I agree. After hearing that 'Inception' was utterly unfathomable, headache-inducing, etc, I was expecting something on a wholly different level to what I eventually encountered. I did enjoy the film, but didn't think it was complex, whether unnecessarily or otherwise. In my view, it's a pretty standard take on a narrative that is very familiar within sci-fi and what I term 'indie surrealism', and even more so in literature of those forms; I'd be surprised if anyone who reads Dick, Vonnegut or Murakami was really stumped by Nolan's approach.

k. so you're just gonna be a dick then? fine.



Complexity and complications are two vastly different things. Don't equate them. Besides, I think you're wrong about working within the context, but whatever.



This pretty much sums it up. Also denotes the difference between complexity and complication.

So apparently they're remaking Leprechaun, because that's necessary.

...seriously? What?

They'll remake fucking anything won't they?

Did you hear that they're remaking The Ten Commandments?

Apparently that Cecil B. DeMille asshole wasn't satisfied with his 30s classic, so he's remaking it into a special effects-laden sellout movie. I'll bet he's gonna do it in color, too, the bastard.

They're remaking everything these days, nothing is sacred. I imagine Back To The Future and Se7en will be next.
Speaking of Cecil B. Demille, did anybody see Cecil B. Demented? It was directed by John Waters and starred Stephen Dorff. Now that was an unusual film. I still can't make up my mind whether I like it or despise it, it had some pretty funny wtf moments.

As much as I despise the idea of a Back to the Future remake (it's one of my all-time favorite movies after all), I have to admit, if it takes place in 2015 and involves the main character going back in time 30 years to the year 1985... that'd be kinda interesting. Kinda.

I would prefer Black to The Future.

"Dayum! Brotha done kissed his mama!"

Apparently, WWE is involved. Let's hope Hornswoggle (or whatever his name is) isn't the leprechaun.

Yeah that and their parodies are almost never funny for me. They often start off ok but then they just keep exaggerating and making it more and more over the top that it gets so stupid and boring. This is the formula for almost every episode for me. The only episode of the last season that I enjoyed was the crack baby athletic association one (and even that wasn't great) and I saw all of them.

Who are these people?

chuck norris

Are you 12 years old?

The Skin I Live In was a deliciously subversive Cronenbergian nightmare. Definitely Almodóvar's finest film in years, and easily the best film I've seen so far this year. If you like disturbing yet poignant character dramas (think Dogtooth on a Hollywood budget), look no further than this. I'm definitely no fan of Antonio Banderas, but I thought he was electrifying in the lead, and I doubt a woman exists who could pull off the female lead with more gusto than Elena Anaya. SEE IT.

Well it took me two tries, but I finally managed to sit through The Tree of Life. What a gorgeous, terrible movie. Easily the most drawn out thing I've ever seen, with little to no plot for the majority of the run time. Through the middle to late stages there is a little story about a son rebelling against his strict father, but for the main part it's all about how this family views their connection with God, and until the end I suppose it could be taken quite philosophically, but in the end the message of "Nature is cruel and life goes on and is much bigger than you, so don't let anger, regret and loss destroy you" (Which seems to be the main purpose of that extended formation of the universe bit, which does look cool [Except for the shitty dinosaur CGI], but I will say it's not pointless, without it, it's pretty much a cripplingly slow and generic boy-rebels-against-parents-due-to-hard-circumstances movie, in a sense that segment justifies the overblown and pretentious meandering somewhat.), gets switched to "Nature is cruel and life goes on and is much bigger than you, but if you follow the way of 'Grace' (Clearly meant as God, there's heaven and everything) and let God into your heart and you will forgive everything and live in joy.", which pretty much just makes this a movie about Christianity and cuts off most types of interperetation. The only interpretation is "Live by mans laws and be the master of your own life, and you will suffer, be jealous, be cruel, but live a peaceful, loving life with God and all your worries will wash away", that's it, there are no other interpretations.

