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GLASSJAW

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Everything posted by GLASSJAW

  1. that's fine. but not what i was really responding to. you said people didn't have time to make their lives complex, and that is what i was responding to. they obviously did. and complexity does not have to supersede tension, in my opinion whether you like movies that make people complex or not is entirely different and up to you, not something i can really protest - try as i may
  2. i need to convince you that people had thoughts and complexity in the 1800s?? read Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" which is a deeply, deeply, deeply complex novel based on legend and myth as described by Samuel Chamberlain's autobiography ("My Confessions") and his time working with a savage group of idiots who were scalp collectors in the early 1800s. Chamberlain's notes reveal that they had conversations about imperialism, about language, about god, about art, about morality, etc. And McCarthy took those things and made them interesting and relevant for contemporary readers. Deadwood essentially does the same thing. Revenant is based on an interpretation of an interpretation of a fictional book based on a myth trickled down through hearsay. Let's not pretend the movie was authentic to any sort of source material and that is why it is so artless and shallow - it's that way because it's lazy, and a paint by numbers revenge movie. And that's fine, I enjoy them too - in this case, though, I was just hoping for something a little more interesting, and that's why I found it disappointing.
  3. Revenant: 6.5/10 - my comments are spoiler free, but don't read them if you think the negative bits can influence how you appreciate the movie (sometimes when i read a negative review or comment, i watch the movie looking for that negative thing. do you guys do that too?) Horrible disappointment in many ways. Beautifully shot, great costume design, great early sequence - followed by 2 hours of almost nothing. Lubezki is one of my favourite people working in the film industry, and I think he may be the best camera man of all time - at least that I've seen. I have been looking forward to this since its announcement, and so my disappointment just makes me feel bitter almost. Sorta sad! This is Gravity all over again: no emotion, technical beauty. For an opposite version of this, check out Malick's "The New World" - which has a pretty mixed reception due to its slow pace and spiritual-heavy aspects, but it utilizes Lubezki's talents even better, and emphasizes emotion and subjectivity over canned thrills and conflict. Once again, I thought the acting was embarrassingly over-cooked from DiCaprio. Hardy, who I normally like, makes his character a Deliverance-grade caricature somehow more believable than DiCaprio's. Hardy has one of the most absurd, unbelievable, sh-tty accents I have ever heard. Maybe it's just because I've been watching Deadwood all week, which is a frequently similarly themed. But Deadwood is a far, far, far, far, far more intellectually and emotionally complex experience. The Deadwood writing is so wonderful and entertaining that this, by contrast, seemed like it was written for, or maybe by, children: I agree with you, Bookie, that scene you tagged was great. I thought there were a few really good small scenes throughout, but the vast majority of this long movie was just brutally uninteresting. I didn't feel a single bit of "real" emotion and so the conflicts/resolution were ultimately boring or unsatisfying. I looked at the time remaining at least 7 times, and that isn't a good sign for me. After reading some reviews, I know I'm not the only one who has these complaints (it "only" has 81 on RT so far) - and I wonder if this is because the final story was a pieced together revenge plot that was not in the movie or the original few versions of the script. But Inarittu signed up and changed all that, apparently.
  4. part of me really wants to hold out for the theatre experience for Revenant, but who am I kidding? I won't get far, i don't think. as for movies: I re-watched Elf. I seem to have a love/hate relationship with this thing. Last year I remember enjoying it. Year before that I didn't. This year I'm somewhere in between, I guess. 6-6.5/10 A Very Murray Christmas: 5.5/10. Bill Murray's netflix variety show. mostly a bunch of celebs or musicians singing famous songs. Some of them sound fantastic (I love the Phoenix song, and the group version of a Fairytale in New York), but some of the songs are just flat, and I don't care about the celeb worship going on, even if it is meant to be ironic.
  5. holy christ. Sicario, Peanuts Movie, Revenant, Brooklyn, Carol
  6. 8.5 is obv the right score. what were your complaints? spoiler tag them
  7. I don't think I remember a time when more mega managers were either unemployed or in precarious positions at one time. Maybe Ancelotti will take over the White Caps (lol), Mourinho will take over and United like we all know he wanted to, LvG will retire and hang out with his wife.
  8. avoid the internet until then. spoilers will be everywhere, my friend
  9. star wars: force awakens: 8.5/10 pleasantly surprised
  10. speaking of re-watching shows, I just finished Deadwood season 1 for probably the 500th time. The single most rewarding show I've seen in terms of re-viewings. So many jokes and references and tidbits that I miss out the first 400 times. Easy 10/10
  11. does anybody have any theories as to why hospital shows are so unbelievably, ridiculously popular? is it because of the nature of a hospital, itself, is episodic? like, there are clean-cut heroes and problems and solutions and a revolving door of them? or do people just really find hospitals all that interesting? or is it just because medical dramas have been around so long that people are just used to them? or something else? in 2015/16, we have The Knick, Code Black, Chicago Med, Greys Anatomy, Nurse Jackie, Getting On, Dr Ken, Heartbreaker, and more. I get that some are better than others and some are totally different (Dr Ken is a comedy, The Knick is more of a period drama than the traditional ER thing), but still, the settings and conflicts are often very similar. edit: as for The Knick, I watched the first season and enjoyed it, but didn't like it as much as I thought I would/hoped to. took me forever to finish. and I found the music to be very, very distracting and kinda cheesy, tbh
  12. star wars sitting at 95% on RT based on about 170 reviews. on IMDB it's at 9.0 based on 20,000 votes. there is hope.
