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What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?
- SuperflyPete
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Last night I saw "Out of the Furnace" which is easily the most overrated movie I've seen in years. Acting's fine, script is piss poor.
The night before, I saw "Rumors of War", which is a post-apoc "Book of Revelations" knock-off about the one world government, etc. I know what you're thinking, but suffice it to say that without any knowledge of any "holy texts", any sort of belief system, whatever, it's a decent movie. Not great, but one of the better Christian films I've seen in a long time. It's really a sort of mystery with lots of jumping around and a shitload of not-too-subtle plot twists that you kind of saw coming.
A couple days before that, I saw "If I Stay". Really good film. Touching. Totally recommend it if you need to earn points with the wife and don't want to watch something horrible and penis-hating.
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- SuperflyPete
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- Michael Barnes
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- Mountebank
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But I didn't love the film. Probably because I absolutely hated the music. Jazz like Coltrane, Davis, Armstrong, Parker, etc. I can appreciate and I get it. That kind of jazz, I absolutely fucking despise. I do not despise much music in the world, but that I do wholeheartedly. Don't care how much talent/technique is involved...to my heathen ears it all just sounds like late night talk show music.
Simmons was good, but he wasn't really much more than a liberal arts version of R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket. I almost felt like he was practically cartoonish at certain points. His "villainy" was just too extreme, and in the real world NO ONE would put up with some of that shit he pulled. They wouldn't file charges, they'd file complaints and his ass would have been out of a job day one.
I did like his hypothesis about "good job" though, and I did like that moment where he sort of revealed why he was such a dick. But then the film flips that over and, oh wait, no, he really is just a dick. WTF.
I actually had a teacher sort of like him once, in high school AP US History. This guy was NOTORIOUS at my school for being completely impossible. He was a TOTAL jackass to everyone. He made up names for everyone, made people cry, humiliated people...he got a lot of complaints from students and parents, but the thing is he was so god damned smart and a GREAT teacher that he was kind of untouchable. One time he asked me- out of nowhere- to memorize "Paul Revere's Ride". I think he thought I wouldn't do it. Next day, I recited the whole thing in class. And he said "well, you did it". I felt like I beat him. So I can kind of relate to some of the movie...and I will say that my finest academic moment in high school was when he gave me an achievement medal and said "you've done some damn fine work, Barnes". I didn't have to bleed for it or anything, at least.
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Speaking of music movies, whether you like the Beach Boys or not, Love & Mercy is one of the better music bios ever, showing two different periods of Brian Wilson's life; when he begins to deteriorate mentally in the 60's, and then in the 80's when he meets the woman who will hopefully have some influence in bringing some sanity back to his life. As a musician/songwriter, I especially loved the earlier period showing some of the way he worked to create those iconic songs, but the later part is also really interesting and has some good performances by Paul Giamatti, Elizabeth Banks and John Cusack.
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- Space Ghost
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- fastkmeans
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Also, was talking to some asshole who claimed the Twilight Zone with Forest Whitaker was the best version.
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- Black Barney
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Black Barney wrote: it's funny cuz the jazz in Whiplash is the only kind of jazz i like. And that's probably because I hate jazz.
After watching Whiplash I developed PTSD and had to enter therapy. Since then every time I listen to Jazz I break out in a cold sweat and shiver.
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- Erik Twice
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This would be forgiveable if the film did not go out of its way to present a moralistic viewpoint, which it obviously does. There's a constant stream of justifications of why all the people who the protagonist beat up are bad: They are wife-beaters, they read The Sun, they are traitors, they are chavs...The main villain is depicted as being a huge hypocrite for not being able to stomach violence in person when he's casuing a mass genocide off-screen, when the impression I got is that the main characters were even bigger hypocrites for being able to justify any sort of smug, needless violence as long as it's personal to them.
I also know several people have been bothered by the portrayal of women in the film, citing stereotypes and such and I have to say it did also bother me, but for a more different reason: Women in this film are not characters, they are female characters, defined by their feminity:
- The mother of the main character, who suffers domestic violence and has to prostitute herself.
- The sexy Asian assassin
- One of the only two fellow students that threat the protagonist well is a women. She dies.
- The other is another fellow student, the only female one remaining. She's supposed to be more compentent than her male colleagues and yet needs the support and help from the main character during most of the film. Also, she leaves the film by the end to fulfill a completely unimportant narrative point.
- The sexy pricess from Sweeden, which offers the protagonist anal sex in exchange of saving the world.
But enough with the moral analysis, it's just a boring film. Beneath its Bond film references and some short quips just lies a poor Bond film with a young adult protagonist. It's not structurally different from the stuff it lampoons, nor does it gain anything by lampooning it, it's just...there. "Better than a bare lighbulb" is not an adage I'm fond of.
Do you know what I wished I had seen instead? Read or Die. It has the same "brown note" plot and is ten times as humble if simply because instead of making some lame jokes about English tailors being secret agents it has giant insects, crazy superpowered clones of ancient samurais with lightsabers and a bibliomaniac protagonist that is actually likeable.
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I have seen Birdman twice now and like it a lot, but as someone else said recently, I view it as more of an ironic dark comedy. Barnes, I disagree that it is snobbishly pooh-poohing the superhero genre in favor of the "theatah" esthetic... Sure, it definitely sets that idea up in some ways, but also knocks it down. In Riggan's confrontation with the theater critic, she was going to give him a negative review only because of him daring to bring his untrained, spoiled Hollywood Birdman self into the revered "real art " theater scene... she talks about Hollywood handing each other awards for cartoons and pornography. NO WAY she is a sympathetic character to the audience of this film. We're all saying a big "fuck you" to her, as he essentially does.
And much of his inner dialogue as Birdman is telling him that his real value was as Birdman. Yes, he's constantly fighting against that idea, thinking that his real value now is with recognition in this oh so important theater show, but I think that can be taken more than one way; not necessarily as a deceptive hallucination, but serious. In a sense, he subconsciously knows that Birdman really was an important work that touched and reached so many people around the world in a powerful way. There's a parallel at work throughout, where the mass of people love him and recognize him for being Birdman, like in the first bar scene and the scene where he's walking through the crowd in his underwear, but he is essentially rejecting their adoration in favor of the snooty critic, whose approval he really is seeking. I don't take that disparagingly towards those people praising and recognizing him, though, and I don't think the film suggests that at all. That character has indeed had a huge impact on the world, in a meaningful way. He just can't accept that, with ego and recognition and approval-seeking (from the wrong source) getting in the way.
It's the kind of film that different people might take in very different ways, but I like that. It definitely had a resonance for me in a way that wouldn't be easy to explain, but parallels some things I've been going through personally the last several years. And having done theater for several years, I was amused by some of the depictions... again, not favorable... of characters like Ed Norton's Super-Method-Man. Really, if anything, the film equally examines, reveres and mocks the supposed superheros of both film *and* theater, and the pretensions and positives of both mediums.
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