hokahey wrote:I watched Moneyball last night. I thought it was excellent. Howewever, I am a baseball fan which I'm sure helped me appreciate the movie more than I would have otherwise.
Proud to be an A's fan since day 1
Even though our owner is currently flushing the team down the drain
Just saw Stardust, recommended by my Israeli friend that visited me last week.
Claire Danes is painfully beautiful.
And this must be the first fantasy film I've ever seen. If I had read the plot first, I'd never seen it... but it turned out to be pretty fun. The cast and performances are quite good, and everything was so ridiculous it ended up being enjoyable. A nice romantic/fantastic comedy.
paradise lost part 3 on hbo about the west memphis 3 - great.
descendants - very good if you like alexander payne. painful if you don't.
and last night i watched one of the worst B movies of all time but whenever its on, i find myself drawn to it like roadkill. so while it doesn't really fit this category since its not a good movie, i heartily recommend 'May' for late night insomnia theater.
watched this last night hasn't even been released in the states yet..but can already guess it won't be on my top of 2012 list...was ok just nothing special...think it comes out in the states in april
I saw the other day "Mother and Child" with Naomi Watts and Annette Bening. All I have to say that there are quite a few movies that get to me and that I can't stop thinking about them, and this is one of those. Just checked the imdb page, no wonder I liked it, it was written and directed by Rodrigo García, Gabriel García Márquez son.
saw this today. michelle williams was very good. if it wasn't such a tough year for the best actress category, i bet she'd take it.
looking forward to that. when i named a few films here the other day i forgot about having seen blue valentine recently in which she and ryan gosling give an acting clinic. sad as shit but man are they both great.
A documentary, shot completely in black and white, about the homeless community living in the abandoned subway tunnels under NYC between 1995 - 1999, with musical score by DJ Shadow.
Pretty fascinating stuff. They even had electricity down there.
I saw this documentary some time ago (not the anniversary edition though).
There is a moving tribute to a homeless artist who lived in the tunnels and died there in a fire a few days ago.
The movie is not fast moving but the tension really grips you. The film is well shot, superb acting and cast too. Gary Oldman was brilliant!
Not sure how the film compares to the book as I've not read it.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – review The new adaptation of John le Carré's novel is a brilliant study of the disenchantment, compromise and tension of the 1970s spy game
Director Tomas Alfredson came to prominence with Let the Right One In, a story about vampires, but his instinctive, even passionate sympathy for the undead was never better displayed than here. This is a skin-crawlingly atmospheric, uncompromisingly cerebral and austere account of John le Carré's cold war espionage novel, adapted for the screen by Peter Straughan and the late Bridget O'Connor. Gary Oldman plays the melancholy agent George Smiley, brought out of his humiliating retirement and charged with rooting out a Soviet mole in the upper reaches of the secret service.
Could it be Alleline (Toby Jones), Haydon (Colin Firth), Bland (Ciarán Hinds), Estherhase (David Dencik) – or someone else? Like Michael Corleone contemplating Fredo's duplicity, Smiley's face is a mask of icy determination. He is also suppressing emotional agony. One of these men has betrayed him personally.
When the BBC television adaptation with Alec Guinness was on the air in 1979, this was contemporary drama. Now it's a 70s period piece. Distance lends yet more disenchantment to the view. We are miles away from Bond glamour: defeating the clearly defined bad guy, getting the girl, and so on. This is an arena of shabby compromises enacted by anxious middle-aged men who feel, to quote Kathy Burke's research agent Connie Sachs, "seriously under-fucked". It is a tatty, nasty, shabby and stiflingly male world of beige and grey, seen through a dreary particulate haze – fag-ash and dandruff. The interiors and government offices are lit with a pallid, headachey glow. Every room looks like a morgue, and the corpses are walking around, filling out chits, wearing ill-fitting suits, having whispered conversations, giving and receiving bollockings and worrying about loyalty.
The movie brilliantly conjures up the heavy weather of Le Carré's spy game: it involves nothing like derring-do, but a ritual of humiliation and a ballet of shame in which the security services play their part in managing decline and managing denial, and the Brit spooks try to rebuild their reputation with the Americans – the only people with secrets worth keeping – in their calamitous post-Philby world. Alfredson shows how the profession of secrets meshes with sexual shame, heterosexual and homosexual: perhaps because married womanisers and in-the-closet gay men are good at pretence and doublethink, and perhaps because they yearn for a world which makes a virtue of deceit. In his visit to Moscow this week, David Cameron regaled his hosts with an ingenuous anecdote about being approached as a fresh-faced teenager during a Russian trip in his 1985 gap year. Two men encountered him on a beach, then took him to lunch, then dinner, and flatteringly asked him about politics. Cameron laughingly says it was a "KGB interview". Well, yes. But were they to collaborate on a film version, Le Carré and Alfredson might give us a clearer hint about the subtexts to this predatory encounter.
