I own Riding Giants and think it's great. My Architect was very sad, no?

no worries. definitely check it out. is great. . . a stripped down, lean story. . . in the good way. it really works well.



yeah, this is england is near the top of my queue. i didn't realize it was the same guy. don't know much about it other than it's about gangs in england.

no one listens to me.

oh you knew that already.

all too well.

did that fat fuck at your work get married yet?

joel?

How many bigfat obnoxious guys at the post office are engaged right now?

yeah he got married awhile ago. he's not really the fat one, his wife is enormous though.

aaahh.

potayto, potahto.

3:10 To Yuma- Yawn. It's pretty easy to tell between "3:10..." & much more impressive "Assassination Of Jesse James..." which was the remake borrowing a 50 year old plot & which kept it's eye on how much more sophisticated Westerns have gotten in the last half century & was looking to push Westerns forward. AoJJBtCRF actually respected it's audience & of course was rewarded with some horrible box office returns, while 3:10 cleaned up. 3:10 is a decent action flick, I'm just not huge on the genre & thought AoJJBtCRF was more interesting.

Caramel - Good, not great love letter to Beruit. Definately worth Netflixing once it comes out. The one you should rush out to see is The Band's Visit, it's the kind of film Jim Jarmusch should make. Lots of deadpan humour & some surprising subplot towards the end. Ronit Elkabitz from TBV is also in another one I recently saw Or (My Treasure), really gripping & at times hard to watch, drama about an aging street prostitute & her teenage daughter in Israel. For some reason I am endlessly drawn to films about children or teens forced into adult situations because the adults around them act like children & this one definately was worth remembering.

Michael Clayton which I thought was definately good, but not Best Picture awesome. Cashback which was decent. Tried too hard to be American Beauty or something more than it was. Had lots of gratuitous nudity & I'm not talking flashes I mean like 2-3 minutes straight of some Big British Bounceys. Rocket Science was better than okay, if you love the Sundance genre then I'd say see it.

I also saw 3 of the Oscar nominated doc's this week (for free on the big screen, thank you SF Doc Film Institute). Taxi to the Darkside was a really depressing look at Abu Ghraib & Guantanamo & basically how F'ed up the Bush administration is. It follows the story of one taxi driver who was murdered in custody & goes over all the policies, Bush admin double speak, interegation techniques. It works in interviews with soldiers involved with the victims detainment, NY Times journalist who broke the story, a British born detainee & lots of aggrivating clips of Rummy & Bush. Towards the end it works in professors who studied interegation techniques in the 60's that the CIA has since adopted. Really a complete overview of the whole clusterfuck.

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience was really solid. The National Endowment For The Arts sent experianced writers to help tutor servicemen & women serving in Iraq & Afghanistan. It features interviews with a few of the soldiers & then acts out what they wrote. No two stories are recreated the same. One is animated, one is retold by almost entirely still pictures or moving film played in super slow mo & so on & so forth. The stories are really well written & well shot. They also work in Vietnam & Korea Vets how are authors by trade to talk about their experiances. Really solid doc that doesn't take a stand one way or another, just says, "these are wartime vets & this is thier story".

War/Dance is about a middle school in Northern Uganda where every kid is a refugee from the civil war in a protected camp. The students won a local competition in 8 categories of song, dance, acting, so on & so forth & now get to compete on a national level in Uganda's capital. It centers on 3 kids & tells their back story, which is some of the most fucked up stuff you can imagine. Then it cuts into the students practicing & getting ready for their trip & ofcourse the competition itself. Really, good, as tough as it was to watch at times. I want either this or No End In Sight to win.

sunset boulevard - way more disturbing than i expected, but as has been every Billy Wilder i've seen, excellent.

i feel totally the opposite about those movies.

Michael Clayton
Ratatouille
Lars and the Real Girl
Bee Movie

great thread...we don't get to go out to movies much anymore, so i appreciate the tips here.

just ordered this is england and dead man's shoes from amazon.

A few comments on movies mentioned:

Oldboy -- I liked it, I think the director is a fucking genius. It's probably my least favorite of the three (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and Lady Vengeance being the other two, Sympathy being my favorite) for the reason mentioned, but it didn't ruin it for me. I love some of the framing he does with some of his shots. There's a long sequence of total non-duff shots in Sympathy that just totally gets me -- referencing everyone from Kurosawa and on, and yet still making them totally his own (I'd have to rewatch the whole movie to see if I can spot a single duff scene). The use of deafness was just brill.

Gone Baby Gone -- meh. Yes, Casey was an excellent choice in casting, yes it was not bad for a first shot at directing, but when the DVD hit the layer change, I was all like "what?" -- I thought the movie was essentially over, and was really disappointed with the pacing of the second half of the film, and therefore with the entire film. I was watching it with a guy from Boston, and he was like, "I've played there" and "I think I know that house" every 5 minutes.

Forbidden Zone -- I love that movie. So unique in look (preceded that RHCP video by years, if not decades), and there were a couple of hot naked women that I never get tired of looking at. It has a certain Terry Gilliam-esque-ness to it that just wounds me. I made a friend of mine watch it, and his response was, "not enough drugs..."

Once -- yeah, if you don't like the music, the movie won't work for you. I thoroughly enjoyed the music, and therefore the movie, and I've never been a fan of the Frames.

Me: Been watching the Lone Wolf and Cub series -- lots of swordplay, great gouts of blood, cute kid, the occasional gratuitous booby shot -- what's not to love?

i enjoyed lady vengeance the best, though i still seriously haven't watched oldboy all the way through yet. i fell asleep the first time i watched it and i even have the 3 disc metal box which i scored for like $15 but it just sits there on my shelf.

i was doing that through gone baby gone too. the quarries they go to are like 2 minutes from where i grew up. i'm wondering when they shot it because i thought it's been filled in for years since a bunch of people drowned there but i guess not. there's a bunch of condos and shit up there now. also, the white drug dealer is slaine.

i've been wanting to buy the lone wolf & cub box set after seeing shogun assassin.

It is my understanding that Shogun Assassin is essentially the first two movies.

I waited until Borders had that 30% DVD box set sale (didn't know they were going to do the 40% off one about a month later, oh well), and then used some of my "Borders Rewards" bucks -- total outlay was ~ US$50. Worth it. I don't know if it's worth it at the full US$150 that Borders was selling it for, but it's certainly worth watching at least once.

I love some of the titles: Baby Cart at the River Styx, Baby Cart in Peril, Baby Cart in Hades, and Baby Cart in the Land of Demons.

My friend has Zatoichi, I need to get him to start watching those next.

I enjoyed both but would rank AOJJ a tad higher than 3:10

These two are currently waiting to be watched:

yeah i saw it used on amazon for like $80 which is just kinda pushing it as to how much i wanna spend on it. that and the tombs of the blind dead collection, x-files & seinfeld complete series, 5 disc blade runner set and that boston red sox 2004 set are all on my list of shit to get whenever i have some extra cash.




edit: harakiri is fucking awesome.

Little Children

Kelly Leak as a registered sex offender!

Children of Men, finally
and
Letters From Iwo Jima

Little Children was one of the best movies of the decade, but I absolutely despise Children of Men.