Movie Watch 3.1

[rockkid]

Dying to see………… Fifty Dead Men Walking.
Damn this is going to be good!

[Thorngrub]

That's one hell of a lot of Miyazakis.

~


I think Ritchie can pull off the new Sherlock Holmes. Looks like a fun time at the movies.

~

Saw THE BROTHERS BLOOM last night. Adrien Brody . . . Mark Ruffalo . . . and Rachel Weisz, together in a dizzy, eccentric Con Game Comedy Romance that I highly recommend to just about anyone here. Some of the plot twists can be a bit bewildering at times, but eventually everything adds up, and there are some terrific performances from this cast. It even features an unrecognizable Maximillian Schell as "DD" - Diamond Dog (the Bloom Brother's Con-mentor). Go see it, or rent it when its out on DVD.

[Thorngrub]

Jul 22, 2009 17:34:02 GMT -5 Matheus said:

I did it again. Big mistake. Big.

Watched Knowing. I have a thing for end of the world movies. Always have. Always will. They always let me down.

I loathe Nicolas Cage, but I watched Knowing anyway.

What a pile of garbage.

I'm trying to decide which movie sucked worse. The remake of the The Day The Earth Stood Still or Knowing.

Let's just keep our fingers crossed that Roland Emmerich's epic 2012 starring John Cusack, delivers the goods. . . .

[Ampage]

500 Days of Summer! Yes - it is that good it brought me back to this board from the past. Of course, nobody will see this post; but if anybody does - have a go. Joseph and Zooey are as about as cute as can be and this is no rom-com chick flick. Inventive, funny and deeply affecting.

[RocDoc]

hey!
amp was here not so long ago!

500 days...yeah, i've read some good stuff about that one...

we're more into the kid-type thing which this one, arguably is:

2 nights ago:

yeah, there's flashes of the ol' ultraviolence (heads and limbs lopped off...a nice multiple slash shot to someone's splayed open spine) all over pretty quick and not one after the other...but still requiring an explanation after looking at my son's reactions, which were admittedly all pretty low-key.
and no, he does not play grand theft auto.
hopefully he won't want to but....

it is a nice, thoughtful message movie, which leaves open a LOT of options (re who IS a good guy and who IS a 'bad' guy), because motivations are always complex...and not simple tied-with-a-bow gimmes.

it is clear that you're not supposed to be fucking with nature especially not in a mean obliterative way.

but the humans' idea of progress depended on pushing a lot of nature aside...but the 'hero' said 'but we CAN work together you assholes!' over and over with no-one giving any notice.

miyazaki rules.

[upinkzeppelin2]

Just saw 88 Minutes. It's been out a while and I probably would've never watched it if Al Pacino wasn't in it. I enjoyed it quite a bit though.

[Ayinger]

It made me think today of how Jacko's been dead for a handful of months and there's aleady a movie out of his rehearsals....where's that Zeppelin reunion show?

[RocDoc]

werner herzog w/ nick cage?
....go haters!

<sub>November 19, 2009

'Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans' -- 3 1/2 stars

By Michael Phillips

“Anything’s possible in this storm!” says the man with the badge in Werner Herzog’s delirious “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” a true feat of daring and one of the craziest films of the year. It’s a very loose remake of the 1992 “Bad Lieutenant,” in which director Abel Ferrara unleashed Harvey Keitel as a drug-addled spin cycle disguised as a police detective. The character of the drug-abusing cop, at work and play, has been relocated from New York to New Orleans, and in place of Keitel’s flaying fits of anguish, Herzog has found his ideal interpreter, a performer whose truth lies deep in the artifice of performance: ladies and gentlemen, Nicolas Cage, at his finest.

The storm the character refers to in the opening scene is a biggie: Hurricane Katrina. In the first scene of “Bad Lieutenant,” Cage’s Terence McDonagh dives into snake-infested, sewage-laced floodwaters to save a prisoner whose cell has been flooded. Is this a characteristic act of bravery or a rare exception to a rotten soul’s rule? It’s up to us to decide.

