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

Idris2002 said:
I dunno, I thought it was pretty good.

For what it was.
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It was what it was and it did what it intended to do very well. The accents were a bit weird, and the cheesy plot simply had to be there to get as many people to watch the film and therefore justify it's stupendous budget. Amazing effects all the way through, I liked it as well :)
 
A Late Quartet - beautifully played. Actors at the top of their game, and yet, so what? It came over as a set of whining well off New Yorkers with their first world problems. Catherine Keener is great, but does she always have to be such a cold bitch? A quartet requires the suppression of ego, so here are a bunch of egotists fighting like cats in a bag. I admit I turned it off before the end and so there could be a synthesising resolution but it didn't look like it was going anywhere.
 
Orang Utan said:
I saw it at the cinema and there were audible groans and sighs (including mine) after the third time it 'ended' and yet another coda began.
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Mr K and I had both half-risen from our seats during the third ending. I heard several other bums hit seats and mutterings of 'FFS!' around the cinema :D

:mad:
 
Tonight I shall watch Point Blank, I saw it was on telly last night and recorded it.
I saw it when it came out.
Great movie!
 
Pain, Pus and Poison: The Search for Modern medecine

an interesting docu, does what it says on the tin really. Lots of interesting stuff in there. Who knew that some of our most commonly used surgical anaesthetics were derived from curare?


Horizon: 40 years on the moon


also quite good. Ubiquitous science program hogger Brian cox did a bit of commentary but not loads. Soviet contributions duly noted (RIP cmrd laika). Lots of amazing footage. worth it. If you hate cox you can just mute his bits cos he only does the odd link here and there, somebody with more gravitas narrates mainly
 
The Vanishing...Dutch Horror. Couple go on holiday to France. Woman goes missing. Partner continues to search and three years on is contacted by the 'kidnapper'. Good film, premise is a scary one and believable enough real life scenario, kidnapper is proper creepy with a backstory to support his weirdness. Good ending too.

The Punk Syndrome...documentary about Finnish punk band Pertti Kurikka's Name Day, a band whose members all have learning disabilites. I've seen it before but the Mrs was watching it. It's ace, punk as fuck. All the band are good enough and I like the way the manager let them get on with it. Singer Kari steals it for me though, he's a fucking great frontman.

A Room for Romeo Brass...Everyone must've seen this Shane Meadows film by now. My 13 year old hadn't so we put it on last night. Paddy Considine is brilliant and the thing Meadows does with turning a comedy into something very dark still gets me everytime.

Ils...French horror about a couple in a house in the middle of the woods in Romania. In the middle of the night they get tormented by people trying to get in. One of those 'based on true life events' stories that isn't quite. A good amount of tension, not quite enough jumps scares, ending so so.
 
Into The Abyss - Werner Herzog's doc about death row, focusing on a triple homicide and the bloke that gets executed for it. I like his documentaries a lot - the one about the mad bloke with the bears was probably the best but this one is good, too. He's got a good, disarming interview technique that seems to get people to open up. It can be quite uncomfortable at times - there's one interview with the sister of the murdered guy that was really grim - but he just allows people to talk and gets some good stuff. I liked the way he didn't hammer home his obviously anti-death penalty stance, too. I'll have to get his one about the caves in France, too. I think I like him more as a documentary maker than a film director.
 
Oh God, I watched Love Actually. I ought to have known better but Netflix streaming options are getting a bit thin and I thought how bad can it be. I do like Four Weddings.

Fuck.

It's beyond bad. It's trying so hard to be feelgood that its cardboard cutout characters failed to be recognisably human. They were lazy devices designed solely to provoke an aw shucks aura of niceness. Which they utterly failed to do, incidentally. Did a dopey guy who went to America because it is populated by hotties who are mad for English guys really walk into a bar and get mugged by a bunch of English mad American hotties? I'm not even sure any more. My brain had stopped processing the syrupy awfulness that was unfolding before me. I turned it off shortly after that, so perhaps it turned into David Lynch, but I suspect not. There should be international treaties consigning this vile piece of festering shit to a place so far from human contact that no one can be contaminated by it. It is a weapon of mass revulsion.
 
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NVP said:
Into The Abyss - Werner Herzog's doc about death row, focusing on a triple homicide and the bloke that gets executed for it. I like his documentaries a lot - the one about the mad bloke with the bears was probably the best but this one is good, too. He's got a good, disarming interview technique that seems to get people to open up. It can be quite uncomfortable at times - there's one interview with the sister of the murdered guy that was really grim - but he just allows people to talk and gets some good stuff. I liked the way he didn't hammer home his obviously anti-death penalty stance, too. I'll have to get his one about the caves in France, too. I think I like him more as a documentary maker than a film director.
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Have you seen Little Dieter Needs To Fly yet?
 
