Last Movie You Watched? 6.0

I actually saw most of BREAKING THE WAVES back in the 90's oddly enough.

Melancholia was fantastic. I still can't get that opening image out of my head: Withered Justine with the falling birds in slow motion. Beautiful film.

FieldsMan wrote:

Melancholia was fantastic. I still can't get that opening image out of my head: Withered Justine with the falling birds in slow motion. Beautiful film.

The hyper-stylized opening ten minutes are fine. Alas, what follows is soul-numbingly dull.

On second thought, and not that it matters for anything, I'm putting HULK in the top spot of my MARVEL rankings.

And then all was right in the world.

Maybe I should give that another watch sometime. I only saw it once roughly around the time THE INCREDIBLE HULK was released. The only thing I remember thinking that flick had over the Norton flick was Sam Elliot, as much as I thought Hurt did fine he just wasn't as good. Elliot owned that role like how Simmons owned Jameson.

Makeshift Python wrote:

Maybe I should give that another watch sometime. I only saw it once roughly around the time THE INCREDIBLE HULK was released. The only thing I remember thinking that flick had over the Norton flick was Sam Elliot, as much as I thought Hurt did fine he just wasn't as good. Elliot owned that role like how Simmons owned Jameson.

Jennifer Connelly >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Liv Tyler.

Back to watching TIH. Okay, I liked the Stan Lee cameo.

Hurt looks goofy as fuck.

The White Tuxedo wrote:

Jennifer Connelly >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Liv Tyler.

I'll take both. :face:

How could anyone ever recommend DANCER IN THE DARK? I wanted to kill myself while I was watching that movie, just so that I wouldn't have to keep watching that movie (it was something I was made to sit through in film school).
The entire Dogme95 movement and its beliefs and offshoots just makes me barf. As if intentionally making your films look ugly makes them somehow better and purer. Von Trier and his entire output disgusts me.

Also, Sharky, how can you say that IRON MAN wasn't ideologically deep enough for you one minute and then say it needed a lighter touch the next? It's a light piece of fluff but wasn't light enough? And yet SUPERMAN RETURNS and HULK, which are both pretty heavy for superhero flicks, are ideal for you, yet the THE DARK KNIGHT, which has much pretentions of being seriouso cinema is on your dislike list as well.

But then, I suppose you never have claimed that to have one consistent standard you judge all films by.
Except the time you did that. ;)

I wouldn't say that IRON MAN has liberal guilt -- I mean guilt, yes, but I think that right/left values have been really confused over the years into the current religious/racial lines in the States. Which is to say that while IRON MAN may reject current day American conservatism (for example Stark refuses to do the patriotic thing and hand his property over to the military in the sequel), it however may more accurately represent libertarianism, a philosophy which punditry seems to lump with the right wing but in fact has disagreements and similarities with both sides depending on the issue. IRON MAN, Tony Stark, is definitely a libertarian hero I think, right down to the fact that his fights are less about saving others or saving the world and more about safeguarding himself, his interests, etc.

But, if I understand your argument, the film should've either deeply involved itself in a political statement or been completely apolitical fluff -- to go all one way or the other, and that your issue is its sort've muddled halfway in between? Because if that's so, well, then at least that's a criticism that makes sense and I can respect, even if I disagree.

Because, y'know, HULK reads pretty strongly as an Iraq War statement, to me. But then, one of the reasons Hulk was originally popular in the 1960s was that his anti-military adventures were adopted by anti-Vietnam youth. So that translation makes sense. And IRON MAN himself was originally a very anti-communist character in those comics, so making him fight the Middle East and be pro-military makes sense today in updating that character.

Stan Lee said in creating Iron Man his goal was to create a character who theoretically should've been hated by his statistically left-wing college age readers -- a capitalist, playboy, alchoholic, weapons dealer, anti-communist avenger -- and see if he could get them to like him anyways. He succeeded, apparently mainly with women -- Iron Man comics had the highest positive female response of any of the original Marvel line.

