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Last seen...

Rewatched if... for the first time in ages, and DAMN, that's a good movie. I'm trying to think of any movie where Malcolm McDowell doesn't play a self-obsessed psychopath - I'm sure he must have made one at some point, but until further notice, a good rule of thumb is always: don't piss off Malcolm McDowell. :star5:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-rKnqV-ueU
Also forced some friends to watch The Room. Not sure if they'll ever forgive me.
 
Nah, Scream 3 is still the worst in the series. That one doesn't even feel like a Scream movie.
My "last seen": Bunhongsin (The Red Shoes). I was enjoying it until the ending. Too vague for my liking.
 
A couple of new horror movies for Halloween:

Stakeland. "Dude, you know Zombieland? Let's do that exact same film again, except with vampires!" ...Well, not really. True, the basic plot is a carbon copy: experienced monster hunter adopts hapless teenage boy as they travel through a post-apocalyptic USA, picking up a few other survivors along the way, fighting off the undead and insane survivalist cults. But the tone and execution are completely different, owing more to The Road than Shaun of the Dead. Bleak, well-paced, beautifully shot, and relentlessly grim, with vampires that make those in 30 Days Of Night look like Twilight. OK, so it treads water once or twice and some of the secondary characters get short shrift, but I like it. :star3: +

Wake Wood. Did you see The Resident last year, the first Hammer Horror film in decades? It wasn't really a Hammer film, was it? Nah, just a regular modern-day dime-a-dozen horror movie with the Hammer insignia stamped on, Christopher Lee or no Christopher Lee. This, however, is the real deal. A 30-something couple mourning the death of their young daughter move to a remote village to start anew, and soon discover that the rustic Emmerdale-tweed-and-sideburns villagers harbour a Dark Secret... they can bring the dead back to life. But only for three days. You know where this is going: mist on the moor, creeping unease, ye olde magick, and BLOOD. Welcome back, Hammer Films. :star4:
 
Another Earth. Rhoda is 17, she just got accepted to study astrophysics at Stanford, and after celebrating with her friends she gets in her car to drive home. The radio DJ talks about a newly discovered planet, similar enough to Earth to support life, and visible with the naked eye. Rhoda, being not exactly sober, takes her eyes off the road to look up at the sky... and plows straight into another car, wiping out a family, killing the wife and son and putting the father in a coma.

Four years later she gets out of jail into a grey world of depression and guilt. Up in the sky, the other Earth gets bigger with each passing day, and those who really did become astrophycisists are trying to find out what it is. When she finds out that the father of the family she destroyed has come out of his coma and is living alone with a bottle, she looks him up to try and make amends...

Another Earth is slow, dreamlike, and absolutely beautiful - "soft" sci-fi where even with alternative planets and space travel, it's still all about two people and who they might have been and might still be. It's not quite Solyaris, but it might just be this year's Moon. :star4: +
 
Coriolanus. Liked it a lot; updated underrated political Shakespeare drama viewed through a lens of G20 riots, Yugoslavian wars, rise of right-wing populism and first-person shooters. Fiennes has a good idea of the story he wants to tell and what makes it relevant today, and he has a pretty good cast led by a Vanessa Redgrave who acts like her children's lives depended on it. Unfortunately Shakespeare's script calls for it to be more a meditation on the meaning of honour than the problems of defending democracy with undemocratic means, and after a brilliant first hour it drags a bit during the second before we get to the big monologues at the end. But still, very good work. :star4:

Apollo 18. "There's a reason we never went back to the moon..." The reason, of course, being that Something there killed off the last crew who went there and their footage wasn't found until now. Very good idea for a claustrophobic conspiracy horror, squandered to overacting, silly plot twists and plot holes that threaten to engulf the entire damn rock. Disappointment. :star2:
 
Midnight in Paris.
A will-o'-wisp of a film. It's fantastical and referential and therefore fun for those with a literary turn of mind. A charming way to spend a couple of hours, whether it stands beyond that I'm not so sure.
 
Nice one! Wings Hauser kicks all kinds of ass in this one.

Ramrod! That character was really creepy. I hope that movie gets released on Blu-ray soon; I'd buy it if the price was right :D.

My last seen: Country Strong. The music was better than the actual movie.
 
Ramrod! That character was really creepy. I hope that movie gets released on Blu-ray soon; I'd buy it if the price was right :D.
He also sang the song that plays over the opening credits, Neon Slime. :D

watch
 
Super 8:

Let me say that I was surprised with this movie. I hate J.J. Abrams, even more than I hate Michael Bay. Super 8 was surprisingly good. The main characters, even though they were kids, were not that aggravating. I bet Abrams was freaking out because he couldn't end it with a dumb cliffhanger.

