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| gromit |
 Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2013 6:50 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9008
Location: Shanghai
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The first half hour of The Master kind of irritated me.
The style, presentation and charter grated a bit.
Just finished Zero Dark Thirty and enjoyed it a good deal. As with the first 20 minutes of Argo, it's pretty impressive to feel that you are there in some of these (recent) historic moments and places. It was a real solid military drama which pulled you along. Jessica Chastain is very strong in the lead.
The only problem was I felt the film weakened after they located the compound, when the focus lasered in on the determination and heroics of Chastain's character. Also, the raid itself was fairly impressive -- especially the gear and those nightvision quadnoculars -- but I lost track numerous times of where the hell they were and which gate to what they were exploding. When presenting their findings to the CIA head they had a model of the compound and I think it would have been useful to have a scene going over the layout and the raid plan. We're left kind of blind as to what is planned/anticipated, and I felt a bit lost numerous times.
I'd probably rec that one watch the dvd extra "The Compound" prior to the film to have a better idea of that scene. In any case, the full-scale re-creation of bin Laden's Abbottabad compound somewhere in Jordan was pretty impressive.
I'm not really sure why the film depicts torture as being useful and yielding the intel that leads to Bin Laden. But I can get that the torturers would feel that it was necessary and feel that they could separate the misinformation from the truth. And the film is about their world and perception. But I tend to concern myself with how a film plays as a film/drama rather than worry about its politics. So that didn't really worry me, and the interrogation/torture scenes were realistic and fairly grim.
So Zero Dark Thirty worked for me.
And I wasn't much on board with The Hurt Locker |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2013 7:00 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9008
Location: Shanghai
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So far my Top 6 for 2012:
1. 5 Broken Camera
2. Zero Dark Thirty
3. Moonrise Kingdom
4. Barbara
5. Lincoln
6. Putin’s Kiss
Probably Argo and some other fairly good films next.
Silver Linings and Beasts really sounded like my kinds of films, but were letdowns. I liked parts/half of Beasts; while SLP didn't work for me at all. I didn't turn up any/many under-the-radar films in '12 as I usually do.
5 Broken Cameras; Barbara (German film); Putin's Kiss all mildly obscure and worth seeing. Tabu and Stolen Seas (Somali pirate doc) both interesting and fairly good.
I think Beasts might still be clinging to the bottom of my Top 10 even though I was fairly ambivalent about it.
It was that kind of movie watching year for me ... |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2013 8:13 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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| Try The Loneliest Planet for an under-the-radar gem. Stick with it and pay verrrrrry close attention. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2013 9:07 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6948
Location: Black Hills
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0D30 is next viewing, hope I can separate out the film as film/drama and the politics/message aspect as you did, Gromit. Might be harder for me to do that with a film ripped from the headlines than with, say, an episode of '24.'
Just caught Rust and Bone, which had some riveting actorial moments but somehow didn't seem quite complete. Cotillard does her very best to show us a rather unusual character arc, but somehow the dots just didn't connect for me. Metaphorically, it seems simple in a rather cute way - she goes from managing one kind of animal (an Orca, a bit of a leg man it seems) to managing another, an inarticulate underground boxer - but it felt strained to me. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2013 10:41 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
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Location: Shanghai
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bartist wrote: 0D30 is next viewing, hope I can separate out the film as film/drama and the politics/message aspect as you did, Gromit.
The film maintains a pretty tight focus on the CIA task force, especially Chastain's character, trying to track down AL Q leaders. I think this works quite well for the first 2/3rds of the film. I believe we only see a photo of bin Laden on the wall briefly a few times, only see/hear of Obama once on TeeVee, and Bush doesn't exist. So the film largely eschews/sidesteps politics and issues. As things progress towards actionable, we do get a small glimpse of the Wash bureaucracy, which seems to be comprised mostly of people trying to cover their ass or look smart or avoid being wrong. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2013 10:53 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
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Location: Shanghai
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billyweeds wrote: Try The Loneliest Planet for an under-the-radar gem. Stick with it and pay verrrrrry close attention.
That's on my to-see list, partly on your earlier rec.
