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Author Topic: Write about the last movie you watched (2006-2010)  (Read 5998002 times)

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Re: Write about the last movie you watched
« Reply #26420 on: January 28, 2010, 03:46:22 PM »

24 City (Jia Zhangke, 2008)


Grade: A-

I remember very much enjoying Still Life. Since last year during the holidays when I saw the film, I haven't looked for any other Jia movie. I'll make sure to see this one at some point. Thanks for the review.

Make sure you see Platform then Unknown Pleasures as well.
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edgar00

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Re: Write about the last movie you watched
« Reply #26421 on: January 28, 2010, 03:52:27 PM »

24 City (Jia Zhangke, 2008)


Grade: A-

I remember very much enjoying Still Life. Since last year during the holidays when I saw the film, I haven't looked for any other Jia movie. I'll make sure to see this one at some point. Thanks for the review.

Make sure you see Platform then Unknown Pleasures as well.

The latter is available at my library.
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worm@work

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Re: Write about the last movie you watched
« Reply #26422 on: January 28, 2010, 03:54:31 PM »

24 City (Jia Zhangke, 2008)


Grade: A-

I remember very much enjoying Still Life. Since last year during the holidays when I saw the film, I haven't looked for any other Jia movie. I'll make sure to see this one at some point. Thanks for the review.

Make sure you see Platform then Unknown Pleasures as well.

And Xiao Wu (Pickpocket) and The World too! They're all really good.

edgar00

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Re: Write about the last movie you watched
« Reply #26423 on: January 28, 2010, 04:00:15 PM »
The library, which has an extensive collection of movies, only has 2 Jia films. Still Life and Unknown Pleasures.
-Le Chiffre: You changed your shirt, Mr Bond. I hope our little game isn't causing you to perspire.

-James Bond: A little. But I won't consider myself to be in trouble until I start weeping blood.

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joem18b

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Re: Write about the last movie you watched
« Reply #26424 on: January 28, 2010, 04:34:17 PM »
Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

21 questions I asked myself during this movie:

1. Who's going to get shot? Every man in the movie is wearing a gun. There are no bad guys, no violence, no threats of violence. Sure, they're down there in lawless Peru, but nowhere do guns figure in the action. Yet it's inconceivable that they'll get through the movie without somebody shooting somebody. A: Somebody got shot.

2. Say, this being a '30s movie, will the characters in it begin a lot of sentences with "Say"? A: Say, yes!

3. Why do I like black-and-white movies? I remember thinking, during, for example, Dead Man, and Manhattan, and this movie, how glad I was that they weren't in color. Color would have diminished them. But I don't watch color movies wishing that they were in black-and-white. What gives? A: I don't know, but I do know that cigarette smoke is much cooler, and much more dramatic, in black-and-white.

4. How wrong can Hawks go with the one black guy he puts in the movie? A: Very wrong. This being 1939, Charles R. Moore must have drifted over from Gone With the Wind, where he was playing Butterfly McQueen's brother.

5. A plane full of nitro and a flock of condors below - what to do? A: Drop the nitro on them. "That ought to move 'em!"

6. That boat coming into port - familiar? A: I just watched King Kong. Those '30s movies were great with the boats in the harbor mist.

7. How have line readings changed since the '30s? Turning on English subtitles calls attention to line readings and one current vogue has the actor pausing before ending a sentence. Think Michael Emerson in Lost: "You're going to have to kill me... John." A: Next '30s movie, I'll pay attention to this.

8. Kid Dabb says, "I've been doing this 22 years." Is that a big deal? A: Not when you're my age.

9. You know somebody is going to get killed. Can you guess who? A: I couldn't. It had nothing to do with the guns.

10. McPherson lands a plane on a short runway that ends at a cliff. Why is this familiar to me? A: Similar to landing in Los Alamos on a DC3. Except that the runway in Los Alamos is not on Barranca Mesa, but one mesa over from there (the movie is set in Barranca).

11. Can it be that for once a crashed plane on fire won't blow up? A: Wow. It's not blowing up. It's just burning, not bl... Oops, there it goes.

