Now Watching

[Moss]

 

I'm still digesting this one. Just some amazing moments in it.

[u2roolz]

^ I agree. I almost posted an extremely lengthy review of it on here, but I held back because the film is such a personal experience.

I'm guessing more people will post about this when it comes out on DVD. It's probably my favorite film of the year (even though I had the unfortunate luck of having two old chatty cathys sitting behind me making ignorant comments like "I didn't realize that this was a documentary", "This director must do a lot of drugs" "I sat here for 2.5 hours and I don't know what I just watched" Really?! You can't elaborate on anything that you just saw to come up with some educated analysis?).

[PopTodd]

Saw 50/50 yesterday and enjoyed it.

Yes, it's obvious Oscar® fodder, but it was well done. Joseph Gordon Levitt was very good. Seth Rogen played the exact same character that he always plays, but I happen to like that guy, so I enjoyed watching him.

Guessing that Levitt will get a nomination for Best Actor and maybe the movie will for screenplay. The rest depends upon the rest of the field.

Still, I'd recommend it if you're in the mood for a sad sack cancer movie that's not a total chick flick.

[Fritz]

[Beltmann]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoyKe-HxmFk

 

Into Eternity / dir. Michael Madsen / Denmark-Finland-Sweden / 2009

 

Conscience, albeit on a grand scale, is at the core of Michael Madsen’s otherworldly documentary Into Eternity, which wonders how far into the future our consumer society will have consequences. Madsen invites viewers on a philosophical, gliding tour through the caverns of Onkala, an underground superstructure in Finland being built to bury a fraction of the world’s quarter-million tons of lethal nuclear waste.

 

Scandinavian scientists appear spooked when describing their design dilemmas: How do we guarantee a seal will endure for a crucial 100,000 years? What language or markers will be comprehensible millenniums from now? Should we perhaps “forget” the abyss, to prevent naive tomb raiders from someday unleashing the radiation? Madsen’s somber voiceover addresses a future civilization, as if we are now watching an artifact before it enters a time capsule—and the conceit, coupled with his eerie, sterilized images of Onkala, makes Into Eternity feel like a sci-fi film that is both warning and requiem.

 

This was one of my favorite films at the Milwaukee Film Festival.

[Beltmann]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9td_3P3w1S4

 

City of Life and Death / dir. Lu Chuan / China / 2009

 

City of Life and Death is Lu Chuan’s unflinching historical drama about the Japanese siege of Nanjing in 1937. As a powerful, black-and-white chronicle of war crimes—the army butchered an estimated 300,000 residents and raped thousands of women, sins compounded by decades of official denial—the movie is within spitting distance of Schindler’s List, another film about the value of collective memory.

 

Like Spielberg, Lu commits to a dynamic, stylized realism fueled by the tension between the unspeakable litany of abuses and the aesthetically pleasing cinematography. City of Life and Death is a grueling yet gorgeous movie, with scenes that establish Lu as a master storyteller. In one suspenseful sequence, Chinese soldiers are rounded up and caged like cattle. Lu zeroes in on two faces, a soldier and a young boy, as they experience the long march to the beach to be slaughtered. Later, Lu stages a wrenching scene in which 100 women volunteer to serve as “comfort girls” for the invading troops, knowing their raised hands will bring weeks of sexual assault and most likely death, but also food, clothes, and coal for their families.

 

Still, it’s more instructive to notice the ways Lu diverges from Spielberg. Mining actual survivor accounts, Lu sees the warp and weft of the occupation but resists the impulse to weave his multiple protagonists into a single, reductive storyline. There is no commanding figure at the center, despite the Schindler-like presence of John Rabe, a real-life German consul who rescued thousands but here remains a supporting player. The closest thing to a traditional “hero” is a valiant Chinese resistance fighter who nevertheless winds up a corpse during the first third of the movie.

 

By choosing as his most affecting witnesses a naive Japanese sergeant and a Chinese secretary who sells out his countrymen to protect his own family, Lu refuses to make simplistic moral judgments. That humanizing decision deepens rather than diminishes the horror on display, and a similar effect is achieved by presenting the atrocities in a clear-eyed, matter-of-fact fashion. The images of City of Life and Death might be monochrome, but there’s nothing black-and-white about the film’s dense interconnection of themes: death, remembrance, self-sacrifice, and private conscience.

[Fritz]

 

City of Life and Death / dir. Lu Chuan / China / 2009

 

Into Eternity / dir. Michael Madsen / Denmark-Finland-Sweden / 2009

 

 

Thank you for pointing me in the direction of these films, Beltmann. They both look quite extraordinary.

[Kim Bodnia]

Winding Refn is an extraordinary director. I'd recommend everything he has directed, specially Pusher. I am eager to see Drive, although theaters in my country surely won't screen this, so I have to wait for the DVD release.

