Last movie you saw and rate it
RAM DASS: FIERCE GRACE (2000, documentary)
7/10
Let me start by saying: Anyone “of a certain age” who’s ever been influenced by Ram Dass, by LSD, by Millbrook, by 1960’s psychedelia, by pop psychology, by Hinduism, by the New Age movement…. or who is bemused by California lifestyles and assumptions…. SIMPLY HAS TO SEE THIS FILM.
Using Richard Alpert/Ram Dass’s 1999 debilitating stroke as a taking off point, the documentary explores the legendary modern American guru’s life story, from his idyllic, privileged childhood, through his being lauded, then ejected from Harvard…. to his later life of lecturing, writing and being something of a celebrity in some circles, mostly in— you guessed it—- Northern California, where guru worship and Eastern buzzword is a fact of life.
It’s definitely fascinating stuff—- whether you are the most ardent True Believer and transcendental meditator…. to the most hardnosed Capitalistic skeptic. The movie aroused BOTH those personae, sentiments within me!
The movie is nakedly a loving valentine to Ram Dass… and that is, for me, its weakness. Not a single opponent or skeptic of the man and his hypnotic, beatific scene, are countenanced. I would’ve frankly welcomed a more balanced, unemotional discussion… After all, if Ram Dass is who he claims he is, then no curmudgeonly naysayer is going to erase that, right?
One does notice that Ram Dass has, since 1965, enjoyed a celebrity status, and that all of his appearances and “happenings”, presided by his English/Sanskrit pronuncements, are decorated with beautiful young blond men and women in their 20’s dancing, writhing, beaming. Not a single Black face appears in the many hundreds of faces in this film… What? Were they not privy to the bliss Ram Dass was handing out?
Somewhat wickedly, I found myself wondering what would happen were Christopher Guest and his gang to do a heartless— but accurate—- send-up of this film and its milieu: Guest as Ram Dass, Michael McKean as Bhagavan Dass, Harry Shearer as Wavy Gravy, Parker Posey as a bliss-addled ageing hippie.
Still, it seems that Ram Dass is a most kind man, beloved by very many. And that’s something.
Flower Children, young and old, should see this movie.
Iron Man 2
Rating
" eh"
“Bad Lieutenant; Port of Call: New Orleans.” (2009) 8.5/10
NIcholas Cage is an increasingly drug-addicted cop searching for killers in New Orleans.
What to say. Take a director whose idea of “mainstream” is unusual at best, kidnap the idea (not the content) of a notorious and beloved film, and let him make it on his terms. Just for once, that awful term “re-imagining” actually fits as a compliment and not as an excuse for ripping off another movie.
Herzog’s fevered crime thriller has instant cult status built in. It is full of mad scenes, instantly quotable lines and lots of Nicholas Cage giving it all he has in the psycho department. Is it a good film? Not really. It is great off-beat trash though, as only Verner Herzog could make it.
“BLPoCNA” plays like a collision of several things. Herzog is not used to directing straightforward drama, so that in itself gives the film a certain tone, along with his deliberately quirky worldview.
Pile Nick Cage and a great supporting cast on top and the story becomes secondary to the meltdowns, the violence, the coked-up highs and the great dialogue as the film lurches to its conclusion.
The opening drug shake-down of a young couple by Cage is an absolute classic. Ditto his getting information by almost killing an old lady. Tarantino-ville.
Cage overacts just right. His million-yard stare from deep in his skull, his weird diction…here it fits.
The ending is, bizarrely, very Establishment, as if Herzog just stops short. Is the Master getting soft-hearted in his old age?
Good dirty fun, to be sure, but I don’t want to see Werner making a habit of this kind of thing.
@Claus
I didn’t read your review, but how does it compare with the original?
Tetro
th
I’m not sure about how I feel, but I think Robert’s rating (0/10) goes a bit too far. I really liked the score. I can understand how Robert didn’t like the film. The film feels like a mess in many ways and the taste and judgment of the Coppola seems questionable at times…but I take that back: I still don’t really understand the film, so I shouldn’t say too much about it.
Oldboy, 2.5 out of 5. What was the hype all about? This?! A pretentious overdose of sex and violence? Boring.
Three Times 2005
Zui hao de shi guang
DIR Hou Hsiao-hsien
SCR Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tien-Wen Chu
131 Min
A nice film, not challenging, but well done.
8.317/10
Robert’s rating (0/10) goes a bit too far.
Probably true, I would rather use a phrase such as “kill in the crib” than a numeric score.
Robert would coal mine canary work?
L’Intrus
10/10
@Robert
“Kill in the crib,” as in the film died before it had a chance? What was your problem with the film?