My rating: 7.8/10
 
Conan-the-Barbarian-2011-Movie-Poster1-500x500.jpg


John Milius' take on the Conan mythos was far more satisfying. Or you could always read Robert E. Howard's original stories. At least this new version didn't skimp on the bloodiness and brutality. I guess that's something.
 
Again, Nordic horror movies have gotten a bit of a shot in the arm after Let The Right One In and Dead Snow so I watched two more this weekend.

Harpoon: Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre is essentially The Texas Chainsaw Massacre On A Boat - it even has Gunnar "Leatherface" Hansen in a supporting role. And a script by excellent novelist and songwriter (for Björk, among others) Sjón. Not that he can have spent more than five minutes on it; the script is barely even there, and the characters are flat and unlikable... which may well be the point, as it all descends into gore and darkness (quite literally, it's often so dark you can barely see what's going on). But it has a sense of humour, plenty of blood, and Japanese secretaries kicking ass. :star3:, even if part of that is for novelty value - it's apparently the first and only Icelandic horror movie ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPmmmW6G6C0&feature=related

Rare Exports, on the other hand, is an absolute blast, and possibly the second best Christmas movie ever (the best being Die Hard, of course). The story: A rich American hires some miners to excavate a mystical mountain in Finnish Lapland, and they dig too deep and unearth... Santa Claus, who was buried there by the Sami hundreds of years ago. And he knows who's been naughty. Now it's up to three reindeer herders and their kids to stop this eldritch horror before it's too late. And it's good. It's really, really, REALLY good, building on pre-Coca Cola myths taking the basic idea no more seriously than it needs to. Show this to your kids and they'll ask when Santa's coming again. :star4:+

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pH9IyqTk1E

Also watched Son Of Rambow, which is a really properly good British comedy about two kids deciding (for various reasons) to make their own sequel to First Blood using only a video camera. Gets disturbing when you realise that Eric Sykes is a dead ringer for Sly Stallone, but mostly heartwarming and hilarious in all the right ways. :star4:
 
I've been catching up on some 2011 movies I've missed:

I quite liked Drive, even if Carey Mulligan is far too good to be wasted in roles like this. But Gosling and Brooks are excellent, and I love the deceptively slow-cooking feel of it - the bastard lovechild of Michael Mann and Jim Jarmusch. Violent without ever being cartoonish, calm without ever being safe, dreamlike with intense flashes into nightmare... Liked it a lot, actually. :star4: +

Dogtooth is the sort of ultra-bleak/black comedy that brings to mind early Dogme stuff; A mother and father have kept their three children locked in the house their entire life, systematically cleansing their language of every reference to something in the outside world, protecting them from everything up to and including their own individuality and adulthood... ending up with three 20-something gradeschoolers, who are polite, respectful, and utterly psychotic. All of it shot almost like a home movie, with long takes, odd angles, uncomfortable silences, no music. At turns hilarious and disturbing, even if your milage will probably vary a lot on exactly what it wants to say. :star4:

Soderbergh's Contagion is one of the most serious disaster movies I've ever seen - trying to give a realistic depiction of how a world-wide epidemic might play out in 2011, with people dying by the millions and conspiracy theories (anti-vaxxers won't like this movie) brewing everywhere while the people trying to solve it are actually, lo and behold, trying to do the best they can under impossible circumstances. Doesn't quite manage to walk that thin line between focusing on the characters and focusing on the worldwide disaster, but does it better than most movies I've seen in the same vein, and the camera and the actors do a fine job of covering when the script occasionally falls short. :star4:

Hesher seems to want to be My Life As A Dog meets Beavis And Butthead; young boy on the poorer side of a midwest town effectively loses both parents when his mother dies in a car crash and his father crawls into depression, but instead gets - very much against his will - a would-be big brother in the form of Hesher, a violent, potsmoking metalhead who likes to set fire to things. Promising premise, nice cast (Rainn Wilson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Natalie Portman, Piper Laurie), but the script doesn't really know where to go, stumbling between comedy and drama before betting everything on a typical heartwarming indie ending that almost works. :star3:

Meek's Cutoff is what you call an anti-western. How anti, exactly? It's shot in 4:3, specifically to make the open plains look like a claustrophobic trap rather than a wide-open field of dreams. A small wagon train heading west in 1845 take up with a lone tracker, who probably has no idea where he's leading them, but is happy to scare them with tales of bloodthirsty injuns. So there they are, lost in the desert, water running out, paranoia rising, the Men taking charge for no other reason than the fact that they're Men, only knowing they have to keep going somewhere... Very slow and meditative, possibly too slow and meditative for most. Recommended to fans of Dead Man, such as myself. :star4:
 
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