shmups.system11.org

I hate starting a thread that is only subtly different than existing threads, but I think this one is needed.

Basically, if you've seen something you like from any era, and want to mention it to the community, here you go.
--------------------------------------------------------

Anyway, my movie tastes lean toward 'older', with my favorite period being late 60's/early 70's; although every period seems to have great movies. I've been catching up on classic westerns lately and finally saw:

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence ('62 I think.) This is surprisingly late, and being in B&W makes you think it should be from the 50's. Absolutely all-star cast, even if you aren't terribly familiar with westerns. Plot is not simply good but iconic, showing the transition from the old west to the modern age of law and order, with much lamentation of the former. I don't know how I avoided seeing this one.

WalkAbout ('71) Very likely no one here has seen this, and might not appeal to many, though a very beautiful film. Picked this up based on descriptions and the endorsement by Criterion. The film was apparently lost for time despite being highly praised upon release. A child and a teen are lost in outback and in time saved by an aborigine who is on walkabout. Works on a lot of levels because the film is mostly visual and nicely contrasts real events with an idealized/romanticized view that comes much later. Non-linear, with some room for interpretation. I'd recommend this to people who like films like (the original) Wickerman, or other films from this same general period--though WalkAbout is weird for feeling both more serene, but sharing the general brutalness that is common in movies from this age (consider the original Get Carter for instance.)

Most recently I watched Inside (À l'intérieur). It's a horror movie about a pregnant woman who is attacked by a crazed woman who tries to take her unborn child. I enjoyed it, definitely one of the better horror movies I've seen recently. I thought it was a bit slow but the last 20 minutes or so are pretty excellent. It doesn't explicitly explain where the villain comes from or the strange supernatural bent the movie takes at the end, so it's good for a rewatch. Overall, it's pretty intense and the gore effects are well done so it gets a thumbs up from me.

Nanny mcphee and the big bang. Harry potter crossed with mary poppins.. good for the kids.

Return of the living dead - My favourite horror movie - well its a comedy really

Descent - Another horror favourite

Identity - Love the "who done it" theme mixed in with the unique approach.

Thelma and Louise - Friends till the end, love it

True Romance - top 5 of all time.

Blues Brothers - Fantastic

Italian Job 1969 - Love it


Cmoon - Have you ever seen Northwest Frontier? Think it was made 1959. I love that movie. Its one of the few oldies that I like.

On the asian side -

Dragons Tiger Gate
Ip man
Protege
Death Note 1 and 2
Kung Fu hustle
Shaolin soccer
Beat (want this on blu ray)
Vengeance Trilogy

Recently watched Armour of God starring Jackie Chan. Man, that movie sucks. It was really quite shocking; I love pretty much every Jackie Chan movie I've seen, and I really don't mind the stupid plots or even the terrible voice acting. But this movie just sucked. There are two action sequences in the entire movie, one at the beginning, and one at the end. They're both pretty good, but the rest of the movie is just cringe-worthy. Also, if you make a movie in which Jackie Chan is a member of a popular singing group, I damn well better hear Jackie Chan fill my ears with his sweet sweet melodies at least three times. It never happens even once. As far as Mitsubishi advertisements go, I'll stick with Thunderbolt any day. It's a shame that he almost died for such a crap movie. I also recently re-watched Enter the Dragon for the 10th time or so. So good. The look on Bruce Lee's face when he kills O'Hara is one of the most ridiculous things ever.

I agree.

Moreso because the missus put Twilight: New Moon on the Lovefilm rental list and made me watch it last night.

Seriously. No, seriously - what the fuck is wrong with kids today? What happened to all the heroes? The first Twilight was so appallingly bad in every sense, it was farcical. A joke. That girl gets the grand prize for being the worst tween actress in history with her raincloud of doom expression and her 'blink five times, look at the floor, say the line' repertoire, but the leading guy isn't far behind.

No, Twilight was painful by all accounts. Everything that's wrong with movies today, everything that's wrong with misleading youth. Well, I concede, if it was just little girls who were digging it, I could live with that. Kids don't see acting, they just see characters, and Twilight is obviously some chick flick shit.
What gets me is when I see the boys jumping up and down at the movie premiere, all excited, posters rolled under their arms, screaming 'Twilight' alongside all the girls and running to get their picture taken with Taylor fucking Lautner. Is there really nothing else for those guys? Twilight is the shittest, pussiest (not a word, but you get it) pile of bull-schlock shit of the decade - like a bad TV series with the same production values. The sort of shit that gets axed after the pilot. Ugh.

