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  1. In Memory of LAJ_FETT: Please share your remembrances and condolences HERE

Amph What was the last movie you saw?

Discussion in 'Community' started by TheEmperorsProtege, Aug 15, 2004.

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  1. DarthMak

    DarthMak Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Jan 4, 2001
  2. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

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    Nov 2, 2000
    Oh good, I thought I was losing my mind there for a second.
     
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  3. SWpants

    SWpants Force Ghost star 5

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    Oct 28, 2004
    Brave: It was absolutely adorable.
     
  4. The_Four_Dot_Elipsis

    The_Four_Dot_Elipsis Jedi Grand Master star 5

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    Mar 3, 2005
    It's certainly more interesting than Wreck-It Ralph. I just wish that Chapman had been able to follow through with what she had clearly conceived as being a story that was genuinely about a girl's adventure, rather than just a boy's adventure with a girl substituted in. Pixar chickened out.
     
  5. Frank T.

    Frank T. Force Ghost star 6

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    Sep 2, 2012
    Brave

    I thought it was alright. Not completely smooth going for me though. Above average for the Pixar I've seen.
     
  6. AAAAAH

    AAAAAH Jedi Knight star 4

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    Nov 8, 2012
    barbara.

    it was quite good.

    here's the trailer:
     
  7. Havac

    Havac Former Moderator star 7 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

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    Sep 29, 2005
    Premium Rush. It's a pretty lightweight movie, based around the basic premise that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a bike messenger and Michael Shannon is a crooked cop who wants to steal what he's delivering. It takes that premise and draws a lot of entertainment out of it, with a lot of very kinetic bike-chase scenes and humor. JGL is a great choice for the protagonist -- he has to pretty much carry the movie, and he's got exactly the right mixture of charm, intensity, intellect, and exasperation for the role. Michael Shannon is the other major component as the villain, and he plays the character not as a menacing heavy, but as a whiny, petulant, obnoxious asshat you can love to hate. It's a good call, as it keeps the film lighter, which is what makes it work. It's light, fun, and kinetic, and the bike-centric premise gives it the chance to make its action very unique and to play around with visualizations of the way JGL chooses his routes. Very solid.
     
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  8. Darth Guy

    Darth Guy Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Aug 16, 2002
    Little Big Man. Blech. I could accept the silly premise (some guy who's almost as old as the oldest documented person to have ever lived lucidly recalling his life story), but it was campy as hell, the acting was mostly hammy or plain bad, the lines were cheesy. I don't get it.
     
  9. MariahJSkywalker

    MariahJSkywalker Poopoo Head star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

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    Mar 11, 2005
    Black Swan. I haven't see it since it was in theaters. This time around I can appreciate Natalie's performance. Still don't don't think she should have won Best Actress though.
     
  10. Jabba-wocky

    Jabba-wocky Chosen One star 10

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    May 4, 2003
    X-Men: First Class. A pretty good film that still holds up on re-watching. I mean, aside from the well enumerated problems with the sudden shifts in Magneto's motivations and the generally rushed progress of the last 20 minutes or so. Still, probably the best entrant in this series after X2. Unfortunately, I noticed a completely nonsensical point. Charles advises Magneto to reach for the point "between rage and serenity." What does that even mean? I mean, his point that maximizing one's power isn't all about rage is well taken enough. But. . .that's not what he said. Instead, his point seems to imply that by being, I don't know, moderately displeased (?), he will get more results than being in a full blown fury. "Only be slightly less angry!" sounds completely idiotic. And yet, by choosing a spectrum that goes from "not angry" to "angry" and telling Eric to find a place between the two, that's pretty much what he guarantees. Am I missing something here?
     
  11. Winged_Jedi

    Winged_Jedi Jedi Grand Master star 4

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    Feb 28, 2003
    Life of Pi. Good casting, gorgeous to look at, seamless CGI (apparently real tigers were used at points- I couldn't tell the difference). The novel is one of my favourites, and I never agreed that it was "unfilmable". Unfortunately Ang Lee makes a poor choice with the "second story", by having Pi almost literally narrate it to camera. Suraj Sharma's performance is fine, but it's basically a straight up reading of a passage from the book- and a condensed passage, at that. It was the ideal opportunity to play to the strength of the medium and do something the book couldn't do, which is to draw a visual parallel between the second story and the first one. Show us it, don't just tell us it, for goodness sake. It's meant to be the key scene.

    The Hobbit. Yep, it's butter scraped over too much bread alright, but I love Martin Freeman in this role. And Middle Earth is hardly an eyesore. The real star, for me, is Howard Shore and his wonderful compositions. And just like the Prequel Trilogy, the score's many familiar references are the most effective echo of the original films. I can see old sets and old faces and feel nostalgia, but it's always hearing the old themes and motifs which send a chill up my spine.

