H1ppychick
We all prisoners, chickee-baby. We all locked in.
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Thorn, I predict that you will love The Dark Knight, if you didn't crumble and see it last night. The more I'm thinking about it today, the better I'm realising it was.
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quote:Originally posted by Thorn Davis: Exactly what kind of films does Mr Sam like? You'd think that between the melancholy beauty of Wall-E and the action-packed drama of The Dark Knight, there'd be something that would appeal to him.
He claims to only like thrillers and action movies. Batman is too - well, yes, melancholy for him. He loved The Bourne Conspiracy for instance and Oceans 11 and 12. Jumpers was OK he said, but too slow.
However, I have dragged him to many films which he has ended up enjoying. He likes to stick with what he thinks he knows, if you see what I mean.
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quote:Originally posted by H1ppychick: Thorn, I predict that you will love The Dark Knight, if you didn't crumble and see it last night.
Saturday at 7pm for me. My excitement was diminished somewhat after seeing Wall-E, though; I came out thinking 'How can The Dark Knight' possibly be better than that? I had the same thing with No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood earlier in the year, and TWBB ended up blowing me away. In fact, if Dark Knight really is as good as people say it is, that quartet alone would make ZOOB the best year ever for American film.
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Batman fans may be interested to know that I am wearing an Adam West era Batman costume to a party on Saturday night. There is no way I wont be pulling.
quote:Originally posted by H1ppychick: Thorn, I predict that you will love The Dark Knight, if you didn't crumble and see it last night.
Saturday at 7pm for me. My excitement was diminished somewhat after seeing Wall-E, though; I came out thinking 'How can The Dark Knight' possibly be better than that? I had the same thing with No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood earlier in the year, and TWBB ended up blowing me away. In fact, if Dark Knight really is as good as people say it is, that quartet alone would make ZOOB the best year ever for American film.
I've bought Old Country and will be wattching it soon. I've hesitated over There Will Be Blood. Would you tell me why I should buy it?
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I done a write up here, but essentially it feels like something genuinely new and exciting, a kind of synthesis of great world cinema of the last 100 years that manages to avoid feeling like the sum of its influences. For my money, it's a better film than No Country..., but at this level that's like choosing whether or not its better to feel up Jenna Jameson or Bree Olsen.
Anyway. TWBB is a tremendous film - one of the very best films - and it always made me sad that no-one else went to see it (certainly noone posted on that thread. Although it's a character movie rather than a plot based film it's never less than gripping, partly because of Daniel Day Lewis's famous performance. It almost threatens to overwhelm the movie, despite the incredibly photography, editing and use of sound. But he's not the only good thing in it - Paul Dano's character Eli, is a tremendous, oily presence and his battle of wits with Daniel Plainview is brilliant, and delivers much of the drama. God! Just thinking back to thier scenes together is making me want to watch the film again, but there's something about Eli that just makes him the perfect foil to Plainview. Which is kind of the point, because one of the themes is obviously faith vs capitalism ALTHOUGH! those traits aren't embodied in the characters you would necessarily think.
There's so much brilliant about this film I could bang on for days - the way it continually shifts away from conventional narrative techniques and continues to defy predictability right up until the crackpot ending, which, in its own way, gives you some idea of where we're likely to end up when the oil runs dry.
You should definitely buy it - it's fucking brilliant.
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I will do. I keep picking the dvd up and wondering why I think I should watch it - maybe I read your post on it and then forgot, or someone else praised it.
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i have been reading all the 5star reviews of man on wire, and feeling very excited and proud because my mum is the archive producer on it and so i kind of feel like i practically worked on it myself for the last two years. this was a nice text message exchange from last weekend
me: have you read the review that compares it to hoop dreams? as comparisons go thats not a bad one!
my mum, six hours later: NO WHT IS A HOOP DREAM
seriously, if misc files thinks my punctuation is bad, just a handful of texts from my wonderful mother would blow his tiny mind beyond repair. still, nobody's mum can punctuate texts, can they? but anyway. go and see man on wire, everybody. go and see it. its wonderful. its not actually as good as hoop dreams, but its pretty fucking great.
