What movie did you watch last night? (20 Viewers)

[Unicron]

Django unchained, was alright like.

Spoiler

Hard going in places, there's one particular scene that recalls Reservoir Dogs whereby Tarantino only hints at a grusome thing going on but does it in a way where you think you're seeing more than you actually are.

 

[David Kronenbourg]

One thing I liked about Django was that it didn't have Eli Roth's fat repugnant head in it

 

[David Kronenbourg]

One thing I liked about Django was that it didn't have Eli Roth's fat repugnant head in it

I also liked the script, the cast, the set pieces, the cinematography, the pace, the action, the editing and all the other things that made it a genuinely great movie. Tarantino's best along with Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown.

 

[hermie]

I also liked the script, the cast, the set pieces, the cinematography, the pace, the action, the editing and all the other things that made it a genuinely great movie. Tarantino's best along with Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown.

Yeah saw this last night, it's great fun. Much better than Inglorious Bastards. Still some distance off Pulp Fiction though.

 

[washingcattle]

Never Sorry.

We Thumpeders often lament and frankly ridicule and guffaw at the the poor treatment of posters on censorship based opinion hating site boards.ie. We do so while posting our daily horns assessing the chances of getting the ride off the various north side burrito venders (you now the one I mean), implying sexual deviancy of various public figure and generally enjoying the glorious freedom of speech that pete; allows us. And may he reign for thousand years. Of course if your going to be an out and out troll it never hurts to suck up and kiss ass from time to time. Oh great and glorious leader pete; may your dropping of the hand always find the sweet caress of moistness.

Of course this freedom of speech is not without it's issues, in recent western history we've seen cases of trial by media where virtually the only evidence has been the accused's facebook or twitter account. Even if the person in question actually commited the crime they're accused of, Like shooting up a movie theatre, or shooting a load of kids at a political retreat, The firt port of call for "investigative news now is no longer the court house steps but facebook. Should i ever find myself on trial and anyone on here shows any prosecutors and threads I've posted in on thumped I'm fucked. Especially if the crime involves Dakota Fanning. This is nothing in comparison to life behind the "great firewall of China" where your twitter can literally lead to your disappearance and imprisonment without trial.

Never Sorry is a film about chinese artist Ai Weiwei, his work, political beliefs, protests and his addiction to twitter. Living as we do in a culture in which free and unpopular speech is inately part of our birth right it is easy to be remiss about fact that we have within our grasp the ability to reach literally billions of people with the movement of our fingers. Ai's political stance and open opposition to the Chinese regime has on occaision landed him in prison and under house arrest and yet he still speaks out through his work and constantly through his twitter account about the Chinese government and it's abuse of power and human rights. Alison Klaymans film tries to investigate Ais beliefs, his past and to chronicle a few months in his life. As an out and out documentary it's not perfect, Ai himself is a charismatic and very open person, he answers difficult questions such as "does your wife mind the fact you have a baby with a younger woman?" with remarkable honesty if not elequency. On the other hand Klaymans reluctance to sit the man down and really interigate him means that in spite of the films, excellent approach work in exploring his past, his family and his work, it' hard to say that you get any fundemental picture of the man as a whole. Instead his Twitter account is carefully reproduced and through this and the roving camera which follows his every move you get a sense that this is an intelligent, genial, likable, sociable man who believes deeply in a new China based on transparency and freedom of speech. What isn't clear is how he deals with the fact that these beliefs may one day lead to his death. Several times during the film Ai tweets or glibly states that the worst "they" can do is make him vanish and yet there is little made of this by the documentrian, obviously this is a topic that Ai shies away from but without this the film doesn't manage to completely nail down the gravitas of exactly what the man is involved in. On the other hand this means that in spite of the amount of footage of him, Ai remains a fascinating and enigmatic which makes the film all the better. Highly recomended.

 

[Cormcolash]

We do so while posting our daily horns assessing the chances of getting the ride off the various north side burrito venders (you now the one I mean),

If you mean the Boojum one, then I am of the opinion that basically all the women working there are pretty fantastic.

 

[washingcattle]

If you mean the Boojum one, then I am of the opinion that basically all the women working there are pretty fantastic.

A gentleman never tells.

 

[Cormcolash]

They are all nice and good-looking like. I'd almost ride the guys too for being sound.

 

[washingcattle]

This turned up in bored at work today

"yaaayyy jets!"

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So inquisitive as I am I looked up this

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The documentary this scene is from.

Rarely shall I ever be this brief. Imagine an anti war essay which is so profoundly brilliant that you are struck dumb by it, and imagine that every single full stop to every sentence in that essay is a gunshot, one which hits it's target and destroys whatever it hits, and that you see the result of that gunshot, unflinching and graphically. I made it to the last 10 minutes when a man asks that his daughters shirt be taken to Washington and thrown in Richard Nixons face, in the background a man seemed to laugh at the anguished father, at that point I couldn't take any more but by then I couldn't look away. This is both a horror movie and the blackest comedy ever filmed. Something not entered into lightly.

 

[washingcattle]

Hanna

Action movies, or action thrillers or action/adventure movies have one inherent flaw. They require sizeable budgets. This means that they have to be made by people with money, and people who have money, in this case large film studios, usually have more money than sense, taste, ambition and intelligence. They also have an eye for fashion and trends which makes them even more dull. So like the grungey plaid shirts that cost $100 back in the nineties or the endless reissues of iWhatevers. Action movies tend to be fads, and rarely advance further than one step at a time.

