28 Film Discussion Threads Later

[Qrazy]

The film you need to watch in response to your World Cup burn out is Wages of Fear.

[balmakboor]

If you're looking to watch Bunny Lake Is Missing on Netflix Instant Watch, don't, I've tried. It's painfully windowboxed and the movie takes up about four to five inches of the actual screen.

Doesn't sound like windowboxing. It sounds like widescreen that hasn't been enhanced for widescreen tvs.

[MacGuffin]

Doesn't sound like windowboxing. It sounds like widescreen that hasn't been enhanced for widescreen tvs.

Yeah, that's probably it. I'll have to rent it, I guess.

[Grouchy]

In the Loop
El Dorado
Le Samourai
Rec
The Assassination of Jesse James by the .....
The Book of Eli
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Wages of Fear
Ulzana's Raid

All those are good stuff.

[Skitch]

Directors cut of Dark City is as strong as ever.

[Rowland]

Legion (Stewart, 2010) **

Absolutely ridiculous amalgam of The Terminator and Carpenter's siege thrillers, only instead of Satan commanding the homeless to perform his dastardly sieging as in Prince of Darkness, we have God's angel army possessing weak-minded human vessels Ã* la the agents from The Matrix to swarm our heroes like mindless Romero zombies, apart from the inexplicable instances where they can crawl like insects and perform other superhuman acts, usually dependent on whatever scenario is most convenient to the internal-logic-challenged screenplay. Also, I expect an angel would be a bit less crude than to quip "Don't worry, I just want to play with your baby" before charging at a pregnant woman with a cleaver. It's because of this at-least semi-self-aware daffiness however that the film retains a surprising degree of watchability, in addition to the fine efforts by the cast, who manage to imbue their paper-thin characters with more pathos than the material warrants, and the solid directorial craft courtesy of former-ILM vfx-stooge Scott Charles Stewart (certainly superior to any given SyFy Original Production to which Walter Chaw ludicrously compares it), which manages to avoid the trendy techniques abused by so many genre hacks. So it's just a shame then that this thing loses momentum during its bloated second act, its hole-ridden screenplay never actualizes the potential of the scenario to any really surprising, tense, or meaningful ends, and the distasteful, nonsensical denouement takes its inherently right-wing politics a little too seriously after the goofiness of what preceded to register as anything more than a significant comedown. Still, that I liked this as much as I did suggests it'll have a robust future in its inevitability as a late-night cable staple. Be sure to stick around for the angel-fu climax, during which a giant-hammer-wielding angel freshly descended from Heaven deflects the bullet-spray from Paul Bettany's dual uzis with what appear to be metallic wings.

[Winston*]

Watched I've Loved You So Long. Good movie, exceptionally well performed, but
[

Show Spoiler

did people think the ending was kind of a cop out? Like they didn't have the guts to leave the audience having humanised a character who straight up murdered her child.

]

[MacGuffin]

Someone recommend me a cool British film a la This Is England.

[Boner M]

Someone recommend me a cool British film a la This Is England.

Scum & Made in Britain.

[MacGuffin]

Scum & Made in Britain.

Seen Scum and liked it, but I oughta give Made in Britain a chance. That also reminds me I need to check out Alan Clarke's Elephant as well.

[Winston*]

Seen Scum and liked it, but I oughta give Made in Britain a chance. That also reminds me I need to check out Alan Clarke's Elephant as well.

The Firm's great also (I haven't seen Elephant).

[number8]

Someone recommend me a cool British film a la This Is England.

Start with Shane Meadows' other films, though the Alan Clarke recommendations work too.

[MacGuffin]

Start with Shane Meadows' other films, though the Alan Clarke recommendations work too.

I wasn't exactly overwhelmed by Dead Man's Shoes when I saw it, but I think I may have to give it a rewatch, as it's on Netflix Instant Streaming in HD. So is Somers Town, which I'll probably give a try tonight.

[Boner M]

Seconded. Somer's Town and Dead Man's Shoes > This is England

EDIT: RE number8

[transmogrifier]

Here's a list of my Top 20 Directors according to the average score of all the films of theirs I have seen (minimum of four films)

1 David Fincher 80.4 (7)
2 Akira Kurosawa 78 (4)
3 Paul Thomas Anderson 77.8 (5)
4 Peter Greenaway 77.25 (4)
5 Sergio Leone 76.4 (5)
6 Michael Mann 75.9 (9)
7 John Sayles 75.1 (8)
8 Sidney Lumet 74.7 (6)
9 Sam Peckinpah 74.6 (5)
10 Paul Greengrass 74.3 (4)
11 Richard Linklater 72.9 (10)
12 Peter Jackson 72.8 (10)
13 Rob Reiner 72.7 (7)
14 Jean-Pierre Melville 72.6 (5)
15 Billy Wilder 72.6 (10)
16 Curtis Hanson 72.3 (6)
17. Lee Chang Dong 72 (4)
18 Michael Haneke 71.3 (6)
19 Wong Kar-Wai 71.3 (6)
20 Samuel Fuller 70.875 (8)

A lot of selective viewing there for sure. Rob Reiner WTF?

