The Bookie
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Posts posted by The Bookie
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The Jinx (6-part hbo) - 8/10
Making a Murderer had me hankering for more true crime series, so I watched this from last year. I guess a lot of people have already watched it. It didn't suck me in nearly as quickly as MaM, and in fact I wasn't totally into it until that 6th episode. It's an interesting story for sure, but was told in kind of a circular, repetitive way. Slicker, but also largely comprised of artsy dramatization footage, some of which was recycled too many times (the rural NY train station where his wife went missing, with the train pulling in and leaving, must have been used more than 20). Or maybe it's a weary cynicism - it's not really as shocking to find out that a rich guy from a high profile NYC family was able to get away with murder, vs. a random redneck in Wisconsin being systematically railroaded into jail for the same crime.
But that final episode, wow. Few things in film are better than the moment the lens scales back a layer and the project itself becomes a part of the story.
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18 hours ago, Monty said:
Before I put together my 2015 top 10, I still need to watch Dope, Sicario, Spotlight, Phoenix, Brooklyn, and Carol. While I'm no longer a music snob, I certainly am about movies; but not as bad as I used to be, where I would crap on people for liking a movie that I didn't. That's a 20s thing that I've grown out of. But because I have 6 movies I still want to watch before I put my list together, I have this snobish feeling that I have to get it done before Jan 1st. Thank goodness the wife is gone until Friday.
I try not to feel rushed with these things. Like I said tentative - there's always going to be some you miss. But I also feel that urgent need to see the big award season candidates, if only to evenly compare them. Carol is the one that might disrupt my list. I hadn't heard of it until a month ago when they had a trailer before Spotlight. It looks very powerful. Stuff like Brooklyn and The Danish Girl might win awards, but just come off as high style melodramatic crud. Youth is the other dark horse for me. Could be great, could be nothing. Hard to say from the trailer.
But the best stuff is likely being made on the outskirts; I'll see them someday, who knows when. On that note, try to watch Dope without expectations. It's not some sweeping epic, or it is but in it's own way, but it's certainly not made for awards. It's made for viewers. I went in with zero anything, and it was the most fun (well 2nd after Mad Max) I've had all year.
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Kumiko screened at festivals all through 2014 but didn't get released til Feb 15 according to imdb. Same with It Follows. Whatever they're 2015 movies to me.
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5 hours ago, GLASSJAW said:
wasn't Kumiko from 2014?
well. if the list police can track me down, the list police can fine me.
it stays!
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And since that's the last I was waiting for, a tentative top-10 list for 2015
1.Montage of Heck
2.Mad Max
3.Spotlight
4.Dope
5.It Follows
6.The Revenant
7. Kumiko the Treasure Hunter
8.The Wolfpack
9.Sicario
10.Room(standard disclaimer, as usual the best movies of the year are ones I haven't heard of yet and will be watching 2,5,10 years from now)
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The Hateful Eight - 5.5/10
Didn't quite dislike it as much as others have, but yeah, stinker of a QT movie. I'd agree it's easily the most forgettable in his catalogue. Django was uneven but entertaining. Jackie Brown rough around the edges but with its own distinct style. This just had ... nothing really, nothing remarkable. The score was nice. I noticed Morricone re-used his music from The Thing near the end there - "So, now, the two of us just have to bunker down, wait out the storm?" - so there's that.
Not much else to say about this. That's a weird feeling for a Tarantino flick.
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Slade House, which I guess is Mitchell's dessert to the main course of The Bone Clocks. Originally cut from the main novel, but too beloved to cast into the cracks, thus developed into its own mini-novel. Reads like vintage King back in the days of The Shining and Salem's Lot. Slightly more self sentient. Delicious.
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On 9/28/2015 at 2:19 AM, GLASSJAW said:
finished Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick deWitt
if I were to rate it, I'd give it a 7ish/10. it was a cute story, funny at times. very enjoyable and easy to read... but I just felt like it sorta just flew by, and I didn't really feel much of anything as I read it. in his other book, The Sisters Brothers, I felt a much deeper connection to the characters and thought the playing-with-genre was far more interesting than anything done in Undermajordomo Minor.
I also felt like each character kind of shared the same voice and personality to some extent - the clever back-and-forth dialogue seemed more like deWitt's voice more than a character's -- again, contrast this with the Sisters brothers where the two characters seem to have very different approaches to conversation and discernible personalities
edit: but then again, I do know that this story was influenced heavily by traditional fables, and I am very unfamiliar with fables - not sure how this agrees with or defies the tradition it's playing with
Enjoyable, just a very light read. Would make a good movie.
I just realized I never came back to do my book report on this one, but it's a testament to how forgettable it was. GJ might as well have written my review. Wasn't bad by any stretch, but 3 months later I can only remember two scenes - the royal orgy and stuck in a cave in the dark. Sisters Brothers, on the other hand, 3 years later I still remember almost everything.
