It was tempered, if that's the right (it's not) word, by a lame bit of dialogue right before all goes to black.



I feel obligated to start mentioning some positives. I'll give one great moment: Paul finds that his phone has several language options. It's not really a victory but, at the time, it really feels like one.

True, but at that point I wasn't really listening, cos I knew what happened once he said those two words.

Yeah, that was one of his small victories.

One random thing that comes to mind is how the trailer subtly influenced me to think something that wasn't true in the film At one point Reynold's character asks how the person on the end of the line knows his name and then asks what's going on. But in fact, this point isn't really important in the larger scheme of the film. Just goes to show how they always lie.

Grand Hotel - 7/10

Another Best Picture winner down, this one a 1932 drama set at a swanky Berlin hotel. For an early forerunner to the "lots of intersecting characters and story threads" mold, it does a fine job of keeping all its plates spinning, though at the expense of making the melodrama a little too soapy and a few characters a smidge one-dimensional. But it's still a good film with heart and fine acting, particularly from Lionel Barrymore as a dying nobody embarking on one last blast.

Season of the Witch (2011) - 5/10

Not a good film by any means, but it's so darn fun to watch. Having laughed out loud a couple times (especially upon seeing that first shot of Cage), this flick was far from the sluggish ordeal I anticipated. The over-reliance on CG is woeful, and Cage looks damn near comatose on occasion, but there was enough good-natured goofiness to make the time go by fast. A great party flick at which to laugh and chuck beers.

Clash of the Titans (2010) - Big CGI-sxf remake of the 80's stop-action-sxf telling of the story of Perseus and his quest to save the lovely princess Andromeda from the monstrous Kraken...or is it to save the city of Argos....or is it to avenge the death of his family at the hands of Hades (Zeus' brother)? Couldn't quite figure out the motivation, but at the end of the day I think revenge was the primary motivator. As far as the story goes, it pays lip service to the original movie and to the greek myths (Olympian gods, check; Pegasus and the winged stallions, check; Medusa, check; giant scorpions, check), although, like the original movie, a lot gets shuffled from the original Greek mythology.
Technically, the film looks fine, the special effects are effective and the performances are adequate. A bit of the ol' shaky cam in play for too many of the action sequences. It was O.K. for a 100 minute diversion. 2.0 / 4.0

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) - Stanley Kubrick's final story, as directed by Steven Spielberg (Kubrick had asked Spielberg to direct the story he'd been working on since the 80's and passed away before filming). Like many of Spielberg's and Kubrick's sci-fi efforts, this is an "idea" picture. Monica and Henry Swinton are a couple in the not-too-distant future who are mourning their terminally ill son, who has been placed on some sort of cryogenic life support. During the same time, Professor Hobby is looking to perfect a new kind of robot that can be taught to love and to dream. Into Monica and Henry's life comes David, the output of Prof. Hobby's efforts.
The bonding scenes between Monica and David are at times poingnant, but things take a turn and David is forced to confront the less-than-idyllic "outside world." The movie has a distinct take on the...well...not quite post-Apocalyptic future...but global warming has caused the ice caps to melt and flooded coastal cities like Manhattan. Society is sort of hanging on by a thread, but it is hanging on.
A lot has been leveled against the film as being too long, and on some levels I would agree. David is a tough character to root for in a script that demands that the audience does so. 2.5 / 4.0

Winter's Bone (2010)

Eh, remind me never to get into trouble in the Ozark's.

2.5/4

A lot of people have been watching Modern Times around here lately, so I popped it in last night...but not for intellectual purposes, just entertainment.

I'm consistently amazed at how much humor Chaplin could find in misery. If anything, Modern Times completely proves Chaplin's saying that "tragedy is a close-up, but comedy is a wide shot." When one takes the broader view of Modern Times, it's a hilarious satire of industrialization. But a closer look at the Tramp's situation (and the characters that surround him) shows harsh, unending hardship of the most brutal kind. Through it all, Chaplin never loses sight of his characters' humanity, nor his compassion for the common worker.

And the setpieces! The Tramp getting sucked into the gears of a machine, having a nervous breakdown on the assembly line. The Tramp being mistaken for a Communist. The roller-skating setpiece. The guy who just can't get his roast duck no matter what. And of course, there's the Tramp singing at the end. There's many more highlights, and it's hard to believe that Chaplin packed so much brilliance into a film that's only an hour and a half long. Was he America's greatest filmmaker ever? Modern Times is good evidence supporting it.

Actually, he was British...though his films originated in the US.

An interesting distinction.

Wow you're like the only person in the world who doesn't like this movie. And because I did very much, I think I will pick on your poor apostrophe use. LOSER! Ahhhh that's what the internet is for.

Watched some badly-written bullshit called Man About Town about an uninteresting talent agent (Ben Affleck) that wants to get a grip on his life. A DTV follow-up to Mike Binder's critically-respected and unseen-by-me The Upside of Anger, Man About Town is populated by cardboard caricatures like Egomaniacal Agent (Affleck), Justifiably-Cheating Wife (Rebecca Romijn) and Powerful Lesbian (Nina Gershon). John Cleese is the only one who doesn't look bored for his 2.5 minutes of screen time. Even writer/director Mike Binder, playing Jewish Executive, looked like he thought his movie sucked. He was right to look that way.

Lady from Shanghai ** 1/2
There's a lot of stuff wrong with this Orson Welles film. The narration, the action sequences, the story itself. The cinematography is nice, but this is a pretty disappointing film.

