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I'm watching Lost series 3, enjoying it. Watched a documentary by Stacey Peralta (did Dogtown and the Z boys) called Riding Giants about surfing and the origins of big wave riding. Lots of grizzled old fellas romanticising the days of their youth and bullshit surfer machismo, still pretty awesome stuff in there, particularly the wipeouts.
I got This is England to watch on DVD, looking forward to it.
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quote:Originally posted by Tilde: I got This is England to watch on DVD, looking forward to it.
I saw that last night. I quite liked it, but not that much. Sean being 12 with a 16 year old girlfriend took more of my attention than it ought to have I reckon.
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I saw that film SUPERBAD. It was good! though there was a sense of two divergent plots (last summer of high school heterosocial romance / cops can be fun zany escapades) that were almost forced to intersect at various points. You could have taken the cop story out and the main point of the film would have been intact, though it would have been about an hour long -- which, maybe disappointingly, might be exactly why the cop story was there.
Interesting 2000s comparison to American Pie, Breakfast Club etc.
-------------------- pudgy little saucepot Posts: 738
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I haven't seen it, but I was hoping to work on it. A load of films that I hoped to work on last year have started to be released now, which is annoying as nothing I have worked on (as a mixer) has been released yet...
The girl who is in it that was in Downfall told me that it was "too bad I was married" in a suggestive way when I worked with her though. Which was nice.
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I've been reading Lord of the Rings book 1 - it's alright, except for the songs, the fact that it takes about 120 pages for them to get out of the bloody shire and the hippy crap about everything being older than everything ever is or was. Tom Bombadil as well - why did they never film that section?
Watching - at the moment World at War is back on loop, so watching that again.
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quote:Originally posted by Benny the Ball: The girl who is in it that was in Downfall told me that it was "too bad I was married" in a suggestive way when I worked with her though. Which was nice.
Please stop fucking bragging.
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I think I have been online too much. I started watching Sunrise, the last great silent film from 1927, and when The Woman From the City stripped off her thin robe to brush her hair in a corset, part of my pathetic brain thought helpfully better start wanking now! .
The actress playing The Woman from the City was born in fucking 1900. She is probably pretty old now.
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I watched 300 last night. It's a shame to watch it on a small screen really, as I imagine it was awesome int he cinema. Still, top fun though. Has everything an epic action film needs: Swords, armies, violence, a naked chick flailing around in slow motion, and a giant homosexual being put in his place by a rugged straight buy with a beard.
This film got me so pumped I kicked my girlfriend in the face
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I think they're pretty retarded. It's a big dumb action film. Plus, while there's some poetic licence going on there, it's fair to say that there is a reasonable degree of historical accuracy to the film.
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quote:Originally posted by Ringo: I think they're pretty retarded. It's a big dumb action film.
Yeah, whoever heard of a ultra-fascist big dumb action movie? Next thing you know they'll be painting stuff like Rambo and Cobra as some kind of right-wing nationalist power fantasy, or something equally ridiculous.
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Having not seen it, my impression of the film is that it's lots of oily musclemen jumping in pop promo slow motion and shouting "FOR SPARTA!".
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quote:Originally posted by Jimmy Big Nuts: presumably in the same way that Indiana Jones is historically accurate.
Well no, I mean in the way it's based on actual historical events. There really was a famous battle between a small group of Spartan warriors against an enormous Persian army, and the Spartans really did inflict a massive amount of damage agaisnt the disorganised Persian army as a result of their training and military cunning.
There are also several aspects of Spartan life which are depicted with relative accuracy, i.e. the fact that the strongest boys are trained from a very young age to be soldiers, and the weak ones ended up being killed.
The way in which poetic licence is used is more in the depiction of the spartans and the persians and obviously the style of combat. That's really where the controversy comes from, with the Persians seemingly depicted as marauding savages lead by an androgynous leader, while the Spartans are clearly 'perfect' masculine ideals. But it's told in the style of a Greek fable, and that's really all there is to it. In my opinion of course. But I think it's understandable some people object. I just think they're wrong for reading so deeply into a film which, at it's core, is just about pressing people's basic buttons.
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You're impressions are correct. However I did enjoy it, really nice style, cinematography, whatever. And constant and unrelenting fighting, beheadings aplenty. And men being real MEN to a comic level.
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quote:Originally posted by Ringo: I think it's understandable some people object. I just think they're wrong for reading so deeply into a film which, at it's core, is just about pressing people's basic buttons.
