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I quite liked Drive, even if Carey Mulligan is far too good to be wasted in roles like this. But Gosling and Brooks are excellent, and I love the deceptively slow-cooking feel of it - the bastard lovechild of Michael Mann and Jim Jarmusch. Violent without ever being cartoonish, calm without ever being safe, dreamlike with intense flashes into nightmare... Liked it a lot, actually. +
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My fave flick that I saw in the theater this year. Loved the Tangerine Dream-like synth score. The redhead from Mad Men was wasted in it too. Albert Brooks was great as the bad guy too.
 
The Hangover Part II. Very much a cut-and-paste effort. You could easily watch this having not seen Part I. Conversely, you could just watch the first film and stop there.
 
Catching up on some 2011 movies:

Cave Of Forgotten Dreams. Werner Herzog does a documentary on the world's oldest cave paintings (35,000 years old) before the cave is permanently closed for tourists, so it's the only chance you'll ever have of seeing them. As always, Herzog is a great narrator and thinker, though it wouldn't have hurt for him to bring in some more people to discuss life back then, but man, those images...

Red White And Blue: One of the most harrowing and non-sensationalist violent movies I've seen come out of the US in 10 years, at least. Lenny, if you haven't watched this, do. Noah Taylor continues to be on fantastic form.

Martha Marcy May Marlene. I will now tell you that the Olsen twins' little sister is one of the best actresses of 2011. Stop laughing. I mean it. Elizabeth Olsen should get an Oscar nod for playing a character with four names given by other people and only a howling void underneath.

Melancholia and The Tree Of Life are kind of yin to each other's yang. von Trier and Malick disagree on absolutely everything. Between the two of them, they say something profound about the nature of humanity, though I'm not sure exactly what... we need a von Trier-Malick Celebrity Deathmatch to determine that, methinks. Two flawed but mostly incredible movies.

We Are The Night. There haven't been many German vampire movies since Herzog's Nosferatu. That was a good thing; the world certainly didn't need this mess.
 
Cave Of Forgotten Dreams. Werner Herzog does a documentary on the world's oldest cave paintings (35,000 years old) before the cave is permanently closed for tourists, so it's the only chance you'll ever have of seeing them. As always, Herzog is a great narrator and thinker, though it wouldn't have hurt for him to bring in some more people to discuss life back then, but man, those images...
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Dammit, you beat me to it, I just finished watching this one. :star4: He's had a busy year, looking forward to seeing his second doc this year, Into the Abyss.

The Countess ~ Julie Delpy wrote, directed, and stars in this biopic about the infamous Countess. Looks great, but that's about it. Accents are all over the place. :star2:
 
We Have A Pope was surprisingly fun... for the first half. Picture it: the pope has died, the cardinals assemble to pick a new one ("Not me, Lord!" "Not me, Lord!" "Please, Lord, not me!"), white smoke comes out, and the next white-haired man is poised to step out and bless the masses... except then he does what many of us would do in the same situation: freaks out, screams in terror and runs away. Cue the cardinals wandering aimlessly around the Vatican trying to look busy while everyone tries to figure out a way to get the newly elected pontiff to accept a responsibility he never really wanted. It's a great idea for a comedy that wants to actually say something as well (not entirely un-Kaurismäkish). Sadly, that's really about as far as the people behind the movie had thought, and it shows in the second half when the movie runs out of ideas, slowly winds down and resorts to long scenes of "This is funny because you don't picture a cardinal doing this". Too bad. :star3:
 
beer good said:
Catching up on some 2011 movies:

Cave Of Forgotten Dreams. Werner Herzog does a documentary on the world's oldest cave paintings (35,000 years old) before the cave is permanently closed for tourists, so it's the only chance you'll ever have of seeing them. As always, Herzog is a great narrator and thinker, though it wouldn't have hurt for him to bring in some more people to discuss life back then, but man, those images...
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It was fantastic, to say the least. 3D was amazing.


We saw the new version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo yesterday. Very enjoyable, as good, perhaps better in some respects than the Swedish version.
 
pontalba said:
It was fantastic, to say the least. 3D was amazing.


We saw the new version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo yesterday. Very enjoyable, as good, perhaps better in some respects than the Swedish version.
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I saw this last weekend and liked it a lot. Very dark and fast paced. I never read the book but I got the feeling they were trying to cram about 4 hours worth of story into about 2 hrs and 40 minutes, which made it a little challenging for me to follow. Had trouble keeping the family members straight and the deal with the money laundering tycoon seemed a little bit slapped together. It was very well acted and the characters were interesting to say the least.
 
