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| Nancy |
 Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 1:47 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 4607
Location: Norman, OK
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lady wakasa wrote: Syd wrote: Bad movie night:
That sounds like a lot of fun!!!
It was. Both movies came from my collection, of course. BTW, Snakes on a Train gives a whole new meaning to the train-going-into-a-tunnel convention. |
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| chillywilly |
| Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:07 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 8251
Location: Salt Lake City
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Rod wrote: The Bourne Ultimatum: Lean mean techno-noir machine.
One of my 10 favorite from 2007. Non-stop action. |
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Chilly
"If you should die before me / Ask if you could bring a friend" |
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| lady wakasa |
| Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:40 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 5911
Location: Beyond the Blue Horizon
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Nancy wrote: Snakes on a Train gives a whole new meaning to the train-going-into-a-tunnel convention.
EWWW!!! |
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http://www.wakasaworld.com |
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| Nancy |
| Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 5:12 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: Norman, OK
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lady wakasa wrote: Nancy wrote: Snakes on a Train gives a whole new meaning to the train-going-into-a-tunnel convention.
EWWW!!!
And probably not what you're thinking. |
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"All in all, it's just another feather in the fan."
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| yambu |
| Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 6:08 pm |
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Joined: 23 May 2004
Posts: 6441
Location: SF Bay Area
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| I loved Volver. Penelope Cruz got as close to the Sophia aura as anyone I've seen. What vivaciousness. Hubba hubba. |
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| mo_flixx |
| Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 9:30 pm |
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Joined: 30 May 2004
Posts: 12533
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2 PICS FOR MARION COTILLARD FANS:
PRETTY THINGS (2001) -
This is one of those diabolical twin movies; the good twin vs. the evil twin. Marion Cotillard plays both. Lucie (the bad twin) is her father's favorite and leaves her French provincial home to make it big in Paris.
Twin Marie arrives in Paris some time later just in time to pick up the pieces caused by Lucie's degenerate behavior.
The plot is full of interesting twists set against the background of Paris' rock and porn scenes.
Cotillard is magnificent, not to mention a truly talented singer (which will make you forget the _dubbed_ Piaf).
INNOCENCE (2004) -
I saw this film in Paris a few years ago and wrote about it back then. It's a haunting tale about teens in a sinister boarding school. The film kept me on the edge of my seat. It wasn't till I did research at amazon.com tonite that I realized that it featured Cotillard.
Cotillard is a chameleon. From Piaf to young teacher to homely twin/rockstar, Cotillard proves herself magnetic.
Both films seem to be available for rental and are on amazon.com . |
Last edited by mo_flixx on Thu Jan 03, 2008 9:35 am; edited 1 time in total |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 3:16 am |
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12:08 East of Bucharest is the Romanian movie that won the Camera d'Or (the award for best first film) at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. It was released in the United States on June 6, 2007, so it's a candidate for the 2007 Blanches as far as I'm concerned.
It's a rather funny, apparently slight film that has a lot more depth for Europeans, especially, of course, Romanians. At 12:08 p.m. Romanian time on December 22, 1989, the Ceauşescus fled the Romanian revolution whose success was immediately assured. The revolution started on December 16 in Timisoara and spread to Bucharest and other major cities by December 22.
The movie is set on the 16th anniversary of the Romanian revolution. The question, posed by a talk show host in a small Romanian City (Vaslui), is whether Vaslui itself had a revolution, or did it wait until after 12:08 p.m. on December 22 to demonstrate, after Ceauşescu and his police state apparatus had lost power. To answer the question, he invites two local people, one an alcoholic schoolteacher who claims that he was demonstrating in the town square with three other teachers, and the secret police (Securitate) even beat them; the other, a locally beloved elderly figure known for playing Santa Claus for decades (he's doing a reprise this year since the usual Santa Claus broke his leg). Unfortunately or conveniently for the schoolteacher, two of the teachers who supposedly demonstrated with him are now dead and the third has left the country. Several callers claim to have been there and not seen the teachers, including a former Securitate agent who is now rich and powerful and threatens to sue the station for the calumnies against his good(?) name. So were the four men there, or is the teacher lying? We never know for sure.
Meanwhile, the other gentleman is sitting there ignored, making paper boats and occasionally making common-sense remarks when prodded. Eventually he gets to give his own recollection, which is pretty moving but reveals he was a demonstrator after the event. He speaks of how with photosensors, the lights in town gradually go on one street at a time, like the revolution spreads from its foci to cover the country. The talk show host denies this, but at the end we see the old man is right.
A lot of the humor comes from poverty. The talk show host is a former textile worker who built his own program, with apparently one assistant (when trained, they run off to Bucharest), and has to call his guests up personally and pick them up in his beaten-up car. He's always ordering his poor assistant to show the guest, do a close up, etc., all of this while he's on screen. The question gradually comes to be not whether a revolution occured in Vaslui, but whether a meaningful revolution occured in Romania at all. (I'd think the absence of the secret police would be a big clue; the question is really whether the people are better off overall.)