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I have been 'reading and watching' The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, but the film (starring Mike off of Neighbours, and apparently directed by Wells's gr7-grandson) seemed to be largely unrelated. I thought the Eloi were supposed to be different to humans as we recognize them. And where did the Morlock leader come from? But more importantly it seemed to lose the point of the book, in favour of generic action movie filler.
I'm currently reading The Invisible Man. Don't think I'll bother with the film this time...
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oh, i have also been reading again since i paid off my latest humungogantuan library fine: highlights have included-
cannery row, john steinbeck: gorgeous and funny and stupid and brilliant. i decided after being forcefed the red cocking pony in 1986 that john steinbeck was a total spazmo, and that if all his books were that dull and stupid and featured grossout bits where a boring old cowboy man sucked mucus out of a horses windpipe with his bare mouth then there was like, no way i was ever reading any of his stupid books again. im totally glad i reassessed that life- defining decision last year but am pretty cross that i should have been put off a great great writer at such an early age. has anybody read the red pony as an adult? is it as shit as i remember it being?
where angels fear to tread: totally boss, because em forster is totally boss, obviously.
michael tolliver lives, armistead maupin: read in one sitting, had me intermittently weeping like a big fucking gay from page 23. page 23. of course if a book starts you weeping that early you have to sit and read it one go, dont you? you cant just go off and cook yourself a quiche and go to ikea and buy scatter cushions and have indiscriminate anal sex with a stranger that you picked up in a public lavatory or generally go about your normal business if a book has set you weeping by page 23. you have to give it YOUR FULLEST ATTENTION. id forgotten how much i loved [insert name of character in question here] until it appeared they were going to die, and that point i began to worry that i might actually weep my own eyelids inside out, but i couldnt stop, i had to keep fighting through the tears, struggle on despite my heartbreak until i reached the bitter end, which, being a born survivor, i naturally managed to do. once i had finished i was too tired to go out and have indiscriminate anal sex with a stranger i picked up in a public lavatory- thats how emotionally involving michael tolliver lives is. its fabulous. darlings.
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Caught a cracker of a film this afternoon - an Australian mocumentary about a portaloo employee called Kenny - seen it advertised on Sky but thought nothing of it, but was thoroughly delighted by it - kind of like the office a bit but without the cringing, and quite charming too. A few moments of laugh out loud stuff, but on the whole just a charming film - the whole relationship with his ill father who just sees him as a 'Glorified turd-burglar', and a wonderful insight about a man who although with a non-appealing vocation is very proud of what he does. Highly recommended - 8 Barrys
quote:Originally posted by MiscellaneousFiles: I have been 'reading and watching' The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, but the film (starring Mike off of Neighbours, and apparently directed by Wells's gr7-grandson) seemed to be largely unrelated. I thought the Eloi were supposed to be different to humans as we recognize them. And where did the Morlock leader come from? But more importantly it seemed to lose the point of the book, in favour of generic action movie filler.
There's a 1960s version of the film which is quite good.
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I watched this a couple of weeks ago. Wayne is bang on the money here - a really charming movie with some great lines. It's knid of interesting in the lines it straddles betweend comedy, drama and character study. There's some set-piece comedy moments, like a sprint across a stock-car track, but parts of it, like his relationship with his dad and his son are quietly tragic. Er. Anyway. JUst wanted to second Wayn's recommendation, there.
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H1ppychick
We all prisoners, chickee-baby. We all locked in.
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I caught the 15 minutes where he's at the festival before going to his brother's birthday party on Sky a couple of weeks ago as well but didn't have time to watch the rest - I'll have to have a look in the listings.
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I watched Rambo yesterday, which was great fun. At 81 minutes it doesn't outstay it's welcome, although it does sort of feel like it's missing a third act (not quite to the same extent as Rambo III, though). Basically, if the trailer that was going around the internet a year ago appealed (the one with the decapitation, disembowelling and disintegration by machine gun) then the film shouldn't disappoint, because it's basically an hour and twenty minutes of the same sort of stuff.
