Last Movie You Watched? 7.0

Django Unchained

Loved it. Tonally consistent and perfect, wonderful dialogue, perfect balance of humour and drama all throughout its length, many colorful and well acted characters, great story. This is one of the most consistent films I have ever seen-- pretty much every note from every character was spot on. I particularly loved Waltz and, quite unexpectedly, Jackson. DiCaprio was excellent as well, and so was Don Johnson now that I think about it. The sensitive and serious nature of the subject matter here could have made this whole thing blow up in Tarantino's face so easily, but he handled it perfectly. All the misgivings I had with IB were fixed here and I would rank it alongside Pulp Fiction as my favorite Tarantino.

I just watched the DVD screener of:

Dredd (2012)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1343727/

WTF did I just watch?

1/5

Django Unchained (2012)

Pretty good but overall felt underwhelmed by it. Just didn't grab me the way some of his other films did.

Django (1966, dir. Sergio Corbucci)

Some very brutal scenes, but they didn't feel gratuitous. It doesn't have the depth of Leone's westerns, but it handles the themes of revenge fairly well. It's technically well made. Not a must-see, in my opinion, but all right. (We need to discuss whether Django deserves his fate).

Die Puppe (1919, dir. Ernst Lubitsch)

Wonderful film, really funny. I must admit I liked it more than my other silent experiences, particularly the Dreyer film I watched not too long ago, and even NOSFERATU (though I like those too). Must see more of Lubitsch, particularly his later Hollywood works. A doll-maker's daughter decides to pass as a doll, because her father's apprentice has broken a doll's arm which had been sold to a baron's son who intends to pass the doll as his wife, because he's afraid of real women, but does not want to forgo the money his father has promised him when he will marry. It's bizarre, but funny. Accurate portrayal of monks too.

IMDb states the film runs 48 minutes, but I've seen a 65 minutes version on TV. Wish I had recorded it...

Harmsway wrote:

DJANGO UNCHAINED could reasonably be called Tarantino's best film, and it also could be reasonably called his worst.

I could see someone making a case that Django Unchained was a poor film...I most certainly wouldn't agree, but I could see it. I don't see how one could argue that it's a poor Tarantino film though. In that respect it's damn near perfect. The film feels whole, focused, and perfectly (and precariously) balanced. It also has time to breath. l love how Tarantino gives every scene a chance to breath and develop on its own terms. Nothing feels rushed and there is no extraneous crap tacked on to keep us entertained-- and it fails to be engaging. I would argue that Django Unchained is Tarantino's masterpiece. It has all the style of Pulp Fiction, but it also has a soul, a very well developed and crafted soul. IMHO Django Unchained is the work of a very gifted filmmaker at the height of his powers and its refreshing to be able to note that he is developing and maturing as a filmmaker, without losing his fundamental identity. I never expected to like a QT film this much again.

PLAYTIME (1967, directed by Jacques Tati). Shot on 70mm, PLAYTIME has been lovingly restored and looks stunning on Blu-ray but - like other classics of the 1960s such as LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY - seems to demand to be seen in a cinema, and on the biggest screen possible (indeed, Tati is said to have refused to provide a 35mm version, which may have contributed to its box office failure, although there are other, more obvious, reasons why PLAYTIME didn't exactly pack 'em in).

PLAYTIME doesn't have a plot so much as a theme - or rather themes. It's an elegy for a lost, romantic old Paris - of which Tati shows only poignant glimpses reflected in glass doors of soulless modern office blocks - that's getting buried beneath a comically malfunctioning hi-tech concrete dystopia. There's also - in the intermittent interactions of the bumbling Monsieur Hulot and Barbara Dennek's American tourist, both outsiders in Paris and the latter a participant on the sort of whistle-stop tour of Europe that barely leaves the environs of each capital's airport - the hint of a LOST IN TRANSLATION-esque near-love story, not to mention the bittersweet notion of travel being both a fundamentally flawed means of international communication and a futile attempt to grasp the ungraspable in a foreign culture.

Perhaps, though, I'm reading too much into PLAYTIME. For all I know, Tati never intended it to be anything other than a loose-limbed and free-floating series of sketches (mostly lacking dialogue, although it would be wrong to call this film a throwback to the days of silent comedy, for the score and sound effects are of tremendous importance - Leonard Maltin notes that Tati is the "only man in movie history to get a laugh out of the hum of a neon sign"), showing off some of the most expensive and elaborate sets ever created. Either way, though, PLAYTIME is a unique and breathtakingly ambitious piece of work, universal and timeless.

It's not entirely flawless. Some episodes are funnier and more engaging than others, and the film is undeniably self-indulgent and overlong. Tati's brand of minimalist humour is sometimes spread far too thinly across far too much screentime, most notably in a restaurant sequence that seems to go on for about nine hours with only the most cursory and rudimentary of punchlines. At its best, though, PLAYTIME is deliciously absurd, almost dreamlike, amusing and strangely moving.

Had a McQueen/Jewison double bill.