Jazz,
I am going to watch the original again; then post.
chloe: 6/10
Mélo (Alain Resnais)
9.5/10
“The Red Baron” (2008) 2/10
The rise and fall of the famed WW1 flying ace.
As a boy, Manfred von Richthofen dreams of flying. He becomes a fighter pilot, then a national hero in WW1.
Most, if not all of the facts, are available to make a reasonably accurate story of his life. Why then this?
This big, slick monster of a German production shows that Hollywood has come to the Rhine (and Eastern Europe, where much was shot.)
All the elements of your basic “Bruckheimer” are here:
An empty, rah-rah script that skates over everything as easily as possible, inventing or omitting facts, but with no cliche left unturned:
Dashing rebel. Proud beautiful nurse. Colorful flying buddies. Resentful brother. Oodles of video-game-like dogfight scenes shown from impossible camera angles. All of the above presented with so-clean-it-hurts 1:2.35 scope cinematography and a hyper-aggressive surround mix that slams you in the head.
And then, just when you think it is done, a rock tune over the closing credits. In a film about WW1…
Richthofen never becomes more than a figurehead here; Matthias Schweighofer is not unappealing in the lead, but there is no room to work within the prescribed scenes of the script. And prescribed they are.
One takeaway line:
Richthofen to the nurse (who is finally giving in to him): “You are my greatest victory”…….
We have a German cast speaking english with a german accent (as opposed to an English/American cast doing the same) for the sake of ‘international sales.’
The Great War through PG-13 glasses.
If all else fails, one can normally watch a film like this for the “eye candy”, the air battles. Here, most of it is computer generated, and the hyperactive editing leaves no chance for scenes to build up.
The unique horror of fighting in open planes, in many cases without a parachute, is never exploited. The terribly exposed crews in the slow bombers and the observation balloons, the heights, the plummet to earth….everything is shoved aside in favor of “Top Gun over France.”
I will take an older film with real planes any day over this. It feels better. This one looks like one of the History Channel air combat recreations.
To top it all off, we never see Richthofen’s end. I don’t know what “creative differences” occurred in editing, but the ‘fade out/fade in’ feels as if a good chunk of material got the heave-ho.
The score is good (if insistently overused); along with a couple of passable scenes, the only reason for the ‘2’.
WW1 gets done so rarely these days. Pity this chance had to be wasted.
TITYCUT FOLLIES (1967, Documentary)
7/10
This film is hard to rate, because as an entertainment, it’s quite slow-going and plodding. But the importance of the subject matter bumps it up a few notches.
People have spoken of how horrifying this movie is.
Naaaah.
It’s just “business as usual” within a thankless, difficult profession. A lot goes on within places like hospitals, psych wards and prisons…….. which just isn’t pretty.
If you spend time in any of these places, I know you’ll agree with me.
I didn’t see anyone in TITYCUT being abused…. not really. Difficult cases requiring muscular, forceful efforts? That I DID see.
Maybe this film raised some awarenesses, and encouraged more delicacy of thought and behavior within psych wards. I sincerely hope so.
Every one of us should get to know some psychotics. They’re actually very interesting people. Their ideas, no matter how outlandish, are often fascinating.
There is the mythology and urban legend of the murderous psychotic; yes, they do exist, but they are fairly rare. Most psychotics are just as “nice” as you and I are.
But taking care of the very mentally ill is no walk in the park…. true in 1967…. and true today.
A horror film, or a “mondo” or “teenage gross-out” exploitation film, this is not.
How can you be so condescending to those with mental disorders?
Metropolis Fritz Lang 10/10
And with live musical accompaniment.
The narrative is still a little incoherent even with the restored footage but who cares.
Best of the added footage is an extended role for Fritz Rasp.
A must see.
Morvern Callar 2002
DIR Lynne Ramsay
SCR Liana Dognini, Lynne Ramsay, Alan Warner
97 Min
If you are looking for a story, this isn’t that film.
It took an hour for the film to click, but it did.
10/10
Today’s Akira Kurosawa double-feature:
Yojimbo (1961, Kurosawa): 10/10
Great hero, action, adventure, and humor all mixed together very well make for a fun and entertaining movie. I’ve seen this movie several times, even twice in the last week, and find it just clips along and holds my interest from beginning to end every time.
The Bad Sleep Well (1960, Kurosawa): 8/10
A very intriguing story, well shot and well told, that is layered, suspenseful, and gripping, with unpredictable twists and turns. I would have rated it higher, but it did drag a bit in the last quarter. This was my first time seeing this film and I was more than pleased with it.