So first the idea was to make your iPod smaller, then bigger so you could watch a movie on it, now it's a phone then it's a phone and a camera, next it'll be an inflatable bath, but one step at a time. You can't just go from mp3 player to the whole, bath, camera, phone, home cinema all at once. That would just be too mindblowingly awsome and some of us would die of shock.

In action/thriller/adventure terms what happens is that one person makes something original, then they make a few sequels. Because this makes money other companies rush out to make basically the same movie but with one change, so Die Hard is one man vs about 10 terrorists in a building, then ad more terrorists and make it an airport, then make it a boat (Under Seige), A plane (Passenger 57,Con Air, Airforce 1 etc) or a Bus (Speed) or a Ice Hockey Stadium (Sudden Death) and so on until it's one man vs an army in a whole city (Die Hard with a Vengence) and then that's run it's course what's next. It's not that I'm saying this is all bad I like the Die Hard Movies a lot it's just they cast a long shadow over an awful lot of clones.

The latest action thriller to be endlessly copied is The Bourne Identity, it spawned a franchise (which has now somehow dropped the main character and still ploughs forward, though the returns have dwindled) and now Hanna, which is essentially the Bourne Identity with a 15 year old girl. To be honest, it nearly works, but it's got a few serious problems and a few annoying small problems which make stop it from fully hanging together as a film. The main issue is that director Joe Wright (of believe it or not - Pride and Predjudice and Atonement fame) can't decide if he's making a straight ahead action movie or a surreal absurd odyssy and as such this indecision stifles a lot of things that could have elevated the film from drab action clone to little gem. The tone shifts uncomfortably and too often. The dreamy dark absurdity works, I would have prefered sections of the rather banal and predictable if the plot had been sacrificed in favour of going fully towards the Jean Pierre Juenet or Terry Gilliam surrealism which the film constantly hints at but never induldges in. There's plenty of scope for this, you've got the practically feral wunder-kinde lost, in a military bunker, in the sensesory assault Morrocco, through laid back rural Spain on the way towards the metroplois of Berlin and ultimately a creepy abandonned Fairground, along the way she finds herself travelling with some hippy drop outs and avoiding a hitman who may be a sex pest. I mean it's all there, but what should have been a down right fucking weird pitch black piece of other-worldy fantasy instead gets lost under the "arses on seats pressure" of a by the numbers thrller. Pity really because Saoirse Ronan seems to think she's in a much better movie and does her best to play the titular hero as both innocent and powerful, think Nell mixed with the Terminator, it's a pity, her performance deserves a better movie. There are other annoying flaws like pacing and structure but the most annoying thing is the musical score by the Chemical Brothers. I like the Chemical Brothers, in fact I'd even say I'd like the score if I heard it in isolation from the film, however, because their style of dance music is classically 4/4 time at 120 beats per minute fair, the film seems to be cut to the soundtrack rather than the other way round and as a result the action sequences seem overly choreographed and come out looking more like a music video than a sequence in a movie. As a result I found the whole thing a little silly. A shame really, but this is what happens when cinema and finance meet. (Or maybe I'm reading too much into what isn't a very good movie) Anyone who has ever seen the extras on Alien 3 will know what I mean.

 

[nlgbbbblth]

The Harry O pilot. The first one with Marianna Hill and Margot Kidder. Downbeat.

 

[xsteox]

Django unchained. silly, thrashy, loads of fun.
The Delta force. Retarded ott 80's propaganda/action film. Fun (if you can live with Chuck Norris & Lee marvin killing "terrorist" Arabs) or Shite, if you're a weirdo who actually want any sort of intelligence in your 80's action films.

 

[Psycho Punk]

Saw Django Unchained, great fun. So many great supporting actors: Bruce Dern, Don Johnson, Don Stroud and even Tarantino himself.

 

[David Kronenbourg]

Cherry Falls. Derivative slasher movie about a serial killer preying on virgins. The teenage inhabitants of a small town decide to hold an orgy to lose their respective virginities and avoid being killed. Nothing new here. Despite this premise there's very little sex or gore in the movie.

 

[CinnamonBoy]

An Affair to Remember. Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr star. It's all over the shop but there's enough nice things in it to get one through a hungover Saturday afternoon in January and emerge with a pleasing glow.

 

[Unicron]

Cherry Falls. Derivative slasher movie about a serial killer preying on virgins. The teenage inhabitants of a small town decide to hold an orgy to lose their respective virginities and avoid being killed. Nothing new here. Despite this premise there's very little sex or gore in the movie.

I remember that, pretty much spot on. Poor auld Brittany Murphy.

Zero Dark Thirty, thought it was quite good. Don't agree with the glorifying torture criticisms, I'd be more cheesed off with it if they had glossed it over.

 

[Cormcolash]

Saw The Hobbit. It was great. I loved it.

Saw Lincoln. It was pretty good. DDL was class as always. Don't like the pacing of it though, and the tone, fuck Spielberg is what I'm saying here.

Saw The Last Stand. FANTASTIC. If you like stupid action films that make no sense. Like me.

 

[jonah]

I watched The Innkeepers and Sinister. Both exceeded my expectations. The cast, performances and general tone of The Innkeepers really worked for me, though felt like they sort of dropped the ending.
Sinister was good, scared the living bejesus out of me. I thought it would be awful, but it was not.

 

[Psycho Punk]

I watched The Innkeepers and Sinister. Both exceeded my expectations. The cast, performances and general tone of The Innkeepers really worked for me, though felt like they sort of dropped the ending.
Sinister was good, scared the living bejesus out of me. I thought it would be awful, but it was not.

I was in two minds about Sinister but I'll try it on your recommendation. I feel like a scary movie right now.

 

[Psycho Punk]

Just watched Sinister, pretty good. Damn scary!