Film The Redcafe Movie review thread

Spoony Kobayashi said:
He could've condensed it into a 20 min long video for school kids entitled 'drugs are bad m'kaaay'... I suspect the MTV style would've been appealing too. Talk about using stereotypes and being heavy handed.
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Alright, so it's lazy writing in terms of terms of the characters and the paths they followed but then he took these extreme stereotypes to evoke that emotional impact and he did that well...actually I can't even argue that given I just played down the emotional impact. So that's me now coming to the conclusion the characters were a little bit weak, the plot lacked impact or originality...so that only leaves it being well acted. It probably wasn't even well acted. feck you Spoony, I liked it. I'd probably watch it again. Always said Pi and Black Swan are his two only great ones anyway. Well, not great in the sense of being movies I'll point to as standing out above the rest from that decade, but thoroughly well made and enjoyable. The Fountain was too ambitious. Noah could be interesting.

What's the MTV style anyway?
 
Couldn't have put it better re: Requiem For a Dream, likewise Mockney's comments on The Shawshank Redemption from a few pages back. With the exception of The Wrestler (which I was always going to enjoy, being a nerdy fan of pro wrestling), I've really disliked Aronofsky's films. They all feel like a shouty child's take on the subject matter, dressed up to be deep and artistic. But beneath the glossy exterior there's never any substance. Black Swan was ridiculous rubbish past the impossible to screw up ballet sequences, & nothing good can be said about The Fountain, it's one of the few films where I've not made it to the end.
 
I like Requiem for a Dream a lot, though when I watch it I find myself waiting for the scenes that don't involve Ellen Burstyn to end so we can get back to her.
 
Vivre Sa Vie (1962) - 9

What a beautiful film. No-one can evoke a love of cinema quite like Godard.
 
Lovely Molly.

A newly wed couple set up house of the wife's dead parents.
The husband is away a lot working as a Truck Driver,soon things start to happen and she starts to remember things and return to old ways.
It is billed as a Supernatural Horror, the horror only appears now and again but builds up has the plot unfolds.
Gretchen Lodge as Molly is excellent
An enjoyable film , with a nice plot twist near the end, but the ending lets it down

6/10
 
LoveInTheAsylum said:
nothing good can be said about The Fountain, it's one of the few films where I've not made it to the end.
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Good god what was that about? I made the huge mistake of watching it with a girl on a romantic night in..

We ended up arguing about who's idea it was to rent it. Absolute fecking nonsense of a film.
 
I'd actually argue that The Fountain is one of his best. It's an incredibly personal and ambitious film that you either hate or love. I'm with the latter, the elements evoked in the film really hit home for different reasons, and I see something new in it everytime I watch it. I don't even argue with people who hated it as, had I seen it a year or two before, I probably would've had the same reaction, but I do get slightly annoyed when people just throw it all away saying it's crap or shite. You can see it's a real film in the sense that there are so genuine filmmaking ideas in it, and that the subject matter is profound. That you don't relate to it in any way, that it leaves you completely cold isn't a crime, of course.

Wibble said:
I remember enjoying Sex Lies and Videotape when it came out but I haven't seen it again since then. Sodeberh films always strike me as emotionally empty which is a major weakness in a filmmaker IMO
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I'd say that's what makes him interesting and one of the few original filmmakers out there. Now I'm not a fan of all his stuff, far from it, but I can enjoy his approach to some of his films, his cold, clinical and efficient storytelling. I thought it suited Contagion perfectly and gave us a global epidemic film that was a sort of mix between a documentary and a movie; but the same type of filmmaking made other of his films painful to watch (The Informant, I found Haywire incredibly boring, didn't see Che but by the looks of it, it would've fallen into that category).

Basically, he's a good director for a very specific type of material, which can be seen as a weakness, but also sets him apart from many mainstream directors that don't really have a filmmaker's identity.
 
I've tried to watch The Fountain twice and the furthest I've got is about 20 minutes in.

It's offensively incoherent and so far up it's own arse it can't see where it's going.
 
In Time:

I was bored, I expected it to be shit but I watched it anyway. I was actually pleasantly surprised. I just have to work out if it was due to my lowered expectations, or if it was actually quite good?
The premise was a bit silly, but that's science fiction for you. Basically, when you hit a certain age, your clock starts and you have a certain amount of time left before you die. Unfortunately time is used as currency, therefore the more you spend the quicker you die.
Then it introduces the idea that the rich keep it all for themselves and keep the poor down, which is obviously overused, but the time element gave it a bit of a new twist.

I thought it was worth a watch, although nothing special.
 
R.N7 said:
My favourite Godard.
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I think Breathless is still my favourite but this one's the best. It's what led me to watch...

