MOVIES MOVIES MOVIES! ACK!

[peacocks]

that's what I said! Or the navigator fish baby mobster. "you didn't heart his from me. I wasn't here, capiche?"

[edison]

Oh fuck Deep End was fuckin great! I like all the Skolimowski films I've seen so far, but I think I liked this Best.

nice! I'm slo-o-owly going through skolimowski but that one should be up next. I caught Moonlighting in the theater at like 2 this afternoon though (heh). loved the soundtrack and the uneasy mood, the way it treated everything as dead serious, which I guess it is when your setting is so precarious... also the guy's dramatic voice-over narration reminded me of a diary from some crazy trip into the jungle or something

*ps thought this movie might help me finally understand the "moonlighting" reference from ninja turtles the movie but no that's the other thing I guess. Oh Well!

I have not seen Le Depart, but Skolimoski AND Jean-Perre Leaud? Sign me the fuck up! have you seen it?

I saw that a few months ago and while not as unbelievably cool as you might imagine, it's pretty damn good!

[Thermofusion]

saw moonrise kingdom. i liked it. the wes andersonness got in the way of the beginning but after the story panned out a bit i either got used to it or it became a good movie. it was fun to watch! some of the action scenes- like when stuff blows up- was like a paper illustration. That was on purpose but I wasn't into it. It didn't take away from the rest of the movie though.

i loved it. of course, i hate the boy scouts as only someone who was forced to join a boy scout troop run by a bunch of weird-underwear-wearing mormon neighbors can hate a kids club. as with piano lessons, my parents relented after two years of torture. thanks, ma & pa.

favorite part in the film was how the soundtrack ends with "cuckoo, cuckoo" repeated about ten times.

I think one of the things that got me into this movie was because I always wanted to be a boy scout. Although I was a girl scout for 9 years and we did a lot of camping stuff it wasn't nearly as in depth or cool as in the movie which was pretty much how I imagined boy scouting to be.

too bad the actual boy scouts of america is run by a bunch of bigoted butt heads.

A girl dragged me to Moonrise Kingdom last Saturday and I ended up really liking it, too. Even all the obvious symbolism (the nature and location of the climax, the use of the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, etc) didn't seem awkward or forced 'cause it suited the very basic, allegorical premise. I thought all the defeated, melancholy adults were fantastic (maybe with the exception of Bill Murray), and I loved Bruce Willis and Ed Norton in particular. I was a lot more invested in those two guys than the young couple.

[Thermofusion]

Also I meant to add, I loved the way the introduction to the scout camp was shot. I know the unedited tracking shot is Wes Anderson 101 or whatever but that was a great sequence.

[milly balgeary]

Batman was a solid 8 on the balgeary scale. I won't put any spoilers out there, except that Tom Hardy does a grand and peculiar job, the info dumps were horrible, and like other Batman movies the tech porn that Batman uses is the least interesting part.

[peacocks]

Wait wait explain again because I was too "pretty colors!" to notice any symbolism of THAT sort!

[peacocks]

Aside from the new jewelry that is acquired, I guess that's a pretty obvious symbol for something or other

[milly balgeary]

I don't think you're talking about batman. Unless he was wearing a brooch. Goddamnit. He was, wasn't he

[Greg Nog]

Just saw the new Batman, thought it was moderately bad.  Still amazed that Christian Bale is doing the rasp-voice open-mouth thing; kind of thought someone woulda told him to knock it off by now.

[elpollodiablo]

Moderately bad to halfway decent seems to be the general consensus. How was Tom Hardy?

[Greg Nog]

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I'm amending it to "very bad".

Tom Hardy was good, though!  They don't give him much to do except stand around looking muscular with most of his face covered, so his acting really comes down to voice-acting.  But! I thought he was great at that, using this cheerfully-avuncular tone that was a nice change from most Movie Bad Guy voices. 

Someone online pointed out that he sounds a bit like Sean Connery in the SNL Jeopardy sketches. I think that was meant as a diss to the voice, but I really loved it; it's the voice of someone who's simply DELIGHTED to be as dastardly as he wanna be and is pretty chill about it, to boot!

[milly balgeary]

It wasn't bad at all. It tied in nicely with the first and second movies, and was about on par with the first Batman movie. This is coming from a guy who doesn't really like Batman, and kind of frowns at superhero movies in general, while still watching them hopefully.

Pros:

*Tom Hardy is a killer big dude type actor, and I loved him in Warrior, so I like seeing him getting big work. He's my favorite part of this movie, and wears pretty cool clothes!
*Christian Bale did a pretty decent job at being background fodder. I don't really like him much and so it's a pro for me that he sunk into the background and acted more like a cipher.
*The movie had a lot of slow burning politicking which sort of meandered in a likable way, and kept me interested.
*The action scenes were about what you would expect, and gave you a nice cipheresque feeling, like you were doing this and that, and getting the reward of seeing the bad guys fall and the public wondering how you did it.
*It ended the entire trilogy in a way that does not beg for a sequel.


