What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?

Three great movies over the weekend, which was a welcome change.

Amy - Really great. Winehouse was just so innately talented that it made it all the more sad to see how tragically misused and taken advantage of she was. It really went a long way to flesh out the over-the-top stereotype she became.

Love & Mercy - Kind of a depressing double-feature after Amy, but oh well. A biopic about Brian Wilson of Beach Boys fame, told in two halves to illuminate his early and late career. Paul Dano was great, which I didn't even think was possible. Plus it has some of the greatest "musician at work" scenes ever.

Phoenix - There's a lot to think about in this one, so I'm still processing it a bit (a good thing). A holocaust survivor has facial reconstruction surgery that almost but not quite restores her previous appearance. She pretends to be a stranger and hooks up with her betrayer-husband and ends up impersonating herself so that he can collect her inheritance. Hauntingly beautiful and sorrowful.

I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark again last night... still my favourite thing that Lucas has ever been involved in. That film, while hockey in places, is pretty much perfect and accomplishes exactly what it intends to. I especially love that Indiana Jones never does anything. For all his heroics the outcome would have been identical without him there, that is awesome.

I'm going to watch the next two over this week as well. This was my favourite series as a kid.

I am totally going to go home and watch Raiders of the Lost Ark tonight.

Greg, I just bumped Amy out of my top 3 for the year after seeing Brooklyn and was sad to do it. GOOD LUCK trying to maintain a stereotype on her after seeing that amazing documentary. What a tragedy

You know, people say that all the time about IJ, but I just don't buy it. I agree that he generally fails at each of his objectives, but the outcomes most definitely would have been different without him.

1) If he hadn't burst back into the Ravenwood Bar, the Nazis would've had the headpiece of the Staff of Ra (and had the full inscription).
2) If he hadn't found the real location of the Ark, the Nazis would still be digging in the wrong place.
3) If he hadn't blown up the flying wing, the Ark would've been flown directly to Berlin instead of the submarine island.

I know the counter argument is that if you remove IJ: Nazis get headpiece, dig up Ark, open it, look inside, and all die-- just like it happened with him there, therefore he's irrelevant. I just don't think that sort of reverse logic works.

I don't watch a lot of movies and haven't in the past, and I've been trying to fix that somewhat. So for the past two years I've made a list of ten movies I have to watch in the upcoming year. It's been a fun activity, and I've increased the number of movies I've seen in addition to those on the list. (For a long time I just plain didn't like the act of sitting down and watching a movie, period.)

Yesterday I made the list for 2016. All things I haven't seen before, and a combination of suggestions from others, things I've been interested in, and things I feel I should see. After a lot of noir and such in the previous years I tried to go a little bit lighter this year.

The Great Dictator (1940)
On the Waterfront (1954)
The Sweet Smell Of Success (1957)
Breathless (1960)
Bedazzled (1967)
1776 (1972)
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
Valley Girl (1983)
Mansfield Park (1999)
Attack The Block (2011)

If IJ hadn't been there, the Ark would have still been in the hands of the Nazis, and not in the hands of the Top Men. Eventually, someone in Berlin would have figured out, "Don't look in that box."

Gregarius wrote: You know, people say that all the time about IJ, but I just don't buy it. I agree that he generally fails at each of his objectives, but the outcomes most definitely would have been different without him.

1) If he hadn't burst back into the Ravenwood Bar, the Nazis would've had the headpiece of the Staff of Ra (and had the full inscription).
2) If he hadn't found the real location of the Ark, the Nazis would still be digging in the wrong place.
3) If he hadn't blown up the flying wing, the Ark would've been flown directly to Berlin instead of the submarine island.

I know the counter argument is that if you remove IJ: Nazis get headpiece, dig up Ark, open it, look inside, and all die-- just like it happened with him there, therefore he's irrelevant. I just don't think that sort of reverse logic works.

I don't know about 'all the time' unless a small group of internet nerds counts as 'all the time' for you - most people I know aren't aware of it at all. But the theory is generally true... not exactly - obviously - or it would be silly to point it out. The film could easily be seen to end up roughly the same way it did without Indiana involved, that's definitely true and it's highly unusual for a film of that sort to have a full fledged hero who, for the most part, doesn't really do anything of note or have a huge impact on the outcome.

I don't see him as irrelevant because of this... so there is no 'therefore he's irrelevant' in my version of it. He's us, he's the viewer, he makes the film worth watching and gives the story what it needs. It's an unusual way to make an adventure film. Without him they certainly would have had the head piece and everything else falls into place after that.

