Recommend a movie

Jargon Monday 20 Jun 2016

Why do you hate it so much? I really liked it.

Also can anyone recommend or not recommend Cross of Iron or Once Upon a Time in America?

Also does anyone here like Ken Russel?

perkunos Monday 20 Jun 2016

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a british TV mini series. I can't imagine hollyweird improving on Alec Guinness.
Cross of Iron is OK for Peckinpah; lots of gratuitous violence. Too much classist horse shit. For WW-2 movies, I would rather rewatch "Come and See" than watch that for the first time, though it was OK.
I have Once Upon a Time in America downloaded somewhere; as an American I need to experience debilitating illness before watching a film which lasts longer than 1.5h.

Kebab Removal Service Friday 8 Jul 2016

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/0P4YG73KHHo

Bittersweet Life

A very esthetically pleasing movie from South Korea, which even offers an interesting revenge story.

Watch it!

Kebab Removal Service Monday 11 Jul 2016

Can confirm that. A pleasant surprise at the cinema, even if Jake Gyllenhaal depiction of this journalist is a bit too spergy, but on the other hand maybe it was the one thing, which made the movie interesting.

Kebab Removal Service Monday 11 Jul 2016

Nine Queens (2000)

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/M9Les56e22c

An Argentinian movie about 2 con artists trying to pull of one giant scam to enrich themselves.

Very smart movie with a superb Ricardo Darin as one main figure.
It was a satisfying experience, especially if you get bored out of your mind by the mindless con movies Hollywood tries to promote lately.

Kebab Removal Service Tuesday 12 Jul 2016

It seems like i would dominate this thread lately.

Cuz of this post:

On Heavy Rotation (what are you listening to?) The Second Coming

I have to follow up with a short review and recommendation for

The Machinist

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/H0fuHY4U1UA

Basically a superb low-budget psychological thriller with a well-known & fantastic perfomance of Christian Bale, who lost considerable weight for the role.

"The film is about Trevor Reznik (Bale), a machinist whose insomnia and psychological problems lead to a serious workplace accident involving a co-worker (Ironside). After Reznik is fired, he goes into a downward spiral of paranoia and delusion"

If you enjoyed the novels of Dostojevsky, this movie will bring you joy.

Local Daimyo Tuesday 12 Jul 2016

Niccolo and Donkey said: ↑

O'Zebedee suggested that I watch "The Seven Five" based on a recommendation from PseudoCop over at The Phora.

The Seven Five is a gripping documentary detailing the avalanche of corruption at the NYPD's 75th Precinct during the 1980s which covers the East New York area of Brooklyn. The epicenter of the story revolves around Mike Dowd, a psychopathic cop who was anything but a proper police officer. Shadowing the rise of cocaine and crack in NYC, police corruption became endemic in several precincts, with the 75th being the most notorious as so many officers were involved (some 25 I think ended up being arrested). Dowd began by illegally taking money from busts on drug dealers and then proceeded to robberies with the help of informants and ex-cops. The game changer was when he offered police services to a Dominican cocaine dealer who was moving tens of kilos of cocaine per week on behalf of the Colombians

Using the style of first-person interviews interspersed with surveillance footage and tapes, what the viewer ends up concluding is that the first rule of being an NYPD cop isn't 'to serve and protect' but rather to 'cover your own ass' and make sure that you protect your fellow officers no matter what you see because they are the ones that will protect you i.e. how Dowd defines what a 'good cop' is at the NYC hearings on police corruption that took place circa 1993.

Greed, union solidarity, and the sheer amount of money being passed through the ghettos with the cocaine/crack boom ended up concocting a satanic brew that not only harmed communities but resulted in the death of at least one police officer (it's quite obvious from the documentary that the police place a much higher value on the life of a Boy in Blue that than of civvies).

I watched this movie with my dad. It is really something special. Especially because Dowd is actually free now and is in the movie and narrates his own actions quite candidly, as well as the Dominican cocaine dealer (I forget his name but it has great moments like his descriptions of his intricate drug dealing system and one point where he basically admits to a murder on camera and isn't the least bit worried about it). The Seven Five is also a good piece of data for understanding how "shit works in the real world" when it comes to corrupt state institutions and their intersection with the broader criminal underworld; although such blatant and direct corruption is definitely less prevalent nowadays, especially among rank-and-file officers, I could imagine when watching how things might work in the era of the internet.

Amadis Wednesday 13 Jul 2016

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/KEA76l3tLzM

City 44 (2014)

Polish movie about the 1944 Battle of Warsaw. Starts off as a lame teenage move but gets increasingly bonkers and savage until it descends into the entire destruction of the city at the hands of the Nazis in Bosch-like scenes. Not much plot - the characters are really just witnesses to the horror.

Also the only film I've ever seen to intercut a 3D, slo-mo sex scene with a raid by insurgents through flooded cellars, set to a dubstep soundtrack.

Cornelio Sunday 17 Jul 2016

Taken
Pierre Morel, 2008

It cracks me up to read comments on imdb or filmaffinity on this movie. People fucking love this movie. A word keeps coming up in the reviews: 'satisfying'. But what's so satisfying about this movie? It offers literally nothing in terms of character developement, dialogue or cinematography. And the plot? Well, Taken 's plot makes Charles Bronson's Death Wish look like War and Peace.

So what is it, then? Let's look at the aforementioned Death Wish (Michael Winner, 1974). It's also a revenge movie, where the main character ruthlessly massacres everyone in his path. But it gets a meager 7 on imdb.com, with mixed reviews ( Taken gets an astonishing 7.9). I believe that where Taken hits the jackpot is in the choice of its main actor, Liam Neeson.

See, in a world populated by overweight, lisping hot-tub technicians with manboobs (like myself) and pencil-neck, aspergerian bezel scholars like Thoughts , it's very difficult to identify with Charles Bronson. Even if he's portrayed as an everyman in DW, a peaceful and somewhat naive architect, every spectator knows that under his gabardine he has a body of steel and the skills to rip your face off with a single spinning kick.

The same cannot be said of Liam Neeson. He looks weak, weary, low-energy. He's your next door uninspiring suburban stepdad. He's a complete faggot. So many modern people can identify with him. If he can slaughter all those scumbags and save his daughter, maybe so can I. That really gets you into the movie from the start.

If you couple that with the race war subtext of the movie, you have a total winner. Neeson doesn't kill many white guys in this movie, maybe 3 or 4 frenchmen. The rest is albanese muds, negroes, and arabs. In a world where middle class whites walk the streets afraid to be mugged/beaten/raped/killed by their colored countrymen, it is indeed satisfying to see Neeson crush them so effortlessly. 'Hey, maybe if push comes to shove and I have to face the nigger menace someday I can also use my skills to defeat them, like the guy in the movie'.

All in all, a shitty, highly entertaining movie, whose success tells us a lot about the world we live in.

Thoughts Sunday 17 Jul 2016

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q17Ig6vdiv0

I just saw Wim Wenders' The Road trilogy , a great journey of mind, body and spirit. The plot is inconsequential, what matters is the visual wandering through open space and new worlds, living environments that one is casually passing by and briefly lounging in, and (importantly) could feel like one can spend forever wandering in any region of it. The ambience of the hearth, combined with the wandering journey of the road.

For most, it should be a life-changing film; and it would be for me, if I wasn't already insane when I watched it.

More importantly, I realized that they made a biopic of me.

10 posts