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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?
Click to expand...

This one was just really odd for me. Sometimes it was honestly suspenseful and/or jumpy, but there were also several moments that I found to be unintentionally funny (like the opening credits with the overdone music, seeing what was after the kid, the gas mask, etc.).

Overall, despite its faults, I did enjoy this movie and wouldn't mind seeing it again. It was a unique take on an over-done horror idea.


As for the most recent movies I've watched:

The Muppets :star5: (I was smiling with pure joy the entire time, honestly I thought it was perfect!)

Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows :star5: (loved it, thought it was even better than the first!)

Heathers :star2: (I don't get this movie, I was pretty disappointed after all the cult-classic hype it has)

Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides :star4: (I thought this was refreshing after 2 and 3 *even though I loved them too, they did kind of warp characterizations and tried too hard to be epic imo*, and loved seeing Jack as the focus and him being true his "Curse Of The Black Pearl" self. Not as good as the first movie, but still a delight to watch and I can't wait for the next one!)
 
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?
Click to expand...

I found the first half quite scary but then when the explanations kicked in I found it ludicrous and completely not scary. Maybe you should have stayed till the end?
 
I watched Troll Hunter last night. Once I got over my intial WTF? reaction to seeing lumbering trolls, I quite enjoyed it. The end was a little disappointing though.

Problem is, none of these hand-held camera/we found the tape but the makers gone types of film will never be better than The Blair Witch Project and just all feel a piss-poor second.
 
Had a 24-hour movie marathon with some friends. Some of the more memorable moments:

Destiny (Fritz Lang, 1921): Not quite on the level of the masterpieces he would go on to produce a few years later, but a fascinating little episodic movie - a woman tries to win back her fiancés life by [-]playing chess[/-] making a deal with death: travel back in time, revisit their love story as it would have played out in other times, and try to change history. Largely an excuse to wow the audience with scenery and special effects (and they're really quite impressive for the time), but solid storytelling as well. Fans of The Thief Of Baghdad should check it out, Fairbanks nicked a lot from Lang.

Tarzan The Ape Man (WS Van Dyke, 1932). I'd seen this before, and forgotten how... OK, it's Tarzan, it's supposed to be a bit hoky, but that it was this openly racist and that the special effects were this poor (even by 1930s standards) I'd somehow managed to repress. Iconic performance by Weissmüller, obviously, and the role of "clueless non-verbal apeman utterly baffled by the existence of women" fits his acting abilities nicely. Worth a couple of laughs amidst the cringing.

Titanic (Werner Klingler, 1943). Yes, it's the first attempt to make a cinematic epic about the Titanic disaster... and the fact that it was filmed in Nazi Germany during the war specifically to show how greedy and incompetent the English were should give you an idea of what it's like. Still, impressive in a certain teutonic way, and at least it's better than Cameron's version.

Wages Of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953). Holy shit. How did I never see this before? Four down-on-their-luck Europeans, stranded in a dead-end South American town, take on a job of driving two trucks full of nitroglycerin across a mountain range. Simple enough, you'd think; Clouzot, and a fantastic cast headed by Yves Montand, turn it into one of the most white-knuckle thrillers I've seen in a long time.

I Am Curious (Yellow) (Vilgot Sjöman, 1968). Was seen as incredibly risque, both in terms of storytelling, sex and politics when it came out. Has actually held up surprisingly well; yeah, it's almost embarrassingly naive once or twice, and the bits where it turns into metafiction of itself are probably unnecessary, but a genuinely intriguing movie and still depressingly accurate in some of the issues it tackles. Glad I saw this again.

Hausu (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977). This is, quite simply, the best film I've seen in my entire life. An utterly deranged ghost story about seven young schoolgirls who go to visit a haunted house owned by an aunt of one of the girls, and... let's just say wackiness ensues. Boy oh boy oh boy, does it ensue. Watch this. Thank me later.

