list/discuss/rate - your recently watched movies

Toaster Mantis wrote: What is the plot of this Carnival of Souls thingy? The title suggests a horror.

yeah, it's Horror its more of a Weird Tales/Lovecraft style Horror,

a car full of people takes a spill in the lake in an auto disaster, no one is found, not even the car, shortly afterwards the woman appears off shore somewhere and everything seems back to normal (or is it?)

Carnival of Souls - Wow, what an unusual little movie I just happened upon here. I'm still sort of absorbing it all after last night, but I will say I've never seen anything quite like this. Not that it was outlandishly weird or over the top or anything, actually quite the opposite - very low budget, crude and simple. The story is easy to follow and you pretty much can guess what the outcome is going to be midway through. But the way it all plays out is alluring. The sounds, the rough film quality, the strange dialog, the awkwardness of the lead character, and the music, the music, the music! It was all done with pipe organ and had a hellish, circusy, underwater feel to it. The lead character (Mary) is a church organ player by occupation in the movie, so that plays into the film score...but seriously some of creepiest and most fitting film scores I've ever heard. I'm not even sure what to give this movie cause the more I think about it the higher my rating goes, I'll say somewhere between an 8 or 9/10, I'd definitely like to see this one again in the future to help sharpen my thoughts about it even further.

Rosemary's Baby. A bit slow in places, but otherwise a great movie. My favourite element is how most of the creepiness comes from these very subtle clues from the beginning that something isn't quite right, rather than outright scares which are used quite sparingly here. That, and how often do you see a major Hollywood production endorsing Satanism?

Cloverfield-
finally saw this film last night.  the f**king filming was an oxymoron.  On the one hand the very very shakey filming lent a certain realism to the movie.....but on the other, it was goddamn annoying very quickly.  I wanted to see better shots of the monster and smaller monsters, but to no avail, which really works on a subliminal level to make the monster shots less about details and closeups and more about quick, teaser shots....
it was okay.  Probably not worth watching a second time, and I wish it had been rated R so that they could have had more racy parts added.  (very few PG-13 horror films are worthwhile imo) (it seemed to me that when the one girl was bitten and then exploded in the quarantine section that they could have showed that in detail and allowed us to see whether she exploded (raining little parasites everywhere), or if she merely exploded due to some viral something in the bite.
I suppose it was an okay twist on the whole Godzilla phenom....(oh and it sh*ts all over the whole Blair Witch style of reality filming....)  6/10

next up:

Teeth (!)


Edited by avalanchemaster - August 24 2008 at 19:39

Toaster Mantis wrote: Going by mithrandir's post, this Southland Tales thing sounds like the result of someone imperfectly imitating either Robert Anton Wilson or Thomas Pynchon... authors that incidentally have a reputation for being unfilmable.

it was made by the guy who directed and wrote Donnie Darko, and since that became sort of a pop culture phenomenon he got big headed and thought he could put out any piece of dung and assume it praise worthy, well not this time...ham-fisted, boring, incoherent, 4th-grade level political lecture masked as sci-fi clusterf**k, total contempt for the audience.

Edited by mithrandir - August 24 2008 at 17:07

avalanchemaster wrote: mithrandir wrote: Southland Tales - eh, I wanted to like this movie, I really did, way longer than it needed to be and if the characters were a little more likable and there wasn't a constant need for stupidity it would have been more tolerable. It's fairly dense but not that hard to understand - afterward I second guessed myself thinking "was there more there that I didn't quite grasp?" nah....there wasn't...in the end it was pretty cut n dry. Modern conspiracy blog culture will probably relate to this more than I since it pretty much caters to their fatalistic whims and predictions - 'so what else is new?' is pretty much how I felt about the political undercurrent of the movie. Some interesting nods to Philip K Dick that I caught right off the bat - and I also wonder if Richard Kelly is a fan if the Illuminatus Trilogy?; if he is I think its pretty safe to say that it has rubbed off on his work with this movie...even down to the 'potty humor' (which is one of the things I really couldn't stand about the flick) - And with that said; what's the problem with taking your work more seriously and not constantly having to drag it through the gutter? 'Cars humping bro!'...not clever, nor offensive, nor witty. Maybe I'm just a wet blanket and I lost my funny bone a long time ago but I didn't laugh one time during any of the intended humor. I wonder if I watched this a second time if I might appreciate it more? It was an interesting process with the motivation and journey of each character and how everything led up to the final "BANG!" But then I think about the ridiculous scenes like when that woman was going to kill herself unless she got to suck off The Rock....ugh.... 2/10 I agree about everything you said above.  I just recently watched this myself but forgot to talk about it in this thread.  I really liked Donnie Darko, but this movie was clumsy and akward, even if it was futuristic and even had some nice notions at times...funny that the clerk at the video store said, "I think the guy has done too much acid."  I concur.