Side note: I was surprised to learn after catching both of these flicks earlier today that they were made only a year apart. In Yojimbo, Toshiro Mifune has a much fuller face and a more weather-worn appearance, as opposed to a smoother-faced, slimmer, and much more youthful appearance in The Bad Sleep Well from a year before. The differences seem greater than a single year and make up can account for. He wore each, very disparate, role like a glove. I find I am as fascinated with, intrigued by, taken with, and impressed by Mifune and his roles as I am with Kurosawa and his films—the range, richness, and variety in both cases.
Great stuff!
“Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (1994) 5/10
Kenneth Branach’s version of the story with Robert de Niro as the creature.
Once again, into the lab. And, once again, viewers have to put aside Boris Karloff’s enduring image to imagine the creature in a new way.
Branach, as star and director, goes for a fevered Gothic feel with Shakespearean ardor. This gives the film a tone that both works, and works against it. The good doctor’s “out of my way” attitiude in the face of stolid medical opposition drives us with him, but it leaves other dramatic building blocks by the wayside in a flurry of excess.
When De Niro appears as the creature, it becomes clear what the film needs. De Niro, bald, hulking, looks like a cross between a mad monk and a man who has been in a terrible accident (which he has, his birth.)
He is excellent and touching as the bewildered creation, trying to understand himself and the world, and his scenes carry a great weight that help ground the film.
This is where Branach goes wrong, in my opinion. Had he let the film slow enough to give De Niro (and himself) more long emotive scenes, we would have had, for the first time, a film that really stops to look at what the creature feels and is all about. The shorthand version is there, but it could have been so much more.
De Niro’s helping the farming family, his asking for a mate; this is all strong stuff, but it doesn’t last as Branach amps up the pace again, and the thunder rolls, and the lab equipment flashes, and Branach practically howls at the moon. It’s as if, without even being there, Tim Burton is directing. The presence of Helena Bonham Carter as the doctor’s fiancee just helps reinforce this idea.
Production design and cinematography is tops, but the cartoon-like cutting of some fast sequences of the doctor frantically creating do bring to mind Wallace and Gromit, if one is in that frame of mind.
So, a ‘weightier’ Frankenstein, which, I feel, is compromomised badly by its script and subsequent pacing. With De Niro as good as he is as the creature, too bad the film didn’t come off better.
@CLAUS
I was under the impression that this FRANKENSTEIN was intended to have been the closest, out of all that have been made, to the story and style of the original Mary Shelley novel…
David,
Yes, that was the idea; to stick to the content of the tale. The problem wiith the film is how it handled said material. We get things here never seen in previous Frankenstein films which is terrific, but my issue is with the dizzying pace and overwrought style getting in the way of genuinely interesting material.
With a slower pace and more focus on the relationship between the doctor and the creature, this one could have been a near-classic, given the talent involved.
There is a moment where De Niro says “He never gave me a name” which is sublimely tragic and which just makes you wish the film had stayed closer to such a tone.
All of this is just my opinion, but I saw a potentially great film being smothered by Branach’s over-the-top approach.
THE IMMORAL MR. TEAS (Russ Meyer, 1959)
(5/10)
“Art” said Andy Warhol, “is mostly about liking things.”
And gee, did Russ Meyer ever like things. Namely, naked ladies.
This movie is a silly little pastiche about Mr. Teas, a middle-aged, flabby-tummied, goateed voyeur, whose days are entirely structured around spying on women in the hopes of catching them naked, so he can take surreptitious shots with his Brownie.
And he succeeds!
In Russ Meyer’s world, there apparently are no shortage of women who’ll get naked for you.
One wonders in what venues a film like MR. TEAS was shown in 1959…. Were they the entr’acte at strip/burlesque clubs?
They’re definitely not porn….. but nor are they Walt Disney, either.
In Mr. Teas, you can see Meyer learning how to structure narrative, indicate setting, pace time, create onscreen gags, build sequences.
By 1966 his skills were ready for something more sophisticated, with FASTER, PUSSYCAT!
Anyway, it’s nice to see sex-cuties here without tooth veneers, UV tans or silicon inflations.
Quiet City
(Aaron Katz)
Starts off kind of cute but slowly descends into a hell of hipstery cliche douchebaggery.
2/10
CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS (1989, Woody Allen)
9/10
It’s a masterpiece. A bleak, awful, terrible, bitter masterpiece. Funny and wounding. Kind of destroying, even. The philosophy underpinning the film is ponderously, monstrously important…. but the texture of the script and film is as light and offhand…. as a mouthful of wedding cake.
One of the best movies ever made, American or otherwise. Fellini would’ve been bowled over, if he saw it, which he may have.
God knows what came between Allen and Mia Farrow— she was his best student and most serious muse. She dedicated her life towards mastering his tone and his artistic vision…. I’m sure he knew that then and knows that now, but I guess he had to move on… his genius is THAT voracious.
