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2014 MOVIE OMNIBUS THREAD

RIPPA

By RIPPA
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caley

caley

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Also while I'm here I'm going to recommend everyone hop on NEtflix and watch Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn, if you haven't already. I've been meaning to watch it for forever. Christian Bale gives a much more interesting performance than you'd expect. He's actually kind of goofy in this. An anti-war film that feels like a spiritual successor to Aguirre, about a pilot shot down and imprisoned by the Vietnamese, BEFORE the war starts. Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies are back up and I wish Steve Zahn got more substantial work. He nails this performance.

 

I really loved this movie until I saw 'Little Dieter Needs to Fly' which is the documentary about the whole incident, and the changes Herzog made to the story are just baffling, like turning the one guy into a Charles Manson-like character.  That's just Herzog playing around with realities, again, as he is prone to do, but the doc. is way more compelling.

 

 

Someone on this board a couple years ago brought up this "game" where you make a list of movies you've put off for whatever reason and you watch them over the year. My wife and I started playing this, so we'd pick 12 movies each that we have to watch together. We're about to finish a second year of doing this, so next year we've turned it into a kind of game, like a scavenger hunt. We still do 12 movies each but 9 of them have to fit this criteria:

 

1. A film by a director whose work you've never seen before
2. A film from a Summer Blockbuster from the last 5 years.
3. A film from a random country - We decided to go with the Czech Republic.
4. A film from a random year. We picked 1939
5. A film featuring a specific agreed upon actor: In our case we randomly chose Mads Mikelson
6. A specific genre. We decided that this needed to be particularly specific, so instead of horror it would be "found footage horror" We went with silent comedy, because I don't watch much comedy and Silent films are important.
7. A film from the They Shoot Pictures Don't They List http://www.theyshootpictures.com/gf1000.htm
8. The top ranked film you haven't seen from the director's Sight on Sound Poll. http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/directors/We went with the directors poll because we're working on making a film and it felt apropos.
9. A movie the other one has recommended to you in the past
 
Anybody else do anything like this?

 

I think this would be a good thread all by itself.

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jaedmc

jaedmc

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Here's my list:

 

1.  Werkmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr)
2. Pacific Rim
3.  Witches Hammer (1969)
4.  The Hunchback of Notre Dame(CHARLES LAUGHTON!!!)
5. Valhalla Rising
6. The Freshman (Harold Lloyd)
7. The Red Shoes
8. The Mirror
9. The Music Man
10. The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis blindspot)
11. Three Colors: Blue (time to get started on this trilogy, right?)
12. The Holy Mountain
 
And my wife's
 
1. All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk)
2. Jack the Giant Killer (2012)
3. The Firemen’s Ball (1967)
4. Ninotchka
5. Pusher
6. Modern Times
7. The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)
8. Apocalypse Now
9. Magnolia
10. The Dragon Painter (1919)
11. Do the Right Thing
12. Water (Deepa Mehta)(2005)

 

 

I'm pretty excited about this year.

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J.T.

J.T.

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I bought the Criterion Zatoichi box as a gift to myself. Now, I've got no time to watch 25 Zatoichi films, but I'd like to hit some of the best ones over the Xmas break. Suggestions? I've seen the original and VS YOJIMBO.

 

The Tale of Zatoichi: The Fugitive follows the usual formula which means it is a perfectly fine Zatoichi movie, but it absolutely has the best implausible iaijutsu scene of the whole series.

 

 

That is badass.

 

Zatoichi and the Chess Expert is also pretty rad.

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cwoy2j

cwoy2j

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Here's my list:

 

1.  Werkmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr)
2. Pacific Rim
3.  Witches Hammer (1969)
4.  The Hunchback of Notre Dame(CHARLES LAUGHTON!!!)
5. Valhalla Rising
6. The Freshman (Harold Lloyd)
7. The Red Shoes
8. The Mirror
9. The Music Man
10. The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis blindspot)
11. Three Colors: Blue (time to get started on this trilogy, right?)
12. The Holy Mountain
 

 

Valhalla Rising was certainly different. I thought it was really cool visually but the plot was just too out there for me.

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jaedmc

jaedmc

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I thought it was funny that of all the Mikkelsen films we chose two Nicholas Winding Refn films. I think we're one of the few people that actually enjoyed Only God Forgives. My wife might have liked it more than Drive, can't remember. Maybe that was me. Doesn't matter they're both good, and I think they work even better seen together. I'm excited to see more of his work so this is a bonus.

 

 

Our 2014 lists looked like this:

 

Her
XSilence of the Lambs
XGood Will Hunting
X8 1\2
XLa belle et la bete
XRashomon
400 Blows
XTaxi Driver
XLa fete de babette
XBirth of a Nation
XNausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
XMaltese Falcon
XLetters from Iwo Jima
 
Me
XSolaris
XIn the Mood for Love
XThe Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
XF For Fake
XBlood Simple
XPlaytime
XViolent Cop
XDouble Indemnity
XThe Bicycle Thief
XTaste of Cherry
XCabaret
XBlack Narcissus

 

We're finishing her's tonight with 400 Blows. So many great films though. I think my biggest disappointment was The Bicycle Thieves. It may have just been a victim of hype. Taxi Driver was a rewatch for me, and I liked it much better this time around. Neither of us are Scorsese fan's, but we both had so much to talk about when it was over. Particularly whether the film is more itneresting if you look at the last bit after the shoot out as a dream or as reality.

