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[Movies]: All Australia jokes, all the time
Astaereth
In the belly of the beastRegistered User regular
In the belly of the beastRegistered User regular
Roger Ebert wrote:In the previous century the movie theater was often, in smaller towns and cities, the only grand architectural statement, save perhaps for a church or courthouse. They unashamedly provided a proscenium for our dreams.
Francois Truffaut wrote:But the cinephile is … a neurotic! (That’s not a pejorative term.) The Bronte sisters were neurotic, and it’s because they were neurotic that they read all those books and became writers. The famous French advertising slogan that says, “When you love life, you go to the movies,” it’s false! It’s exactly the opposite: when you don’t love life, or when life doesn’t give you satisfaction, you go to the movies.
D.W. Griffith wrote:I foresee no possibility of venturing into themes showing a closer view of reality for a long time to come. The public itself will not have it. What it wants is a gun and a girl.
Alfred Hitchock wrote:In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call 'photographs of people talking.' When we tell a story in cinema we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise. I always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.
Woody Allen wrote:My films are therapy for my debilitating depression. In institutions people weave baskets. I make films.
David Fincher wrote:Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything's okay. I don't make those kinds of movies.
Slavoj Žižek wrote:Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.
Akira Kurosawa wrote:Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.
Jean-Luc Godard wrote:Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
Roger Ebert wrote:Gene [Siskel] often mentioned something François Truffaut once told him: the most beautiful sight in a movie theater is to walk down to the front, turn around, and look at the light from the screen reflected on the upturned faces of the members of the audience.
Let's talk about movies.
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Lovely thread-starting post, by the way.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Renee Russo's character describes her news station's ideal story as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut, and that is the perfect metaphor for this film. It is a dirty, disturbing, sleazy, relentless film that makes you squirm from start to finish. It is fantastic.
The brilliance of this movie is that it is not unpredictable. There are no twists. From the moment Louis picks up a camcorder and shoves it into the face of a broken and dying man, you know exactly the trajectory of this story from start to finish. You dread what's coming, but you're also darkly fascinated by what's coming, and you can't wait to see each sordid moment play out. Part of you wants to see that screaming, bleeding woman rushed to a hospital and patched up, good as new. But a more primal part of you wants to see her bleed out right there in the street. This film knows what you want, and it also knows what you want, and the interplay between those things gnarls your innards into a tense little ball until the credits roll.
That is the film's conceit - on the surface, sure, we all want the happy ending and the idyllic existence full of rainbows and lollypops, but on another level, we crave the sleaze and the filth and the death and destruction. That is what drives the success of sensationalist news, and that is what this film captures perfectly. Louis Bloom is one of the most deeply disturbing film creations in recent memory, made all the creepier because he is a few exaggerated affectations away from being so horrifically plausible. Meanwhile, Nina is entirely believable as the news director who enables Louis, journalistic ethics be damned.
This is a deeply cynical film. It doesn't leave you with warm fuzzies. But it's amazingly acted, beautifully directed, and expertly written, and it's probably now my favorite film of 2014.
Still need to see Birdman, though, so that's subject to change.
This was a surprisingly fun, instantly recommended for anyone who liked the A-Team, Narc, or The Grey. Everything that Carnahan screwed up with Smokin' Aces is fixed here, and this is the movie equivalent of rebuilding damaged credit.
The story revolves around a guy who is a limo driver in LA after his dreams of acting were shattered, along with drug, gambling and alcohol addiction. Finding his dream girl Brooklyn Decker he gets his life on track, but she breaks up with him and he's left trying to pay off his gambling debt by midnight or face getting whacked, due to changes in mafia management. From there he looks for a way to get a big tip from an eccentric client after dealing with celebrities, while also trying to avoid the wrath of the competing livery service from who he poached clients. And along the way he deals with the ghost of the best limo river int he company knowing away at his psyche, who had killed himself in his limo after snapping.
It sounds ridiculous, but it walks that line between smarmy and self referential just right, making it across that tightrope to the fun side of things without falling into shit. This is an ensemble cast movie, with Patrick Wilson doing a really good job playing the lead, never being too cool for school, Chris Pine plays a completely crazy billionaire who does wacky stuff but sells it, Jessica Alba is the limo dispatch girl and this might be the first good role she has ever done ever, and a whole slew of other actors, from James Badge Dale who plays against type, the same with Ed Helms, Ray Liotta playing himself, and Brooklyn Decker is again surprisingly good as the hot chick who knows her range and sticks to it (like was talked about with Tatum last thread).
