What have you watched recently: Electric Boogaloo

krudler

Psychedelic wrote: »

Session 9 (2001)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0261983

Starring Peter Mullan (Boy A, Tyrannosaur), David Caruso (CSI, yeah meme guy) and a few actors unknown to me, this is a superbly executed psychological horror mystery about a group of guys cleaning up an old mental asylum. No stupid characters doing stupid things and no jump scares, this is a genuinely creepy story that is engaging throughout with clues & red herrings presented in each scene.

It also has nice camera work and a haunting atmosphere and simple music cues that don't overdo it. The story doesn't neatly wrap up everything in the last couple of minutes but leaves the viewer to try piece the clues together - it reveals enough so you have an overall idea what's going on with a few things left to puzzle over later, a good balance.

Good little movie that, some decent creepy moments.

johnny_ultimate

Shoah: what to say? Weighing in at a whopping 550 minutes, the film absolutely justifies its extreme running time and esteemed reputation. A truly immense, artful, compassionate, exhausting, illuminating and complex account of one of history's darkest chapters. Through rigorous adherence to its stylistic choices, it explores the processes, people and places of the Holocaust, in devastatingly minute detail. Almost entirely told through the testimonies of those who were there - eyewitnesses, victims, and perpetrators - it's also intercut with ghostly, evocative tracking shots of the locations in the modern day. There's no archive footage, not even any music - instead it's one of the most effective examples of documentary filmmaking I've ever seen, that gets to the heart of the subject in endlessly captivating ways. Intimate and insightful, it evokes the horror of the Shoah while also containing some of the most heartbreaking and honest accounts of the atrocities. It's a difficult film in terms of scope and themes, but if you ever have the time, it's one of the greatest films you'll ever watch.

The Innocents - creepy Gothic ghost story. A still distinctive, eccentric take on the 'haunted house' and 'creepy kids' subgenres of horrors, that ends on a particularly eerie and haunting note.

Dry Summer - the last film from the Eureka World Cinema Foundation boxset, and a hypnotic watch. A wild Turkish melodrama about a man who decides to stop providing his neighbours with access to his spring, it radiates with visual energy, sensuality and violent undercurrents. It's a provocative exploration of class divisions too, while the story's high drama is extremely compelling.

poundapunnet

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

The Innocents - creepy Gothic ghost story. A still distinctive, eccentric take on the 'haunted house' and 'creepy kids' subgenres of horrors, that ends on a particularly eerie and haunting note.

That creepy fecking song! Seriously influential film, the Others is basically a remake with a stupid twist, and the whole

is she isn't she mad thing

, probably not the first but definitely an early example of those themes and one of the best.

Not sure if you know but it's based on a short story called The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, very good read in itself and interesting from an adaptation point of view. Actually Henry James in general is a very good read.

johnny_ultimate

Yeah hopefully get around to reading the original at some point. For some reason I never thought the The Turn of the Screw was a horror story, so was surprised when it appeared on screen. Ditto Truman Capote as a screenwriter!

poundapunnet

Jesus yeah, forgot he was involved!

cursai

Out of the Furnace.
Good. Left an impression. Good atmosphere.
Although there are unnecessary characters and does crawl in places. Accents may be a bit too forced.

charlie_says

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

Shoah: what to say? Weighing in at a whopping 550 minutes, the film absolutely justifies its extreme running time and esteemed reputation. A truly immense, artful, compassionate, exhausting, illuminating and complex account of one of history's darkest chapters. Through rigorous adherence to its stylistic choices, it explores the processes, people and places of the Holocaust, in devastatingly minute detail. Almost entirely told through the testimonies of those who were there - eyewitnesses, victims, and perpetrators - it's also intercut with ghostly, evocative tracking shots of the locations in the modern day. There's no archive footage, not even any music - instead it's one of the most effective examples of documentary filmmaking I've ever seen, that gets to the heart of the subject in endlessly captivating ways. Intimate and insightful, it evokes the horror of the Shoah while also containing some of the most heartbreaking and honest accounts of the atrocities. It's a difficult film in terms of scope and themes, but if you ever have the time, it's one of the greatest films you'll ever watch.

