Movie Discussion Thread

[Dr. Gonzo]

PSH is incredibly underrated. He consistently gives brilliant performances. Everything he has done with P.T. Anderson and his work as Caden Cotard in Synchedoche, New York along would rank him among my favorite actors but he has given quite a few other great performances. I love DDL but I think PSH is certainly in that upper tier. The Master could be his best performance yet too.

[scottyboy]

is american gangster any good? my friend's been telling me to watch it

[eaglesalltheway]

Originally Posted by scottyboy

is american gangster any good? my friend's been telling me to watch it

If you have two hours to kill and nothing to do, you can't go wrong. Its not an overly great movie, but it has its moments, as well as a few little tidbits and quotes that are pretty decent. I honestly can't remember them right now, and I can't say it'd be one of the first movies I'd recommend, but Denzel Washington does his **** and Russel Crowe doesn't totally suck ass in the movie, so there is some sort of point of reference. I've watched it probably twice now, the whole way through, and would watch it again if it came on TV and I had nothing else to do (see first sentence, lol).

[Caddy]

[Brent]

Originally Posted by Caddy

so funny

[Brodeur]

Originally Posted by Brent

so funny

PSH pushed the movie from boring as **** typical Stiller crap to okayish, just because he was awesome for every moment he was on screen.

[A Perfect Score]

My new wallpaper!

[Bengals78]

Originally Posted by A Perfect Score

My new wallpaper!

OMG! I have the same one!
We are like brothers or something.
We are close.

[niel89]

I still yell rain drops when I shoot

[Caddy]

Finally saw Avengers and loved it. Tony Stark/Ironman is by far my favourite comic book movie character and it's not even close. I was so annoyed every time someone else made a Stark-esque joked because I wanted Downey Jr. to have a monopoly on them. Probably my favourite movie so far this year.

[Bert Macklin]

Originally Posted by Caddy

Finally saw Avengers and loved it. Tony Stark/Ironman is by far my favourite comic book movie character and it's not even close. I was so annoyed every time someone else made a Stark-esque joked because I wanted Downey Jr. to have a monopoly on them. Probably my favourite movie so far this year.

When Lee created Tony Stark he had no idea he was thinking of RDJ.

[A Perfect Score]

Originally Posted by Caddy

Finally saw Avengers and loved it. Tony Stark/Ironman is by far my favourite comic book movie character and it's not even close. I was so annoyed every time someone else made a Stark-esque joked because I wanted Downey Jr. to have a monopoly on them. Probably my favourite movie so far this year.

I put on the beginning the other day while I was eating breakfast, just as something to watch. Meant to catch the first 15 minutes, watched the whole damn thing. Great movie.

[Bert Macklin]

Just downloaded The Avengers with extras I am excite. But no extended edition so I am a little dissapoint.

[ryno626]

Originally Posted by Bert Macklin

Just downloaded The Avengers with extras I am excite. But no extended edition so I am a little dissapoint.

I will be buying this

[Bert Macklin]

Ten Movies People Love... and Why They're Not That Great

Crash

Paul Haggis’ 2005 meditation on race-relations took away the Best Picture Academy Award that year, performed well critically (well-ish, 76% on Rotten Tomatoes), and made more than seven times its budget at the box office.  But does anyone really remember it?

We all recall its Oscar running mate, Brokeback Mountain, and while this could be put down to Mountain’s audacious subject matter, it's more likely that Brokeback is a stronger film - Crash still feels too manufactured to be distinctive. Haggis’ Los Angeles is a horrific melting pot of racism, but his characters' racist attitudes are written upon them, engulfing any semblance of character and giving the whole affair an aura of unreality. Weakened further by a series of unlikely narrative turns (they were blank bullets? Gimme a freakin' break!) Crash misses its mark, despite any admirable intentions behind it.

A Beautiful Mind

Despite an engrossing central performance from Russell Crowe, A Beautiful Mind was another topical film elevated into the stratosphere by a Best Picture Academy Award. The embodiment of the term ‘Oscar-bait,’ A Beautiful Mind appears to tell a story of mental illness in earnest, but is bogged down by a  script that descends into easy melodrama, feeble supporting characterisation – Jennifer Connolly deserved much better than this one-dimensional-put-upon-housewife, despite her Oscar win - and absolutely nothing to distinguish itself from a ‘movie-of-the-week’ on the same subject.