I'm between books now, few on the shelves I'm looking forward to but the only christmas present suggestions I gave out were books so I'm waiting for a surprise. The last two I read were back to back masterpieces: David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks, possibly the best I've read from him (Cloud Atlas is a heavy adversary though) and 2666 by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. Mammoth vortex of a novel that centers on missing/murdered women in Mexico. Easily in my all-time top 10.
21 hours ago, Svengali said:My condolences to all of you who had to read The Catcher In The Rye in school ... it's well on it's way to becoming the first and only book that I quit this year.
I had two that I abandoned this year. First was Dave Eggers' The Circle, which I had pretty low expectations going in to, and gave up after 2 chapters. The second was a surprise though, Margaret Atwood's latest, The Heart Goes Last. Made it a good 200 (out of 300) pages in, but after the first 50 or so it was a series of increasingly often eye-rolls. Totally unexpected. Sucks seeing one of your literary heroes fall on their face like that.
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4 hours ago, Monty said:
Very quickly going to go back to the one of the things that bothered me about The Hateful Eight.
I thought the narration that started up at Chapter 4 (I think) was absolutely brutal. Tarantino choosing himself to do the narration may not have been the best choice. I honestly thought that as soon as it kicked in, I was listening to director's commentary.
It's not a big deal, especially given how far my expectations for the movie have fallen, but I would have preferred this to be under a spoiler tag. I know the movie's leaked and all, but this one I'm still gonna hold out and see in theatre next week.
Just for anyone who's gonna be talking Hateful Eight, if you wouldn't mind. We were using them for The Revenant for specifics.
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Making A Murderer -> new 10 part Netflix documentary series. Recommend for anyone into true crime / legal courtroom / general wtf-level perversions of justice. It's insane what they're doing to this poor good natured redneck guy in Wisconsin. Dude spends 18 years in prison for a rape he didn't commit, dna testing exonerates him in 2003, then in 2005 when he files a lawsuit against the local police, suddenly all this evidence turns up on his property linking him to a missing/murdered woman. Oh and the 'evidence' is all 'found' by the same officers who put him in the first time, even though they aren't supposed to be investigating because of conflict of interest.
Like ... good stuff but at the same time I want to punch through my tv constantly.
It's very reminiscent of Paradise Lost, the doc series on the West Memphis Three, teenagers in Arkansas who were railroaded into jail over supposed satanic ritual murders in the 90s and just got out a few years back. Or Ivan Henry here in Vancouver. I haven't listened to Serial podcast but it's supposedly on the same level of addictive storytelling (it is very, very addictive).
3 episodes to go still so no rating. It'll be a very bingey xmas eve tomorrow.
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8 hours ago, GLASSJAW said:
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:
DiCaprio: u... killed my son
Hardy: Maybe u shouldn't have raised such a girly little b-tch!
DiCaprio: raaaghhh*gurgle gurgle*
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.
Yeah that dialogue you quoted in the spoiler, that definitely was a cringe moment for me. Especially because, for a 2-1/2hr movie, it was pretty sparse on dialogue, and then at the final climactic moment to yell something so bland and cliche.. and I don't know much about the backstory to the movie, how the script was changed etc. What's the deal there?
But I actually already re-watched Revenant again tonight - gf found out I watched it late last night without her and got mad - and I do really like this movie. The simplicity is the point, I think, in the idea that if you still have a breath you can fight (paraphrasing one of the dream passages there I think). Maybe downgrade it to an 8.5 but it's solid and in the top ten of the year for me. Like Monty I'm partial to early frontier/savage/whatever label stories.
Hateful Eight I haven't watched. I can catch that one in theatres, despite the bad early reviews. I tend to have a sometimes opposite reaction to Tarantino, like Deathproof gets crapped on often but it's one of my favorites. And I kind of wanted him to faceplant in hopes it'll push him to stop phoning it in. Those quotes about wanting to win lots of oscars and threatening to take his toys and go home are interesting. My personal theory on QT is he's had a chip on his shoulder ever since Pulp Fiction, put everything he had into Inglourious Basterds (arguably the best film of 2009 imo), got spurned, and decided to just do what he feels like with his little actor posse. But goddamn it he's capable of so much more.
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9/10 for The Revenant. I only intended to watch the opening scene.... nope, just got sucked in. Very hypnotizing. The cinematography alone is worth 8. Simple story but I like that; reminiscent of Apocalypto. Leo did a great job and it mmmmight be enough to get him his long chased Oscar, I'm mostly impartial on him and this is probably the best acting I've seen from him, but on the other hand Hardy subtly upstaged him. My one complaint would be that there was a minor-character subplot (starring Ben Hutton!) that seemingly went nowhere unless I missed something.
Not my personal favorite of the year but I could see it winning Best Picture. They won't give it to Mad Max, so my vote would probably go to Spotlight, unless Hateful Eight or Carol ridiculously surprises me.