La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc - 9

Utterly unique. I've only ever seen two other silent films; Nosferatu is a fantastic horror film and Metropolis is thoroughly engrossing, and the influence they've had on cinema can still be seen today in millions of films. This one's different. It's simply not possible for anyone to replicate any aspect of it. Entrancing, mesmerising...just otherworldly. I had no idea so much emotion could be conveyed in just one micro-expression. No idea one look could contain so much emotional power and resonance. The moment she goes from pure terror and despair when being forced to sign her confession to utter elation as she sees the shadow of a cross...it's magnificent. To think she never took part in another movie again simply because so few saw this movie at the time, it's heartbreaking. And the Bishop's portrayal of pure evil, pure condemnation and disgust - wow. And the accompanying music by Richard Einhorn is just so...transcendental.

Simply a film everyone should see.
 
Wonderful shout, mate.
 
CassiusClaymore said:
I've tried to watch The Fountain twice and the furthest I've got is about 20 minutes in.

It's offensively incoherent and so far up it's own arse it can't see where it's going.
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Try watching Tree of Life. Made me want to shoot myself, which is a bit ironic looking at the title.
 
Watch 2 British Horror films and both pretty nasty.

Axed

A banker is give forced early retirement from his job and decides that his family need a day out in the country.
Blood, lots of bad acting and not much plot.

3/10

Storage 24

A bad attempt at a sci-fi/Horror.
Terrible plot , terrible acting.
Set in a storage warehouse after a place crashes on Battersea and something is let loose.
The ending just made me laugh.

2/10
 
Art said:
:nono:

I'm 30 minutes away from finishing the movie and the stupidity of the cops knows no bounds Nilson. Aren't you like the movie-guy of the caf?
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I've yet to see a Korean film where the cops haven't been portrayed as bumbling and incompetent tbf, must be a Korean thing! I don't remember much of the film, been a long time since I've seen it, but I distinctly recall being enthralled by the unpredictability and gruesomeness of it.
 
R.N7 said:
I've yet to see a Korean film where the cops haven't been portrayed as bumbling and incompetent tbf, must be a Korean thing! I don't remember much of the film, been a long time since I've seen it, but I distinctly recall being enthralled by the unpredictability and gruesomeness of it.
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I suppose so.The movie could've ended ages ago if all they used was bunch of sniffing dogs to sniff out the bodies.

I don't understand why the release the killer when there is clear footage of him admitting to killing 9 people in the cc tv at the police station!

I assume you have netflix nils. Any recommendations?
 
I don't have Netflix, but if you're looking for a good thriller, Zodiac is the way to go.

It's very long (about 3 hours I think), and quite slow, but I can assure you it's the best thriller that's been made in the last decade.

And don't know if you've seen The girl with the dragon tattoo (Fincher's version), but it's worth seeing. If only for 'cat !'
 
Just thought of some other thrillers for you Art:
- Mystic River
- Gone baby gone
- Shutter Island

All three are adaptations of Dennis Lehane novels if I'm not mistaken. First two are pretty straightforward detective/thriller films, with a good scenario, good acting performances and very decent directing (first is by Clint Eastwood, second was Ben Affleck's first film as a director). Shutter Island is by Martin Scorsese, I'd say it's the best of the three, it's a real psychological thriller with an amazing Leonardo di Caprio, but it's maybe not everyone's cup fo tea. But all three good films to see.
 
End of Watch
Very good move. The chemistry between Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Penna has you convinced in their friendship. Gripping, and surprisingly tense in parts.

Definitely worth a watch.

7/10
 
Just came across this by coincidence, worth a read.

mehro said:
The Moment I 'Got' Ingmar Bergman
EW's movie critic reflects on the work of the late auteur and why, despite what some critics are saying, it is eternally important

Owen Gleiberman

Reading over the obituaries for Ingmar Bergman, I couldn't recall another legendary movie director whose passing, almost everyone seemed to agree, was quite so...symbolic. More than anyone else — including his compatriot Michelangelo Antonioni, who died the same day — Bergman was the popular incarnation of the mythical/cultural spirit of Art Film. If you had to capture, in a single iconic image, what made ''foreign films'' so exotic and meaningful to audiences, then surely that image would be Max von Sydow's quizzical platinum-haired Knight playing chess with Death in Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Everything that viewers of the '50s and '60s were first entranced by when they began to discover art houses was present in that image — the luscious solemnity and metaphorical splendor, the grandly severe black-and-white beauty, the fearless declaration of cinema as a literature for the eye. The forbidding metaphysical romance of it all.

