28 Film Discussion Threads Later

[baby doll]

Care to throw out a few titles? I've seen nothing. What's a good entry point?

My favourites, in roughly descending order, are Teorema, Il fiore delle mille e una notte, Accattone!, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, The Hawks and the Sparrows, Mamma Roma, and Oedipus Rex.

[baby doll]

Bertolucci's La commare secca, which Pasolini wrote, is also pretty terrific.

[Spinal]

I'm an admirer of Salo. I don't think it's about story. It's about constructing the surreal perverse cruelty of fascism and it does so in a way that's highly effective and appropriately disturbing. I would think it would resonate right now. It's the kind of gonzo artistic vision that makes the 70s so great.

I'll add another voice in support of Teorema , which is the best Pasolini film I've seen.

[Yxklyx]

Not much of a fan of Pasolini but I liked Teorema and Mamma Roma a lot. Salo was just pretty dull. It hasn't aged well but I can see why it was talked about when it was released.

[TGM]

Whelp, it appears Scarlett Johansson's dropped put of the project as a result of the backlash, so I guess that's that.

[Dukefrukem]

I was organizing my rankings in Letterboxd this morning and I think I've determined that 2005 was the worst year for cinema ever. I've never seen so many 1 and 1.5 star groupings before.

And 2012 and 1968 and 1954 are the best.

[Grouchy]

2005 is also my weakest year for the 'aughts.

An acquaintance of mine posted a letter of congratulations to Scarlett for having quit the project. I wonder if he realizes that she was essentially forced to by the backlash.

[Lazlo]

I was organizing my rankings in Letterboxd this morning and I think I've determined that 2005 was the worst year for cinema ever. I've never seen so many 1 and 1.5 star groupings before.

And 2012 and 1968 and 1954 are the best.

How'd you figure that out? I feel like a dummy but I can't think off the top of my head how to figure that stat without just sorting and counting manually.

[Dukefrukem]

How'd you figure that out? I feel like a dummy but I can't think off the top of my head how to figure that stat without just sorting and counting manually.

Unfortunately that was all I was doing. I am making a list of each year with the films I've seen and rank them using the LIST VIEW.

https://letterboxd.com/dukefrukem/list/2005/

[TGM]

So I finally watched all two of George Lucas' non-Star Wars movies that he directed. THX 1138 was alright, a decent directorial debut. I've seen about a million other movies that are almost exactly like it, and without doing any research, I'm not sure how many of those came out before this or not, so I can't say for sure how influential it may have been? But even so, still a pretty decent and interesting flick in its own right. I did watch the director's cut version though, which I believe was put together much more recently, so I don't know how different it is from the original release. But I'd be interested to know, because there's seriously a ton of visual, and especially audio, precursors to the Star Wars films littered all throughout, so I'd be curious to know how much of that was inserted post-Star Wars, and what all did Star Wars actually take from this movie.

Also saw American Graffiti for the first time, and honestly, I was pretty damn impressed by this film. It feels both incredibly familiar, yet incredibly unique all at the same time. Just the way the story's told over the course of the night, hopping from car to car, and having so much dialogue take place between people yelling at one another from different cars, yet it somehow just feels normal and natural here? I dunno, but this was a pretty delightful film, almost like a slice of life through Hollywood lenses, with charming characters in a fun setting, but told in a way that feels really fresh, even today. Really, this movie makes me wish that George had ventured outside of Star Wars even more as a director, to see what other interesting takes and ideas he could've pull off.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Right on. THX, GRAFFITI, and STAR WARS make up a seriously impressive three-movie run, and when you watch them in relation to each other, Lucas shows a lot of variability and confidence in his storytelling. He really was a terrific filmmaker for a spell there.

[Dukefrukem]

Back to organizing my rankings again on this Friday. 2012- what a great year for discussion (also the year I've seen the most films out of any year). Look how diverse it was. I'm not trying to point out quality here but just of how many discussion topics there was. Does this year stand out for anyone else?

Tent-poles/Franchises:

The Avengers
The Dark Knight Rises
The Hobbit
John Carter
Total Recall
Wrath of the Titans
Skyfall
Dark Shadows
Battleship
Hunger Games
The Amazing Spider-man
Men in Black 3
Underworld Awakening
Resident Evil Retribution
Snow White and the Huntsman

Horror:

Cabin in the Woods
Prometheus
The Tall Man
ABCs of Death
V/H/S
The Woman in Black
Antiviral
ATM
The Collection
Paranormal Activity 4
Sinister
The Lords of Salem
Chernobyl Diaries


Animation

ParaNorman
The Dark Knight Returns
Rise of the Guardians
Justice Leage: Doom
Wreck-it-Ralph
Superman vs the Elite
Brave

Action

The Raid
Dredd
Looper
Contraband
Haywire
Safe
Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning
Red Dawn
Bullet to the Head
Killing them Softly
Taken 2
Man on a Ledge

Comedy

The Dictator
Ted
21 Jump Street

Critically Discussed

Magic Mike
Leviathan
The Master
Springbreaks
To the Wonder
Zero Dark Thirty
Lawless
Lockout
Lincoln
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Django Unchained
Chronicle
Cloud atlas
Much Ado About Nothing
Mud
Moonrise Kingdom
The Grey
The Place Beyond the Pines
Argo
Life of Pie
John Dies at the End
The Intouchables
Side by Side
Pitch Perfect
Wrong
The act of Killing
Beasts of hte Southern Wild
Silver Lining Playbook

[Irish]

2012-2014 was a good period.

