unknown
fuck ftagn
I think there's a teaser trailer floating around out there somewhere...can't wait for the bourne ultimatum
The Official Movie Thread
- Thread starter Manic Ferocity
- Start date
I think there's a teaser trailer floating around out there somewhere...can't wait for the bourne ultimatum
AchrisK
Weakling
Look, I never argued Tarantino can be a substitute to Kurosawa. In my opinion, the fact he uses non-linear structures and every scene stands by itself is both his greatest strengh and greatest weakness - it sucks because they are not really movies, they have no artistic purpose, no structure and no lasting value or ideas like other the really good movies (he also doesn't manipulate the camera as skilfully as other master directors). It's really annoying that critics try to find some sort of post modern meaning in his movies. But it fucking rules because he's doing something totally different... there is a Tarantino trademark on everything he does, and the fact they became so iconic of modern culture just speaks for itself. There is something very charming about all those highly stylized characters, and the dialogue flows so naturally it's almost poetic. Yes, they talk about crap and pop culture, but not everything has to be concerned with the eternal. It's not genuine but it's identifiable and, well, fun. My English is not so good soe doesn't hav I have a hard time paraphrasing it but let's say that Tarantino could be a genius script EDITOR. He just has it. Like, being able to beautifully describe something you've seen on the National Geographic does not make you Dostoevsky but only the capable can do that, and Tarantino does, IMO.
I think Tarantino is simply judged in his own terms. Like you can't compare between Beethoven and Morbid Angel and The Beatles... they are all great but they just aim for different things.
I am interested in what you said about the fact he interprets Asian cinema badly... He is an avid film fan so I guess he loves tons of Asian cinema, but if you refer to all those ninja and martial arts movies - what content do they have? In this style I've only watched Hard Boiled which is very good and considered a classic (I think), but apart from great action and empty symbolism I've seen no great value... Can you please elaborate on that?
I think Tarantino is simply judged in his own terms. Like you can't compare between Beethoven and Morbid Angel and The Beatles... they are all great but they just aim for different things.
I am interested in what you said about the fact he interprets Asian cinema badly... He is an avid film fan so I guess he loves tons of Asian cinema, but if you refer to all those ninja and martial arts movies - what content do they have? In this style I've only watched Hard Boiled which is very good and considered a classic (I think), but apart from great action and empty symbolism I've seen no great value... Can you please elaborate on that?
How so? Non-linear structures aren't at all uncommon at this point, and haven't been since Rashomon came out in 1950. His dialogue is clever in its wordplay, but heavily derivative of 70's neo-noir and exploitation cinema (Chinatown, Dirty Harry, Shaft etc.). His visual style and plotting are little more than watered down versions of the work of Suzuki Seijun and Fukasaku Kinji and early career John Woo. The 'Tarantino Trademark' is no trademark at all. He is a compiler and a 'master' of pastiche, not a serious director with a body of meaningful work.
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All of Tarantino's work, broadly, has fallen within the 'gangster' and exploitation genres. However, his films draw primarily on Asian (especially Japanese) sources.
The American gangster film is essentially an offshoot of film noir, and it shares the dark, shadowed visual style of noir, as well as noir's interiority and focus on the psychology of its characters. Since the 1960's, Asian gangster cinema - especially the Japanes yakuza genre - has relied on a more colorful and kinetic visual style and a thematic focus on idealism and the visceral physical realities of violence (albeit in a highly stylized form).
Tarantino has built his reputation by taking the visual style and structural propensities of Asian gangster cinema, stripping away the idealistic core and shoehorning in the sort of casually sadistic but 'witty' monologue/one liner driven scripts that have been typical of American action flicks since the 1970s. The general consensus is that Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are Tarantino's best films, and both are highly derivative of the golden era of the yakuza film, drawing heavily on Fukasaku Kinji's Yakuza Papers saga and Suzuki Seijun's brilliantly fragmented mid-60's classics (Youth of the Beast, and Tokyo Drifter). What's missing from Tarantino's interpretations is the human sensitivity of Fukasaku or the sheer artistic audacity of Suzuki. In both cases, Tarantino tries to compensate with a heavy dose of American slacker cool, but this only serves to highlight the emptiness that lies at the core of his films. The same is true of his take on Japanese sexploitation. The Kill Bill movies simply lack the subversive quality that made movies like Female Convict Scorpion (an obvious template) interesting in spite of their technical shortcomings.
AchrisK
Weakling
unknown
fuck ftagn
I watched Godard's "Band of Outsiders" last night and loved it. The whole film is enjoyable and moves rather quickly (literally and metaphorically...everybody's running around or driving really fast). There's a scene that takes place in a cafe that's just totally amazing. The movie is worth seeing just for Anna Karina, who looks totally hot throughout the whole film.