Badlands (1973) Im bloody losing the will ta live regarding films at moment. It feels like am swimmin in a tide of cocacola cans n popcorn. conjurin, man ov steel,, pain in the arse gain, pacific rim me, its like bein sucked inta a black hole of nothingness,,.,.. Anyway watch Badlands even if yuv seen it ,,,its cleanzez the mind n soul,. A sick, courteous, funny, horrid pathettic, cancerous injection of the human condition! Plus scenery you can fall in i love wiv.... Its a 10 outta 10 film and. its brill...
 
avu9lives said:
Badlands (1973) Im bloody losing the will ta live regarding films at moment. It feels like am swimmin in a tide of cocacola cans n popcorn. conjurin, man ov steel,, pain in the arse gain, pacific rim me, its like bein sucked inta a black hole of nothingness,,.,.. Anyway watch Badlands even if yuv seen it ,,,its cleanzez the mind n soul,. A sick, courteous, funny, horrid pathettic, cancerous injection of the human condition! Plus scenery you can fall in i love wiv.... Its a 10 outta 10 film and. its brill...
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Are you Paul Ross?
 
Night Of The Demon scared the fuck out of me when I was a kid, I daren't go up the stairs to my bedroom on my own. :D
 
Argo.

A good yarn, well told, and the "America fuck yeah" stuff was mercifully kept to a minimum.

Strangely, they didn't mention that the attempt to rescue the other hostages was a total, humiliating fiasco.
 
Das Boot
Epic submarine movie. Watched the directors cut at over 3 hours long. Brilliantly tense and engaging all the way through. Fun fact: the war correspondent in the film wanted to concentrate on music after doing this film and is now the most successful artist in Germany.
 
Curse of Chucky (new straight to DVD one by the original director).

Pretty naff (I wasn't expecting much in fairness!), but better than 'Bride' or 'Seed'. Quality ending scene too.

And I believe Jennifer Tilly has a deal with the Devil, she looks amazing at 55.
 
Nada
Decent 1974 French thriller directed by Claude Chabrol. A bunch of leftys form a group to kidnap the American ambassador but once they've got him and a ruthless police force are after them their plans soon go awry. I like Chabrol's films that I've seen, and while this isn't his best it's well put together and definitely worth a watch.

La Silence de la Mer
Early Jean-Pierre Melville film from 1949 set in occupied France, where a German officer is billeted at the home of a french man and his niece who refuse to speak to him. It's not a typical Melville film, but I suppose it has a fair bit in common with another of his occupation films, 'Leon Morin, Pretre' if you've seen that. Melville manages to produce an incredible amount of tension from scenes consisting of a man delivering speeches praising shared French and German culture being met with a stony silence. The acting by the three main characters is very good, but I was especially impressed by Nicole Stephane as the niece who delivers a really powerful performance I thought. An excellent film.

A Time to Love and a Time to Die
Another film about the Second World War, this one from 1958 and directed by Douglas Sirk. The film follows John Gavin as Ernst Graeber, a German soldier fighting on the Eastern front who falls in love with Elizabeth Kruse, acted by Liselotte Pulver, as he tries to find his parents amidst the air raids and brutality of 1944 Berlin while on a few weeks' leave from the front. The photography is really beautiful and with some nice camera movements, while Gavin and Pulver are very convincing as the two leads. Another good one.
 
inva said:
Nada
Decent 1974 French thriller directed by Claude Chabrol. A bunch of leftys form a group to kidnap the American ambassador but once they've got him and a ruthless police force are after them their plans soon go awry. I like Chabrol's films that I've seen, and while this isn't his best it's well put together and definitely worth a watch.
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I really liked that one. Maybe not as good as "State of Siege" as terrorism movies go, but still a damn sight better than what you would get on the subject today.
 
Magnolia

I really don't know what to make of this film. I think I enjoyed it. I don't usually watch films that have this sort of non linear narratives style. I mean, I struggled to get magic realism in books, when it comes to stories I'm a meat and potatoes man.

but this was in places moving- and in places hilarious (RESPECT THE COCK! TAME THE CUNT!).

its the first time in a long time I can genuinely say 'Tom Cruise was good in this'

Dunno though. Despite what worked there was something brittle about it all, something overall false and hollow. Need to think more on it. Cos maybe that was the whole point.
 
Idris2002 said:
I really liked that one. Maybe not as good as "State of Siege" as terrorism movies go, but still a damn sight better than what you would get on the subject today.
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My review from MATB:

Nada/The Nada Gang - Chabrol from the early 70s about anarchists kidnapping the US ambassador to France. This one seems very unpopular with Chabrol afficianados - i thought it was great. Skewered both the dead end of terrorism and the state brilliantly with some great unexpected black humour and informed cynicism. He part wrote this and the political discussions in the first half were very good and sounded genuine, like he'd heard them in real life.
 
butchersapron said:
My review from MATB:

Nada/The Nada Gang - Chabrol from the early 70s about anarchists kidnapping the US ambassador to France. This one seems very unpopular with Chabrol afficianados - i thought it was great. Skewered both the dead end of terrorism and the state brilliantly with some great unexpected black humour and informed cynicism. He part wrote this and the political discussions in the first half were very good and sounded genuine, like he'd heard them in real life.
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Roger that. I also liked "La Guerre Est Finie", which deals with similar themes, though set a bit earlier.

DotCommunist - I thought Cruise was the worst thing in Magnolia. For example -

When he has the scene where he meets his estranged father on the father's deathbed, and they're supposed to have a deathbed reconciliation. Cruise just wasn't up to the job.
 
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