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

Red, White & Blue. A slow boiling American horror/gore film where a small series of unfortunate events lead to a very bloody & very brutal ending.
 
Captain Hurrah said:
The Seventh Bullet. A very good example of a Soviet 'Eastern,' this one from Uzbekistan and a big hit in its day, back in 1972. Their version of a Western, indeed inspired by and borrowed from them - transposed styles, themes, tropes etc put in a 1920s Central Asian, revolution and civil war-era setting. But not to be confused with those Soviet/Eastern European films that actually were set in nineteenth-century America.

The same director also did another well-regarded film of the genre seven years later in 1979, for the Tajikfilm studio, called The Bodyguard.
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Have to check these out. Thanks for the recommendations CH.
 
My pleasure. :)

Keeping in that part of the world, the screenplay for The Seventh Bullet was co-written by Andrei Konchalovsky, who's Soviet feature debut was an adaptation of Chingiz Aitmatov's novel The First Teacher. That's worth checking out too.
 
Captain Hurrah said:
The Seventh Bullet. A very good example of a Soviet 'Eastern,' this one from Uzbekistan and a big hit in its day, back in 1972. Their version of a Western, indeed inspired by and borrowed from them - transposed styles, themes, tropes etc put in a 1920s Central Asian, revolution and civil war-era setting. But not to be confused with those Soviet/Eastern European films that actually were set in nineteenth-century America.

The same director also did another well-regarded film of the genre seven years later in 1979, for the Tajikfilm studio, called The Bodyguard.
Click to expand...

Ooh, must tell ms starfish about this, her grandad was from there.
 
20th Century Boys, a manga adaptation. I think you need to have read the comics to follow the plot. I found it confusing and lost interest after an hour. It had a great look apart from the shoddy CGI, but don't ask me about the plot.
 
It was very confusing i agree, but it all does sort of come together in a confusing way at the end. Never read the comics but i liked the energy of the films, and there were a few scenes i thought were well creepy as well.
 
I heartedly recommend Marwencol. In short, it is a documentary about an American man beaten half to death who forget who he is, how to walk, talk etc...He recovers by creating his own action man / barbie village to act out his fantasies. It sounds crazy and it is, in all the right ways. Best human interest documentary I have ever seen.
 
belboid said:
Nostalgia for the Light

Simply stunning - visually, politically, 'humanly.'

How the hell do those women decide where to dig?
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You heard anything about Guzman following up on hints he dropped a few years back that he was pondering doing something on Leonardo Henrichsen (the cameraman who filmed his own murder by mutinying troops that Guzman used in the first part of the Battle of Chile) - i think he was a bit fearful about it because Henrichsen's wife wasn't keen on digging stuff up, but since then the family brought a wrongful killing case. Can't find anything up to date that mentions any plans though.
 
butchersapron said:
You heard anything about Guzman following up on hints he dropped a few years back that he was pondering doing something on Leonardo Henrichsen (the cameraman who filmed his own murder by mutinying troops that Guzman used in the first part of the Battle of Chile) - i think he was a bit fearful about it because Henrichsen's wife wasn't keen on digging stuff up, but since then the family brought a wrongful killing case. Can't find anything up to date that mentions any plans though.
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Same as - other than knowing he's talked abou it, not heard anything else. hopefully the success of Nostalgia will make it easier for him to raise funds etc
 
Tiny Furniture is well worth a watch, and if you like that the series Girls (which is loosely based on the film) is even better.
 
I had friends round for my annual Halloween horror screening. I showed them The Pact, which is the best horror film I've seen this year. I only watched this for the first time a few weeks ago and it's one of those films that are great to re-watch after you know what's going on, because I picked up on a lot of things that I didn't first time round.

The film doesn't re-invent the wheel, it is a fairly traditional ghost story (with touches of MR James' Mezzotint and J-horror in its use of "haunted technology"), but it is the best directed horror film I've seen this year. It's very well shot, establishing a real sense of place and it has fantastic sound design. The Pact avoids cheap jump scares to build a slow burning atmosphere of genuine dread. While neither weird nor surreal, the way it generates scares reminded me more of David Lynch, than what you usually get in this type of film. Especially in the way a character gets swallowed up by the darkness behind a door and a scene in a crack den, set to a deafening rock drone, which is reminiscent of a scene from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

After the rubbish period haunted house films I've seen recently (The Woman in Black, The Awakening), which rely on all the cliches of the genre (dolls upon creepy dolls, ghostly children in white make up failing to look scary) I loved how this is set in an impoverished, modern blue collar town in the US. The house itself looks just slightly 'off', with a 'wrong' layout and subtly oppressive wallpaper, instead of being decorated like a Blackpool ghost train.

The way the mystery slowly unfolds is cleverly handled. The lead actress, playing a character who is tough on the outside but also quite traumatised and vulnerable, was excellent. In some ways the film is reminiscent of the Kevin Bacon starring Stir of Echoes from the 90s, but this does a better job with similar material.

The film is only let down by the 'blah' title and an awful poster/DVD cover, which looks like the dated looking (and much copied) CGI spook from The Frighteners, a visual that doesn't appear anywhere in the film.




We also watched Cockneys vs Zombies which is better than its title suggests and reasonably fun for the first half (loved the pensioner with a Zimmer frame outpacing the old school zombies) but it outstays its welcome a little by the end.
 
Orang Utan said:
Final destination 3 - probably the best one. The tanning salon scene is genius.
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O rly ? I think 3 is the second worst, with 4 being the nadir. They are all enjoyable to some degree but I far prefer 1,2 and 5.

2 and 5 are proper sequels which build on and often subvert your knowledge and expectations from the previous films, while 3 and 4 just lamely recycle the premise.
 
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