(Also, I like how you snuck "Prometheus" onto the list. Did you think nobody would notice your shenanigans? )

[Dukefrukem]

2012-2014 was a good period.

(Also, I like how you snuck "Prometheus" onto the list. Did you think nobody would notice your shenanigans? )

I should have put it in it's own category as "Universally misunderstood".

[baby doll]

I should have put it in it's own category as "Universally misunderstood".

It's possible to understand a movie and still think it's lousy. And in the case of Prometheus, there isn't all that much to understand in the first place.

[Wryan]

I watched Geostorm lol.

[Dukefrukem]

I watched Geostorm lol.

Me too. That's about right.

Funny thing is, I'd watch it again.

[StuSmallz]

Finally watched and reviewed The Dark Knight for the first time since 2008, and long review short, I felt that Nolan truly swung for the fences and constantly hit homers while doing so, creating an epic, multi-faceted, larger than life tale, driven by a dark, tragic tone, busy (in a good way) plotting, and an absolutely propulsive overall pace, almost never slowing down, but continually ramping things up to an almost unbearable degree, with a dread-laden, almost apocalyptic tone underpinning the whole affair. This is truly an uncommonly, undeniably powerful piece of pop entertainment, and all in all, my rewatch has convinced me that the (dark) knight in shining armor of modern-day cinema is officially here to stay, for a long, long time...

[baby doll]

my rewatch has convinced me that the (dark) knight in shining armor of modern-day cinema is officially here to stay, for a long, long time...

Given all the money Nolan's films have made over the past twenty years, I wasn't aware that there was any question of his not being able to continue making films (barring of course any unforeseen personal or health issues that would force him into early retirement). Or were you referring to Batman, or The Dark Knight?

[TGM]

I read it as him essentially saying that The Dark Knight has stood the test of time for him.

[Dukefrukem]

I'm re-watching the Mission Impossible franchise before seeing the new movie. The writers really don't stray too far away from the overall formula. So far, all three first movies involve terrible IMF employees.

Mission Impossible- Espionage thriller about a mole trying to sell information on the black market

Mission Impossible-II Action thriller about a former IMF Agent trying to sell a biological virus to a legit organization

Mission Impossible III - Wanna-be James Bond trying to stop a mole helping an arms dealer from selling a MacGuffin on the black market.

[Lazlo]

I'm re-watching the Mission Impossible franchise before seeing the new movie. The writers really don't stray too far away from the overall formula. So far, all three first movies involve terrible IMF employees.

Mission Impossible- Espionage thriller about a mole trying to sell information on the black market

Mission Impossible-II Action thriller about a former IMF Agent trying to sell a biological virus to a legit organization

Mission Impossible III - Wanna-be James Bond trying to stop a mole helping an arms dealer from selling a MacGuffin on the black market.

Haha, everyone's kind of on the straight and narrow in Ghost Prote. Rogue Naysh has villainous MI6 employees but I think IMF is generally good.

[Dead & Messed Up]

I watched MIRACLE MILE (1988) last night, and now all I wanna do is just think about the flick and talk about the flick. Not perfect, but so weird and exciting and specific.

[transmogrifier]

I watched MIRACLE MILE (1988) last night, and now all I wanna do is just think about the flick and talk about the flick. Not perfect, but so weird and exciting and specific.

While the characters were all in the diner, I thought it was excellent; as soon as they left, it becomes campy and shrill and unintentionally hilarious in places.

[Dead & Messed Up]

While the characters were all in the diner, I thought it was excellent; as soon as they left, it becomes campy and shrill and unintentionally hilarious in places.

I guess it depends on which scenes you think are "unintentionally" hilarious, as some of the film seems to operate with a sort of absurdist humor. The cops blowing themselves up, for example. Or the one driver getting so road-raged up by Edwards leaping on top of his car that he makes the final moments of his life about tracking down Edwards and shooting him. Love the priorities, guy. Those bits folded into a surreal streak that evoked AFTER HOURS and made the tonal shifts feel appropriate instead of discombobulating.

I would agree with you that the diner scene is a standout, but if subsequent sequences fell from that peak, they didn't fall nearly far enough for me to have a negative reaction.