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Author Topic: Write about the last movie you watched (2006-2010)  (Read 5997318 times)

Sam the Cinema Snob

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Re: Write about the last movie you watched
« Reply #28550 on: March 10, 2010, 11:16:50 PM »
It's not on netflix so I've got no way to watch it.

Clovis8

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Re: Write about the last movie you watched
« Reply #28551 on: March 10, 2010, 11:24:19 PM »
A Bittersweet Life (2005, Korea)

I have rarely had this much fun with a film. If you like gangster films you will love this one. 100% money back guaranteed.

Find this movie and watch it, right now! RIGHT NOW!

Grade: A+
I've been trying to get people on the boards to watch this film since I started posting.  It's not perfect, and I think you've overhyped it whereas my analysis is a more balanced rave review.  But whatever gets more people to watch it is good with me.

I'm not saying it's a good as Godfather or Pulp Fiction, but it's a hell of a lot of fun. It's ultra-violent and oozes cool. It's the most fun I have had watching a movie in a while.

It recently made the Empire list of the 20 greatest gangster films you have never seen.
« Last Edit: March 10, 2010, 11:28:22 PM by Clovis8 »

FLYmeatwad

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Re: Write about the last movie you watched
« Reply #28552 on: March 10, 2010, 11:26:22 PM »
Remember Me (Allen Coulter, 2010)

My feelings are really really mixed and undecided right now. I'll try and make sense of them and write something up for you guys (and myself) tomorrow.

Yes!

¡Keith!

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Re: Write about the last movie you watched
« Reply #28553 on: March 10, 2010, 11:33:44 PM »
The Informer

This film is unabashedly a farce, for better or worse, and I think the roster of comedians perhaps more accustomed to playing themselves than others in a lot of small roles verifies this. I think Matt Damon's performance here is really strong playing a kind of unsettling character. You see the really hokey part of him in the trailer (narrating for the wire tape) and he has this kind of "I saw it in the movies" view of life, but it isn't one-note. The film style does a good job mirroring the character's path, which is intellectually interesting but ultimately makes the film feel a bit long in the second half. It is a bit of a battle between artistic and narrative effectiveness. Kind of just ok.

We didn't see the same film!

Care to expand?

ant! ;)

flieger

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Re: Write about the last movie you watched
« Reply #28554 on: March 10, 2010, 11:44:13 PM »

Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton, 2010)
Another pallid reinterpretation of a "classic tale" by Burton Inc., more concerned with shallow, meaningless imagery than any semblance of a half-interesting narrative. Burton seems desperate, absolutely desperate, to fill the screen with his "vision", resulting in an onslaught of vacuity and clutter that evokes nothing, and more despairingly, symbolises nothing. The same goes for Elfman's relentlessly intrusive score, where every single action is backgrounded, or foregrounded, with music, music, music. The bookends of this film were awful, the insides just as much so.

Burton seems to think that just putting something on the screen, stamped with his inimitable middle-class, chintzy Gothic schtick means that the job is done. For him, process and conceptualisation is all, and the rest can go to hell. The man is just so damn conservative and timid, and mired in his own self-image as a "dream-maker" or whatever, that his films just reek. Take away his bloody toys, make him work with Paul Reubens again, and start making some real things.

Space was so needed. Absence, inference, something to exercise the mind as a viewer, instead of painful obviousness at every turn. The only thing that livened it for me was Crispin Glover's weird (artificial?) body, and Anne Hathaway's very effete and bent-elbowed White Queen. The rest just washed over me, until the dancing of Depp and Wasikowska at the conclusion infuriated me no end. Despicable film.

flieger

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Re: Write about the last movie you watched
« Reply #28555 on: March 11, 2010, 03:15:24 AM »

Green Zone (Paul Greengrass, 2010)
Matt Damon and his crew are looking for WMDs in the weeks after the start of the Iraq War. Problem is, each "intel-confirmed" site comes up negative, and Damon starts to wonder what on earth is going on. Who is the source for this crap intel? After asking at a command briefing, and getting slapped down and told to just do his job without question, Damon goes off to the next site, and meets an apparently friendly Iraqi with a tip about a meeting of ex-Ba'athists taking place. Just missing the main attraction there, Damon starts to get the idea that things are not quite what he's been told. The thing is, he steps right in the middle of an inter-agency turf war about the future direction of a "free" Iraq. 

It was great to be in the recreated chaos of post-liberation Iraq - rubble, looting, gutted buildings, angry crowds - and then be knocked off-balance by the swimming pool scene inside the Green Zone. Being a Greengrass film, the action on its own keeps you off-balance for most of the film, ending with a Bourne-esque pursuit through the streets of nighttime Baghdad. There are also some great little nods to Abu Ghraib and "Mission Accomplished" etc peppered through the film that doesn't drag the narrative momentum down. Greengrass has got that sort of thing down pat.

The engine of the film is the everyman, investigative and never-say-die ethos of Matt Damon's character. All it takes is one man, dammit, one man seeking the truth without compromise, and maybe we can make things right. This could almost be seen as the liberal version of a Rambo tale, but without the psychosis and huge pecs. But I digress. Damon is certainly no Stallone (read it whichever way you want), but more of a fully-functioning grunt trying to tread the right path, bypassing political spin to get to the truth. Problem is, he's the only fully-drawn character, with the rest, by necessity, inhabiting only shells of their "type".

This is the core problem with the film. There's none of that intense character-study, lone-wolf vibe that the Bourne films give off. Bourne is out and about, inhabiting the everyday world, but a sort of parallel everyday world filled with assassins and secret entities wishing him ill. In this film, Damon's character is in a war-zone, is part of a team, and the dangers are nowhere near as hidden or abstract. It just sort of dissipates the tension. There are no covert ops, just overt ops. This is a full-on war, dammit!

Pyrotechnics and smash-bang editing aside, this is an astute and cheeky film, effectively offering an alterno-history of the WMD debacle, producing a hefty middle-finger to the crooks and liars of the Bush administration, and giving the lapdog, lickspittle media that allowed it to happen one more chance to get their bloody reporting right.

worm@work

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Re: Write about the last movie you watched
« Reply #28556 on: March 11, 2010, 06:35:20 AM »
Platform (Jia Zhangke, 2000)

I wrote down that it was a sort of collectivist, intimate epic. The grand sweep of history becomes localised into little meetings discussing how much members are willing to put up to become part of the new privately-owned collective. Where female agency is constantly suppressed, by family, by lovers, by the state. And where commercialisation just sort of creeps up and robs the characters blind. Jia eyes are wide open, refusing to romanticise the collectivist past, but also squaring up to the new capitalism with a critical eye.
Whatever it is, and whether I'm even making any coherent sense, it was a spectacularly great film.

Yay! Thanks for a great writeup, flieger and am so happy you loved it :).

smirnoff

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Re: Write about the last movie you watched
« Reply #28557 on: March 11, 2010, 07:31:46 AM »
Great review of Greenzone flieger. I'm going to be checking it out this weekend.

'Noke

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Re: Write about the last movie you watched
« Reply #28558 on: March 11, 2010, 07:48:21 AM »
Thank you Flieger. You've made me very excited to see Green Zone.
I actually consider a lot of movies to be life-changing! I take them to my heart and they melt into my personality.

'Noke

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Re: Write about the last movie you watched
« Reply #28559 on: March 11, 2010, 07:57:10 AM »
A Bittersweet Life (2005, Korea)

President Baek: "Life is pain. Didn't you know that?"



Grade: A+


Must.Watch.Moviefilm!!
I actually consider a lot of movies to be life-changing! I take them to my heart and they melt into my personality.

 

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