Herzog is obsessed with obsessives, and Cage’s character — like the movie — will work best with those who, like Herzog, have a natural antipathy for the rabble-rousing cliches of the vigilante cop genre. The script by William Finkelstein provides the groundwork, plus some ripe insults and turns of phrase, but Herzog keeps repaving that groundwork for the better. The film is cracked, yet whole, and while I have no idea what a general audience will make of it, I also have no idea what a general audience is in the first place.

Some scenes, such as the waterfront encounter between Cage and Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner (as a gangster behind a multiple murder), could be taken from any ordinary crime movie. Other scenes belong to this film and no other. In one of his cocaine-induced hallucinations, at a stakeout, McDonagh suddenly sees a pair of iguanas on his coffee table, leading to the natural question: “What are these iguanas doing on my coffee table?” The other cops dismiss the non sequitur, casually — with McDonagh, even the sweatiest, most obviously chemically induced behavior is treated as just another day on the job in the post-Katrina mess. It’s one of the comic strengths of the picture: Even when he’s showing the audience things from an imaginary, metaphoric lizard’s point of view, Herzog’s film never tries to out-crazy the man in the middle of it all.

Shooting on location, Herzog gives the story a melancholy and naturalistic backdrop, which makes the hallucinations all the stranger. McDonagh’s father (Tom Bower), whose new wife (Jennifer Coolidge) is a beer lush, struggles to stay sober with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, and just when you think Herzog and company are going to play the family-crises scenes for laughs, they don’t — or rather they do and they don’t.

Cage can be tiresomely crazy in some films, but here, the minute he starts trashing a pharmacy out of sheer impatience to get his next fix, you know you’re in the company of the right actor in the right role. Early on, we’re told McDonagh has a bad back; by the time the picture has zigzagged to its midpoint, Cage is bent over and snarling like Richard III, with a badge. Then, for a while, Cage tries a new cocaine-, marijuana- and Vicodin-ravaged vocal delivery, alarmingly close to his adenoidal mole in “G-Force.” Somehow these strategies and effects add up. Cage’s instincts are on target in nearly every scene here, and to hear him mock a thug for his one-letter nickname, “G,” is to hear the very concept of sarcasm born again.

In a completely different stylistic vein, “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” which co-stars Eva Mendes as the coked-up call-girl lover of the anti-hero, reminded me of Orson Welles’ great “Touch of Evil.” Neither film really cares about who killed whom, or why. Their mixture of tones, from anguish to irony to grotesque slapstick to pathos, borders on the sociopathic or, at their peaks, the ecstatic.
Herzog’s achievement is far more modest than Welles’, but both swan dives into the cesspool ask the question: What happens when the enforcer becomes the exploiter? Without cheapening the memory of Katrina, Herzog sends McDonagh into a downward spiral, in a city struggling to pull itself out of the drain. Ferrara’s ’92 “Bad Lieutenant” is steeped in Catholic guilt; Herzog’s is steeped in nondenominational hypocrisy. Cage is a gas; the movie’s a peculiar, lingering variation on the themes of corruption and addiction. Herzog has made a film to join his “Grizzly Man” and “Encounters at the End of the World” in a fruitful decade of obsessional portraits.

“Vampires are lucky,” says one junkie to another in the original “Bad Lieutenant.” “They can feed on others. We gotta eat away at ourselves.” Cage’s itchy portrayal, a more stimulating creation than his Oscar-winning portrait of a self-destructor in “Leaving Las Vegas,” sells that notion in every fiber — real and synthetic — of its being.

