Recommend a movie

10 posts

Niccolo and Donkey
As my brother mentioned, it's my favourite film of all time. When I was 14, I first caught it on TVOntario's Wednesday night program called "Film International". They would weekly show the great foreign films throughout history. I remember being quite confused during the opening scene but at the same time intrigued. By the end of the film I realized that movies could be much, much more than I could have ever imagined.

The film has a story, it has cinematography, it has great, smart dialogue, it has style and panache and it has humour that is both intelligent and shows that Fellini doesn't take himself all that seriously since Guido Anselmi is simply Fellini himself. The key here is that Fellini always directed movies with the sense that they were movies: they were never too snobby nor did they try to shut out the larger audience even though they movies weren't dumb. Fellini perfected the art of the absurd as well as that of fantasy and spectacle and they all come together perfectly here in 8 1/2.

The movie doesn't come across as preachy which is a testament to Fellini's rejection of allying with any sort of fashionable politics even though he would tackle such difficult subjects as sexuality, liberty, and church politics. As you've mentioned, the film is so multi-layered that I continually find new things to admire and understand upon repeated watching.

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Savrola

minor gem

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Cornelio
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Rampage (2009) , by Uwe Boll. :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

The adrenaline rush one must feel when going on a killing rampage is portrayed in this film with great accuracy. An entertaining product with a bit more depth than usual.
Angocachi

I would break Uwe Boll's face open if I happened to come within speaking distance of him. Dumb fuck, I want to hurt him bad. The main actor too.

I adore violence, but the victim has to deserve it (see the ending to 'Staten Island'). The tagline, "Have you ever considered it?", it's directed at aspiring shooting spree'ers.
I've had to deal with so many fucking medicated, seeing-a-psychiatrist, "I've been institutionalized/arrested for making threats", I hate people/living/everything sucks, through high school, college, and even after... a prick who gives them a fictional hero who gets to live his fantasy and, at the end, face no consequence, Uwe Boll really merits my kneecap in his mouth. He's Tarantino but worse.

Thomas777
Red White and Blue 2010

*SPOILERS*

This is a really solid film that seems to have gone underneath the radar and was mostly shown at arthouse type festivals, largely to critical panning. It was further maligned by tepid promotion that made it appear from trailers to be nothing more than torture porn tripe of the kind put out by Eli Roth or faux-retro garbage on the order of I Spit on Your Grave.

In reality, its a genuine horror film that owes a lot to Paul Schrader's Taxi Driver and Hardcore as well as the much underrated 80s indie picture Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

The movie is also about distinctively White pathologies, but its an honest treatment of them and it presents them in terms that aren't moralistic or contrived; at base, all the main characters of the film, save for a hapless family man caught in circumstances out his control, are despicable, sociopathic, pathetic or all of the above.

The film opens with a day and night in the life of a teenaged whore and barfly in Austin, Texas. When she's not hustling, she doles out free ones to any and all comers, sometimes two or three at a time; with the only stipulations being that she doesn't ''do friends'', never fucks the same guy twice, and barebacks exclusively because ''condoms are for homos''. She lives in a boarding house with a slew of other nameless and faceless derelicts, with the exception of a newcomer named ''Tate''; a white trash, scarfaced drifter and Iraq war veteran who claims to be in the process of being recruited by the CIA. Tate works at a lumber yard stocking planks and sweeping floors, and he takes an almost obsessive interest in the girl; although he seems wholly unmoved by her feminine wiles and expresses no desire for her sexually. She asks him why he is being nice to her and he relays that when he was a boy, he was punished for setting fire to his little sister's parakeet; and his parents punished him by giving him a pet cat to care for to teach him the value of life over death. He explains that he loved the cat, and his affection for the cat also allowed him to kill other neighborhood pets while avoiding suspicion. The girl initially tolerates him out of pity, and then later convinces herself that his kindness towards her is genuine and pure and not encumbered by lust. They begin a largely Platonic affair, only holding hands together or sleeping next to one another while fully clothed and carrying on almost as married people would, but for the girl's constant and compulsive sexual antics with every other man she meets.

The second act of the film focuses on ''Frankie'' and his friends. Frankie is a suburban rich kid in his 20s, embroiled in perpetual adolescence, who fronts a punk band with his similarly situated friends. Their hipster tattoos and leather jackets seem especially ridiculous when juxtaposed with the bizarre, pathetic, and authentically meager lives of Tate and his new friend. Frankie's mother is dying of cancer, and he is charged with donating blood to her during the course of his treatment. It is during one of these now-routine blood donations that he learns he has been infected w/HIV; which he has contracted from Tate's girl, having participated with his pals in a sordid late night gangbang at her behest only weeks earlier. His anxieties are exascerbated when he realizes he may also have inadvertently infected his mother during the course of the blood transfusions.

