wonderboy779

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• 
  IfeellikeGregorSamsa

  That's interesting perspective about emerging oneself in kid's world. I won't argue that as a concept it was interesting, since it wasn't about the killing but the inner state of the kid - him being closed-up in himself - made me more bored than interested. As you now know, I loved "Last Days", finding it to be the most powerful study about isolation (very next to "Woman from the Dunes") but "Paranoid Park" didn't grab me, it made me wait, and I believe you know how it usually ends. "Paranoid Park" bares the same themes like "Gerry" and "Last Days" - unability to communicate and being lost in oneself. "Paranoid Park" made me think that these themes has been worn out by the former two. What can I say more? :-)
  
  I'm glad you liked it though. In the end, it's all about having pleasure from this or that title. And to work out grey matter a bit. ;-)

  posted 12 hours ago
• 
  I recommend you see...

  Paranoid Park

  by Jac

  The last few Gus van Sant's pictures were hit or miss cases and while I despised "Elephant", I loved "Last Days" and even more the experimental "Gerry". "Paranoid Park", on the other hand, is just a bad movie-- poorly written, uninvolving story for a 30 minutes strechted out for 80 minutes.
  
  The plot is messy, from one point jumping from past to present whenever it suits it best, as if connecting the events into dramatic structure was too big of an effort. Probably was. Christopher Doyle's sensible cinematography doesn't make it any better. In fact, it reminds viewer of Wong Kar-Wai's recent pictures-- often beautiful to look at, but deadly thin on its substance. "Paranoid Park's ending is undoubtely interesting but by the time one gets to it, it nearly isn't as thought-provoking as it could've been if things prior to it weren't so tiresome and heavy-handed. It's like getting on a tasty dessert after a bad dinner-- distaste stays.
  
  Gus van Sant may still respect viewer's intelligence and sensitivity as he always have but it seems that no matter what cinema you wish to create, the story still remains the core on which everything else takes off and this one feels like a pretext, therefore making van San't ambitious thought blurry.

  IfeellikeGregorSamsa

  Edwin, I believe we won't agree on this one. Nevertheless, I fully respect your opinion. :-)
  
  Wonderboy: In case you still wish to know my thoughts on this picture. (I suggest you to go back to "Last Days", then "Gerry". "Drugstore Cowboy" is also highly recommended, I think it a good place to start.)
  
  Best regards to both of You!

  posted 19 hours ago
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  I recommend you see...

  1900 (Novecento)

  by Jac

  Bertolucci's "1900", a 5-hour epic is definetely one of the most ambitious cinematic untertakings I have yet had oppurtunity to experience and results, although mixed, brings a unique character study, a story of a friendship torn between Right and Left.
  
  A lot can be said about events, or rather character development here, but the important thing is to acknowledge that the first part could've be easily cut down to from 2.5 hours to 1.5 since it's clearly over-long, having not enough substance to sustain the interest. Yet the second part brings true drama to the table, fully compensating this careful introduction into the relationship of the two main characters.
  
  Technically, it is wonderful. Storaro with his rich, colorful cinematography is at his best here, direction, rythm is flawless and acting is also captivating, even though italian dubbing can be annoying sometimes. Donald Sutherland goes over himself here and therefore joins my private list of The Most Ruthless Villians in Cinema History as a terrible, vicious, Fascist Attila.
  
  This is cinema they simply don't make anymore and "1900", despite having some troubles with the selection of the material, still is a powerful filmmaking neverthless, the one one won't easily forget.
  
  A must-see for everyone fascinated with Italian cinema.

  IfeellikeGregorSamsa

  While many of you have been praising "The Dark Knight", which I'm sure will live up to its hype, I decided to catch your attention with this underrated epic, something from sort of a different dimension, yet also deserving your time.

  posted 2 days ago
• 
  I recommend you see...

  Doomsday

  by Markus

  If you like Mad Max, this is your bag baby.

  SadisticMinister

  Hey, you should really see this!
  
  Blood, gore and crushed/decapitated heads.
  What more do you need on a rainy day?

  posted 4 days ago
• 
  I recommend you see...

