Recommend a movie

10 posts

Niccolo and Donkey
Bob Dylan Roof

I saw David Ayer's End of Watch over Christmas. Ayer gained notoriety for the decent but over-stylized Training Day , the success of which stemmed more from acting than writing. In performing a routine jew-or-not-jew google screening of Ayer (results inconclusive, possibly halfjew), I discovered that he lived for some time in south central LA with his cousin, which explains why all of his scripts surround the LAPD, south central LA, race relations, and crime.

End of Watch is shot cinema-verite style and depicts the daily life of two LAPD officers driving a squad car in one of the most violent sections of L.A., following the pair from one seemingly improbable heroic scenario to the next. The interactions between Gyllenhaal and his Mexican partner are extremely well-constructed and feel organic, in stark contrast with some of the implausible action sequences that detract from the film.

What impressed me the most was the near total absence of political commentary on race relations. Aside from a single remark about the similarities between Mexicans and the Irish, the film simply attempts to portray, as realistically as possible, the difficult dynamics of an interracial friendship between two officers in a crucible of racial violence. L.A. blacks are depicted as a dying breed, killed and bred out of existence by the more violent Mexican gangs, and economically displaced in the criminal market by the incredibly powerful drug cartels. No attempts are made to apologize for the brutal behavior of the Mexican gangs and cartels through blame shifting to whitey, and the Mexican co-star of the film is not presented as a stereotype-negating prop. Indeed, Ayer almost succeeds at what liberals purport to desire but in practice resist: presenting a non-white character simply as an individual to be evaluated on his own merits.

Three :agree: s out of five.

O'Zebedee
Broseph
Cornelio
Atlas Shrugged, part I (2011)
:thumbsup: /5
In a desperate attempt to cling to a new ideology, one that can mitigate my depression and my fits of rage, I decided to brainwash myself with objectivist propaganda, so that I become an efficient, economics-obsessed robot. Despite my not so spectacular IQ, I noticed from the start that this movie is the dumbest pos to have been filmed in the last 10 years. Worst dialogues EVER. Only good for a few laughs if you drink a few liters of beer while watching it. An embarrassing artistic and philosophical failure.
Cornelio

I have also written an alternative review of the same movie, for those who didn't like the previous one:

Atlas Shrugged, part I (2011)
:thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: /5

I was fearing a total crapfest with all the whining about low budget and unknown actors, but this is not a bad movie at all. Of course committed leftists and anticapitalists will find it morally repulsive, but for the rest of the audience it can be an engaging movie. The actors do a good job, the dialogues are not that bad taking into account they have to use the material given to them by Rand. In fact the director does a good job in "humanizing" the cardboard characters created by the author. An efficient business drama /romance, better than most of the shit we get these days.

Apocales
The Chocolate War
A surreal portrait of a Catholic Private School and its hierarchy. A new student must submit to the bizarre rituals of his peers and the expectations of the school's administration by selling chocolates. New boy at strict Catholic High School, Jerry Renault, is bullied into selling boxes of chocolates for the school's annual fund-raising event. The sadistic headmaster, Brother Leon, and 'The Vigils', a viscious gang of school thugs, make Jerry's life hell when he decides he won't be pushed around anymore.
Stubby

Aguirre the Wrath of God
:thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

Fitzcarraldo
:thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

both are Herzog films, in the JUNGLE

Bronze Age Pervert
Just watched it. Agree...and movie was a little depressing because it shows the US becoming Brazil. I guess California is already "Mexifornia," but the profile of a white-mixed crack unit barely holding back savagery at bay is Brazilian, and if you watch Elite Squad, you won't be able to distinguish between the two countries; actually Brazil looks whiter in that movie.

Like I said before, US is quickly becoming a cheerless version of Latin America...get a gun, isolate, live in gated community, and pepper your angus...

At least there will be cheap labor and good Latina ass around...
Theo
Dead Man's Letters (1986)

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A dark philosophical movie, a true masterpiece of Soviet cinema, takes off as a story about residents of a fallout shelter located under an old museum in an unnamed city of an unnamed country. Confined in their shelter, ex-workers of the museum prepare for an evacuation into the central bunker located underground for deep conservation. Trying to make sense of what happened, they put to question morality and human history in general - as one of the museum worker says, "Tonight, I want to talk to you like a deadman speaks to the deadmen. That means - honestly. Let's concede the obvious that human history is over, and now its time to sum up the results" . As they struggle to make sense of it all even this small community is divided in its view of what fate awaits humanity in the future: a birth of new, anti-humanist morality, death of any morality at all or just another test for our humanist ideals?

But what starts as an exercise in misanthropy later turns into a Bible-like parable - even in the end, there's still hope.

Superb acting, superb dialogues, a very atmospheric movie for an evening when you are in that philosophical mood and just a bottle of fine spirit won't do the trick. I'd give it five [​IMG] s out of five.