Not sure when it will turn up though.
Here are the few '12 films I'm still waiting for:
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
The Loneliest Planet
Sound of My Voice
and I'll probably give Robot & Frank a try
and some foreign films:
NO (Pablo Larraín)
The Hunt (Vinterberg, Denmark)
Post Tenebras Lux (Reygadas)
This Is Not a Film (Panahi)
In the Fog (Loznitsa)
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I watched Lola Versus last week, but it's really not my type of film, so I didn't comment. It seemed like an extended sitcom to me -- like some alternate universe version of Friends. I'm surprised I made it to the end, even if it took two nights as I feel asleep midway through. Maybe folks who liked Take This Waltz might be more disposed to like it. But i couldn't find anything to latch on to, it all seemed so stale and forced, while the 2 male leads seemed so wimpy (kind of like Friends). |
Last edited by gromit on Wed Mar 20, 2013 1:09 pm; edited 1 time in total
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2013 12:09 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: New York City
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| The mention of Lola Versus reminds me to remind you that Whit Stillman's Damsels in Distress (starring Lola's Greta Gerwig) is 2012's most urgent Must to Avoid. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2013 12:35 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
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Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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| Gromit: the only one of those I've seen is The Perks of Being a Wildflower, which was my #3 film of 2012, after Argo and Lincoln. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2013 1:11 pm |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
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billyweeds wrote: Whit Stillman's Damsels in Distress (starring Lola's Greta Gerwig) is 2012's most urgent Must to Avoid.
I thought Cosmopolis had that title sewn up ... |
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| Befade |
| Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2013 9:28 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: AZ
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Thank you, Billy for recommending Flight. Ordinarily I wouldn't go to a Denzel movie or and airplane movie. He really held my attention. The ending was a little cloying, otherwise great stuff.
Netflix streaming artist movies to recommend: The Woodmans and Ai Weiwei. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2013 11:48 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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| Betsy--Can't imagine feeling that way about Denzel. I think he's pretty awesome. You're right about the last chapter of Flight. It's sort of dorky. But up to that point I loved it. |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2013 11:57 pm |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
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| STOKER is a beautiful, atmospheric bore. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Thu Mar 21, 2013 4:27 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Marc wrote: STOKER is a beautiful, atmospheric bore.
You're the bearer of bad tidings today. I've been looking forward to Stoker more than any other movie this year. First Enlightened and now this!
I saw the other movie I've been looking forward to, The Call, described as "trying to out-deprave Criminal Minds." This puts the kibosh on that movie, too. Well, there's always the Swedish version of Wallanger on Netflix. So good it hurts. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Thu Mar 21, 2013 1:28 pm |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
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Location: Black Hills
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| I heard bad things about The Call, and was warned off - sounded like another tv director not quite making the leap to film. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Fri Mar 22, 2013 8:48 pm |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9008
Location: Shanghai
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billyweeds wrote: Marc wrote: STOKER is a beautiful, atmospheric bore.
You're the bearer of bad tidings today. I've been looking forward to Stoker more than any other movie this year.
Well, Billyboy, this internet review might stoke your fires:
Quote:
I thought Stoker was quite good. Then again, I'm up for every new Park Chan Wook film since I first saw Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, which remains a particular favorite. Park Chan Wook has said before that he decided to become a filmmaker after a single overpowering screening of Vertigo. At this point it almost goes without saying that Hitchcock is an important influence on all of his work, especially the extent to which both filmmakers toy with creating and shifting audience identification among various characters through plot twists and the selective revelation of various bits of information.
Though the larger than life tone and content and the explicit sex and violence of Park Chan Wook's films are certainly post Hitchcock and even post De Palma in their depraved extremity, both Hitchcock's key idea and his visual motif of the close intertwining of acts of love and murder -- an aspect Truffaut remarked upon in the famous interview book -- remain a constant in Stoker as in other key Park Chan Wook works.
He even goes on to reference Shadow of a Doubt, but in a spoiler, so i didn't quote that part ...
It's not my kind of film, so I'm unlikely to see it. But Asian Post-Modern neo-Hitchcock ... you gonna pass that up? |
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