So New Moon, is worse. In fact, at one point I suggested it would be more exciting if we watched it with our eyes closed. It's so bad it's offensive to every movie about vampires ever.
Actually, no, it's so bad it's even offensive to Beverly Hills 90210 and The OC. Two hours of moving wallpaper that sounds like it was written by a ten year old.

Please, if you've got kids, and they're boys, and they come home in a fucking Twilight T-shirt, burn that shit, sit them down and give them a strict diet of Die Hard, Predator, Total Recall and Aliens, just so they've got their head on straight and they realise that it isn't cool to be a shitty gay vampire who has as much confidence as he does screen presence, it's about being an ass-kicking, wise cracking mofo who takes on all comers and wins.

Do it for your kids man.



(Rant over.)

I'm going to try and not go into full-on rant mode, because this shit can whip me up into a near-aneurysm every time. The series is just the biggest crock of shit ever made. I was/still am an old grump with regards to the Harry Potter craze ("Back in my day, we read Lord of the Rings for our epic fantasy, and we liked the fact that the first book was sprawling mess that could understandably make you skip the much better second and third volumes") but that at least seems to be created by something of a storyteller. The Twilight franchise, on the other hand, is the product of an imbecile.

What fires me up the most is the perversion of the literary/film character of the vampire. The western concept of the vampire was pretty much created by Brahm Stoker in "Dracula," where he set forth some of the basic rules for how a vampire lives, its weaknesses, etc. Anne Rice twisted things around enough with her weird Gothic romance take on the creature, where the books were often one Fabio short of a straight-up romance novel, but at least she kept the conventions established by Stoker. Hell, even Buffy managed to be fairly creative while still working within the boundaries of the creature. That hack Stephanie Meyer, on the other hand, completely threw away the rules for her 'vampires', and there doesn't even seem to have been a good reason for doing so, other than it would complicate some of her shitty stabs at romance if everything had to happen in the dark or at night. They glitter in the sunlight? REALLY?

Look at it this way: Superman as a character is defined by some very specific characteristics. He's of alien origin and gets energy from the sun, is weak against Kryptonite, can fly (that one's a bit more contentious, but still), his secret identity is Clark Kent, etc. Change any of these fundamental properties, and he ceases being Superman. Now, one could obviously argue off into the whole comic book tangent that you could indeed change these for the sake of a spinoff or non-canon story, etc., which is true, but that's not what I'm talking about. What if, from this day forward, all instances of Superman in fiction changed his origins to that of a normal human who was the victim of a tragic radioactive accident and thus gained his powers? That's a huge and fundamental alteration.

It doesn't help that the Twilight movies are populated by some of the most hideous fucking CHUDs ever to invade Hollywood. The actress makes the adjective "homely" seem like something you'd use for Marilyn Monroe, and she's got the same stupid "I'm bitchy/sexy" half-sneer on her face in EVERY SINGLE picture ever taken of her--even for the poster of that terrible film where she played Joan Jett! And the leading man has eyes like he's perma-baked and hair like he just crawled out from under a bridge after wrestling another hobo for the guy's wool socks and last can of beans. You can practically see the grease! My wife (who professes that the books and movies are trashy but at the same time has read all of them and insists on seeing every movie with her friends when it comes out) described some of his shirtless scenes in New Moon as "Remember in E.T., when the government caught him and put him in the coffin-thing, where he was all pale and emaciated? It was like that."

And all these vapid kids are going to grow up thinking Count Dracula is some comical figure who vants to suck your blahd and that this terrible shit is real literatures and real vampires and have no idea what the fuck "Nosferatu" is or who the hell Bela Lugosi was and maybe if we're lucky they'll know that Coppola did a sub-par adaptation of "Dracula" and

*huff, puff*

--------------------------

So I watched Goddard's "Alphaville" the other day, which was my first experience with French New Wave. It hasn't aged terribly well, visually, but was still wonderfully enjoyable on the strength of its originality. The combination of pulp sensibilities in a 1984-esque world of paranoid conformity still managed to feel wonderfully fresh. By the end I was pleased with the way the movie's world unfolded: I didn't get what the hell the scary gravel voice was about right at the start or why people acted like such zombies, but all this was explained in time to the main character, and I felt like I was discovering it along with him--always a tough balance to strike with movie exposition. Very enjoyable.

I need to see more Goddard.

Regarding Twilight. Does anyone with a Y chromosome have the authority to evaluate these movies / books?

