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

Separation City.

Yawnsville adult drama from New Zealand. Bored with their sex lives, middle class couples try musical beds. Nothing works out as they had hoped. Even the wild party in Berlin can't save this one. Boring, avoid.

Midnight in Paris.

Owen Wilson stars in the Woody Allen time-slip adventure. Would have been better as one of Woody's early, funny, movies.
 
Reno said:
True ! It was another Woody Allen film which was praised as his return to form and which was shit
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It wasn't as bad as some of his other recent efforts, and the recreation of 20s Paris was well done, but what bugged me was that the weird, surreal, time-slip experience didn't have much of a life-changing experience for Wilson's character.

The attempts at "intellectual" dialogue were also best described as a "stupid person's idea of what a smart person sounds like".

The last Woody film I really liked was Everyone Says I Love You, and that was what? 15 years ago?
 
Idris2002 said:
The attempts at "intellectual" dialogue were also best described as a "stupid person's idea of what a smart person sounds like".
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That and I just found it unbearably twee. I hate his snobbishness, like the caricatured tourists who took no interest in anything cultural, including Wilson's girlfriend. They were drawn like hissable villains. It's all so clumsy and so transparently rigged. And I say that as someone who loved most of his films of the 70s and 80s.
 
butchersapron said:
*potentially libelous thought removed*

More that he had a an astonishing run for a few years, then just...nothing. Maybe CCR would have been a better comparison.
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Yeah, 'cause I would think of Rod Stewart as first and foremost a bottle-blonde media celeb, and only then would I remember "oh yeah, he did do some credible stuff in his day (forty years ago)".
 
Finished watching Top of the Lake - Jane Campion written/directed thriller for TV. It's twisted, and convoluted and messy and unbelievable, but I did enjoy watching a great cast in a fantastic landscape playing out a story that didn't feel terribly original, but maintained enough drama and character to keep wanting to know what happened next. Some characters are very flimsy, and some of the stories go nowhere. There's a few too many plot coincidences and some bloody terrible 'red herrings' and 'twists' that you can spot a mile off.

It reminded me of the Red Riding series. Ambitious, flawed, well acted TV drama.

coming soon to BBC2 apparently....
 
Started watching a Canadian show called Durham County on Netflix US. It's a serial killer thriller and police procedural which is fairly grim in tone so far it's very good.
 
Nanker Phelge said:
Finished watching Top of the Lake - Jane Campion written/directed thriller for TV. It's twisted, and convoluted and messy and unbelievable, but I did enjoy watching a great cast in a fantastic landscape playing out a story that didn't feel terribly original, but maintained enough drama and character to keep wanting to know what happened next. Some characters are very flimsy, and some of the stories go nowhere. There's a few too many plot coincidences and some bloody terrible 'red herrings' and 'twists' that you can spot a mile off.

It reminded me of the Red Riding series. Ambitious, flawed, well acted TV drama.

coming soon to BBC2 apparently....
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I was really disappointed in this. I can't agree that it was ambitious at all, it promised a lot but just ended up as a standard crime drama, complete with all the usual clichés. I agree you could spot the 'twists' a mile off though.
 
The Eagle - much better than I was expecting. Based on (childhood favourite) Rosemary Sutcliffe's novel The Eagle of the Ninth about the notoriously lost Roman legion which went north of the Wall and disappeared altogether along with said eagle, so lots of themes of honour / manliness/ loss and of course all those old urban favourites of militarism, colonialism, racism and anarchy too. Overall it's earnest and serious and really not tacky, which is rare among toga sagas. Even having hunk o'lunk Channing Tatum and other Americans play the Romans works well - very modern resonances of Iraq/Afghanistan etc in their lazy assumptions of superiority and difference between frontline soldiers and fey elite politicians. Really seriously well art-designed by people who obviously care passionately (maybe too much so) about Roman materiel, Pictish wattle and daub and so on. Jamie Bell as an ex-Brigante Briton acts beautifully and more than counterweights Tatum's fratboy heft in the lead. Very nice casting all round, although it all goes completely bonkers with the end-of-the-known-world Seal People who're covered in woad and look a lot more like Mohicans ... and I can't figure out at all why their main man is none other than Tahar Rahim (A Prophet) in a green-mud suit and feathers, muttering away in a mixture of cod-Arabic and cod-Gaelic. Bonkers.

