rolling movie thread

avi said:
I watched Ichi the Killer last night. It was okay, but mostly just tedious. I guess I'm just not that entertained by gore. The movie is just way too long and not particularly engaging character-wise. I didn't care about anyone one way or another and was tempted to turn it off numerous times.

so now the question is: do I give up on Japanese horror? I still have Battle Royale in my nicheflix queue and am curious about The Eye, Suicide Circle and Uzumaki among others. Am I just setting myself up for disappointment?
I watched the first 30-45 minutes of Battle Royale tonight and it was pretty cool throughout the part I saw. I'm going to have to be sure to borrow that from my friend so I can see the whole thing.
 
This mighta already been mentioned, but I saw The Incredibles tonight...as a way of elluding the thoughtfulness of my sister and her bf thinking I might like to see National Treasure with them. It MIGHT be a perfectly interesting flick if it didn't have Nicholas Cage and wasn't produced by Bruckheimer. They liked it. I'm still skeptical. And I guess Nick Cage n company ended finding the goods at the end of the film....might have been a great twist if they donated all their invaluable finds to pay off the national deficit???

Oh wait, but I was gonna recommend The Incredibles? I was excited upon first reading about the flick, as I am a sucker for the parodical/realistic/postmodern/<insert adjective here> takes on the comic superhero thang. But then I got whiff of the mass marketing aimed at the younger audiences...looked like it might be less of an intelligent spoof and more of gawd-awful disney marketing eye candy.

But in the end my urge to see it shifted back to cautious interest once reviews were pretty positive. My fears were dispelled....overall just amazing on all fronts with music (no singing supervillians unfortunately), animation, writing, humor, character designs, cinematography....they weaved a fresh concept very much true to most comicbook parodies, mixing the goofiness of The Tick with more realistic takes like The Watchmen. Pixar played their cards well!

So, The Incredibles, Hellboy, and Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow in one year...no comment on Spiderman2...but some good comic book flicks being put out there, will anyone take notice? oh...and these movies are a heck of a lot better than Unbreakable (sorry to revisit an old theme in this thread :p)
 
Spider-man 2 was exactly what it was supposed to be, a really good action movie involving a legendary character doing some things you've always wanted to see. It can't really attain the depth of character it would in an actual comic book due to length requirements but it does a great job of once again, adapting to the medium it was put into. Anyone who expected more than that is intentionally looking for flaws as opposed to them reaching out and smacking you in the face.
 
i'm wondering if the good, the bad and the ugly is a 'classic'. i have problems seeing it within the context and era it was made.

i do like a lot of it. and in retrospect clint eastwood is not so good.
 
yeah, I saw them first too. I think the Kurosawa "versions" are far superior if just for the presence of Mifune, but I still appreciate the spaghetti westerns.
 
earlier this year (?) i kept mentioning tsui hark's WE'RE GOING TO EAT YOU, which i had on VCD. it recently got remastered for DVD. the translation seems pretty consistent.

i still say that the first 30 minutes are so jammed with visual puns and brilliance/cleverness, it could be a movie unto itself. it took me 3 viewings to figure out everything that was going on.

a lot of reviewers try to characterize this as hark's martial arts tribute to gritty 70's horror and texas chainsaw massacre, but i think it's so much more of a MAD magazine fusion of rural/poor china and the italian cannibal epics of that era.

so brilliant. i guess this is hark's 2nd film. eddy ko and norman tsui are here (both were also in duel to the death. melvin wong is too, looking a lot like howard stern. norman is one of the most underrated and overlooked dudes in the history of entertainment.
 
imma gonna hafta track that sucker down. I think I've pretty much liked everything I've seen by Tsui Hark and that's already quite a few movies.

I saw Ariel by Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki last night. Probably the most straight-forward film by Aki that I've seen so far, but it of course retains most of his usual qualities: droll characters, deadpan delivery, a mysterious time period, great subdued colors and excellent choice of music.