MPAA rating: R (for drug use and language throughout, some violence and sexuality).
Cast: Nicolas Cage (Terence McDonagh); Eva Mendes (Frankie); Val Kilmer (Stevie Pruit); Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner (Big Fate); Jennifer Coolidge (Genevieve); Tom Bower (Pat McDonagh)
Credits: Directed by: Werner Herzog; written by William Finkelstein; produced by Stephen Belafonte, Alan Polsky, Gabe Polsky, John Thompson, Randall Emmett and Edward R. Pressman. A First Look Studios release. Running time: 2:01.

featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/talking_pictures/2009/11/bad-lieutenant-port-of-call-new-orleans-3-12-stars.html</sub>

[Ayinger]

In the original didn't Keitel let his wang be filmed? Wonder if that's a reference to Cage being "at his finest" here if he follows suit. Either way, probably a good watch.

[Thorngrub]

I can't wait to see that Herzog/Cage affair!


On the down side, I saw 2012. And a new word was born into my vocabulary:

RETARDACULAR

[Ayinger]

By Kirk Honeycutt Kirk Honeycutt

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter)
– Let the arguments begin. The best films of the decade are, in my opinion, as follows.

For certain, they won't be yours, though I do hope this list jogs the memory. These are films that had an impact. They shocked, dismayed and provoked. They unsettled people. They established legacies, won awards and aggravated more than a few. None is easy or conventional. That's what great movies are about.

10. THE WHITE RIBBON

Austrian director Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon," made in Germany, looks at the Hitler generation when they were in knee pants. A small Protestant village maintains a strict hierarchical order, where everyone knows his place, yet an inhuman moral code holds sway. Again, as in his "Cache," much is hidden, and Haneke is never one to resolve the story's mysteries. The youngsters have embraced the dark side of the adults' values, and he doesn't have to explain where this will lead.

9. THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY

The story of a devastating handicap -- a paralyzing stroke that traps French editor Jean-Dominique Bauby in his body where only a left eyelid can communicate -- becomes an essay about the strength of the human spirit. It is probably the only film ever to exist as virtually one long POV shot. Director Julian Schnabel, who specializes in films about artists who overcome huge obstacles, writer Ronald Harwood and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski solve the problem of a "locked-in" movie by showing everything the man sees from his bed and wheelchair, in sometimes blurred and shaking images, as well as his fantasies and memories. It actually improves on Bauby's dictated memoir by making us literally see and feel the rage, lust, hunger and humor that illness cannot diminish. The performance by Mathieu Amalric is both poignant and breathtaking.

8. CACHE

Yes, Michael Haneke makes the list twice -- and I don' t even count myself a fan. These two films are simply that good. "Cache" -- "hidden" in French -- is a mystery film and one that never bothers to solve its mystery. That lies outside Haneke's interest. He is more concerned about institutional racism, the hidden, if not unconscious, bias that humans harbor about one another and the subject of guilt, communication and willful amnesia. The film operates like a thriller, with overtones of Hitchcock's "Rear Window," which serves to remind us that moviemaking -- and movie watching -- is an act of voyeurism.

7. DIVINE INTERVENTION

A film that probably will not appear on many top 10 lists for the decade, "Divine Intervention" comes from Palestine, a country not recognized by many nations and certainly not the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a convenience which gave that organization cover to not include such a discomforting film in its best foreign language films category in 2002. It's a subversive film that uses the powerful weapon of humor to portray relationships between Jews and Arabs in Israeli-occupied Palestine. Elia Suleiman's mordant comedy is certainly the funniest film on this list: He has just the right, light touch to explore the mindless indignities an occupier can impose on the occupied. Much of this comic stalemate occurs in tiny quotidian moments: locked stares between hostile people or characters sitting helplessly in cars at checkpoints. No one has to say anything: The images do all the talking.

6. FAR FROM HEAVEN

Todd Haynes' film is many things, not the least of which is a flawless replication of 1950s American cinema conventions from art direction and themes to costumes and mores. But his film digs deep, beneath the surface, to show what is taboo -- from the love that dare not speak its name to interracial relationships. The film predates Stonewall and the civil rights movement, but it never tries to get ahead of itself and wink at us about these poor, deluded fools. It accepts their cultural values; no, it traps you in them. No film has subjected the Eisenhower era or suburban culture to greater critical scrutiny. Few films have captured the ways of wayward hearts any better. And that title is just perfect.

