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CINEMATIC FANTASTIC [Film and Media Discussion Party]
Snowbeat
i need somethingto kick this thing's ass over the lineRegistered User regular
i need somethingto kick this thing's ass over the lineRegistered User regular
Let's talk about film, ladies and gentlemen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVEflECtfBM
Films. Movies. Cinematic spectaculars for all ages. We all watch them and have thoughts about them, but very often we keep our opinions to ourselves in order to not be "that guy", that stick-in-the-mud who can't just turn their brains off for two hours and enjoy their cheap seats.
If that's you, you've come to the right place. This thread is intended to provide the good people of SE++ a place to honestly discuss recent and classic film without the overt pressure of needing to "go with the flow" or misplaced franchise loyalty. A place where you can come and chat about movies that don't have men in tights as their protagonists.*
Feel free to be as theoretical or grounded as you like, because part of the joy of analyzing and critiquing movies is finding the places where two opinions lock horns and figuring out why. All discussions and lines of inquiry are welcome: the political, the structural, even the Freudian, although if you start in about sons and mothers you may be politely asked to leave.
Welcome to the party, everyone.
*
I'd like to start things off by talking about a relatively recent film that was released to great acclaim in 2006 and took home the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. The title is, of course, The Lives of Others.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3_iLOp6IhM
Personally, I thought that while it's obviously an accomplished and well-made film, with some wonderful performances and gorgeous cinematography, the story itself was rather dull and predictable. Additionally, for such a realistic film to end on such a saccharine and melodramatic note was a huge disappointment to me. I also don't think it was saying anything that necessarily needed to be said again. The film never considers the actual moral implication of installing listening devices in the walls of someone's home; it's far too busy driving home a well-blunted point about the evil inherent in totalitarian systems. In fact, eaves-dropping is depicted as something somewhat good in the film, as it's the mechanism that allows Wiesler to have his moral awakening.
Without putting too fine a point on it, it compares rather poorly to its closest cousin in subject and theme, the 1974 classic The Conversation, starring Gene Hackman and directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrhRsZ56b4g
While The Lives of Others aims for the low-hanging fruit of past totalitarianism, The Conversation presents a much more disturbing truth: that the same kind of men who were thrown out and ostracized after the Wall fell are living among us today, working the same sort of work without the stigma of being "secret policemen". These are men in suits and khaki pants, going to trade shows for new laser microphones and pistol-grip automatic lockpicks. They spy on people not for ideology or out of fear, but because it earns them a paycheck.
Both of these films are currently available for streaming on Netflix, although The Lives of Others is only on Netflix UK.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVEflECtfBMIra Konigsberg wrote:motion picture. a story presented in the form of moving pictures projected on a screen.
Films. Movies. Cinematic spectaculars for all ages. We all watch them and have thoughts about them, but very often we keep our opinions to ourselves in order to not be "that guy", that stick-in-the-mud who can't just turn their brains off for two hours and enjoy their cheap seats.
If that's you, you've come to the right place. This thread is intended to provide the good people of SE++ a place to honestly discuss recent and classic film without the overt pressure of needing to "go with the flow" or misplaced franchise loyalty. A place where you can come and chat about movies that don't have men in tights as their protagonists.*
Feel free to be as theoretical or grounded as you like, because part of the joy of analyzing and critiquing movies is finding the places where two opinions lock horns and figuring out why. All discussions and lines of inquiry are welcome: the political, the structural, even the Freudian, although if you start in about sons and mothers you may be politely asked to leave.
Welcome to the party, everyone.
*
Not that there's anything wrong with movies about men in tights. If you'd like to go in-depth with an analysis of Iron Man 3, please feel free. For more general comic book movie chat, though, please see the dedicated thread.