There's just the right amount of piss taking and absurd-for-absurd moments, but because this movie moves so fast and covers such a wide swath it can't linger on the jokes that don't work. And that's good for a movie, it leaves you wanting more as opposed to thinking how that was such a waste of time. The movie is just as stylized as Carnahan's other works, but there's a humility here where he actually did figure out what he did wrong with some past works and fixed it, as opposed to Blomkamp. And more than anything, there are some funny scenes here and some improv that makes things work.
The only real problem I have with the movie is that is does have David Hasselhoff in it as one of the crazy celebrities, and he's acting over the top, and it just feels so dumb and dated and it's never that fun when the actor is so in on the joke it's trying to roll back around to being funny. But the good news is this is only ten minutes into the movie and from there things pick up dramatically.
It's a movie that will win you over, and I really recommend it. I don't know why it wasn't released in theaters, this could have done well in a February slot where people just want something different.
Might have to give it a shot.
-edit-
Disregard, it was a fake-out. She left when they took the vote on whether she could stay in the group and she just assumed she was being kicked out, but they didn't.
I really enjoyed that one. The narrative made some predictable arcs once the setup became clear but overall it was a welcome departure from the usual sci-fi fare.
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I thought it was the diary of a wimpy kid, not an asshole kid.
The best part of the Wimpy Kids is the first movie where he holds his pee and his brother surprises him and he pees everywhere. I saw my cousins do just about the same thing in real life once.
Very much this. Additionally, a lot of the crap Greg gets is a direct response to him being a jerk. Don't get me wrong, it's funny, and well-written, and the characters are very believable, but Greg's not someone you really empathize with.
wish list
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/14/why-russell-brand-and-katy-perry-split.html
It was Katy Perry’s rising fame that killed her marriage to Russell Brand—according to a new documentary so painfully penetrating it made the unabashed attention hound cancel his trip to SXSW.
Alternately overly flattering and incisive, BRAND: A Second Coming chronicles the flamboyant Brit’s relentless knack for reinvention, from drug addict to sex addict to stand-up comedian to Hollywood actor to political provocateur.
Among the film’s touchier subjects: His short-lived marriage to Perry, which lasted just over a year after the couple tied the knot in India.
Technically speaking, Perry was the first to put their split on blast on film—sobbing onscreen in her 2012 concert tour doc Katy Perry: Part Of Me, she blamed the break-up on that classic enemy of every Hollywood relationship: conflicting schedules.
BRAND points the finger, with a subtle dash of shade, on her failure to match his quest to make the world a better place.
If any single sound bite goes viral from this film, it might well be Perry declaring, “I control the pussy” to the camera in a baby voice as she abruptly ends the interview.
The documentary seven years in the making tracks Brand’s life from Essex mama’s boy to the tortured aspiring comedian whose career was nearly derailed by a nasty heroin habit. After getting off drugs and achieving notoriety in his native UK, Brand set his sights on Hollywood, got America’s attention by hosting the MTV VMAs, and started landing movie roles. In 2010 he scored the next feather in his hipster Jesus fedora: A celebrity marriage to the fairytale princess of bubblegum pop, the California Gurl herself: Katy Perry.
But just as Perry’s career was exploding, Brand became restless from the rapid, vapid crossover fame he’d finally achieved. In a scene straight out of an Aldous Snow music video, he went to Africa on a charity trip to ease his jaded soul and experienced a life-changing epiphany.
After watching young Kenyan children sift through heaps of syringe-laden garbage for recyclables, he flew back to his Hollywood millionaire existence where the juxtaposition hit home, he says.
Brand started plugging into the 2011 Occupy movement. In a scene in BRAND, he visits protesters sans Perry while on break from filming his studio romantic comedy Arthur. Then the comedian, who at one point tried to direct the documentary himself, sits with his wife in their home for an interview that goes south.
Struggling to answer Brand’s query about the existential pickle of money and fame, Perry demurs. “I think you’re a genius and you make me look good, and that’s why I picked you,” she chirps. (If any single sound bite goes viral from this film, it might well be Perry declaring, “I control the pussy” to the camera in a baby voice as she abruptly ends the interview.)
Following their split, a deflated Brand ponders why the marriage failed. “We were going in different directions,” he sighs. “Possibly opposite directions.”
“It was a real crisis—at one point Russell was really uncomfortable with it ever even playing here,” Timoner revealed at the post-screening Q&A, where she described the making of BRAND as “a roller coaster ride” and admitted to making some edits at Brand’s request “for ethical reasons,” despite having final cut.
