posted
He actually sounds like a funny guy. Talking about Brown Bunny:
quote: "I accept what they say. It's a disaster and a waste of time." He apologised to his backers too. "It was never my intention to make a pretentious film, a self-indulgent film, a useless film, an unengaging film." No wonder his co-star and former girlfriend Chloe Sevigny - whom he admitted to hating when she took up with her next bad-boy director boyfriend Harmony Korine - broke down and wept at the premiere as the cinema emptied and those remaining in their seats laughed and booed.
If it was anyone other than Gallo - who confessed he only cast Ryder when he was convinced she was going to jail for shoplifting - you would almost feel sorry for him.
"I thought I had something beautiful that I could share with other people. I can only apologise to those who feel they have wasted their time," he cried.
For him the final insult was that the French liked it. "It is almost like salt in the wound," he said.
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I was under the impression that Chloe Sevigny is a pretty dedicated actress and doesn't shy way from difficult roles, dick sucking or otherwise. When you see her appearance in American Psycho in comparison to say...the nurse get-up in Party Monster you don't get the impression she is scrabbling around looking for work and can only get roles if they include degrading scenes. Should we scour the internet for soundbites from the Chlomeister?
H1ppychick
We all prisoners, chickee-baby. We all locked in.
posted
I am always right about everything!!
Yeah, that was Boys Don't Cry.
I have to admit to a grudging lol at that comment about the French.
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H1ppychick
We all prisoners, chickee-baby. We all locked in.
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Poor Chloe. Even if your view is that she made a balanced, reasoned decision to suck her egomaniac boyfriend's dick on celluloid in the belief that she was creating art that people would appreciate and understand, it must be so galling (hah) to then find out that people think that the end product was a piece of indulgent crap of little or no merit and that, best case, you know jack shit about picking a decent role.
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posted
In other gay hate news, the headline of today's Reading Chronicle reads GAY KISS - TOO MUCH FOR LOCAL BAR. Apparently a gay couple were thrown out of Reading's Ice Bar after sharing a passionate kiss.
quote:Originally posted by MiscellaneousFiles: Apparently a gay couple were thrown out of Reading's Ice Bar after sharing a passionate kiss.
I think there's some new government directive about subjecting bar staff to passive gay kissing isn't there? Or are the House of Lords blocking that one too? Rich bastards that have never done a day's hard graft in a gay bar in their lives. Posts: 8467
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quote:Originally posted by dang65: passive gay kissing
Now that'd be something to see. I don't think you could describe any of the public gay snogs I've witnessed as particularly passive.
Not that I find it any more offensive if it's queers or straight folk trying to eat each other in public, it's all a bit "get a room" IMO. Unless it's me doing the kissing obv.
[ 14.03.2006, 10:21: Message edited by: Boy Racer ]
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anybody been watching the artshock thing on channel 4? Last night's was pretty harsh, eh? - 'the human canvas'. It was basically a real life version of Hellraiser. Compulsive, but horrid. Still, I'd maybe be interested in going to see a show like that, an exhibition of pain. I was getting a violent physical reaction from watching it on TV, so seeing it live would probably be a really intense experience. Also, they had a slightly attractive sociologist on going on about the post modern tribus and all that shit, which I lap up. Anyway! Emin is on tonight. If you didn't know about this series, you also missed a cracking show by the Chapman brothers, that posed the question 'what happens when culture turns bad'.
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i know alice newstead. or, to be accurate, i have met her several times. gosh, she likes to talk about suspension, and herself being suspended. its a shame she didnt get to talk about what its like being up there, because she does that very graphically and effectively. i have never done a sick in her presence but ive seen people on the verge. what i thought was interesting whilst watching the programme was that by the time the american guy was being hoisted i had worked out how to not flinch or chew my kneecaps whilst watching- i just decided that i wasnt going to. up until that point it had been a very uncomfy viewing experience, but the last ten minutes were a breeze. yeah, interesting.
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I went to see Aussie western The Proposition last night.
It's directed by John Hillcoat, who made the brutally brilliant prison movie Ghosts of the Civil Dead back in the late eighties, and written by Nick Cave. It is correspondingly bleak-as-all-hellfuck. It is also very good.
Like one long, boiling swoon, the visuals and music (Cave again) throb and buzz with the heat of the desert and the constant threat of imminent bloody violence. It’s also packed with some very solid performances, particularly Guy Pierce (skipping his handsome lessons again), and a cracking John Hurt cameo.
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Just to resurrect a great thread, I finally got round to watching Ghost in the Shell II: Innocence the other night, which was mentioned way back on page 4 of this thread by Kovacs.