[transmogrifier]

Other notables:

25 Robert Altman 69.8 (25)
27 Martin Scorcese 69.7 (19)
40 Woody Allen 67.3 (36)
42 David Lynch 67.1 (9)
47 Alfred Hitchcock 66.2 (10)
49 Quentin Tarantino 65.7 (7)
67 Clint Eastwood 62.5 (11)
69 Stanley Kubrick 62 (9)
77 Werner Herzog 59.8 (4)
90 Brian De Palma 56.7 (15)
100 Paul Verhoeven 55.4 (7)

BOTTOM 10

137 Kim Ki-Duk 45.3 (7)
138 Todd Phillips 45.25 (4)
139 Roland Emmerich 44.8 (6)
140 Andrew Davis 44 (5)
141 Brett Ratner 42.3 (4)
142 Ivan Reitman 41.6 (9)
143 Kim Woo-Suck 40.8 (4)
144 John Badham 38.2 (5)
145 Gary Fleder 36.3 (4)
146 Michael Bay 34.9 (7)

[Watashi]

I'm more worried why Curtis Hanson is above the likes of Hitchcock, Scorsese, Lynch, Herzog, and Kubrick.

[baby doll]

I'm more worried why David Fincher is above the likes of anyone. Admittedly, I've just seen three of his movies, but neither Fight Club nor The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was anything to write home about. (Not having seen Alien 3 since I was ten, I'll withhold judgment on it for the time being.) While I suppose that Fight Club might seem edgy for such a commercial movie, that hardly makes the guy Fassbinder. Even among music video directors turned commercial filmmakers (the Michel Gondry-Spike Jonze-Mark Romanec-Tarsem Singh Hollywood hipster brigade), he doesn't demand a heck of a lot from the viewer. I don't think he's a bad director (although Benjamin Button is a very mediocre movie, even by the standards of year-end Oscar-bait; I frankly preferred Frost/Nixon and The Reader), but making slick Hollywood movies with Brad Pitt that are nominally more challenging than other slick Hollywood movies with Brad Pitt doesn't seem like a huge victory over the system to me. I'm tempted to say that he's the Park Chan-wook of America, except that nothing I've seen by Fincher is as good as Sympathy for Mr. Vengence.

[B-side]

I'm more worried why David Fincher is above the likes of anyone.

Yeah.

[MacGuffin]

baby doll: See Zodiac. It's far and away Fincher's best movie. Edit: And Se7en. Jeez, man, looks like you need to see the movies Fincher is known for before dissing him entirely.

As for Somers Town, it's great. Thomas Turgoose is hilarious.

[B-side]

I can only imagine how thrilled soitgoes has been regarding the recent influx of roughly 430352187255196529786 Mikio Naruse films on KG.:lol:

[transmogrifier]

I'm more worried why Curtis Hanson is above the likes of Hitchcock, Scorsese, Lynch, Herzog, and Kubrick.

That's the side effect of small sample size and ignoring films likely to be crap.

[soitgoes...]

I can only imagine how thrilled soitgoes has been regarding the recent influx of roughly 430352187255196529786 Mikio Naruse films on KG.:lol:

Well there's only been three new ones in the last few months, but yeah, I'm pretty stoked on those. I have a solid 15 of his films waiting to be watched on my computer though, so as excited as I am to see new films of his popping up, I have to find the time to watch them all.

Glynford and Bressoniac are my idols. They account for about 30 of his films on KG, which is to say 30 films available for the English speaking world.

[BuffaloWilder]

he doesn't demand a heck of a lot from the viewer.

In this instance, with the films you're referring to, two films that are pretty implicitly viscerally designed to be driven entirely by the emotional aspects of their particular concepts, that piece of criticism is a little silly.

Do you enjoy Mike Leigh movies? I get the feeling you enjoy Mike Leigh movies.

[Winston*]

Do you enjoy Mike Leigh movies? I get the feeling you enjoy Mike Leigh movies.

Is this supposed to be a slam?