Birdemic: Shock And Terror (James Nguyen, 2008). This is, quite simply, possibly the worst film I've seen in my entire life. Nguyen apparently tried to make a horror movie that would fuse his two favourite movies - Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. With no budget. And even less talent. I'm honestly not sure what's worse: the "acting", the script, the special effects, or the completely insane plot that's 45 minutes of awful romcom that suddenly does a 90-degree turn into awful horror movie. The fact that it all looks like it was filmed with a camera phone doesn't help, of course. The fact that the sound engineer was apparently happy to just toss a mic somewhere in the vicinity of the "actors" and trust his luck does help - in that we don't have to hear the dialogue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrxZblVUkMU&feature=related
 
The Descendants is everything you want in an Oscar winner, and probably everything fans of Sideways wanted: very well-acted, nicely shot, with a beautiful setting that doesn't get too overworked, a heartpinching story, a dark sense of humour, children and parents behaving badly, a tearjerking conclusion, and utterly and completely predictable all the way. Liked it. Couldn't possibly love it. :star4:
 
Saw Albert Nobbs yesterday. And yeah, true to Academy form, both Close and McTeer got their Oscar nominations for playing Things They're Not - in this case, women passing as men in 19th century Ireland. It's kind of Remains Of The Day meets Boys Don't Cry. Again, well-designed, well-acted (McTeer especially, and Mia Wasikowska continues to impress me - where the hell is this new generation of blonde ingenues coming from?) But still... it's based on a short story, and it shows; even if the story tries to say a lot - about gender and sexuality, about 19th and 21st century morals, about Ireland under England, etc etc, it doesn't quite have the story to carry all that. The story and the characters are just a little flat, and in the end it fizzles out a bit. But still, yeah, Close and McTeer do a brilliant job with what they've got. :star4:
 
In A Better Life, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who's been in the US for 14 years invests everything he has in a truck that will make it possible for him to support his teenage son and keep him away from gangs and drugs. There are basically three reactions you can have to this:

1: "Hey, this is just a remake of Bicycle Thieves with the serial numbers filed off! Booo!" In which case you'll probably spend the whole movie spotting similarities and whining about how things were better at being worse in the good bad old days.
2. "Hey, they remade Bicycle Thieves in today's LA. That's clever." In which case you'll probably enjoy it for what it is: a still-relevant story that tugs a bit at the ol' heart strings, adds a few little touches of its own, and doesn't take easy ways out. Or in. And which is a fine piece of character drama even if it's not as great as the original, but then again, what is?
3. "What's Bicycle Thieves?" In which case you have better things to do than reading this.

:star3: +
 
The Grey ~ bit of mismarketing on this one, they're selling it as an action pic but what you get is a grim story of survival and death in an unforgiving arctic wilderness. Pretty good, but I could've done without the cgi wolves, and the whole time I kept thinking how I would've loved to have seen Terence Malick take this material on. :star3:
 
The last movie we saw was The Devil Inside, about the exorcisms and whatnot. I thought it was brutally good, despite not-so-rave reviews.

In fact, I find that the better reviews a movie gets these days, the less I actually like it, by and large. I'll take an Indie film over something that costs $20 million to make any day.
 
"I'll take an Indie film over something that costs $20 million to make any day." (Lovecraftian).

I'll second that. I almost universally hate contemporary blockbusters. The only widely popular movies that I've liked in the past few years were the Harry Potter films. Russel Crowe and Johnny Depp make pictures that I like from time to time, but most of Hollywood's really big ticket movies end up being disappointing, IMO. I think that when you try to please everyone, you usually end up pleasing no one and that that is the biggest problem with designed-for-wide-appeal movies.

Leonardo Noto
 
Good point. I think that the blockbusters are, by and large, just the same movie made over and over again, and aimed at the folks with average or below average intelligence.

We saw “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and I thought that it was really well done, especially for being a book adaptation released to the masses. It was definitely different.

But, for the most part, new movies don’t do a whole lot for me; at least, not the ones that hit the theaters. While I realize there are only so many plots out there, you’d think they could do *something* other than the main five or six that get rehashed, year after year.
 
Don't well-made indie movies usually get good critique - or at least better than the dumbest blockbusters, at least - though?

I just continued my dip into silent movies with The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (1928). And... holy SHIT. Dreyer's direction looked odd then and looks odd today - all close-ups on makeup-less faces - but it's very effective, and then there's Maria Falconetti's performance, which is just incredible. She has nothing to work with except her naked face, and the absolute anguish she projects onto the screen as the story goes from trial to prison to death is... well, you can understand why she found the experience so harrowing she refused to ever make another movie.

Plus, now I know where Martyrs got that last shot. Another reason to love that movie, too.
 
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