Amph What was the last movie you saw?

The Deal (2003)

A decent little political drama with Michael Sheen as Tony Blair.

 

Didn't he play Tony Blair in something else too?

EDIT: The Special Relationship

 

Faster (2010) - (re-watch) Hits the ground running and never stops. Does an excellent job of building and then weaving in three very unique characters. Nice blind side twist as well. A little contrived, but when a movie works as well as this you forgive a few minor sins. - 7/10

 

Kick-Ass II. Was it my imagination, or was the continuity between the two movies off? In the first movie, Hit Girl is 11 years old and Dave Lizewski is a high school student. In the second movie, she's 15, and Dave is still in high school. Was he a freshman in the first movie? Even so, he should have graduated. Is he mentally disabled? Seems like it through much of the movie.

Also, I wondered why the bad guys suddenly had no guns in the climactic battle.

 

Screened Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug last night. It was pretty good.

 

I'm not a hundred percent sure they were always ridiculing it. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, for instance. I think that's a horror/sci-fi that's just tapping into that seething fear without really discussing whether it makes sense in the real world or not. It's just tapping into it and using it to make the fear more compelling in the film.

La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus (2012) – Mark Kendall



This movie ostensibly follows a junked out school bus from the auction block in Pennsylvania to the mean streets of Guatemala as a “camioneta,” a fancy public transport bus. Well, not ostensibly, it actually does. But what the movie is about is the people that the bus touches on that journey. The film is a surprisingly engaging movie and at only seventy-one minutes, it doesn’t wear out its welcome at all. We don’t spend a lot of time with some of the people. A good example is the bus driver who transports the bus from Pennsylvania to Guatemala. We spend about ten to fifteen minutes on the road with him, driving sixteen hours a day to get the bus back to his boss. When the bus arrives in Guatemala , it passes out of his hand and he passes out of our vision and the movie. The people we meet come across vividly and warmly; it’s seeing these individuals as real people and feeling empathy for them in their struggles that seems to be the real point of the movie. When we meet the twenty-six year-old non-college educated, seemingly very poor owner of a bus decorating business and find that he has an inexplicable passion for graphic design it’s a wonderful moment of upended expectations. The film delves into the high-crime rate and the fact that camioneta drivers are killed at a surprisingly high rate by gangs that run protection rackets. The fear of the two drivers who are going to be driving the bus we’re watching is palpable; they are never open about their fears, only briefly talking about the danger, but in their eyes and the way they walk, you can see that they do have those fears. All in all, it’s an unpretentious slice-of-life movie. It doesn’t really have anything new to say; but it does get inside the lives of the people involved with this bus and make you see things, to some degree, from their perspective. That’s an admirable thing. I wouldn’t call this a great film, despite its 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but it’s certainly an interesting and engaging one. On the whole, it definitely gets a recommendation.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (2013) – David Lowery



This is one of those films that just keeps growing in my estimation the farther I get from it. While watching it, I was enjoying it; a three star rating seemed in the cards. Driving home from the theater, I had decided on three-and-a-half. The next day, I had upped it to four. Now, I think it’s one of the top ten I’ve seen all year. There’s nothing at all new here. Casey Affleck is a prison escapee trekking across Texas to reunite with his wife, Rooney Mara, and his four year old daughter, who he has never seen. Meanwhile, Ben Foster’s laconic police officer finds himself being more and more drawn to Mara’s character. Keith Carradine looms on the sidelines; he’s the adoptive father of Rooney Mara’s character and his one goal is to keep Affleck’s character from getting back into the lives of his daughter and granddaughter. The film is languid and incredibly atmospheric. The film seems to take place in two different lightings: it’s either a dark, dimly lit, dusty interior or an exterior bathed in the haunting orange light of a Texas sunset. The film takes place in the seventies and it has the aesthetics of a film made in the seventies. The Malick comparisons come naturally; if they aren’t entirely accurate, they’re at least somewhat apt, though Lowery is more focused on story than Malick’s ever really been. Regardless, the familiarity of the story and the characters are overcome brilliantly by the luminous direction, the spare yet poetic script and, probably most of all, the incredible, amazing performances given by the leading quartet. The performances are all subdued, restrained, very minimal, but the emotion that comes across is strong, very powerful. It’s impossible to pick a favorite; Affleck, Mara, Foster and Carradine all excel completely. These are people who keep their emotions hidden behind a rural stoicism. Affleck’s character is verbose, but rarely emotive in any other way. Mara and Foster are so silent that when they finally have a discussion about the fact that Foster is in love with Mara, neither one of them even speak the word “love.” Carradine, sadly absent from our cinemas of late, it seems, is as good as he ever was; he hasn’t lost a step. All in all, it’s a magnificent masterpiece.

