[atari 2600]

I'm listing twenty-five. List however many you want.

1 Rescue Dawn
2 No Country for Old Men
3 3:10 To Yuma
4 Control
5 The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
6 Eastern Promises
7 Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
8 Sicko
9 Michael Clayton
10 Zodiac
11 The Great Debaters
12 Into the Wild
13 My Kid Could Paint That
14 Hot Fuzz
15 American Gangster
16 Superbad
17 Grindhouse
18 Knocked Up
19 The Darjeeling Limited
20 Ratatouille
21 The Simpsons Movie
22 In the Valley of Elah
23 The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
24 Lars and the Real Girl
25 Paranoid Park

I haven't seen Atonement, Juno, or Cassandra's Dream.

[Sheriff Rhys Chatham]

I think your sums it up quite well. There's a few there I haven't seen though.

[SpectralJulianIsNotDead]

Holy poop you watch a lot of movies.

1. No Country For Old Men
2. Darjeeling Limited
3. Juno
4. Rescue Dawn
5. Superbad
6. Knocked Up
7. Superbad
8. Simpsons movie

still want to see: Pathfinder (haha I know it is gonna be crap), There Will Be Blood, Hot Fuzz, The Lookout

[Rob Instigator]

I think I have only seen like ten movies that came out last year

of those I liked

No Country for Old Men
Eastern Promises
Children of Men

[SpectralJulianIsNotDead]

Isn't Children of Men 2006?

[Rob Instigator]

maybe, what do I know?

movies are a total waste of time.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

maybe, what do I know?

movies are a total waste of time.

ha ha come on, some are art.

eastern promises, no country for old men and rescue dawn were awesome.

then again my favorite movie of the year bar none was "killer or sheep", which was re-released in a fresh new print this past year.

if you don't believe me some movies are art, and great art, please watch this masterpiece, you won't regret

 

worth every second of your time.

[Rob Instigator]

I know. They are not my preferred form of art intake though.

I have seen some wonderful films, as high in art as anything else ever made.

most movies to me, even the GREAT ones, are like short stories, and not like novels.
due to the inherent limits of film it is nearly impossible to truly adapt the depth and scope of even the shortest novella into a film. all you can do is "streamline" the story and make the movie. this to me is quite unsatisfying. even great movies deal with topics on a very shallow level. it is just impossible for film, for a 2 or 3 hour film, to convey the depth and riches that a written novel brings.

short stories are wonderful, and CAN be life changing, but the ratio is quite small, same for films, while even mediocre novels can impact one's life in deep ways.

it is like Cliff Notes. I can plainly see th gaps.

[king_buzzo]

con-fucking-trol.

[Rob Instigator]

hey !@#$$#, the ending of Eastern promises SUCKED ASS. it brought the movie down from a solid 5 star rating to a 4 star rating.

It felt tacked on and "hollywood" happy.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

hey !@#$$#, the ending of Eastern promises SUCKED ASS. it brought the movie down from a solid 5 star rating to a 4 star rating.

It felt tacked on and "hollywood" happy.

no, the hollywood ending would have been he gets out & lives w/ that chick happily ever after. there was a foreshadowing with that girl that he fucks in front of that guy getting "rescued". it was not unexpected. sure the ending is happy for the midwife and the whore's baby and the etc-- but he self-sacrifices in order to provide that. in hollywood movies the sacrificed hero is magically saved by his good deeds somehow--ok, not in terminator 2-- but he wasn't "human".

i guess, i don't know. i wasn't disappointed at all with eastern promises. it was not implausible. for him it's a very dark fucking ending though.

about the short story-- yeah i hear you, of course it is like that. in some cases more like a novella. screenplays are usually 100 pages doublespaced with lots of instructions so yeah.

if you're ever craving a visual piece that feels more like a novel please check out the wire dvds, start with season one, and follow them-- brilliant tv, from a great writer.

i have disc 1 of berlin alexanderplatz (a miniseries directed by fassbinder) and i've yet to watch it.

anyway i gotta get back to work but please check out killer of sheep. you'll love it for what it is-- a brilliant, beautiful movie.

[Rob Instigator]

will do!

[atsonicpark]

I dunno, I mainly pay attention to films released in other countries, specifically Japan, and all the 2007 Japanese films I wanted to see haven't been released here yet, so I'll just say the best film I saw in 2007 was "Rampo Noir", which is still fairly recent.

