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ysbreker

Seen any good movies lately?

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Did you think I was comparing it to Hotel Rwanda?
Nah, I was just bitching on the subject that you provided.

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Let's see, I think the only things I've seen over the past few weeks are Million Dollar Baby, Life Aquatic, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. All of them are excellent. Of the bunch I probably liked Life Aquatic the most. Hilarious movie. I liked The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but I was actaully a bit disappointed by it because I was expecting it to be better than Once Upon a Time in the West, and it wasn't. Still an awesome movie, but I think it was as awesome as OUATITW (how the heck are you supposed to abbrivate this things?). Oh, I just remembered I borrowed Veritgo and Strangers on a Train a few weeks back too. Natrually, they were also excellent.

So, has anyone here seen Sin City yet?

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No I haven't being as I am of the european variety, but I think that there is this really strange trend of movies getting ridiculously good casts!

To name a few in no particular order

Mystic River

The Royal Tennenbaums

The Life Aquatic

Sin City

Ocean's Eleven

Ocean's Twelve (They could have also called that one Ocean's Dozen but I guess "the People" would have been confused...)

amongst many others

Is this the new Hollywood trend to invest in such starpower that the success is completely secure simply because of the combined fanbase of the names involved?

Movies I saw and liked for no particular reason:

:tup:Cellular (surprisingly nice simple movie without any bad moments)

:tup:White Chicks (I know, but to me the Wayans Brothers can get away with it)

:tup:Once Upon A Time In The West (Had never seen it before and was really blown away by the simplicity and purity of the movie)

:tup:Old Boy (great movie all in all if sometimes actually hard to watch in its cruellty but then I guess that is the point)

:tmeh:Million Dollar Baby (why make a movie about boxing and then turn it into a story about euthanasia? think it's trying too hard to be significant and should rely more on its strong characters)

:tmeh:House Of Flying Daggers (to me they all seem kind of contrived at this point, I still like the idea of having characters plot and martial arts in one movie but this one at times feels like a b-movie, the camera is trying to be good but in a lot of shots simply isn't)

:tmeh:Mists of Avalon (yes so it's Marion Zimmer Bradley who to me is a total hack but still some nice moments and for a tv production not bad at all)

Actually Mists of Avalon got me thinking about the concept of big tv productions. You can really tell great stories with this kind of thing, but so few people do it. There is this huge gap between Movies and Television, I think the concept has not been sufficiently explored since Lynch did Twin Peeks...

Oh yes, to me a movie is always measured at what it is trying to be and wether or not it actually it is able to good at that.

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How can anyone seriously think oceans dozen is a good movie?

It's a complete rehash of 'oceans 11's script. Complete with 'fooled ya' plot twist at the end.

OK ok the bits that took place in the Netherlands were kind of fun to watch. especially seeing Brad Pitt and George Clooney standing on the very same platform of the very same trainstation I daily walk by.

But the whole operation with lifting the whole house up a few centimeters? Puh-lease!

oh and about the royal tenenbaums and the life aquatic having a good cast: Bill Murray and Owen wilson are in almost every movie by wes anderson ;)

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Yeah, I agree with ys and I even loved Ocean's Eleven. Ocean's Twelve was pretty bad, though there were some cool parts. The plot twist at the end was retarded, and there wasn't even any interesting/complex attempt to steel anything (that deal with Julia Roberts was stupid). But probably the worst part was its plot. It was so convoluted and unfocused. It needed a good editor so badly. I mean, the thing went on for over two hours, didn't it? They should have scrapped the cheesy sub-plot with Catherine Zeta-Jones entirely (as in taken he character completely out of the movie) and just had it as a caper movie between Ocean's Twelve and that French guy (I can't remember the name he went by anymore). Now that would have been a movie worth watching.

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heh yeah, that would have been worth watching :)

And Miss Zeta Jones is Clooney's woman, we all know that. Not that hussie Roberts :hmph:

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Sin City was a good flick. The style and cinematography were out of this world, even if the story lagged in sections. It's a must-see for any film noir fan.

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I want to see Sin City! I'm reading the books just now.

Just yesterday I saw Cube for the first time. Very disturbing, had me hallucinating for hours afterwards.

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I just saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow!

Brilliant! I love the whole feel of the movie though there are times when you really feel the technical side kind of dropping the ball, but still!