*The info dumps were consistently terrible.
*Bane seemed to show up randomly, being strong. I kept wondering how he knew where and when to be.
*The secondary characters, Oldman, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, even Ann Hathaway, were quite awful in their scenes. I'm not sure why Levitt played Jimmy Olson in cop form, but he was so annoyingly eager. Hathaway seemed cool at first, but then sucked, and didn't even flounce around in her cat woman suit. I get that Nolan was injecting Noir attitude into comic book characters written for juvenile adults but Hathaway was super boring.
*The tech porn of Batman's toys was intolerable. Nolan's a cool guy and maybe his producer is screaming during the filmmaking, "we only let you make this movie Nole, dark and shit, like you like, because Kenner has a tie in on Batman toys so make a flying copter and put it in a lot of scenes like it's a character in the movie."
*I think Nolan thinks of himself as a kind of new fangled auteur, based on his movies, like he is out there making big art house super hero films with dazzling technical acumen and amazing narrative, and to a degree he's right, for this format, but on the other hand, you just wanna say nigga please! Prestige is great, but that's based on the subject matter, not Nolan. But he ain't some auteur like Paul Thomas Anderson. Ain't like people are mixing Inception up with There Will Be Blood. But, he's better than JJ Abrams.

PS I'm sort of intrigued by Man of Steel which trailer played prior to Batman. Written by Nolan, directed by Snyder (director of the Watchmen) ...color me interested. I much prefer Snyder to Nolan. I'm still repping for Watchmen and in fact the complete edition including the animated short is one of the only Bluerays I own. I also loved his Dawn of the Dead reboot. He's a genuinely crazy dude, I think, and so Man of Steel could go places. I am not going to discuss Sucker Punch except to say that it took balls.

[milly balgeary]

Also, hilarious factoid. Two stuntmen who worked on original Batman movie invented a fighting system called

Keysi Fighting Method
https://www.keysikfm.com/en

This was a fighting style developed by 2 stuntmen on the set of Batman Begins and it's what Batman uses to fight in the movies. These stunt guys then founded an online university training program. Isn't that weird? Christopher Nolan on set was like. "Yeah, totally a great idea."

Watch the video to the right for some hilarity. Forward to about 4:24, after a shocking 4 duration of weird fake guy stuff. It's hilarious! I just ordered package #2 for you Elpollo. There is too much to mock here.

[milly balgeary]

Yo I just got my Urban X street certification!..Batman style sonnnnnn

[jebreject]

Gods I do hate Zach Snyder

Agree about Nolan though. I think he thinks he's much more clever than he really is. He pulls off some amazing stuff here and there (the spinning fight scene in Inception, natch) but there are also total turd piles like Memento. He's awful at plotting, but I get the distinct feeling he thinks it's one of his strongest points. On the whole I think he's done a great job with the Batman series, even though it's far from perfect, and I'm looking forward to the new one quite a bit.

[milly balgeary]

We disagree about Snyder! I still think the Watchmen is awesome! Like a teenager thinks Metallica is awesome in 1988.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks Momento stinks. It's a real pile. I never actually finished watching it.

[dieblucasdie]

Yeah, I mean, I don't hold Synder in any high regard at all, but people who believe he did a disservice to Watchmen or 300 think too highly of Frank Miller and Alan Moore. The problems with those movies were features, not bugs, and I'll definitely approach Man of Steel with an open mind. Honestly, the pervading sense of conflicted-yet-overeager masculinity that highlighted the flaws of Watchmen and 300 might actually make for an interesting take on a more old-fashioned story like Superman's.

I maybe feel about Nolan the way milly feels about Synder. You can nitpick Inception to death, but if nothing else, it was a big dickslap of original, not-based-on-a-book-or-comic sci-fi, and my inner 13 year-old is always going to love him for that.

Hopefully, though, in two months time, we'll all have seen Looper and we can talk about how much Rian Johnson makes them both look like chumps *fingers crossed*

[jebreject]

Yeah, I mean, I don't hold Synder in any high regard at all, but people who believe he did a disservice to Watchmen or 300 think too highly of Frank Miller and Alan Moore. The problems with those movies were features, not bugs, and I'll definitely approach Man of Steel with an open mind. Honestly, the pervading sense of conflicted-yet-overeager masculinity that highlighted the flaws of Watchmen and 300 might actually make for an interesting take on a more old-fashioned story like Superman's.

Frank Miller is a fascist piece of shit and Zach Snyder made a(n absolutely stunning-looking) fascist film adaptation of 300, so I have no problems there.

You're totally wrong that he didn't do a disservice to Watchmen, though. His adaptation of Watchmen makes me wonder if he has any understanding of subtext whatsoever. The problem with Watchmen is that it's too faithful to the source material, I think--but it's faithful to the letter and not the spirit. And Watchmen is all about the spirit. Plus it was designed to be, you know, a comic book, and thus unadaptable, but whatever. Snyder did a better job with an unadaptable work than anyone could have expected him to, and, once again, it looks amazing, but it's utterly devoid of complexity and nuance, and it makes a champion of a character meant to be morally ambiguous at best (though in reality, incredibly fucked up and terrifying in his actions). So I guess Snyder gets an A for Effort, but he utterly fails at understanding or putting across what Watchmen is actually about.

