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Author Topic: Respond to the last movie you watched  (Read 684087 times)

pixote

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #210 on: January 19, 2017, 06:18:02 PM »
Theeb  (Naji Abu Nowar, 2014)
This film is almost worth seeing just for the whites, beiges, and browns of the desert landscape. The storytelling is fairly simple and familiar, reminiscent at times of Rabbit Proof Fence, A Time for Drunken Horses, and even Where Is the Friend's Home? — though it lacks the personality of the latter. No real great moments, but no bad ones either. Abu Nowar elicits good performances from a cast of mostly non-actors, and I like his sense of rhythm and scope, even if the screenplay takes almost half its length to really get started. He's definitely a director I'd like to see more from.
Grade: B-

Weiner  (Josh Kriegman & Elyse Steinberg, 2016)
The virtues of this documentary are largely just the access granted to the filmmakers by Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin, during Weiner's run for mayor of New York City. The filmmakers are there to capture some very good moments and don't mess things up too much in the editing — but they don't do much to elevate the film beyond that. It feels very much like the first documentary of directors still learning the craft. It's not amateur filmmaking, but it's not fully professional either. Moments like the camera's lingering on Weiner as he scarfs down his lunch just sort of bothered me, feeling almost like a break in trust, in light of the amazing access that was granted. Mostly just a subjective response, I grant you, but there were more bombastic editorial choices that were equally annoying.
Grade: B-

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Junior

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #211 on: January 19, 2017, 11:39:43 PM »
Cameraperson

Not often does a movie come along and change the way you think about an entire genre. In editing and framing scenes from many of the documentaries she photographed as a memoir, though, Kirsten Johnson did just that. I never really thought about the people making a documentary outside of maybe the director and the subjects. But there are other people involved, and they too are important to the process of making a great movie. Here Johnson invites us to see the B-roll and unedited (or at least differently edited) scenes she filmed for others as pieces of her. There are a few more obviously personal touches here and there, mostly involving her adorable young twins and her Alzheimer's-patient mother, and they fill out a sense of family nicely. It is the other scenes, though, especially those in Bosnia both documenting the everyday lives of survivors and the brutally painful recollections of a rape victim, that really leave a mark. And the mark is what matters. "These are the images that have marked me and leave me wondering still," the opening paragraph reads. With a simple three-sentence introduction, Johnson has expertly staged a dialogue between herself and her audience. Each new scene had me wondering where the mark would come, and why she might be continuing to think and wonder at it. Some are immediately obvious, such as the long shot of a mid-west plain which is suddenly struck by lighting, eliciting a gasp from Johnson. Others, like a brief glimpse at a pre-fight boxer, doesn't pay off until much later in the film. It delivers. I couldn't tear my eyes away, delighting in the most adorable scene you'll see all year involving a young kid and an axe or welling up at a woman who feels such shame at an accidental pregnancy when she can barely afford to provide for her toddler. Johnson is everpresent, even when she doesn't speak, and it was fascinating to get a small peek into the way she sees the world. The last shot in the film says it all. Everything is interesting if you're paying attention.

Asuperplus


Under the Shadow

Motherhood is scary, y'all. I don't envy those who bear the title, especially when they're also living in a war zone. Such is the case with Under the Shadow, ostensibly a horror story about djinn, but really a horror story about trying to live under an oppressive regime and the constant threat of bombs and missiles. It's the 80s in Iran and a mother is left alone with her daughter. Or at least they think they're alone. In fact, they might be haunted by the local monster, the shapeshifting djinn that come on the wind. This movie sneaks up on you. It isn't until the 20 minute mark that you start to suspect something's up. It's much later in the film that you realize what exactly is going on, and how it relates to the cultural situation it depicts. The creature design, once it is finally revealed, only enhances this connection. I like this film a lot. It has several great scares, including a great jump-scare or two, and it feels very tightly constructed without squeezing the life out of it. I'm not quite ready to call it better than The Babadook, but it's certainly great.

