What Movies are you Watching?

[the_wolfs_howl]

Rewatched the Death Note movies, which will never get old <3

I also saw an old, over-the-top musical called Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which is about seven brothers who all decide they need wives...and so they go out and grab them and take them home. Rather funny, very exaggerated.

[SierraLea]

I ended up watching a lot of the blueray extras on the Lord of the Rings with my oldest younger sister. Some of them are really funny and interesting, like the small fact that the actor for Eragorn has kissed at least five male members of the cast, including the actor for Pippen!

[Rewin]

I am almost finished re-watching Serenity but my daughter woke up so hopefully I will be able to finish it later. In the meantime it seems she aims to misbehave, so I must go rescue the house from her amazing destructive powers.

[SierraLea]

I watched Super Eight with my dad last night. If not for that last bit, the "thing" would probably have given me some serious nightmares.

[the_wolfs_howl]

Flightplan - Finally got to knock this one off the list. It was an okay sort of thriller, about a child abduction on an airplane. It was cool to see a movie that deals so closely with the airplanes I'm so familiar with, and I thought they did a pretty good job of portraying what an extremely long flight is like. The plot itself was just sort of average, but the main attraction of the movie was Sean Bean <3

[Panda4christ:3]

Beautiful Creatures. It was meh...i didn't care much for the male lead and i felt like their were parts of the plot that didn't go anywhere >.>

Edit: Also, the portrayal of christianity was just...
Nobody prays like that -_-...

[SierraLea]

Saw Hookwinked Too! One of the worst sequels ever. Who on earth wrote that script? I wonder if they ever wrote a decent story in their life.

[MomentOfInertia]

Rise of the Guardians

A decent coming of age tale in a fantasy setting.

[the_wolfs_howl]

I rewatched Serenity, since I just finished rewatching Firefly. As before, I like it, though I think this finale of the story would have been ten times more awesome if they'd actually been allowed to unfold it in a TV show format. The injuries also feel a bit pointless, whereas injuries in the show always held some sort of significance to the plot of the episode, at least.

[SierraLea]

Rewatching Rise of the Guardians. I see a lot of similarities between Jack Frost and Naruto.

[MomentOfInertia]

Wreck It Ralph

Better than I expected, a decent "find your path" sort of story. Kind of like Toy Story for an arcade.
Decent overall.

[the_wolfs_howl]

In the past few weeks, I've rewatched the Harry Potter movies. Good stuff, good stuff.

[KnightOfFive]

Watching Harry Potter for the first time, not bad at all.

[GeneD]

I watched Hugo last weekend, which was very pretty and a good story overall. Still didn't completely sell me on Asa Butterfield so I remain nervous about Ender's Game.

[bigsleepj]

Disconnect, a movie about how inter-connectedness through the internet and technology can lead to less social cohesion. It is well made and well acted, but not a cheerful movie.

[GrubbTheFragger]

Spring Breaker. While not a film for everyone, I seriously doubt its a film for anyone here, it really took me by surprise. Its a really simple film on the surface but really weaves a story about the four girls finding themselves amidst the drugs and sex. Its a controversial film, and a film that I won't talk about much here due to the content.

[bigsleepj]

White House Down. Fun, old-style Die Hard movie, but not perfect.

[mysngoeshere56]

Pooh's Grand Adventure.

[the_wolfs_howl]

TMNT - After I finished watching this, I turned to the friend who showed it to me and sobbed on her shoulder, "WHY DID IT HAVE TO BE NINJA TURTLES?! " Because the only thing that keeps this movie from being completely awesome is how stupid the whole concept of ninja turtles is. But if you can manage to stand that, it's actually a really great movie about brotherhood - my favorite kind of story There's some cool action scenes, and the animation is just gorgeous.

I also rewatched the Rurouni Kenshin, Death Note, and Prince of Persia movies, which are always loads of fun.

[Sanderson]

Watched Blade Runner a few nights ago, one of my favorite movies.

[Atria35]

Going through everything horror on Netflix.

