What have you watched recently: Electric Boogaloo

ButtersSuki

Dave147 wrote: »

The way you feel about The Following is how I feel about The Blacklist, I just can't understand why anyone is watching it..

I started The Shield recently, despite being 13 years old am really enjoying it.

Film wise, Taken 3 is just awful, I would encourage everyone to avoid it, John Wick was good, but not as good as I was hoping it would be. Not quite on the same level the original Taken was at. Watching Dumb and Dumber To tonight with herself and might give Nightcrawler a go after that.

Haven't looked at The Blacklist yet but I really enjoyed The Shield. I still think it's criminally (apologies for the awful pun) under-rated. Some great performances from Michael Chiklis and Walton Goggins in particular as regulars and Glenn Close and Forest Whitaker in later series. Enjoy it, wish I had something as good as that to sink my teeth into now!

Arkaron

ButtersSuki wrote: »

Haven't looked at The Blacklist yet but I really enjoyed The Shield. I still think it's criminally (apologies for the awful pun) under-rated. Some great performances from Michael Chiklis and Walton Goggins in particular as regulars and Glenn Close and Forest Whitaker in later series. Enjoy it, wish I had something as good as that to sink my teeth into now!

Have you tired The Wire or Luther?

ButtersSuki

Arkaron wrote: »

Have you tired The Wire or Luther?

Yep, more than once too! And The Sopranos….and pretty much everything else! Think I might start the long-planned rematch of Breaking Bad.

pq0n1ct4ve8zf5

Boyhood Finally got around to this. I'm not sure how coherent I can be about how much I liked it. And I don't know if I can talk about it without using the word "novelistic". I'm an absolute sucker for Richard Linklater anyway, but wow this really affected me far more than I thought it would. I was sat there after it ended for a good few seconds just kind of stunned or having difficulty returning to the world outside of the film or something. The fact that he can produce that effect not through big epic set pieces or horribly disturbing violence but just through depicting the unexceptional lives of decent people is...I dunno, I did say I can't be coherent about this!

Schadenfreudia

Panic Room (2002) with Jodie Foster. First time to see it; much better than I expected, well worth a watch.

And not as creepy as the musical score.

Del.Monte

"Secret State"(2012) Channel 4 mini-series on Netflix. A political thriller starring Gabriel Byrne.



If you're a fan of Gabriel Byrne - I am since the Riordans - or if you enjoyed "Edge of Darkness" (the original one) or "House of Cards" (the original one) this is for you. My only complaint was that it wasn't long enough - despite running to almost four hours.

As an aside, I couldn't help thinking how much better Byrne would have been in the title role of Jack Taylor in the TV series of that name rather than Iain Glen. 10/10

FloatingVoter

^ Thats a remake(ish) of this....

A Very British Coup with our own Ray McAnally

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094576/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_7

Well worth the watch for anyone who remembers 80s fun and games.


For myself I watched The Rewrite last night. Yes, it's got Hugh Grant as lead..... but also JK Simmons, Marisa Tomei and Allison Janney. A relaxing two hours in good company.

FloatingVoter

FloatingVoter wrote: »

^ Thats a remake(ish) of this....

A Very British Coup with our own Ray McAnally

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094576/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_7

Well worth the watch for anyone who remembers 80s fun and games.


For myself I watched The Rewrite last night. Yes, it's got Hugh Grant as lead..... but also JK Simmons, Marisa Tomei and Allison Janney. A relaxing two hours in good company.

I never understand that hatred Hugh Grant gets, he may have the onscreen presence of a deck chair thrown into a garden party but when he plays a bit of a bastard he's always good fun and his voice role in Pirates An Adventure with Scientists is brilliant. He's also one of the few actors whom if you met looks exactly like he does onscreen, William Goldman said that he alongside Paul Newman were the only actors he ever met who do. Not sure how it's relevant but hey.

