Suggest and rate movies

Stay tuned, folks.

Reprise → imdb.com/title/tt0827517/

Quite a strange film. Very beautiful at times, poetic even. However also very vague, abstract and disjointed.
Can’t really say much more then that.

A History of Violence

Amusing thriller about a guy in smalltown America who turns out to be a gangster trying to escape his former life. Very violent in places, darkly funny, bit of an underwritten script but rattles along very quickly. Highly enjoyable.

3.5/5 stars.

great film, although i think its better the less you know about it tbh. good either way though :slight_smile:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcBjOVKKxh0[/youtube]

I can’t wait.

The Conversation

70s thriller about spying on people. About an hour into this film I realised it was Gene Hackman playing the central character, a bugging and surveillance expert who gets mixed up in a corporate conspiracy when he is hired to bug a conversation between a man and a woman. Wonderfully paced, largely well acted except for a young Harrison Ford who is far too pretty to pretend to be menacing, some great camerawork too. Lots of visual storytelling - these days they’d have the central character rabbiting on all the time so you knew what he was thinking, and they’d probably cast Shia Lebouf in the main role. Still, this was awesome, right up there with All the President’s Men (and the haircuts are even better in this film). Perhaps not quite as good as Three Days of the Condor, but it doesn’t have Faye Dunaway so it can be forgiven that.

4.5/5 stars.

Has anyone seen any of these:

Prometheus
The new Judge Dredd
The new Total Recall

Looking forward to The Hobbit

Just watched Inception, boooooorrrrringggg!!! 0 out 5

Anyone seen Looper?

Dredd 3D was a total let-down, a waste of 15 English pounds, and I can’t believe they went with such a crap storyline… was that story ever in one of the comics?

CamGirl (2011) - Seriously terrible. Even watched in 10 minute chunks the near-constant nudity was sickening. Maybe that was the point but I just didn’t care. Kinda a micro-budget Showgirls.

Currently watching Skyfall. My thoughts later.

Loved Skyfall… and not just because I was in it (for all of a few seconds… after 5 days of filming and a flirty smile exchange with Daniel Craig).

Every second is action-packed, the storyline is realistic, and the whole mood of the film draws one in… Looking forward to your review on it :slight_smile:

Which one were you? Were you driving the train?

I wouldn’t flirt with James Bond if I were you. Most of the women who go near him end up dead, and in Skyfall he didn’t even give a toss (unlike in previous films).

My thoughts: It was a massive improvement on Quantum of Bollocks, and the new Q was nowhere near as annoying as I thought he would be. He was fucking stupid though - when you have a master hacker’s laptop the last thing you do is plug it into the office network to enable it to wreak havoc.

In terms of cultural programming there was the obvious, i.e. the ex-agent cyberterrorist that is quite a common bad guy role in these sorts of films and TV shows, and the slightly more obtuse, i.e. the portrayal of the Intelligence and Security Committee as a bureaucratic waste of time. Now, it is a waste of time, not to mention hugely corrupt and incompetent, but not for the reasons portrayed in the film. I was highly amused by the ascent of the chairman of the Committee to replacing M at the end of the film, mirroring John Scarlett - the man who put his name to the fake Iraq war intelligence.

The climax up in Scotland was pretty good, but there wasn’t enough shots of the mountains. Those mountains are great, like a 19 year old woman’s breasts. There was a distinct lack of cleavage in the film and I felt some more lingering shots of the mountains would have made up for it. The token comedy Celt was a bit run of the mill, and the expositional dialogue rather ham-fisted and lazy. Still, the amusing booby traps and the return of the Aston Martin were nice, imaginative little
ideas. In general the movie did make me laugh a lot. I don’t know if that was what they intended.

Nah… I was one of the 200 train passengers, but I caught a few seconds glimpse of me getting on the train as Bond is scurrying past.

I exchanged a flirty smile with Craig in real-life, not with Bond in film land… it was on a re-set :slight_smile: I didn’t make eye contact with him again after that 8-[ I prefer the way they didn’t dwell on his relationships in Skyfall, but enveloped it within the on-going action.

I liked the pace of this movie… compared to the other Bond films which never held my interest, and the storyline was at least a feasible one, and the unravelling of the characters at the end… which sets things up nicely for the next movie in the saga, but I’m appalled at their lack of insight over the lack of cleavage. [-(

These days there’s no distinction between the actor and the role - otherwise why would Daniel Craig/James Bond be visiting ‘our boys’ in Afghanistan?

bbc.co.uk/newsround/20390244

If I were a soldier living in daily fear of having my legs blown off then some yuppie actor who plays a spy on TV turned up to promote his new film, I would be livid. It’s so condescending, and I loathe British soldiers like you wouldn’t believe, I don’t normally have the slightest sympathy for them.

