Author Topic: Respond to the last movie you watched  (Read 684653 times)

don s.

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #1910 on: January 19, 2018, 10:45:35 AM »
Above Suspicion sounds great.  Right up my alley.  I'm going to look it up.

Wow, same here.
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Junior

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #1911 on: January 19, 2018, 11:21:45 AM »
Wonderful post Junior, thanks for sharing.

This is why we watch movies: to get those life-movie-moment experiences in the same way you might develop and grow as a person from travel, or going to a festival, or climbing a mountain, or meeting a new person or whatever.

I was overcome with a wonderful calmness and joy when I watched Call Me By Your Name for a second time in the theatres the other day. What an outstanding film. :)

Thanks for reading! I had that same sense of calmness and joy when watching the movie. Everything feels so perfectly placed, so well crafted, that you can just sink into the movie's world and enjoy your time there.
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Teproc

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #1912 on: January 20, 2018, 07:47:36 AM »
Taegukgi hwinalrimyeo / Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War (Kang Je-gyu, 2004)



The Korean War tends to get overshadowed from a Western standpoint by WW2 and Vietnam, so I was interested in seeing what a relatively big budget South Korean film would do with it. Not much, as it turns out. As with seemingly all popular Korean films, this is very melodramatic, which works when it comes to the relationship between the two brothers, but not so much when it's mixed with the massive violence on display. It feels at times like the cinematic transposition of a Call of Duty mission, with one of the protagonists seemingly impervious to bullets and prone to headshots... and that's not something I'm very comfortable with, frankly. I't's hard to call the violence in a war film gratuitous because, well, war is violence, but it does feel that way here.

The relationship between the two brothers is the most interesting thing going on here, with the brave, heroic one gradually becoming more unhinged and violent, but it's more interesting on paper than on screen, because his evolution feels more like a thing the film wants to do than a natural path for the character, and there is a turn late in the film that, while shocking and thematically interesting, is completely preposterous. The actor isn't bad, but he's not able to ground the character in the midst of all the insanity.

The action - misgivings about the violence aside - is pretty good, and I do like the meeker brother's performance overall, but it's not enough to make it all work.

4/10
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1SO

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #1913 on: January 20, 2018, 09:36:08 PM »
Above Suspicion sounds great.  Right up my alley.  I'm going to look it up.

Wow, same here.

Honestly, reminding me that Sanders is in that movie accounts for 50% of why I want to rewatch it.

I love posts like this because most of the time I think when there's a film featuring George Sanders or Basil Rathbone the response is closer to this...

Whenever I do write one of my reviews from the 30s/40s I hear DH having one of these reactions:

 


DarkeningHumour

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #1914 on: January 21, 2018, 03:49:36 AM »
He's Addison DeWitt, of course I know him!
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don s.

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #1915 on: January 21, 2018, 03:17:30 PM »
He's Rebecca de Winter's favorite "cousin"!
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DarkeningHumour

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #1916 on: January 21, 2018, 05:33:17 PM »
And I hear he's a tiger at night, if you know what I mean.
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smirnoff

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #1917 on: January 21, 2018, 10:55:27 PM »
Wind River (2017, Taylor Sheridan)   -   5/10

A female FBI agent from Las Vages shows up in snowy Wyoming to assist local police with a murder investigation. There's three tiresome cliches in that premise, and Wind River chooses to run with all of them. First: A lady cop, oh no... there's no way she's up to the task. Or is she?! ::) Second: person from somewhere warm comes to somewhere cold and is unprepared. ::) Third: jurisdictional pissing contest. "It's federal!" "No, it's reservation land!". ::)

The cast and the cinematography and the well executed action sequences all deserved so much better than to be built on this boring story. Wyoming in the winter is beautiful and large and this captures it. But the scene to scene drama was unoriginal or weirdly off key. The experience was just okay.


Lady Bird (2017, Greta Gerwig)   -   4/10

Not my style. It exists in a weird middle ground where it's not quite funny and not quite emotional. I had the same reaction to it as Noah Baumbach's Mistress America, Whit Stillman's Metropolitan and Hal Hartly's Trust. Lotta rambling. Lotta confident quirk.

You could push it left and it would be Napoleon Dynamite and I would laugh. You could push it right and it would be a Mike Leigh film and I would cry. Or you could do neither and put me to sleep. I get what the film is. I don't get what people enjoy about it.


The Shape of Water (2017, Guillermo del Toro)   4/10

Somehow watching a movie about a mute woman who had underwater sex with an aqua-monster my reaction was, "I wish it had been weirder".

I was initially pretty excited with the film and how it dove in the deep end and didn't come up for air. I thought "great, we're skipping all the boring parts where the protagonist takes 400 years to figure out what we already know". The film goes hard and fast and it had me completely at a loss for where things might be headed. And then it didn't. It hit the breaks and became just another love story.

It had me and lost me.


Meagan Leavey (2017, Gabriela Cowperthwaite)   -   1/10

Even worse than I feared a Hollywoodized military movie about a soldier and her dog could be. Just unconvincing in every respect. It tries very hard to be raw... To be the unglamorous side of military life, and thereby make you feel like you're getting a real story. But it's shot like a conventional blockbuster (without a blockbuster's buget). What I think it really needed was an indie touch. Just forgo the action/gunfire scenes entirely since they were way to generic to be any good, and cut right to the ugly aftermath.

The dog stuff isn't well executed either. Everything comes too easy. Blah.

DarkeningHumour

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #1918 on: January 22, 2018, 09:13:02 AM »
There it is. The one negative review of Lady Bird.
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1SO

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #1919 on: January 22, 2018, 09:38:57 AM »
And I agree with all of it, though the acting raises it to mixed for me.