I will admit that it is gorgeous, every shot is perfectly framed and every detail designed to be as beautiful as humanly possible. But that doesn't make up for how ridiculously overblown this is. For starters, The first 15 minutes give the set up, from a future perspective what the meat of the movie is about, you learn that there are two ways of living, Nature, becng materialistic and left important, Grace being reserved and loving, you learn that the family have a dead child and the three main characters all react to this in different ways and have other issues too there is virtually no dialogue for this, but at least it gets it's point accross. Films like Rabbit Hole discuss this issue with far more thought and better watchability. Next up is the 25 minute scene with the formation of the universe and a bunch of whispered questions for God, which makes me ask why dies all the narration need to be fucking whispered. I guess it's meant to be like prayer or something. The scene is beautiful, the music is a little overblown, but it is undeniably impressive. It runs a very long time, but I guess that's kind of the point of showing the age and massiveness of the universe. The most contentious stuff here is the heavy handed metaphors taken with the dinosaurs, basically using sharks going after blood as a metaphor for the way of "Nature", and the friendly dinosaur who takes mercy on the dying prey dinosaur reflecting the way of "Grace", which is meant to show that things have always known the way of God or some shit. The dinosaurs have very poor texture rendering, which is a pity because the movement is very realistic.

Then you get another 20 minutes of home movies of children growing up, again with no plot or dialogue so by the time the story actually rocks up the whole thing has been pretty well worn out. The story itself is ok I guess, all quite predictable, still really drawn out and artsy with every scene have six or seven unnescessary seconds of looking off into the distance or camera trickery between every single cut. And there are a lot of cuts, no scene in the entire film plays out in a simple continuous motion, constantly chopping around and dissecting the flow to make it look all meaningful despite having no substance. I'm not sure why people spoke up the wife's acting for Oscar buzz, she doesn't speak much and she's rarely out of the background of the film. Obviously the film is all about said meaning and moral of the story, so the actual plot would only have taken up about 4 pages of script (Which would have topped out at around 9 pages probably), and the rest being all ethereal shots of streams and trees while people whisper the same old shit to God. Seriously, all the questions to God are "Why me?" "Did he deserve it?" "Why do you do this?" "Are you there?" There are hundreds of these for two and a half hours! This line of of questioning why the film could be giving an atheistic approach to the film to be interpreted, which goes out the window in the final scene.

It's a gorgeous movie, so I can sort of see why some people want to make it out to be hugely moving and meaningful, but the message offered is so very simple and pretentiously blown up to unbearable levels I can't see how it could be considered to be so important and thought provoking.

Watched Good Morning Vietnam (1987) last night. Good flick.

I really enjoyed The Skin I Live In as well, except for

Good post, very throrough analysis. The movie has improved for me on repeated viewings in some respects and weakened in others. I too had problems with the seemingly Christian "message" at first, but quickly disposed of the idea that it is trying to put across any impartial or objective moral. It is really just presenting the experiences of several characters and the voiceovers help to show these experiences through their own eyes. I think everything in the film serves to emphasize that - the whispering shows it's more of a self-dialogue rather than narration, and the movement of the camera is unique, not handheld or static but floating as if representing a disembodied consciousness searching for a foothold. I don't think it is saying "be nice to people, don't be selfish, follow the good road". It just describes a problem most people deal with in their lives and shows one person's mostly internal journey in resolving it. The transcendent ideal which is being sought all along doesn't have to be God, but if you want to think of it as God that is within the realm of interpretation. It could have been more open-ended but to be honest I'm glad to see a film which offers something other than blurred ambiguity.

The acting is by far the worst part of the movie, I mean it wasn't bad but there's a limit to what you can do with actors like Brad Pitt.

The Tree of Life had its merits but it definitely wasn't the best Malick film. The ending verged so thoroughly into trite New Age territory that it kinda lost whatever unspoken power had been building up to that point, which honestly wasn't that much. I might watch it again at some point in the future, but I don't feel particularly compelled to. The subject matter and the acting, etc, weren't gripping enough to get me totally involved throughout.

Just checked out Drive tonight. Again, had its merits, but toward the end the story just petered out into a whole lot of nothing.