Romania is a hot country in cinema right now, much as Iran was a few years ago, and South Korea is recently. Another Romanian film (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year. 12:08 East of Bucharest is pleasant, very low key and rather slow. It doesn't particularly stand out for the acting or camerawork although everyone is certainly competent. I mostly enjoyed it but wasn't knocked out. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 4:42 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9016
Location: Shanghai
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Syd, that was more or less my impression.
I think it was pretty good and some of the ideas stuck with me for a few weeks. But the small-scale and melancholy slowness is why I was trying to damp down expectations a little. Someone somewhere (Ebert?) referred to it as "the least distinguished TV panel ever."
The key question isn't really whether protests occurred, but whether anything has changed since in the countryside.
I thought the title can also be read to mean that time has stood still. They are still at that moment waiting for change
Whenever I watch any Eastern European or Russian films, I'm always struck by the amount of drinking and number of alcoholics.
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu seems to have kicked off the recent wave of attention for Romanian films. That film was slow, and I didn't care for it much at all, but it got a good deal of praise.
Try The Paper Will be Blue. |
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| mo_flixx |
| Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 9:54 am |
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gromit wrote: Syd, that was more or less my impression.
I think it was pretty good and some of the ideas stuck with me for a few weeks. But the small-scale and melancholy slowness is why I was trying to damp down expectations a little. Someone somewhere (Ebert?) referred to it as "the least distinguished TV panel ever."
The key question isn't really whether protests occurred, but whether anything has changed since in the countryside.
I thought the title can also be read to mean that time has stood still. They are still at that moment waiting for change
Whenever I watch any Eastern European or Russian films, I'm always struck by the amount of drinking and number of alcoholics.
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu seems to have kicked off the recent wave of attention for Romanian films. That film was slow, and I didn't care for it much at all, but it got a good deal of praise.
Try The Paper Will be Blue.
gromit --
I don't know if your question was rhetorical or related to present day Romania. When I visited Romania last August, the country had changed tremendously from the Communist days. Bucharest is packed with SUV's and expensive cars. The charming town of Sibiu has a summer-long _free_ cultural festival featuring top musicians. Money from the EU and tourism seems to have poured into the country. Romanians are opening restaurants and B & B's. Sports stars have done well and are making investments in resort/real estate complexes. Even agro-tourism has taken off, especially with French visitors who enjoy working in the fields. You can still see plenty of horse-drawn carts in the countryside (and almost imagine that it's the 19th C.), but I suspect all that will be changing soon.
Nearby Moldova (populated by Romanians) but still heavily under the influence of Russia provides a bleak contrast to the relative prosperity one sees in Romania. |
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| lady wakasa |
| Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 10:13 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
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Location: Beyond the Blue Horizon
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| bart |
| Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 10:51 am |
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Joined: 05 Dec 2005
Posts: 2381
Location: Lincoln NE
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| Just watched a late 2006/early 2007 release called First Snow, a pretty good tumbleweed noir set in NM, with Guy Pearce, JK Simmons, and William Fichtner. Has a metaphysical element regarding fate and changing the future, which seems to work well against the southwestern backdrop. Recommend it for serious Guy Pearce fans and/or aficionados of tumbleweed noir. Not quite as good as a John Dahl, but better than an Oliver Stone "U-Turn." Piper Perabo plays a GF/Voice of Reason to a coming-unglued Pearce, blandly but not badly. |
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| Rod |
| Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 11:01 am |
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Joined: 21 Dec 2004
Posts: 2944
Location: Lithgow, Australia
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Viewings:
This Is England (2007)
Shane Meadows’ first film, Twenty Four Seven, was a work that promised big things without delivering them, hollow in its hyper-realism. Meadows seemed to realise this himself, and his follow-up, the superb A Room For Romeo Brass, was loose and artfully artless, establishing his great gift for organic character studies of very ordinary people which also subtly and surprisingly develop along non-clichéd arcs. This Is England is a concise, quietly symphonic expansion of his style, if not his material, one of the best directors of actors working, and proves him the only director in Britain doing something interesting with the Loach/Leigh tradition, as well as retaining of dash of Truffaut and Dickens in his interest in poetic-realist portraits of youth – the search for a way to grow up in a time and place that makes a mockery of human potential is Meadows’ strongest theme. This Is England has the advantage of a very concentrated, simple story that happens to involve a personalised take on a specific cultural moment. The longings and losses of its young hero, Shaun (Thomas Thurgoose), make him grip like a limpet to anyone who can give him an iota of love and empowerment, gravitating from the gregarious Woody (Joe Gilgun) to the fierce, bullock-browed ex-con skinhead Combo (Stephen Graham) who promises to barge his way through the bullshit of Thatcherite Britain.
