That's just the first 20-25 minutes.

M:I 3
The best in the M:I series. A good script, good acting and very good scenes involving action on the IMF operating .

3 stars out of 4

I haven't watched V For Vendetta recently, but it suffers gravely with comparison to its source material. This isn't a fanboyish call for slavish adaptation or anything. I'm sure V could have made a marvelous movie. But the very essence of the story--the nature of the fascism, the anarchy, and the moral ambiguity of it all--was nerfed horribly in transition to screen.

I did watch Rebel Without a Cause recently. Two things struck me: as a narrative, the film is hopelessly messy. As pure, raw material, it does have power. There are some brilliant ideas lurking within, but it's shapeless and directionless. I think the script unintentionally imitates the rage and ennui of its characters.

I think I remember that being Alan Moore's main beef with the screenplay by the Wachowski Brothers. He didn't like how they turned it into a comment on the Bush Administration.

You at least caught the funniest explosion, even though the truck diving out of an explosion was nearly as hilarious.

(2005) Cache (Hidden) (**1/2 out of ****) - A very well-acted, nonetheless disappointing psychological thriller in which a family is terrorized by an anonymous stalker, who leaves violent drawings and video tapes consisting of following his victims around, at their doorstep. Haneke inserts many of his calling cards here, such as prolonged scenes, a tense atmosphere, sudden acts of violence, and ultimately, an anti-ending. This formula worked wonders in his heavily underrated near-masterpiece, "Funny Games" (US Version), however, it doesn't work as well here. The slow burn exercise he puts his viewers through doesn't completely prove rewarding, as he ends on a giant cliffhanger while not really explaining many of the questions the family, and viewer, still have. As far as performances go, Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche are pitch-perfect, and they do a good job showing different sides to their characters. To me however, I just felt an overwhelming amount of dissatisfaction with the conclusion of the story, it felt very incomplete.

I think that MI3 is the worst of the the mission impossible series. Its not a bad movie but I thought that MI2 was absolutely amazing, great action, great acting, and a great story. Mission impossible i thought was a much better story than MI3. I didn't think that the action scenes in Mi3 were very good, and I also found the story to be not at the same level as the other two.

Journey To the Center Of the Earth - yawn. This was just awful. All kinds of yelling and screaming and running around, but no point to it.

I watched Caché recently and absolutely loved it, including the ending. From what you're saying and from Berardinelli's review I get the impression that U.S. audiences perhaps don't get the symbolism of the story concerning post-colonial guilt and the situation of Algerians in France, just because American audiences would not be familiar with the history and political situation. This is not really a thriller, although it takes the shape of a thriller, but a study of guilt and secrets being kept and laid open, both on a personal level and on a societal level.

Watched (Sympathy for) Lady Vengeance by Park Chon-Wook - follow-up to Oldboy - and Takashi Miike's Audition yesterday.

Lady Vengeance is more of an arthouse film than a revenge thriller, particularly in comparison with Oldboy. What I liked about it most is that, unlike Kill Bill and othes, it was not just about someone taking revenge, but that it was concerned with the consequences of revenge, as Berardinelli has pointed out in his review.

Audition is a masterpiece of horror cinema - the first two thirds are actually relatively slow-moving and are more of a drama about loneliness and companionship. In the last two thirds, the film goes into a nightmareish overdrive mode and I could only watch it through my fingers. A great horror movie, but definetely not for everybody.

No, I caught that, in fact, I thought it was cool that Haneke threw in something political. The problem for me was the ending for the most part, plus it felt like the movie plodded along at certain points. It's a mostly well done movie, the acting was terrific, but

I saw both of them recently too and pretty much agree with everything you said. I'll throw out a good word for Park's Joint Security Area which may be my favourite film from the director.


I like Cache a bit more than Funny Games too. Part of the reason is that we never get all the answers. I don't remember the film too clearly but one probable explanation is that

I saw JSA...I kinda liked it but the structure threw me. It took me way too long to realize that the bulk of it was a flashback and it kinda threw away the investigation angle after the first 45 minutes.

I finally watched 'Au Hasard Balthazar' all of the way through. This film is a hypnotic, wholly ambiguous, and utterly brilliant odyssey of not only spiritual transcendence but the unrelenting hell of human life on Earth.


This will undoubtedly be making my Top 100 the next time I update it in the next month. I will view the film again next week to get a idea of just how highly it will place.

A Christmas Carol 2009 (*** out of ****)

Quite possibly the best looking CG animated movie I have ever seen. The movie is candy for the eyes and ears. The voice actors do a good job and although the facial animations aren't quite up to the challenge yet in terms of realism, they are getting closer.

Ah, but Mr. Haneke does give a wink at who it may have been. Maybe. It's all in the very last shot of the film, at the bottom-left corner of the screen -- two characters who have no business knowing one another are shown having what appears to be a familiar, very friendly conversation. Hmmmm.... it's the easiest thing in the world to miss but, for many, seems to wrap up at least one of the many dangling threads of the narrative.

I took it as a tease. I just didn't find a conceivable way as to why those characters would do it, maybe the one. If anything, when that scene started, I felt a sort of dread, thinking one might do something to the other. However, when Haneke didn't even let us listen into their conversations, like he let us listen into everybody else's conversations during the rest of the film, it just felt cheap. Don't get me wrong, for the most part, this is a good film, quite a good film. But to build all this suspense and dread, then to totally just leave you hanging, it didn't work here. Atleast for me.

You know, as much as I love the movie, I freely admit you're absolutely right in calling the last shot a tease. James, in his recent reviews, has been using the word 'obtuse' as frequently as I use oxygen to continue typing -- I'm going to pull out 'obtuse' and apply it like so much lip balm to Cache. The end is frustrating and so open-ended as to be disastrous for some viewers (I've felt this way about several movies but not Cache) -- I believe it earned its ending/non-ending in that it completed its character arcs and resolved (some may say unsatisfactorily) most of its themes by giving us a direction of where things will end up after the credits are done rolling.

But you never know. James didn't see much in the way of 'guilt' being addressed and I thought that was one of the principle themes of the movie.

More on Cache (Hidden) in this long-defunct thread:

viewtopic.php?f=27&t=434

Regarding Caché



I think this is a possible interpretation. Particularly because the 'surveillance footage' is filmed in the same style as the film throughout - long distance and a static camera.



If you accept the 'reality' of the film and one of the characters as a 'culprit', there is a very plausible answer

Rush Hour 3 - **1/2 out of ****

Why does Chris Tucker have to be so damned annoying?

the thread on this in 'The Great Movies' could use a post or 2

viewtopic.php?f=48&t=1321