The Innocents - creepy Gothic ghost story. A still distinctive, eccentric take on the 'haunted house' and 'creepy kids' subgenres of horrors, that ends on a particularly eerie and haunting note.

Dry Summer - the last film from the Eureka World Cinema Foundation boxset, and a hypnotic watch. A wild Turkish melodrama about a man who decides to stop providing his neighbours with access to his spring, it radiates with visual energy, sensuality and violent undercurrents. It's a provocative exploration of class divisions too, while the story's high drama is extremely compelling.

Wow, did you watch Shoah in one sitting? Meal breaks? Is it worth it? Depressing?

I loved The Innocents too, the child acting was superb. That little boy is a creepy little so and so.

johnny_ultimate

charlie_says wrote: »

Wow, did you watch Shoah in one sitting? Meal breaks? Is it worth it? Depressing?

Not quite one sitting, alas, which proved near impossible to organise (and it was sort of a new year's resolution of mine in January to get through it!). But as close as I could get: the 'first era' on Tuesday evening / night (with a swim break in the middle), and the 'second era' in one go on Wednesday morning / afternoon (albeit with a sandwich break and a few unavoidable distractions). I'd have loved to see it in a cinema setting in one go, but who knows when that opportunity will arise - probably next month knowing my luck :pac:

But yeah, it's absolutely worth it. It's certainly dark and shocking, with some sections particularly harrowing as people break down on screen or describing appalling things. It's difficult, but I wouldn't let that put you off, it's a must watch.

Sad Professor

I watched The Innocents for the first time last week and was really blown away. It's surely up there with The Shining as one of the great psychological horror films. Like Kubrick, I don't think Clayton believed in the supernatural. His ghosts aren't spectres but repressed memories that have been buried for good reason. They can't be confronted without re-creating the past, running the risk that history will repeat itself. There's probably only a handful of scares in the film - but f**k are they scary!

mike65

Tora Tora Tora - sinks Pearl Harbor.

Gamayun

Dreams AKA Yume (1990)
Kurosawa film comprised of eight short vignettes based on the directors own dreams. The cinematography, especially the colouring, is amazing and the stories have a calm magic realism style. Loved it. Oh, and Martin Scorsese plays Vincent van Gogh in one story!

charlie_says

Sad Professor wrote: »

I watched The Innocents for the first time last week and was really blown away. It's surely up there with The Shining as one of the great psychological horror films. Like Kubrick, I don't think Clayton believed in the supernatural. His ghosts aren't spectres but repressed memories that have been buried for good reason. They can't be confronted without re-creating the past, running the risk that history will repeat itself. There's probably only a handful of scares in the film - but f**k are they scary!

Yes, it is one scary movie alright. You should check out The Haunting easily one of the scariest movies I have seen. Pure psychological horror. I actually don't like watching if I have to spend the night in the house by myself.

:eek:

Tony EH

mike65 wrote: »

Tora Tora Tora - sinks Pearl Harbor.

'Pearl Harbor' scuppered itself.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO

Tron Legacy

I haven't seen Tron, or at least if I did I was very very young and don't remember it. So I was going into this blind, although I did know Jeff Bridges was from the first one and trapped in the computer world.

Visually, it's very nice to look at and weirdly enough the huge amounts of CGI didn't bother me at all, maybe because it wasn't supposed to look "real", it was supposed to be a computer generated world. The score was also pretty good. Not one I'd run out and buy so I could listen to on repeat but I thought it suited the film very well. It felt like an actual old fashioned video game score. One you don't notice while you're playing but it's slowly seeping into your subconscious until you can hum it perfectly.