    Man Push Cart. Quietly devastating.
     
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  12. Armenian_Jedi

    Armenian_Jedi Force Ghost star 7

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    Mar 14, 2003
    Watched Django Unchained again yesterday morning. Perfect movie is perfect.

    And I rewatched Hunger Games last night. Kind of. Had it on in the background as I was doing other stuff. Still a good movie though.
     
  13. Force Smuggler

    Force Smuggler Force Ghost star 7

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    Sep 2, 2012
    Les Miserables. Amazing movie
     
  14. NYCitygurl

    NYCitygurl Manager Emeritus star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

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    Jul 20, 2002
    Les Mis, yesterday.
     
  15. Merlin_Ambrosius69

    Merlin_Ambrosius69 Jedi Master star 5

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    Aug 4, 2008
    I love this film and haven't read the book. I do see what you mean with your above critique WRT "the second story", but I disagree it's unfortunate. I think Lee and company made the right choice: to limit the revelation to a spoken monologue, to let "the second story" remain unseen, undramatized. I understand your disappointment; I think I would feel let down if, like you, I had read the book first, and expected this "second story" to be given the full cinematic treatment of dialogue, scoring, pacing, etc.

    But ultimately I feel the film works well with that revelation constrained to speech. This way the veracity of the "second story" remains a question in the viewer's mind: 'which one was real?' we wonder as we leave the theater. The mystery invites post-film conjecture, provokes in-the-car-on-the-way-home discussion in a way that, had the "second" events been filmed, would be less ambiguous, less fun and less interesting. The fantasy remains foremost in the mind in place of the more mundane (and sad, and hard-to-take) "reality"... which is I think the very gist of the film's thematic underpinning.
     
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  16. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

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    Nov 2, 2000
    F for Fake (1973) - Orson Welles

    [​IMG]


    Art is a lie; a lie that makes us able to see the truth.

    The final film completed by the great Orson Welles is a monument to his genius and his excess; in all Welles films I can see greatness behind the frames and also sense something lacking. And yet, even at his worst, Welles managed to make films that were intensely unique. Citizen Kane may not be the best film of all time, but there’s certainly not another quite like it. The same could be said for any number of others; as Gary Graver once stated when asked why he wanted to work for Welles, “I think there should be more Orson Welles films.” Amen, Gary, yea and amen.

    To describe this film is impossible, but let’s take shot. Francois Reichenbach filmed a documentary about Elmyr de Hory, a man who claimed to have made his living by art forgery. He brought the film to Welles, hoping Welles would narrate it. With his usual panache, Welles asked if he couldn’t re-edit it and share credit. Reichenbach was thrilled; he was French, remember?

    As Welles began to edit it, the consummate irony arrived; Reichenbach had been inspired to make the film after reading a book about De Hory, a book called Fake, a book by Clifford Irving who Reichenbach had interviewed extensively for the film. And then suddenly Clifford Irving’s heralded biography of Howard Hughes was revealed to be almost entirely fabricated and it became common knowledge that Irving himself was a forger, a fake, a conman, a liar. And Welles was off and running with a film that is moving, artistic, hilarious, ironic, witty, profound and absolutely unlike anything seen before or since.

    Welles himself called it a film essay and that fits as well as any description could. It muses on the nature of truth and art and how the two relate. Welles focuses on de Hory briefly, skips to Clifford Irving, jumps from him to Howard Hughes, from Hughes to Welles’ own early career (what was War of the Worlds, after all, but a masterful forgery?) and from there to a hilarious interlude involving Oja Kador, Welles’ companion at the time, and a series of forged Picasso paintings.

    In between, we muse on the nature of criticism, the nature of reality, the nature of perception, the nature of anonymity and everything else relating to art and truth. If this sounds like a head spinning film, it is. The editing style is frenzied; Graver remarks that the cuts were so fast that some cuts did not have negative numbers. The final joke: Orson Welles invented MTV. He’d love that, I think. I know I do.

    There are moments of pure transcendence scattered throughout this baffling film. The movie opens appropriately with Welles showing off magic tricks to a befuddled youngster; he spends the rest of the film doing the same to us. A sequence musing on Welles’ early career is entertaining, hilarious and, almost unheard of for Welles, self-deprecating; “I started at the top and have been working my way down ever since,” he says ruefully and he can’t help but laugh. It’s a great laugh line, but it’s also the closest anyone has ever come to really summing Welles up. There’s a moment of raw poetry as Welles muses on the Chartres Cathedral, the pinnacle, in his mind, of human achievement, a work left . . . unsigned, with no name to give it definition.