  Woman in the Dunes

  by Jac

  Note: Hiroshi Teshigahara's "Woman in the Dunes" is an ultimate picture. An unparallel work of a genius.
  
  This remarkable film made me look at certain things differently. For cinema buff, not experiencing this story, its meaning is like for poetry lover not reading T. S. Eliot's "Waste Land" -
  
  something is definitely missing.

  IfeellikeGregorSamsa

  This one really doesn't need too much of a word, so I thought I just leave you an note.

  posted 9 days ago
• 
  I recommend you see...

  Eureka (Yûreka)

  by Jac

  Note: One of the greatest movies ever made and one of my personal favorites.
  
  It's indescribeable experience.
  
  Profound.
  
  Magic.

  IfeellikeGregorSamsa

  220 minutes of your time maybe too much but I believe it's worth it.

  posted 9 days ago
• 
  I recommend you see...

  Bad Timing

  by Jac

  Infamously called "a sick film made by sick people for sick people", Nicolas Roeg's "Bad Timing", indeed has moments that one may call disgusting, but putting them in a context of the story and its main theme - that is, obsession - it shouldn't be so shocking that constant misunderstandings, egoism and finally mistrust can create one of the most awful situations people can put themselves through.
  
  It is well said by Nietzsche that from one point on, man rather loves his/her desire than the object he/she desires and that seems to be the case of Dr. Alex Linden (somewhat wooden yet mostly convincing Art Garfunkel) who, at the end, nearly causes his girlfriend, Milena (terrific Theresa Russell) to die from pill overdose, being certain that it's one of her desperate acts to get his attention after another split. Before he decides to call the hospital he undresses her and have sex "to" her...
  
  Prior to it, they were getting more and more confused over arguments, breaking up with each other and coming back many times, creating toxic and painful area from which they couldn't escape. Alex longed for the time how it was between them at the beginning, having wild sex and small talk when Milena wanted to clean herself out from various romances she had on the side when they were apart but he only made her feel guilty. He teaches psychoanalysis at the univeristy but he's as helpless as Alice in Wonderland when it came to found himself out in the chaos of what he really felt. She searched relief in alcohol, which she abused heavily. Nothing was resolved and it couldn't be because language simply isn't enough and "another chance" is a strong narcotic that quickly makes you forget about the price.
  
  It is not an easy film to watch but Roeg masterful directing skills makes it strangely poetic, with vibrant camera work, rich lighting and - of course - brilliant, unsettling yet compelling editing. One can't also forget to mention an excellent supporting role from the great Harvey Keitel.
  
  After all, good, healthy relationship mostly consists of good timing, with right gestures and right words from one to another at any given time but that's an ideal rarely achieved or sustained and Roeg's brutal statement of how far mankind can drive off from this ideal is emotionally as strong as intellectually Bergman's "Scenes from the Marriage" are.

  IfeellikeGregorSamsa

  This is heavy but this is Roeg so it's good. I would give it 4.5/5 if it wasn't for the last, somewhat confusing, minute but it still is a powerful, creative and challenging cinema.
  
  Not to be missed.

  posted 10 days ago
• 
  I recommend you see...

  L.A. Confidential

  by Jac

  "L.A. Confidential" is a masterful picture, having literally everything at the right place at the right time. Flawless, really. I could go on for hours how much I love this masterpiece-- its rhythm, humor, elegance, cockyness and cynicism...
  
  A splendid tribute to noir of 50's and highlight of 90's cinema;
  
  a crowning acheivement of cinematic storytelling.

  IfeellikeGregorSamsa

  I just watched it for... I'm not sure, sixth, seventh time?.. The rest is obvious. If you haven't seen it, there's no time to loose.
  
  A must-see. Period.

  posted 12 days ago
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  I recommend you see...

