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Fitzgerald Fortune
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Re: Track Your Film Viewing, 2008
24. Marple: 'The Moving Finger' (Tom Shankland, 2006) Water
25. Palindromes (Todd Solondz, 2004) Fish
26. [Rec] (Jaume Balaguero, 2007) Sugar
27. Ripley's Game (Liliana Cavani, 2002) Fish
28. Sunshine (Danny Boyle, 2007) Fish
29. Android Apocalypse (Paul Ziller, 2006) Sugar
30. Hardware (Richard Stanley, 1990) Sugar
31. Death Sentence (James Wan, 2007) Sugar
32. Suicide Battalion (Edward L. Cahn, 1958) Sugar
--- 'Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy'.
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1/27/2008, 11:31 pm
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Fitzgerald Fortune
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Re: Track Your Film Viewing, 2008
quote:
Edge44 wrote:
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007) Fish
Violent, beautiful and tragic. It's not without its faults, yet this film is superb.
One of the things I love about it (which I suspect may also be one of the reasons that attracted the Coen's), is that the story does not give the audience what it wants. It really is great.
It's still not playing here 
--- 'Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy'.
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1/27/2008, 11:33 pm
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Edge44
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Re: Track Your Film Viewing, 2008
quote:
Fitzgerald Fortune wrote:
quote:
Edge44 wrote:
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007) Fish
Violent, beautiful and tragic. It's not without its faults, yet this film is superb.
One of the things I love about it (which I suspect may also be one of the reasons that attracted the Coen's), is that the story does not give the audience what it wants. It really is great.
It's still not playing here
There's something strange about the distribution of this film. I've been told that Meridian Parkway is showing it next week (although the wavering voice at the other end of the phone did not fill me with confidence), and Vue cinema in sfunthorpe and Odeon Hull don't seem to have any plans to show it at all!
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1/28/2008, 9:50 am
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Edge44
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Re: Track Your Film Viewing, 2008
ROCKY BALBOA (Sylvester Stallone, 2006) Grite
The first hour is an overly sentimental soap-opera, then there's 10 minutes of weight-training, then 20 minutes of ringside action... Stallone tries to bring back what he thinks is the power of the first film by having his character down and out, but it just becomes sentimental tosh.
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1/28/2008, 10:00 am
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algy
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Re: Track Your Film Viewing, 2008
Notes on a Scandal. Pretty good. A bit written at times, but well worth a watch.
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So we know their names
When those Spurs are done
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2/1/2008, 11:29 pm
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Edge44
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Re: Track Your Film Viewing, 2008
DISTURBIA (D J Caruso, 2007) - a homage disguised as a teen slasher, but without the slasher, or very little of it. That's because it's left to your imagination to fill in the gruesome facts, as the writers want you to ask: "Well, is the neighbour really a serial killer, or is paranoia taking hold of the voyeuristic main character."
Voyeurism is still good to comment on, particularly in the Big Brother state we now find ourselves in, but DISTURBIA suffers from the contemporary issue of dumb teen heroes.
1408 (Mikael Håfström, 2007) - John Cusack carries this film from start to end and if you like him, as I do, then he's the only reason to watch the film all the way through. Initially the horror suspense is gripping, but eventually it becomes over-the-top and quite laughable, and sadly the film loses something because of this, therefore placing itself alongside most other mediocre horror/supernatural movies.
Last edited by Edge44, 2/4/2008, 4:21 pm
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2/4/2008, 1:27 pm
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Edge44
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Re: Track Your Film Viewing, 2008
CLOVERFIELD (Matt Reeves, 2008)
If you suffer from motion sickness then this film is a no go. 
I read a review of CLOVERFIELD that said this movie was "...an astounding technical achievement..." That's an understatement. The whole film is shown through one hand-held camera, and although the camerawork does not draw attention to itself other than for that fact, if you analyse it you'll see a lot of very long, very complex (and therefore well thought out and planned) takes that are perfectly executed and make the action sequences relentlessly breathtaking. I mean, you get physically breathless just watching the screen bounce around as the operator flees down the stairs! The camera also gives the scary scenes a genuine sense of menace.
Okay, the comparisons to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT are unavoidable, but it's a real shame that it's taken this long (Blair Witch was 1999!) for the camera technique to make it's way to the forefront of mainstream Hollywood cinema.
Once through the camera, though, you'll discover the usual nuts and bolts workings of a traditional Hollywood blockbuster, in which, unfortunatley, there are flaws (for instance, an overly long Act 1 which sets up the main protagonist's motivation/goal). Yet they're shown from a different perspective that makes it not only visually stunning, but also very refreshing.
And if any film deserves a sequel, it's this one.
