films you've seen recently and would NOT recommend
- Thread starter bruno
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baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
Can't wait.
After asserting that it was good, i was forced to watch a bit on youtube and find out that i was lying to myself
After asserting that it was good, i was forced to watch a bit on youtube and find out that i was lying to myself
rubberdingyrapids
Well-known member
48fps is such a bad idea.
i saw ghostbusters for the first time in years. it was half better than i thought it would be now that i am an adult, but also not nearly as good as i wanted to be now that i am an adult. ditto trading places. the FX in ghostbusters are actually still pretty amazing though - slimer and the marshmallow man looked brilliant, the librarian ghost even more so.
i saw ghostbusters for the first time in years. it was half better than i thought it would be now that i am an adult, but also not nearly as good as i wanted to be now that i am an adult. ditto trading places. the FX in ghostbusters are actually still pretty amazing though - slimer and the marshmallow man looked brilliant, the librarian ghost even more so.
mistersloane
heavy heavy monster sound
I said it was one of the three truly great 3D films, not greatest films of all time. The other two would be Avatar and Hugo. Neither of which are Citizen Kane.
The Hobbit is a steaming bag of shite and looks like shit. I liked Lord of the Rings.
Here's some stuff on 48fps http://blog.vincentlaforet.com/2012...a-reaffirmation-of-what-makes-cinema-magical/
but he's still making excuses for the technology instead of criticizing a paltry script, laughable acting and the worst art direction in the history of picking up cameras.
You never mentioned a specific number.
Not heard of Hugo. I don't have 3D at home (is home 3D the same as in the cinema?) but now want to see it after a quick read of it's background on Wikipedia.
Personally I think you are being a little harsh in your description of the Hobbit's failings. Was there nothing you enjoyed about it? Have you read the book?
The article you link to about 48fps fleshes out a lot of the discussion around the technology. I think the final sentence is key though; "And I do wonder if we’ll be eating our own words and initial experiences come a few years from now… only time will tell."
craner
Beast of Burden
I'm amazed you didn't like Ghostbusters more than before. I like it more with every viewing, and I reckon I've seen it over 50 times since 1985. Trading Places stands up to repeated viewing, too.
I think that, after all these years of CGI monsters and space ships and post-production colour tinting, people will begin to realise the aesthetic benefits of models, film stock and working out your colour schemes before you've shot anything. The mania for colour saturation irritates me the most. I don't know what the technical terms or processes are, but the worst films look, the more interested in the specifics I get.
I love the stories of Argento hoarding Kodak film stock and using the last dye-transfer printer in Europe to get the vivid colours for Suspiria. You can saturate all you want but the colours will never live like they do in Suspiria.
Haven't read about 48FPS second resolution yet, but I will.
mistersloane
heavy heavy monster sound
My bad about not mentioning a number! I'd meant to in the first post, sorry.
Yeah, read the book as a kid and loved it, I don't have any particular attachment to it. I thought LOTR was a monumental achievement, and was looking forward to The Hobbit, and no, didn't like anything about it. I fell asleep during it twice and both times I felt were a blessed relief.
I don't play video games for similar reasons though - I think they look horrible, though they're getting better - so maybe it's the particular aesthetic he's attached to this that I don't like.
That doesn't excuse the acting though, which was laughable at best. I really did just hate everything about it, and I'm not in any way anti-Tolkien, I just hated the film.
mistersloane
heavy heavy monster sound
I didn't get a frisson from em, no. Sorry!
rubberdingyrapids
Well-known member
argo. its pretty lightweight. some good tension, but its more of a farce, and the pro-american bias grated, esp when people in the audience started clapping at the end. ben affleck started off well as a director but the town was a load of boston hardnut cliches, and this is just a patriotic love letter to hollywood.
Yes, apart from the tension, there was nothing to see there. A forgettable TV movie. There's going to be 'less biased' Iranian version of that movie, I read somewhere yesterday.
The Dark Knight Rises - has that been named in this thread? Terrible in every way.
baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
Dreams of a Life - just heart-rendingly terrible, emotionally cheap and exploitative. Rarely have I felt so angry towards a filmmaker.
The complete inappropriateness of the 'docu-drama' style added a uniquely awful gloss.
http://www.trespassmag.com/sydney-film-festival-dreams-of-a-life-whores-glory/ - the only review I could find where I felt as if the reviewer had actually watched the same film as me.
The complete inappropriateness of the 'docu-drama' style added a uniquely awful gloss.
http://www.trespassmag.com/sydney-film-festival-dreams-of-a-life-whores-glory/ - the only review I could find where I felt as if the reviewer had actually watched the same film as me.