12. Does Jean Arthur have twice the normal number of teeth? A: I need to go back, pause the movie, and count them.

13. Who wrote this? I wondered, because of the bananas in the Andes. Peru joined the banana market only recently. I'm thinking that the writer assumed that any country south of Mexico is a banana republic. But wait, the NYT reviewer back in 1939 thought that the movie was set in Equador, which does export bananas. Peru or Equador, which is it? A: Howard Hawks himself wrote the story. The Corvallis-Benton County Public Library has a copy of "Plane From Barranca." Maybe I should call up there, and ask the librarian to take the book off the shelf and read the first few pages of it to me, to see if Hawks specifies a country.

14. Is Dimitri Tiomkin going to drive me crazy again, like he did in The Fall of the Roman Empire? A: No. His score is absolutely unobtrusive.

15. Does Grant say "Judy, Judy, Judy..."? A: No.

16. The movie was filmed in Hollywood but what about those tropical airplane sequences (not with the obvious little model, but the other ones)? A: Don't know how they were done, but the picture was nominated for the first-ever Special Effects Oscar. Didn't win it, and neither did GWTW or The Wizard of Oz. The Rains Came won it; now I want to see those rains; must have been really something.

17. Pilot wears a white shirt and tie, leather jacket, and snap-brim fedora - cool or not cool? A: Hayworth went for it. Whereas Cary Grant's Panama was just plain silly.

18. Jean Arthur or Rita Hayworth? Arthur is the romantic lead and Cary Grant tells her that she and Hayworth, his former girlfriend or ex, I forget which, are very much alike. Perhaps so, but there are a couple of big differences, which are obvious from the start. A: I'll take Arthur. Maybe Grant could handle Hayworth, but I couldn't.

19. Is Arthur quite a bit shorter than Grant, or not? A: She = 5' 3"  He = 6' 1.5" The difference is only apparent every so often. Richard Barthelmess, on the other hand, looked shorter than Arthur and he = 5' 8".

20. Kid and Bat, the deadly adversaries - are they going to end up in a deadly situation that recapitulates their antagonistic backstory? A: Three guesses, and the first two don't count (that expression was fresh in the '30s; now, 23,800,000 Google hits.) A line in the movie that I was surprised to hear: "I've always preferred a bath to a shower." Somehow I don't picture a lot of showers in the '30s.

21. Are these guys all supposed to be angels, because they're pilots flying dangerous missions? Is that the message of the movie, encapsulated in its title? A: Yes. They are manly men, by God, and Howard Hawks wants you to know it.





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Re: Write about the last movie you watched
« Reply #26425 on: January 28, 2010, 04:43:33 PM »
Watchmen:  The Director's Cut

...making this film longer doesn't make it better.

I just believe that the book can't be done proper justice on the screen.  Unless they maybe would have made it a 12 part Miniseries on HBO.

I find your contradiction interesting.

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Re: Write about the last movie you watched
« Reply #26426 on: January 28, 2010, 05:08:40 PM »

Claire's Knee - The fifth of Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales, it's a kind of mellow version of Dangerous Liaisons.  Jean-Claude Brialy (from A Woman Is A Woman, though now with an awesome beard) is on vacation at Lake Annecy (which is, like the beach house in La Collectionneuse, a stunning location and definitely a place I'd rather be).  He's about to move to Sweden to get married, when he meets an old friend who eggs him into a flirtatious relationship with a local teenaged girl.  He than falls more seriously for the girl's older sister, or more specifically, certain parts of her.  Like the protagonists of most of the Moral Tales, Brialy isn't a particularly admirable character, but he nonetheless remains both likable and sympathetic.  This seems to be something special Rohmer brings to the films, maybe it's in the leisurely pace, the dialogue and narration-heavy scripts, the visual relations between the characters and their environments, or just something basically decent and humanistic about the way he sees the world.  He's ever curious about behavior, and the lengths people go to to justify that behavior, but he never condemns and encourages that magnanimity in his audience.  I can't ever imagine feeling bad after watching a Rohmer film. 