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Tabe

Tabe

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Hey, a couple new movie reviews from me:

 

The Wolf of Wall Street - Lots of people have sung the praises of this movie, assigning to it great depth and meaning as a cautionary tale.  It isn't.  No, this movie is an excuse to show 2-1/2 hours of debauchery.  Seriously.  There's no cautionary tale here.  Leonardo Di Caprio is Jordan Belfort, a gifted and highly driven stockbroker who, after being laid off, forms his own company and immediately begins cutting corners and committing fraud to be successful.  And it works.  Big time.  What follows are years of drugs, prostitutes, binges of all types, massive profits, and wild living.  And it's pretty much all true (except the part about people calling Belfort "wolf" or "wolfie" as a nickname - didn't happen).  Di Caprio is magnificent in this, commanding every scene with incredible charisma.  But that deeper meaning and cautionary tale stuff?  Nah.  What's the cautionary tale?  That you get massively rich and marry a scorching hot woman, while ripping off people?  Sure, Belfort gets his comeuppance - sort of.  He loses his wife, serves a couple years in a country club prison, wrote a really successful book, and is now a successful motivational speaker.  Hell, the real Belfort is even in this movie.  It's not like he's broke and he's not paying back the $110m fine he owes.  So, no, this ain't a cautionary tale.  It's 2-1/2 hours of constant profanity and mayhem.  And it's really entertaining.  But let's not assign some deep meaning to it that ain't there to try and make ourselves feel better for enjoying watching a movie about a guy who destroyed a whole lot of lives.  7/10.

 

Perfect Sisters - This movie is based on the true story of "The Bathtub Girls", a pair of Canadian sisters who murdered their alcoholic mother by drowning her in the bathtub.  And got away with it.  Until they, being teenage morons, bragged about the murder.  This movie is basically a Lifetime movie but with profanity.  Very low budget, very "small" in feel.  The director makes some interesting choices that simply don't work - lots of imaginary stuff, dream sequences and the like.  What we end up with is a very shallow retelling of the story and a movie that's pretty darn empty.  Some fine performances from the cast, but this one simply isn't very good.  3/10.

 

Hey, peep my signature or something.

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Guest The Magnificent 7

Guest The Magnificent 7

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Actually I think Tabe's mostly spot-on and that's coming from a huge Scorsese fan.  It was funny as hell, but I was worn out from all the debauchery and repetitive scenes of excess.  Much too long for the points it was making. 

 

"What the fuck do you know about chop?", though, is one of my all-time favorite movie lines. 

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Tabe

Tabe

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Wow you missed so much in the Wolf of Wall Street. 

Sure there are moments - the humiliation of the intern where they shave her head, the breakup with his wife, but overall, the movie portrays Belfort as coming out unscathed.  He's still rich, etc.  And it's not like the movie spends more than 5 seconds reflecting on the damage that Belfort did to people.

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jaedmc

jaedmc

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But that is the point. The point is that he can do ALLLLL of that shit, be a genuinely shitty human being, and still be looked up to, admired, and emulated by an army of douche bags who want to be just like him.

 

The cautionary tale isn't don't be like Jordan Belfort - that's self evident because he's a shit person and any non-sociopath would recognize that. The cautionary tale is that Jordan Belfort wins because we let him win every day. And despite all of the horrible fucked up things he does over the course of a 3 hour movie, people still think that life is great. The damage he does to people doesn't have to be shown, because it's his story and in his story he never has to deal with any of that. That's how isolated these assholes are from regular joes like you and me. This lack of perspective between what he thinks he's doing and what he's actually doing is expressed through the overdose sequence where he thinks he's kicking ass and being awesome but he's actually fucking things up. This is the only point in the film where what Jordan says is contradicted, and it can be applied to the film as a whole. He thinks he's being awesome and living the american dream - but he's fucking things up for everone else.

 

I also like that the film does NOT put the responsiblity all on Jordan Belfort. Yeah, don't be evil - but also YOU, the audience, shouldn't be a fucking sucker. It takes two to tango. I think it has one of the most important messages about capitalist culture in America, that we need to hear. Is it too long? Maybe, I thought it flew by. But I think the message and meaning of the film is very very important, and it'll probably be overlooked by people who can't get past the run time and all the debauchery. This film, if anything, should be a motivator to get people up and to action to stop Wall Street from fucking us in the ass, and for us to stop routinely bending over like that's not what they're going to do.

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Reed

Reed

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I don't disagree that there is a deeper message in Wolf and Jaedmc's analysis is probably accurate.

 

However, it kind of reminds of those rape revenge movies like "I Spit on Your Grave"  or "Death Wish" where, sure, the filmmaker ostensibly attempts to have a somewhat serious message (women can be empowered! Vengeance can become an obsession if you're not careful!) but it just gets lost in all the excess and violence and leaves most people with a bad taste in their mouths instead.

 

Maybe Scorsese did set out to make this indictment of a corrupt system and the indifference of normal people. But I think he fell in love with the character and his wacky antics half way through.  

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jaedmc

jaedmc

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I can certainly see that side of things. I'm not really into Scorsese, and while I thought this was one of his best films ever, it's far from perfect. It just happened to connect with me that day and I think any length issues were saved by how amazing Leo was the whole time.

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Brian Fowler

Brian Fowler

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I feel Wolf was Leo's career best work, and worth seeing just for that.

 

Somebody needs to write a deep, fascinating character driven movie for Leo and Amy Adams to co-star in called "Just Give Them Their Damn Oscars Already!"

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