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GLASSJAW

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Everything posted by GLASSJAW

  1. my shelves just cleared. how big was that?
  2. no direction home: 8.5/10 American Masters documentary on Bob Dylan. At 3 1/2 hours, I feel like Scorsese coulda chopped out a few bits and pieces of songs and references in Part One. Part Two was far better overall. And even though it was very long, I feel like a lot of interesting information was largely left out in order to cram all the folk-y aspect of Dylan's career - not saying the doc should have been longer, just that the stuff Scorsese chose to focus on is stuff that has already been written about and analyzed heavily over the years. D.A. Pennebaker's documentary "Don't Look Back" essentially deals with the same subject in Scorsese's Part Two, but I'd say that Pennebaker's doc is significantly better. When Scorsese's doc ends (around 1965 in Dylan's career), Dylan takes a lot of really bizarre and interesting career turns that could have been very interesting to watch/hear/learn about - no need to re-tread Pennebaker's steps, IMO, even though I guess the value was having the man himself offer his admittedly muted commentary on the situation
  3. i started reading Please Kill Me yesterday, the "oral history of punk" which is essentially just 400 pages of interviews and quotes about a lot of proto-punk musicians/cultural figures from the 60s and 70s. the book is alright, very gossip-y. very little substance to the thing. i'm already 180 pages in, and i've only been reading it for a day. i'm a very slow reader, so that should hint at the complexity and depth of the book.
  4. the polar responses to Catcher in the Rye is always interesting. i think it's great, but i've known a lot of people who hate it. i've read A Christmas Carol twice this month - once being the version Dickens supposedly read in performances, then the original unabridged version. both were charming
  5. Peanuts Movie: 5.5/10: cute movie, very engaging animation and style - but if you're a fan of the Peanuts strip and the original seasonal specials, like I am, then this just isn't for you (us). it's definitely for a young audience, as it deals with very little of the depression/cynicism-loaded observations and problems Schulz was obsessed with. the great jazz is largely replaced with meaningless pop music, and the youthful alienation in a grand cultural sense is largely replaced with "that girl is cute, but how do i talk to her?" type problems
  6. I don't know if many people pay attention to directors these days - most seem to only care about actors? Maybe not. My top 5 living directors would be: 1. Woody Allen: He's made like 52 movies, and even though at least half of them are mediocre or bad, he's still made some fantastic films that are among the best of their genre. Don't know if there's a director/writer who more consistently reflects my interests and feelings. 2. Coen Brothers: Like above, they take some heavy subjects and often give them humour. Unlike the above, their worst movies don't really have much I can enjoy. Even Woody at his worst still has a FEW good jokes/thoughts I like - Coens don't. 3. Terrence Malick: Won't be for everyone, and he's made a couple of duds (I thought 'To the Wonder' was awful; his newest is getting poor reviews. Wasn't a big fan of The Thin Red Line, either). But... New World, Tree of Life, Badlands, and Days of Heaven are all fantastic IMO. 4. Tarantino: stylish, often offensive. (almost) always enjoyable 5. Wes Anderson: sugar sweet, not sure there's a whole lot going on there. But enjoyable. Top 5 dead directors: Stanley Kubrick Hitchcock Ingmar Bergman Tod Browning Billy Wilder
  7. I just made the mistake of reading the IMDB forums, too. there is a strong recoil going on as Rey is being considered a PC character by liberals to empower women, and undermine the Star Wars universe... rather than be written as an interesting character, like Luke is. Just like they are saying Kylo is written to be too weak. As you say, people are straight up forgetting that Luke was. not. trained. to be some crazy, flipping-around fighter. He was trained for a couple of days to be patient, and that's it. He left his training because he was TOO IMPATIENT, and goes to fight the dark lord of the f-cking galaxy, and handled his own quite well. That was literally the entire point of like 90 minutes of Empire Strikes Back. Luke doesn't hold a lightsaber until halfway through A New Hope (where he aborts his training early). By the end, he uses the force to blow up a death star an hour later. But now that some super Force-strong girl comes along and handles her own against an untrained Kylo Ren, who just had his gut shot by Chewbacca's gun (which had its power emphasized like 10 times in the movie), people are losing their minds. Big budget sci fi/fantasy movies are just loaded with contrivances, top to bottom, and nobody cares unless their personal prejudices are offended or challenged, it seems. It's very weird, and somewhat disheartening. Shows some serious cultural divide, I think, when characters in a world of magic and mind control and laser beams and big planet destroyers are considered "too unrealistic" lmao That said, I really hope Poe is given a bit more screen time or "seriousness" next movie. Not because he's a white male, but because he wasn't given much complexity or "reason to care" in this movie, unlike the others
  8. sicario: 7.5/10 really good movie, but not sure i would call it great or anything. nice visuals, nicely acted. good story, good action and suspense. but something tells me i'll forget all about it next week. and Emily Blunt is far, far too attractive to be on screen. it's almost distracting how pretty she is, even when she's all messy and beat up.
  9. Fair enough I did forget to add one thing, though: Tim Roth's performance did seem to me like he was doing his best Christoph Waltz impression -- from mannerisms to appearance. the whole thing did seem like a channeling a few times - and that definitely stood out to me. I've seen it mentioned elsewhere a few places, but nobody seems to find that weird. I sure did.