It's really hard not to compare this to An Education, a film with a similar subject, albeit with a different point of view: that of the young girl in a relationship with an older man.  Despite that shift, though, the two girls in Claire's Knee are much more interesting and real than the girl in the newer film, and where Claire's Knee overflows with generosity and warmth, An Education is bitterness and cynicism, its characters existing, for the most part as cheap jokes or object lessons.


Fixed Bayonets! - Samuel Fuller's second Korean War film from 1951, it's not nearly as good as the first, The Steel Helmet.  Still, it's a rock solid movie, a kind of version of the Battle of Thermopylae with a single platoon of 48 men left to hold a mountain pass against the Chinese while the rest of their division retreats.  The heart of the movie rests with a corporal played by Richard Basehart who doesn't want to be a leader because he fears sending men to their death.  The film is structured around the deaths of the four men who outrank him, leaving him at the climax to face his fears and lead his remaining men to complete their mission.  As always, Fuller is grittier than the mainstream, but the whole thing feels a bit too schematic and doesn't ever reach the poetic heights of his best films.


Looney Tunes: Back in Action - Way better than you think it would be.  Brendan Fraser stars as a stuntman who gets mixed up with the recently fired Daffy Duck.  The two of them take off on an adventure after Fraser's father (Timothy Dalton) an actor who stars in James Bondish spy movies as a cover for his secret life as a spy.  Dalton's been kidnapped by the head of the Acme Corporation (Steve Martin, in possibly his worst ever performance) for something to do with some kind of jewel that turns people into monkeys.  As Fraser and Daffy try to rescue him, their joined by Bugs Bunny and Jenna Elfman (also pretty terrible as the executive who fired Daffy, sent to rehire him).  Director Joe Dante's achievement here is that he truly captures the anarchic spirit of the Looney Tunes cartoons.  There are jokes aplenty (visual, verbal, Hollywood satirical) some of them not funny at all, like Steve Martin's whole performance, but the rapid-fire pace never slows down.


Mission To Moscow - Part of the series TCM's been running this month on depictions of Russia in American film, this one is truly weird.  At the height of World War II, the Roosevelt government encouraged Warner Brothers to make this adaptation of the memoir of the American Ambassador to the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, Joseph Davies.  Michael Curtiz directs (it was his follow-up to Casablanca) and the film seems oddly split.  On the one hand, it does a yeoman's job of whitewashing the real concerns Americans had about Stalin's government (the show trials, the lack of industrial progress, the failures of the 5 Year Plans), but on the other, the film seems to covertly acknowledge that those fears are real.  More striking is a show trial sequence, when a number of Soviet officials (all of whom we'd met in the first half of the movie) are put on trial for plotting a Trotskyite coup against Stalin.  The trials consist almost exclusively of confessions (which with historical hindsight we can assume were forced), and Davies is there to assuage any doubts as to their veracity.  Someone even asks him "How can we be sure these confessions are real?" To which he responds "I've been a trial lawyer for 30 years: they're real."  Now, either he's the worst lawyer ever, or he's lying for the sake of propaganda.  I think he's lying and I think Curtiz knows it.  It shows in the way he directs the performances of the people on trial.  I think.  Maybe it just looks that way 60 years into the future.  I'd love to know what audiences thought of this film in 1943.
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Re: Write about the last movie you watched
« Reply #26427 on: January 28, 2010, 05:10:57 PM »
Watchmen:  The Director's Cut

...making this film longer doesn't make it better.

I just believe that the book can't be done proper justice on the screen.  Unless they maybe would have made it a 12 part Miniseries on HBO.

I find your contradiction interesting.

Touche...

Though I was referring to this version, not the awesome one in my head!  But you make a valid point.
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Re: Write about the last movie you watched
« Reply #26428 on: January 28, 2010, 05:16:33 PM »
Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

21 questions I asked myself during this movie:

So, did you like it?

Because I think it's pretty much perfect.
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Re: Write about the last movie you watched
« Reply #26429 on: January 28, 2010, 05:35:33 PM »

Still Walking (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2008)

Even when they die, people don't really go away.

The sadness. The poisonous resentments and disappointment. The way that family members can cut you to the bone.

The women, oh the women. The grandma.

I really have nothing to say. Easily the best thing I've seen in... well, ages. I think I need to go and weep for a little bit. Or a lot.


 

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