Cecil, ya see Jerry’s review?
It sounds personal, but it is steeped in cinematic insights.
is that infinity/10, mags? lol
i also watched stars in my crown. reminded me a good bit of to kill a mockingbird. that klan scene was pure movie fantasy, like the klan came to mayberry, rfd. still enjoyed it very much. i prefer joel mcrea to gregory peck for one thing. 8.5/10
Passing Fancy
Dir. Yasujiro Ozu
74/100
Enjoyed this quite a bit, as I did the other silent Ozus in the eclipse set. The ending was a tad disappointing, though.
zat the one with the kid and his dad? that actor playing dad made the film! he was terrific
i too recently saw PASSING FANCY. i was my favourite of the three in the eclipse series
@Ruby
Yep, that’s the one. I liked the dad, but the kid was very good, too. (The scene where the kid hits the father and then cries—with the father apologizing later was surprisingly effective. The child actors in all three films were quite good.)
@Curtis
I felt the same way for most of the film, but the ending sort of disappointing me. Somehow the film skirts the rejection and humiliation that the father has to face regarding the girl and encouraging his friend to marry her. And the ending seemed a bit awkward, as if Ozu and the screenwriter didn’t know quite how to end the film or just abruptly ran out of funds. Still, i twas an enjoyable movie.
I think I like them equally. They all have some weak points, but they all have some really great moments, too. The one thing I like, that’s absent in the Ozu’s later films, are the comedic moments—especially the ones in a slapstick vein.Somewhere 2010
DIR Sofia Coppola
SCR Sofia Coppola
DP Harris Savides
CAST Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning, Benicio Del Toro, Michelle Monaghan, Laura Ramsey, Robert Schwartzman, Caitlin Keats, Chris Pontius
98 Min
No doubt this would win a Golden Lion – think Enzo’s boys fund the festival?
The car was a great portentous symbol. If this were a European film, the expository phone call would have been left out for the final scene – we get it, his life is empty.
Nicely done.
7/10
The Long Good Friday (Dir. John Mackenzie, 1980)
Political will is stronger than greed…or perhaps more blinded.
After watching Bob Hoskins run around like an idiot for almost two hours, the payoff seemed uneventful and, well, decidedly unrelated.
“No doubt this would win a Golden Lion – think Enzo’s boys fund the festival?
The car was a great portentous symbol. If this were a European film, the expository phone call would have been left out for the final scene – we get it, his life is empty.”
hahha, yeah, that’s exactly what i thought!!
HOUSE OF GAMES: well done, but Crouse’s performance was too uneven and almost took me out of the film. Mantegna, on the other hand, was great. A reasonably assured debut for Mamet. I didn’t think it was great though. 6.5/10
Joks,
have you seen Mike Hodges’ Croupier (1998)?
^^^Yeah, saw it on release. just thought it was ok, but i wasn’t really in the mood for it though. never bothered revisiting it.
Not sure it can be re-visited cuz of the ending
Hesher (Director: Spencer Susser)
4/5
Dennis was spot-on in comparing this movie to a weird bizarro world version of two and a half men (the Sheen version) because that’s what this is. I wondered why this movie didn’t have a wider releasebut now I know why: it’s one of those odd little ducks (like Bellflower) that’s too mainstream for the arthouses but not mainstream enough for the multiplexes.
I hope they do a sequel with Ashton Kutcher as Hesher ;)
Men who stare at goats – 6/10 the cast being jail bait
July Rhapsody 7/10
Story Of A Love Affair 8/10 quality of audio on DVD 1/10
Nowhere Boy 3/5
A non-Beatles-fan interested in a coming of age story in 1950s England might be interested in this film, but the known future of the protagonist is obviously the main area of interest. A bit heavy handed in the soap-operaish middle, but the rest was nice enough.
Ossos (9/10)
Dario Argento’s Opera (1987) – kind of ropey to me. [4/10, roughly a C+]
The Girlfriend Experience: Can somebody please explain to me why Soderbore decided to edit this film in non-chronological order? at least partial non-chronology? What function does it serve exactly? Damn this was a really mediocre film. Grey’s flat line readings work to a point, but after a while it just becomes tedious. The points about the commodification of desire, love, sex and companionship were grating and obvious through their repetition, and i wasn’t even that impressed with the way the film was shot. A few people on imdb compared this film to the work of Antonioni. really? They must be in charge of the S.S fanclub.
