Write about the last movie you watched (2006-2010)

[roujin]

http://www.vimeo.com/2778156
Diamonds of the Night (Jan Nemec, 1964)

No context. Just running and hunger and dirt. There's unexplained images, pretty awesome use of non-diegetic sound blah blah blah. What I like most about the film is just the main actor. The way his very being indicates this perpetual state of hunger and pain. Watching him feverishly trying to capture water in his mouth while it's raining is heartbreaking. The way he looks at a pair of shoes -- damn. Anyway, the film is told in almost poetic film language. Using only images to tell the story, it eschews dialogue and traditional narrative. There's these great almost "flashes", I hesitate to call them flashbacks, that one of the characters has as he sort of makes associations in his head regarding the things he sees. And there's scenes where alternate scenarios are provided and we're not sure entirely what happens (the ending could be seen in this way as well). Yeah, this was good...

Editor's Note: This is extra credit for the 60s World Cinema marathon

Probably underrating this...

[edgar00]

Non-diegetic sound?

[skjerva]

Citizen McCaw, so bad it doesn't have an imdb page?  not really that bad, but not too good either.  doc on santa barbara daily that gets bought up by a super-rich woman, McCaw.  she turns the paper into her playground, hires some buddies, fires some folks she doesn't like.  supposed to be the story of big-media today, and it kinda works for that.  better than that, though, is the idea of folks resisting employment that they believe is unethical, quite nice from that perspective.

[skjerva]

slumdog millionaire - second time, still maybe a Top 10, not so much a Top 5.  so clearly an attack on wealth; i am a bit less disappointed with the ending as i was last time (prolly cuz i knew what was coming :p ).  the memory/answer prompts don't hold up as well a second time through.

Gran Torino - are you fücking kidding?  what an absolutely horrible and fantastic film!  as i was walking out with a friend he said he has never been so conflicted about a film, i was thinking the same thing during the film.  so much bad acting, horrible dialogue, ridiculous situations, but also genuinely good, not even (or only?) in a campy way.  so tempted to toss this into my Top 5 or 10.

Citizen McCaw, so bad it doesn't have an imdb page?  not really that bad, but not too good either.  doc on santa barbara daily that gets bought up by a super-rich woman, McCaw.  she turns the paper into her playground, hires some buddies, fires some folks she doesn't like.  supposed to be the story of big-media today, and it kinda works for that.  better than that, though, is the idea of folks resisting employment that they believe is unethical, quite nice from that perspective.

every year i try start keeping track of the films i experience, invariably i stop doing this by the end of feb.  here's to another effort.  from a couple of days ago, i don't think i noted:

Taxi to the Dark Side - amazing to see the massive amount of overlap in Taxi with the other recent War on Terror/torture flicks: Standard Operating Procedure, Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, and even Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo, which i think is the best of the bunch (i liked SOP least)

The Weather Underground is fine. While it has many very strange choices going on (cuts away to ashtrays, film leader cut in for certain transitions, occasional droning soundtrack), i still think it does a good job of creating a sense of urgency that was the backdrop for the folks involved. nicely romanticizes engaged (radical) action, not unlike the efforts of Chicago 10, another decent film in the same family. like the terror films noted above, it is also interesting to see Green and Siegel reusing much of the archival footage used by de Antonio in Underground, while also nodding to the film by using some footage of it

[pixote]

Redbelt  (David Mamet, 2008)

Maybe one of the worst inciting incidents in the history of movies that turned out to be pretty good.  If I'd been watching on tv, I would have changed the channel right when the window broke.  Everything leading up to that was just so needlessly clumsy and dumb.  Then things got okay.  And then they got really good.  I was more interested in the "let the wheel come around" story then the subsequent twists that sabotaged that arc (that's Mamet's thing, I guess), but it worked out pretty well in the end.  I might be overrating this coming off the disappointment of Honeydripper, but, whatever, after an awful start, it was consistently entertaining and often badass.

Grade: B+

pixote

[jbissell]

If I'd been watching on tv, I would have changed the channel right when the window broke.

Yeah, people complain about the ending but that part was far worse.

[¡Keith!]

Reprise - Top 5 material and the best camera work of '08. 

[skjerva]

slumdog millionaire

Gran Torino

Citizen McCaw

Taxi to the Dark Side

The Weather Underground

The Prisoner, or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair - pretty standard fare for the sub-genre, guy tells his story about being interrogated and imprisoned.  what always stands out with these is there really is no why.  did like the humanized Abu Ghraib guard(, and the faux-conversation of him and Yunnis through editing).  not sure what to make of the animated bits, seemed to just provide a break from what otherwise would have been a fairly tedious story.

6

[Junior]

Wordplay.

Hilarious and crazy. This is a perfect doc for me. I liked the famous people and I liked the pros. Only the crazy teeth woman rubbed me the wrong way, but she was funny in her own way, too. Especially the baton twirling.

B+.

[sdedalus]

Non-diegetic sound?

Non-diegetic sound is sound that doesn't have a source in the world on screen.  Most musical scores for example.  if a character plays a CD or goes to a concert, that'd be diegetic sound.  It can be all kinds of sound, not just limited to music.  The wikipedia article I linked to has a number of examples, including one from a Bond movie.