By this point Sharky has gotten bored and stopped reading, thoroughly disgusted that any human being should have written so much by this point about a comic book character.

Fairbairn-Sykes wrote:

How could anyone ever recommend DANCER IN THE DARK? I wanted to kill myself while I was watching that movie, just so that I wouldn't have to keep watching that movie (it was something I was made to sit through in film school).

Eh, I don't think it's that bad...

I usually hate musicals, too. I love how Von Trier took an awful situation in the film and made it 100x more awful in one simple scene. I thought it was gripping.

Quote :

The entire Dogme95 movement and its beliefs and offshoots just makes me barf. As if intentionally making your films look ugly makes them somehow better and purer. Von Trier and his entire output disgusts me.

I think setting boundaries and limitations forces an artist to push their creativity. THE CELEBRATION, for example, turned out great, in my opinion. The 'no artificial lighting' rule and the fact that it was filmed on that type of camera added a lot to the overall mood of the film.

I just felt that the whole movement was born out of the same "I'm the greatest director in history" asshole attitude that colours a lot of Von Trier's work. And found DANCER IN THE DARK to be ugly to look at, I mean I've seen VHS tapes with better quality, Bjork to be aggravating, and the whole plot just so completely and totally nihilistic and relentlessly horrible that it went past Griffith-esque melodrama and became just plain meanness. It became one-note, and that one note repeats in all of Von Trier's films -- an innocent woman has horrible things happen to her in various genres.

I mean, the characters in that film all come to horrible ends because they're all too stupid to just simply talk and explain things to each other. It's the same thing that infuriates me when I watch sitcoms, actually -- contrived situations that arise only because people aren't telling the truth because of no reason other than the script demands it.

I agree that artists need boundaries to push creativity (just look what happened to Lucas, Jackson, Singer, etc. after being given all the money and time), but the fact is that Von Trier declares a director shouldn't put his credit on a movie and then his name fills the screen as a backdrop for the entirety of the DANCER IN THE DARK credits.

Von Trier has allowed me to appreciate Kirsten Dunst.










... Her tits, I mean.

HA. Yeah, I pretty much know who Kirsten Dunst is because I was a puberty-addled teen when that first Spider-Man came out and they had her tits in the rain.

Terrible casting choice for Mary Jane in retrospect over those three movies -- but in that moment? Can't complain.

"Weird face, great body" I believe Family Guy said.

The Incredible Hulk (2008)

So this is thought to be better than HULK? I found it lazy and pointless. No one who made it gave a crap, so I'm following suit. Hell, I wasn't even following WTF has going on and I didn't care anyway. Tim Blake Nelson was a bright spot, though.

MARVEL-O-Meter

1. HULK
2. IRON MAN
3. FANTASTIC FOUR: RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER
4. FANTASTIC FOUR
5. THE INCREDIBLE HULK

Hey, at least the FF movies were entertaining. This movie had me thinking of Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album. Marvel had to make another Hulk movie. They did so. Perfunctory across the board.

Yeah I can't really say THE INCREDIBLE HULK is bad, so much as it just IS. It just checks off boxes on a list of things a Hulk movie needs to be but you never really get the impression anyone is trying very hard -- except Tim Roth actually, who I kinda liked in it.

And the Hulk himself just looks awful and fake.

For the most part I just think that HULK was far too high brow for most of the people who are Hulk's traditional fanbase.

Also, I frakkin' hate that thing Liv Tyler does where she exhales on every single line. She's trying to sound "breathy", but she just ends up sounding out of breath instead, like she's always in the middle of running somewhere. It's awful.

Oh yeah, I liked Tim Roth. Forgot to mention him. Sadly he drops out to become the Alien hybrid newborn thing from ALIEN RESURRECTION.

TIH isn't X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE bad or anything, but it doesn't even have any camp value to make things fun.

