Film The Redcafe Movie review thread

PhilipB said:
I ended bored watching Tinker, Tailor and just fell asleep.
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It really was hard to follow, could easily have lost my patience with it. I don't think you could get the full gist and enjoyment of it unless you have already read the book or watched the mini series, the consequence of trying to fit everything into a 120 minute film. I thought everything else about it was quite excellent though.
 
A lot of people said that about Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, but funnily enough I found it really easy to follow and understand. I don't know why, maybe cos I'd heard beforehand that it was extremely complicated and convaluted and impossible to follow, so my brain was functionning at 200% or something, but I really didn't find it that hard to follow. I loved it, I agree with you that many actors didn't get enough screentime (notably Mark Strong who's another cracking actor whose films I really enjoy), but I didn't cite it as one of Hardy's films as he's too peripheral in it for my liking. Though he is indeed very good when you get to see him.

I feel like watching it again actually, was such a slick, well done film. And the cast was really great, like an all-stars team of British talent.
 
Rooney in Paris said:
A lot of people said that about Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, but funnily enough I found it really easy to follow and understand. I don't know why, maybe cos I'd heard beforehand that it was extremely complicated and convaluted and impossible to follow, so my brain was functionning at 200% or something, but I really didn't find it that hard to follow. I loved it, I agree with you that many actors didn't get enough screentime (notably Mark Strong who's another cracking actor whose films I really enjoy), but I didn't cite it as one of Hardy's films as he's too peripheral in it for my liking. Though he is indeed very good when you get to see him.

I feel like watching it again actually, was such a slick, well done film. And the cast was really great, like an all-stars team of British talent.
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I reckon a second viewing would probably clear up some things for me. I hope they make a sequel or release an extended version. I'd pay to watch a film consisting entirely of them sitting around that conference table glaring at each other.
 
La Cérémonie - Loved this one. A manic, suspenseful psychodrama that just spirals and spirals towards the climax of the film.

Papillon - Ebert wrote in his review of this that you just wanted the hero to escape so that the film could end. I felt exactly the same way, really struggled to fully sympathize with McQueen's rather bland protagonist and Hoffman (or possibly Jean Reno?) as his sidekick, which he shared zero chemistry with. It wasn't like the escape attempts were very intricate either, they just sort of escaped. To tell the truth, I really don't know how I managed to sit through this one.
 
R.N7 said:
It really was hard to follow, could easily have lost my patience with it. I don't think you could get the full gist and enjoyment of it unless you have already read the book or watched the mini series, the consequence of trying to fit everything into a 120 minute film. I thought everything else about it was quite excellent though.
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Really captured the era well I thought but you couldn't switch off for a second or lose concentration.

I need to get the original TV show now as I never watched it when it originally aired.
 
Norwegian Wood - 60's Japan, death, sexuality, wood as in wooden acting. It was a very pretty looking film but I found myself constantly squirming at the lethargicness of it. The dialogue was stale as feck and the characters acted like zombies, especially the main character. It constantly oozed a dreary melancholia and it dealt with some very emotional subjects but I just couldn't connect with the looming dourness. Jonny Greenwood's score was nice enough but also pretty lifeless. It felt like it could have been a much better film but was just so poorly executed by the director. I'd describe it as an anti-Wong Kar Wai film in terms of it's treatment of melancholy, nostalgia and romance.
 
He was so middle of the road, it was one of the most unconvincing portrayals of a gangsta in Hollywood history. Then again he's very inoffensive.
 
Seven Psychopaths: Good dialogue with a passable attempt at a movie constructed around it. Some genuine funny momments (most of them from Sam Rockwell) but ultimately not enough of them to raise it above an average and slightly disjointed movie that does not reach anywhere near the heights of In Brugges at any point. Needed a more coherant and interesting plot to raise it above a decent black comedy. A little disapointing considering the expectation.

6/10
 
Battleship.

Not quite has bad as I expected, still a dreadful film mind.
The GCI was excellent on the aliens, but the story was just rubbish, It could of been so much better, there is a good film in the plot just not this film.
Rihanna was just dire, along with just about everybody else and the few mins after the credits was :lol::lol:

Best thing about the film was the music, some good stuff in there, but still only worth.