Story wise though..... was there even a story? There was a very basic goal but not much else, I suppose a bit like a video game? It was pretty threadbare if you stripped away the visuals and sound. I probably missed loads of references and nods to the first film too but still, pretty poor.

pixelburp

On the Beach (1959)
A most civilised armageddon; an odd film this, it's arguably one of the grimmer, more pessimistic post-apocalyptic films you'll see, but it's lathered in 1950s cinematic styling that frequently jar with the overall tone. So one moment you might have a scene featuring Anthony Perkins desperately seeking suicide pills for his baby & depressed young wife, a cut later and a jaunty score will kick in as we chart an admittedly tragic romance between the two leads (Gregory Peck & Ava Garnder).

The film is set in Australia, the last country alive on Earth as radioactive clouds from global nuclear war has killed off everyone else, with the dust now only 4 months away from the Aussie coast. So as you can imagine, the mood throughout should be fairly low, and while everyone seems utterly resigned to their doom, it's a tired, almost blissful resignation - there's a real notable absence of panic & anarchy, both emotionally and on the streets. On the Beach's closest genetic cousin might be something like Children of Men, but in Cuaron's film the UK is shown to have devolved into chaos. Everyone in Kramer's film is so polite in the face of extinction (make no mistake, the film offers no hope), and it kinda ages the film more than anything.

Still though, worth checking out, particularly for the performance by Fred Astaire, the last sort of actor you'd expect in a film like this.

Riddick (2013)
Firstly, I enjoyed both previous Riddick films, for different reasons. Pitch Black was a perfect B-movie; a simple sci-fi horror that subverted some cliches, offered decent scares & thrills and was headed by an excellent and memorable anti-hero. A worthy genre classic of its type. Chronicles of Riddick was a glorious failure; a Space Opera on drugs that made little sense, took itself way too seriously but had a brio that made it charming none the less. Utter nonsense, but still oddly entertaining.

Riddick feels like an attempt to get back to the formula used in Pitch Black: a hostile environment filled with ugly beasties, a human contingent trying to survive it while Riddick acts as the wild card causing ructions. And for about half the film it works, even if its the arrival of those other humans (mercenaries hunting Riddick) that cause the wheels to completely come off. The scenes of Riddick surviving on his own were decent - the barren world looked impressive despite the modest budget - and bar one great scene at the merc's hideout (where

Riddick booby-traps a locker, setting the rival mercs against each other

) the film loses all its traction. It's also a waste of Katee Sackhoff and that's pretty unforgivable right there...

The Last Stand (2013)
Enjoyed this more than I thought I would, but still much worse than it could have been, particularly as it was Ji-woon Kim's first Western film. The action was serviceable, well-choreographed - and it's sad that this is something that needs to be said in this day and age - and Arnie surprised me with a half-decent performance, working with his age instead of ignoring it. What was most striking though was just how bloody cheap it all looked throughout; lots of needless green-screen, CGI blood squibs, and a general sense of ... "TV movie"ness in the whole thing. It also features one of the weirdest accents I've heard in a film recently, Peter Stormare take a bow; your mangled accent was just ... bizarre.

Hootanany

Zomblies a film made in 2010 low budget strong cast watch out for them they will be big.

charlie_says

By the way....


Best Christmas wishes to all frequenters of the the Boogaloo. Hope you enjoy the week and watch some good movies over the next weekish.

Also thanks for the brief, but awesome, after action reports for 2012. Many an engrossed hour has been spent by this poster on the recommendedations of this thread.

Happy Christmas folks!

:):):):):):):):):):)

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

the adventures of baron munchausen

very good movie, just barely not great. Must remember to pick it up on blu ray in the new year, the dvd is nice and all but it's such a colourful movie it'd do well in HD

pixelburp

A Field in England (2013)
Hmm, perhaps my first mistake in taking this on was to do so sober and clear-minded because it felt like a film 'best' watched completely baked out of ones tree. At least then the frustratingly abstract indulgences wouldn't have annoyed me so much. An utterly vague film with barely any structure, populated by sketchy and uninteresting characters who basically fumble about a field (in England no less) serving no purpose except to act as victims for Wheatleys acid-trips and experimental visuals. Michael Smiley's character seemed like a potentially intriguing injection of mystery into proceedings - was he actually the devil? - but there was no substance to sustain the idea, which sums up the overall film to me really.

