saw a talkie at the picture show: new film thread

[coldforge]

I am watching True Grit. It's fantastic.

[peacocks]

YEAH! I wanna see the orig.

I saw part of The Magus the other night and we turned it off because it was so boring. When it tried to be trippy and mind bending it only got more boring. Everyone was so stiff in it and Candice Bergen, who I was excited about, was fake and barely there. I love Michael Caine so much but this was not good. We were reading about it online and apparently Woody Allen said that if he could live his life over again he would do everything exactly the same except for watch this movie. I wouldn't be that harsh. It wasn't AvP. I just had high hopes.

[davy]

Then I watched For the Love of Benji. I know Joe Camp's big thing is wholesome family films, no nudity, profanity, fart jokes and what have you, but for children's entertainment, the Benji films are really distressing. In this film, Benji spends almost the whole time lost in Greece, hungry, unable to find his family. After spending about 40 minutes watching the dog wandering about being unhappy, then the crime caper plot kicks in, and a bad guy kidnaps Benji and a secret agent tells the weeping nanny and children "this guy has killed man in cold blood! Do you think he'll balk at killing a little brown dog?" I think I would've been really, really upset by this film as a child. But, like all the other Benji films I've seen, it moves along slow as molasses, with just a lot of footage of a dog wandering about the streets, all shot very much from dog-level, all while very bad music plays. those parts of the film are what I like, and find very comforting.

Yes! I've said these same things about Benji: The Hunted, which is one of my favorite movies of all time.

[Greg Nog]

I saw part of The Magus the other night and we turned it off because it was so boring. When it tried to be trippy and mind bending it only got more boring. Everyone was so stiff in it

That's how I felt about the book!  When I finished it, I was like, I could see this being massively cool and mindblowing for like eight years in the seventies, but goodness it feels dated now.

[G.C.R]

ADF said my thoughts on A Film Unfinished:

Other than my newly beloved RWF the only thing I've seen lately has been A Film Unfinished, which left me unsatisfied. Documenting the Holocaust is of course important, but as a documentary this just underperforms. I guess I was expecting some historiographical contextualization--we have this 1942 Nazi propaganda "documentary" shot in the Warsaw ghetto, 5 decades later exposed (to the surprise of anyone?) as staged, and . . . well, and mostly we watch a few survivors watch it and react. I got no harangue against bearing witness, but riveting cinema, this is not. I wanted a better sense of how the ghetto doc had been perceived in the interim, whether it had been used in historical narrativizations, stuff like that--basically, this is probably the first time in my life I will assert a documentary could have been improved by academic talking heads laying out the meaning and significance of what we're seeing. There are these revealing moments of outtakes exposing the staging, but the film doesn't really do anything with them besides saying "look, it's fake."

I found the survivors watching the film to be not just unriveting, but inethical. It's the documentary channel equivalent of that TV news cliche of shoving a mic in the face of someone who've just seen theirfamily killed and asking "so how do you feel?" It felt like the filmmakers weren't convinced that a long lost unfinished propaganda film of a hugely important and moving historical time and place would be interesting, and that they needed to jazz it up a bit with old women in pain and crying.

[Nick Ink]

Tried to watch The Social Network last night. We persuaded ourselves to give it a go because of all the positive reviews, but man alive, what a mistake! We hated, loathed and despised it from the first second. Dispicable characters, a one-dimensional story, ultra-irritating performances and visually, completely unappealing.

I also cancelled my lovefilm account (someone had given me a free trial) early. I only got it to find more Korean/non-Hollywood films, and the choice wasn't as good as I'd hoped.

[edison]

I didn't hate it quite so much as you, but also found The Social Network very unappealing for similar reasons. I actually thought there would be no way in hell I'd like The West Wing (written by the same guy) based on that, but The West Wing is pretty much the opposite in the sense that most if not all of the characters are eminently loveable. The Social Network can be very good, but just seems to lack a heart.

[Anne the Man]

You should watch Catfish instead, which I was just coming here to post about. Two guys started documenting their friend's Facebook friendship with a young girl who painted his photos, her mother and eventually the older sister who he started seeing. And then it turns out to be fake in spectacular proportions. Everyone in the film is so nice to each other though! It's kind of strange and awful and lovely.

[Ignatius]

This board convinced me not to bother with Catfish some time ago. Something about manipulation.

[elpollodiablo]

Actually I think if you watch it it makes you gay

Just what I heard

[Ignatius]

Fatherhood has made you strange

[Dick]

More than anything else seeing that film made me really glad that I live with all my artist friends in Brooklyn and not in like, a trailer in the rural Midwest or something.

[milly balgeary]

Source Code


Man, this was close to being pretty ok. But not.

[G.C.R]

Watching Source Code was like talking to a stupid person who thinks they are really smart and wants you to think they are really smart too.

[milly balgeary]

Yup! That's an apt way to put it!

[Babar]

First



and then



and finally




they were very good, good & bad.

[jm]

Source Code


Man, this was close to being pretty ok. But not.

Ahahaha this was directed by David Bowie's offspring. Just like Moon.

[Almanzo]

Source Code


Man, this was close to being pretty ok. But not.

Is this the one where there's a dunkin' donuts inside the train?

[Ignatius]

You say that like it's weird. But what the hell train doesn't have a dunkin donuts that also sells tall boys?

[elpollodiablo]

On a list of things the existence of which would make me unhappy, a Noah Baumbach-directed adaptation of The Corrections ranks pretty goddamn high.

[Ignatius]

If Anthony Hopkins plays the dad Odin-style, I'm down.

[davy]

Source Code


Man, this was close to being pretty ok. But not.

Ahahaha this was directed by David Bowie's offspring. Just like Moon.

man, I love Moon.

[davy]

L & I watched Lars Von Trier's Antichrist this weekend.

What the fuck, man.

[davy]

Ok, yeah, this, basically:

I watched the opening of Antichrist the other night, and then I said, I cannot watch this. I have enough shit to deal with in my own life right now.

In fact, I did not/could not watch the opening montage, came back for most of the middle, but just didn't care enough by the end to put myself through finding out what she did with the scissors. L filled me in later.

I guess I'm okay with not being cut out for films like that.

[peacocks]

hyuk hyuk