An absolute must-see, especially because it is such a unique vision that takes me right back to my wish that someone was seriously doing a movie version of those old tintin comic books! that feel of adventure and pure joy and amazement!

aside from that:

:tup:Dead Man (by jim jarmush) brilliant crazy neurotic western, one of the best western ever

:tmeh:Willard (by glen morgan) nice although predictable performance by crispin glover who to me still seems to be trapped in the body of George McFly. unfortunately the overall feel of the movie is unfinished and the point of the story that never seems to be able to focus on a certain theme, eludes me. to me they were trying to do everything ok instead of one thing really good... alas

:tup:13 going 30 is a totally predictable teen-dream flick that is so unexciting and formulaic that it feels almost good again. but the real reason for this movie working for me has to be jennifer garner who just manages to make any character work with aparently no effort at all! (sorry, guess this is basically cuz she looks a lot like one of my exes... ;( )

:tup:On the Waterfront (by Elia Kazan, starring Marlon Brando) Well an obvious classic but a great movie nonetheless. personally I fail to why people make such a big deal out of the scene in the cab, but I guess I would be one of the few (just like brando himself ;P) great movie, must-see.

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Just saw Sin City, probably the best comic book movie I've ever seen. It followed the comics almost perfectly.

I also saw Monty Python's Meaning of Life, which was also awesome but the weirdest Monty Python thing ever (like the halfway through the movie scene)

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hmm im gonna deal with many topics at once

oh man garden state was just... well it had no substance at all. :tdown:

anyways an A team movie? well then its gotta be

Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal ¬¬ (shh)

Tom cruise as face

jim carrey as murdoch

Vin disel all blacked up as mr T ¬¬¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬

hahah erm yeah. :hah:

Layer cake is actually decent... :tup:

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Sin City was one damn great movie, easily the best comic book adaptation ever made, but it had a few flaws. I think the balance between the pulpy flights of fantasy from the graphic novels and the gritty noir feel were never truly in sync with each other, so scenes like Marv's getting hit by the cars just seem too ridiculous. Worst offender of all though was Britany Murphy's acting, which made me wince in pain and laugh at the same time with every single line. :frusty:

On the other side, though, everyone else was just stellar. Especially Elija Wood as Kevin. Man, that was one hell of a casting job. He was scary as hell. :blink:

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House of Flying Daggers I found pretty disappointing. It's not half as visually rich as I was expecting... the dance with the drums is cool but it pretty much goes downhill from there, and the plot is as convoluted as it is predictable. The dialogue was, well the subtitles were pretty hammy - "Are you for real?" -, but I suspect the original lines aren't especially good either. The combat gets old pretty fast as they don't really do anything interesting with it and the ending is just, well...

stupid.

No, if you want to see a good martial arts film, go see Hero. The trailer suggests little more than some epic ass-kicking, but it totally surprised me. Beautiful film.

House of Flying Daggers was more "typical" of the genre's obsession with absolute tragedy. The writers do the same type of contortions to get a miserable ending that their peers in Hollywood undergo in order to make a film end happily. All this being said though, I found Hero much more compelling and entertaining, in terms of basically everything. I fucking liked all the music and colour symbolism, and question the political education of anyone who considered it some kind of pro-Communist propaganda - its clearly about nationalism not international revolutionary socialism. :gaming:

I liked Garden State and The Life Aquatic.

Didn't see any of the ersatz history movies that have been turning up a lot, and avoided Constantine so as to avoid fanboy-ish frothing.

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What the?... But it's set in medieval fuedal China. Leaders killing people happened. Happened in Europe too. Lets contrast it to American movies shall we, which are all about a lone wolf committing murder for the greater good.

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Let's not turn this thread into a stupid discussion of movie-making ideology, ok? Actually I didn't like the fact that Hero tells the same story three times... I didn't like that kinda thing in Lola Rennt either... feels stupid for moviemakers to show you three different ways they could have gone with a story...

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Who said anything about "international revolutionary"? It is clearly trying to justify the idea of leaders committing murder for the "greater good".

Sorry I thought you said "communism".

If you really want to compare 20th-century CE political systems to 3rd-century BCE political systems I would be inclined to suggest that the enthusiastic nationalism of the National Socialists has more in common with Qin Shi Huang's attempts to create a unified state in what we like to think of as China.