4/10
 
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Tabu - One of the most intriguing films I've seen in a while. Containing gorgeous, evocative black and white cinematography, it's a story that unravels gently and is divided into two parts, one set in modern day Lisbon, one in a Portuguese colony in Africa back in the day. An illcit love affair, a crocodile, a delightful romantic homage to silent cinema...I found all this rather spellbinding. My main criticism of it was that it lacked a proper ending and therefore came off a bit flat in the end, but on the other hand the running length of the version I watched was 20 minutes shorter than it supposedly should be so I might not have watched the complete version of the film.
 
Why I fell out of love with the films of Paul Thomas Anderson by Owen Gleiberman

If I were to compile a list of my ten favorite movie experiences in the time I’ve been at EW, for number one — just edging out the night I spent drinking into the wee hours with Russell Crowe — I’d probably have to choose the first time I saw Boogie Nights at the 1997 Toronto Film Festival. It was a little like the first time I saw Pulp Fiction — Boogie Nights had that kind of virtuoso rock & roll Gen-X Scorsese dazzle, and it gave you that kind of brain-spinning cinematic high. Its writer-director, Paul Thomas Anderson, had taken on the most daringly degraded subject matter imaginable (he made a movie about beautiful dumb clucks who “acted” in porn films and thought that they were real stars), and out of that audacity he spun a story that was dark, exhilarating, moving, scary, and true.
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Magnolia (1999), his first film after Boogie Nights, was probably as worthy a follow-up as you could have expected, and it remains a tender and fetching depressed-soul-of-Los Angeles ensemble piece. In many ways, it’s closer to being the young filmmaker’s sentimental balancing act that you’d imagine a director like Anderson might have made before Boogie Nights. It’s a movie so emotionally open it wears its heart on two dozen sleeves. I watched it again recently, and got caught up in its rhythms, its mystic fascination with coincidence and genius kids and broken spirits, and I thought that Tom Cruise, frankly, was extraordinary. His performance as a preening, samurai-haired self-help guru who teaches men to pick up women by hating them — but only because his own hatred for his father has hollowed out the space where love should be — is charged with a thrilling showbiz fakery, then a bitterly honest dramatic excitement.

Yet Magnolia, compelling as it is, comes apart in its last half hour, and it’s the way that it comes apart, with that Biblical shower of frogs, that’s a harbinger of what would start to happen to Anderson as a filmmaker: his grandiosity taking over, elbowing everything else aside. You can forgive that frog deluge as a sophomore-slump moment in the middle of an otherwise compelling movie, but the fact that Anderson thought he could get away with it at all is, frankly, telling.
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To a solid but lesser degree, I enjoyed Anderson’s follow-up, Punch-Drunk Love (2002), in which he didn’t merely team up with Adam Sandler but made the cunningly perverse decision to do a kind of arty, discordant version of an Adam Sandler angelic-idiot fantasy. It works: Punch-Drunk Love is an engaging sweet-and-sour little novelty. But that’s all it is. It’s only some kind of exquisite movie if you begin to see it from the point of view that says that if P.T. Anderson made it, it must be special. Which is exactly the sort of thing that began to be said about him around this time.
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The total gaga worship of Anderson, of course, is all about There Will Be Blood (2007). And I have to say that this is where I draw a line in the sand — even though I do find the movie fascinating, and in a number of ways compelling. Here’s the rub, though: There Will Be Blood establishes its central character, Daniel Plainview, as a deviously unscrupulous and manipulative sociopath, a tycoon-crackpot obsessed with oil and money at the expense of everything else, within its opening 40 minutes. Basically, he acts the same way, and does the same (immoral) thing, in scene after scene after scene after scene. Not to be overly lowbrow, but where’s the arc in that? Now, it must be said that Daniel Day-Lewis, channeling the voice of John Huston and the demeanor of Snidely Whiplash, throws a sickly mesmerizing party of one. He has great fun turning up the heat on Daniel’s monstrousness one meticulous Bunsen burner click at a time. Yet if there’s always a kind of suspense about what form his corruption will take, there’s never any doubt that he’s going to lie, and cajole, and dominate over and over again. The result is, on the one hand, a grand didactic parable of capitalism. (Message: It’s ruthless.) It’s also a movie in which there is no essential person to identify with.