The Cincinnati Kid, which I liked. Would make a nice pair with THE HUSTLER. This one I may take another look at within a year. McQueen is excellent, just being so utterly present in every moment. Eddie G. Robinson is really great. Boy, this film had me thinking of Casino Royale. Not just the '06 film, but the book too. Had Ann-Margret betrayed McQueen, and if Eddie G. took a carpet beater to his nutsack, this would go down as the best adaptation of that book. Seriously, the McQueen/Robinson dynamic puts a lot of fuel into this film, and even though I like Mikkelson from the '06 film, THIS is what the Bond/Le Chiffre dynamic should be like if you ask me.

And Ann-Margret. Holy f***. And it's great to see Malden, Weld, Blondell, and Calloway. A Peckinpah version would be interesting, but I think his doing it in black & white would have been a mistake.

One thing I'd change... I'd have Weld walk away from McQueen at the end. She caught him with another woman, and I just would have prefered a totally downbeat ending.

The Thomas Crown Affair. This one didn't do as much for me. The editing was cool. The title sequence is first rate. But it feels undercooked, and riding on "cool" too much. I honestly lost interest in the second half. I have to see the remake again. It's been a decade. I may prefer it to the original.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (2012) :2*:

Where to begin with this film?

It's not a bomb in the obvious sense of the word. The acting is very good, the f/x are generally top-notch....the casting is A-list... the plot is somewhat engaging and the direction is credible..but basically most of the choices that get made in this movie are all the ones I wouldn't have made, starting with Peter Parker.

I find Andrew Garfield just generally unpleasant to look at. When he does his emotional, crying scenes with either Capt.Stacy or Uncle Ben, I believe him. It's good acting. I just don't buy him as Peter Parker. I'm not comfortable with this version of Peter Parker....the one who is constantly keeping his head down, wearing a hoodie, skate boarding in places he shouldn't be, doesn't comb his hair, is a loner and is generally "emo" throughout the whole film. Garfield's oddly shaped head, bushy eyebrows and unkempt hair serve as a distraction.

How do you have a Spider-Man movie and there is no J. Jonah Jameson? That would be like having a rebooted James Bond movie without Q or Moneypenny. Oh, wait, they already did that. Moving along.....

The first hour of the film was sheer tedium. I only slogged through it because of the potential of seeing The Lizard unleashed. Marc Webb takes his time setting up Peter Parker's transformation into Spider-Man, and Curtis Connor's descent into being The Lizard. But then after they figure out each others secret, the film struggles to find ways to keep them clashing with one another until the climactic showdown on the top of the Oscorp Sky Scraper (which is actually a pretty good showdown; best part of the movie comes 2 hours in, with Capt Stacy firing shot gun rounds into a rapidly freezing Lizard, who then manages to keep regrowing his claws).

There are times when the tone feels a bit....inconsistent. For the most part the film is deadly serious, with almost no humor that I can recall. But there are other times when characters seem to change for no discernible reason. For example: Curt Connors appears to be a cutting-edge scientist with some moral restraints imposed upon himself, but the moment The Lizard comes out, suddenly he has a plan for world domination: make all people like him and usher in the new world of a cross-bred, genetically enhanced interspecies. And then there's the perfunctory angle where Captain Stacy has to go after Spider-Man because he's a "vigilante" (and by "vigilante" I mean Spider-Man is actually scooping up the scum off the streets and dumping them on the precinct doorstep), then the Capt.realizes who Parker truly is, gets killed by The Lizard, and before dying makes Parker swear to break up with Stacy, which then leads to her on Peter's doorstep crying about the state of their relationship. Oh GOD! I thought we left all that sappy, soap opera-centric crap behind us for good w/SPIDER-MAN 3.

One thing that totally stunned me about the movie was the lack of any sort of identifiable Spider-Man theme; the rip-roaring epics we got from John Williams in SUPERMAN, or Danny Elfman in BATMAN, or Hans Zimmer in BATMAN BEGINS. What's worse, it was James Horner conducting the score for this movie, which is quite easily the least memorable soundtrack to any major motion picture I've seen in quite some time. A lot of the tracks sounded like they came off a SPIDER-MAN game for X-Box that I've owned for years. No original content in this soundtrack. It wasn't until the end credits that I saw Horner composed the music, and then it became clear why we were getting refrains of Irish folk songs and shades of Enya in the back ground: Horner was stealing from his own TITANTIC soundtrack to use as filler in this movie.

So, unfortunately it must be said that the whole of the movie is not greater than the sum of the individual parts. By contrast, at least Toby McGuire's movies seemed light-hearted and more hopeful. There was more of a sense of optimism in that Peter Parker than i see in this one. Sam Raimi brought the right balance to the movies (overall). There was also never any doubt that Peter Parker was the good guy in those films; in Raimi's version Parker was noble and you knew he wanted to do the right thing. This Peter Parker comes off as much more schizophrenic than I've ever seen, and he looks to have more in common with the kids who shot up Colombine High School or Sandy Hook Elementary School than anything Stan Lee wrote. Webb takes Parker beyond being slightly socially awkward; here he's the emo kid...the hoodie wearing loner...he has ZERO friends in the movie. Maybe I'm too old for this. Maybe I misremember Peter Parker., but it just doesn't feel like this was the Peter Parker I recall growing up with as a kid, and so I don't recognize him and don't like him. This feels like THE DARK SPIDER RISES more than anything else. Glad I only payed 1.59 at Red Box to see it.