The Heartbreak Kid
Afterimage
AchrisK
Weakling
I watched Godard's "Band of Outsiders" last night and loved it. The whole film is enjoyable and moves rather quickly (literally and metaphorically...everybody's running around or driving really fast). There's a scene that takes place in a cafe that's just totally amazing. The movie is worth seeing just for Anna Karina, who looks totally hot throughout the whole film.
Of all the 'greats' of the French New Wave, Godard seems to be the most beloved, but the least consistent. For every Band of Outsiders or Week End or Alphaville, there seems to be a huge clunker like Sympathy for the Devil or Masculin féminin: 15 faits précis, possibly because some subjects lend themselves to his radically non-linear style, while others just lend themselves to lots of smoking in cafes and subway bathrooms.
unknown
fuck ftagn
Krigloch the Furious
Pants full of poo
Napolean Dynamite was pretty damn good.
Tonight I will watch the original Die Hard. "now I know what a tv dinner feels like"
Tonight I will watch the original Die Hard. "now I know what a tv dinner feels like"
~ED~
the silent one
- Dec 18, 2006
- 226
- 0
- 16
Krigloch the Furious
Pants full of poo
seriously. will any pure action movie ever top the original Die Hard? I really dont think so. Its perfect in every way possible.
Astrum
Psion
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Werner Herzog has been called a madman, a dreamer and a maverick of cinema. An eccentric and driven filmmaker, his drive and eccentricity often crossed the border into obsession. Not surprisingly, his films have often been seen as explorations of the depths of obsession, and his masterpiece of masterpieces, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, is no exception.
Aguirre is a fairly accessible film, considering its pedigre, and one that eschews the temporally disjointed structures and arcane avant-garde-isms more typical of earlier German art cinema (including Herzog's own previous work). Instead, Herzog relies on simple narrative filmmaking to tell a story that is on one level a chronicle of a Quixotic yet doomed quest, on a second level, a meditation on the descent into madness and death, and on yet another level, a scathing rebuke of the cultural zeitgeist of Herzog's age.
Aguirre, the Wrath of God begins with one of the most visually stunning shots in cinematic history (and ends with another), as conquistadors under the command of Gonzalo Pizzaro (brother of the conqueror of the Inca), guided by Indian slaves, pick their way through the fog down an impossibly steep mountain terrace toward the jungle below. Soon, a small force leaves this main body to scout down a river in the search of the fabled city of El Dorado.
The rest of the film follows the course of this scouting party as it floats to its inevitable doom, done in by starvation, disease, the decidedly unfriendly attentions of the natives, and, most of all, by the madness and boundless ambition of the expedition's second-in-command, Don Lope de Aguirre (the incomparable Klaus Kinski).
In telling this story, Herzog makes use of a minimalistic cinematic style in which both dialogue and action are sparsely distributed. Instead, the plot unfolds primarily through a series of visual metaphors - the descent into the jungle, the river, a fully rigged sailing vessel somehow stranded in the forest canopy - which, combined with the brilliant soundtrack by ambient music pioneers Popol Vuh, help to create the trancelike dreamscapes for which Herzog is justifiably famous.
One of the highlights of Aguirre, the Wrath of God is the simply stunning cinematography of Thomas Mauch. The fluid, languid movements of Mauch's camera mirrors to the agonizingly slow progress of the expedition (shown to particularly brilliant effect in the film's opening shots), and serves to lend an epic sensibility to a film that clocks in at a spare 94 minutes. The supersaturated colors of the jungle backgrounds become at once beautiful and suffocating - a choking, endless emerald sea, swallowing all human presence and endeavor, rendering them futile and meaningless.
Special attention should also be paid to the Klaus Kinski's performance in the title role, which is not only magnificent, but must be counted among the greatest performances in film history. For a lesser actor, the sparseness of dialogue and plotting in Herzog's largely improvised script could have presented an insurmountable obstacle, but in the hands of a master like Kinski, that very lack of dialogue and action becomes an opportunity to fill the empty space with the edges of a character created from the fragments of gesture. Kinski renders the madness of Aguirre all the more frightening by cloaking it in mystery and only allowing us to view glimpses of the beast within. Instead, we are left to intuit his insanity from subtle cues of movement and expression: his curiously bent walk; the inhuman detachment he shows in the face of the suffering and fear of his men; the way he simply materializes in front of the camera, drifting in like fog (a feat he contrived through a contorted sort of pirouette); the calculating silence into which he frequently falls. That his madness is only hinted at makes the unnervingly whispered moments of rage even more terrifying.