Really? For me, the of the ending was what lifted that film out of the ordinary; while a few deft touches here and there - like Gosling's character having no name - made it more than an ordinary heist film, those last few scenes retrospectively changed my perspective on the entire film. I hadn't even wanted to see it at first, since there are few things that I hate more than movies about men driving fast and doing little else, but of course Drive turned out to be far more. The of the conclusion transformed it into a meditation upon the genre and that dreaded thing, the human condition, in general; made it both more contemplative and more realistic than stereotypical examples of the genre. It's a trend that I think has become more prominent in recent action films, and is something I welcome. Btw, I didn't know if those were spoilers or not, but I thought I'd tag them just to be safe. That's one film I don't want to ruin.

I found Tree Of Life tremendously boring too.

Most all of that director's films are excruciatingly boring i.e. The New World and The Thin Red Line.

Ha I tried to watch the New World once, but my girlfriend was around and she shut it off after about twenty-five minutes. Malick seems to really hate words.

@Expedience, I would look into that sort of viewpoint because you have some interesting thoughts in there, but there is no way I'm watching that movie ever again.

I'm not too keen on either of those films, but Days of Heaven is in my top ten movies of all time. One of the few films I have yet to find a flaw in.

I'm shocked. What films do you guys like then? I've watched The New World and The Thin Red Line about 5 times each and never get bored for a second.

Lars Von Trier pre-Antichrist. That's pretty much it.

Why pre-Antichrist? I think his best are Melancholia and Breaking the Waves. Some of his earlier stuff is incredibly tedious, I think Dancer in the Dark and Dogville require either enormous perseverance or drugs to sit through.

I found both Antichrist and Melancholia pretty much appalling in every way, although Melancholia was the lesser offender. I even rather enjoyed the "measuring stick" portion, which was about the only extended metaphor that didn't feel incredibly forced and pretentious. Sadly, the awful cast, glacial pacing and--frankly--awful concept still made it an absolute chore to get through.

It's been years since I've seen Breaking the Waves. I remember it was labored and overlong, but effective by the end, and while I'd probably consider it among his lesser films, it's about 400 plateaus higher than his recent offerings.

Dogville/Manderlay and Dancer are perfect films. I'll never understand how anyone who's serious about film can't revel in their flawless exercising of the craft. From the radical subversion of "the great American play" Our Town in Dogville, to the careful side-stepping of the boundaries of Dogme 99 in Dancer, Von Trier took film to an entirely different level. Shame he's unlikely to ever do it again.

It's puzzling to me why you like Dogville but not Antichrist. Both are what I would call subversions of traditional themes, Dogville the American Dream and Antichrist the biblical myth. Which is why I'm not a huge fan of either film - It just seemed like he had the idea of inverting the plot elements of certain stories and making films out of that. I'd sooner watch Antichrist though, just because it's shorter.

What do you think of Riget (Kingdom)? I quite liked that series.

Hmm. I can see where you're coming from here, and I guess if you look at it as a genre piece it seems a little more interesting, given the points you mentioned. Except I didn't view it in terms of fitting into any one genre, really, whether heist or action or...whatever. I honestly didn't know what genre it was even supposed to be, if any, going into it (which is ideally how I tend to approach films), so all I could do was judge it by what it offered. It had this odd feeling like the writer just decided, 2/3 of the way through the screenplay, that he didn't feel like bothering anymore, Not to mention that the last clash in the film was laughably tepid and riddled with illogical points.

Also, I could've done without the cloying "hero" theme song. Yeah, we get it, he's meant to be a good guy, no need to literally tell us that ad nauseam via soft pop. I read several people here on MA gushing about the soundtrack, but I thought it hurt more than it helped.

Anyway, yeah, as heist/action films go, it stands out and seems like something more, but as an overall piece of art it left me wanting.

EDIT: After talking with my girlfriend a bit more about Drive, we touched on the interpretation that

Antichrist was mostly awesome because of the many unnecessary close ups of Willem Dafoe's abnormally large penis.

I didn't get that feeling at all from Drive, Under_Starmere.