5. 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS

Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu depicts with bleak accuracy and wry observation what it's like to navigate the back alleys, easy cruelty and sheer pettiness in a totalitarian society in "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days." This is not the stuff of concentration camps, strong-arm tactics and vicious repression, but rather a society's complete indifference, absent even the slightest human empathy, toward two hapless young women trying to resolve an unwanted pregnancy. Yes, the ostensive portrait is of the final years of Communist rule in Romania, but the film speaks to the banality of evil in all political systems and the contemptuous creatures more than willing to exploit the vulnerable in all societies.

4. THE FOG OF WAR

Robert Strange McNamara died earlier this year, and thanks to Errol Morris' documentary, we were left with a more complex and fundamentally altered view of the former Defense Secretary and architect of the disastrous Vietnam War. This is Morris' least fussy doc -- a film distilled from 20 hours of recorded interviews with the then 85-year-old man. The film has no other voice. The portrait that emerges is surprising, as surprising as McNamara's assertion that he and General Curtis LeMay were essentially war criminals for directing the fire bombing of Tokyo and 67 Japanese cities at the close of World War II and his claim that he desperately urged President Johnson to pull troops out of the Vietnam quagmire. The film should be required viewing in all university classes in 20th-century American history, moral philosophy and the history of warfare. Not to mention film classes.

3. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

Many films in the decade -- many films -- took hard looks at violence in America, and some of those were by Ethan and Joel Coen. Certainly "The Dark Knight" and "The History of Violence" tried to penetrate the seemingly inexhaustible allure of blood in the American psyche. Perhaps because this film is set in the West, which reminds us of the dark, murderous legacy of the Old West and the genocide of Manifest Destiny, "Country" gets to the heart of the matter. The title works two ways, describing a territory where the young are predators or a place where few live to be old. Evil exists in a banal, commonplace manner. You can't reason with it or outsmart it; evil will mercilessly track you down. The movie's dialogue is startling, its character portraits staggering, and the theme of pure malevolence crawls into your skin like a plague.

2. UNITED 93

A shocking, emotionally searing account of the first people to inhabit the post-September 11 world, "United 93" depicts the fourth ill-fated flight of that unforgettable September day. Paul Greengrass makes you experience that flight and that day, as well as the intersection between hopelessness and determination. It's the only film of the decade that takes the measure of our changed world, from its ordinary, everyday opening minutes to a final confrontation with religious and political madness.

1. LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA

Hollywood has been making war movies since D.W. Griffith, but you seldom if ever get a sense of how it feels. You may in the first 20 minutes of Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan"; then that movie reverts to genre form. But Clint Eastwood's "Letters From Iwo Jima" accomplishes this feat: You get war in all its horror, boredom and grit -- and from the point of view of our country's enemy, so any empathy is hard-earned. With unsettling brilliance, the film captures war as experienced by soldiers lost in its fog, as a grinding, sickening, numbing death machine. In Eastwood's version, heroism and cowardice are two sides of the same coin, and glory a concept best left to generals and historians.

[maarts]

So, Avatar...one to watch?
It looks like one of those Pixar-jobbies which I'm not too keen on.

[Ayinger]

I too wasn't too keen on it from previews. Nice cgi but so?

DID make an effort to go out and see Sherlock Holmes --- good enough of a distraction....was satisfied in it.

[maarts]

As a massive fan of the books I'm afraid Sherlock Holmes will all be sexed up beyond recognition...

[Ayinger]

Actually, not too bad in that department. There's a dashing element but Downey doesn't really play upon it all that much. He's not as stoic towards women as Jeremy Brett in the great BBC series but not totally handicapped either by the beter sex in this outing.