I'd like to start things off by talking about a relatively recent film that was released to great acclaim in 2006 and took home the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. The title is, of course, The Lives of Others.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3_iLOp6IhMPersonally, I thought that while it's obviously an accomplished and well-made film, with some wonderful performances and gorgeous cinematography, the story itself was rather dull and predictable. Additionally, for such a realistic film to end on such a saccharine and melodramatic note was a huge disappointment to me. I also don't think it was saying anything that necessarily needed to be said again. The film never considers the actual moral implication of installing listening devices in the walls of someone's home; it's far too busy driving home a well-blunted point about the evil inherent in totalitarian systems. In fact, eaves-dropping is depicted as something somewhat good in the film, as it's the mechanism that allows Wiesler to have his moral awakening.
Without putting too fine a point on it, it compares rather poorly to its closest cousin in subject and theme, the 1974 classic The Conversation, starring Gene Hackman and directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrhRsZ56b4gWhile The Lives of Others aims for the low-hanging fruit of past totalitarianism, The Conversation presents a much more disturbing truth: that the same kind of men who were thrown out and ostracized after the Wall fell are living among us today, working the same sort of work without the stigma of being "secret policemen". These are men in suits and khaki pants, going to trade shows for new laser microphones and pistol-grip automatic lockpicks. They spy on people not for ideology or out of fear, but because it earns them a paycheck.
Both of these films are currently available for streaming on Netflix, although The Lives of Others is only on Netflix UK.
+2
This discussion has been closed.
Posts
One thing that I enjoyed greatly about it was it gave a neat swearve that I was not expecting.
Essentially it started and was advertised as one movie and it was something much more... complex.
It's one of my favorite movies (I would go more in depth but I'm phone posting.
Then we shall rest on our cinema laurels and eat cakes
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
My favorite part about Identity is how it's basically just the movie Donald Kaufman writes in Adaptation
Most films he just sort of falls his way through as John Cusack but in Identity? I don't know, I somehow fully believe his character, emotions and actions.
A+ towards you Mr. Cusack!
good god almighty, that would be an accomplishment
but it does seem worth it
It was pretty dope.
SteamID: Baroque And Roll
the first half is an great, great murder mystery. the second half is just depressing
I agree that Cusack is great in it!
He's arguably the greatest cinematographer of all time, yet he also has a web forum for students and film professionals where he'll regularly answer technical questions from random people, and is basically just a super mellow, humble dude.
That is one hell of a resume.
Waste Land
Born into Brothels
The Thin Blue Line
What engages me is the spectacle of the thing, lights and colours and shots and angles and interesting exciting visuals that I haven't seen before.
So obviously this year my two picks are Gravity(hot damn) and Pacific Rim, but what do you folks think about the fine art of cinematography and the visual palette? What images stick in your heads with that sense of motion, intimacy and glory that only film can provide?
And hey, movie recommendations based solely on aesthetics are cool! The movie Ultraviolet is a horrible piece of shit but it does some very clever things with color and light when it's not settling into godawful CGI.
Or Tron: Legacy, which has an amazingly strong and unique style and I can't watch it without gasping over the set design and costumes and props and the lighting oh god.
I'd ramble more but I'm phone posting and I just haven't seen enough non-enormous movies lately which seriously clouds my judgement.
despite the fact that he has a fluid style that he adapts to the material, you can still recognize each one as a Deakins shot
They are each amazing in their composition as well as the story they tell. Waste Land will fill you with so much optimism and hope while Born into Brothels will crush your heart in the harshest of ways, and The Thin Blue Line is a powerful exploration into freedom and the corruption of our authority by ignorance & laziness.
That film is really fucking intense.
I might do a whole post dedicated to him, but maybe I won't. First, I'm going to eat this steamed chicken before I pass out.
Deakins is kinda old school, like he's unafraid to present his compositions as compositions. It feels like most movies these days are either just trying to look 'realistic' and natural, or are green-screen-a-paloozas, which is cheaper and easier but is always unmistakably kind of flat and lifeless. The color and light in his movies is always so rich and ever-present and 3-dimensional, very few movies even try to look anything like it.