How Twilight Works



I don't think men or boys were the intended audience for it so, not really. I don't get the grump people raise over Twilight. It's typically bad melodrama aimed at Jane Everyteen and no worse than the garbage that was read years ago (Sweet Valley High, Babysitter's Club etc etc...). All the harumphing reeks of the "Damn kids these days with their music" stupidity that every generation inevitably shits out as they get older. Why people work themselves into a frenzy because teenage girls have shitty taste is beyond me.

My take is that the more vapid shit you shovel on a demographic or generation, the less likely the vast majority are to attempt to develop a critical mind and independently seek out works of quality, either classic or contemporary. Obviously you'll have the free spirits that will tire of their peers' mindlessness and try and buck the trend, but in general the masses make "Idiocracy" a little less funny every day. It's less about rock and roll being the devil because it is noisy and I do not understand it and more about if you force-feed your kids nothing but Easy Mac and McDonalds from day one, they're obviously going to be horrified by and resistant to the idea of such as an avocado.

When they read in school they still read Shakespeare and Orwell and the Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye. When they go to college they'll still read Yeats and Coleridge and Homer and Chaucer. Twilight is the stuff they read for fun. It's silly to suggest that just because they choose to read garbage when they're young, as pretty much every kid does, they won't recognize quality when they see it eventually. It's compounded by the fact that regardless of time, mass market stuff like Twilight is almost universally mediocre. Twilight as a piece of mass market fiction is no better or worse than the shit dumped out 20 years ago that sold a billion copies and got turned into horrible movies so I don't see what the fuss is.

This sounds like a thread I'll posting too much in.

Last film I watched was 5cm/second. Very pretty but OH GOD I WANT TO DIE

Finally got around to watching Moon last night. Terrific movie.

Yes!



No.

The bastardisation of Bram Stoker's original character or the Vampire 'lore' is the least of my worries with this. Artistic license can be tolerated depending on the handling. But this is definitely worse than the shit that was dumped out 20 years ago. I actually cringe at the suggestion that such shit and my reaction to it is a result of my ripe old age of 28.
No, it's not aimed at me, but there are still females in my age bracket who have pre-ordered their day one theatre ticket. Why would they do such a thing if they're not in the right age demographic?

I actually think, if you rewind time to the shit way back (and there was shit, we're agreed on that) I think you'd find even that garbage at least had some tiny spark of creativity, and most of that shit was straight to video. Twilight is, by all accounts, the absolute total and utter poster product for the dumbed down general public of the naughties. The mind boggles that so many people have actually become so dense that they can watch such crap as if it had any kind of credibility, even as a love story.

Yes, it irks me to think that something so awful is kick-starting a new decade of film, and it bothers me that so many people are sheep to one another.

Twilight is for little, itty-bitty, kiddy girls who have no concept of the vapid nothingness that lies beneath the micron thin plot and farcical execution. If it stays with that audience, no harm done. When it gets accepted mass-market, I see a problem.

...and that is such total and utter horseshit I can't believe anyone is actually making that claim. You're blinded by nostalgia, and not only that, you're not going by any objective measure of quality, just memory, which is both clouded and selective. You can keep saying there was a spark of creativity or whatever nonsense you want to peddle, but there wasn't. It's those rose colored glasses you're wearing and the simple fact that you've filtered out most of the shit from back then because it wasn't worth remembering and are more aware of the garbage nowadays.

Oh no Twilight...

Twilight = biggest grossing stare athon ever.

I wish I could pull girls at school by staying in the corner of class, looking ill and all quiet.


Twilight is the worst vampire movie ever conceived.

Sure maybe they (them) are more sophisticated with manufacturing fads, whatever. Worst thing Twilight did to me was remind me of the latent lesbianism innate to all women that trends them toward androgynous anorexic men in times of plenty.

Not like the damage received from, say, LOST. A show that had no plan, no plot, no story, no point, with only the occasional interesting scene. The only redeeming features it had, and the only reasons it was successful:

* It looks damn good. Look at how pretty everything is.
* It was the only serial on TV. People hunger for serial, but all they ever get are Soap Operas. Which only have plots about booger kids, and women who are only concerned with penises and where they're going and where they've been.

This isn't to dump on the Soaps - it's remarkable to me that they can generate 200 minutes of TV a week. Yeah, it comes at a tremendous knock in its quality - but also remember they're not trying that hard intentionally. The plots are designed as "dish washer" tv - something to watch while doing other stuff.

