ysbreker

Movie/TV recommendations

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It's definitely trying to be serious. But I don't think it's at all scary, and everything that's cringe-worthy is so absurd it becomes laugh-worthy.

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I'd be surprised if it didn't have any of that Three Stooges physical humour that Raimi is so fond of.

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I've just rewatched Melancholia for the third time, and now I need another movie that has a similar tone. Primarily, I am looking for films that deal with the alienation of depression, and the idea of being "there but not there". The idea of trying to put on your best face as you feel yourself crumbling internally is fascinating, and I don't know of many other films that deal with it. I'm more of a book guy, so my knowledge on cinema is lacking. I've watched other Lars Von Trier films, so I need to step out of the box for a little.

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I've just rewatched Melancholia for the third time, and now I need another movie that has a similar tone. Primarily, I am looking for films that deal with the alienation of depression, and the idea of being "there but not there". The idea of trying to put on your best face as you feel yourself crumbling internally is fascinating, and I don't know of many other films that deal with it. I'm more of a book guy, so my knowledge on cinema is lacking. I've watched other Lars Von Trier films, so I need to step out of the box for a little.

How about this? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108394/

As long as you don't mind the fact that it's in French it might be right up your alley. Even if it's not what you're looking for its a good movie and I recommend it.

Edit: Just remembered "Last Life in the Universe". Great movie and it has a kind of muted atmosphere like "Melacholia" . Again it's foreign in case that's a deal breaker. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0345549/

I have probably seen stuff that is what you're looking for I just cant remember any right now.

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I've just rewatched Melancholia for the third time, and now I need another movie that has a similar tone. Primarily, I am looking for films that deal with the alienation of depression, and the idea of being "there but not there". The idea of trying to put on your best face as you feel yourself crumbling internally is fascinating, and I don't know of many other films that deal with it. I'm more of a book guy, so my knowledge on cinema is lacking. I've watched other Lars Von Trier films, so I need to step out of the box for a little.

A Serious Man absolutely nails the frustration and helplessness of it, and is my favorite Coen film for it.

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Being away from work because of comp' time then flu; I gathered a few 'Best Movie Ever' lists from the interweb and extracted two handfuls of films I had never watched or heard of.

Interestingly (or not), nearly all of them are in the Criterion collections.

So far:

  • Tokyo Story: a great and depressing movie about the growing gap with our parents, the disappointments of life and loneliness. It paints a couple of characters in broad strokes and the elder cast's acting style get some used to; but the most of the personalities are painfully believable and there's a good chance it will strike home somehow. I think I enjoyed mostly the care with witch Ozu shouldered the intricately nested geometry of Japanese interiors to re-frame nearly all situations and the way he created succession of those shots to build a fragmented and sometimes conflicting sense of space. This camera work and the delightful slow pacing have been haunting me ever since.

  • Paths of Glory: excellent. Except for the characterization of General Mireau, each character and actors deliver hugely (Timothy Carey is brilliant). The very end was a bit out of place in what is a movie with very little hope for redemption, but everything else is grand. I particularly love [spoilers]the sequence from the moment they fetch the prisoner to the actual execution.[/spoilers]

  • Raging Bull: I couldn't connect at all with that movie: I can see LaMotta is a pathetic being,but I couldn't build any sympathy or empathy toward a character whose second scene depict him on the verge of hitting his wife over how well a steak is cooked... There was no secondary character (like in Goodfellas) and no intellectual angle (like in Taxi Driver for instance) that I could cling onto to 'get' this character. This story isn't talking to me I guess.

  • His Girl Friday: beside the exhilarating but exhausting scenes between Grant and Russell (this is turbo boost rapid fire dialog), this movie is also a gem: the dialogs are fluid, naturalistic, with distinct overlaps between lines and organically timed hesitation and strutter. And the most amazing is that each character's voice survive that treatment: it's as if Sorkin dialog had taken human form and diversified. The structure of the movie is great on its own : the accumulation of divergence in the plot results in a damn funny movie that kept me the edge of my seat - which is pretty rare for a comedy. I particularly loved the first scenes inside the journalists retreat and their confrontation with a witness they purposely portrayed badly. I'm on the fence about the ending though: I can't tell if it's misogynist or just plain cynical about people and their jobs.