To rub salt in the wound, this ‘true story’ of the schizophrenic Professor John Nash eschews pivotal facts about the real Nash, including his homosexuality. Director Ron Howard, while generally reliable, if not remarkable, is painting-by-numbers.

Forrest Gump

Overexposure can be a terrible fate for mega-successful movies; look at the backlash against Titanic and Avatar. But it's not a fate that has befallen the mighty Forrest Gump. The feelgood drama still holds a warm place in our hearts, even in the face of our rampant Internet-bred-cynicism.

This is weird, because Forrest Gump shares much with the Cameron blockbusters, insofar as it's a remarkable technical revolution with a story batting above its weight. The principle problem with Forrest Gump is Forrest himself - who is, in fact, a one-note 'holy fool', untouchable to the sinful masses (e.g., the rest of us, and poor slutty Jenny who embraced the 'alternative lifestyle'). This would be palatable if his simple virtue was not presented to us as quite so inspirational by director Robert Zemeckis. Consider the message behind the death of Jenny, who bucked against the status quo, while Forrest continues through life immoveable and unquestioning. It's a dodgy conservatism that washes over us like hyper-coloured baby barf, mixed up with a magnificent soundtrack.

Garden State

2004's Garden State is another of those beloved indie dramadies that sits quite comfortably with fellow upstarts Juno and Little Miss Sunshine. While credit must unquestionably be given to creator Zach Braff – who made this in his twenties – Garden State is nonetheless too threadbare to justify the (principally Gen Y) love heaped upon it.

In 2004 the term ‘manic pixie dream girl’ did not exist yet (it was coined by a critic the following year), but the narrative formula associated with the archetype is pitch perfect here. Zach’s Braph’s paper thin ‘emotionally-repressed young dude’ meets impossibly kooky Sam (Portman), a charming cipher who eventually ‘rescues’ him by bringing him out of his shell. Set to a soundtrack dominated by indie darlings The Shins and featuring enough wacky moments to sink a polka dot tugboat full of Zooey Deschanels, it’s no wonder people loved this. It’s just without substance; a rom-com in skinny jeans.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

There should be a support group for those who didn’t love Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. We generally find ourselves in the minority, and act like overexcited lunatics whenever we meet someone else who suggests hey, I didn’t think it was that great either.

It’s not that Pilgrim is a bad movie – in fact it's very clever – but it lacks the emotional weight to elevate it beyond a very smart in-joke. Much of the problem lies with its ambition to stuff a series of graphic novels into a single film, rather than spreading them across multiple; we are whisked from one irony-encrusted encounter to the next before catching our breath. The characters consequently get very little time in which to be anything but super cool, super confident quip-machines - and when everyone is just so unruffled, why give a damn?

The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker, which sits at 97% on Rotten Tomatoes and won six Oscars at the 2009 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, is a satisfying war thriller, yet a curiously indistinct one. Perhaps this is because The Hurt Locker is, in fact, just a satisfying war thriller, despite being sold to us as something more authentic; a mirror held up to reality without Hollywood’s dusting of sugar.

It was, after all, based on the accounts of freelance journalist Mark Boal, stationed in Iraq for two weeks in 2004, and its themes of ‘war addiction’ evoke the grimy realism of classic war flicks The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now et al. But instead of the kitchen sink, we get an entertaining war flick, albeit one peppered with as many hackneyed quips and manufactured narrative turns as the next (Staff Sergeant William James’ personal revenge mission still rings false upon re-watching). Director Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break) is great at capturing muscular action in a cinematic bottle – but this time, that’s all she’s captured.

The Green Mile

If one thought Frank Darabont’s ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ erred on over sentimental, one could sure as hell never admit it out loud; it would be akin to killing a puppy. While Darabont did indeed tread a fine line between sentimentality and sensitivity in 1994’s prison drama classic, he leaped over it into a bottle of syrup in his 1999 prison drama ‘classic’, The Green Mile.

On paper, the movie hits all the high-notes for weighty Hollywood drama, yet onscreen it drowns in its own sappiness, over-simplifying the roles of the good guys and bad guys into perfect saints and wicked sinners, battering us across the face with Disnefied messages of hope and the power of miracles. This didn’t stop it from being nominated for a handful of Oscars; perhaps its heady cocktail of Tom Hanks, race-relations, and dramatic Stephen King source material (which takes much of the blame here) was too much for the Academy to resist. Suckers.

Closer

Mike Nichols’ heavy ‘war of the sexes’ drama Closer certainly has its detractors, but chances are you still know someone who thinks it’s the best thing since Citizen Kane for its uncompromising bleakness and single-minded determination to ‘go there.'