Uh, saw a few of the movies on atari's list, "Superbad" was good. "Eastern Promises", obviously Cronenberg is amazing, so yeah. "Grindhouse" was brought down by the second half, which was just god awful. And I still haven't seen "Zodiac" though I need to -- really can't wait to see that, though I've heard nothing but bad things about it from people I know who saw it. Don't know how it could possibly be bad, but I'll see. I mainly slogged through lots of shitty DVD's, like "Murder Party" and that movie about the killer sheep [EDIT: not "Killer of Sheep", it was a movie with sheep.. fuck I can't remember the name of it...] . Not to mention all the AWFUL Masters of Horror films. I enjoyed "Live Free or Die Hard". "The Simpsons Movie" was also pretty cool. I dunno. "Spiderman 3" was fucking terrible. My girlfriend made me sit through some stupidass Eddie Murphy movie that was terrible. She also made me sit through some other stupidass movie, "The Brave One" or something, which was hilarious because this black dude goes up to Jodie Foster and goes "GIVE ME RADIOHEAD." and points at his dick. Awful film. All in all, a typically shitty year for film based on what I saw, but what else i s new?

[SpectralJulianIsNotDead]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

I know. They are not my preferred form of art intake though.

I have seen some wonderful films, as high in art as anything else ever made.

most movies to me, even the GREAT ones, are like short stories, and not like novels.
due to the inherent limits of film it is nearly impossible to truly adapt the depth and scope of even the shortest novella into a film. all you can do is "streamline" the story and make the movie. this to me is quite unsatisfying. even great movies deal with topics on a very shallow level. it is just impossible for film, for a 2 or 3 hour film, to convey the depth and riches that a written novel brings.

short stories are wonderful, and CAN be life changing, but the ratio is quite small, same for films, while even mediocre novels can impact one's life in deep ways.

it is like Cliff Notes. I can plainly see th gaps.

I try not to compare film and literature.

The only movies that come close to their novel companions are One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Catch-22. But the film adaptation One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest lacks Bromden's view of the world and what they were doing in there which is a huge metaphor for society. The Catch-22 movie focuses more on the death of Snowden then the book, but it lacks a lot of things that are impossible to convey in a movie. Yossarian thinking that he knew why Jesus went and lived with the lepers. Or the part where Yossarian is thinking about grabbing the nurse's snatch. (those 2 parts really stuck out to me and were very well written)

Conversely though, a great film to book adapatation is non-existant. Could you imagine The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly without the music and those camera shots? Or any Sergio Leone film. In all of his films, when you hear a gunshot, you really hear it. The sound of a gunshot in his films is breathtaking and heart stopping.

[SpectralJulianIsNotDead]

BTW, I haven't read No Country For Old Men, but from what I've been told, the book is pretty much the same. I think newer books might translate better because they have been inspired by film.

[Rob Instigator]

very true.

but movies regularly use literature as their source material.
it is quite the oppoosite with movies being used as source material for literature. (besides the obvious ghost-written novel adaptatios of hit movies)

[toxic johnny]

1 Inland Empire
2 Control
3 The Science Of Sleep
4 I’m Not There
5 A Prairie Home Companion
6 Paranoid Park
7 Bug
8 Sherrybaby
9 La Noche De Los Girasoles
10 Two Days In Paris

Honourable mentions to:
Rescue Dawn (I'm a big Herzog head but I was slightly disappointed with the ending of this one...)
Black Book
Babel
28 Weeks Later
Zodiac
The Lives Of Others
Paris J’taime
Death Proof
The Singer
Eastern Promises
The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford
Wassup Rockers (one half genius one half trash)

2007 was notable for me because I finally popped my Cassavetes cherry and boy was I not disappointed... A Woman Under The Influence, Opening Night and Shadows all lit up my world.

We here London Europeans didn't get No Country For Old Men Until Last weekend... so we have to count it as a 2008 movie. It is truly fantastic though and it's gonna be a tough cookie to beat this year.

I saw a lot of movies last year and hope to see even more this year... aah celluloid.

[SpectralJulianIsNotDead]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

very true.

but movies regularly use literature as their source material.
it is quite the oppoosite with movies being used as source material for literature. (besides the obvious ghost-written novel adaptatios of hit movies)

In general the best movies are not adapted from books. There are a few exceptions.

The Graduate, the Shining, and Psycho are all great movies. In those cases the directors were all very talented and simply used the book for the story and used their amazing vision to make quite wonderful movies.

I haven't read the book versions of any of those, but I get the impression that none of them were incredibly wonderful novels.

[Rob Instigator]

the shining movie is like a shot of whiskey

the shining book is like a three day bender in Tijuana

way way better IMO.

ut it is not about "better" or "worse" really, as much as it is about shallowness and depth.
films, even the most deep multi-layered, symbolic ones, can only hope to achieve a mere fraction of the depth of a novel.

[!@#$%!]

back for lunch break, to say i saw control and it was an ok movie, but it didn't blow my mind except for the fact that it was a black and white movie in a 2.35:1 ratio--highly unusual.