I think acid would have actually helped, cause there was nothing trippy, nor 'weird' about this move.  Such an immature attempt at making something unconventional.

The Bucket List - Eh. Seemed like I'd seen it before; nothing special.

micky wrote: Toaster Mantis wrote: Independence Day... hooh boy, was this one stupid movie. you forget the worse outrage.. in a movie full of them.the President's speech before the final battle....even worse than some of the ones 'W' has uncorked upon us  ...and that is REALLY saying something hahhha

Of course it's appalling - hackneyed, cliched, USA-saves-the-world-as-usual - utter garbage , yet guiltily entertaining for all that

Incidentally, the speech you've cited is a direct homage/parody/rip-off of Kenneth Branagh's speech in Henry V (even down to it being delivered from the back of a truck (or wagon in Henry V):

Bill Pullman (Independance Day) +++oh dear, oh dear, oh dear...+++

Kenneth Branagh (Henry V) +++this is how it should be done +++

Edited by Jim Garten - August 21 2008 at 07:26

Jurassic Park
Some of the dinosaur effects aren't quite as good as they were back in 1993, but all the big action scenes - especially those with the T-Rex - are every bit as exciting as they have always been. My favourite dinosaur attack scene, though, is actually the one with the Dilophosaur. With its spitting of corrosive venom, ridges on its head and fold-out neck collar thingy it looks like a dragon! That said, this movie is far from perfect and not just because of all the things it gets wrong about biology (why do they use frog DNA to fill the gaps in the dino DNA instead of bird DNA?). No, the biggest problem is that the script a couple of times relies on the main characters behaving rather stupidly in order to create drama: For example, the movie makes it clear that things would not have gone so horribly wrong had Hammond not undermanned the security system of the park and generally rushed everything (which made it easier for Nedry to sabotage things)... so it never seems inevitable that the dino rampaging would have happened, no matter how often Jeff Goldblum's character says so. In short, Jurassic Park is a story that fails to prove its own message.

The Last of the Mohicans (1992)
It's a pity this movie takes so many liberties with history, because I have seen few movies that so perfectly capture the intensity of a true turning point in history: Entire cultures dying out, leaders losing control over processes and mechanisms that they themselves have started, the heroes mainly trying to stay alive and make the best out of the chaos they find themselves in... all this in just 105 minutes, yet this movie is every bit as epic as an entire trilogy. This aspect of it, I think, is proof enough that Michael Mann understands the entire medium of film much better than most other directors active in Hollywood. That said, Mohicans '92 is not perfect. First there are the historical inaccuracies I mentioned before (the book Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies is quite harsh on it). Then, there's the fact that the approach of having most of the characterization come from the actors' performances rather than exposition is a bit of a double edged sword: While it keeps the pacing up, it also means that a handful of rather major characters get disappointingly little screentime.

Easy Rider
Ah yes, the movie that inspired the Deep Purple song Speed King and made Jack Nicholson famous. He gets an awesome scene where he expounds on how space aliens are more enlightened than us Earthlings! Seriously, this is a great movie - the cinematography is absolutely beautiful, as a cinematic time capsule of the era in which it was made you can't find a better example, the way that it stays concise as hell while allowing itself to truly sprawl and ramble as an existentialist voyage should, the goddamn soundtrack... conceptually there is just so much there beneath the surface here. Okay, that does make it easy to misunderstand if you don't look for nuances, for example I've read in reviews that many hippies who saw Easy Rider back in the day didn't get that the movie was also critical of their subculture, but I am coming more and more to think that movies (and art in general) is at its best when giving its content shape rather than spelling it out explicitly. (which is, when you think about it, rather un-artistic)

Hero
Talk about historical epics being unrealistic! Here, however, it works to the movie's favour because Hero not only is very honest about its mythologizing of the past but also has the subjectivity of historical narratives as a theme. Like the '92 Last of the Mohicans, this one looks is very much about capturing the feel rather than the details of being at a turning point in history... if in a very different way simply because the two movies are products of very different cultures. Everything that should sink this movie - the ridiculously stylized swordplay, the occasional thematical heavy-handedness - actually ends up strengthening Hero because of how it positions itself in this hazy border one between history and fantasy. That, in turn, does not seem like a cop-out because of how much thought there has been put into its construction beyond just the sheer craftsmanship. The fact that I wound up appreciating it for the complex plot more than the elaborate fighting scenes (which alone make it worth rewatching, my favourite aspect of them was how the characters' swordfighting styles reflected their respective personalities) is probably the biggest testament to how good a movie Hero is... it's the sort of thing that on paper shouldn't work but in practice somehow does.