I'll re-evaluate once I can see it in theatres, but I didn't want to wait since I'm traveling in January and won't be able to catch it until February.
SpoilerSmall detail that I really liked from the bear attack scene - I have a friend who was bluff charged by a grizzly; wasn't injured but had to play dead. The thing that always stuck with me about his story was the bear pressing down on his chest and waiting to see if he was breathing. Creepy as F. Anyhow I like that they included that.
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ah, screener season - the most wonderful time of the year came early! I'm so tired yet still tempted to stay up til 3am watching The Revenant
Watched season 2 of Fargo over the past few days. Didn't watch season 1 so I have nothing to compare it to (oh, there was that 90s movie I guess) but I found it quite enjoyable in a popcorn crime drama sense. Scratched the Breaking Bad / True Detective s.1 itch. Pushed into navel gazing territory occasionally, and as much as I'd like my 70s mid-western gangsters to debate French literature it's not the most realistic, but still a lot of fun. The UFO stuff was a little out of left field but it fit. 8/10
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20 minutes ago, GLASSJAW said:
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?
Probably naturally offered itself as an early archetypal drama setting because it was one of the only places that men and women worked side by side.
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2 hours ago, GLASSJAW said:
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
Thief? It's old and dated, but pretty damn good from what I remember.
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On 12/13/2015 at 0:13 PM, Down by the River said:
The twitter hashtag #ExplainaFilmPlotBadly is pretty good for some laughs.
Were I a twittererer, I'd go with a split-screen Rainman / 7even #whatsinthebox?
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Crimson Peak 3.5/10
Unfortunately del Toro & co. seem to have spent so much time designing sets, costumes and props that they forgot to check if the script is any good. Turns out it isn't. It's a melodramatic soap opera that takes itself so seriously it almost comes off as a parody of gothic haunted house stories. What a waste for a good director to make a big budget horror flick and have it go splat like this. Better acting would have probably elevated it to a neutral 5.
Really was nice to look at though. Points on that alone.
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Black Mass 5/10
Can't pinpoint why but the movie never really took off for me, like I watched the whole thing waiting for it to really start. Competently made and acted. But it just felt like a checklist of his crimes, no real style or pacing. And Johnny Depp .... on the one hand it was nice to see him really acting again vs. playing another Burton cartoon. On the other I've heard people saying he should get an acting nomination, but Jack Nicholson took pretty much this exact role ten years ago and turned him into a legit unhinged psycho. Depp's Bulger just came across as an annoying asshole.
World's End 9/10
Think I gave this 8 or 8.5 after seeing it in the theatre. I knew it would be better on a rewatch, these Edgar Wright movies always are. The jokes are so multi-layered and the visual scenes so stuffed with detail. My favorite that I missed the first time was after fighting the twins in the garden, when Rosamund Pike thinks Simon Pegg is offering her a hand, and he's like "Oh no love just give us a ciggy!" and then pockets the pack. Probably need another couple viewings to really catch everything.
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6 hours ago, riffraff said:
I thought Revenant was showing this month. Is it January?
at the theatre the other night, poster said Jan 8
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Trumbo - 8/10
Bryan Cranston playing Dalton Trumbo, Hollywood screenwriter jailed and blacklisted for being a communist in the 50s.
Only real complaint was the personal life/family drama stuff bogging down the pace. But great acting with excellent dialogue. Probably the best one liners I've heard this year.
Personal favorite - Louis CK, playing one of Trumbo's fellow blacklisted writers, after the two are spurned by an old producer friend making a movie deal at a bar: "Look at him - he's trying to sell his soul, but he can't find it."
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'Happy Holidays' -Jon Trvolta
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The One I Love - 7.5/10
This is how I like my rom-coms: morally questionable, unsettling, surreal, philosophical. with just a pinch of Ted Danson.
(note: I am not a good judge of rom-coms, but this was still a good movie, in its own way)
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Slightly off-topic (in Off-Topic!) but after watching that Amy Winehouse doc I picked up her first album. It's quite good. Has a bit of a throwback 90s funk-jazz sound.
What a shame that she passed away before the hip hop supergroup she was planning (her, Questlove, Mos Def and someone else, I forget)
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Amy - 8/10
Should be infinity out of 10, she seemed pretty ageless. I didn't really know anything about Amy Winehouse before watching this - I knew her one big song, and a vague general reputation from celebrity culture osmosis. Some bulbs burn too bright.
Rate The Last Movie You Saw - 2
in Off-Topic General
Posted
The Host - 7/10
Korean monster movie from 2006. Took me 3 installments to watch cause I kept falling asleep, but I did like it, it was just my fault for putting it on late. Had that peculiar ability to be gory and wacky at once. Epic ending I didn't see coming. Joon Ho Bong's first big movie (he did Snowpiercer).