Alas, I don't have much to add to his original analysis but one thing struck me about the original and sequel, which is that most people watch the dubbed version rather than original Japanese. When I was first starting to enjoy watching Anime, this was just the way it was, nobody realistically wanted to sit down and watch a cartoon with subtitles. But when I first watched these dubbed films, it never actually dawned on me just how appalling the 'voice talent' actually was. I watched the original before the sequel, to remind myself of what happened in the original film as it had been years since I'd see it, and some of the dialogue was absolutely excruciating. And little had changed in the sequel.
I could forgive the haphazzard mix of slick CGI and comparatively poor conventional animation if I wasn't being constantly annoyed by what sounded like a child's aproximation of what an adult should sound like.
It's also hard to see quite why they got this CGI mix so wrong. There are plenty of examples of where CGI and hand-drawn animation can blend together fairly seemlessly. They even achieved it in the first film without any problems, so it seems baffling that they got it so wrong in the second. If you watch any of the later series' of Initial D you'll see how it's possible to seemlessly switch from CGI to anime and back again. The formula surely can't be that hard? It seems lazy and slapdash, and when you combine that with the ridiculously bad voice talent, even the most engrossing story (which this is not) would struggle to hold its appeal.
There was potential for Ghost in the Shell II to be a great film. Unfortunately it fell way short of the mark.
I've also recently watched Final Fantasy VII. That was pretty good but I can't be arsed to tell you about it right now.
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Ringo, if you haven't seen GITS: Standalone Complex, then you should have a look at that. It's supposedly closer to the original Manga, and has a much more conventional structure than the films. But it's just as interesting and thought provoking, if not more so. I tried watching the second series, but only got about half way because the subtitles were wanked. I think that they'd either been translated by somebody in HK, or they'd gone from Japanese to Chinese to English, because they were kind of nonsensical at times. A shame, because it looked like it had the potential to be better than the first series if you could follow what the fuck was going on.
I may have already said all this. I can't bear to read things that I've written in the past, so I won't check. Sorry for repeating myself.
[ 23.05.2006, 08:42: Message edited by: Dr. Benway ]
posted
To be honest the story itself has never really been that interesting to me. It can’t have been very interesting for the film makers either since they seem to have almost entirely dropped it in the second film, choosing instead to give the viewer a mere montage of plagiarised scenes and situations from other popular movies from the past 10 years or so. Even still, it’s not something I feel particularly compelled to seek out, since GITS doesn’t really seem to offer much more than your standard cod-metaphysical sci-fi nonsense. Not flashy or violent enough to be mindlessly entertaining, nor original enough to be poignant or thought provoking. Perhaps the series makes up for this by being vaguely ‘epic’, to the point of being quite involving, but I don’t really feel inclined to invest that much time or effort into watching something I find vaguely uninteresting.
Wow, that really was a negative post wasn’t it. I guess people are right.
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Tried to watch Brokeback Mountain on dvd at the weekend but I couldn't make out 90% of the dialogue - and none at all from Heath Ledger. Then, 20 minutes in, the guy next door started practising his bass-playing (yes, The Chain by Fleetwood Mac was essayed) and we gave up completely, turning to liquor for solace.
Have I missed anything? The scenery looked pretty enough, but the story seemed to be taking time to get into its stride.
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I thought it was one of the best films I've seen for years, and its understated dialogue, soaring scenery and inarticulate cowboys in becoming shirts very moving. I well up even now, thinking about the ending.
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I watched Murderball the other weekend. Incredibly, it was a documentary about spastics (quadraplegics actually - Ed. Whatever. They were weird little semi-people at any rate - Thorn) smashing their customised armoured wheelchairs into each other while Ministry blared on the soundtrack. It was like someone had dug some brilliant, forgotten dream out of my own head and put it on film. Even now I really get a kick out of the fact that this is a real thing that actually happens, and is probably going on in the world right now.
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Thorn and I watched Predator 2 last night. It was hilarious.
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I liked the section where they seem to fuck loads of chicks, just because the chicks want to do it with a quad before they die. Not a single one of them was in trouble. Their wheels were really skiddy on the court from all the poon.
Also, the Team Canada Captain's geeky son. Oh it made me laugh.
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Brick Though some may find their disbelief hard to suspend for it's entire duration, there is much to recommend this High-School gumshoe. Perhaps too much an an excercise in style, this nevertheless wrings every penny out of it's High School/nowhereville-Califonia locations, and it's convoluted, old-fashioned private eye dialogue is frequently sharp enough to cut.
X-Men: The Last Stand A well polished turd is still a turd. This wasn't even that.