On the surface, Aguirre is an exploration of the romance of the Impossible Dream, yet another sign of his obsession with obsessions, perhaps the central concern of Herzog's art. On a deeper level, it is perhaps best understood as a blistering critique of the 1960s counterculture. The Enlightenment conceit of the 'noble savage' which the hippie movement adopted as its central tenet is ruthlessly dissected, and the hollowness made manifest by the Summer of Love, Altamont and the Manson Family is given concrete expression in the form of the Indians. These, far from being the peaceful sages of hippie lore, appear in Aguirre as faceless demons of fear, invisible except for their handiwork, which is no less than death itself.
Herzog's Jungle, his emblem of Nature, reinforces this critique: Herzog's Jungle is not the counterculture's garden of delights, it is Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Here, the hippies' peaceful paradise is consumed by Kipling's 'nature, red in tooth and claw.' Though the Jungle teems with life and beauty, it is in the end a cradle of madness, and the triumph of the Jungle is a meditation on the triumph of Death.
But it is in the character of Aguirre himself that Herzog's critique of the counterculture achieves its most complete form, for Don Lope de Aguirre can be fruitfully read as the film's hippie stand-in (he conveniently even sports long hair). It is Aguirre, conquistador, and ex officio, agent of civilization, who descends into the Jungle (and into madness), stripping away the last vestigial remnants of his own civilized veneer in his pursuit of the Impossible Dream of El Dorado. What emerges is, in a sense, the Natural Man. But the Natural Man is not a man at peace and harmony with other men and nature, but a man reduced to a state of madness and endless, unquenchable desire. In Aguirre, the great lie of the Enlightenment and counterculture is made manifest: divorced from any civilized impulse, he is only a savage, vicious, ruthless and subject only to his own impulses and wishes. Instead of Rousseau's Noble Savage, the Natural Man stands revealed as nothing more (or less) than Hobbes' Leviathan.
10/10
NinjaGeek
Member
- Feb 22, 2007
- 1,056
- 1
- 36
I don't get why there's so much hate on special effects. Special Effects takes a lot of creativity and innovation to be done well. If you actually take the time to think about how they do it you realize the time and effort that goes into it. I'm not a huge fan of CGI though, it has it's place in film but until it looks exactly like real life it's best used in the shadows or far away where no one can tell. I hate it when directors use in your face CGI because they lack the creativity to think up another way to do it.
I recently re-watched AI today, I really enjoyed it this time besides the ending which didn't really fit, and also the special effects were breath taking. Very effectively pulled off a lot of effects that could've easily been done with CG characters and it looked awesome.
To me a good movie is as simple as you can enjoy it. If the script is entertaining and interesting, the effects blend well and don't take you out of the movie, and the action is kick ass then it's a good movie.
Also good cinematography that you can enjoy even if you know nothing about cinematography. Like how 12 Angry Men so skillfully manipulates your emotions with its camera work. I hate show offy cinematography that only someone who knows film will enjoy. A lot of my friends who are into film always talk about long tracking shots with no cuts, which to me is pointless unless not cutting somehow helps your films. And I hate stuff like how in Citizen Kane he tracks through a table and you can see the table wobbling slightly because it was just thrown down as the cameraman passed by where it's supposed to be. Just show offy shit to prove you can do it.
Some of my favorite films are Seven Samurai, Barry Lyndon, The Street Fighter, Riki-Oh, Ninja Wars, Sin City, 300, Saw(I know this movie gets a lot of shit but I enjoyed it so fuck you), Kill Bill 1 and 2(especially 2 much more interesting plot), The Sixth Sense, and pretty much every godzilla movie ever made.
I recently re-watched AI today, I really enjoyed it this time besides the ending which didn't really fit, and also the special effects were breath taking. Very effectively pulled off a lot of effects that could've easily been done with CG characters and it looked awesome.
To me a good movie is as simple as you can enjoy it. If the script is entertaining and interesting, the effects blend well and don't take you out of the movie, and the action is kick ass then it's a good movie.
Also good cinematography that you can enjoy even if you know nothing about cinematography. Like how 12 Angry Men so skillfully manipulates your emotions with its camera work. I hate show offy cinematography that only someone who knows film will enjoy. A lot of my friends who are into film always talk about long tracking shots with no cuts, which to me is pointless unless not cutting somehow helps your films. And I hate stuff like how in Citizen Kane he tracks through a table and you can see the table wobbling slightly because it was just thrown down as the cameraman passed by where it's supposed to be. Just show offy shit to prove you can do it.
Some of my favorite films are Seven Samurai, Barry Lyndon, The Street Fighter, Riki-Oh, Ninja Wars, Sin City, 300, Saw(I know this movie gets a lot of shit but I enjoyed it so fuck you), Kill Bill 1 and 2(especially 2 much more interesting plot), The Sixth Sense, and pretty much every godzilla movie ever made.
unknown
fuck ftagn
YES. This was such a good movie. I was so proud of David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen. It was such an awesome fucking movie. I loved it.
@ Scourge: I have Aguierre in my netflix queue...glad to see another positive review of it.