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It's just kind of a shame that Michael Sheen has taken some really crappy roles in recent years. He has talent.

 

Yeah, he was really fantastic in The Queen. I thought he was just as good as Mirren.

 

That Hamilton Woman, 1941, Vivian Leigh and Laurence Olivier. Historical drama about Admiral Nelson's affair with Emma Hamilton, mostly a soap opera made entertaining by Leigh's effervescence, ending with the Battle of Trafalgar, filmed with impressive special effects for 1941. It's worth seeing once, but I have no need to watch it again.

 

Rango (2011) - Meh. It's produced competently enough, and is well acted, but the story is extremely predictable and lacks any real dramatic punch because of it. 5/10

 

Dirty Harry (1971)

Strangely enough, besides the atrocious porntastic 70's soundtrack, this cop thriller has not aged a day. Clint establishes his badassfullness to a perfect T, and the villain is one of the most sadistic bastards in any cop thriller I've seen, even though he looks like a freakish hybrid of Jim Carrey and Sean Penn.

 

'The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug'

I'm very tired and don't have an in-depth review in me but I thought it was pretty middle of the road. This is the farthest from Tolkien Jackson has ever gone and it needs a lot of reigning in of it's tremendous excess.

 

I recently saw this one again too. A local theater screened it for a few days as part of a classics series. Yeah, it holds up. And I've always thought Andy Robinson's turn as Scorpio is vastly underrated in the annals of cinema villainy. He really is terrifying.

I find a couple of moments kind of icky. It feels like they kind of shoehorn in some breasts at rather . . . unfortunate moments. Like when they're unearthing what is supposed to be a fourteen year old girl that's been raped and buried alive. That feels pretty exploitative. But minor quibbles aside, yeah, it holds up really, really well. I wish it hadn't been sullied by a string of increasingly cartoonish sequels. I mean, given the ending to this movie, Harry Callahan shouldn't just hit the reset button and be in four more movies; he should be forever changed by what he's faced in the Scorpio case. I really do love Eastwood in this though; he nails a couple of quieter moments too - I like the scene where he finds the place where Scorpio fired the shot from in the first murder we see, of the girl in the swimming pool. And I adore a scene that I'd forgotten about until I just saw it again; Harry's conversation with his partner's girlfriend. "No reason for it really," feels like the most pivotal line in the film, both for understanding Harry and what the film itself is positing about the world he lives in.

 

Agree with all this. Are the sequels really that bad? I've heard that The Dead Pool is the only one that's truly terrible.

 

Well, that"s what you get when the bad guy is played by Garak.

 

Oh wow I didn't even know that. No wonder he looked so familiar.

 

The Dead Pool excepted, I think they're pretty enjoyable. But then, my enjoyment of the original is primarily rooted in the fact that it feels like a shlocky exploitation film that accidentally got a massive budget.

 

Jim Carrey's in the last one isn't he?

 

Yes, he's the first victim. And might I add that a dead Jim Carrey is a fitting metaphor for the quality of the film that follows.

 

Well, I've actually only seen Magnum Force. I really disliked it; I felt they were deliberately softening the character. The villains in that film is a group of vigilante cops murdering criminals and I think they're intended to kind of help the series back off of the raw way Harry killed people in the first film. Harry has to parrot an anti-vigilante stance and I don't really think that's all that consistent with the first movie.

