Recommend a movie

Broseph Sunday 15 Apr 2012

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

:thumbsup:

/5

Shit movie.

Bronze Age Pervert Sunday 15 Apr 2012

yes completely forgettable...I liked part 3 though

Cornelio Sunday 15 Apr 2012

Happy People - A Year in the Taiga (2010)
Werner Herzog

Documentary about the self-reliant trappers who inhabit the taiga, in the middle of Siberia. Due to my linguistic limitations, no commentary on my part would do justice to the sublime beauty and wisdom of this work. Watch it.

:thumbsup:

/5

Ash niccolo and donkey O'Zebedee Angocachi Vuk Cadavre Exquis Xenophon Roland Thomas777 Asterion Porkchop Holocaust

popfop Friday 20 Apr 2012

Rampart (2011)
:thumbsup:

I was excited to see this as it was co-written by James Ellroy and was only shown in the art house theaters around Boston. Unfortunately, I found it rather disappointing. Harrelson plays "Date Rape" Dave Brown a corrupt cop under investigation in the wake of the Rampart scandal. Dave has earned the nickname "Date Rape" as he is alleged to have killed a serial date rapist, a charge Brown will neither confirm nor deny. Despite this initial offering of brutal knowledge, the film is surprisingly sparse when it comes to scenes of violence and action. Instead Rampart works as a character study and a moderately dark LA noir.

Brown is emasculated at home, living with his two ex wives and two daughters. While his exes pityingly tolerate his presence, his alt-dyke daughter openly despises him, leaving his youngest as the only one who gives him any respect. His work life is downright conspiratological, almost comically so. Well known faces like Ice Cube and Sigourney Weaver all step out of the shadows to chip away at his confidence and offer professionally worded threats. The problem with this method of storytelling is that the scenes come off as unconnected. Likewise, when we actually see Brown engage with his surroundings as a cop, it seems unnatural and forced.

The most interesting theme of Rampart is the friction between the politically correct officialdom of the law enforcement bureaucracy and the measures a beat cop like Brown has to use in a hellish City-State like Los Angeles. Of course, the fact that there can be an ideologically motivated, entrenched bureaucracy and an unaccountable, brutish police force operating at the same time isn't entertained as Hollywood movies have to offer their audiences an either/or scenario. This, coupled with cliches with we've seen endless times within the cop drama genre (unstable domestic life, hard drinking protagonist, casual racism), make Rampart seem more like a wasted opportunity.

el greco Saturday 21 Apr 2012

And God said to Cain (1969)

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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/WrSPVZXK_5A

http://www.spaghetti-western.net/index.php/And_God_said_to_Cain_Review

After ten years of forced labour, for a crime he didn't commit, Gary Hamilton (Klaus Kinski) is pardoned. He was framed by his former friend Acombar, who is now married to Gary's former girlfriend Maria. In the meantime Acombar has become a local tyrant, with an army of gunmen to protect him. On the stagecoach Hamilton accidently meets Acombar's son Dick and asks the boy to tell his father about his arrival. A tornado is announced and when Hamilton approaches town the gunmen who are waiting for him are blinded by the dust raised by the heavy winds. Hamilton uses the network of underground galleries (from an Indian graveyard) to stalk his enemies and kill them one by one, helped by some of the town's people who hate Acombar.

Often called Margheriti's best western, as well as one of the very best of the gothic spaghetti westerns, this is also a controversial movie. It's an unofficial 'remake' of another spaghetti western, made only months earlier, Salvatore Rosso's A Stranger in Paso Bravo. Although some story elements were changed, the similarities cannot be denied or simply called coincidental, the more so because in Rosso's film Anthony Steffen plays an avenger called Gary Hamilton, while his nemesis, played by Eduardo Fajardo, is called Acombar. In his Dizionario Giusti calls it a near miracle that Margheriti wasn't sued for plagiarism. Maybe the possiblility of a legal procedure was the reason for Margheriti to practically disown his movie for the most part of his life. As we shall see plagiarism doesn't necessarily imply a lack of creativity.

In And God said to Cain Margheriti further developed some ideas already used in his previous western, Vengeance. While in that movie the horror aspects were still rather restrained, we start to doubt during this movie whether Kinski's character is a man or a ghost. In the first half hour, when his character is developed, we see Kinski gradually degenerating into a creature possessed by a craving for revenge, and when he finally arrives at the gates of Acombar Town (in the best sequence of the movie and a truly brilliant scene), he is no more than a shadow, a figure silhouetted against the horizon. In the next scene only his horse rides into town, as if the man has been swallowed by the howling winds. In true horror style, excellent use has been made of slamming windows, flapping curtains and tolling bells to create an atmosphere of terror and imminent danger. Birds start screaming when Hamilton's name is called ...

Another aspect that is pushed further here than in Margheriti's previous western, is the depiction of violence. The famous opening scene of Vengeance, in which a man is about to be quartered, is frightening, but in a suggestive, not exploitative way. But in this film a priest is executed, slowly and deliberately, in front of an immobile camera, and one of the villains is literally crushed by a giant bell, in probably the most graphically violent scene you'll ever see in a spaghetti western. Margheriti also called his own film 'more Sicilian than American': with a script about betrayal and the strength of family ties, it is closer to a mafia story than a typical story set in the West. When Acombar's son, who seems a decent and mild-tempered person throughout the movie, finds out that his beloved and seemingly respectable father is a criminal, he still chooses his side, referring to the strong feelings of loyalty with the clan and the family, that lie at the base of Italian crime rings' existence. In agreement with the classical family drama, it's the father, the patriarch, who finally causes the downfall of the dynasty by killing his own successor by mistake.