I've also tried watching both of the Ghost in the Machine movies and have found both of them powerfully somnolent.
Looking forward to Nacho Libre.
[ 01.06.2006, 07:18: Message edited by: Boy Racer ]
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There’s a righteous Ultimate power/ TV Go Home inspired meme about dumb action movies that aim squarely at the lowest common dominator of 14 year old boys and the men who think like them (ie, me), but it’s actually a rare movie that embraces those tits and guns clichés as enthusiastically as Stone Cold.
For starters, the hero has not one but two crazy ass-kicking names: in his real life he goes by the name Joe Huff. When he’s undercover he become John Stone. I don’t know about you, but I reckon that’s one of the best action names out there, easily eclipsing John McLane, rivalling John Rambo and nipping at the heels of Commando’s world beating John Matrix. I only wish they’d gone the whole hog and just called him John Fuck.
We first meet John Fuck – I mean, Stone – as Joe Huff, when he’s out doing his grocery shopping in a bad-ass leather trench coat that’s as wide as it long – it look like he’s having trouble getting down the aisles. Anyway, there’s a robbery in progress at the store, so he just beats the crap out of these armed robbers with his groceries, including one instance where he cleverly leaves some yoghurt lying on the floor and one of the robbers runs through it and flips heels over head, about ten feet through the air and lands in a pile of tin cans.
It transpires that Joe is a cop already on suspension for insubordination because he’s a rebel who doesn’t play by the rules (he does always get results, though). His boss just stands there and seethes at him. I don’t know who played his boss (Richard Gant according to IMDB), but he’s a great seether – one of the best I’ve seen. In every single shot, he stands there, hands on hips brewing with silent displeasure at whatever’s going on in front of him. There’s no doubt about it: he doesn’t like what’s happening, but he’s forced to go along with it. I imagine his acting CV looks like this:
Richard Gant (b. 1940)
- Black - Can supply own suit - Good seether
So, Joe has has to infiltrate a drug running biker gang and bring them to justice, blah, blah blah. I don’t know why the bikers are the villains because the film-makers are obviously in love with them. Their get together looks like a confused suburban teenager’s boundless fantasy of how cool it might be to be in a biker gang. Every one’s a leather clad, muscle bound freak who spends their days shooting tin cans off each other’s shoulders, pulling their shirts off and fighting, forcing their chicks to shower in the open, and swapping girls like they were trading cards. Every single chick in this film looks like she just stepped off the set of a porn film and is always either topless, or completely naked, but always fit as fuck. I mean – I’ve seen biker chicks in real life and generally they look like someone took a giant dumpling, rolled it in leather and stuck a wig on it.
In spite of that, this film is seriously gay – gayer even than the time Kovacs and Ganesh had an argument about Brokeback Mountain. Joe Huff parades round his flat in front of some other dude, wearing nothing but one of those Chippendales thongs. When the camera pulled back to reveal this Vogon actually screamed in horror – a far more visceral response than anything she displayed throughout the entirety of The Devil’s Rejects. There’s all the shirtless wrestling scenes, obviously, but the film goes beyond that. In one scene John Stone throws his knife at a picture of a naked man, and the knife lands squarely between the buttocks. Immediately he turns round to the gang leader and says something like “I’m interested in guns, including the pistol in your pants.” John Stone!
What really elevates the film into righteous awesomeness, though, is the soundtrack. It’s unlikely to spring to mind when people list the best movie music of all time, but I’m struggling to think of anything else that gives so much. Just when you’re nodding off (ie, when no-one’s getting their arm snapped, or there are no hooters flopping about), the momentum of the scene will be kicked back into gear as some dude in the studio starts wailing on his axe. Following the awesomely righteous ending where the gang launch an assault on City Hall (and the exploding bike goes out a window and explodes a helicopter, which falls on some cars, which then explode), the villain does the customary last-ditch-pulling a gun thang. Stone is caught off guard and all he can do is stand there with a gormless expression on his face (actually, I think that’s all actor Brian Bosworth can do) and it’s left to Stone’s geeky sidekick to whip out his gun and shoot the villain to death. Everyone stares at the office-boy-cum-killer who calmly holsters his sidearm and shrugs, “It was time to turn it on.” There’s a few seconds as you choke on the lameness of that payoff, but then the soundtrack comes to the rescue: “Waaahowwrrrrr!” goes the axe and saves the scene, the movie, the everything. Waaahowwwrrrrr!
Just how awesome, how righteous, is Stone Cold? It’s 14 hours since I watched it and still the only thing I want from life is to join a biker gang and watch hot chicks take showers while standing against the sunset wailing on an axe. Waaahowwwwr!
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