Of course, what the image also possessed was Bergman's dark genius for presentation, for drama. The myth of Ingmar Bergman is that, with his stoic tales of anguish, cruelty, identity, and the silence of God, he was the film world's most celebrated anti-entertainer. His movies invited you to experience them as a kind of high-modernist X-ray; their very catharsis was in how they offset the joy and color and escapism of Hollywood. The reason that all of this actually made him popular, though, inventing a new appetite for a new kind of movie, is that Bergman staged his brooding visions with eroticism (just think of ******* Andersson, the tawdry goddess of Monika), violence (the horrific rape and revenge in The Virgin Spring), and pageantry (those spectacular Seventh Seal medieval landscapes). With morbid theatrical flair, he made his anti-entertainments...entertainingly.

When it came to watching Bergman's films, I passed through various phases, and I have a feeling that I wasn't alone. Here, in fact, is what I think of as the Four Stages of Watching Bergman:

1. Youthful Befuddlement I first encountered his films as a teenager, catching a handful of them late at night on our local PBS station. Television was actually a good medium for them, as it still is; it fit their hushed, stinging intimacy. Watching Sawdust and Tinsel or Through a Glass Darkly in a darkened rec room, I was intrigued by their mood, the beauty of the sun-dappled Swedish landscapes punctuated by those angry, sodden cloudbursts of confessional dialogue. Yet I had almost no idea what any of it meant. It all seemed so adult, so beyond me — a world I was vaguely curious to enter but could only stare at, thinking that it must be important. I knew that if I could ever understand Ingmar Bergman's films, I would somehow be a more enlightened human being.

2. Collegiate Awe A few years later, as an undergraduate, I was now a full-fledged movie buff, and I discovered, to my exhilaration, that I now ''got'' Ingmar Bergman. College, in many ways, is the perfect time for Bergman, because suddenly you're immersed in divining the hidden meaning of things, if only for the purpose of finishing term papers. Bergman's movies, with their distant fathers and buried family secrets and anguished sexual combat, their dreamlike use of religious totems, are all about people clawing and scratching to get to the spiritual truth beneath the fake surfaces of their lives. The Seventh Seal, with its lamentations of lost faith; the great macabre dream sequence in Wild Strawberries — these were cinematic poems begging to be unlocked. And Scenes From a Marriage, with its raging recriminations, its vision of how scathingly people who lived together could lie to one another, was even better: It was a window onto the tormented world of bourgeouis commitment that made me feel glad I wasn't there yet. Now, thanks to Bergman, I could know what I was in for.

3. The Mary Wilkie Phase You remember Mary Wilkie, don't you? She's the haughty, neurotic brainiac played by Diane Keaton in Woody Allen's Manhattan — the one who, with visible pride, has relegated Ingmar Bergman to ''the Academy of the Overrated.'' In her view, Bergman is a hopelessly precious and declassé artist, far too showy in his gloom and doom — the sort of filmmaker she loved ''when I was at Radcliffe.'' After that, she says, ''you absolutely outgrow it.'' The thing is, I was starting to know what she meant. All that damn symbolism — it could be so wearying! I was now out of college and pretending, at least, to live like an adult, and with my term-paper days behind me, I discovered that I no longer had much use for Bergman's characters. They'd begun to seem gnarled and insular in their self-absorption. Before, watching them had made me feel grown-up. Now, I saw through to what I thought was the nagging Freudian conventionality at the core of Bergman's clinical mysteries. His dour intellectualism was no longer, in itself, alluring. If anything, it had become distinctly unhip.

4. Really Seeing Bergman Finally, there came a moment of recognition. It might have been when I was watching Passion of Anna, with its quartet of lost souls, or Winter Light, with its anguished pastor grasping for belief as though it were a kite string slipping out of his fingers. Suddenly, confronted with a soliloquy of torment, or gazing into the face of one of those extraordinary actresses, like Bibi Andersson or Liv Ullmann, it hit me: This isn't art because it's heavy and high-flown and symbolic and ''adult.'' It's art because it shows you real people doing real damage to each other and longing to be healed. It's art because it's been ripped, bleeding, from Bergman's psyche. The older I've gotten, the more I've seen past the metaphorical fanciness that is, admittedly, a huge element in the appeal of Bergman's films, and the more I've responded, simply, to the rawness of their humanity: to the wounds that adults feel yet don't necessarily talk about. Bergman draws those wounds out and makes them sharp, tangible, memorable.