FloatingVoter

Deleted User wrote: »

I never understand that hatred Hugh Grant gets, he may have the onscreen presence of a deck chair thrown into a garden party but when he plays a bit of a bastard he's always good fun and his voice role in Pirates An Adventure with Scientists is brilliant. He's also one of the few actors whom if you met looks exactly like he does onscreen, William Goldman said that he alongside Paul Newman were the only actors he ever met who do. Not sure how it's relevant but hey.

Well said....and I've never been to a garden party where someone wasn't complaining about the lack of deckchairs.
Apart from that one on the Titanic....oh well.

SarahBM

Just finished season 2 of Ripper Street! It's brilliant! Can't wait to watch season three. I cannot believe I missed out on it first time round!

FloatingVoter

SarahBM wrote: »

Just finished season 2 of Ripper Street! It's brilliant! Can't wait to watch season three. I cannot believe I missed out on it first time round!

I've seen season 3. It ran on Amazon and went online (ahem!). It's better, deeper and darker than the previous two. Bring your brain to the party. Each episode more or less depends on the last this time with the usual villain of the week pieces running on top. Hopefully it'll air here in a couple of months.

Pierce_1991

City Lights (1931)

First Chaplin or Silent movie I've ever seen. Just trying to work through the imdb 250 at the moment and have kind of been putting these types of films off. I'm always open to watching anything but when I went to watch a film off the list I always fancied a more modern 'easier watch' first. Loved this though, glad I watched it and I'm looking forward to giving a few more Chaplin films a watch. Particularly excited about watching The Great Dictator. I'd probably give this a 9 out of 10.

e_e

Nice. Check out Modern Times next, still an amazingly funny and pointed movie.

FloatingVoter

Chaplin created the entire bloody industry / artform / whatjamacallit. Before him it was just a thing to go see alongside the bearded lady at the circus. After him came art. You can argue about Harold Lloyd / Buster Keaton as silent clowns all day long....but ultimately Chaplin took the moving picture seriously and demanded we do the same. Evening if laughing was allowed.

Sad Professor

FloatingVoter wrote: »

Chaplin created the entire bloody industry / artform / whatjamacallit. Before him it was just a thing to go see alongside the bearded lady at the circus. After him came art. You can argue about Harold Lloyd / Buster Keaton as silent clowns all day long....but ultimately Chaplin took the moving picture seriously and demanded we do the same. Evening if laughing was allowed.

I think you might be giving him too much credit. Chaplin’s work was brilliant but stagey. He may have been the greater performer and the bigger screen presence, but as filmmakers Lloyd and especially Keaton were consistently far more cinematic, even if they never achieved the same emotional link with the audience that Chaplin did.

FloatingVoter

Sad Professor wrote: »

I think you might be giving him too much credit. Chaplin’s work was brilliant but stagey. He may have been the greater performer and the bigger screen presence, but as filmmakers Lloyd and especially Keaton were consistently far more cinematic, even if they never achieved the same emotional link with the audience that Chaplin did.

I was expecting that and I agree with you totally in terms of what we see in front of camera. I meant the business part of show business. Universal Artists. The lunatics running the asylum.
The entire concept of opening out sketches and turning them into 70 - 90 minute scripts that begin, middle and end. Himself and DW Griffith (he of the Ku Klux Klan epic) at roughly the same time were exploring the possibility of using film not as a magic trick with girls tied to railway tracks but as a way of getting grown-up theatre to the masses.
Sure, it looks quaint now...but without those initial daring attempts we don't get Battleship Potemkin a few years later. He looms over all of cinema. Not as a direct influence but as a founding father.

The Strawman Argument

Shoah
AARRRGGH, I had a huge post typed up ranting and raving about the history channel and the browser crashed!
It's very, very good (good?). The whole thing was put together a lot more professionally than I expected (considering Lanzmann doesn't seem to have done much else); asides from some annoying subtitle stuff with translators and a disproportionately negative attitude towards the people of Poland (at least it seemed like he was out to get them in particular far more than anyone else), I thought it was a huge achievement and it totally justifies the reputation it has. Tested my patience far less than I expected it to as well (the last hour was a bit of a slog for some reason though).
Em, yeah, overall I think most everyone should give it a shot, especially if you've ever been at all interested in watching it.