As is traditional for a Rambo film, the cinematography is brilliant, the better to offset the crunching brutality, the script is dogshit awful and the performances are perfunctory. The female lead is ghastly, even though all she has to do is gasp in horror everytime something atrocious happens (about 90% of the film) and she's mainly there so that Rambo can keep stopping her from getting raped.
Anyway. There's plenty of kickass action, including an extrordinary montage of people being cut to shreds by a .50 cal machine gun. Stallone is quite charismatic as Rambo, although it doesn't really... it's not a hugely demanding role. But he's come a long way from Rambo: First Blood Part II where he can't even walk convincingly.
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Has anyone else been watching that Saddam's House on Wednesday, BBC2? It damn good; solid acting and great atmosphere. Final episode next week and I'll be away.
What does anyone else think of it?
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I'm currently watching To Catch A Predator on FX. My sister put it on and now I can't tear my eyes away.
It's about, well, it's about catching predators. People pretend to be underage girls and chat to older men. Finally, they agree to a meet in the 'girl's' house. But when the man turns up there are hidden cameras and a man ready with 'what are you doing here?' questions. As soon as the man leaves the police arrest him.
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Sounds like that infidelity one, where they take people to where their partner is having it off with someone else and then get them to confront each other - but with perves. Like you said, weird.
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OHMYGOD one man brought his own FIVE YEAR OLD son to the house where a 'fourteen year old boy' was waiting to meet him.
Another man stripped off as soon as he entered the house and started roaming the house looking for the girl!
I can't wait for this to finish because it's making me feel strange. It's also making me laugh quite a bit which probably makes me a bad person, or something.
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Watched Cloverfield last night and it was shit. Appropriately enough for a movie that's a collage of camcorder footage, it appeared to be stitched together from the set pieces of better films, so there's a scare that's lifted directly from The Descent, there's some crawly critters that attack people in dark tunnels and after you escape apparently unharmed, you find that your chest explodes, there's the sobbing confession to camera from Blair Witch and blah blah blah. It's all completely soulless, there's only really one character, which all the actors inhabit and even that isn't drawn so much as a character as it comes across as a marketing demographic. Wealthy mid-twenties hipsters run around screaming and gradually succumbing to the viewer's powerful wish for them all to die.
Towards the beginning of the film I found myself wondering whether maybe we were supposed to hate all the characters, whether perhaps it was some kind of scathing attack on the complacency of the west pre-2001 and the film was going to suggest that the fall of the Twin Towers was something that we needed in order to shake us out of self-absorbed gluttony. But no. Turns out that the vapid, beautiful, boring characters were the result of creative bankruptcy rather than satirical intention.
For all the supposed novelty (gimmickry) of its hand-held camera premise, Cloverfield sure is an uninventive, cliche infested monster flick. From the tunnels, to the 'hey there's something moving - let's go check!' moments, to the love story that only exists to provide a reason to stick in the disaster area there's not one single moment of inspiration or invention. It's awful. Even the supposed in-the-moment realism of the camcorder is undermined by the stupid wise-cracking jerk behind the camera whose lines seem there only to remind us that we're watching a Hollywood movie.
So yeah. That's about it really. The people in the movie behave with a baffling level of stupidity - forgetting to take water with them even after they've prised open a vending machine and that kind of thing. The acting is dreadful, from a dreaful script. Throughout the whole movie you can practically hear JJ Abrams babbling 'Yeah man, we've re-invented the monster movie by pushing it through the twin filters of 9/11 and lives and habits of the My Space Generation', when really as a viewer I just got the impression that he'd ruined the evening by pushing my face through a filter of shit.
