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Shocker: Sausage Party is exactly as lazy and unfunny as all those shitty Dreamworks movies it tries to parody. First Rogen/Goldberg movie I've out and out hated.

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Watched River's Edge the other night and thought it was really good. I'm kind of split on how much I like or dislike Crispin Glover in the movie, I definitely think most people who watch the movie will probably hate his performance, but as much as I found it annoying I also knew a couple people like him and that combined with him being Crispin Glover led to me finding it slightly endearing. Other than that I dug everything else in the movie. 

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On 10/11/2016 at 3:49 AM, TheLastBaron said:

Watched River's Edge the other night and thought it was really good. I'm kind of split on how much I like or dislike Crispin Glover in the movie, I definitely think most people who watch the movie will probably hate his performance, but as much as I found it annoying I also knew a couple people like him and that combined with him being Crispin Glover led to me finding it slightly endearing. Other than that I dug everything else in the movie. 

Yesss, you spend the whole time wanting to punch Crispin Glover, but also maybe give him a hug and tell him that he might want to get some rest and stop doing so much speed.

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I also liked it.

 

Currently PÖFF is going on, I've seen and liked most: Paterson, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Manchester by the Sea, Tunnel (Korea), It's Only the End of the World.

 

There's one movie I saw yesterday, which is leaving me a bit confused as to why it is as highly rated as it is and even praised for the cinematography:

 

 

You can't really see it in the trailer that much, but the movie was full of scenes where everything is out of focus, until a characters walks into focus. Almost every second scene was full of lens flare (also seen towards the end of the trailer) to the point of distraction. Camera (non-)movements were unexplicable - making a continuous dialogue with still shots take place in e.g. 2-3 different rooms, as if the characters talking were just seeking a place where they looked better on camera. For most of the movie, there was nothing really interesting going on, it only got philosophical and interesting 20-30 minutes before the end.

 

I liked the director's (Pablo Larraín) previous movie, El Club, much better, but that one was also ugly. This movie, I consider one of the ugliest looking films I've seen recently, even as it filmed beautiful people in beautiful environments, but of course, ugly/beautiful may not be a relevant aspect for critics.

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It had been on my list for a while: I watched Jauja, which Erkki once described as 'Viggo Mortensen walking on rocks, what more do you want?' Turns out, not a whole lot more. It's a wonderful, dreamlike experience. The very very very barebones story confounded me after the viewing (as it seemed to do the very characters that inhabited it), but after giving it some consideration I stumbled upon some very fun possible answers that endeared me to the film even more.

 

Fundamentally, this is a gorgeous, truly stunning set of shots of Argentina's nature, framed in a spectacular rectangle with rounded edges that I'm almost sure is even squarer than 4:3. The characters are boxed in by this aspect ratio, its claustrofobic quality made ironic considering the open wideness of the desert they're in. What's more, the movie chooses to let literally every action the characters take (for instance, picking something up or choosing to venture to a nearby bush) breathe and stand on its own. A typical shot lasts at least thirty seconds and might consist of ten seconds of empty wilds, then a character wandering in and doing something in their own sweet time, exiting the frame, and then twenty more seconds of the now-deserted place. What happens is that your mind gets all this room to start thinking and dreaming away, without really ever estranging from the movie because it's so damn hard to miss anything (due to the small size of the frame and how little happens at all).

 

From a story angle, I was first puzzled by the story of this Danish officer struggling to find his daughter, but I managed to make sense out of it in the end.

 

 

Especially once I realized the modern day ending held a few important clues. The story is actually that of the daughter, who runs off. Viewed through her lens, it makes sense. It's her fantasy to disappear and have her father, who also battles feelings of being abandoned by his wife, be the one to lose her. When Viggo finds the old woman in the cave (easily the most symbolic moment in the film), there's a strange conversation where she seems to fumble a line: she talks of her mother, when she means the daughter's mom. Perhaps it's one and the same, and the old lady is the daughter, made old by desert magic or warped time.

The ending also speaks of dogs and how a dog might start scratching and damaging himself if it struggles to understand something. The dog in the end was missing the daughter, who apparently had been away. Viggo could be seen as a dog as well, but rather than going for the simple explanation of him not understanding why the daughter left, why not consider that he may not understand why the mother/his wife left? After all, we are offered no clue as to why they're both in Argentina in some godforsaken desert, fighting against an unseen enemy. This may be Viggo's selfinflicted wound, and the daughter wants out, having healed much faster than he did.

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I went to see Edge of Seventeen today, and I absolutely loved it. If you have any affection for teen comedies, I highly recommend it.

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Edge of 17 was screening today here, but I couldn't go. Was busy watching this year's black & white Jim Jarmusch movie not made by Jim Jarmusch. This time it's the Korean A Quiet Dream. Quite good, the third movie at PÖFF (besides Paterson & Hunt for the Wilderpeople) that I gave 4,5 stars to.

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I saw Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them it was just as much of a cynical cash in as expected. Poorly written, heavy use of CGI, bad jokes, predictable plot. I can believe they will be making four more of them, I just hope people get wise after this one. 

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Huh, I loved how far they went to make it feel different from the HP series in terms of movie structure and treatment of the world. The well realized 1920s setting did a good part of accomplishing that goal.

 

My biggest complaint was the obvious dangerous contents and poor security of that darn briefcase. Whimsical leftovers from children's book origins. 

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On 24/11/2016 at 3:25 AM, Patrick R said:

I went to a screening of Meet Me in St. Louis last night and it's such an amazing movie, my favorite ever made, and it was the first really beautiful experience I've had since the election. I wrote a long rambling thing about the movie and what the experience meant to me.