    And the last fifteen minutes are pure theater as Welles and Kador act out a confrontation between an angry and confused Picasso and a desperate, dying forger who seeks validation; it’s the consummate artistry and Welles’ performance, as the forger, is stunning.

    Somewhere between the cuts, we see what Welles is driving at. Who was Howard Hughes really? Isn’t forgery in itself an art? Who really made this film, Welles, Reichenbach, de Hory or Irving? And aren’t they all, each and every one of them, firmly established liars? How can any art ever be ‘real?’ How can we ever know anything is ‘real?’ Welles, of course, provides no answers; Welles, as you can see from The Lady in Shanghai, for God’s sake, wasn’t interested in having things make sense. But still, this film, where Welles fully embraces the fragility of reality and art and wrestles with all the themes that he flirted with throughout his career is his final joke. You see, he’s finally definitely topped even Kane; he worked his way down for decades and then his last film . . . was and is his very best. Talk about a rabbit out of a hat.

    5 out of 5 stars.
    More Movie Reviews!
     
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  17. Rox

    Rox Administrator Emeritus star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

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    Nov 24, 2000
    10 Year - Kind of what you expect from that kind of film. Someone does some dumb crap, someone falls in love, someone re-connects with old friends.
     
  18. Frank T.

    Frank T. Force Ghost star 6

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    Sep 2, 2012
    Looper

    It was decent time travel flick. I'll watch it again.
     
  19. Rox

    Rox Administrator Emeritus star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

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    Nov 24, 2000
    Captain America, been watching Marvel movies today. On the Avengers now.
     
  20. The_Four_Dot_Elipsis

    The_Four_Dot_Elipsis Jedi Grand Master star 5

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    Mar 3, 2005
    Life of Pi (2012, Lee)

    Handsomely mounted film and certainly a return to form for Lee after the atrocious Taking Woodstock, but not quite hitting those Ice Storm and Sense and Sensibility highs. Claudio Miranda continues to impress, although I'd still say that the most picturesque and visually arresting film of the year is Skyfall (save for the fact that it's not 35mm... that is its tragedy). What was clearly difficult source material is unpackaged methodically and cleanly here - it's a good screenplay serviced by strong direction and strong performances. I don't know that it's a great film, but what it posits resembles my own opinions on faith, and I don't usually get to see that writ large in a quasi-spectacular film, so that was quite nice. I don't think I'll ever revisit it, but it was certainly worth a gander.
     
  21. AAAAAH

    AAAAAH Jedi Knight star 4

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    Nov 8, 2012
    i was handsomely mounted by a young buck just the other day.
     
  22. The_Four_Dot_Elipsis

    The_Four_Dot_Elipsis Jedi Grand Master star 5

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    Mar 3, 2005
    The Broadway Melody (1929, Beaumont)

    At first I thought it was one of the more innocuous Best Picture winners, but it winds up being semi-effective thanks to Bessie Love's dated but impassioned performance as someone who gives up the love of her life so her idiot sister can live properly. Beaumont's direction is filled with slop merchantry, even for the time (the previous BP winner, Wings, looks positively slick compared to this, as does the work that Murnau and Borzage were doing in Hollywood at the same time), and it clunks and clangs along without a shred of fluency, but it does ultimately work.
     
  23. The_Four_Dot_Elipsis

    The_Four_Dot_Elipsis Jedi Grand Master star 5

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    Mar 3, 2005
  24. Chancellor_Ewok

    Chancellor_Ewok Chosen One star 7

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    Nov 8, 2004
    Tom Hooper's Les Miserable. Excellent film. I can not recommend it highly enough. =D=
     
  25. Merlin_Ambrosius69

    Merlin_Ambrosius69 Jedi Master star 5

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    Aug 4, 2008
    Clearly I like both Life of Pi and Taking Woodstock more than you, but while I wouldn't agree the latter is atrocious, it is a let-down that, for one failing, depends on the viewer having seen another film, namely Woodstock, to understand what's going on. Lee and company leave out key details that, had we been given to know them, would have enhanced our emotion and increased our understanding of the events. Also, while presenting a fairly unvarnished view of the era, the filmmakers can never summon the bravery required to criticize my parents' generation for its failings; in the final scene Altamont is referenced, and the end of an era vaguely hinted at, but we don't understand what it means unless we happen to know what it means. The movie just kind of ends with no real sense of what we're to make of it all.

    Life of Pi, on the other hand, is a genius-level tour de force IMHO, and the best of the films I saw in 2012.
     
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