Except Combo’s a mass of conflicting, entwined impulses, whose desperate, quaking desire for love and acceptance is counterbalanced by a vast, rumbling rage for a world that denied it, so the small family he builds for himself in his tribe of skinheads, and his xenophobic passion, are sides of the same coin, to both reach out and embrace and reject and destroy. Finally, both impulses collide head on in a brutal finish we know is coming but are not certain who it will involve and when it will come. Meadows effortlessly swings the tone between wispy joy, serio-comic romance, and taut foreboding, though the postscript is flabby and obvious, to let us know it’s all okay with a dull-witted symbolic act. If Meadows had ended it where Scorsese ended Mean Streets, he’d have had a near-masterpiece.
The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2005)
Speaking of Loach, his Palmes D’Or winner is an ambitious and troubling work, with Loach’s usual effortlessly real mise-en-scene, but it is a retread, in story and theme, of his galvanising 1995 Land and Freedom. Like that film it centres on a set of heroes in a recent-historical conflict, who pay the price for sticking to principal and are destroyed by the people they fought with and for, thus preserving a note of unbridled, uncompromised idealism within an otherwise shitty mess. Except that unlike in Land and Freedom, the romantic element is colorless, and Cillian Murphy’s hero eventually irritated me, signing on with anti-treaty forces to fight for a Socialist Ireland (yeah right) and putting more innocent people, and finally himself, in mortal peril. This seriously weakens the would-be tragic conclusion, and the film actually does not measure up to Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins, a bolder work of cinema and political contemplation, even if Julia Roberts did suck in it.
The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941)
Monty Woolley rocks. Certainly more so than the corn-fed idiot Bette Davis mysteriously wants to marry.
Abe Lincoln In Illinois (1940)
Veers close to cornball on occasions, and littered with dire patches of stagy acting by much of the supporting cast, but Robert Sherwood’s politically purposeful late ‘30s subtext and Raymond Massey’s mostly well-judged performance, marred only by occasional lapses into pseudo-saintly oratory, manages to make for a lively, intelligent character portrait. It attempts to drag real people out of the folklore and marble, and builds to an excellent, charged contraction of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. |
Last edited by Rod on Fri Jan 04, 2008 1:05 am; edited 1 time in total
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| gromit |
| Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 11:01 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9016
Location: Shanghai
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mo_flixx wrote:
gromit --
I don't know if your question was rhetorical or related to present day Romania. When I visited Romania last August, the country had changed tremendously from the Communist days. Bucharest is packed with SUV's and expensive cars. The charming town of Sibiu has a summer-long _free_ cultural festival featuring top musicians. Money from the EU and tourism seems to have poured into the country. Romanians are opening restaurants and B & B's. Sports stars have done well and are making investments in resort/real estate complexes. Even agro-tourism has taken off, especially with French visitors who enjoy working in the fields. You can still see plenty of horse-drawn carts in the countryside (and almost imagine that it's the 19th C.), but I suspect all that will be changing soon.
Nearby Moldova (populated by Romanians) but still heavily under the influence of Russia provides a bleak contrast to the relative prosperity one sees in Romania.
The film was looking at small-town life "east of Bucharest." And I think a part of it is that people's mindsets and habits haven't changed.
But good to hear what's going on there. I expect if it was still so poor, there wouldn't be cinematic renaissance underway. Have you seen any good Moldovan films lately?
I knew a few Romanians in Shanghai about 5 years back so got a picture of what things were like around 2000 (when they had left).
I'd like to get there. |
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Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number. |
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| bart |
| Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 11:23 am |
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Joined: 05 Dec 2005
Posts: 2381
Location: Lincoln NE
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Rod, I would almost think you view the posting of thumbnail reviews as a competitive sport.
 |
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| chillywilly |
| Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 11:24 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 8251
Location: Salt Lake City
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I have a friend that I've known for sometime (used to work with him about 10 years ago and now work with him again at the new company I am with). We've shared lots of things... good times at the bar, the same stripper at a gentleman's club (not at the same time), hanging out at the same concert and of course, various non-work related conversations on the job.
One of those took place a month ago, when he came in and raved about how Transformers was the best movie ever. It was so good, that he went out and bought the HD-DVD version of the movie without owning an HD-DVD player.
So I added it to my Netflix list and sat down the other night at watched it.
Was it the best movie ever? Well, in my opinion, I've seen better movies. But I have to admit that for a Michael Bay film, where you can expect all sorts of action scenes, no matter how over the top they may be, it was a pretty fun movie to watch.
In a nutshell, Shia LaBeouf was great, Megan Fox was hot, Josh Duhamel was ok, but mostly uttered cheesy dialouge, Jon Voight played a decent goverment official and the story wasn't all that bad. Throw in some funny jabs (including one at Bay's Armageddon) and pretty incredible CGI effects when the Autobots and Decepticons start going at it, and you have an action film that's actually fun to watch. |
Last edited by chillywilly on Thu Jan 03, 2008 1:53 pm; edited 1 time in total
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"If you should die before me / Ask if you could bring a friend" |
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