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What DVD / Video did you watch last night? (pt3)

Leave Her To Heaven - Technicolour film noir starring Gen Tierney as insanely jealous wife. Looks good but it's so overblown that I just couldn't get into it.
The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid - Another version of the James-Younger gang's story. This is very much focussed on the raid itself and has some nice touches, the comedic tone and the portrayal of the James brothers as idiots and thugs, it makes Cole Younger the main character. Cliff Robertson and Robert Duvall both do a nice job playing Cole Younger and Jesse James, respectively.
 
Sherlock Holmes - A Game of Shadows. Not as good as the first and slightly undermined by BBC's more cerebral interpretation but still an enjoyable no effort Sunday night romp.
 
Populärmusik från Vittula

A Swedish coming of age movie from 2004, which is adapted from an incredibly successful book of the same name.
 
The Australian found footage horror film The Tunnel. After the excellent Absentia and the rubbish Urban Explorer this is the third tunnel based horror film I've seen this year. This one was middling, with the usual running around with a shaky cam and then it had a couple of creepy moments towards the end. Most interesting thing about it was that you could download it for free from their website.
 
A few of these -
Nuclear War in Britain: Home Front Civil Defence Films DVD, 1951-1987

The early ones from the 1950's seem so naive now and are full, as the review below says, of keep your dander up, Blitz spirit. Fascinating though. Not just how nuclear war and civil defence were viewed but as a social record of the times. There are accents which you just don't hear now, not even in the confines of Buckingham Palace!

http://www.moviemail-online.co.uk/film/dvd/Nuclear-War-in-Britain-Home-Front-Civil-Defence-Films/
 
Only just noticed I'd seen two on more or less the same subject but with utterly different approaches over the weekend...

A Better Life - pretty glib, slick, handwringing liberal drama about the lives and struggles of a Mexican gardener working as a gardener in Los Angeles, with no papers, and a son on the brink of joining local gangs. Very very inauthentic and wet/condescending in its politics, but well filmed and with some terrific acting from Damian Bichir (who played Fidel in CHE and I think got oscar-nominated for Better Life). Clearly made with the aim of trying to persuade anti-immigration republican types in the US to try and see 'illegals' as real people, so if you're not part of that target audience it fatally lacks crackle and real life though.

and...
The Yellow Sea - a bonkers high-octane bloodsoaked Korean epic (is there any other kind of movie from there?) about the life and struggles of an ethnic-Korean citizen of China working as a contract killer in South Korea. After his wife has taken off for Seoul and dumped him, he ends up being contracted to go to S Korea, settle accounts with her and do a murder for a local gang boss while he's at it. Some interesting stuff in there I'd never heard or seen anything about, this world of ethnic Koreans within China, their crap status as illegals when or if they make it to S Korea; made with terrific energy and suspense in parts. (It's made by the same guy who made the very gruesome but v good THE CHASER so perhaps not surprising.) But like I said, as you can expect, it turns into a massive long protracted brawl with buckets of gore, dozens of guys running around with hammers and cleavers and a hero who survives astonishing numbers of usually-lethal injuries, not one but two baffling crunchy car chases and a dramatically unsatisfying ending. Way derivative of Sympathy for Mr Vengeance in bits, and it doesn't have the same satirical snap of a lot of more recent Korean films.


It might not sound like it but both of these were perfectly good ways to spend a few hours - you wouldn't hate them.
 
After a long hiatus, I watched another old video nasty - Island Of Death. It's bonkers basically. Totally unpredictable. A couple arrive on a small Greek island and, well, stuff happens. It's a tad homophobic and if you like goats, don't watch it. Unusually for a video nasty, it's British and it has a fanstastic soundtrack, with a theme song covered by many a nobody goth/death metal band
IslandOfDeath-DVDArt.jpg
 
The Thing (2011): A very poor prequel with none of the tension, humour or depraved body horror of John Carpenter's film.
 
The first DVD (2 hours) of Schindlers List.