Side note: would you believe that Wheatley's next project is to direct 2 episodes of Doctor Who? Something tells me they won't be so post-modern as Field in England.

johnny_ultimate

Prince Avalanche - Once upon a time David Gordon Green was a director of subtle, poetic and elegant slices of rural Americana. More recently, he's been tossing out broad, wacky stoner comedies (most of which are garbage). Prince Avalanche sort of combines bits and pieces of both, with not unpleasant results. Featuring a possibly career best performance from Paul Rudd, it's a bromance (that word - shudder) about two lads (Emile Hirsch being t'other) painting lines along a seemingly endless stretch of isolated road, surrounded by recently burnt down forests. It's an extraordinarily slight film, it must be said, but it moves along amiably even though it holds few surprises. The best bits are a handful of sequences that dispose of dialogue, the scenes instead surging to life with vibrant editing, cinematography and an energetic score from Explosions in the Sky. Not Gordon Green's best work, but good to see him back on the general right track.

It's a Wonderful Life - Hollywood at its most classically manipulative, but it's also a considerably darker and more cynical film than its famously sentimental final moments suggest. In fact, the reason it works at all is that it earns its ending by dragging George Bailey through a rather unrelenting deconstruction and examination of the mid-century 'American Dream'. Has there ever been a better 'movie star' than Jimmy Stewart? The man just had a pretty much peerless screen presence.

The Patience Stone - an intriguing if overly wordy drama about a woman in an unnamed Middle Eastern country (the writer / director is Afghan), forced to care for her paralysed, completely unresponsive husband after he's shot in the next. It presents many curious explorations of the challenges of life in the region, with our protagonist subject to near constant inequality and violence. As she begins telling her basically comatose husband her deepest secrets, she slowly begins to become more self-empowered, and the Iranian Golshifteh Farahani again proves herself to be a truly brilliant young actress bravely shattering through cultural taboos (a personal choice that has seen her forced to live and work outside of her homeland). Atiq Rahimi (adapting from his own novel) is clearly a writer before director, and barring a few memorable moments - such as a strongly framed finale - the film doesn't quite leap off the screen. It's also heavy on the monologues - it's almost Farahani's film alone - and is sometimes languish in its pacing. Still, worth a watch, if not quite up there with the best films to have emerged from the region in recent times.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO

Nativity!

I'd seen bits of it before but it was kind of just on in the background. Watched it properly today with my little cousins and it's just a nice family Christmas film. Martin Freeman plays Mr. Maddens, failed actor turned primary school teacher. Put in charge of the school Nativity play he gets drawn into the ongoing rivalry with the local posh school and their nativity, directed by former drama school pal, Gordon Shakespeare. Mr. Maddens tells Gordon that his ex, Jennifer, now a Hollywood producer is bringing her company over to see their nativity and possibly turn it into a film. Mr Poppy, the classroom assistant, overhears and tells everyone at school and the local press that this is happening and events spiral very quickly out of control.

Yes, it's a ridiculous premise, but it's very entertaining, very funny in parts, a little bit moving at times too without trying too hard, and it's just a good film to watch with all the family just as it's getting dark and the Christmas lights are on, maybe a hot chocolate on the go. Harmless Christmas fun for all ages.