The final third of the film involves the search for the girl by Frankie and his friends, whom upon finding her, bind her and take her to Frankie's home., at which point Frankie sends his friends away and confronts the girl about his infection. She tells him casually that carrying the bug is ''no big deal'', and that she fucks everyone she meets because she wants there to be consequences for their lust. She claims she developed this sense of mission after being raped by a man at four years old, but its unclear as to whether or not this is simply a melodramatic narrative she invented, gleaned from the popular culture and endlessly repeated, not unlike Tate's own claim of working for the government. Bleary-eyed Frankie in his callow and effeminate emotionalism and flagrant inability to perceive the bestial nature of people outside of the cloistered middle class existence he takes for granted says he wants to ''save'' the girl and they should be married and ''learn to love each other''. The girl's feelings then shift from fear to utter contempt and she rebuffs him, dumbfounded. He responds by binding her once again and holding her captive in his basement. His treatment of her is at first ridiculous and kindly, but soon after, he learns of his mothers' death and in a fit of rage stabs her ultimately killing her.

Tate meanwhile has begun searching for his friend; and when he comes upon a lost credit card belonging to one of Frankie's friends, he travels to the man's home and cons his way in. At which point, Tate begins torturing the man, his, wife and his daughter in a calm and efficient manner to extract information about those responsible for the girl's demise. He ultimately kills the whole family after subjecting them to what is best described as ''enhanced interrogation techniques''. Upon discovering the whereabouts of his other quarry, he massacres them in a similar fashion, buries his friend in a makeshift grave, and quickly leaves Austin to avoid detection.

This is ultimately an unpleasant film, and it resorts to shock at times, but its highly effective nonetheless. There is no deeper theme other than that people who are sociopathic are like other humans in that they aim to mythologize their own compulsions and experiences in order to confer some kind of heroic meaning upon these things so as to escape their own mediocrity and banality. Concomitantly, it fleshes out the truism that all men, no matter how wretched, seek out company in others; most often others like them, because nobody can truly go through life completely alone, if for no other reason than that they require another to act as witness to their own lives.
Cornelio

Thanks for that, I'm downloading it.

Cornelio
SweetLeftFoot

Snowtown. Ausie flick about our worst serial killers .

Trailer

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/fvu_tBQgZyI

Here's what I wrote about it on another site.

Brilliant flick. People seem to want it be to a few things it ain't:

1) An arthouse version of Saw I-MMCXXXVI that they can 'deplore' as exploitative.

2) A Wolf Creek treatment they can then deplore.

3) A 'smart' Hollywood style 'journey' INTO THE MIND of the killer in which case they would have done well to get Robert Downey Jnr to play Bunting.

Instead its a movie not about the serial murders but rather the underclass of a time and place in which the murders occured.

Some reviewers have complained that its hard to keep track of who 'disappears' and when. Der, that's the point. These people lived transient poverty stricken lives that really didn't impact on wider society.

That is why nobody noticed, not the cops, not even social security, when these people were murdered. A few taped 'phonecalls' were literally - this shit happened - enough to convince the very few people who knew and cared about these people that they'd just decided to move on, as transients do.

And they got away with it for a decade.

The movie isn't about the killings, its about the environment in which they took place - hence us only seeing one killing taking place. Its not torture porn by any stretch, its savagely accurate social commentary.

What the movie tells us isn't that serial killers are stylish malevolent types a la Hannibal Lecter who prey on the beautiful.

The vast majority of victims of serial killers are the poor, the systematically dispossesed, the mentally ill, the already abused, the desperately vulnerable and those people with a very specific form of mental illness who prey on them them circulate in that very same milieu.

Enough inner city flog stuff from me. Great film, one of the best Aussie films I've seen as long as you realise it isn't about the murders, but the world in which the murders took place.

Thomas777
Australian filmmakers excel at gritty realism. One of the best, and most overlooked films, of the 1990s IMO is ''The Boys''. Its motifs are much in the same vein as Snowtown.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/KOoDbw0DTk4
SweetLeftFoot
Yeah, its very much in the same vein as The Boys. I'd still rate The Boys as better, but Snowtown is right up there. The guys depicted in The Boys didn't have at all a good time in jail by all accounts.