As for Tyler, she hit her peak years before filming this movie.

TIH is really just going through the motions. Reestablishing the Hulk in a way that more comfortably tied into Marvel's plans for their film franchises. A safer Hulk. At least it resulted in us getting the delightful Mark Ruffalo version in AVENGERS, who will hopefully get a HULK 3 to star in.

I found TIH enjoyable to be honest, not great but a solid HULK flick. Something about it grabs me more than Ang Lee's flick, which I should check out again.

Fairbairn-Sykes wrote:

How could anyone ever recommend DANCER IN THE DARK? I wanted to kill myself while I was watching that movie, just so that I wouldn't have to keep watching that movie (it was something I was made to sit through in film school).

Peter Bradshaw on DANCER IN THE DARK: " . . . one of the worst films, one of the worst artworks and perhaps one of the worst things in the history of the world."

Now, I'm not a big Bradshaw fan, but he nailed it.

Fairbairn-Sykes wrote:

But, if I understand your argument, the film should've either deeply involved itself in a political statement or been completely apolitical fluff -- to go all one way or the other, and that your issue is its sort've muddled halfway in between? Because if that's so, well, then at least that's a criticism that makes sense and I can respect, even if I disagree.

That's my argument in a nutshell. Shame it took you so long to figure it out. ;)

PS. I'm a right-libertarian myself (but socially very liberal - legalise weed, prostitution etc.) and I don't really recognise Stark as a libertarian figure, compared to say Travis McGee. He's just a arms dealer who realises the errors of his ways and then decides to blow shit up with the US military.

I like HULK because despite of its father-son drama (which works ridiculously well for this kind of movie), it's incredibly fun. The desert jumping chase alone is more memorable and comic book-like than any setpiece in the two IRON MAN flicks, and it's not bogged down in any half-arsed Hollywood Afghanistan/Iraq guilt. Any similarities to those conflicts just part of the zeitgeist of 2003. It's making no big effort to draw any kind of simplistic commentary, that's not where heart of the film lies. In fact, you could argue that David-Bruce relationship and consequences subtly parallels that between George Bush Senior and Junior - a sort of precursor to Oliver Stone's W.

That said, I will agree with you that Ang Lee's HULK is far more interesting and truly cinematic than the entirety of Lars Von Trier's filmography.

Mr. Brown wrote:

I think setting boundaries and limitations forces an artist to push their creativity.

That's true, but not when the "boundaries and limitations" are completely arbitrary, and pretty much one big prank by Von Trier, as in the Dogme scam. He just wanted his deluded to apostles to ask "how high" when he told them to jump.

I think Von Trier and Co. were just trying to mix things up and have a bit of fun with the art form, and it yielded some interesting results.

I liked the rule that denied the use of special effects.

And no music. What a load of crap.

Makeshift Python wrote:

I found TIH enjoyable to be honest, not great but a solid HULK flick. Something about it grabs me more than Ang Lee's flick, which I should check out again.

I saw it at Best Buy a few days ago for 7 bucks or so. I'm tempted to get it. Maybe in a year or two when I feel like seeing it again.

Sharky wrote:

The desert jumping chase alone is more memorable and comic book-like than any setpiece in the two IRON MAN flicks,

Yeah, agreed, the entire sequence from when the Hulk escapes from the desert base all the way to his transformation back into Banner in San Francisco is fantastic, with really topnotch effects work, and really not topped in terms of Hulk action for me until Avengers.

The Magnificent Ambersons

Very good first impression of it, direction and acting, also the intelligent dialogue that I'm used to in Welles. It's a dynamic film, both in narrative and in terms of cinematography and editing.
I guess the original cut was very different and isn't to be found anywhere?

Sharky wrote:

That said, I will agree with you that Ang Lee's HULK is far more interesting and truly cinematic than the entirety of Lars Von Trier's filmography.

Bold claim. I'd love to see what such a remark would do to a room full of would-be cineastes.