But I just object to them on principle. Harry Callahan throws his ******* badge into the lake at the end of Dirty Harry. There is no way that Harry's still a cop after the events of Dirty Harry. To have him in the next movie just contentedly still on the force is a slap in the face to that powerful ending to the original. It's like if they made a sequel to High Noon where Will Kane was just still the sheriff. Oh, wait, I think they did that. Dammit.

World War Z (2013) – Marc Forster



I never read the book, so I don’t have the baggage that a lot of people brought to the movie. That’s probably a good thing, frankly, since it seems most of those people were disappointed or angry at how the movie reportedly ditched the book’s groundbreaking format. As it stands, I was able to appreciate the movie on its own terms. It’s a reasonably good action flick, though those going for the horror will be disappointed. Gore is mostly kept offscreen. A woman gets her hand lopped off, a guy gets a crowbar through the head, another guy shoots himself in the head, but all off screen. The film simply isn’t a horror film; it’s an action film. On those terms, it works pretty well, at least for the first two thirds of the movie. There are some great sequences here; a mass panic in the streets of Philadelphia, the surprising, darkly humorous fate of a whiz-kid scientist, a suspenseful “be very very quiet” bicycle ride through a rainstorm and, finally, a great, intense, frenetic assault on Jerusalem by the zombies. That final one in particular is a showstopper, packed with incredible visuals, like a helicopter raking its 50 cal across a horde of zombies making a mountain out of themselves in order to breach a wall. And it’s incredibly fast paced; as our heroes race at top speed through the also fleeing mob, just ahead of the charging zombies, the heart climbs into the throat. Unfortunately, the last third is pretty terrible. At that point, the pace slows considerably; all the zombies start shambling like a typical Romero zombie, instead of sprinting at attack speed like they have been. And once they slow down, you get an eyeful of the generally terrible makeup. One scene in particular finds Brad Pitt trapped on the other side of a glass door from a teeth-chattering zombie that keeps repeatedly bumping his head softly on the door. If you can keep from laughing during this scene, you’re a better man than me. And, unfortunately, this scene is the CLIMAX of the film. Too bad. The Rotten Tomatoes rating was around 66% positive, which is basically exactly right: two-thirds quite good, one third awful. A word on the cast: Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, James Badge Dale, David Morse, Matthew Fox, Peter Capaldi . . . it’s a good ensemble that, unfortunately, isn’t called on to act. But a word for Daniella Kertesz who gives a very good performance as Segen, an Israeli soldier; she finds both terror and determination in the character and is the only one here giving anything approximating a real performance.

The Heat (2013) – Paul Feig



I’ve seen comedies this year that were better than this one, as in just having better characters or having surprising plot twists or whatever, but I’d have to say this is probably the funniest comedy I’ve seen all year. Melissa McCarthy is the slob streetwise cop; Sandra Bullock is the arrogant, tidy FBI agent. I mean, there’s a plot (sort of), but who the heck cares? Bullock and McCarthy have fantastic chemistry and the script is undeniably hilarious; McCarthy in particular has some really wonderful lines and, boy, does she sell them. These are roles that these ladies could play in their sleep, but they don’t. They’re both totally committed and neither one of them has any compunction at all about looking the fool. They’re both very funny performances taken on their own; as a unit, they’re even better. Of the generally funny supporting cast (except for a sadly underused Jane Curtin), Dan Bakkedahl is a real standout as a huffy DEA agent who just happens to be . . . an albino. He even gets the funniest line in the film, which I won’t spoil. Yeah, there’s some pretty non-PC stuff directed at that character. Melissa McCarthy calls him “chalk balls” at one point and that might just tell you right there whether this comedy is for you. As for me, I found it absolutely riotously funny. It starts a little slow, but give it time. By half an hour in, I was rolling on the floor.

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The Heat is probably the funniest comedy of the year. Bullock and McCarthy have tremendous chemistry together. World War Z is a great disaster flick until the idiotic and anti-climactic climax. Hopefully, the sequel is more consistent.

 

Wow, sounds like we're in total agreement on those two. Apparently that last third to World War Z was tacked on by new writers after they felt that the action oriented climax didn't work. I'm not sure it could have been worse than that moron zombie standing outside that door clicking his teeth together for twenty minutes.