Oh totally. How bad is Welles's accent? The shootout in the hall of mirrors is great, but otherwise this movie would have been completely forgotten if it wasn't directed by The Great One (yes, Wayne Gretzky directed it)

All this Buried talk has got me interested. I'll try to check this out soon. Saturday. Maybe.



Good call. I saw this a couple of months ago and didn't care for it either (4/10 here). Fassbender is clearly a gifted actor but some of his choices have been questionable.



I'm intrigued! It's like a strip-club, just in reverse.



Cool! Let us know how Wizard of Oz goes. I continue to insist that this is a great movie for people of any age. As for suggestions: how about a Chaplin picture? It's a bit risky, but Chaplin certainly appeals to all ages.



I distinctly recall Ken disliking it too. Either that or he was indifferent. Too much of the same mood or something like that.

He called it "dramatically inert". That proves he hasn't seen Man About Town for, if he had, he would have called Winter's Bone "a thing of gravity that no celestial object could make it gooder and cooler and so fuckin' awesome yeah Winter's BONE RULESSS!!"

Man, I have Ken's voice down.

I didn't like it much either (okay, so I thought it was okay, but not worth all the praise), much for the same reason Ken apparently didn't. Way, way too self-consciously morbid, and the pacing was somewhere between "slow crime thriller" and "Andrei Tarkovksy taking a shit" and it thus didn't gain the advantages of either. A solid 6/10 by my scale. Also, If it wasn't for the acting everyone else would have thought it was just another piece of rednecksplotation too, I think. The acting was great, though. John Hawkes could carry my child if he wanted to.

Grim Prairie Tales - 6/10

A very odd case, this one. Usually in anthology films, the wraparound story is the weakest link, but whenever Grim Prairie Tales cuts back to Brad Dourif and James Earl Jones staring one another down over a campfire, the flick really comes alive. I could watch these two play off one another all day -- it's the stories they tell that get shortchanged. Each one is simplistic to a fault, often ending abruptly and sometimes even before a point's been made. But the film had a good, spooky aura about it, and again, Jones and Dourif worked great together. Not a totally satisfying film, but it's a lot better than I expected something called Grim Prairie Tales would be.

Still Breathing - 5/10

Sweet Jesus, you can smell the late '90s quirk seeping from this. Ostensibly your average loopy romance (goofball artist falls for a con woman he sees in a vision), Still Breathing comes to fall in love with itself more than its own character. It's the sort of movie people will like just because it's pleasant, which it is a good deal of the time, but it's also slow, meandering, and flat-out not funny/convincingly dramatic more so.

Mary and Max

Gotta thank the forum for this one. I didn't like it as much as some others, but I wouldn't have seen it without other members here championing the film. It's smart, perceptive, and touching in a humorous, atypical way. Sad but sweet.

Knight and Day

A hell of a lot of fun. I'm puzzled as to why this bombed so hard at the box office. Oh, wait. No I'm not. Tom Cruise is a bit of a psycho and people don't care to see him in movies anymore. That's a shame too, because this should have been the film than answered any questions about his movie star status. He's a pretty good actor when called upon, but the guy is first and foremost a movie star. He's perfect in this role. The movie doesn't take itself seriously from the opening, and keeps its fun spirit intact for the majority of its running time. If all James Bond movies were this fun...

The Way Back - *** 1/2 out of ****

Incredible movie. This should be receiving so much more attention than it's been getting. It did manage to get 1 oscar nomination, for makeup, which I'm thankful for, but it deserves soooo much more! At the very least it should have gotten a nod for it's AMAZING cinematography!

He's now an Oscar nominated actor so you'd have to carry his child. Is this acceptable?



What didn't you love about the picture, Pete? I had a few quibbles, but overall I really liked it.

Invincible (**1/2 of *****) is a 2001 film about a Polish Jewish blacksmith (Jouka Ahola as Zishe Breitbart) who becomes a strongman for a cabaret of the occult in Berlin. This is taking place in 1932 as it's becoming apparent that the Nazis are the party of the future and the mentalist (Tim Roth as Hanussen) who owns the cabaret is catering to the Nazis in hopes to become the Minister of the Occult in their cabinet. Since Zishe is Jewish, he has to pretend he's Aryan and dawns a wild blond wig and is called Siegfried. Once he reveals he is Jewish, he becomes Samson, attracting crowds of Jews and Nazis alike, which as you can imagine is not a healthy combination. Marta Farra plays the beautiful pianist who Hanussen abuses and Zishe dreams of and protects. Eventually Zishe becomes a true prophet in the wake of the false Hanussen, but the prophet he becomes is Cassandra.

This minor incident in history has become a minor Werner Herzog film. The performances are curiously soft-spoken so the impact of the film is muted when it really needs to be flamboyant. The strongman feats here aren't the sort of thing that would produce a legend. The feats performed by the real Zishe Breitbart were truly spectacular and are barely hinted at here. Jouka Ahola is especially convincing as a strongman since he won the 1997 and 1999 titles as Europe's Strongest Man.

In fact, the real story of Zishe Breitbart might make a decent movie and I hope someone makes it some day. As far as historical accuracy of his story, all you need to know is that Breitbart died in 1925, long before all the stuff about Hanussen. He also toured in both Europe and America and became an American Citizen, none of which makes it into this movie.

Hanussen was also a real person, and the story of his Palace of the Occult, his ambitions and murder is more or less true if you ignore the intrusion of Zishe and Marta, which you can if you see the 1988 film Hanussen.
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"I knew there had to be an advantage to high blood pressure," he said as another mosquito exploded.