Would love to hear other people's opinions on it too. Are Lanzmann's other Shoah-related releases worth checking out?


Also, not really related, but there's another holocaust documentary called A Film Unfinished that I watched a bit ago that I'd also recommend. It's much shorter and very focused on a much smaller thing (it's about the shooting of a propaganda film based in the warsaw ghetto).

FloatingVoter

^ Its a documentary account. A piece of living history. I look on it as an archive. The edited versions can be found elsewhere. At 8 to 9 hours in length this is not the movie where the guy gets the girl. It isn't the history book you pick up and read then cast aside. It is what it is.
Words are failing me. I've just finished Primo Levi's "If This Is A Man". It's not fair to compare it to other books. You go into this knowing that it will change your perceptions of what man is capable of inflicting on man. And if you have a soul, you leave at the other end a better person. And hopefully wiser to the ways of evil.

johnny_ultimate

I feel like the difference between Chaplin and Keaton is that the former used the camera to film jokes, whereas the latter used the camera as part of the jokes.

I love Chaplin, and I'd definitely agree his films pack more of an emotional punch (indeed, pure storytelling, however sentimental it is at times, is almost his biggest strength - some of his close-ups are devastating stuff). But many of his most iconic moments are fairly 'static' - just the camera, in a room, pointed in the direction of his routine. Keaton was much more dynamic, his camera rolling along wherever the gag went. And it went some crazy places - The General, after all, is basically a film of constant momentum.

Chaplin's place in cinema history is undeniable, and his films almost always a delight. But there's just something about Keaton's filmmaking that takes it to another level for me, and he achieves pure cinematic comedy in a way I'm not sure anybody else - bar IMO Jacques Tati - has.

As for Shoah? Guess I'll just copy and paste what I wrote after watching it. I haven't gotten around to watching Lanzmann's other work yet, but certainly will be picking up Eureka's After Shoah set at some point (I'd go with the Blu-Ray, but can imagine it'd be a good few years before I try to tackle Shoah itself again!)

The experience, the sheer overwhelming force of viewing Shoah is near impossible to describe - appropriate, given the subject matter explored is one of the most shocking and incomprehensible chapters in human history. Its 550 minute running time (longer in some territories) is dominating, but the insights and depths hidden within make it worthy of the time investment.

Rarely has a documentary so rigidly adhered to the director's stylistic choices. There is no archive footage. There's no explanatory voiceover - although many scenes do have voices over them, albeit not of the omnipotent narrator sort. There's not even any music, bar a handful of diegetic moments (some of the most evocative in the whole film, it must be said). Lanzmann instead believes in the power of the viewer's imagination, the film instead consisting almost entirely of talking head interviews and contemporary (well, early 1980s) footage of several locations of areas where the Nazi's mass extermination of Jewish people took place - Auschwitz and Treblinka, most prominently. The results are startling, the finished film almost conclusively proving Lanzmann's thesis on documentary construction, at least in relation to this subject.

Taking in a wide range of voices - eye witnesses, survivors, perpetrators and an historian, among a few others - the film delves into the terrifying processes developed into the systematic genocide that was the Holocaust. From the early days when Nazi officers used jerry-rigged trucks as improvised killing machines, to the later years when the machines grew more specific and 'efficient' (what a horrible word to use in these circumstances) it's an at times uncomfortably detailed exploration of the reality of a deplorable era. Lanzmann gives space to voices discussing everything from the train controllers & drivers to the often futile resistance efforts that arose in concentration camps. In detailing in minute the systems and techniques developed in the 1940s for the 'final solution', Shoah's matter-of-fact approach manages to be much more disturbing than any red dress jutting out of a sea of monochrome.

Some of the testimonies are shocking, some rile the blood (such as the elusive responses of former Nazis, or the barely disguised apathy and indifference of the citizens of towns and villages near the camp), almost all deeply moving or affecting in some way. There are moments among the most devastating in all of cinema, documentary or otherwise. One survivor, a barber named Abraham Bomba, presents his testimony with a stony-faced resolve, until one particular line of inquiry causes him to breakdown and struggle to regain his composure. Another (Jan Karski) hasn't even been asked the first question before he needs to leave the room, the emotional impact of his dreadful memories of the Warsaw ghetto saying as much as the memories themselves.