  10. Don't hold your breath for that one. Is there a more self-loving filmmaker out there? Lars von Trier, maybe? I think I'll have a Tarantino week soon and give all of his movies a re-watch. Definitely not excited for Pulp Fiction for the same reasons - after seeing it so many times, I find it exhausting now
  11. I am a little confused with what you're saying here. In my post, I say that I don't think "we" have reason to believe that Tarantino is making a movie about, say, Michael Brown - but I do say that the movie feels fresh. Meaning, the movie may not be about Michael Brown, but it deals with American history and how that is littered with [white] authority and oppression issues. As the Faulkner quote says, the past isn't the past. Whether or not Tarantino made the movie about Brown is irrelevant, because the movie is still about misguided concepts of justice, and violence and oppression and paranoia and some bizarre (proven fake) idea about Hope. How is that inferring deeper meaning? I think that's very literally what it's about, and what "the words" express. "Our culture" has been talking and writing about these issues for a few years now. My finding it "fresh" is because I think it fits in with that cultural conversation - and I also think it's infinitely more powerful than, say, liberal-on-liberal Salon articles or something I didn't say cartoonish violence earns it points, I was just saying that it has cartoonish violence because of it being a polar opposite to Revenant, which is more broadly about "the violence of nature" (although we could probably say that the bear part of Revenant is both literally and figuratively cartoon-y). But okay, now I'll say the violence earns it points. Kill Bill was enjoyable too, but its violence was pure style over substance. Totally different realm, for me. When I said Hateful Eight is difficult to watch, I felt it was because of how the violence is tied to issues that are actually very "real" to me (oppression, racism, paranoia, control, blah blah). The movie itself wasn't all that shockingly violent at all, because everybody and their mother watches Game of Thrones week in, week out, where people are castrated, beheaded, de-eyed, etc. constantly - the difference here is that the violence is WELL DONE. I think that because it made me feel weird and uncomfortable, as violence should - whereas Game of Thrones (or Kill Bill, or whatever) violence just makes me recoil for a second, if at all, then have a little chuckle.
  12. completely unrelated note, the "new french extreme" movie Martyrs is getting the American Remake treatment. ...it's pg-13. I know a few of you have watched it, since I got it from here. an absolute shockfest gets totally neutered so children can watch it. what's even the point?
  13. westerns/frontier stuff are my fav. genre when it comes to niche 'genre' stuff. doesn't matter if we're talking movies or books, i love them. i'm just really, really picky about what i love or enjoy. i like the old stuff, like High Noon, with all the communist fear and implicaiton/subtext/backstory, but I find the more middling ones, like Tombstone, to be too boring and clean to even care about as for the script, here's one link: http://screencrush.com/the-revenant-alternate-story/ - they talk a bit about the son originally being a memory, continued through a gun metaphor, etc. vs. an actual child. they opted for the son being alive in the movie, obviously. again, it just reminds me of Gravity in some ways - and i hated Gravity. I wasn't alone in thinking the script seemed paint by numbers there, with the daughter stuff sounding so forced and tacked on and there being no emotional resonance - so I know I wasn't just being picky. here, I just get the same feeling from all the "my son, my son" lines. I'm not saying Smith's version would have been better, but I personally didn't think the movie had any emotional value or payoff at all so I can't help but wonder! as for QT, I think Inglorious Basterds may be my favourite of his, with Django being my least (haven't seen Jackie Brown in forever though). IB is just so good.
  14. the hateful eight: 8.7/10 i certainly agree there is some re-tread here, but i enjoyed it all the same. i agree with one of the reviews i read (The Telegraph) which read that "it's a nation reduced to a room" and goes on to quote Faulkner: "the past is never really dead. it's not even the past." whether or not we can read Tarantino's "black lives matter" involvement into the movie is up in the air, as i think the script pre-dates most of the crimes he's taken interest in. but it still seemed fresh to me. anyway, I definitely thought there was a bit of a lull in the middle, but still enjoyed it. very difficult to stomach at times, i thought. fantastic performance from Jennifer Jason Leigh. not his best work, but i definitely really, really enjoyed it in the end. it's one i really want to re-watch though. couldn't decide between 8.5 and 9, so i went with the unprecedented 8.7. kinda funny to watch it and The Revenant so close together. despite being snowy westerns, they are totally different. one is so big and cinematic: big vistas, harsh nature, sparse script, violent nature, doesn't really "say anything" or play with genre. the other is so traditionally anti-cinematic: it's full of close-ups, takes place in a single room, is dialogue driven, has cartoonish violence, has political implication, and has hammy acting that, unlike in The Revenant, is intentional and self-aware due to the obvious genre influence and (debatable) subversion
  15. hmm, sounds familiar cough, Revenant, cough oh well. my download is going, hope to give it a watch tongiht
  16. The first quote isn't really telling - what is the context? "Weird-ass sh*t" isn't necessarily a bad thing Second quote is a bit weird, yeah. I've never been particularly convinced Tarantino is that unique, I just think the "well" he returns to (to borrow your language) is one that is obscure to most of us. Over the summer, I watched a bunch of movies he played at "QT FEST" for fans a few years back, and you could see how much his early movies borrowed lines of dialogue/images, etc. from some really obscure, really bad movies. He just updates them. That said, I don't have a problem with that, and I love almost everything he's done - but he hasn't really been one for SELF-emulation... yet. I don't think, anyway. The praise is, so far, overwhelmingly positive for this one, surprised to see such a harsh recoil on here - but RT only has like 23 or 24 reviews listed. but you've made me really curious now, whereas before I was almost indifferent I hope it's better than Django, which I liked at first, but became immediately bored with after a second viewing
  17. is it just me, or has this movie received far, far, far less publicity than every other Tarantino movie? i've seen MAYBE 5 ads for it in weeks and weeks. very little critical buzz, too. will be interesting to see how Tarantino responds to this, as he's not one to back down to criticism at all (in fact, he seems to take it very personally)
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