Grim, but a lot easier to watch than Auschwitz: The final Solution. It is what is I guess, the grim tale with a Hollywood shine on it.
 
I enjoyed Life is Beautiful a lot.

Not always a good measure of a film but it did very well at the Oscars.
 
I'll add those two to my Lovefilm list, assuming shoah is on it. I must say though that having avoided learning about it for so long I'm already starting to wish I hadn't started.
 
Shoah - and Lanzmann - are coming under increasing attack. Justified IMO. Have a read of this:

Nothing he hasn’t done, nowhere he hasn’t been


When Pauline Kael panned the film – ‘Shoah is a long moan. It’s saying: “We’ve always been oppressed, and we’ll be oppressed again”’ – the New Yorker received a flurry of outraged letters. But in the 27 years since its release, the film’s defects have come into sharper focus. There is no discussion of anti-Bolshevism and Social Darwinism, as integral to Nazi ideology as anti-semitism; no account of the invasion of the Soviet Union, which accelerated the process of extermination; and hardly a mention of non-Jewish victims – Gypsies, or the mentally ill or homosexuals. The lack of context was deliberate. Citing a story told by Primo Levi in If This Is a Man, Lanzmann argued that attempting to understand the Holocaust was a form of ‘madness’, ‘an absolute obscenity’. Levi, desperately thirsty, grabbed an icicle and an SS officer took it from him, shouting, ‘Hier ist kein warum’: ‘Here, there is no why.’ But Levi continued to try to understand the horrors he witnessed; he didn’t elevate the SS officer’s command into a taboo. As Dominick LaCapra argued, Lanzmann appeared to be insisting not only on a Bilderverbot, a prohibition on images, but a Warumverbot, a prohibition on explanation itself. In the absence of explanation and historical context, and with non-Jewish victims removed from the picture, Lanzmann’s Holocaust is the story of Jews facing an eternally hostile Gentile world where another genocide is always a latent possibility. ‘The worst crime’ when making a film about the Holocaust, he said, ‘is to consider [it] as past.’
Click to expand...
 
Sarah's Key was a pretty good attempt at a film of the Holocaust . . . but even there, the heroine is both Jewish and an icy blonde - so that goyish audiences might more readily identify with her?
 
Idris2002 said:
Sarah's Key was a pretty good attempt at a film of the Holocaust . . . but even there, the heroine is both Jewish and an icy blonde - so that goyish audiences might more readily identify with her?
Click to expand...

Most Jews in films do have dark hair but there are plenty of Jewish people with blonde or red hair. I didn't see a cast of blondes in Schindler's List, The Pianist, Bent and the many other dramas about the Holocaust, so not sure what you mean with "...but even there". It seems rather odd to imply that the sort of liberal audience this type of middle brow art house film is aimed at couldn't empathise with a dark haired girl because they are raving anti-semites..

On the other hand you are missing the real issue with the film, which intercuts the trivial, comforting present time scenes of the do-gooding reporter with the war time scenes to soften the blow and therefore it trivialises what it sets out to do.
 
Johnny Canuck3 said:
Shoshana in Inglorious Basterds is blonde.
Click to expand...


One reason the actress was cast is because she is Jewish. The other is that she has to be able to pass as non-Jewish to suvive, so her blonde hair makes sense for the plot. And that's one other actress, not a conspiracy of having loads of blonde Jewish actors in films about Jews.
 
DotCommunist said:
I've got a soft spot for the visual style. It's magpied from loads of sci fi films and then given a shot of helium. Also: tricky lol.
Click to expand...

Films that look like they cost a hundred zazillion dollars and say absolutely nothing very loudly piss me off somewhat.
 
Jeff Robinson said:
Films that look like they cost a hundred zazillion dollars and say absolutely nothing very loudly piss me off somewhat.
Click to expand...

This one was never claiming to be deep though :D the effects, music and costumes were great. Leeloo was not bad either ;)
 
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