films you've seen recently and would NOT recommend

spooky girlfriend

Wild Horses
that's the one. Another recent film was 'Babel'. It's like 'Amores Perros' but occurring across several continents...
If you haven't seen it, that was also directed by Alejandro Gonzalez, and consisted of several separate narratives that inter-cut throughout, and finally all converge in the final scene.

It's great because with his films you tend to harbour a favourite character (mine was the deaf-mute Japanese girl who does pills and licks dentists) and you wait for the next 'installment' of their story.
 

tomd

penis like a micromachine
sweeny todd

ended up walking out, as i was walking to the front a guy started laughing at me.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
sweeny todd

There was a fairly decent BBC adaptation of that story a couple of years ago, with Ray Winstone in suitably menacing form in the title role. The depiction of life in 18th century London was impressively grim. Worth watching if they repeat it at some point.
 

tox

Factory Girl
sweeny todd

ended up walking out, as i was walking to the front a guy started laughing at me.

It was pretty bad, but pretty much exactly what you would expect from the set up. I mean its Tim Burton doing Sweeny Todd with Johnny Depp and the rest his usual cast. It was so predictably carried off I'm pretty sure someone pretending to be Tim Burton could have made the same movie. To be honest my expectations were so low I actually found myself enjoying it. Ali G raised a smile.
 
S

simon silverdollar

Guest
juno.

what a piece of shit. desperately unfunny (it's like being stuck in a room with 3rd rate student stand-up comics trading one-liners relentlessly), and trying way too hard- the bits where the characters namecheck sonic youth and the melvins were toe-curlingly contrived. oh, and that bit of 'cute' whimsy at the end where michael cera and ellen page sing a kimya dawson song can fuck off too.

like with Borat, i get the feeling that this has only got such good reviews because middle aged reviewers want to appear down with the kids.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I watched the Brian De Palma film Femme Fatale the other day and my god it was rubbish. Wasn't someone slating Brian De Palma on here the other day? - well, on this evidence I agree with them, this has to be the silliest and most cliched film I've seen for a long time, it even had a bit at the end...

SPOILER (actually it's already spoiled)

....when the main character wakes up and IT'S ONLY A DREAM. Surely you aren't allowed to do that any more? The acting is terrible as well, for some reason I watched the extras and there is a bit when BDP says how great an actress his leading lady is and it cuts to the first time she actually speaks in the movie (the very bit where it dawned on me that I was going to hate the film in fact) and barks woodenly into a public phone "No, YOU don't understand, I need a passport yesterday".
Add in loads of scenes that fall apart under the slightest bit of scrutiny plus some utterly ridiculous coincidences which take the place of a plot (she gets rescued from a gunman chasing her by a passing family because she is the exact spitting image of their daughter who went missing the week before) and you are left with an absolute dog's dinner.
 

crackerjack

Well-known member
I watched the Brian De Palma film Femme Fatale the other day and my god it was rubbish. Wasn't someone slating Brian De Palma on here the other day? - well, on this evidence I agree with them, this has to be the silliest and most cliched film I've seen for a long time, it even had a bit at the end...

More like the other month, but that sounds like me. Black Dahlia was the worst film I've seen in aeons (at least 300 probably hit the target if you like badly written, hackneyed shite - and lots of people do).
 

run_time

Well-known member
LA Takedown - seen Heat and enjoyed and I gathered it is Mann's remake of this film. The two whilst similar in plot are worlds apart in terms of execution. Feels like a bad 80s TV cop programme
 

mms

sometimes
Last king of scotland -
of course Forrest Wittaker works twice as hard as anyone else and is amazing but the film comes across as a kind of post modern James Bond thriller complete with really obvious you could see it coming tits and ass scenes.
It's supposed to be based on fact which you would imagine might be important in a film about a complicated brutal dictator, but the lead character didn't existin real life and the plot is somewhere between a boys own adventure and some kind of post trainspotting/the beach fantasy, with the emphasis bizarrely based on Scotland, where incidentally the director came from, and alot of the plot swings on this.
It completely avoids any of the actual issues that did exist and any of the colonial complications that existed in Amin and Uganda and avoids the more difficult and interesting story of 'major' bob Astles who the Scottish character was very loosely based on instead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Astles
 
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UFO over easy

online mahjong
^ I read the book when I was 16 or 17 and really liked it, I think I thought it was pretty moving. The lead character only really 'exists' through his narration in that so maybe not surprising he has less presence in the film, though I avoided it after quite a few people basically said the same thing as you :)