 

My favourite bit of your review:

" There is an alternate universe where the Iraq war never happened, and also where Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Chaney were both eaten by sharks and while that will be little comfort when you watch the fascists murder your friends and neighbors it is, at least, more than nothing. "

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Boy, The Love Witch is something else. If you aren't interested in pastiche or witchcraft you'll likely get bored by it, but it's one of the most remarkable acts of mimicry in film history.

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Kelly Reichardt has made another great movie Certain Women. My favourite from PÖFF so far.

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I watched the 4 mini-movies of Gilmore Girls that went up this weekend and I have a lot of opinions!

I liked them & Amy Sherman-Palladino is the greatest troll in history

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I also binged the four episodes of Gilmore Girls (also rewatching the final episode of season 7 to get me back in the mood).

 

It is hugely fanservicey but after 10 years it felt satisfying in a way that I didn't think I could be satisfied by having random people showing up for 5 minutes to say 'hey, remember me?'.

 

This run also shows up season 7 for how bad it was and how manipulative that that final episode was at the end of that season.

 

In your spoiler bit Jennegatron - I actually spent most of yesterday fuming.

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My daughter was being fussy over the weekend so I watched Zootopia with her.  Standard plot hole complaints aside, pretty good movie.  Some cute and funny moments.  I had forgotten the story is a thinly veiled allegory for racism and prejudice.  I like that they went after a actual topic but recent events have made me wish real life worked so well.

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I watched Ti Xi Qu(West of the tracks) a month or so ago and I still think about it often.  It's such a beautiful film,  one of the best docunentaries I've seen.  It's about Chinese railway and smelting factories and the people who work in them. It's also so long that by the time it's finished youve forgotten what life was like before you started watching it, you've just been existing somewhere else for 9 hours or whatever.  The last section focuses on a father and son who scavenge on the railway and it's the saddest thing I've ever seen. It's all on YouTube

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Hey just thought I'd mention two absolutely wonderful food documentaries.

 

Cooked is on netflix and it follows an author's journey through the primary elements of cooking, Fire (roasting), Water (boiling), Air (baking), Earth (fermentation). Through following the stories of people from all over the world and all types of classes and backgrounds he builds a picture of a world where everyone innately knows the love and joy that comes from cooking and being cooked for. However many of us exist in a world where the food industry has gradually eroded our motivation to cook for ourselves and our loved ones.

From ancient Aboriginal bush methods to the high concept kitchens of a 2 minute noodle laboratory. I've lost track where I'm going with this but it's a series I outright love in a landscape of television and movies that usually promote infatuation at best. I actually started to cry watching the trailer after seeing the series. It's just. Idk I just get lost in this whole cuddly wave of human compassion when I watch it.

 

 

Also from the director of Cooked is Jiro Dream's of Sushi. Jiro is the best sushi chef in the world and the only one (or the first one) with a Michelin 3 star rating. You'd think he would run some crazy restaurant on a mountain top somewhere but his cozy sushi bar is in a subway station with his 50 year old son apprenticed to him and another branching out with his own restaurant. Guests pay some hundreds of dollars and are treated to a sushi train's worth of dishes. Just a real good look at family legacy and craftsmanship.

 

 

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1 hour ago, Mawd said:

Also from the director of Cooked is Jiro Dream's of Sushi. Jiro is the best sushi chef in the world and the only one (or the first one) with a Michelin 3 star rating.

That's the impression you'd get from watching the movie, but Jiro was not even the only sushi chef with a Michelin 3 star rating in the movie. Hachiro Mizutani, the former disciple of Jiro, was interviewed in the movie as the owner of his own sushi restaurant, which itself had three stars. (It later went down to two and then closed about a month ago.) There are lots of other 3 star sushi places. The documentary, perhaps understandably for dramatic purposes, tries to make Jiro seem really special, but it's worth thinking about whether that's the fact of the matter or whether the documentary makers just realized that things would be more interesting if they made Jiro out to be more impressive than everyone else to a degree that might not really be supported by the facts.

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That's the impression you'd get from watching the movie, but Jiro was not even the only sushi chef with a Michelin 3 star rating in the movie. Hachiro Mizutani, the former disciple of Jiro, was interviewed in the movie as the owner of his own sushi restaurant, which itself had three stars. (It later went down to two and then closed about a month ago.) There are lots of other 3 star sushi places. The documentary, perhaps understandably for dramatic purposes, tries to make Jiro seem really special, but it's worth thinking about whether that's the fact of the matter or whether the documentary makers just realized that things would be more interesting if they made Jiro out to be more impressive than everyone else to a degree that might not really be supported by the facts.

Well that makes much more sense. The narrative around the movie in the first place is that the director was so struck by the chef that he focused what was to be an ensemble project into a solo act. So his own regard of Jiro might be playing into it as much as wow factor.

I think I got carried away after the emotional high that was thinking about watching Cooked again. :P

 

 

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I've been watching Atlanta, and I like it a great deal. It's funny and clever and touching, and it's directed with style without being showy. It's satirical without being cruel. I'm not sure it's an especially deep show, but as a character-driven comedy (dramedy?) it's really impressive in a lot of ways. 

 

It has some of the trappings of the actor/comedian-as-writer/director show that Louie and Master of None had, which is that you can't quite believe that Donald Glover is anything like the hapless schlubby guy his character is portrayed as. And sometimes there's individual sequences which seem like great little skits that have very little to do with story or character. But I like both of those other shows a lot as well so whatever!

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I'll be attending the European Film Awards this weekend - I won a ticket to the Wroclaw, Poland event due to legally watching a lot of European movies this fall. :)

 

I'll also be in a group photo with Wim Wenders (if I wake up in time on Saturday). OMG!

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Cool, Erkki! Good luck and, you know, try not to punch Wim Wenders, if that's a thing that might happen.

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