[evollove]

Almost two decades of DeNiro:

1997--Jackie Brown, Wag the Dog, Cop Land (!!!Three very good movies, I'd say)

1998- Ronin, Great Expectations (respectable quality)

Then what happened?

99/00 - Analyze This, Flawless, The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle, Men of Honor, Meet the Parents (a mix of having fun and bad scripts)

01 - 15 Minutes, The Score (more bad scripts, this time masculine genre stuff)

And that's been his career since. Having fun and lame cop/crime films. With maybe Silver Linings an exception.

Seriously, what happened? Does he just suck at picking scripts? I don't think he's ever bad (sometimes coasting, but not "bad" exactly) but most of the movies he picks seem like such a waste of time to make.

[Toilet & Bowels]

Originally Posted by evollove

Almost two decades of DeNiro:

1997--Jackie Brown, Wag the Dog, Cop Land (!!!Three very good movies, I'd say)

1998- Ronin, Great Expectations (respectable quality)

Then what happened?

99/00 - Analyze This, Flawless, The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle, Men of Honor, Meet the Parents (a mix of having fun and bad scripts)

01 - 15 Minutes, The Score (more bad scripts, this time masculine genre stuff)

And that's been his career since. Having fun and lame cop/crime films. With maybe Silver Linings an exception.

Seriously, what happened? Does he just suck at picking scripts? I don't think he's ever bad (sometimes coasting, but not "bad" exactly) but most of the movies he picks seem like such a waste of time to make.

Yeah, I'd love to get the inside scoop on what happened with him. I read somewhere that he got involved in some property investment thing that resulted in him having to go for the jobs that paid rather than took his interest. But who knows if that's true.

[Severian]

I forgot Wag The Dog. Brilliant! Great Expectaions was his last really dating role choice, I think, as that movie could have been extremely pitiful, and the part is a small but very important one.

His early '90s films were brilliant too. Awakenings, Goodfellas, Cape Fear.. He really crushed it back then, and was as much a living legend as Nicholson or Pacino. But yeah, aside from Silver Linings Playbook, which was still a pretty comfortable role for him, but one that he knocked out of the park even so, he's just been having a nonsense career since 2000.

A few thoughts:

• he hasn't been working with Scorcese, and he hasn't been able to establish the same sort of "home plate" relationship with any of Scorcese's modern counterparts.

• Scorcese has a new DeNiro figure in Leonardo DiCaprio, and he's turned him into a damn fine actor along the way.

• All the big character roles that might have gone to DeNiro, had he been of age, went almost directly to Russel Crowe (for a while) and Daniel Day Lewis, and such like, as soon as he 00's hit.

• remember how he had sort of a Christian Bale-like "difficult to work with" thing going on back in the day? That couldn't have helped.

Shit though, I miss him! He was my favorite actor for years. I know he's still got the chops, but Christ... Bruce Willis has aged more gracefully!

Poor Bob.

[demonrail666]

I'd love to know the reason for his decline. But if you wanna see a great actor really scraping the bottom of the barrel ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir791xwvOP4