One sorta funny thing with Ozu, his style will feel very familiar if you've ever watched much anime, as his trademarks of pillow shots, lack of camera movement, and characters addressing the camera translate very well to animation. If there's one reason why anime seems to be shot in a very fundamentally different way than western animation, it's Ozu. Directors like Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell), Hideaki Anno (Evangelion), Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue), and Akiyuki Shinbo (bakemonogatari) have wildly varying styles, but their cinematography clearly descends from Ozu's films.
Those are very cool. Hadn't seen 'em before. Much obliged.
The I got to the second and went, "Ah, there we go."
Jason Schwartzman
Holy damn that is excellent.
Spoilers below
We meet Kane's new wife, a virginal Quaker he marries in the opening scene. She urges him to leave with her, and for a moment he does before something draws him back. What? Well in the words of mysterious Mexican (and the film's most interesting character) Helen Ramirez, "If you have to ask, you'll never know."
Mrs. Ramirez, presumably a widow, has a history with both Will Kane and his nemesis, Frank Miller. We are informed of this by the leering hotelier, who in a few lines establishes himself as a smirking scoundrel who preferred the town when it was run by outlaws.
At first, it seems Kane will get the support of the townspeople, but as the clocks get closer to noon, the willingness to help dries up and the pleas for him to leave town become a dull roar. His own deputy, jealous and resentful, first demands a job recommendation, then quits when it is refused.
Ultimately the only people in town willing to help seem to be a one-eyed drunkard and a 14 yr old boy with more courage than brains. Marshall Kane must face Miller and his three gunmen alone.
Oh right, the three gunmen. They're the ones who tipped everyone off that Miller was coming back, and they've been waiting for him at the train depot. The camera goes back to them every ten minutes or so to remind us the train is coming, as if the constant shots of ticking clocks weren't enough to drive the point home.
I won't tell you how it all ends, except to say that every character has their moment to make a difference in some small way.
Not a very literary review and sort of rambling but you get the idea
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
"You've been Detroit's most famous disappearing act since white flight!"
huh
that period between 1984 and
wait a fucking second
High Fidelity came out in 2000?
what
I felt my life flash before my eyes for a moment there
2000 was still the 90s, basically
High Fidelity is one of my all time, desert island films
I remember you being pretty happy that I informed you about MoviePass
It was good for a solid month after I joined, then they introduced a new "feature" that made it really shitty, so
I can't really recommend it anymore, if you haven't gotten it yet
I canceled my contract
what's up with it? i've left it hanging since then
So the deal with MoviePass when I started, I was pretty fine with. You needed a GPS-enabled smartphone, and they'd send you a MoviePass credit card in the mail, which was essentially a Discover card and could be used at any theater that accepted Discover.
To see a movie, you had to go to the actual theater and start up the app. Pick your move, pick your showtime. It would check that you were roughly within 100 yards of the theater, and then credit your MoviePass card with the exact amount of money it took to purchase a ticket for that showing, and gave you 30 minutes to purchase the ticket. I didn't mind this that much - even if you wanted to see a midnight showing of, say, Thor 2 and were afraid of tickets being sold out, you would be able to go to the theater earlier in the day and get a ticket then.
This whole process was strange but justifiable - you can't just give out a card by itself, because there'd be nothing to stop me from loaning it to whoever. Loaning someone your card and phone is possible but way less practical.
So it already had some odd restrictions but ones I were mostly okay with since I just love film and like to digest new films, good, bad, whatever
The restrictions when I signed up were:
- One movie per calendar day
- Each movie only once
- No 3D/IMAX showings
I was fine with that!
But then they added a "feature" (in an insulting manner, their email describing it as something they were "so excited to bring to customers") called the Countdown Clock. This changed the "one movie per calendar day" to "one movie every 24 hours" - if I saw a movie tonight at 7:00 PM, I wouldn't be able to purchase tickets again until the next day at 7:01 PM
As I'm only off two days a week and work nights and there was no way I was arranging my weekend schedule around this stupid set of restrictions, I canceled.
Luckily, they had a two-week opt-out period when this change occurred to prevent an early termination fee.
guess they had too many college kids with open schedules sign on
nah
this thread is for good movies