A-


Money Monster

Eh, it's fine. If you watched the trailer twice you'd get most of the important bits. I hope Jack O'Connell keeps getting work, though, because he's really great here in a pretty dumb role.

C+


Deepwater Horizon

Surprisingly good film. I didn't know why this movie existed until shit started to go down. It's one thing to hear about a disaster like this one on the news, it's an entirely different thing to see it happen to real people, even when those real people are Marky Mark and Snake Plisskin. It's an intense film when things go really wrong, and it seems like a valuable piece of docu-drama filmmaking even if it does kind of neglect the environmental damage that resulted from the explosion.

B


Now You See Me 2

Does it help anybody if I say this is marginally better than the first film? Are you enticed by that statement? Me neither, though it is true. Mostly the goodness comes from a more coherent character arc for everybody, and I kinda cared about a few of them, even. Especially new-to-the-series Lizzie Caplan, who is always welcome in my book. She doesn't do much other than crack jokes, but at least they're fun and she's certainly got charisma. I'll watch the next one, I guess.

C


Sully

Love the repeated visions and versions of the event, a formal choice that pays off wonderfully in the film's courtroom scene. It's also always nice to see Tom Hanks on screen, and I think I might nominate Aaron Eckhart's moustache for best supporting actor in the Filmspots.

B+
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Bondo

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #212 on: January 20, 2017, 12:18:57 AM »
Netflix automatically started Under the Shadow with English dubbed audio. Did you guys switch to Persian with English subtitles?

I had to force the switch to Persian.

DarkeningHumour

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #213 on: January 20, 2017, 04:37:45 AM »
Silence

A+

Good to know. It is going to be the next thing I watch and I would hate to see Scorsese go bad. Will read your review later.

Lion  (Garth Davis, 2016)

Watching Lion, I was excited to finally have a film to root for in the Surprise category of the Filmspots. Then the hour-mark came and the film made its inevitable jump ahead in time and became the very rote story I expected originally.

The first hour is basically just beautiful shots of a small, adorable boy set against the vastness of India — his wide, bright eyes lighting some very dark corners. Sunny Pawar is really wonderfully cast, and Davis and cinematographer Greig Fraser film both him and the landscape with expertise, perhaps giving the editor too many great shots to choose from, resulting in some restless cutting. The lovely score by Volker Bertelmann and Dustin O'Halloran completes the sensory immersion into the child's nightmare, and it's all rather effective.

After the time jump, the baton of adorableness passes to Rooney Mara, but it's not her story, so that's no good. Dev Patel's role is weirdly thankless. There's little doubt what his character will inevitably do, so all his hesitations in doing it are frustrating and boring. Nicole Kidman adds a bit of emotion, especially if you're a mom yourself, but the trappings are too familiar. The flashback moments in this section aren't very well handled and a couple of them were even a bit cringe-worthy.

The ending does what's it's supposed to, and does it well even, but I wish the film could have found a different way to build to it.

Grade: B-

pixote


You didn't think the first hour pulled at your heartstrings too much? It was an excessive amount of « Hey, here's this adorable kid ; look at him get lost and sad and lonely and how very sad this all is. Look. At. It. » for me.

You're right about the second half. Too rote, too expected, too by the book.

Thank you, I read both!  It opened here today and we'll see it this weekend.

It's going to turn out that Australia-living saltine is in fact the mother in the movie, you just watch.
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DarkeningHumour

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #214 on: January 20, 2017, 04:40:11 AM »
Cameraperson