It's difficult viewing for any number of reasons, and even when they go on for long stretches at time they inevitably lead to some sort of powerful catharsis. Lanzmann's occasionally persistent interview manner - albeit justified by his reportedly careful behind-the-scenes treatment of subjects - does sometimes come across as overly harsh, but the resulting responses are typically worthy of the risk. Interestingly, an essay accompanying the Masters of Cinema DVD release notes on one occasion, while surreptitiously filming a former Nazi, Lanzmann was actually assaulted. If ever a director's commitment to his art was absolute...

The interviews form the backbone of the film, individual ones frequently being granted a half hour or more of uninterrupted screentime, particularly in the more solemnly paced 'Second Era' (the film being broadly divided into two halves). But there's more to Shoah than just talking heads. Of particular note are the tracking cameras that trace their way around the remains (literally and figuratively) of the concentration camps, evoking a spectral atmosphere that's equal parts disturbing and poetic. Abandoned railway lines are the film's most common visual motif, visualising the frequent remembrances of Jewish people being transported en masse via train. In another powerful directorial decision, the aforementioned barber recounts being forced to cut people's hair before they were sent into the gas chamber - an account made more provocative by the fact that Lanzmann chooses to have Bomba casually cutting a customer's hair. Accompanying the interviews, such sequences allow Shoah to become a film where history does not come 'alive' in the traditional sense, but certainly reaches deep within both the viewers' and interviewees' souls in a way more traditional documentary techniques could not possibly manage. It's impossible to fully comprehend the scale of the Shoah through a single film alone, and Lanzmann makes no claims of his film being definitive (indeed, he's even revisited the subject as recently as this year's The Last of the Unjust). But no film has ever communicated the horror, the scale and the specifics of the Holocaust in such an unforgettable way.

I can't add much more to the discourse surrounding Shoah, and honestly I probably shouldn't have to. Despite the fact there are many pieces of excellent writing on this remarkable cinematic achievement, Shoah is a film so bold, so distinctive, so powerful, that it speaks for itself. Clear a day: this is a film that needs your complete attention.

Schadenfreudia

Better Call Saul, the current Breaking Bad spin-off on Netflix.

Watched the pilot - kind of oily plot, hard to get a grip on it. Or maybe I wasn't fully sober.

I'll report back....

LaVail

Nightcrawler (2014)

Decided for some reason to watch a movie tonight. I found movies over the last couple of years to be quite boring and predictable so I veered towards watching tv series (House of Cards, Breaking Bad, Fargo etc)

This film restored my faith though. I found it a fantastic watch.
Jake Gyllenhaal played the sociopath part brilliantly. Some fantastic lines and acting on his behalf.

Going to watch "End of Watch" now starring him also as I've read it's another decent watch.

the_monkey

Boyhood - they say it took 12 years to make - felt like 12 years watching it too - awful overrated shîte

Frank O. Pinion

the_monkey wrote: »

Boyhood - they say it took 12 years to make - felt like 12 years watching it too - awful overrated shîte

Stand-up comic or professional critic? You sir, have talent for both.

charlie_says

Watched over the last few days:

The Way of the Gun (2000)

Slick crime thriller with Ryan Phillipe and Benicio Del Toro (whom I think is great in nearly everything he's been that I've seen). Great script, has a fantastic opening scene and probably my favourite gun battle of all time at the end. Quite a good score. A personal favourite of mine, have watched it many times. Think it would make a good play actually, it's kind of a 90's Western.

Patrick's Day (2014)

The IMDB plot synopsis is quite succinct for this drama: When a young man with mental health issues becomes intimate with a suicidal flight attendant, his obsessive mother enlists a dysfunctional cop to separate them.

Thought this was very decent, well acted and refreshing to see another Irish film that doesn't fixate on the fact that it's in Ireland with Irish people in it. One or two stand out scenes one being very harsh and jarring and the final one is emotional and gripping.