[Greg Nog]

I pretty much agree with jeb on all of the above, and kind of love 300 in the same way that I kind of love Triumph of the Will. (NO NAZI)

[Trousers and Pat]

Oh fuck Deep End was fuckin great! I like all the Skolimowski films I've seen so far, but I think I liked this Best.

nice! I'm slo-o-owly going through skolimowski but that one should be up next. I caught Moonlighting in the theater at like 2 this afternoon though (heh). loved the soundtrack and the uneasy mood, the way it treated everything as dead serious, which I guess it is when your setting is so precarious... also the guy's dramatic voice-over narration reminded me of a diary from some crazy trip into the jungle or something

*ps thought this movie might help me finally understand the "moonlighting" reference from ninja turtles the movie but no that's the other thing I guess. Oh Well!

I have not seen Le Depart, but Skolimoski AND Jean-Perre Leaud? Sign me the fuck up! have you seen it?

I saw that a few months ago and while not as unbelievably cool as you might imagine, it's pretty damn good!

Yeah, I saw it a few days ago- it's good. I remember in particular one visually stunning moment when the lighting in the bedroom changes... Maannnn I found Leaud's character really annoyingly aggressive though, in the end I guess it's like that for a reason though, at least.

[edison]

He's definitely the least likeable Léaud character I can think of.

[dieblucasdie]

Yeah, I just don't agree jeb. I don't feel like Rorschach's character or plot function are significantly different. The type of person who comes out of the movie viewing him as a hero would also be likely to come out of the graphic novel viewing him as a hero. Whatever moral ambiguity is intended, the way it ends is always going to push that potential reading to front of some people's minds.  My position definitely isn't "that movie sucks because the graphic novel sucks," it's more that Watchmen has certain potentially problematic aspects, and that Synder's style was always going to highlight those things rather than ameliorate them. That's not to let Synder off-the-hook: a better director would've adapted his approach to the material. I just think there are fewer potential land-mines in something like Superman, and, as I said, some of his tics might even make the outing more interesting rather than more  .

Let's all forget the Hallelujah sex scene exists though

edit: Man of Steel might also turn out terrible, too, of course. Like I said, I'm just keeping on open mind.

[jebreject]

Yeah, I just don't agree jeb. I don't feel like Rorschach's character or plot function are significantly different. The type of person who comes out of the movie viewing him as a hero would also be likely to come out of the graphic novel viewing him as a hero. Whatever moral ambiguity is intended, the way it ends is always going to push that potential reading to front of some people's minds.

... if they're idiots.

I mean, I guess we're just not going to agree here, but it's my feeling that the film and the comic portray Rorschach in different ways, that the film steamrolls all the nuance right out of the character (and the entire story). I mean feel free to write this off as a dude being knee-jerk protective of one of his favorite books, but after watching the film, by far the strongest thought I had was, "wow, this dude really doesn't get it." I already disliked Snyder, but I tried going in to Watchmen with as open a mind as possible, and I really wanted to like it! I was actually blown away by the trailers--and I actually really admired parts of the film! But I think you're dead wrong to state that the only thing that happened with it was that Snyder highlighted already problematic aspects of the book. That's straight up untrue, unless you had a wildly different reading of it than I did, and that most people did.

[Greg Nog]

Yeah, I just don't agree jeb. I don't feel like Rorschach's character or plot function are significantly different. The type of person who comes out of the movie viewing him as a hero would also be likely to come out of the graphic novel viewing him as a hero.

I think the graphic novel's ability to fill in more weird details about Rorschach -- from his paranoid libertarian streak to the gross-looking smear around his mouth when he's eating beans to his grimy childhood flashbacks -- make him look much more like some fringe weirdo than the movie does.  There's still plenty of people who see the comic's Rorschach as The Coolest Dude, but I think the comic does it make it more difficult.

Also Snyder's version of Ozymandias is SO HILARIOUSLY BAD and making him an effete Continental washed-out-looking mincer kind of misses the whole point of that character by miles and miles, and I think goes further to position Rorschach as an exemplar of Commonsense American Badassery by way of contrast.

Anyway, I have high hopes for Snyder's Superman, mainly because I think he excels at the fascistic kinds of celebration-of-male-power stuff, though heaven help us if he tries to make the character dark and/or complex.

[jebreject]

Yeah, I just don't agree jeb. I don't feel like Rorschach's character or plot function are significantly different. The type of person who comes out of the movie viewing him as a hero would also be likely to come out of the graphic novel viewing him as a hero.

I think the graphic novel's ability to fill in more weird details about Rorschach -- from his paranoid libertarian streak to the gross-looking smear around his mouth when he's eating beans to his grimy childhood flashbacks -- make him look much more like some fringe weirdo than the movie does.  There's still plenty of people who see the comic's Rorschach as The Coolest Dude, but I think the comic does it make it more difficult.

Also Snyder's version of Ozymandias is SO HILARIOUSLY BAD and making him an effete Continental washed-out-looking mincer kind of misses the whole point of that character by miles and miles, and I think goes further to position Rorschach as an exemplar of Commonsense American Badassery by way of contrast

Yes, this, exactly