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rubberdingyrapids
Well-known member
hmm i didnt think it was a well made documentary, but i thought the story was powerful. that none of her supposed friends really knew her i thought was actually what gave it its power. it made the whole theme of isolation despite appearing to have a good social life and 'nice friends' hit home. it also gave it a kind of element of surprise as if the friends didnt act as if they were all great to her and reminiscing on good old times then the ending wouldnt have had half as much of an impact. the ending is what makes you call their sincerity into question, even though yeah, the boyfriend at the end did seem to be crying crocodile tears. i also wondered why none of her family were in there (apart from them not wanting the embarassment or other personal reasons). why did you think it was exploitative?
i felt like a bit you did about the arbour, which again, was a really powerful story, but there was something about it that seemed to enjoy the misery too much. obv the story itself was already massively bleak but there was something almost pornographic about how it was presented.
i saw my brother the devil - it isnt 'bad', but its not what the reviews made it out to be. the twist did catch me off guard, and it turned into a cool character study, but it was too straightjacketed by the limits of the kidulthood-style narrative. its really hard it seems to get this kind of dialogue right i think, and while i originally thought the narrative shifts were too blunt-handed, i guess that fits with the territory, but it was still a bit suffocated by the same old inner city/socio-realist crime drama tropes.
i felt like a bit you did about the arbour, which again, was a really powerful story, but there was something about it that seemed to enjoy the misery too much. obv the story itself was already massively bleak but there was something almost pornographic about how it was presented.
i saw my brother the devil - it isnt 'bad', but its not what the reviews made it out to be. the twist did catch me off guard, and it turned into a cool character study, but it was too straightjacketed by the limits of the kidulthood-style narrative. its really hard it seems to get this kind of dialogue right i think, and while i originally thought the narrative shifts were too blunt-handed, i guess that fits with the territory, but it was still a bit suffocated by the same old inner city/socio-realist crime drama tropes.
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IdleRich
IdleRich
Shame. I thought that this sounded interesting - although hard going which is why I haven't got round to it yet.
I agree, was talking to my brother about the nonsensical lameness of the plot in this and Skyfall and how they just cover up the gaps with explosions/chases etc We sort of said "Oh well, they're blockbusters, what do you expect?" but then we thought "No, they spent hundreds of millions of pounds on these things, it's inexcusable that they can't be bothered to at least look at the plots".
rubberdingyrapids
Well-known member
skyfall did a decent job at plotting, compared to most blockbusters. i hate all the nolan batman movies - skyfall was much better. but yeah, hollywood doesnt think The Kids care much about plot and just need sensation and bombast. anything to get people paying attention. bigger, louder, noisier, etc etc. the main problem with skyfall for me was bardem - it was like an impersonation of a million other villains (including hannibal lecter most obviously).
baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
That's what I'd thought too - it could have been interesting if made by someone who showed any real interest in/empathy for the subject/humanity in general. This is largely on the money:
"The result should make for fascinating viewing. Except no one has anything interesting to say about Joyce, nor do they seem to have known her very well at all. As a consequence, the recreations (which mirror the hearsay of the interviewees) have little substance. The long scenes of a melancholy Joyce singing alone in her apartment (she allegedly had singing aspirations) are cheesy, melodramatic and weightless. In addition, the subjects interviewed seem to mug the camera, clutching at the fame offered by Joyce’s tabloid infamy rather than offering anything particularly revealing about her life. The most affecting and poignant thing about this documentary is knowing that these were the best people that could be found to talk about her."
...except that it's impossible to judge/really know anything about the interviewed subjects themselves by watching brief, largely decontextualised soundbites organised for maximum dramatic impact by a filmmaker who inspires no trust that she has any higher motives than a tabloid editor. Ironically (or maybe not), what was left on the cutting room floor probably tells a more revealing story.
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baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
I agree that the themes were potentially powerful, but the execution was terrible and completely disingenuous in the implicit declaration by the filmmaker that 'I care about Joyce, but no-one else did'.
I felt like Joyce's memory/existence as an actual person who lived in the real world had been desecrated/cheapened in a bid for a sensational story (the filmmaker was actually very reminiscent of the journalists featured in the first scene), and also that a lot of the interviewees had been the subject of a cheap tabloid hatchet job. It was as though the filmmaker thought: "No-one cared about this woman, so I can do what I want with this story - who's going to argue with me? And the interviewees have signed release forms, so I can arrange that footage into a sensationalised narrative that makes it look like she was this stereotypically 'mysterious' woman let down by people who didn't really care about her (which we'll gradually let slip in a hackneyed dramatised way, by carefully selecting and excluding footage). At the same time, by doing this project, it will make me look like I really care about Joyce and people like her".