Most recently it was 'Purification'.

..... If that is some strange way of saying pure crud, then they got it right. The actors are either incredibly stiff or overplayed (except for the lead). It's far too dream-sequence logic, which makes no sense where the storyline is concerned. They used the novel technique of giving the cast their lines the day of shooting and it shows (in all the bad ways that this sentence can imply. So terrible). It's incredibly lackluster. Dang what a bad movie. It had a good premise but was all downhill from there.

White - a Japanese horror film, and while not great, was far more than decent. It was rather like The Ring in how the curse of the song worked, but I rather liked how it all played out.

[sandalwood]

I just watched Star Trek: Into Darkness, and I thought it was GREAT!

Raises a few questions regarding the Wrath of Kahn, but was wonderful nonetheless!

Also, hi guys. I haven't been here in a while...

[GhostontheNet]

Last night I saw The White Balloon directed by Jafar Panahi.

I'm very impressed. It's not this feel-good movie like some people thought, because all these adults on the streets of Iran are too pre-occupied with their own nonsense to help this 7-year-old girl attend to the urgent matter of buying a goldfish on New Years Eve. But along comes an Afghani youth—he appears to be of the Hazaras minority no less!—as he becomes the Good Samaritan with a resourceful solution in the last ten minutes.

[GhostontheNet]

I just watched Sans Soleil directed by Chris Marker.

Always a personal favorite of mine. This documentary is full of information on Japanese media culture, ranging from manga and anime, horror, religion, sexuality, politics, art, philosophy, video games, and computers. Something of a symbolic follow-up to his film A Grin Without a Cat, Sans Soleil portrays scenes from Japan and Northern Africa as they function at "two extreme poles of survival" in a very thoughtful video essay to present an alternative history of the future.

[PandaPop]

I just re-watched Unbreakable, forgot how much I loved it, such a good movie!

Also saw Elisium, I honestly wasn't impressed.

[GhostontheNet]

Last night I watched Sanjuro directed by Akira Kurosawa.

I can see why my dad termed this film The Seven Stooges the first time I saw it about a decade ago. Back then I thought it was another director's satire of Kurosawa, but it is in fact Kurosawa's satire of samurai cliches. In this regard, Toshiro Mifune is cast as the offbeat ronin who calls the tune as the nine samurai are hopelessly lost in the power struggles between the Superintendent and the Chamberlain.

[bigsleepj]

High and Low

A classic Akira Kurosawa crime drama starring Toshiro Mifume. A businessman named Gondo puts together a deal of a lifetime that would make him gain control of the company he works for, only to get a call from someone telling him they have kidnapped his son and that he must pay a king's ransom to get back. It turns out, however, that the kidnappers got the son of his chauffeur. The first act of the movie is mostly a social drama exploring how feudal class divisions still remain, to a degree, alive in 20th century Japan. Gondo struggles with a deeply personal question: why was he willing to pay the money for his son and not for his chauffeur? The second half is an intriguing, gritty and realistic procedural about the police attempting to track down the kidnappers. It also explores the effect the kidnapping has on the chauffeur, but oddly keeps Gondo (the most interesting / central character) at arms length. Despite being too long by 20 minutes it is still a pretty good movie.

Last night I watched Sanjuro directed by Akira Kurosawa.

I can see why my dad termed this film The Seven Stooges the first time I saw it about a decade ago. Back then I thought it was another director's satire of Kurosawa, but it is in fact Kurosawa's satire of samurai cliches. In this regard, Toshiro Mifune is cast as the offbeat ronin who calls the tune as the nine samurai are hopelessly lost in the power struggles between the Superintendent and the Chamberlain.

Sanjuro is great. Its not as excellent as Yojimbo but it has a charm of its own. I enjoy watching it every now and again.

[GhostontheNet]

High and Low

A classic Akira Kurosawa crime drama starring Toshiro Mifume....

