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Movie Release Awareness - December '08 (Ex-Presidents, Aliens, and Wrestlers)
Posts
Welcome to the world on this side.
Agreed. I get so visibly angry if I try to watch a Burton Batman movie that people ask me if I'm feeling alright. I didn't even like the first one when I saw it at 9 years old in the theater.
I enjoy Batman & Robin the most because I laugh every time Arnold utters a line, but in terms of quality Returns is my favorite Pre-Nolan film.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
The fact that it's absent from the OP while Benjamin Button has "(Yesssssssss)" next to it makes me want to puke. Clint would fuck you up for somethin like that.
Side note: I work at a theater and we have this rich old doorman (who works so he's not bored) who makes up dumb names for all the movies. Benjamin Button has become Benjy Buttmans. And he brings in a megaphone.
So every 3 hours it's, "Now seating Benjy Buttmans"
old people.
I won't get to see The Wrestler till after January 9th. I so want to see it.
What about the other WWII movie coming out, with Daniel Craig? I can't even remember the name.
They've been advertising it quite a bit... is that this year? Or do I need to wait for the next thread?
Also, I feel like I've seen enough WW II movies.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
I guess I was an early reader or something, because I'd been reading Batman for a little while before I saw the movie. I've been a huge Batman fan since I was about 6.
Anyway, even at 9, I wondered just why the hell Batman was killing people in the movie, why Kim Basinger was so damn annoying, why Billy Dee Williams was Harvey Dent, and why there were so many Prince songs.
I read somewhere (maybe in this thread) that at least the ending was satisfying. Clearly that person has a completely different perception of closure than I do, because the entire film (and especially the ending) really left me wanting.
It opens wide in January, not December.
Not to mention that it is getting terrible reviews.
Taking a lady friend to Benjamin Button on Tuesday, good date movie?
Ah. I heaven't read the whole thread so I didn't know.
It's hard to tell living in Los Angeles (and probably any major city) when a movie is still in a "limited" release nationwide. It's been in most theaters here since mid December.
I still haven't gotten Milk or Frost/Nixon.
Review enclosed if you don't feel like going to www.rogerebert.com
by Roger Ebert
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is a splendidly made film based on a profoundly mistaken premise. It tells the story of a man who is old when he is born and an infant when he dies. All those around him, everyone he knows and loves, grow older in the usual way, and he passes them on the way down. As I watched the film, I became consumed by a conviction that this was simply wrong.
Let me paraphrase the oldest story I know: In the beginning, there was nothing, and then God said, "Let there be light." Everything comes after the beginning, and we all seem to share this awareness of the direction of time's arrow. There is a famous line by e.e. cummings that might seem to apply to Benjamin Button: and down he forgot as up he grew. But no, it involves the process of forgetting our youth as we grow older.
We begin a movie or novel and assume it will tell a story in chronological time. Flashbacks and flash-forwards, we understand. If it moves backward through a story (Harold Pinter's "Betrayal"), its scenes reflect a chronology seen out of order. If a day repeats itself (Harold Ramis' "Groundhog Day"), each new day begins with the hero awakening and moving forward. If time is fractured into branching paths ("Synecdoche, New York"), it is about how we attempt to control our lives. Even time-travel stories always depend on the inexorable direction of time.
Yes, you say, but Benjamin Button's story is a fantasy. I realize that. It can invent as much as it pleases. But the film's admirers speak of how deeply they were touched, what meditations it invoked. I felt instead: Life doesn't work this way. We are an observer of our passage, and so are others. It has been proposed that one reason people marry is because they desire a witness to their lives. How could we perform that act of love if we were aging in opposite directions?
The movie's premise devalues any relationship, makes futile any friendship or romance, and spits, not into the face of destiny, but backward into the maw of time. It even undermines the charm of compound interest. In the film, Benjamin (Brad Pitt) as an older man is enchanted by a younger girl (Cate Blanchett). Later in the film, when he is younger and she is older, they make love. This is presumably meant to be the emotional high point. I shuddered. No! No! What are they thinking during sex? What fantasies apply? Does he remember her as a girl? Does she picture the old man she loved?
Pitt will of course be nominated for best actor and may deserve it because of his heroic struggle in the performance. Yes, he had to undergo much makeup, create body language and perform physically to be manipulated by computers. He portrays the Ages of Man with much skill. That goes with the territory. But how did he prepare emotionally? What exercises would the Method suggest? You can't go through life waving goodbye. He is born looking like a baby with all the infirmities old age. He grows younger, until he resembles Brad Pitt, and then a younger Brad Pitt, and then -- we do not follow him all the way as he recedes into the temporal distance.
The film was directed by David Fincher, no stranger to labyrinths ("Zodiac," "Fight Club"). The screenplay is by Eric Roth, who wrote "Forrest Gump" and reprises the same approach, by having his hero's condition determine his life experience. To say, however, that Roth "adapted" the original short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald would be putting it mildly. Fitzgerald wrote a comic farce, which Roth has made a forlorn elegy. Roth's approach makes Benjamin the size of a baby at birth. Fitzgerald sardonically but consistently goes the other way: The child is born as an old man, and grows smaller and shorter until he is finally a bottle-fed baby. Not much is said about Benjamin's mother, which is a pity, because he is 5-feet-8 at birth, and I wonder how much pushing that required.