Honestly, the movie's ideological stance is so ding-dang obvious, that when people indignantly insist that it had no such thing I can't help but feel that they were so fully seduced by its flying martial arts action, use of color and cinematography that their wish to love the film came before (and snuffed out) any honest assessment of its moral/politics.

I like red, ergo I am a slavish commie?

Damn, I guess you got me, sir.

Is it utterly impossible that a director might want to talk about the historical events that led to the foundation of the culture of the society in which he lives without having to indirectly sanction the authoritarian politics that prevail there now? Should Yimou have made Qin Shi Huang a centuries-too-early Chinese Benjamin Franklin or something? How the hell do you portray the character of the guy who was the first emperor of China without talking about the themes of authority? FFS, isn't that "ding-dang obvious".

--

Movies play to our own ideologies all the time. Is it really so hard to believe that a Chinese movie might be playing to an ideology currently in prominence in that country? It's not like it's much stranger a phenomenon than Braveheart supporting an ideology of freedom and self-determination.

...

It's dealing with the mythologised history of the guy who unified China.

You are away of the contention about Qin Shi Huang in Chinese historiography right?

Don't even get me fucking started about Braveheart... :pan:

N.B. Condensed this to one post to stop people moaning.

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Portryaing the character is one thing. Getting people to deeply sympathize with him is another.

You don't need to make people sympathise with him, Qin Shi Huang has been mythologised as the founder of the nation for centuries. :shifty:

It's like the Founding Fathers in the USA, except that it happened about two millenium earlier. There has been discourse about the character of Qin Shi Huang for a long time before Hero, and it seems fairly likely that it will continue afterwards.

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And anyway, how the heck could he sanction those politics in the first place when it would just get censored away.

:erm:

That link I posted is worth checking out.

It is interesting. The most interesting thing about it is that it was written by a film-maker from Hong Kong - someone who is obviously utterly without a political agenda.

You seem to be really simplifying this issue. It would be impossible to make a movie about the character of Qin Shi Huang and his role in the formation of China without discussing his politics; obviously if you view the formation of China as a positive thing (and, I may be going out on a limb here, but I expect that a lot of Chinese people might see it that way) then you are going to have to deal with the trick of talking about authoritarian models of governance in a positive way. The same is true if you look at the role of any autocrat in national "creation myths".

It doesn't mean you endorse authoritarian rule.

Can you conceive of how this story could possibly have been done without making the actions of Qin Shi Huang positive?

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Let's not turn this thread into a stupid discussion of movie-making ideology, ok? Actually I didn't like the fact that Hero tells the same story three times... I didn't like that kinda thing in Lola Rennt either... feels stupid for moviemakers to show you three different ways they could have gone with a story...

Mmmm it's clear that in Hero the uses of three different points of view is misused... it's just an opportunity for the photographer to show off... but that doesn't mean the technique is bad.

For example, in Mankiewicz's All About eve, we are told the story of an actress by three persons attending to her first award ceremony and who think they are in some way responsible of her success. The several stories depicts three different characters in place of the same person... and in the end, none of them are entirely correct.

Rashomon by Kurosawa went even further by describing a short sequence of events leading to several deaths and in which appears only 3 characters. Each time the story his told, the former version is nullify, but event at the end when we are told the true story, we can't remove the different aspects of the personnalities givent in the false versions. This effect is great because

the characters gain huge depth from it.

Anyway, I saw The Decalogue by Kristof Kieszkowski (10*50 min long movies) and its great. You should see it if you have the opportunity

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God forbid that the director could have had one. Interesting that you're willing to invalidate all of that argumentation based on the suspicion of an agenda, when you aren't even willing to acknowledge that there might have been one in Hero.

I'm damn sure he did have a political agenda, I'm just not at all convinced it is the one you are saying. There are political meanings that can be extracted from Hero that are not propagandistic. (EDIT: I mean specifically that are not propagandistic on behalf of the current regime of the P.R.C.; not that the political message might be "propaganda", since one could argue that all political messages are this)

This is going nowhere, and I'm sorry I even brought the issue up.

If that's the way you feel, I'll certainly call it quits. No point in continuing something that's stopped being interesting.

You have an affinity for free-roaming space games, I see. :tup:

Adventure-capitalism makes for fun games, I wish someone would make some more of them though. :yep:

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