I haven't seen any of Kurosawa's post-War Film Noir works yet. The closest to that I've seen to them is Ikiru, which has some related themes, but doesn't count. In terms of American cinema and history, Hollywood pulled something of a P.R. hat trick that is documented in the Discovery Military channel's documentary Mafia vs. KKK. In the first decades of the 20th century, the American public really liked the KKK's brand of domestic terrorism, making mega-blockbusters out of films like The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind as they presented Klansman as knightly guardians of old-fashioned Southern feudal chivalry. But with the advent of the gangster picture during the Prohibition and Great Depression, you see their cultural rivals the Mafia reinvented as ambiguous anti-heroes trying to reclaim the American dream in a state of domestic warfare (i.e. Scarface: The Shame of the Nation as the surplus of machine guns from World War I hits the streets of Chicago). As the Klansmen are portrayed more unsympathetically in film and media into the 50's and beyond, this helps to engender a culture-shift in American values.

One of the positive functions of Mafiosi is that they have been a concealed brute force protecting statements of cosmopolitan values against the threat of reactionary violence (i.e. when the KKK would show up at a Jazz concert). To be sure, gangster films after the New Hollywood tend to be filled with a stream of racist epithets, as other ethnicities signal rival gangs. And their rigid organization echoes something of feudalism, corporatism, and police forces. But I think gangster films tend to be about a wider cultural struggle for a society governed by cosmopolitan values. One becomes a gangster in these films because the society is a fraud only chumps believe in, and someone has to stand up for an alternative. One battles a gangster on behalf of the values of a progressive mudraker, as they used to say, even if the method is kung fu. To watch something like The Godfather films or Goodfellas, what this situation most reminds me of is the client-patron system that supported the Renaissance against the backlash from vestiges of the feudal order. I think that what these films offer is a vision of how an underground culture has reconciled the imperatives of tradition and cosmopolitanism, which is of course a major concern of Asian cinema.

Sanjuro is great. Its not as excellent as Yojimbo but it has a charm of its own. I enjoy watching it every now and again.

I haven’t seen Yojimbo yet, but I probably will. I think the boldness and charm of Sanjuro stems from its willingness to portray Japanese feudalism as something ludicrous, and certainly not worth nostalgia. Thematically, Kurosawa has always had a thing for human stupidity. Mifune’s ronin has achieved perspective because he has stepped outside the prescribed roles. Conversely, the samurai are naive and impulsive to a fault, while the court ladies are not very good at escaping in a timely manner. But the latter are educated, and they offer a counter-perspective on violence, anticipating the theme of the sword and sheath in Samurai X: Trust and Betrayal. I like the running gag about the guard they capture, who ultimately defects to offer unexpected perspective and insight. The women free him in humanitarian naivety, for which he dutifully stays in their hideout. The men confine him to an offscreen room out of principle, from which he occasionally emerges to say something important. Beneath the comedy and action, Sanjuro has an interesting recurring subtext of the concept of trust.

[GhostontheNet]

Tonight I watched Hiroshima Mon Amour directed by Alain Resnais.

Victor Frankl is famous for the quote: “Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.” As a Left Bank auteur of the French New Wave, Alain Resnais was one of the first filmmakers to take up that challenge. While he recognizes a similarity between the images of the Holocaust he had documented in Night and Fog and those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he ingeniously realizes the story of the destruction and reconstruction of Hiroshima should be told as a love story. The story goes that a French actress filming an anti-war picture has a one-night stand with a Japanese man, and is surprised by the level of intimacy they quickly reach. With the time of her departure at hand, they must come to a deeper understanding of matters of love and war. Hiroshima Mon Amour is one of those films that is sexy because of its intelligent conversational tête-à-tête.

[the_wolfs_howl]

Due to an unprecedented instance of insomnia, I decided to watch the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, and then followed it up with Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility movie, and the Kiera Knightley version of Pride and Prejudice. Wow, I'd really forgotten how inferior the acting is in the later version I mean, it's okay and all, and I certainly like some of the things they added to the story, but...after Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, everyone in the newer movie just seemed so flat and bland.