That’s what bothers me not just about the movie, but about how much other critics love it. There Will Be Blood seems to reinforce, as a viewing experience, the very inhumanity that it’s about. It basically invites us to revel (with a thin veneer of “judgment”) in Daniel Plainview’s misanthropy, and it doesn’t offer any vital dramatic-emotional alternative. (The wispy glare of Paul Dano can’t compete.) But it’s not that Anderson wants you to identify with Daniel Plainview. When you watch There Will Be Blood, he doesn’t want you, really, to identify with anyone on screen. He wants all your identification reserved for him — for the eye of the storyteller.
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http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/10/03/my-problem-with-p-t-andersons-films/
 
verminater said:
I really liked it, but it makes you work. I was fecking exhausted.
Don't watch if you can't pay it your full attention.
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I don't know whether I want to watch it or not. It's one of those I could potentially love and be fascinated by, however I could equally end up wasting 2 precious hours of my life and be bored rigid by it. I'll probably get around to a watch at some point though.
 
Yet if there’s always a kind of suspense about what form his corruption will take, there’s never any doubt that he’s going to lie, and cajole, and dominate over and over again. The result is, on the one hand, a grand didactic parable of capitalism. (Message: It’s ruthless.) It’s also a movie in which there is no essential person to identify with.

That’s what bothers me not just about the movie, but about how much other critics love it. There Will Be Blood seems to reinforce, as a viewing experience, the very inhumanity that it’s about. It basically invites us to revel (with a thin veneer of “judgment”) in Daniel Plainview’s misanthropy, and it doesn’t offer any vital dramatic-emotional alternative. (The wispy glare of Paul Dano can’t compete.) But it’s not that Anderson wants you to identify with Daniel Plainview. When you watch There Will Be Blood, he doesn’t want you, really, to identify with anyone on screen. He wants all your identification reserved for him — for the eye of the storyteller.
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I'm not sure that any of the above constitutes truly valid criticism. It's not the duty of an artist to simply give the public what it wants or expects.
 
Cheesy said:
I don't know whether I want to watch it or not. It's one of those I could potentially love and be fascinated by, however I could equally end up wasting 2 precious hours of my life and be bored rigid by it. I'll probably get around to a watch at some point though.
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Unplug the phone and throw any chatty women outside. You can't be distracted.
 
verminater said:
Unplug the phone and throw any chatty women outside. You can't be distracted.
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Compared to something like Inception, is it a lot harder to understand? It's just that everyone told me Inception was supposed to be confusing however I found it to be generally understandable. I'm assuming this requires a lot more attention?
 
The dialogue holds lots and lots of information. It's not meant to confuse, just to see if you've been paying attention. You'll still get the ending explained to you, but it's not as satisfying as drawing your own conclusion, prior to that point.
 
The Don said:
The Samaritan An action thriller. Storyline was very dark and twisted at times but incredibly smart. Acting was superb and the characters very believable. I enjoyed this film immensley. The main character (Samuel L. Jackson) was just the right mix of tough, cool, smart but ultimately decent.
The Girl, there's always a girl, was quite sexy in a weird way and was a good foil for the lead. The villan, I actually wanted to kill him, numerous times. I felt real rage and anger. This is why I loved the film, it took me through a good range of emotions. The storyline and characters were top notch.
Best film I've seen in ages. 9.5/10
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Is this a wum? I thought it was atrocious.
 
pauldyson1uk said:
OK yes a high mark, but if he feels that the film warranted it it.
I love Highlander and I think I give it a score of 8, I know that maybe only me will give it that high a score.
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My problem is sometimes in this thread I click back through random pages, look for a film that's been given a really good review and then watch it. That's what I did last night and after watching it I thought he was on the wum :lol: I wasn't even joking, I thought he was being sarcastic or something.
 
PhilipB said:
My problem is sometimes in this thread I click back through random pages, look for a film that's been given a really good review and then watch it. That's what I did last night and after watching it I thought he was on the wum :lol: I wasn't even joking, I thought he was being sarcastic or something.
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But is that not part of the fun of watching films?
I never read a review till after I have watched the film, I will only read the plot and make my own mind up.
 
SteveJ said:
I'm not sure that any of the above constitutes truly valid criticism. It's not the duty of an artist to simply give the public what it wants or expects.
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True, but he has shown to be a very empty filmmaker with There Will Be Blood, yet people still worship the ground he walks on. I rank it as one of my worst film experiences. It was all just surface, a tediously rambling story with barely any progression and of course, painfully over-the top acting.

You never know though, I might end up liking The Master.
 
I came across Boogie Nights the other day and watched an hour of it and thought to myself that Marky Mark did a great job as the dumb eye-candy star of shit films. Then I realised that it probably wasn't much of a stretch.

The rest of the cast are phenomenal though.
 
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