Gravity's Silhouette wrote:

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (2012) :2*:

Where to begin with this film?

I tried to watch it.

I watched about 30 min of it and turned it off.

Loomis wrote:

PLAYTIME (1967, directed by Jacques Tati).

I'm very sympathetic to what Tati is doing in Playtime - I don't think you're reading too much into it at all - and there are a number of moments I enjoy quite a lot, but I find the film pretty flat in a number of places (not least the restaurant scene you mention). I think Tati is much more successful in Mon Oncle which, like Les Vacances de M. Hulot , is genuinely hilarious throughout. It also benefits significantly from not merely depicting the absurdities of modern life, but also contrasting them directly with the sort of quaint rural japery he had played with in Jour de Fête.

I won't disagree with claims that Tati is a master of sound effects based comedy, but he's nonetheless a distant second behind Jerry Lewis. Tati is very inventive with his use of sounds, but it's usually more amusing than it is laugh-inducing (there are exceptions, most memorably a scene in Mon Oncle involving a plastic jug and a glass).

The Serpent's Egg (1977, dir. Ingmar Bergman)

An engaging tale with fine direction and acting. The ending reveals a background to the events that one would not have dreamed of. Can there be people more evil than the Nazis? Or are they just foreshadowing what was to come? Quite different from the other Bergman films I've seen so far, but worth consideration.

The White Tuxedo wrote:

The Thomas Crown Affair. This one didn't do as much for me. The editing was cool. The title sequence is first rate. But it feels undercooked, and riding on "cool" too much. I honestly lost interest in the second half. I have to see the remake again. It's been a decade. I may prefer it to the original.

I really prefer the remake.

I don't really buy McQueen as a millionaire playboy either. I think he works best as a blue collar everyman. A cop in BULLETT, a fire chief in TOWERING INFERNO, etc.

THE HOURS AND TIMES (1991, directed by Christopher Münch). A fictionalised account of John Lennon's 1963 holiday with Brian Epstein in Barcelona. Well-acted and strikingly shot in moody black and white, it's also strangely uninvolving.

HJackson wrote:

Loomis wrote:

PLAYTIME (1967, directed by Jacques Tati).

I'm very sympathetic to what Tati is doing in Playtime - I don't think you're reading too much into it at all - and there are a number of moments I enjoy quite a lot, but I find the film pretty flat in a number of places (not least the restaurant scene you mention). I think Tati is much more successful in Mon Oncle which, like Les Vacances de M. Hulot , is genuinely hilarious throughout. It also benefits significantly from not merely depicting the absurdities of modern life, but also contrasting them directly with the sort of quaint rural japery he had played with in Jour de Fête.

I won't disagree with claims that Tati is a master of sound effects based comedy, but he's nonetheless a distant second behind Jerry Lewis. Tati is very inventive with his use of sounds, but it's usually more amusing than it is laugh-inducing (there are exceptions, most memorably a scene in Mon Oncle involving a plastic jug and a glass).

I'll have to see MON ONCLE again. It's been a long, long time. Also MR. HULOT'S HOLIDAY. And I remember enjoying TRAFFIC, although, again, it was many, many moons ago.

For all its flaws, PLAYTIME is a truly dazzling technical achievement and all in all a remarkable piece of work. That it even got made seems miraculous. If I were ever to make a list of "One hundred films to see before you die", PLAYTIME would certainly be on it and probably in the top ten.

Peter Sellers is supposed to have said that if he had his whole life to live over again, he'd do it all the same ... except he wouldn't see the movie made from John Fowles novel (and screenplay) THE MAGUS.

I saw about a half hour of the movie late night on tv when i was a teenager, and it had a sufficient level of 'weird like THE PRISONER' that I wound up buying the revised version of the novel. Really liked it, enough to re-read it several time over about 15 years. But the book kept falling apart and I was lazy about finding a hardcover. Hadn't really thought about it in the last couple decades, but saw a dvd of the movie on sale at 7-11 and ALMOST bought it.

Instead I netflixed it first, to see if it would be worth the 5 bucks.

The first 45 minutes are slow and unintentionally funny at times, but then it ramps up into something that turns out to be pretty interesting. It is kind of a proto-Fincher story in a lot of mindfuck ways, built around a SOPHIE'S CHOICE moment of truth from decades past.

Don't think I could actually recommend it (they should have hired the lady who used to do all the early Bond girl voices to replace Candice Bergen's pseudo-accent) ... but even so I'm probably going back to 7-11 to buy the disk anyway. Too many moments that stimulated me to dismiss because it doesn't work all the way through.

Movie also uses an ee cummings poem a couple times, and it made me think that you could have used it in another movie that year: PLANET OF THE APES (the one about exploring and then returning to know home better than you did before.)

I dig Fowles' novel, but I couldn't stand the movie adaptation.

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