Recommend a movie

10 posts

popfop
You might want to also check out the cinematic version of The Fountainhead (1949), which Rand wrote the screenplay for. Gary Cooper plays the architect Howard Roark who is uncompromising in his vision to build a structure that is indistinguishable from most other modernist hi rise buildings at the time. Because Roark is such a rogue visionary the mediocrities that write for newspapers and run architecture firms naturally hate him. When his building is altered in violation of his vision he burns it down. The dialog is so absurd that it's comical. Rand beats the viewer over the head with her ideology so there is no question as to which characters represent collectivism and which represent individualism. One character goes on a tangent to Roark about how we all live for others and must compromise to survive that is so ridiculous it's impossible to think that anybody would actually say it if it wasn't scripted. Roark also pursues a romance with a woman who is obviously supposed to be Rand. At one point she whips him across the face with a riding crop in a bit of foreplay. This is interesting since Rand was known to slap around her much younger lovers.

As a cheesy but well filmed quasi-noir it works. It is also a testament to the fact that those use fiction to promote political ideology are almost always hacks.
Bob Dylan Roof
I finally czeched this out. I agree with the review and enjoyed the film. Gleeson's character was funny.
O'Zebedee
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/jvXvTySfWMU

Decent little documentary on the studio musicians (Hal Blaine, Earl Palmer, Glen Campbell, Carol Kaye, many more) who ended up playing on a ton of pop hits through the '60s, plus a ridiculous number of tv themes. Sort of a counterpart to the Funk Bros. doc, only maybe a little more interesting because these guys were so versatile, playing with the Beach Boys, Sinatra, Byrds, Nat King Cole, Sam Cooke, Sonny & Cher, lots of others. It's an unreleased movie, only made the festival circuit - the producers couldn't come up with the money for music clearance, which is considerable - but you can find it in the usual places if you look. Clearly someone wants it to be seen.
Fatale
Drieu
Niccolo and Donkey
O'Zebedee
There's apparently a way to get around it, but I'm too lazy to find out. And too busy to watch this weekend anyways.

I still have the Pasolini box set to get through, mind.
President Camacho
Buffalo Soldiers
:thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: /5

Buffalo Soldiers is a dark comedy/drama about a US Army supply regiment stationed in Cold War Germany immediately preceding the fall of the Wall. I was going to give it 3.5 stars because a lot of minor details and plot facilitators in this movie are hokey in the sense of, say, Heartbreak Ridge -- implausible even for the loosest military unit-- but I upgraded to four stars because of originality, entertainment value, and balls for thumbing it's nose at Hollywood's Support Are Troops boilerplate. This film was actually released in 2001 at the Toronto Film Festival but apparently did not secure a widespread release until 2003 because of.... 9/11. :tard2:

Base life in Germany is pointless and bleak, and the soldiers who partake in it are portrayed as apathetic fiends, cretins, and sociopaths. Protagonist Cpl Ray Elwood (Joaquin Phoenix) is the base's smug, nihilistic chief clerk who reports directly to the Colonel (Ed Harris); he's one of many soldiers in the underachieving unit who'd chosen military service over prison. In the opening scene, a doped-out soldier splits his head open on a table corner during an indoor tackle football game. His corpse is thrown out the window and Elwood reports the fatality to the Colonel as an unfortunate window-repair accident.

Elwood is the ringleader of the base's extracurricular activities; he specializes in reselling portions of ridiculously overabundant requisition orders (such as cleaning supplies, obtained by flattering and distracting the Colonel) on the black market to seedy German businessmen. He also synthesizes heroin from the base's morphine suppy, which he funnels to the negroid MP chief/drug kingpin. In one hilarious scene, a doped-out tank crew wreaks havoc on a German town and the surrounding countryside during a routine training exercise:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ymptVB3T28M

But the film's scathing tone isn't only reserved for the lumpen enlisted types. It exposes a senior US officer corps that is narcissistic, small-minded and internally-focused, detached from serious tactical or strategic considerations, and ambitious only for promotion. Ed Harris shines as the softheaded colonel who's constantly prodded by his status-obsessed whorish wife to secure a promotion to Brigadier. First attempting to regale the commanding General with stories of his distant relation to a Confederate general, when this backfires he rashly challenges his chief competitor-- the infantry regiment colonel-- to a wargame against his own pathetic logistics regiment.

Buffalo Soldiers is an entertaining film from front to back, it's well acted and scripted, and explores a time and environment that hasn't gotten as much attention on film as one would think. As mentioned earlier, there are surreal elements that one could argue might cheapen it in ways (in one scene, the hostile top sergeant sent to investigate the base forces a platoon on the firing range to annihilate Ellwood's Mercedes sedan). But ultimately the film succeeds in its objective: it is a macabre indictment of post-Vietnam US military culture.

This is a Salo Film, I give Buffalo Soldiers my seal of approval. :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:
Apocales
Delicatessen

French black comedy film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro starring Dominique Pinon and Karin Viard. It is set in a post-apocalyptic apartment building in a France of an ambiguous time period. The story focuses on the tenants of the apartment building and their desperate bids to survive. Among these characters is a newly arrived tenant who arrives to replace a tenant whose reason for departure is initially unclear. The butcher Clapet is the leader of the group which strives to keep control and balance in the apartment building. It is largely a character-based film with much of the interest being gained from each tenants own particular idiosyncrasies and their relationship to each other.
popfop
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Spring Breakers
:thumbsup: :thumbsup: /5

I went into this film with high hopes but walked out disappointed. The advertisements gave the impression that it was a tongue-in-cheek action movie about some sluts who go on spring break, meet up with a Riff Raff type character played by James Franco and together go on a spree of armed robberies. While this is the plot of the film, it is surprisingly lacking when it comes to action and instead plays out the events in a stoned haziness interspersed with a repetitive montage of spring break revelers and voiceovers about having fun and meeting new people and being part of something bigger than oneself. The film is less about the characters or even the plot of kinda bad (i.e. slutty) girls gone real bad (armed robbery, murder) but rather the banality of a youth culture which seeks out Fun and Excitement not only at all costs but also as a source of transcendence. The problem is that the movie bores the viewer to tears in making this point.

The girls themselves are little more than objects of titillation and the only character who is somewhat interesting is James Franco's Alien and possibly Gucci Mane simply by virtue of having an ice cream cone tattooed on his face (Ice Cream Identitarianism.) The voiceover bits about spring break being about more than just drinking and partying, about people coming together and about it being something indescribable were apparently lifted from an MTV special. If there was any doubt that American youth culture from the 1990s on is exceptionally idiotic the fact that real people uttered these lines with sincerity should cement the notion.