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Interestingly I watched Diary of the Dead the other day, and almost all of your post above could be used to describe that film. Plus the added criticism that, for a movie which seems to be trying to make a point about the validity and importance of Web 2.0s great user created content, it seems almost totally uncommitted to looking convincing as an amateur film. Every shot is perfectly framed, beautifully edited, and other than a few interesting perspective elements, looks about as convincing as the first-person sequence in Doom. In that respect Cloverfield is actually far more successful than Diary.
I really don't know at what point Romero lost his way so badly, but this film was a total let-down. Especially after the hype about how it was going to be indipendantly produced so Romero could fully realise his artistic blah blah etc.
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Diary of the Dead doesn't really interest me at all. Land of the Dead was a bit ropey with some nice ideas, but you get the impression that George has flogged his zombie metaphor to, er, death and really it's time for him to put a bullet in its brain to take it out of commission permanantly. I'm sure he didn't want to spend his life making zombie films and the response to Diary of the Dead seems to indicate that he can barely be bothered to try anymore.
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This was my favourite part because it reminded me of Hud going round the party with the camera at the start of the film. It made me think "Get him to give a farewell message to Rob!" and then I laughed out loud at my own joke. Also, if you ever wanted to know what it would be like to be eaten by a giant amphibious monster this is probably the most accurate representation, short of actually going out and doing it.
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People who haven't seen the film may like to ponder that in that clip the monster, which hitherto has been pushing over skyscrapers, creating shockwaves when it walks and plucking helicopters out of the sky has just sneaked up on them in central park.
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quote:Originally posted by Thorn Davis: Diary of the Dead doesn't really interest me at all. Land of the Dead was a bit ropey with some nice ideas, but you get the impression that George has flogged his zombie metaphor to, er, death and really it's time for him to put a bullet in its brain to take it out of commission permanantly. I'm sure he didn't want to spend his life making zombie films and the response to Diary of the Dead seems to indicate that he can barely be bothered to try anymore.
I dunno, it's like he wants to try and say something but it's really hard to know what. There's this subplot about how the guy doing the recording has basically become obsessed with blogging everything. There are some really cringe enducing moments like SPOILER when he's laying there dying from a zombie bite at the end and he turns to the chick and it like "shoot me!" and passes her the camera. We're clearly meant to think that this is some kind of clever social commentary but the whole thing feels so forced and unrealistic that it's impossible to actually buy into it at all.
It's like he wants to tell us that microblogging your life is an unhealthy obsession, but at the same time he's quite obviously going out of his way to say that you can't trust conventional media and it's only through looking at people's uploaded, unedited media that we can really hope to get a clear picture of what's going on in the world.
There are some nice ideas in there but the film never really hits any chords with me, partly because of the confusing, mixed messages, and also because the execution is so poor you have to feel that George is really commenting upon subjects on which he actually has very little understanding.
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quote:Originally posted by Cherry In Hove: The scene where SLJ says
"English, motherfucker. Do you speak it?"
When this scene is dubbed into French or whatever, do they also change the word English?
The standard way to overcome this potential problem when translating/subtitling/dubbing lines like this one is, at least in Spanish, to use the phrase "my language" instead of "English" or whatever other language it might be. So SLJ would say, in Spanish, something like "D'you speak my language, motherfucker?"
The actual wording or re-wording of the phrase depends largely on how well it will synchronise with the lip movements of the original.
Spanish dub actors (and behind them, the translators and editors) are very good, and it's easy to suspend disbelief and just go along with these foreign people speaking Spanish. The lip-syncing is really really tight. The voice-over actors themselves become associated with certain screen actors, so the same Spanish voice actor will always dub SLJ, for consistency across all his films.
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in which the line you mention is "Mi idioma, cabronazo, ¿sabes hablarlo?"
which is a direct translation of the original, literally "My language, massive bastard [literally 'big male goat'], can you speak it?", but avoiding the "English" problem.
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Excellent. Thanks very much mart. Unfortunately I can't view youtube at work, but I very much look forward to watching that at home.
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Of course in the specific context of Pulp Fiction that approach would make Jules sound a bit ridiculous. "My language motherfucker! Do you speak it?" can only really ever be met with a confused "What?"
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