  13. he is a bit overrated, isn't he? outside of Collateral, i don't know if he has a single movie I would consider 'great' personally. I re-watched Last of the Mohicans recently, and it had a couple of good scenes, but mostly just seemed dated. Heat's alright. The rest I just don't remember or wasn't all that impressed with to begin with - yet he's often written about or regarded as some A List director or something, it seems
  14. boy, did Seth Meyers sure choose the wrong path
  15. polar express: 4.5/10. deus ex machina chugs along at the speed of a train, i guess. the landscapes look nice, but the human animation is so bad to the point where it's distracting in almost every scene. looks like a cut scene from a video game from 2009. i read a quote from Rick Rubin earlier which said something to the effect of "the art that is supposed to look like tomorrow quickly looks like yesterday" - seems applicable here. how the grinch stole christmas (2000): 1/10. "the noise, noise, noise, noise, noise"
  16. yeah, this is just not how i like my sci fi. but i'm the first to admit i'm EXTREMELY picky about my sci fi movies. 2001 is one of my favourite movies of all time (top 3, if not top 1), and i just love how meticulously bizarre and unemotional it is at times, but even at its most "unemotional" its so evocative at the same time. its challenging. Some people, like Tarkovsky, said it was TOO clinical, which is why he made the emotional/philosophical jumble Solaris (which I also love). both deal with pretty intense aspects of space travel. and while i understand those movies deal with the future, i think they totally question very basic aspects of human nature. i'm a liberal arts kinda guy, i like human nature stuff far more than science stuff. i liked Interstellar (a lot more than most around here, it seems) for more or less the same reason. it's like a blend between Solaris and 2001 For Dummies, condensed in a pretty billion dollar package. this is also why i hated Gravity. it was a pretty package, but no heart. i think The Martian would have been way, way, way, way more interesting if it was SOLELY about him growing his crops and trying to survive. but i have no idea how that would have worked? one negative review I read said that the tension of the movie is completely removed by the fact that Damon's character never seems alone. he's either talking directly to the camera (with almost total confidence), or he's talking to people back home, or his scenes of solitude are so brief and intercut with NASA sequences that the tension is cut right out. I really have to agree with that. I wanted to like it, just a miss for me
  17. the martian: 5.5/10 jeez, i did not enjoy this. really confused about the praise here, even after reading some of the reviews. to me, it just seems like Armageddon meets Apollo 13. pure hollywood cheese. the movie closes on a few dumb comments about death, as if the 2 hours that precede those closing moments were about death too. but they weren't. they were all about optimism in American Know-How, and the value of "Science!" in a universe where all philosophical or emotional problems can seemingly be solved like math, or ignored completely "disco sux" and "i wanna be iron man!" are among the last lines in the movie. that says it all for me.
  18. golden globe list for best director is pretty interesting this year. sure would be something if Miller won. I haven't seen the others, and I'm sure I'll be pulling for Inarritu again, but part of me thinks it would be cool for Miller to win. Mad Max is essentially his life's work, and as somebody who generally doesn't like action movies _at all_, I sure loved Mad Max Todd Haynes, "Carol" Alejandro G. Iñárritu, "The Revenant" Tom McCarthy, "Spotlight" George Miller, "Mad Max: Fury Road" Ridley Scott, "The Martian"
  19. the walk: 7/10 this was a pretty interesting movie because it is so totally intense if you're easily freaked out over heights, yet it's not at all emotionally engaging. throughout the movie there are clips of Petit (actor, not really him) giving commentary about this or that, or how this or that "felt" or what it meant to him. at first i thought that was a lame trick for Zemeckis to pull, but then i sorta thought that without the Petit character talking about how much this event meant to him, and how it's his "art," then the movie wouldn't evoke ANY emotion at all. the crew is just tossed together and there is no real reason to care about their involvement in anything. though there is a lot of talk about relationships and their coordination, this is pure Petit and his ego, so I think the little interludes of him talking about the experience kinda makes sense in the end. for the first hour, i was sorta rolling my eyes at the "this is art, this is art, this is my masterpiece!" dialogue, but by the end, i bought it.
  20. I loved Event Horizon as a kid. I re-watched it last year and was horrified at how bad it is. I even went into it telling my friend, "oh we should watch this, it's good!" and then feeling utterly embarrassed the whole time "...well, it was good"
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