Mickeroo

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

Prince Avalanche - Once upon a time David Gordon Green was a director of subtle, poetic and elegant slices of rural Americana. More recently, he's been tossing out broad, wacky stoner comedies (most of which are garbage). Prince Avalanche sort of combines bits and pieces of both, with not unpleasant results. Featuring a possibly career best performance from Paul Rudd, it's a bromance (that word - shudder) about two lads (Emile Hirsch being t'other) painting lines along a seemingly endless stretch of isolated road, surrounded by recently burnt down forests. It's an extraordinarily slight film, it must be said, but it moves along amiably even though it holds few surprises. The best bits are a handful of sequences that dispose of dialogue, the scenes instead surging to life with vibrant editing, cinematography and an energetic score from Explosions in the Sky. Not Gordon Green's best work, but good to see him back on the general right track.

Watched that myself a couple of nights ago, really enjoyed it. Like you say the best bits were the few scenes where the cinematography and music took over but overall it was nice little film with two likeable performances from the leads. I kind of got the impression like there was something going on beneath the surface like

all the other folks they encounter in the wasteland were supposed to be ghosts or echoes or something

but that's just idle speculation. Surprised to see its a remake of a recent Icelandic film.

I watched George Washington a couple of weeks ago to and, though I don't mind some of Green's Hollywood films it's fairly baffling how he ended up doing those films after a debut like that. Looks like it's a bit of a return to form though, word has it he's wrung an excellent performance of Nicholas Cage in Joe due out soon.

Ashamed to say I only saw My Neighbour Tottoro for the first time today on Film Four. Not much I can say that hasn't been said about a true classic in fairness. It was a lot lighter in tone than the likes of Nausicaa, Princess Monoke or Spirited Away. Closer to Kiki's Delivery Service type Miyazaki I suppose. I also now know what the South Park guys were riffing on with their Chtulu song too.

DazMarz

Went for an original and a remake today:

The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three (1974)

Starring Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam and Jerry Stiller.

Four colour-coded men (Mr. Blue, Mr. Green, Mr. Brown and Mr. Gray; and you thought that was Tarantino's idea!) board a New York City subway train. Each is wearing a disguise of a hat, false moustache and glasses. Each is armed with a high powered sub-machinegun and a sidearm. They separate the lead car from the train, taking 18 people hostage. Their demand is that $1,000,000 be paid within the hour, or they will kill one hostage for every minute that elapses thereafter.

Lieutenant Zachary Garber (Matthau) of the New York Transit Authority Police Department is the main negotiator. He tries to outwit and out-think the tenacious, brilliant and brutal lead hijacker, Mr. Blue (Shaw).

What makes this film is the humour; the sardonic, world-weary, cynical and darkly humorous New York wit permeates the film. Some of the exchanges between the characters are brilliant and quite hysterical.

This is Matthau's show, no doubt, but he is ably backed by Jerry Stiller as the wise-cracking Lieutenant Ricco Patrone ("who on the weekends works for the Mafia"). The Mayor of New York is a pathetic figure; sniffling with a cold, he comments "Let them keep the train! We got lots of them, we'll never miss it!" and grumbles when he misses part of his game show.

Matthau's foil, Robert Shaw, is icy cold as the mercenary leader who was once a battalion commander in Africa getting paid a fortune. The hijackers themselves are a misfit bunch; Mr. Green (Balsam) is a former subway motorman who was "dismissed with cause" and is thus disgruntled, Mr. Brown is a former armed robber with a stutter and Mr. Grey is a pure psychotic who was too mad for organised crime.

It is taut and well executed. There is genuine tension as the seconds tick by to the deadline; the police scramble to get the money to the hijackers in time before a hostage is killed, the ingenious escape plan of the hijackers, the revelation that there is an undercover NYPD officer amongst the hostages, the tense moments when one of the ESU snipers in the tunnel behind the captive train gets a bit too trigger happy.

This is a wonderful film, one of the best films of the 1970's. It has just the right blend of wonderful dialogue, humour, tension, action and of course a brilliant conclusion. This is a gem and would be a perfect film to watch over the Christmas, to wash away the saccharine nature of Christmas TV films with some good old fashioned New York humour and attitude.