Anyway, I've been subjected to a couple awful shaggy dog movies in the past year and need to wash out my soul with Ghostbusters. Synosieses so you don't have to suffer as I did:

Dark Matter
Stressed out asian student just wants to be loved, but no one ever does. He shoots some colleagues and kills himself.

Bright Lights, Big City
Michael J. Fox loses his wife, loses his job, and tries to touch a boob. He loses and fails at everything, but despite it all, he feels kind of happy at the end.

There is a remake forthcoming (in case you thought anything was unworthy of a remake [Drop Dead Fred is getting a remake, everything is a remake]) but you don't have to watch it now that you know what happens.

Recently watched (Some for the first time, some for the billionth):

The Exterminating Angel
Days of Being Wild
Revanche
Micmacs
Mr. Lonely
Stalker
Holy Mountain

A grand list!

I remember tracking down a pirate DVD of El ángel when I was 15 and being overjoyed to finally watch it. Of course Buñuel's stuff is so easy to find now. I think angel in particular would work amazingly as a play. Its central conciet is just delicious, and and is a great show case for an acting ensembles talents.

I didn't like Days of being Wild so much, I have to say. I see it as a director finding his feet, compared to his later output like Fallen Angels and 2046 which are amazingly fleshed out and nuanced. I just don't think he'd found his style at this point. I adore Wong's films though, and had the absolute pleasure to teach a few lectures on him a few months ago.

What did you think of Mr Lonely? I hated it. With a passion. Which is a shame. Korine really redeemed himself with Trash Humpers though. I can't wait to see it again

Stalker is an amazing scifi film, perhaps the most amazing scifi film ever made. It sculpts something fantastic with so little. I went to an exhibition partly inspired by the film, and it just underlined how awesomely this film works on even a purely visual level, with its abandoned concrete shells and pools of calm muddy water.

The Holy Mountain is the ultimate drinking film. It's pretty easy to decode, and it's batshit insane. I've seen it so many times I'm a bit bored of it now, but I'll get back into it in a few years time

I actually really like Days of Being Wild. Maybe not as much as something like Fallen Angels but I actually found it to be a more subtle and "mature" movie even if it seems more raw than some of Wong Kar Wai's others.

Mr. Lonely is another movie I really liked but in comparison to Julien Donkey Boy, not as much. Werner Herzog's character is so great in J.D.B. I can watch it over and over just for the sheer entertainment of the Dirty Harry monologue alone. Unfortunately I haven't seen trash humpers yet but it sounds like something I'd absolutely enjoy.

Stalker, well yeah, Tarkovsky is arguably my all time favorite director.

I first saw Holy Mountain a long time ago on a head full of all types of stuff and was borderline horrified/scarred/enthralled, and kind of wasn't sure what I actually thought of it. Like you, I kind of got over it but still enjoy watching from time to time. It's a good movie to put on at 8AM on a Sunday morning when you want people to stop partying and get out of your house finally.

Oh man, Stalker has to be the best film I've seen that relies almost wholly on atmosphere to carry the story. What dialogue there is could probably fit in the space of two or three television commercials and not feel crowded, but it's really just the scenes and camerawork that convey the simultaneous feelings of wonder and lurking menace.

I just did a Wong Kar Wai-athon of sorts. I didn't think Days of Being Wild was one of his best, but I just watched 2046 and some other movie that was clearly a Brokeback Mountain precursor. Despite being pretty gay, it was a pretty good film.

I've only seen the last two on this list. I am going to assume this means the rest is worthy

If you enjoy films like Stalker and Holy Mountain, consider checking out the film I started this thread with, Walkabout.

Man, someday I need to catch up with all those other Tarkovsky films.

Well, you can certainly skip Micmacs. I'm not a big Jeunet fan but I don't hate his movies either. However, this seemed like an hour and a half of Jeunet patting himself on the back with one hand and masturbating furiously with the other. Recommended only if you either haven't seen a Jeunet film before, or are a blind Jeunet fanboy.

I just watched: Big Trouble in Little China

I watched Dead Reckoning this morning. Good stuff. How can you say no to Humphrey Bogart playing a character named "Rip Murdock"?