  [Rec]

  by Jac

  Once this hellishly intense 75-minute Spanish horror takes off, it is mind-blowing experience. Shot in High-Definition with only one camera and one microphone, it presents us events in a form of a rough cut of TV reportage, just like in a episode of a reality show, and it is often geniuely brilliant in its disturbing realism. Forget the conceptual resemblance to "Blair Witch Project". Nevermind the story. It's a pretext, it's all about "how", not "what" here. The concept of the way it is shot, with natural lighting and a sound of limited range might've been good for nothing, if everything wasn't very well-thought through and superbly acted.
  
  I always thought that they are the masses who produce the most sick needs, not the TV producers. Sure, they're cynical and ruthless in their greed to make as much money as they can and but one always have a choice. And all it really takes is to push OFF on TV remoter. Many circuses, in a tune of a "Big Brother" had no option than to be shut down if that button did get pushed more frequently than it was. But compulsion to voyeur rather than to do is constantly growing, because doing means responsibility. Once you know that you would rather want to watch some tasty blonde on a shower on a screen than to create situation in which you could watch her in reality, you can be damn sure you're a case to consider.
  
  "[rec]" is the product of that kind of voyerism, only it is a fiction that creates a perfect illusion of reality-- let you watch gruesome violence and sheer terror from a safe position, wanting to experience the extreme but at the same time have your body intact and once it's done, go to the kitchen and grab a bite of a cheese cake and push it with a hit of a nice hot coffee. Being a reaction to today's voyerism, in the most brutal form to date, it shows how low we've become in indulging our senses, letting ourselves being provided with something as strong as this, when you'd often - disturbed out of your mind - want to question that it is fiction.
  
  "[rec]" is a first true horror of 21th century. For better, or for worse.

  IfeellikeGregorSamsa

  Americans already cooked up and remake, but you would want to watch the original one.
  
  "[rec]" is a first true horror of 21th century. For better, or for worse.
  

  posted 18 days ago
• 
  I recommend you see...

  Dead and Gone

  by Markus

  What a piece of shit.
  No suspense. No horror. No.. nothing..

  SadisticMinister

  Hey, you should really NOT see this!
  
  If you come across this.. skip it!

  posted 26 days ago
• 
  I recommend you see...

  Robot Bastard!

  by Markus

  This was really good.
  Thank you for the tip Kevin!

  SadisticMinister

  Hey, you should really see this!

  posted 26 days ago
• 
  IfeellikeGregorSamsa

  Yeah, I heard about "Day Night Day Night". It sounds very promising. I'll check out the other two titles. And yes, aviod Normal, man. You don't want to do this to yourself.

  posted 29 days ago
• 
  I recommend you see...

  Ed Wood

  by Jac

  Tim Burton's "Ed Wood" is a magnificent semi-biopic picture. A wonderful tribute to the power of passion and determination with a high dose of humour and wonderfully overacted performance from Johnny Depp that gives a perfect tone to the film.
  
  Edward D. Wood Jr. started making pictures in mid-50's, quickly establishing himself as a director of the worst movie ever made, exceptionally awful indeed "Glen or Glenda". He ended up badly, frustrated and an alcoholic, dying forgotten only soon to be rediscovered and gain a cult status as The Worst Director of All-Time. Or maybe we should say The First, if you look closely at what's happening nowdays.
  
  The story comprises a "creative peak" of Wood's career, in which time he gave the world aforementioned "Glen or Glenda", "Bride of the Monster" and - Oh boy - "Plan 9 from Outer Space", focusing mainly on his relationship with Bela Lugosi - at the time under heavy addiction to morphine - played masterfully by Martin Landau.
  
  Edward D. Wood Jr. turns out to be a complete idiot here. A deluded moron, really. Naive infant with absolutely no sense of composition or intuition. However, Burton and Depp respects their hero and their approach have nothing of a intention to humiliate him for only he was laughed-off through most of his life. Depp gives Edward such a charm in his vision of being The Next Orson Welles, you almost wants him to succeed, even though you can't stop laughing at his incompetence at the same time.
  
  With all the enormous amount of talent involved, the true star of the picture would be a famous nowdays double team of screenwriters, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who lately wrote a terrific horror "1408" inspired by Stephen King's mediocre short-story. Their script of "Ed Wood" is simply a state of the Art. On the other hand, Tim Burton is, ironically, at his creative peak here, playing with bad props and cheap studio locations, feeling like at home.
  