The book might be worth a shot though, although I wouldn't put much faith in the tastes my teenage self.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
One of my housemates rented Deathproof last night, and having nowt better to do I watched it with her...wouldn't say it was awful, per se, but I just couldn't really understand what it was supposed to do, or be. It's almost as if Tarantino has become a parody or caricature of himself, and his mental process as he was writing the screenplay went something like "Rockin' soundtrack - check! Hot chicks - check! Snappy dialogue - check! Mad car chase - check! Loadsa gore - check! Quirky little kinda-postmodern 'this is a movie' moments - check!", and so on, with 'plot' languishing down around seventh or eighth place, if it featured at all.

I dunno, perhaps I'm being too hard on it, or I just didn't 'get' it, but the linearity and one-dimensionality of it made it seem to most films as a novella or short story seems next to a full-length novel.

Anyone else here seen it? Does it work better when complimented by the Rodriguez film?

Edit: just found this photo - love the look on Tarantino's face. It's as if the camera is actually a sophisticated array or mirrors and lenses for looking down her top...
180px-Quentin_Tarantino_directing_Death_Proof.jpg
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
I saw that a few weeks ago and, while I'd basically agree with everything you said, I actually enjoyed it. It seemed to have all the elements of a Tarantino movie in the right places and yet to actually be quite different from his other movies. Of course some might say that the way it differs is in being more boring but not me. I love that track on the end credits, it's a cover of a Gainsbourg/France Gall tune but it's a very nice version.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I saw that a few weeks ago and, while I'd basically agree with everything you said, I actually enjoyed it. It seemed to have all the elements of a Tarantino movie in the right places and yet to actually be quite different from his other movies. Of course some might say that the way it differs is in being more boring but not me. I love that track on the end credits, it's a cover of a Gainsbourg/France Gall tune but it's a very nice version.

Heheh, why does that not surprise me? I was just thinking "This'd sound perfect at Sleep All Day..." as I heard it. Yeah, great tune.

Well it was entertaining, I guess, it just seemed as if the whole film (or rather, the two parts of it) should have served either as intros to a film, or (in the case of the latter part) perhaps the end part of a film where a relationship between the stuntman and the young women had been properly built up over an hour or so. As it was, it just ended and I was left thinking "Eh?".
The sassy chick-chat was great too, I thought - especially the black woman with the braids, who appeared to be carved from a block of pure, solid sass. But on the whole, I don't think it really saved the film.
 
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ripley

Well-known member
More like the other month, but that sounds like me. Black Dahlia was the worst film I've seen in aeons (at least 300 probably hit the target if you like badly written, hackneyed shite - and lots of people do).

late to the party here.. but FUCKING Brian DePalma.

excepting Carrie, which is kind of awesome, his films are such crap. ugh.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"Well it was entertaining, I guess, it just seemed as if the whole film (or rather, the two parts of it) should have served either as intros to a film"
I watched Planet Terror yesterday which was supposed to be the other half of the Grindhouse double bill and it was a lot more like what I was expecting. Death Proof was surprisingly restrained given the nature of the event and the way it was advertised... I found that restraint interesting in a way. Planet Terror is far from restrained, it's cheesy, gory and silly and it's almost great. Very enjoyable I think and if you found Death Proof lacking go for that instead.
 

crackerjack

Well-known member
Death at a Funeral aka the perils of filling up your rental list by the grades of others.

This was well reviewed most places (60something scores on metacritic and rottentoms) and even billed in places as a drama, when it's actually a whimsical comedy set among - shoot me if you've heard this one before - the British upper-middle classes, that could've been Sunday night TV if it wasn't for a few drugs, some poo and a bare arse. For a comedy, it didn't have one single funny line.
 

kagankad

New member
miami vice
shit
can't hear any of the script.
nothing going for it, the female interest is really boring and you'd have to be desperate to find her interesting.

hey miami vice was brilliant. cinematography and general tone. will concede that gong li can't actually speak english
 

craner

Beast of Burden
cutthroats.jpg


I scored a copy of this spaghetti western recently, and it is the most brutal, visceral, bizarre example of the genre I've yet seen; makes Fulci's westerns look tame indeed. Recommended! Grimy sado-psychedelia.

Edit was: it's Spanish directed so technically a 'paella western' a la 'El Topo', but you know what I mean, euro-western insanity.
 
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