By cutting all superfluous dialogue and story elements from Salvatore Rosso's movie, that served as a model, Margheriti has managed to make a nearly completely original spaghetti western, cold, frightening, bloody, beautiful. It respects the classic dramatic unities of time, place and action: the story isn't concerned with sub-plots, is mainly set in one place, and unfolds within one terrible, stormy night. Probably only a director with a history in horror could come up with the idea of casting Kinski as a hero, albeit a hero who doesn't look his enemies in the eye but stalks them and doesn't even hesitate to shoot them in the back. As you might guess, Kinski turns in a wonderful, almost hypnotic performance. Familiar with more extrovert heavies like Sancho or Fajardo, most temporary critics weren't happy with (co-producer) Carsten as Acombar, but in retrospect his subdued performance serves the film pretty well. Marcella Michelangeli's part as the woman who betrayed her lover to live with his corrupt friend, is a little underwritten. Another let-down is the film's finale, a rather predictable homage to Orson Welles' mirror scene in The Lady from Shanghai. Otherwise this is a magnificent western. Allegedly Clint Eastwood was inspired by the dark, haunting look of the film for his oscar winning Unforgiven.

Download And God said to Cain (1969)

http://bitsnoop.com/and-god-said-to-cain-1970-dvdrip-x2-q34787510.html

Broseph Sunday 22 Apr 2012

What About Bob?

:thumbsup:

/ 5

Meh. Bill Murray doesn't work for this role. Same goes for Scrooge. He's better in just about everything else I've seen him in.

Bob Dylan Roof Thursday 26 Apr 2012

I disagree. Murray confounds the careerist Jew psychoanalyst Dreyfus with his Irish impertinence!

Cornelio Saturday 28 Apr 2012

Into The Abyss
Werner Herzog
2011

:thumbsup:

/ 5

Herzog's own "In Cold Blood". Interviews two convicted murderers in Texas, and also some of their relatives and the relatives of the victims. A meditation on just retribution and the death penalty. I expected a more in-depth exploration of the wretchedness of the lives of impoverished southern whites. A bit trite -- definitely not his best work. Check "Happy People - A Year In The Taiga" instead.

Ferdinand Saturday 28 Apr 2012

I won't comment on the film as I am yet to see it, but Herzog recently had a series of 3 documentaries regarding death row inmates on CH4 here. I don’t think it was his best work, particularly as it lacked the sublime visual aspect of that. Nevertheless, I felt it was far from trite because he did not focus on of the lives of the poor as an explanatory device. Instead he tried to tease out how the prisoners coped in the monochrome world of managerial banality that was death row. It heavily emphasised the flight into dreams and also the total lack of majesty of the impending death sentence.

Bob Dylan Roof Monday 21 May 2012

Mel Gibson Movie Night

Get the Gringo
Gibson tries his hand again here in the action/thriller/whatever genre with the aim of further capturing his fellow Catholics (hispanics) as a loyal fan base. Despite Gibon's recent attempts to propitiate Big Jew in Hollywood by proposing a film on the Jewish hero Judah Maccabee and acting along side a predominately hispanic cast in the instant film, the big studio executives objectively decided that Get the Gringo was only straight-to-video quality, and thus denied Gibson another chance at big-screen popularity. I doubt the film would have been a success, but it certainly wasn't more risible than a film based on the board game Battleship .

The story surrounds a career criminal and bank robber (Gibson) who finds himself in the custody of the Federales in Mexico. After relieving him of the proceeds from his latest heist, the Federales throw Gibson in an exaggerated simulation of a Mexican penitentiary, which functions as an island city populated by criminals who govern and exploit the prison and surrounding local population.

As Gibson manipulates his way up the prison hierarchy, he befriends a young boy and his mother and discovers a terrible truth about the relationship between the boy and the gangster running the prison. There's a lazy attempt at portraying moral ambiguity as Gibson weighs the fate of his new friends against the prospect of personal aggrandizement, but Gibson's character isn't developed enough to generate viewer engagement.

There's also an utterly fantastic "shootout", reminiscent of some of the poor C movies that glorify Mexican drug warlords, featuring Gibson catching a grenade in mid-air and tossing it back at his attackers.

The depiction of the Mexican prison almost makes Get the Gringo worth watching, but the rest of the film is worthless.

:thumbsup:

out of 5.

The Beaver
In The Beaver, Jodie Foster undertakes the difficult task of both directing an archetypal SWPL indie movie with American Beauty pretensions and rehabilitating the career of a drunken, raging anti-semitic actor in Hollywood.

Gibson plays the chronically depressed CEO of a failing toy company. The film simply tells us that he is depressed through the narrator and reinforces the conclusion for good measure by showing Gibson doing depressed people stuff, like sitting on a couch in a psychiatrist's office, taking pills, sleeping, lying on furniture in slumped positions with that airy indy movie piano music playing in the background, etc. But it's hard to sympathize with a man who, despite having a solid midface and a CEO's salary, is depressed for unknown reasons. Thus, the film fails to adequately develop the main character.

The core of the narrative focuses on the coping mechanism Gibson's character discovers while in the throes of a depressive psychosis: dissociating from himself through a stuffed beaver hand puppet with a British accent. The puppet allows Gibson's character to escape his self-loathing and resentment by inhabiting the stronger personality of the beaver and focusing all of his self-abuse back onto the man operating the puppet.

This unsatisfactory solution predictably results in a disaster that ties together the various subplots and allows the writer to promote his message, which signifies the west's spiritual maturation toward its own form of Buddhism. The film asks us to accept that suffering and weakness are innate and to forgive and commiserate with each other for our mutual suffering and weaknesses. Its depressing to think that this passes for spiritual enlightenment among many westerners today.

:thumbsup:

out of 5.

10 posts