I said the film is well-made, and so it is. The actors are the best: Taraji P. Henson, Julia Ormond, Elias Koteas, Tilda Swinton. Given the resources and talent here, quite a movie might have resulted. But it's so hard to care about this story. There is no lesson to be learned. No catharsis is possible. In Fitzgerald's version, even Benjamin himself fails to comprehend his fate. He's born as a man with a waist-length beard who can read the encyclopedia, but in childhood, plays with toys and throws temper tantrums, has to be spanked and then disappears into a wordless reverie. "Benjamin" rejects these logical consequences because, I suspect, an audience wouldn't sit still for them.
According to the oddsmakers at MovieCityNews, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is third among the top five favorites for best picture. It may very well win. It expends Oscar-worthy talents on an off-putting gimmick. I can't imagine many people wanting to see the movie twice. There was another film this year that isn't in the "top five," or listed among the front-runners at all, and it's a profound consideration of the process of living and aging. That's Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York." It will be viewed and valued decades from now. You mark my words.
It reminds me of his review of Treasure Planet, which was I movie I enjoyed to a degree, but he just couldn't accept the premise and dismissed the movie out of hand.
I'm actually a fan of musicals, rock, and gore, so I had been meaning to see this movie, but at the end it was just very, very meh. It has a sligthly interesting premise, but the story doesn't go anywhere and the music is more repetitive than catchy.
I think the highlight of the movie was telling a group of girls sitting behind me to shut the fuck up, as they'd been talking through out all the previews and one had just said "I know, let's sing the songs!" as apparently this was the fourth time they seen the movie.
I then went home and was introduced to the Buffy musical episode, so it ending on a good note.
I haven't seen the movie yet, so maybe I'm wrong, but why does he (and a lot of review i've read) get all revolted by the fact that "oooh old man young girl"? I mean, in the movie they are both young, it's just his body is old. Only his body ages backward. right? That's what I got from the preview, why didn't they get that?
I thought it had a nice dual message, which I'll spoiler just in case:
2) there are many things you can change about life. For those things, you are never too old or too young -- there are no rules to life, no proper way of living.
The only part I didn't really get was the Katrina tie-in
A couple members of my family had about the same reaction, but yes, this is how it is handled. They make it painfully obvious that despite the different ages physically, they are the same mentally. I really don't see what the big issue with it is.
Pokemon Black 2: 0519-5108-3139
You'd think it'd premiere here, since it's a Swedish movie, but I guess not.
I loved that movie, and I would hurt you so bad if I could for even comparing it to Twilight. I don't know if it's top ten material(simply because there were so many good movies this year), but it's quite a neat little vampire movie.
I think I'm the only person that didn't really like Let the Right One In, though I may very well be weird. I ended up spending a good 2/3 of the movie trying to figure out if
Though I also didn't like The Dark Knight much, despite some really amazing bits, because I thought the plot holes were glaring and just sloppy, so maybe I'm not the person to ask these things.
I. WILL. EAT. YOUR. SOUL-L-L-L-L-L!
It's not my fault! I want to love it, because Ledger is amazing and there are some great scenes, but the plot just has so many stupid, unnecessary holes in it!
Or when the Joker is chasing Dent in the police car and they randomly pull out of the tunnel and there just happens to be one of Joker's henchmen in just the right place to bring down the helicopter that comes by.
Or after that when batman decides not to hit the Joker on his bike he decides to wreck instead of just, for example, driving around him and then coming back to kick his ass.
And so on.
Eh, I mentioned that I really liked the ending. I'm guessing you're probably the type of person that hated the ending to No Country, eh?
Also, I saw Gran Torino a few days ago and it's 'meh'. It's god damned hilarious because it's basically Clint Eastwood throwing out a racial slur every minute and just being a badass. At one point he literally tells some hooligans to "Get off my lawn." Also, every performance (with almost no exceptions) besides his own is so fuckawful it's distracting. It's really not a great movie and I'm not sure where the hell his head was at for this.
Werehippy - While TDK wasn't entirely free of plot holes, all of those you mentioned are very easily explainable. Please let's not turn this into a TDK debate thread, but I do think if those things are in the way of you liking the movie and can be easily addressed, then I'm going to go for it.
2 - Uhm, Joker led the people down the tunnel, why wouldn't he have people posted up to take care of the chopper that almost certainly would be there at the end of the tunnel he knew they were going to be forced to go to? Joker proved himself to be a master of planning, that one wasn't unbelievable at all.
3 - Batman pretty much struggles with the decision of whether or not just to murder Joker right there, and only at the very last minute decides to refrain from it. Batman just "driving around him adn then coming back to kick his ass." would have diminished the difficulty of the decision Batman was grappling with the entire movie to break his one rule for the Joker.
Also haven't gotten Milk here yet...
Stupid limited releases....
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
I saw that movie a few weeks ago. Either there was an early European release or the Asian mall I bought it from sold me a pirated version. It is a badass movie, basically Commando with Liam Neeson.
Xbox Live Gamertag: Suplex86
Because 9% think it's too high, and shouldn't be cut! 9% of respondents could not fully
get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for, "I
have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."
do they kill hitler????!?!?!?
And I thought I couldn't be more hype for the Wrestler, but after reading Bret Hart's book, I find myself being wrong.
If there was ever any chance I wouldn't see this movie, that right there demolished it.
Also, the movie apparently came out in Europe months ago and is only now reaching the US.
Because 9% think it's too high, and shouldn't be cut! 9% of respondents could not fully
get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for, "I
have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."
Your reasons for not liking The Dark Knight reek of someone who was looking for a reason to not like the Dark Knight. Just letting you know.
On a different topic... I actually kind of enjoyed The Spirit. It didn't take itself seriously at all, and that really made it watchable.