The somnambulist gloom of Tinker, Tailor is animated by two chillingly realised setpieces: in one, an agent named Prideaux (Mark Strong) is summoned by the spy-chief Control, played by John Hurt, and ordered to go to Budapest where he is to bring in a Hungarian general who wants to come over to the west and reveal the mole's identity. His initial meeting with a third party at a far-from-innocuous cafe takes place in circumstances crackling with unease, an almost Truman Show theatre of paranoia. A droplet of sweat from the waiter's brow lands on the table, like the first sign of a thunderstorm. The meeting ends in calamity, and is to trigger the forced resignation of Control and Smiley, an unjust humiliation they accept like the good chaps they are.
The second setpiece takes place in Turkey, and involves the young hothead Ricki Tarr, played by Tom Hardy, the nearest thing this drama has to a Bond figure. Tarr is an other-ranks figure in his blue denim shirt, not a member of the Smiley officer class, spying on a louche military attache. Alfredson creates a tremendous Rear Window tableau of sex and violence in the distant lighted windows of grim apartment buildings. Romantically, in the middle of this bloodbath, Tarr is to fall in love with this man's beautiful wife Irina (Svetlana Khodchenkova), who is in a position to give him far more important intelligence than the man he is following. At a crucial stage in the proceedings, Tarr promises to help Smiley, but makes him give a vital promise in return, and the consequent betrayal colours the drama with yet more dishonesty and bad faith.
This Tinker Tailor is a weightless, slo-mo nightmare taking place in what looks like an aquarium filled with poison gas instead of water: I found it more gripping and involving than any crash-bang action picture, and it is anchored by Gary Oldman's tragic mandarin, a variation on Alec Guinness which transfers the emphasis away from George Smiley's wounded feelings to his cool capacity for unconcern in the face of violence, a hint of a daredevil past, long mummified by bureaucratic self-control and a schoolmasterly scorn for his victim's weakness and disloyalty, while seeing how easily any agent could give the wretched Judas kiss. What a treat this film is, and what an unexpected thrill.
Matz wrote:Cliff Martinez is pretty brillant though. If anyone doubt that watch the movie Solaris. Super beautiful music, and it's a cool movie as well
Yeah, he's become a big name in "ambient film scores". He did the score for Traffic. I listen to some ambient internet music channels often while doing work and his stuff pops up a lot.
chaos wrote:I wanted to like this movie, but I almost stopped watching the DVD after the first 20-25 minutes. I stuck it out and it got better. I could see where/what the filmmaker was trying to go/do, but it just didn't work.
I just watched it last night and feel the exact same way. The concept of an entire movie of first-person perspective dream-like memory sequences with little dialogue, although unconventional, I wanted to be down with it. However, a little bit more of a linear plot would have helped. The thing that really made me decide I didn't like the movie is the ending. It seemed like they just needed to end it somehow, so they tacked on this BS heaven sequence.
Matz wrote:Cliff Martinez is pretty brillant though. If anyone doubt that watch the movie Solaris. Super beautiful music, and it's a cool movie as well
Yeah, he's become a big name in "ambient film scores". He did the score for Traffic. I listen to some ambient internet music channels often while doing work and his stuff pops up a lot.
Three semi-recent so-called ambient film scores I would highly recommend checking out if you haven't already are the scores for "The Prestige," "The Fountain" and hardest to find, "The Machinist."
Six7Six7 wrote:Just as bad as i thought it would be. Nick Cage should not be allowed to play super heroes.
There's a Ghostrider sequel that Cage filmed about 2 years ago that's finally getting released soon that looks every bit as stupid as the first one was. Then there's the aborted Nicolas Cage Superman movie that was going to be directed by Tim Burton about 8 years ago that had the plug pulled just as they went into production.
Cage is a huge comics and monster movie buff. Over a decade ago when he had money to burn, he routinely blew hundreds of thousands of dollars on comics and movie memorabilia. The biggest deal I can recall, he bought a copy of Superman (Action Comics) #1 for something like $200k, lost it in a home theft, recovered it a decade later and just sold it through auction for something like $2 million. The last year, he's been selling all his stuff through agents on eBay and auction houses as I guess he has major back owed tax issues.
Matz wrote:Cliff Martinez is pretty brillant though. If anyone doubt that watch the movie Solaris. Super beautiful music, and it's a cool movie as well
Yeah, he's become a big name in "ambient film scores". He did the score for Traffic. I listen to some ambient internet music channels often while doing work and his stuff pops up a lot.
Three semi-recent so-called ambient film scores I would highly recommend checking out if you haven't already are the scores for "The Prestige," "The Fountain" and hardest to find, "The Machinist."
just watched The Machinist for the first time not long ago. I'm really impressed with Christian Bale as an actor and what he's willing to put his body through to nail a part. Try to compare him in The Machinist with American Psycho fx. pretty impressive
Larry B. wrote:I hated, HATED The Machinist. Easily one of the most overrated flicks I've seen.
I didn't hate it but I do think it's very over rated aside from Bale's physically amazing transformation to do the role. It's essentially a knock-off of something you'd expect from M. Night Shyamalan (in his better days) like Sixth Sense with the "trick ending" thing. I will say the scene with the machine shop accident is pretty harrowing, as I saw a few comparable things like that in my sheet metal mechanic/aerospace days.
But I love the soundtrack which is a neat homage/rip-off of arguably the greatest film music composer of all time, Bernard Herrmann's more otherworldly movie scores complete with Theremin.