Overall it's surprisingly worthwhile and surprisingly downbeat, which is nice. (Spoiler: watch the alternate ending, it's a lot better than the main-release one). If you like a bit of toga (and I do, I do) this will probably pleasantly surprise you.
 
redsquirrel said:
I was really disappointed in this. I can't agree that it was ambitious at all, it promised a lot but just ended up as a standard crime drama, complete with all the usual clichés. I agree you could spot the 'twists' a mile off though.
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It was ambitious, for me, in that it had plenty of promise, a great cast, a beautiful setting, and a story with potential.

It was disappointing that none of these came together to be something greater than, as you point out, a standard crime drama, which is all it did end up being.
 
Frances Lengel said:
Right I watched best friends forever

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2224073/

Decent film.

But honest to god Reno

You couldn't see a sinister agenda in citadel?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1641975/
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Horror films have always exploited base fears and have never been bastions of political correctness. Citadel is no more than a British variation of the backwoods horror film. Nobody seems to get particularly outraged when the US equivalent is represented as monsters, as with the likes of Wrong Turn. But we get all sensitive when trailer parks turn to council estates. What political effect do you think a low budget horror film will have on the UK population ? Do you think anybody really won't be able to distinguish the reality from what is a supernatural horror film where hoodies actually turn out to be supernatural creatures ?
 
tried to watch 'The Eagle' but was defeated by codiene, fatigue and cider. Will try again in the week, I'm normally a fiend for roman stuff
 
Reno said:
Horror films have always exploited base fears and have never been bastions of political correctness. Citadel is no more than a British variation of the backwoods horror film. Nobody seems to get particularly outraged when the US equivalent is represented as monsters, as with the likes of Wrong Turn. But we get all sensitive when trailer parks turn to council estates. What political effect do you think a low budget horror film will have on the UK population ? Do you think anybody really won't be able to distinguish the reality from what is a supernatural horror films where hoodies actually turn out to be supernatural creatures ?
Click to expand...

I didn't like wrong turn for much the same reason :oops:
 
Reno said:
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Deliverance, The Hills Have Eyes ?
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All good films, don't get me wrong & Citadel actually did scare me a bit in places - The bits where Tommy was in his house at night, I know what it's like to not feel safe in your own house so it struck a bit of a chord. But yeah, in all them films my sympathies mainly were with the hillbillies/hoodies - "Who are these trumpets coming round our way, thinking they can just walk about and nothing's going to happen to them?".

The thing with Citadel though, is days after seeing it, there was some report saying that X percentage of the population believe that benefit claimants aren't capable of having the full range of emotions/feelings & I somehow got the two things conflated. Mainly though, I was just being a contrarian/dick for the sake of it. Soz.
 
Frances Lengel said:
All good films, don't get me wrong & Citadel actually did scare me a bit in places - The bits where Tommy was in his house at night, I know what it's like to not feel safe in your own house so it struck a bit of a chord. But yeah, in all them films my sympathies mainly were with the hillbillies/hoodies - "Who are these trumpets coming round our way, thinking they can just walk about and nothing's going to happen to them?".

The thing with Citadel though, is days after seeing it, there was some report saying that X percentage of the population believe that benefit claimants aren't capable of having the full range of emotions/feelings & I somehow got the two things conflated. Mainly though, I was just being a contrarian/dick for the sake of it. Soz.
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I'm not sure mutant monsters claim benefits ? :D

I don't think you are a dick btw. I showed Citadel to a friend of mine and he had the same objections and we had the same discussion. There have been similar films which I did find offensive, like the OAP vigilante flick Harry Brown and that was because it tried to be far more realistic but its drug dealers and hoodies were laughable caricatures.

Citadel is more of a urban fairy tale that taps into some primal fear which the film-maker said came from getting mugged. I have been there as well and it was a traumatic experience. As a horror film I found it more effective than most and no doubt this had to do with once getting my head kicked in by a large gang of laughing 12 to 16 year olds, but I saw it more as an irrational if understandable emotional response than any sort of political comment. I can see how it could be interpreted as such, but then we have to dismiss an awful lot of other horror films which are no different just because they take place in the US.
 
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