  Make sure you know anything about filmmaking before you pull any string there: i.e. one cut won't cut it. Right?

  IfeellikeGregorSamsa

  "Really? Worst film you ever saw. Well, my next one will be better. Hello? Hello...?" ;-)))
  

  posted 30 days ago
• 
  lovebugtorres7

  hello

  posted 30 days ago
• 
  I recommend you see...

  Normal (2007)

  No rating. by Jac

  There are times when I feel that I was too harsh or even radical in my critical opinion about certain pictures, supposedly good or mediocre. But when I happen to see a bad picture, my hands hesitate to write a word about it since I don't want to advertize it, feeling that, after all, bad publicity is still a publicity. I want it to be gone, to be buried under the ground. Even though I'll admit I had some perverse pleasure out of mocking certain titles here and there, being it mostly a need to compensate the lost time, I really don't like reviewing bad movies and I don't even remember most of the bad ones I'd seen. Once I see a bad picture, some mechanism I have in my mind makes me forget it and - usually - it succeeds.
  
  But it's unlikely that I will forget "Normal" anytime soon. And when it finally ended, for the first time I felt truly obligated - somewhat like a madman with a sense of mission, yes - to get to the bottom of how bad this picture actually was. Or, I should say, is, because I won't make it disappear, as sad as it sounds.
  
  Let's make something clear before going into it: Carl Bessai must be one of the very incompetent directors working today. How he managed to make couple of pictures in the past before landing with "Normal" before us is basically beyond my imagination. I sure hope previous ones were better, even though I'm not one bit eager to find out. Making a picture like "Normal", hell, even writing it to do it the way it was written, has to have something to do between narcissism, infancy and sheer ignorance.
  
  Aside from the awfully shallow, plot holled as a Swiss chesse script, stiff, amateurish acting and dull pace, "Normal" is also absurdishly flawed in its intercutted multi-character storytelling, turning it into a mess, really, almost impossible to describe. The most important event - and we see in the end, the most interesting - happens before we enter the picture. There's been a car accident in which a young man died, a tragedy that supposed to have a great impact on three main characters - his mother, his friend who's been with him at the time of his death, and the perpetrator himself. The picture stars with the mother being in the state of mourning; his rebelious, somewhat non-conformistic friend getting out of the prison and the perpetrator, being a teacher at the university, having an affair with one of his female students. There's also sub-plot - God only knows for what - of perpetrator's autistic brother, who acts like someone with this mental disability usually do, only without any cinematic motivation, nor any relevance to the story. That's for the premise.
  
  It's clear what Bessai wishes to do here. Presenting three characters after the traumatic event is a good point to start, but when you decide to go such route, you might need something equally strong to carry the story, especially in case of three, completely different characters and that's what Bessai seems to forget. Thinking that it's enough, having no clue how to carry out either of them, he makes us follow their boring lives. Can you imagine it?
  
  Nothing works in this picture. And nothing ever really happens. Everything that's going on is irrelevant to the subject, nor has any real meaning. The mother doesn't do anything besides being sad simply because she's not given any motivation to act. Same goes for a friend of the dead. He goes back home and soon become sexually involved with his father's girlfriend only to find that he likes much younger girls, like the girl he meets between time in bed with his older lover, later to be discovered by her, kissing the girl. The plot of the perpetrator is equally hopeless. The student he has affair with reintroduces him to wild ways of drugs and sex, then leaves him, then he tries to get back to her but it's no use. And what the hell's that got to do with anything?
  
  And since we landed on sex. The bad movies sometimes share certain awkward similarities with erotic movies. Erotic films almost always treat their stories as a fillers between sex scenes so we wouldn't get bored, even if we eventually do. In bad movies, only sex seems to fill the gaps in the story. "Normal" is a perfect example of that observation. And naturally, it fails even in that department.
  