Also, if the filmmaker was interested at all in the real person, why would she use shitty tearjerking recreations rather than simple snapshots of the actual person? In fact, all the stylised stuff was just horrible. The first half of the film reminded me of an 'I Love 1992' type show more than anything else. And then the final 'reveal' where we see CCTV footage of the real Joyce - so fucking cheap.
I'm not sure about the boyfriend crying crocodile tears. Not because I didn't have that gut reaction too, but because I felt that the filmmaker was deliberately manipulating the audience into thinking that, having only just allowed one of the boyfriend's friends to let slip the (fist-in-mouth) line that he had said he didn't want to marry Joyce because he didn't want 'tinted children'. And who knows when during the interview he actually cried - that could've been right at the start for all we know, after which he could have collected himself.
To put it more neatly than I have above, I found that it was the filmmaker who was shedding crocodile tears for Joyce - or indeed for anyone in a vaguely similar situation - and not necessarily the boyfriend. I think I shouldn't' see the Arbour!
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Bangpuss
Well-known member
No, the new film with Gael Garcia Bernal.
I can't believe so many people are going wild for this. Besides the videotape look and the design, which were absolutely spot on, capturing the aesthetics of the time perfectly, there was so much wrong with the plot.
Mostly, and I'm not giving anything away here: Bernal's character says the NO campaign ought to be more shiny and happy, to give people something to vote for rather than against. The people running the campaign, Pinochet's political enemies, are rightly pissed off that Bernal is essentially glossing over years of oppression, etc. It's made perfectly clear they don't agree, and for good reason.
But then the film cuts to an ad being shown on the TV, and it's full of Bernal's happy crap. So Bernal's clearly got his way, but we're not told what it was that made the others changed their minds. That, for me, is a pivotal moment in the plot: how did he convert these people to his way of thinking? But that's not in there at all.
Also, for a film like this to work, we have to be convinced as an audience that those ads were powerful enough to get people to vote NO. But the way they present it, the NO advert stinks almost as much as the Yes. I'm just not convinced it was powerful enough to get people to vote out of the orthodoxy.
So yeah, that's what I think. Some cool shots of Bernal on a skateboard though.
I can't believe so many people are going wild for this. Besides the videotape look and the design, which were absolutely spot on, capturing the aesthetics of the time perfectly, there was so much wrong with the plot.
Mostly, and I'm not giving anything away here: Bernal's character says the NO campaign ought to be more shiny and happy, to give people something to vote for rather than against. The people running the campaign, Pinochet's political enemies, are rightly pissed off that Bernal is essentially glossing over years of oppression, etc. It's made perfectly clear they don't agree, and for good reason.
But then the film cuts to an ad being shown on the TV, and it's full of Bernal's happy crap. So Bernal's clearly got his way, but we're not told what it was that made the others changed their minds. That, for me, is a pivotal moment in the plot: how did he convert these people to his way of thinking? But that's not in there at all.
Also, for a film like this to work, we have to be convinced as an audience that those ads were powerful enough to get people to vote NO. But the way they present it, the NO advert stinks almost as much as the Yes. I'm just not convinced it was powerful enough to get people to vote out of the orthodoxy.
So yeah, that's what I think. Some cool shots of Bernal on a skateboard though.
Wasnt impressed by 'The Master'.
It was quite immersive and intense, but there wasnt much in the way of a story, not much changed really. Not necessarily a bad thing but it didnt work for me.
It relied too much on close-ups on the phoenix's intense facial expression, which were powerful but it didnt go much beyond that.
I remember watching 'Shame' and telling my friend I didnt like it because I was so cold and made me feel horrible. He said that that was kind of the point and I guess it was. I felt similarly about this film and perhaps the same is true but I still don't feel I gained or learned anything from watching either of them.
It did look good though, the 70mm film obviously works a treat, especially compared to when I saw cloud atlas on a relatively small digital screen recently.
Not something I would choose to watch again, or recommend to others.
It was quite immersive and intense, but there wasnt much in the way of a story, not much changed really. Not necessarily a bad thing but it didnt work for me.
It relied too much on close-ups on the phoenix's intense facial expression, which were powerful but it didnt go much beyond that.
I remember watching 'Shame' and telling my friend I didnt like it because I was so cold and made me feel horrible. He said that that was kind of the point and I guess it was. I felt similarly about this film and perhaps the same is true but I still don't feel I gained or learned anything from watching either of them.
It did look good though, the 70mm film obviously works a treat, especially compared to when I saw cloud atlas on a relatively small digital screen recently.
Not something I would choose to watch again, or recommend to others.