Brand tapped the Dig! and We Live In Public filmmaker to direct the project after it originated with the late Albert Maysles and Oliver Stone, who appears on camera along with Brand supporters Mike Tyson, David Lynch, Rosie O’Donnell, and Noel Gallagher. The wide-ranging doc careens through Brand’s four decades of personal struggle, addiction, self-destructive spirals, spiritual resurrection, career ascendance, and family relationships with (mostly) adulation, while an off-screen Timoner includes herself in a few scenes, battling to draw out her subject.
She also spends a ton of screen time on Brand’s recent metamorphosis into a political ideologue who tsk-tsks big media on YouTube, destroyed MSNBC’s “shark-eyed Stepford berks” on live TV, and went viral by scrapping with the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman. It’s not hard to see the new radicalism, slammed by critics of his 2014 book Revolution, as the latest stage of Brand’s paradoxical pursuit of celebrity.
Friday afternoon, Brand shocked Timoner and festival organizers by bailing last-minute on the film’s premiere in Austin, Texas, where he was also slated to give a keynote speech.
“You’d think a narcissist would like nothing more than talking about themselves and their ‘rags to riches’, ‘hard luck’ story but actually, it felt like, to me, my life was hard enough the first time round and going through it again was painful and sad,” Brand wrote in a statement hours before the high-profile opening night gala.
“Obviously, he’s not here [at SXSW],” said Timoner. “It’s not like I drank the Kool-Aid. I think I have a pretty clear perspective on who he is and I have a lot of respect for him, but I obviously see all his foibles.”
There's also the fact that I prefer watching horror movies in the comfort of my living room, instead of in the public eye so people can witness me morphing into a mortified blubbering vagina
hopefully it will be like when babadook was released here widely and simultaneously appeared for purchase on amazon, google, etc
Been dropping all the balls lately
It's an odd film, but an enjoyable enough time. You're not going to get any closure on anything but I really enjoyed the take on the concept of the tortured genius.
http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/video-world-according-koreeda
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Agreed. It is also probably my favorite film of 2014, and I did see Birdman (which I liked a lot, actually).
It's dearth of Academy nominations is the year's biggest cinematic atrocity.
Also guys I saw It Follows again last night* and appreciated it all the more. What a fantastic movie! I'll probably have an essay on it up at some point, talking more in-depth about the camera, editing, screenwriting, and especially the thematic use of color throughout.
*As filmmakers are wont to do, the director and three of his crew (producer, editor, cinematographer) showed up at the Arclight in Hollywood for a post-movie Q&A. Which was cool, but apparently at the midnight the night before Edgar Wright showed up to moderate. Totally bummed I missed out on that. I've met a lot of directors but Wright has so far eluded me.
Ahem.... Lego Movie.
I'm tired of all the "LEGO movie got snubbed!" talk.
It did. But it was a movie about LEGOs. It was very fun, but the story wasn't anything novel or daring, and it relied on a lot of familiar tropes to tell a very familiar story. It definitely should have been nominated for Best Animated Feature. The End.
I'm still waiting for Wright to make the magnum opus I know he's capable of.
He still needs to work on understanding tone.
So what you're saying is that you have not seen Scott Pilgrim yet?
But while it's an immensely fun film, it's not Wright's best. There are several moments that just don't quite work, or work largely in the context of referencing the source material. The battle with Patel and his demon groupies is too much too early, and kind of screws with the gradual flow of utter crazy the story builds to. The film should probably have nixed the demons and played it a little more low-key, gradually building through Lucas Lee's comparatively straight battle into the wackiness of the bass battle. By the time you get to the final confrontation with Gideon, it's all good, but the path there is a little uneven.
There are also a few lines that just don't work. "Getting a life" makes me squirm every time I hear it, and I love me some puns, but... no.
The film is incredible as an achievement, and should be commended based on just how much of the source material they were able to squeeze into one film. It also has some of the most perfect casting in any movie ever, and I'll even go to bat for Michael Cera, whose Pilgrim is tonally different from the book's, but still well-suited for the universe. But there are just enough stumbles throughout the film that I know Wright can do better.
As an aside, I had forgotten Brandon Routh was in SP. Between Pilgrim, my recent marathoning of Arrow, and his performance in Chuck, the dude is becoming one of my favorite actors. He just makes everything fun.
Painfully niche.
I have no clue how they got money to make it. Absolutely none at all.
But I guess que cera cera