Not often does a movie come along and change the way you think about an entire genre. In editing and framing scenes from many of the documentaries she photographed as a memoir, though, Kirsten Johnson did just that. I never really thought about the people making a documentary outside of maybe the director and the subjects. But there are other people involved, and they too are important to the process of making a great movie. Here Johnson invites us to see the B-roll and unedited (or at least differently edited) scenes she filmed for others as pieces of her. There are a few more obviously personal touches here and there, mostly involving her adorable young twins and her Alzheimer's-patient mother, and they fill out a sense of family nicely. It is the other scenes, though, especially those in Bosnia both documenting the everyday lives of survivors and the brutally painful recollections of a rape victim, that really leave a mark. And the mark is what matters. "These are the images that have marked me and leave me wondering still," the opening paragraph reads. With a simple three-sentence introduction, Johnson has expertly staged a dialogue between herself and her audience. Each new scene had me wondering where the mark would come, and why she might be continuing to think and wonder at it. Some are immediately obvious, such as the long shot of a mid-west plain which is suddenly struck by lighting, eliciting a gasp from Johnson. Others, like a brief glimpse at a pre-fight boxer, doesn't pay off until much later in the film. It delivers. I couldn't tear my eyes away, delighting in the most adorable scene you'll see all year involving a young kid and an axe or welling up at a woman who feels such shame at an accidental pregnancy when she can barely afford to provide for her toddler. Johnson is everpresent, even when she doesn't speak, and it was fascinating to get a small peek into the way she sees the world. The last shot in the film says it all. Everything is interesting if you're paying attention.

Asuperplus

I would normally be made to want to watch a doc with that rating, but your description of it makes me believe it is not my sort of doc. It sounds very introspective in a way I wouldn't care about.

The first Now You See Me is loads better than this year's episode. Loads.
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DarkeningHumour

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #215 on: January 20, 2017, 04:58:33 AM »
Weiner  (Josh Kriegman & Elyse Steinberg, 2016)
The virtues of this documentary are largely just the access granted to the filmmakers by Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin, during Weiner's run for mayor of New York City. The filmmakers are there to capture some very good moments and don't mess things up too much in the editing — but they don't do much to elevate the film beyond that. It feels very much like the first documentary of directors still learning the craft. It's not amateur filmmaking, but it's not fully professional either. Moments like the camera's lingering on Weiner as he scarfs down his lunch just sort of bothered me, feeling almost like a break in trust, in light of the amazing access that was granted. Mostly just a subjective response, I grant you, but there were more bombastic editorial choices that were equally annoying.
Grade: B-

pixote

There are a couple of scenes I wish they had left out ; then, there is the car scene with Weiner complaining about them not being the best flies on the wall that feels like a moment of self-awareness on the part of the filmmakers. I am not sure what the movie is trying to do there.
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Bondo

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #216 on: January 20, 2017, 01:30:46 PM »
The Birth of a Nation (2016)

How do we fight for what is right? During last year's Presidential campaign, Michelle Obama popularized the saying "when they go low, we go high," which fits in with the lofty non-violent approach of Rep. John Lewis and of Martin Luther King, Jr. Reading Lewis' March series, one sees the challenge and benefit of such an approach. In some ways, it functions as a middle ground, demanding risk, putting yourself at risk of bodily harm and social ruin, even death, without the immediate gratification of anything like revenge. And where progress is seemingly non-existent, it is understandable that someone taking on the risk might start to figure they might as well get something out of the losing battle. This is all the more true in that non-violence needs perfect coordination, as Dawn of the Planet of the Apes displays so well.

The Birth of a Nation, telling the story of Nat Turner's life and the revolt that would demand the end of that life, might ask a similar question of when is life worse than death, the state of affairs so unbearable that it is worth risking everything, but gains its satisfaction in blood. When you get the pre-credit text comparing the body counts, it sounds a lot like the Israel-Palestine conflict, where violence from the oppressed group gets rebounded ten-fold. It certainly paints a bleak picture for Turner's approach, though the film oddly connects Turner to black battalions fighting in the civil war and ending slavery, suggesting that his tactics were a vital component. So it is hard to say what the film leaves you with other than a feeling that the Bible is pointless as a source of external morality because it can be used to any end. Rather, it might be best left as a source of internal comfort or resolve...like opium.

On the other hand, I think about the graphic novel Irmina, centered on a German woman initially studying in England who circumstance pulls back into Germany during the rise of Hitler and we see the pressure that the fear of losing what safety one has as a powerful incentive to not act. It isn't hard to see why atrocity is perpetuated when alternatives are so murky, why sacrifice to no avail. This feels all too relevant in present situations and I'm honestly not sure where I've landed on a theory of change. Part of me wants to duck out, feeling lack of political efficacy, and just try to find happiness in my own life. This is a rather privileged option to be true, but if I get out and march tomorrow, will it change anything?