Would they have figured out 'don't look in the box' ... I think that's unlikely, the reason the Nazi's wanted it in the first place makes it clear that looking in the box was a top priority (they were supposed to weaponize it). In fact I think the film hints that it may still be opened at some point in the future again based on where they put it. Safe for a long time, but not forever.

Saw The Revenant this weekend.

The good:
Cinematography - Beautiful. Perhaps the best I've scenery I've watch in long time. Pretty amazing how isolated it made you feel seeing the harsh cold of Canada in 1820s.
Acting - Tom Hardy and Leonardo DiCaprio were excellent even if DiCaprio grunted half the movie.
Great Scenes - Indian attack, Bear attack, John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) key scenes, Hugh Glass (DiCaprio) survival scenes.

But...
I found myself looking at my watch twice. A sign a movie is running a too long. I didn't really get the bond between Hugh Glass and anyone else including his son. I also didn't need to see another scene of DiCaprio eating raw meat or fish or falling off a cliff. I guess it was just too much brutality. Kind of reminded me of watching Unbroken last year. The endless suffering gets old after a while. So Revenant won't make my top five for 2015. It was good so maybe the sixth or seventh behind Fury Road, Force Awaken, Inside Out, Martian, Big Short, Ex-Mach and I still haven't watched Bridge of Spies, Brooklyn and a few other.

You gotta see Brooklyn, King

I doubt bridge of spies will break your top five list.

Black Barney wrote: You gotta see Brooklyn, King

After reading your review, I think I need make a date to bring QueenPut to see Brooklyn.

Caught up with some Oscar-nominated pictures over the weekend.

A friend of my wife's is an Academy voter so they lent us a "for your consideration" screener of The Revenant. It is undoubtedly a very well made, very well executed film with some lovely photography (all natural lighting from what I understand) and a couple of excellent scenes like that bear attack. Tom Hardy is, as always, fucking ace. The sound design/editing was just stunning.

BUT THE MOVIE SUCKED!

It was _BORING_. From the very beginning, I felt zero connection or interest in the story. It simply was not compelling, and Hugh Glass was not really all that interesting a character beyond "he fought a bear and lived". Other than that, it was just uninteresting and the survival story came across as more trite than grueling. The Native American elements were very welcome and I appreciate the significance there (especially the sweat lodge), but it still veered into the "magical indian" tropes too much.

But hey, you know it was an "art film" because it had lots of shots of running water. Seriously. Watch for it the next time you are watching an "art film". Running water. Mark my words.

I also watched The Martian on PPV. I liked it somewhat better than The Revenant (although that movie was better made on a technical level), mainly because I loved how optimistic it was despite the situation. I really liked how Watney was just like "you know what, this sucks but I'mma just get it sorted and see how far I can go here." I liked the soft science/engineering, I liked the ingenuity. But here again, the story was just kind of crap- not very interesting to watch unfold at all. By the time the Hermes gets the coordinates to go back, it was just really kind of stupid...I would have been the dude on the ship saying "nope, fuck that guy, let's go home". But Hollywood Heroism, Doing the Right Thing and all that. Interstellar was WAY better and far more compelling.

your description of the Revenant sounds eerily like Fury Road

Watched a couple of movies this weekend.

My wife picked Kingsman: The Secret Service from On Demand. It was an OK spy movie. The concept is kind of fun, this secret secret service that's all about being the gentleman spy and throw in this fish out of water street kid and a megalomaniac villain and you've got yourself a movie going on. As the movie went on it started feeling more and more like a Mark Millar comic, I had to look it up, and yep, it's based on a Millar comic called The Secret Service. So you get what you expect from Millar, lots of violence, really characterized characters and of course some juvenility.

The next night I watched Jodorowsky's Dune. Good documentary. It definitely would be interesting to see how Jodorwsky's version of Dune would have gone down. He had definitely assembled an amazing visual team, but I question his decisions to cast his son and Salvador Dali. Dali was a genius of course, but as an actor? I'd love to get my hands on a copy of that book though, it would be amazing if they someone got the rights to reproduce it. Even though Jodorowsky had everything meticulously planned out as evidenced by the book they sent the studios, I get why they didn't have faith in him. I mean Holy Mountain, El Topo and Santa Sangre still top my list of weirdest movies I've ever seen.

The shame is he never made another movie again, until he reconnected with his producer during the filming of the documentary. He did go on to have an amazing career in comics though. If his career had been reversed and created The Incal, Metabarons, etc., first I'm sure a studio would have snatched up Dune right away.