Adapted from a wordy play script by dialogue wizard Patrick Marber, Closer the movie occasionally sings in isolated pockets of verbal warfare -“have you ever seen a human heart?! It looks like a fist wrapped in blood” - but eventually buckles under its own ultra-serious weight. The four leads – gamely played by Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, Jude Law and Natalie Portman – are all cruel urbanites whose only redeemable collective feature is an ostentatious physical attractiveness, lending their poetry all the weight of a bit of dead skin floating up an air vent. Could Closer have had more of an emotional punch if Nichols had pared down Marber’s script, focusing on quiet, reflective moments that could potentially have redeemed some of its humanity? Possibly, but maybe the source material was too damned contemptuous to be adapted to film in the first place.

American Beauty

American Beauty teetered on universal praise when it was released in 1999. Funny and dark, it was a surprisingly anarchic Hollywood drama, an attempt to sardonically lift the veil on the white middle class and flip the bird to the faceless ‘Man’.

And while American Beauty gives it an admirable shot, it falls short of revealing our deep, dark realities. It presents to us, instead, a caricature of them, our desires in hyper-coloured strokes. Col. Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper) as a brutish Nazi sympathizer and closet homosexual is handled loudly and, arguably, crassly - consider the film’s ending, which, while moving, rings like an easy out, rather than the shockingly revealing blow the filmmakers intended. Wes Bentley’s ‘weirdo’ Ricky Fitts also comes off the rent-a-character shelf, quirky enough to provide contrast to the shrieking suburbanites but nothing more than a hastily sketched idea. Broad strokes would be forgivable if this was satire, but American Beauty is not. It presents us with shocking scenarios intended to move us to reflection, to 'look closer,' but in fact it’s a well-acted, often titillating flirtation with a more brutal truth.

Little Miss Sunshine

The winner of Best Original Screenplay at the 2007 Academy Awards, Little Miss Sunshine was a true crowd pleaser. It was also a critical darling (91% on Rotten Tomatoes), praised for an unusual emotional intelligence in the well-trodden dysfunctional middle-class family yarn. Alan Arkin snorting heroin and Steve Carrell attempting suicide? Daringly dark stuff.

But instead it’s a wholesome optimism that laces itself through Little Miss Sunshine’s bones, and the characters, pitched as ‘you and I’, ultimately reveal themselves to be delivery boys for the screenwriter’s alarmingly virtuous messages. Along the way, their complicated issues are packaged into a single convenient box labelled FAMILY IS IMPORTANT, while the film’s ending dissolves into nauseating sap (they were going for heartwarming, we got ipecac instead.) This would all be fine of course, if we hadn’t been lead to believe there was going to be some pluck here. A little bit more of that promised indie edginess would have gone a long way.

http://m.ign.com/articles/2012/08/26...not-that-great

[Job Reborn]

**** this ****.

[josh07039]

Other than American Beauty and Little Miss Sunshine, I basically agree with the choices if not all the rationale. I think Scott Pilgrim is ******* awesome but im not going to argue if someone criticizes it. That one is a divisive movie.

[A Perfect Score]

Of the movies listed, I thoroughly enjoy Scott Pilgrim, The Hurt Locker and Garden State, with American Beauty somewhere in my Top 25 movies of all time.

[WMD]

If you dislike Scott Pilgrim, I dislike YOU

[Brent]

did skip bayless & his contrarian ways write that?

[WMD]

I didn't really like Crash though. I actually haven't seen many of the others so I can't offer an expert cinematic opinion on them.

From that write up, it doesn't seem like they didn't like Scott Pilgrim, it's just that they think it should've been spread out over more movies. I can agree with that, I <3 Scott Pilgrim but I would also <3 like 3 or 4 other movies in the series.

[comahan]

I agree with some, disagree with others.

Five star post, I know.

[Ness]

Originally Posted by Caddy

Finally saw Avengers and loved it. Tony Stark/Ironman is by far my favourite comic book movie character and it's not even close. I was so annoyed every time someone else made a Stark-esque joked because I wanted Downey Jr. to have a monopoly on them. Probably my favourite movie so far this year.

Why weren't you able to see it before?

[Ness]

Originally Posted by Brent

did skip bayless & his contrarian ways write that?

Just some guy at IGN. I can go throw rocks at their building if you want. They're right down the street from me.

[WMD]

the Crank series is a quality series.