I don't think you can read too deeply into stuff which is just about pushing people's buttons, unless what you're saying is unsubstantiated by the film itself. I don't hink "it's just a piece of entertainment" is really a defence, surely? It doesn't have to be art to be a metaphor for America's righteous and lonely stand against camp, marauding followers and whether it was the intention of the filmmakers or not to make a piece of "Might makes Right!" fascist propaganda is irrelevant, if that's what they ended up with.
-------------------- Now that you've called me by name? Posts: 2007
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Right, but that doesn't even really make much sense. Surely it's America who are the overwhelmingly strong army, the disorganised ones who fuck everything up and get their asses handed to them by a small but determined group of freedom fighters? If you're going to start taking readings like that, then surely it's a much more logical conclusion that it's actually anti-American propaganda? Since it's obviously America who rock up to other countries with an enormous show of force, with the proposition that the defending country can basically go about its business, so long as it's prepared to accept the rule of America, the strongest country in the world?
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Well, yeah, but the States doesn't really see itself the way everyone else does. I remember when 300 came out and I think someone asked the director "So which one [of the leaders] is Bush supposed to be?" and I think the guy dodged the question because he didn't want to alienate anyone who might go and see the move, by pinning the allegory down one way or the other.
There's a great deal of conservative rhetoric about how America is standing alone in the face of this savage threat from the Persian gulf, so I suppose some people saw the film as an extension of that. But, yeah. You're not alone in reading the super-powered Persian army as analagous to the Americans, except that I understand the American viewer is being asked to identify with the handful of brave Spartans throughout the movie.
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I watched the remake of The Hitcher, yesterday. It was shit. Sean Bean could've been good as Ryder, he didn't need the American accent. The premise of the original, psychopath cat-and-mouse, was given the Hollywood airhead treatment, two protagonists, a cool young couple, her=sexy, him=boho, driving a cool muscle car, with the body count quadrupled and the Hitcher transformed from obsessive serial killer to near-indestructible SuperMurderer. Stupid. I watched a bit of Cody Banks, as well. That was hilariously rubbish. Keith Allen must be SO ashamed of that movie.
quote:Originally posted by Nathan Bleak: Well, yeah, but the States doesn't really see itself the way everyone else does. I remember when 300 came out and I think someone asked the director "So which one [of the leaders] is Bush supposed to be?" and I think the guy dodged the question because he didn't want to alienate anyone who might go and see the move, by pinning the allegory down one way or the other.
There's a great deal of conservative rhetoric about how America is standing alone in the face of this savage threat from the Persian gulf, so I suppose some people saw the film as an extension of that. But, yeah. You're not alone in reading the super-powered Persian army as analagous to the Americans, except that I understand the American viewer is being asked to identify with the handful of brave Spartans throughout the movie.
I see what you’re saying, but what I’m trying to point out is that you’re having to suspend a fair amount of your understanding of reality in order to make that association between the Spartans and the Americans. I mean, you’re saying that it’s simultaneously pro-fascist, and pro-american, yet capitalism and fascism are based on fundamentally opposed ideologies. Like you’re looking at subtleties in the allegorical subtext which seem to support what you’re saying, while having to overlook the fact that, like, the Spartans were a warmongering bunch of baby murderers, and it even says so much explicitly in the film. If it was the intention of the writer and director to put in the kind of messages you’re talking about, they’ve made a pretty hashed up job of it. It seems more like the controversy is little more than a knee-jerk reaction of over-sensitive people to a film which shows white people killing brown-skinned people. Which really doesn’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny whatsoever, once you start to look at the details.
Is it not far more feasible that Zack Snyder read Frank Miller’s comic series and thought “hey, this would make a totally kickass movie!” without giving much thought to how it might be compared to real life? Y’know, you could kind of apply this kind of analysis to just about any movie which seems to depict a struggle between good guys and bad guys, where the bad guys are portrayed in a negative light. At some point you’ve just got to accept there will always be people out there who are going to be offended by anything which is less than 100% politically correct, but it doesn’t make them actually right, and it doesn’t make it any less enjoyable to watch computer-enhanced beautiful men beating 70 shades of crap out of other computer enhanced men. In slow motion with CGI blood splatter.
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afaik frank miller wrote the original graphic novel and is credited as something like 'executive administrator' rather than writer for the film adaptation, which was written predominantly by Zack Snyder.
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