I get what he was trying to do with this film, but i felt the context of the recession seemed gimmicky, and there was too much goddamn talk for my liking. I wish he went for a more impressionist approach. This subject matter had great potential, as the girlfriend experience is different from regular prostitution, and poses far greater emotional risks, but this film didn’t really explore any of it sufficiently to me.
The final scene was effective, however, and the moments where Grey’s character drops her guard momentarily felt just right. Overall, this could have been more.
5/10.
Dogtooth (Dir. Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009)
My gut reaction is to read this as a metaphoric comedy about totalitarianism. It was not a comedy that I laughed at, but it was amusing in the way that it created an unreal world and sustained its parameters through to the end.
My wife really loves cats. Glad I didn’t show this one to her.
But seriously, does Greece not have an equivalent to DSS?
We had a long debate about Dogtooth a while ago. Interesting film. (What’s DSS?)
Jazz – I skimmed through a lot of that thread. Interesting stuff. DSS = Department of Social Services.
Breaking Bad episodes 3-4: 9.5/10
The Wire episodes 1-2: 8/10
Two series I will be watching all the way through once I am liberated from the DC shackles.
Breaking Bad has such amazingly fleshed out characters right off the bat and such good writing it’s irresistable. I don’t know what made me stop watching after episode 2 when it first came out. I liked it then, maybe it was just up against something I liked better or something.
I like The Wire, but my negative comments revolve mostly around the dialog. It’s realistic in the sense that the situations seem like real situations. The dialog on the other hand so often sounds forced and hackneyed, and a lot of the cops in particular come off as unbearably cliche. Nonetheless, it’s a very good show that just falls a little short of hype.
I also notice this with Boardwalk Empire, it seems every time writers want to do the ‘The cops are just as bad as the criminals’ thing they play it so far over the top it’s ridiculous.
macgruber
the celery, and human shield scenes were great. The 80s love scene juxtaposed with the horrible grunting is the comic highlight of last year, a lot of jokes only bring a faint smile tho
grade B-
@Jirin
Did you see episodes 1 and 2 or seasons 1 and 2? You really should see all the seasons and, fwiw, seasons 3 and 4 are the best imo. Btw, judging the series on just the first two seasons would be almost like judging a novel by reading a third of it. (I’m assuming you meant the first two seasons. I almost quit the series after the second season, which, to me, deviated from the heart of the series. They get back on track in season 3. There are both character (the community is a character) and story arcs that are worth following.)
“The Girlfriend Experience: Can somebody please explain to me why Soderbore decided to edit this film in non-chronological order?”{
So that you could enjoy “The Soderbergh Experience”?
.
SS seems more interested in experimenting with various formal possibilities for his own personal enjoyment than he is with creating a cohesive whole film. This has always been both his primary strength and weakness.
I won’t rate it since I only saw like an hour of it before I shut it off but if I were to rate it, Julie Taymor’s “The Tempest” would get 1/5 from me. A fantastic cast (Helen Mirren! Alfred Molina! Chris Cooper! Alan Cumming! David Strathairn!) but they are lost in a film more concerned with production design and style over substance.
Call it “The Taymor Curse” ;)
Jerry Johnson
Stars in My Crown (Jacques Tourner, 1950, 9/10)
Tourneur does Ford. Or rather, Freud does Will Rogers. What’s psychological in Tourneur is sociological in Ford. Which is why Tourneur’s racists don white hoods while Ford’s are out in open flesh. Watch this and Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright together.
Wife (Mikio Naruse, 1953, 9/10)
Ginza Cosmetics (Mikio Naruse, 1951, 8/10)
“There is no Mizoguchi. There is no Ozu. There is only Naruse!” A cheap paraphrasal sentiment, yes, but as I grow older, I’m only interested in the cold, hard facts of cinema. Characters are always entering and exiting a scene in Mizo and Ozu. Not in Naruse: his cinema is a trap. He never gave an actor direction- he cornered them and watched them squirm for our benefit.