  So how does it end. It ends horribly since all of a sudden, exactly ten minutes before the end, the director wants to sort this mess out. Without any real reason the friend of the dead and the mother meet each other, even though they could've met up at the beginning but who would pay attention to that. Then, the friend, after triumphal couple of blows on his father's face, gets out of the city with a new-found love, just like in a cheap melodrama. The autistic guy also finds a woman, as if we cared one bit from the beginning. The mother trashes the perpetrator who suddenly lands in front of her house, making an awful judgement on him, so we could see that there's no forgiveness in the world and shouldn't be, even though, of course, politically correct of not taking eye for an eye since he's left on the street to grow in guilt for the rest of his life. And as she drives off the street she says to her younger son that she feels "allright now". Oh sure, that's the answer. And that's what cinema, the drama, are for.
  
  Have some shame, Carl Bessai.

  IfeellikeGregorSamsa

  When it finally ended, for the first time I felt truly obligated - somewhat like a madman with a sense of mission, yes - to get to the bottom of how bad this picture actually was. Or, I should say, is, because I won't make it disappear.

  posted 30 days ago
• 
  I recommend you see...

  Planes, Trains and Automobiles

  by Jac

  "Planes, Trains & Automobiles" is, in my mind, simply the best of what's left from 80's US comedy. It stands the test of time because of its honesty and modesty. And while it is damn funnier than all of them, it is also suprisingly moving. If I wanted to give this gem a justice, I would call it "Sideways" of 80's.
  
  Even though simple as a stick, the story carries its subjects - friendship and understanding one another with all one's imperfections - perfectly, without any sidekicks and sub-plots. Having on board the great John Candy can't go wrong and he indeed is perfect as a Del Griffith, desperate for company lonely shower ring salesman who, because of his politness, becomes pain in the ass for Neal Page (watchable this time around Steve Martin) on his way to Thanksgiving.
  
  The dialogue between the two of our heroes is so well-written and delivered that it makes you nostalghic seeing that there was once a time when people were talking funny and you cared for them even though you might've wanted to call them a bunch of morons. This movie is special in this case, carried out almost without any slapstick - Hughes builds up a funny moments from characters' flaws and the subtext of each scene works wonderfully, having its place unconditionally within the story and the evolution of their relationship is then especially touching. And thus more funny. Oh man, this one has plenty to laugh at.
  
  No other way than to call it a classic.

  IfeellikeGregorSamsa

  Wonderful. The best was 80's left.

  posted 31 days ago
• 
  I recommend you see...

  Time Masters (Les Maîtres du temps)

  by Markus

  Not as good as Rene Laloux's Fantastic Planet, but still entertaining.

  SadisticMinister

  Hey, you should really see this!
  
  Just a chill movie.

  posted 31 days ago
• 
  I recommend you see...

  Caddyshack

  by Jac

  "Some people just don't belong."
  
  Oh yes, the tagline got it right.
  
  At least when you read it now.
  
  As campy as nothing in recent memory, this unfunny, probably non-scripted, terribly acted mess brings up frustration and stands as yet another example of how most of 80's comedies can't stand the test of time. And Lord knows how much I hate this Rodney Dangerfield guy to begin with, having to endure his lame one-liners and truly annoying dance moves which made me want to walk on my walls. While the rest of the cast isn't any better, the man is a embarrassement, and brought up the worst of me. Too bad only death did something about him.
  
  And to think that they actually made a sequel to it makes me feel a bit low.

  IfeellikeGregorSamsa

  AVIOD.

  posted 31 days ago
• 
  I recommend you see...

  Ehi amico... c'è Sabata, hai chiuso! (Sabata)

  by Markus

  Great fun.
  Lee Van Cleef is hardcore.

  SadisticMinister

  Hey, you should really see this!
  

  posted 32 days ago
• 
  I recommend you see...

  Django

  by Markus

  Django guns down more bad guys in one movie than Clint has done in his whole career.

  SadisticMinister

  Hey, you should really see this!
  
  And the ones of you whow has already seen it can just watch it again :)

  posted 37 days ago

In Theaters

• Wanted
• My Winnipeg

On Dvd

• Ohayo (Good Morning) 1959
• Cop and a Half

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