Ultimately where this film is concerned, it isn't that the story shouldn't be told or known, but as a purely filmic venture, I guess I prefer my revenge stories as fantasy, the heightened realm of Inglourious Basterds or, to a lesser extent, Django Unchained. Revenge is such a historically terrible tactic that watching realistic films of the nature are just too depressing and unfulfilling. Parker finds no artistry to overcome this.

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #217 on: January 20, 2017, 01:45:47 PM »
Mustang  (Deniz Gamze Ergüven, 2015)

There should really be a Filmspot category for Best Juvenile Performance, like the honorary Oscars they used to hand out occasionally from the 1930s-1960s. Filmspot voters have been very kind to kid actors in the regular acting categories over the years — too kind, in my opinion. There are exceptions, but in general I feel that the quality of many of these first-time performances is attributable more to the casting and film directors than to the kids themselves, who also seem to benefit from a lack of expectations. But that's just me being cynical, I suppose.

There have been some very impressive juvenile performances over the past year, but I haven't seen one more impressive that Günes Sensoy's turn in Mustang. She delivers one of the most natural debut performances I've seen in a long time, full of quiet, playful intensity. I can only hope that a few years down the road, Ergüven follows up this Turkish Virgin Suicides with a Turkish Hunger Games and casts Sensoy as the lead.

Mustang represents a very strong debut for Ergüven as well, and I look very much forward to watching her skills develop over the next decade. This first film lacks, for me, any sustained moments of greatness, but it's still very appealing throughout, especially tonally and thematically. Highlights included: the innocent sensuality of the scenes in the water: the progression of the house from a home to a prison, from a prison to a fortress, from a fortress back to a prison, to be escaped from; the person on the phone, when asked if a long-haired guy was there, saying, "I don't have any queer salesman," which seemed to speak so much to the cultural climate of the area, with just six throwaway words; and the fairy tale atmosphere that imbues the whole movie.

I wish I better understood where the girls' very modern sensibilities came from, along with their modern clothes and accessories. The change in their upbringing seemed so drastic, but maybe I missed a key plot point. Were they raised in the city but transplanted back to the conservative countryside when orphaned? Or are their classmates equally modern and it's just a handful of these parents and guardians clinging to the old ways? I couldn't figure that out.

Grade: B

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Teproc

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #218 on: January 20, 2017, 01:49:50 PM »
I wish I better understood where the girls' very modern sensibilities came from, along with their modern clothes and accessories. The change in their upbringing seemed so drastic, but maybe I missed a key plot point. Were they raised in the city but transplanted back to the conservative countryside when orphaned? Or are their classmates equally modern and it's just a handful of these parents and guardians clinging to the old ways? I couldn't figure that out.

It seems they were raised somewhat permissivly after their parents death : the grandmother repeatedly says this is all her fault for having been too easy on them.

I don't know that I'd call their sensibilities "modern" anyway : they yearn for freedom... that's not modern, that's just human. Children rebelling against authority is nothing new.
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pixote

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #219 on: January 20, 2017, 01:56:55 PM »
It seems they were raised somewhat permissivly after their parents death : the grandmother repeatedly says this is all her fault for having been too easy on them.

Yeah, I agree, but it seemed too much, I guess. Like, even with that earlier line of dialogue, I couldn't reconcile their earlier upbringing with what transpires in the film. It suited the thematics of the movie, but I couldn't convince myself that it was fully genuine.

I don't know that I'd call their sensibilities "modern" anyway : they yearn for freedom... that's not modern, that's just human. Children rebelling against authority is nothing new.

They seemed like special cases in the context of this area, though, so I wondered if it's because they themselves were yearning for freedom extra hard; or if their guardians were extra conservative; or if their story wasn't exceptional at all, but fairly true to the village as a whole.

All of which is to say, I wish I had a been understanding of the context of their story.

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