Woody Allen is so big of a soul and his need to give a gift so big——- that he’ll even let goyim laugh at his physical appearance, at least those who do not understand the seriousness of his Jewish faith. Now, how ’bout that?
In the documentary of his modern existence with Soon-Yi, called WILD MAN BLUES, Allen reveals himself to be something of a monster. And I’m sure he is. (-: But, hey.
Fist Full of Dollars (Sergio Leone) – 7.5/10
For A Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone) – 9.5/10
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (Sergio Leone) – 10/10
truly a prolific and influential body of work – instantly, i see where Tarantino borrows his tension-building sequences which usually involve a long, slow-boiling conversation, then to one guy killing another (every single opening enemy encounter in the ‘Kill Bill’ series, the Ezekial 25:17 bit in ‘Pulp Fiction’, the “eggplant” talk in ‘True Romance’ between Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken, and even the introduction to ‘Inglourious Basterds’… to name a few). The tug-of-war between all the characters’ trust and double-crossing is well-developed, and the timeless Western landscapes are best articulated through slow, languid pacing. Clint Eastwood’s ‘Blondie’ is a character of true mystique, played effortlessly perfect… and I admire how it waits until toward the end of the final film to show any sort of sensitive side to him. In comparison to the rest of Sergio Leone’s filmography, I do much prefer ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ and ‘Once Upon a Time in America’, as they are two films I can consider all-time favorites. ‘The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly’ is not far behind though.
The Slammin’ Salmon (Kevin Hefferman) – 5/10
better than ‘Club Dread’, but not quite as good as ‘Beerfest’… and most definitely not as much as ‘Super Troopers’ – yet, still a worthwhile and VERY ridiculous comedic venture for anyone who likes anything Broken Lizard related. This time, it’s a cast of 5-star restaurant employees battling each other to sell the most product and receive the most tips all in one night, all to financially repair the owner’s idiotic bets with the Japanese Yakuza. Michael Clark Duncan’s comedic wow-factor wears thin real quick, and in comparison to their better films, the Broken Lizard team obviously cooked up some half-ass jokes through-out, and not to mention, its direction is horrendously “cutting-edge” and attempts to be unnecessarily slick.
Daybreakers (The Spierig Brothers) – 3/10
a somewhat promising and imaginative futuristic tale of a dominating vampire population running into a shortage of human blood, in the midst of a researcher struggling to save humankind by developing an alternative to vampire food. i was surprisingly bored to death, but i was also everything BUT entertained with the Spierig Brothers’ supposed breakthrough zombie film ‘Undead’, so i don’t know what i was thinking to expect. Both films are not scary, not suspenseful, and are nothing more than genre-worship at their least potential.
Crazy Heart (Scott Cooper) – 9.5/10
I did not expect to appreciate this so well, but ‘Crazy Heart’ definitely struck a chord in me, as it details the music industry and tour-life with brutal accuracy – everything from battle-of-the-bulges arguments with the soundguy during sound-check sessions, musical proteges successfully outdoing their mentors, loneliness that leads to the womanizing nature of a man, risky addictions, douchebag managers, etc etc. This film hits all areas, while piecing together heartfelt exchanges of dialogue between Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges), and genuinely funny words of cynicism and negativity from Bad Blake. Jeff Bridges truly deserved the Oscar for Best Actor, and Maggie Gyllenhaal pulled the finest performance of her career.
Splice (Vincenzo Natali) – 5/10
A complete divisive re-hash of ‘Species’, trying to carry a more suit-and-tie, cookie-cutter “playing God sci-fi” homage to the parenthood themes of David Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’. The themes of irresponsible parenting and attempting to synthetically create and control a child are brilliantly handled in storyline, yet the believability and development of character relationships are completely shit on by horrid scripting – which is sad, because we know Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody can actually act. The character design is attractive and organic, though oftentimes botched by sketchily noticeable CGI. Not to mention, Adrien Brody looks like he shopped at Hot Topic on the way to the movie set.
Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman) – 9/10
fucking destructive and powerful take on the rejection of faith and having everything you centered your life around crumble in a matter of seconds. Next to ‘Fanny and Alexander’, ‘Wild Strawberries’, and ‘The Seventh Seal’, this is certainly my next favorite Bergman. It’s a good companion piece to Bresson’s ‘Diary of a Country Priest’.
Night of the Hunter-
9.5/10
Why was it the only one?
@Brady
If you mean why it was Charles Laughton’s only film it is because it did so bad at the box office and with critics that vowed never to direct another film.
Banana Nut
Yes! Jesse, I just got Bigger than Life in the mail today!