Just got back from a screening of Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1924) and... holy moly. Apparently his original cut was 10 hours and the studio then chopped it down to 2 1/2 and threw the rest in the trash, which raises all sorts of questions about all the subplots that must have been lost. But what's left is, a lot of the time, a brilliant little drama that's as far from the clichéd image of 20s silent films (either big epics, simple love stories or slapstick) as you can get. A (fairly) realistic, serious, and often brilliantly shot allegorical family drama about three people who should have been wrong for each other from the beginning, builds from slight creaking to full-on disaster and ends with one of the most beautiful black-and-white shots I've seen in a long time - our "hero" at the end of his trail,
alone in the desert, handcuffed to a corpse as the sun blasts down
. And no, it's not a Western.

Having live music by a band who know their Tom Waits doesn't hurt either.

:star5:
 
The Robber ~ based on a true story about an Austrian world class marathoner who had a side hobby as a bank robber back in the 80's. There's one great sequence in this where he's robbing a bank, the teller spills most of the cash out, so what does he do instead of gathering it up? He sprints 2 blocks down the street and robs another bank. :star3:

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory ~ third doc on the West Memphis Three that covers the past decade up until their release last year. The judge who denied all of Echoll's appeals is now a state senator. :star5:
 
The Innkeepers is Ti West's (House Of The Devil) new movie. And yep, it shows; even if it's set in the present day, it has the same feel of being a throwback to a more innocent but still damn effective age of horror, with long takes where suspense and dread are built slowly without a single drop of blood. If I didn't know it was based on a supposedly haunted hotel West stayed in while shooting House Of The Devil (and it is in fact filmed at that very hotel), I'd swear West had watched Paranormal Activity and went "...OK, that's not how you do it."

The basic story, and it is very basic: two hotel clerks (Sara Paxton and Pat "I kinda look like Simon Pegg" Healy) are manning the desk of an all-but-abandoned New England hotel during the last weekend before it closes down and gets bulldozed. Since they have almost no guests to take care of, he talks her into taking this last chance to try and find proof that the hotel is indeed haunted - he's seen the ghost several times, but never been able to capture it on film or tape. And so they take shifts, walking around the spooky old hotel mic in hand, looking for something... This being a Ti West movie, of course, it's no surprise that at first they find nothing. The trouble comes when they start finding Nothing.

It's an intriguing effort, and there are some really effective scenes, but ultimately I don't like it quite as much as his previous movie. For starters, Sara Paxton really isn't a very good actress; she's stuck playing an Ellen Page sort of role here and plays it like she was mainlining caffeine, which jars with the rest of the movie. There's also one or two fake scares too many that defuse the dread rather than add to it. Still, once West does get to work and stops trying to write hipster dialogue, it... well, works.

Oh, and I should mention Kelly McGillis too, who seems to be having a bit of a career resurgence 25 years after Top Gun; she does good stuff here, just like she did in Stake Land last year.

Bit of a disappointment, but doesn't hurt. :star3:

Oh, and I also watched a Japanese movie called Underwater Love, which is... hang on, let's see: a low-budget softcore porn musical about water spirits and factory workers, all shot by Christopher Doyle (Hero). Think Dancer In The Dark crossed with Creature From The Black Lagoon. It's... unique, to say the least. :star3:
 
Insidious.
I DO NOT normally watch horror movies because I am a sissy. I had seen bits and pieces of a few modern ones lately flipping through channels and thought I would be okay watching one.
This scared the bejeezus out of me. I had to turn it off. I am very curious to hear from any of the many horror fans here what they thought of this one. Did anyone else find this one to be scary?
 
753C said:
Insidious.
I DO NOT normally watch horror movies because I am a sissy. I had seen bits and pieces of a few modern ones lately flipping through channels and thought I would be okay watching one.
This scared the bejeezus out of me. I had to turn it off. I am very curious to hear from any of the many horror fans here what they thought of this one. Did anyone else find this one to be scary?
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Hmm. I thought it was more suspenseful than scary. Honestly I felt the movie lost its way at the end, although I can't think of a better conclusion.

Let's see . . . the last few films I watched were:

-The Help :star3:

-Warrior :star3:

-Breaking Dawn, Part I :star1: 1 /2
 
Anamnesis said:
Honestly I felt the movie lost its way at the end, although I can't think of a better conclusion
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I wouldn't know about that. I turned it off half way through. :lol:
I'll have to try to watch the rest of it sometime. When I'm not alone. And it is daylight.
 
^ The only cure is to sit through 3 horror films, one after the other. After that you'll never be scared again. : )
 
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