Last edited by Edge44, 2/6/2008, 9:16 am
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2/5/2008, 10:48 pm
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Fitzgerald Fortune
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Re: Track Your Film Viewing, 2008
THE BACKWOODS (Noldo Serra, 2007)
 
Gary Oldman and Paddy Considine play two Englishmen who, along with their wives (Virginie Ledoyen and the Spanish actress Aitana Sanchez-Gijon), venture to Basque territoy in the north of Spain to spend time in an isolated house that Oldman has bought. On a hunting expedition, Considine and Oldman discover a deformed young girl held captive in a seemingly abandoned house, and they take her back to Oldman's home; their actions spark a reprisal by the family of the girl.
Some of the dialogue fell flat, and I think that by and large this was due to Ledoyen and Sanchez-Gijon's dialogue being too sculpted and lacking any sense of spontaneity: in particular, Ledoyen seemed to be performing as if she was in a Harold Pinter play, with... meaningful pauses... before random... words. However, this issue to one side I enjoyed just about everything else about the movie, so I'm more than willing to forgive those foibles.
Early in the movie, Gary Oldman's character asserts that 'There are only hunters and prey: that's the only Ducking truth in this world', and at the core of the film is Paddy Considine's transformation from 'prey' to 'hunter'. There's a lovely moment at the end of the film in which our sympathies are questioned, and much like the climax of STRAW DOGS we're asked to question the myth of violence as an index of masculinity.
The English tourists are painted as colonisers who don't understand the community that they're interfering with; where the girl they think they're rescuing is physically handicapped and is as much a victim of the tourists' pity and 'cultured' sensibilities as she is a victim of her imprisonment by her family, the tourists themselves are handicapped by their lack of cultural understanding. This is a point that is hammered home near the end of the film: Virginie Ledoyen yells at Considine, telling him that 'You don't understand', and Considine responds by asserting that he finally 'understands'; then Considine, who does not speak Spanish, is asked by a local (in Spanish), 'Do you understand?' Of course, Considine may think he understands, but he does not: he doesn't understand the language or the culture. The gender conflict is clearly delineated too; both of these thematic areas are underscored by the use of Leonard Cohen's 'There is a War' ('There is a war between the rich and poor, a war between the man and the woman'). It's a strong and pertinent message for our time: don't patronise and interfere with or take selfish pity on cultures that you can't fully comprehend. (Even Oldman's character, who has old family ties with the community, struggles to fully understand the situation until it's too late.)
I loved the film's focus on the culture clash between the locals and the tourists, and the selfconscious play on the imagery of the Western genre. It's a very pomo film in a lot of ways; the idea of setting the film in 1978 (although the trailer states that the film is set during 1976--did you notice that?) meant that there was no interference from the mobile telephones and laptops that seem to crop up in just about every genre film nowadays--a particular bugbear of mine. (There's nothing less cinematic than watching someone sending a text message on a mobile telephone or typing away on a laptop.)
Serra's handling of narrative isn't brilliant: there were perhaps too many stops and starts for my tastes (for example, there's an interminable conversation between Ledoyen and Considine that seemed to stop the film dead in its tracks). However, there's an interesting theme bubbling away in this film which, for me, made it more than just the sum of its parts (i.e. more than just a pastiche of STRAW DOGS or DELIVERANCE et al).
All in all, this is a very, very good film, and is a huge step away from the dreadful teen slashers and such that dominate the horror genre nowadays. Sadly, although the film was a British-French-Spanish coproduction, there seem to be no plans to release the picture in either the UK or America, although it is available on DVD in Thailand and New Zealand.
http://www.thebackwoodsmovie.com/
--- 'Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy'.
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2/7/2008, 7:18 pm
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Edge44
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Re: Track Your Film Viewing, 2008
DEJA VU (Tony Scott, 2006) Water.
Immensely heavy-handed writing and directing make this film laughably predictable. Nuff said.
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2/12/2008, 9:25 pm
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Fitzgerald Fortune
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Re: Track Your Film Viewing, 2008
THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (Andrew Dominik, 2007) Fish/Sugar
I'm probably going to end up writing DVDCompare's review of the American DVD, as I'm the resident Western fan, so I'll post a link when it's done. However, for now I'll simply say that this film is a-bloody-mazing. Ten years ago, I'd have happily dismissed Pitt as a pretty face and little more, but he's absolutely brilliant as Jesse James: he plays James as a dark, conflicted, scared and psychotic character who's haunted by his past and has a strong self-destructive streak. Casey Afflect plays Bob Ford as an idiot savant (with more emphasis on the 'idiot' than on the 'savant'). Just about all of the performances are pitch perfect, and the movie is one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen, accompanied by a tremendous Nick Cave score.
Last edited by Fitzgerald Fortune, 2/13/2008, 2:17 am
--- 'Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy'.
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2/13/2008, 2:15 am
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