He was, more or less, the first film artist to do so, and the door he kicked open was immense. In her review of Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller, a movie released in 1971, Pauline Kael wrote: ''The question is always asked, 'Why aren't there America Bergmans and Fellinis?''' She then declared, ''Here is an American artist who has made a beautiful film.'' Kael, in daring to compare Altman to Bergman, was staking out bold new aesthetic-ideological turf. She was stating that the torch of high art in cinema was now passing to American filmmakers — or, certainly, that it now included them. What she was onto was nothing less than a cultural realignment. For although Ingmar Bergman continued to make interesting films, his decline as a force in cinema roughly paralleled the rise of the New Hollywood directors. Altman, Coppola, Scorsese — by the mid-'70s, they had, in effect, supplanted the mojo of Bergman, Fellini, and Antonioni, whose major work was virtually all behind them. (Bergman did, of course, have his 1982 greatest-hits swan song: the luscious Fanny & Alexander.)

But something else, too, conspired to make Bergman passé, and that was the rise of a new mystique in art film — a cult of austerity that persists to this day. In a staggeringly wrong-headed but quite revealing harangue that ran in The New York Times five days after Bergman's death, the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, ''The hard fact is, Mr. Bergman isn't being taught in film courses or debated by film buffs with the same intensity as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, or Jean-Luc Godard. His works are seen less often in retrospectives and on DVD than those of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson — two master filmmakers widely scorned as boring and pretentious during Mr. Bergman's heyday.... The same qualities that made Mr. Bergman's films go down more easily than theirs — his fluid storytelling and deftness in handling actresses, comparable to the skills of a Hollywood professional like George Cukor — also make them feel less important today, because they have fewer secrets to impart.''

I'm not sure where Rosenbaum is getting his statistics. From everything I've Googled and read, Bergman's films are more popular now, on DVD and in college classes, than those of Bresson, Dreyer, or Godard. (Hitchcock is another story, but then — he's Hitchcock.) I also don't know how anyone could think that a movie like Persona, with its naked acting and mind-warp structure, or Scenes From a Marriage, which so captures the music of relationships that I could it watch forever, is lacking in eternal secrets. What's truly notable about Rosenbaum's dismissal, however, is the battle line he's really drawing: between Bergman the middlebrow, an art filmmaker who actually deigned to tell his stories fluidly (how vulgar!), and Rosenbaum's heroes, such as the arid, oblique Bresson, with his dessicated zombie acting and general lack of forward motion.

Specious as it is, this argument represents what has become a vanguard attitude in the way that foreign films are now routinely celebrated — not for their expression, but for their benumbed lack of expression. You see it in the canonization of directors like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Abbas Kiarostami, the spiritual heirs to Bresson: filmmakers who fetishize their refusal to dramatize, who create art that is meandering and oblique, at times to the point of madness. For a while there in the '50s, '60s, and early '70s, Ingmar Bergman's films held sway as a ''classy'' cultural phenomenon, but through all the symbols, the feverish close-ups, the otherworldly chess games, the torment and the tenderness, what you always felt was his deep desire to connect. That's what made his art, and art film itself, matter.
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I think he's right on the money with a lot of things in that article, enjoyed those last digs at Bresson and Kiarostami.

Art said:
I suppose so.The movie could've ended ages ago if all they used was bunch of sniffing dogs to sniff out the bodies.

I don't understand why the release the killer when there is clear footage of him admitting to killing 9 people in the cc tv at the police station!

I assume you have netflix nils. Any recommendations?
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I don't actually! Never seen much point in getting it.
 
pauldyson1uk said:
:lol: cant deny that I watch some shit.
Helps to pass quite nightshift's.
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What is it that makes you want to watch something like the Sweeney over something like Casablanca, Paul? Just prefer some light watching while you're in work, basically?
 
Lent a few Blurays to a 22 y.o. colleague and chucked in Casablanca dvd.
His response was, "Why? I've never wanted to watch that!"
He returned them saying that he was really surprised how good it was.
Dunno if he's ready for Cinema Paradiso yet...
 
Mockney said:
You'll never know what it's like unless you watch it.

I've got no inclination watch Casablanca tbf.
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Paul loved Casablanca, that's why I mentioned it! Great film. So if he can love that then there's no reason he can't love so many of the other classics, which is why I wanted to know what the added appeal of these other movies is.
 
Brwned said:
What is it that makes you want to watch something like the Sweeney over something like Casablanca, Paul? Just prefer some light watching while you're in work, basically?
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Not even that, I like to watch films, good bad or just plain shit.
Casablanca is a top quality film and I gave it a 10/10.
I have said before I am a sucker for a bad film, I have watched films and liked,that others think are rubbish.
Highlander is one of my fav films, I know it is rubbish, but I can watch it over and over again, I thought The Raven was a good film and other hated it.

OK The Sweeney, I read the review on here and elsewhere and wanted to make my own mind, I thought it would be shit.
The thing is I expected it to be like the 80's series and it was way off being that good.
 
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