Seriously, if you’re still alive in 6 months I’d be surprised. Most Bond girls barely make it into the second reel of the film. Not that they have reels anymore, it’s all done online.

Crocodile Dundee - 9/10: Over the top, very Australian. Paul Hogan’s from the older generation of Australian larrikins. He used to have a Australian comedy show back before he got into film (it’s be difficult to locate, but these too are very well worth the watch). Very tongue in cheek, but an easy and fun watching experience.

The film follows the story of a journalist who comes from the States to write a story on a man who survived a crocodile attack. The journalist travels with Paul Hogan through to the scene of the incident, overcoming certain obstacles along the way.

[Spoiler] I particularly love the scene where Mick (Paul Hogan) kisses Donk instead of punching him to dislodge the beer from the top of his head. That, and the scene where Mick just shoves a massive knife through a crocodiles skull, to which the journalist still recovering from the shock of the incident asks shakily, ‘…is it dead?’ In pure larrikin fashion, Mick replies, ‘well if it’s not, I’m gonna one hell of a time skinning the bastard.’

The Castle - 9/10: A film about relatively poor Australians living in an area that an Airport wants to buy out to expand operations. The film follows the family from their day to day life, to interactions with neighbours to court proceedings and it’s outcome. It probably doesn’t sound like all that much, but like Dundee, the charm lies in who these people are, and the film is written with Larrikinism in mind.

I don’t much know how to explain this style of Australian comedy outside of saying they’re Larrikin’s, and it has my ‘piss funny’ recommendation.

[Spoiler] Loved the scene where the Lebanese man in the neighbourhood speaks with the main character: “Real estate man come to my house, he say, ‘plane fly over house, drop value.’ I say me no care, in Lebanon, plane fly over house, drop bomb!” Written prior to 9/11, at a long forgotten time where Arab/Terrorist sensitivities weren’t what they are today.

Two Hands - 7/10: Australia’s ‘Snatch.’ A more serious Australian film than the others, but still with the natural touches of larkinism somewhat inherent in Australian culture. The story follows a strip club bouncer (Heath Ledger) who falls in love, and scores a job with some Australian gangsters (chiefly Brian Brown). Heath is sent on his first job, which goes horribly wrong, leaving him looking to fix things to save his life.

The story shows a good deal of Sydney as it is, and presents us with a funny story, and characters I could swear I meet week to week. ‘It’s a good country, you’ll never go back,’ my uncle used to say, knowing full well I was born here. I don’t know how that relates to anything, but I just thought I should write it.

[Standout] The bank robbery scene, and the preparation for it. Holy fucking God… It’s fun.

imdb.com/title/tt0089881/

Ran (1985)
Very well made. One of those old movies that’s bearable to watch, partly because it’s an adaptation of King Lear, and the plot captivates you from the beginning, but also because the acting is solid, and the cinematography is incredible.

10/10

imdb.com/title/tt0861739/
imdb.com/title/tt1555149/
Elite Squad (2007)
Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (2010)

If you enjoy a good action flick, you have to see these movies. 9/10

Classic movie, a must-see film if you haven’t already. The sequel is quite amusing too.

Stalker - 10/10

Science fiction film from the USSR, made in the late 70’s, directed by Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky’s got a massive cult following, mostly for this film and Solaris, so I was apprehensive before seeing it.

It’s not about a stalker. The stalker is a guide, who leads people through a forbidden area called the Zone, heavily protected by the state. Something happened in the Zone, and no-one knows quite what, but it’s probably something to do with aliens. There’s a room in a building in the Zone that will apparently grant your most dear wish, but the landscape is fraught with unseen danger, illogicality and the threat of random death for those who don’t respect the Zone’s rules. The film is about Stalker taking two people, the Professor and the Writer, into the Zone. I can’t give any spoilers, or even confirm or deny that there are spoilers to give. It’s a very talky film, and after the excitement of breaking into the Zone, the pace slows right down and the harsh monochrome of the outside gives way to saturated, lush colours of the nature in the Zone. Everything about the Zone is non-linear, contrary to expectations, menacing in an entirely passive way.

It’s a film about man’s relationship with the unknown, about hope, truth and faith and uncertainty and how the stories we tell and the reasons we give are formed by, and form, our view of the world. And it leaves the unknown unknown, there’s no grand denouement in which a wizard is found behind the curtain or the magic of the Zone is explained, no aliens or deus ex machina. The final scene is beautifully-shot and strange, emphasising the unknown world that the people are dealing with. It’s a slow, thoughtful film that stayed with me for a long time afterwards. I am sure some people hate its intellectual pretensions, wordiness, lack of pace and resolution, but I think even they could enjoy the beautiful imagery in the Zone.

More details and shots here (not my blog, just a random google hit).

Ran is a fantastic film, no question.