The Taking Of Pelham 123 (2009)

The more famous remake of the above; there was a made-for-TV remake made in 1998.

This time out, we have Denzel Washington, John Travolta, John Turturro and the late, great James Gandolfini.

The basic plot is the same; four men de-couple the lead car of a subway train and hold it to ransom. Minor details are changed around, but the premise is the same. However, the sardonic humour is mostly stripped from it and it is played much more straight than its predecessor. It is much more dramatic and the violence is much more brutal. There is less development of the hijackers (apart from the lead hijacker played by Travolta). The heroes are less clearer as Garber (Denzel Washington; no longer a cop, but now a mere subway dispatcher) is under investigation for corruption and while a nice guy, is a lot less likeable than Matthau's Garber.

There is also the addition of a major plot point; the ransom demanded ($10,000,000 this time out) is merely a distraction from the main aim. The hostage crisis prompts a huge stock market slump and thus are the hijackers able to manipulate this by shorting stocks and making a fortune before making their escape.

The film is also brought into the digital age, with cellphones, Wi-Fi, laptops, webcams and so on all bringing Pelham forward from the 1970's.

While it is a shame to see the light-hearted parts of the predecessor ditched, in the post 9/11 New York, something like this happening would not be treated with such a darkly humorous approach nowadays. "Terrorism" looms large and there is no room for fun or larking about now.

Travolta is a million miles away from Shaw's cool Mr. Blue; raving, bug-eyed, screaming, bloodthirsty. But scary nonetheless. Washington is an excellent choice as Garber, but is still nowhere near as wonderful as Matthau was in his role.

All in all, while not a patch on the original, I enjoyed this film. Gandolfini is a high point for me as the Mayor who is about to leave office and yet he is doing his best. The look he throws at the reporter who asks him about his divorce while he is en route to the Transit Authority HQ is priceless.

Not a patch on the original, but still a very enjoyable film for me. More straight up action and drama. Travolta might ham it up a bit too much, but I liked his interpretation of the manic "Mr. Blue" (even though he is never referred to a such in the film). A solid, if unspectacular, film that doesn't do anything necessarily wrong, but could have been so much more.



If you want to choose between the two, go for the 1974 version. It is a proper classic and well worth the effort of tracking down.

Gesundheit!

Birneybau

Jeff Who Lives At Home - It took ages to grasp me but when it did, I found it affecting.

Pacific Rim - I'll always give Guillermo Del toro's stuff a go, can usually be relied upon to throw something new into the mix. What impressed me was the colossal scale of the Jaegers and Kaiju, what didn't impress me was the majority of the rest of it.

Now, I watched it on a laptop but I thought a lot of it, indoors mostly, was actually televisual in quality, it looked like it could have been, maybe not a Sci-Fi channel work, but maybe something of the Joss Whedon about it, a "Firefly" perhaps.

Anyway, was ok, if I was to give it a mark out of ten I'd give it a 5.

johnny_ultimate

Mickeroo wrote: »

Watched that myself a couple of nights ago, really enjoyed it. Like you say the best bits were the few scenes where the cinematography and music took over but overall it was nice little film with two likeable performances from the leads. I kind of got the impression like there was something going on beneath the surface like

all the other folks they encounter in the wasteland were supposed to be ghosts or echoes or something

but that's just idle speculation. Surprised to see its a remake of a recent Icelandic film.

I watched George Washington a couple of weeks ago to and, though I don't mind some of Green's Hollywood films it's fairly baffling how he ended up doing those films after a debut like that. Looks like it's a bit of a return to form though, word has it he's wrung an excellent performance of Nicholas Cage in Joe due out soon.

I definitely think the ethereal vibe was intentional. I guess reading more into it, the endless road is intended as some sort of purgatorial state as the pair 'find themselves', encountering a couple of ghostly guides as they do so. But probably not worth overanalysing it, as it's a proudly modest and small-scale film that mostly just uses those aspects to create a distinctive atmosphere.