  • Kind Hearts & Coronets: Loved it too, very well written, with some great performances by the secondary cast (the amount of detail in the hand gesture of Miles Malleson in the opening scene is amazing) and also the leads. It's really remarkable to see a movie not let go of its point, its tone or its cynicism and still make you root for its main character. It's also worth watching for witnessing Alec Guiness play 12 different character successfully.

  • Harold and Maude: if this isn't the original template for all Wes Anderson movie, I don't know what is. It's fresher and less contrived though and thus appealed to me more. It has its limits - there's a lot of useless posing and the otherwise nice soundtrack often drowns the movie - but it's still pretty unique. It's also pretty admirable that the actors manage to make these characters and their relationship believable.

Next: The Life of Others, The Bicycle Thief and The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp.

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After this year's (decade's) Sight & Sound list I had been digging up some classics too, including Tokyo Story. Haven't seen that one yet, but I did recently watch The Rules of the Game from 1939. It's so interesting to see films from a completely different time (interbellum).

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I don't know if it's true for all interwar movies but the few Renoirs I've watched have aged really well.

Actually, from the above selection, the only element that sometimes aged badly is the soundtrack; and god, when it's extreme, it's truly distracting. French movie from the 60s-70s are notable for suffering from that - Le Samurai for instance.

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I've just rewatched Melancholia for the third time, and now I need another movie that has a similar tone. Primarily, I am looking for films that deal with the alienation of depression, and the idea of being "there but not there". The idea of trying to put on your best face as you feel yourself crumbling internally is fascinating, and I don't know of many other films that deal with it. I'm more of a book guy, so my knowledge on cinema is lacking. I've watched other Lars Von Trier films, so I need to step out of the box for a little.

I haven't seen Melancholia, so I don't know how it compares, but I highly recommend Wristcutters: A Love Story as a very creative dark comedy in which nobody smiles.

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I watched The Apartment, because it seems a recommended view around these parts. I liked it! Though didn't love it. The dialogue is very snappy and the characters act with gusto. But it also gets a little slow and sloppy in the middle, editing-wise. I couldn't help be a little bored here and there, sorry to say!

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it also gets a little slow and sloppy in the middle, editing-wise.
Really? Do you have any particular sequence in mind? The

overdose sequence

is in the middle and I found it brilliantly edited.

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Yeah, that one! But there are other scenes too that I thought, on first viewing, could use some trimming. I mean, the movie lasts two hours and five minutes. I wish everything about it was so excellently paced as the first twenty minutes, which as an exposition of Baxter's situation is just so well done. I love his intro monologue too, I missed it as soon as it stopped.

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Yeah, that one! But there are other scenes too that I thought, on first viewing, could use some trimming. I mean, the movie lasts two hours and five minutes. I wish everything about it was so excellently paced as the first twenty minutes, which as an exposition of Baxter's situation is just so well done. I love his intro monologue too, I missed it as soon as it stopped.

Get out.

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For liking the film but also sometimes being a little bored? :)

Also, I thought of another film recommendation for Max Ernst who was looking for movies that tonally dealt with the feeling of depression, loss, phasing out of existence. I remembered that Zatoichi the Last captures that feeling really well. Check it.

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He, is it just me, or does Batman, as character, suck in all movies. The main villain takes the pie in all of them.

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He, is it just me, or does Batman, as character, suck in all movies. The main villain takes the pie in all of them.

You're not alone. Batman has always been overshadowed by his villains once you get out of his origin story.

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Cloud Atlas was interesting. I mostly went because I'm a fan of Tom Tykwer and not so much the Wachowskis. I thought I was going to see a movie with six parts played chronologically but instead they were all intercut according to emotion and situation at hand between the stories. It really got on my nerves at first, but after about 20 minutes I was constantly amazed on how the technique does not allow you to have a reset point as you would if the movie played out as a short film anthology. In that way a 3 hour long movie tends to be constantly exciting as your mind juggles each storyline hoping to know what happens next.

The actual plots were enjoyable enough, some more successful than others. Lots of typical Matrix style stuff on one segment that ebbs and flows between cool and idiotically out of place.

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