On a funny note the cinema people gave us the wrong ticket and we ended up in an empty screening of Taken 3 and none of us noticed the IFB certificate or the ticket name so we started watching it. It was so shockingly bad in the first 1 minute even before the title came up we left having a chuckle at how terrible it looked and piled into Patrick's Day next door. I'd planned to avoid Taken 3, but that experience only redoubled my lack of interest in it.

Timecrimes (2007)

A cracker of a Spanish movie. Definitely my favourite time travel film. Can't really say much about it without giving away the plot but a guy's curiosity and cunning gets him involved in a bizarre day of time travel. Quite unique in the way that a nearly every mundane scene is totally integral to the plot and causality. Highly recommended it. Also for subtitle haters it doesn't have a ton of dialogue.

ButtersSuki

The Debt Undercover Mossad agents sent to apprehend an ex-Nazi Doctor in 1960s Berlin and how the mission impacted on all their lives 30 years later. Had relatively high-hopes for this as I had heard good reports, and despite a promising start the last act is poor and more than a little too far fetched. Helen Mirren as usual is rock solid, but the standout for me was Jessica Chastain's performance - an actress who up to this point I've really been wondering what all the fuss was about - but she's excellent in this. A passable thriller, you could do worse. 6/10.

Edge of Darkness Having quite enjoyed the Mel Gibson movie (which likely suffered critically and at the box office due to Gibson's public "behavior" at the time) take on this 1980s BBC series, I decided to record the source material when it appeared on BBC4 last year but only got around to watching it last week. The plot holds up well, though obviously things like special effects and the stunts do look quite dated at times. Definitely worth it for Bob Peck and Joe Don Baker's performances, as well as seeing a very young Joanne Whalley and Tim McInnerny and loads of other British actors you'll recognise from your youth if you're over a certain age. A strong 7/10.

Barna77

The Little Death
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2785032/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Australian comedy about couples' attitudes to sex. Some awkward moments but a skype video call was hilarious.

LaVail

Starred Up

Jack O'Connell plays a violent prisoner who end up in the same prison as his father.

Gritty and intense, well worth the watch

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2567712/

Red Wolf

The Iceman - hadn't hears of it before watching. Pretty decent gangster movie.

Pierce_1991

Network (1976)

Continuing on my quest through the imdb 250 watched this one tonight. Big Robert Duvall fan and he was excellent as ever. Found it to be a strange one, entertaining but the love story felt a bit tacked on. 7/10

robisjack

...Le Feu Follet (1963), The United States of Leland (2003) and Grave of the Fireflies (1988) last night and they were the three most depressing movies I have ever seen in my life and I have seen a lot! They three of them hit me like an emotional sledgehammer. I don't know if it is possible to pick three more depressing movies to watch simultaneously.



Le Feu Follet (1963) aka The Fire Within

The Fire Within is truly the quintessential study of existential anxiety in film; it contains themes such as misery, hopelessness and alienation. Erik Satie provides the melancholy and evocative score for the film which includes his Gymnopédie No. 1 and Gnossienne Nos. 1, 2 and 3 which really adds to the mood of the film. This is truly a remarkable film not to be missed.



The United States of Leland (2003)

The United States of Leland is a deeply sad and thought-provoking movie that really stirs an emotion in the viewer. I found the main character; Leland P. Fitzgerald to be an incredibly insightful emotional person. While I can't condone his actions at the same time I can feel the pain of Leland. I think The United States of Leland deliberately intended to achieve this; to confuse the viewer by portraying this "moral muddle" as Roger Ebert descried. The United States of Leland in my opinion is a very underrated movie that the critics did not fully grasp. Ryan Gosling must be commended for his heart breaking performance as Leland P. Fitzgerald.



Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

Grave of the Fireflies is just a heart-breaking film that will stir a lot of emotions in the viewer. A genuine masterpiece of cinema, one of the greatest animations ever made in my opinion. It's an unforgettable and emotionally "haunting" film; it is beautiful and painful at the same time.


Have you seen these movies and if so what did you think of them?