Green's career trajectory was truly baffling for a few years there. It's understandable that he'd embrace the opportunity to hit something of a big time (especially since he's best friends with Danny McBride, explaining his involvement in Eastbound & Down* / Your Highness / Pineapple Express) and one can only imagine the financial rewards are significantly more appealing. And say what you will about some of those films, but there's no doubt they were all having a blast making them, even when that didn't transfer to the audience

But personally I was immensely frustrated that a filmmaker with the skill of Green could shift so radically in tone and style, with the new films not a patch on his older stuff. Can't even think of any more radical comparisons, actually, and any director could be behind the camera of those films with few obvious repercussions. George Washington is one of the most distinctive, brilliant American debut films of the last few decades - how that director could end up on workman schlock was just bizarre. I was genuinely bamboozled how a talented, knowledgeable director could happily just work away on producing silly stoner comedies. Hopefully the fact he has two films more in-line quality wise with his early stuff will mean that he's back on form, or at least capable of balancing his smaller projects with the larger ones. The latter, after all, could well be directly supporting the former.

*disclaimer: while I haven't seen as much as Eastbound as I'd like, I do understand his work on there is more acclaimed than his work on the big screen efforts.

Mickeroo

I guess Guillermo Del Toro is the only other person that's comparable that I can think of when you look at something like Blade II/Pacific Rim compared to Pans Labrynth or Devil's Backbone, but even then his less thoughtful big budget movies are usually a step above the norm and projects like Hellboy 1 & 2 kind of meet somewhere in the middle between both ends of his creative spectrum.

MilanPan!c

Mickeroo wrote: »

I guess Guillermo Del Toro is the only other person that's comparable that I can think of when you look at something like Blade II/Pacific Rim compared to Pans Labrynth or Devil's Backbone, but even then his less thoughtful big budget movies are usually a step above the norm and projects like Hellboy 1 & 2 kind of meet somewhere in the middle between both ends of his creative spectrum.

Del Toro is someone who I'll always give a chance. But. I'm also never surprised when a movie of his is less than great.

TICKLE_ME_ELMO

De Battre Mon Coeur s'est ArrêtéThe Beat That My Heart Skipped

Thomas is living a life of crime, kind of, I think, when a chance meeting with a former friend of his dead mother reignites his interest in the piano. Torn between his regular life and his dream he struggles to prepare for an audition.

That's basically what it says on the back of the DVD. I suppose that's what happened but it was all very wishy washy. There didn't seem to be any real motivation for Thomas. He literally went from being perfectly happy with his life to being obsessed with being a professional pianist in the space of 2 minutes. I didn't hate it but I didn't love it either. Meh, is what I would say.

Your Sister's Sister

Iris (Emily Blunt) sends best friend Jack (Mark Duplass) to her dad's cabin to spend some time on his own to get his head sorted. When he arrives there Iris' sister Hannah (Rosemary DeWitt) is already there, for similar reasons. They get drunk and sleep together. Next morning Iris arrives and reveals to Hannah that she's in love with Jack.

I liked this a lot. I was expecting your typical boring mumble core type film with unlikable characters and no real plot but I was pleasantly surprised. There's a very basic plot, but it works. I think a lot of the dialogue is improvised but it works well here, the cast seem comfortable with it and with each other and all in all it's an enjoyable 90 minutes.

mike65

Harvey (1950) Charming and amusing from start to finish with some of that James Stewart homespun wisdom mixed in.

krudler

White House Down, as dumb as a bag of hammers, but it's basically the Die Hard sequel that never was. It's also suprisingly funny, with a real tongue in cheek approach that works in it's favour. It's beyond stupid in places and has some pretty woeful CGI but when it;s all played for cheese and laughs it kinda works. Ever want to see the president of the US fire a rocket launcher out of a moving car? this is your movie.