Watched Audition two days ago. The Japanese "horror" flick... and goddamn. Wow, haha.

Goddamn was it ever boring. The pacing was ass, to the point of virtually nothing, nothing enjoyable, interesting, or all that important or engaging happening for the first two thirds or so, at least that's what it felt like. On the bright side, you can at least follow what goes on in those parts, before the film seems to decide it's time for a change in, well, just about everything, including making "chronology" a taboo word. We have flashbacks, dreams (or maybe they aren't dreams, let's be vague for the sake of being artistic! Nah, just kidding. They're totally dreams... probably), future visions (or something) and all sorts of crazy, faux-trippy, confusing, and ultimately boring shit. It's like the film makers realised it was going absolutely fucking nowhere, and figured "Welp, weeeee blew it. Let's add random gory, creepy, freaking-out scenes!" that weren't particularly gory (you don't see all that much blood, or dismemberment, etcetera going on except for in one scene towards the end, and even then they hide a lot of details), creepy (you're too busy figuring out what the point of the action is) or even doing a very good job freaking you out! (You don't really care enough to do more than go "Huh... meh.")

And then there's the cast. Good lord, the cast. I don't know who did the casting, but they should probably be subjected to some of the remotely "gory" stuff we do see in the film, because I have no idea who the hell all these Japanese people are, but they don't really seem to care about being in the film. Maybe I'm just having trouble grasping some important, innate detail of Japanese culture and tradition - would anyone here more versed in the matter than myself perhaps be able to tell me why everyone's a fucking cardboard cut-out who doesn't even care to be on camera either way? Seriously, there's something wrong with the movie when the "character" you care for the most is the dog. (No, the dog does not have any lines, and no, the dog provides nothing of particular importance to the plot.)

I'm sure I'd be able to glean more worthlessness from the film if I watched it again so I could warn you further, but that'd require me to actually watch it again, and I'd rather live the rest of my life mutilated in a barley sack.

To be blunt, the average Japanese person is very stiff and very awkward, so the movie's being accurate in that regard. This is why Japanese drama and anime are filled with lively, crazy, over-the-top characters--the subconscious desire to be something you're not, and the need to see it manifest in some form.

The whole Japanese style of horror movies doesn't usually do it for me, but Audition is an excellent film. Very chilling. If you think that's a bad horror movie you haven't seen much.

Project X - 3/5

A pretty silly and over the top party comedy much like Superbad if it was less substantial and had less character stuff - this is pretty much all just raucous jokes and risque humor, and I had a fair bit of fun with it. The ending gets to be a little too much, but for most of the runtime it's just a hilarious little romp. There's nothing really outstanding here but I had enough fun with it. Separated from being unremarkable due to its energy, mostly.

The Hunger Games - 4.75/5

This is just awesome. Based on the now-hit book series by Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games had a huge load of hype on it, and against all odds it came out as one of the best films of 2012 so far. The story about a dystopian future where children from impoverished 'districts' are forced to fight to the death is given a huge amount of weight and gusto, and feels totally believable and credible at all times. The acting is pretty excellent and there are some truly great dramatic moments - you feel the full weight of sorrow and agony that Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) feels. The action is rough and brutal and while sometimes the camera shakes too much, mostly it adds a pretty savage and visceral feel to things. Far from your usual teenage pop movie, The Hunger Games delivers with excellent conviction and strength, and captivates the viewer for the entire 2.5 hour runtime. This is a huge movie that never gets dull and never wimps out, and I loved every minute of it. Knowing the book beforehand lent some extra gravity to the emotional scenes, but even without that, this is a great movie. See this one. It's the first big-budget killer of our 'summer blockbuster' season.

I thought Project X looked like the worst thing to happen to film in the history of mankind.

How so? It's pretty much your generic 'party' comedy movie in the same vein as several other films.

It looks like it took even that genre template to it's most retarded and pointless extreme. It dosen't even look like it has much of a story beyond the "look at us, we are the ADD generation, now see our random party shots with shitty music and lots of nudity"

Well the movie itself isn't really anything too extreme. It's just a silly comedy.