Cmoon wrote:
I've also been on a 70s kick for a couple of years: car movies - Two Lane Blacktop, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, The Driver.
Others: Barry Lyndon, Charley Varrick, Silent Running, Soylent Green, Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, 'Monte Carlo or Bust' is better, First Men in the Moon. (Been looking for Jules Verne's Trip to the Moon)
Rarer Westerns: 'Ace High' is excellent, Boot Hill, The Great Silence, My Name is Nobody
Late 60s: La Grande Vadrouille.
Bought or seen all of the above recently, except Jules Verne's Trip to the Moon, although I did see it a long time ago.
& Yes I have seen Walkabout Mr Cmoon

Recent movie viewings include: Blood and Bone, The Losers, 'Deep Rising' again twice, and The Good the Bad and the Weird.
Recent series viewings: Logan's Run 1977 series, The Fantastic Journey 1978 series and True Blood current.

I don't mean to be overly negative here, but the sentiment that Bram Stoker came up with anything new is completely incorrect. At the time when "Dracula" was released, the Vampire as a literary figure was almost beaten to death, being one of the most important figures of Gothic literature; all Stoker did was rehash old clichees (not even in an especially pleasing way... Dracula is boring as shit to read). The vampire motif itself can be traced back hundreds, if not thousands of years (some people argue that the ancient greeks spoke of monsters that shared some of the most important character traits of the typical vampire), and can be found in many different folk mythologies.

I understand but do not share your criticism of how Meyer changed the characteristics of vampires, and I don't think your Superman analogy works: Superman is a certain fictional character, and if you changed his backstory etc. too much, it's not Superman anymore, sure. The vampire, however, is not a character, but rather a complex motif; it has been used in various forms, and very often as a symbol for depravity. It's perceived by many people as very sensual, and as such, it has worked very well as a projection surface (had to look this one up, there's probably a better word for it) for sexual urges.

Now, I haven't seen any of that Twilight bullshit (apart from a couple of trailers), but from what I've read and seen (I'm a high school teacher ), it appears the reason why it's so successful especially with teens is because it enables adolescent girls to act out their unfulfilled desires for partnership and sexuality with a perceived ideal without feeling threatened. Anyway, using vampires as the locus of sensuality and as a projection surface is not different from how they've been used before.

Doesn't change the fact that having vampires glitter in the sunlight is gayer than two sweaty dudes fucking each other's buttholes...

To be fair, I didn't emphasize it well enough, and I'm sorry if I gave the impression that I was claiming Stoker's vampire was an entirely original creation. I know creatures of similar properties have existed in various cultural myths for hundreds if not thousands of years, and even in Western culture before the publication of "Dracula." Stoker's contribution was to codify various aspects of the creature into something that pretty much single-handedly informed the creature of the vampire in popular (Western) culture ever since. You'd be hard-pressed to find anything since that does not draw its inspiration from Stoker's work. Not that we should just take that as the final word in the vampire mythos--others have made their own takes on the concept that aren't completely barbarous (for example, Matheson's "I Am Legend" does a decent job of trying to put a scientific spin on the vampire, despite his writing being better suited for TV and movies than books). It's just such a culturally-ingrained set of characteristics at this point, and what bugs me about Meyer's take is that she's willing to follow these characteristics to a certain extent, but discards the inconvenient ones for her own inventions, which are neither as well-thought-out or well-written as what's come before.

I agree as to the appeal of the books for teen girls in one regard--you write your main character as a formless nobody with very little in the way of defining characteristics, and of course it's going to be a perfect reader surrogate for the hormonal twits that get a charge out of it.

It's a shame you find "Dracula" boring; I think it does an excellent job as an almost proto-pulp adventure that manages (in a similar fashion to Arthur Conan Doyle's writing) to take a lot of the Victorian adventure sensibilities (which I've always enjoyed) and present it in something a bit more readable than the typical turgid Victorian prose. To each their own, I suppose.

So, back to movies: Can anyone recommend any really must-see Takashi Miike films? I loved "Dead or Alive", was disturbed by "Audition", need to watch the last half of "Ichi the Killer", and just had "Sukiyaki Western Django" arrive courtesy Netflix. I know he's done an enormous amount of work, and I'm wondering what real standouts there might be in his repertoire.
Not too keen on "Visitor Q", though.

As far as his fucked up horror type stuff goes, Izo is one of my favorites. It's really disjointed but I love how surreal it is and you can't go wrong with a vengeful samurai ghost fucking shit up. I liked Imprint as well, definitely one of his more fucked up movies.

I've also seen the Great Yokai War, which is a fairly enjoyable kids movie, and The Bird People in China is pretty great. It's a drama about some Yakuza guys who travel through China. I've heard the Happiness of the Katakuris is good too but it hasn't reached the top of my queue yet.