 

 

 

(meant to post this Sat night)

-I really haven't seen a film in awhile that I knew would hold a special place in my memories (and heart) for being amazing. It holds you in its grip with its perfect direction, terrific sound design, top notch performances and shocks and twists. Certain scenes,shots and sounds (most notably the amazing soundtrack which evokes the 80s New Wave) are forever etched in my memory.

 

It should be kind of noted that this isn't like a certain franchise with Vin Diesel. This film mixes together American & European cinematic sensibilities. Hell, even the font on the poster is awesome. As a reference point, I liken this film's ambience and similar storyline to that of the recent Anton Corbijn classic The American.

 

 

Refn is definitely a talent to watch. Drive is on my priority list, but I probably won't have a chance to see it anytime soon. Tomorrow night the Milwaukee Film Festival opens, so I'll be consumed by that for 11 days, and then recuperating for some time after (and trying to find time to crank out my write-up).

[Albert Tatlock]

Like the Beltman reviews - please continue.

 

Meanwhile, spent the last couple of hours watching Holy Flying Circus -a 'fantastical reimagining' of the controversy surrounding the 1979 release of Life of Brian. Very good indeed. Gilliam-esque surreal in parts and Often very funny. Enjoyed the fact that Palin's wife and mum were played by men in true Python style.

 

[Oil Can Boyd]

 

Really liked this. Brendan Gleeson is great.

[GtrPlyr]

 

Great doc about obsessive record collectors. The director is also one of the subjects so you get an honest look at the toll this kind of obsessive collecting does to ones personal life. There's a few semi-famous people in the film such as Harvey Pekar and Don McKellar.

[Beltmann]

Great doc about obsessive record collectors. The director is also one of the subjects so you get an honest look at the toll this kind of obsessive collecting does to ones personal life. There's a few semi-famous people in the film such as Harvey Pekar and Don McKellar.

Have you seen Cinemania, GtrPlyr? (I assume you have. But if you haven't, it's worth seeing. It's also about a particular groups of obsessives, here NYC film fanatics.)

[Beltmann]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KAm7E_R18Y

 

Sophia Takal’s Green begins as a miniature, naturalistic story of culture clash--a Brooklyn couple re-locates to the countryside and befriends a chatty local--and somehow morphs, seamlessly, into an intense psychological study of female sexual jealousy. Takal owes a debt to Cassavetes, yes, but the mood is something new. There’s a strange friction between the comfortable acting and affable dialogue, and the way the forbidding electro score portends the mounting neurosis. Odd, too, how the leaves always seem to be eavesdropping.

 

Unfortunately, the trailer doesn't do the movie justice.

[Beltmann]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg0OODPSc44

 

Page One: Inside the New York Times / dir. Andrew Rossi / USA / 2009

The Green Wave / dir. Ali Samadi Ahadi / Germany; Iran / 2010

 

There’s no doubt our media landscape is changing, but should we mourn the changing of the guard? The all-access documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times expresses hard-boiled anxiety about a news culture that allows venerable print institutions to collapse and be replaced by amateur bloggers, cable news, Twitter, and aggregate websites. As the Times performs old-school investigations that require weeks to prepare for publication, readers flock instead to Gawker and HuffPo. No wonder media editor Bruce Headlam always has an open bottle of painkillers on his desk.

 

And yet there’s something electrifying about how citizen journalism can yield reports like The Green Wave, which pushes back after Iran’s official information channels were shut down during the civil unrest sparked by the disputed 2009 presidential election. Mixing live action with animation, the documentary recites actual Facebook posts and tweets to present personal testimonials of police transgressions. There are questions about authorship--perhaps a Times fact-checker could help--but it’s a stirring experience, and the animation, which resembles a graphic novel, extends its youthful theme of the old giving way to the new. The revolution will be modernized. (Too corny?)

 

I saw both of these films only days apart, so I couldn't help but think about them as thematically intertwined.

[PopTodd]

Last night son and I watched:

Final Destination

 

It was pretty good. A fun little horror/thriller. It's not one of those sadistic, slasher-type flicks (which I cannot stand), but a supernatural thriller with a few bloody murders. Enjoyable for Halloween night.

[Oil Can Boyd]

 

I know I'm a little late on this but I really enjoyed it. It present some scary information about food production/food policy.

[Analogman]

Doc Martin (Series 5)

 

Someone has put the new season up on Youtube. It's funny as hell right off the bat.

[PopTodd]

Last night Heaven Can Wait was on broadcast TV. I caught the last 45 min. or so of it and remembered how much I loved it. Also remembered how much I like Warren Beatty.

Also remembered that I should probably go out and rent the original (Mr. Jordan) to see how it stacks up.

[Oil Can Boyd]

City of Life and Death / dir. Lu Chuan / China / 2009

Beltmann - wow, thanks for recommending this powerful movie. Watched it last night and I am still thinking about it. It was at once both beautiful to watch and horrible to imagine those events.

[Analogman]

The Adventures of Pete & Pete cast reunion

[Beltmann]

Beltmann - wow, thanks for recommending this powerful movie. Watched it last night and I am still thinking about it. It was at once both beautiful to watch and horrible to imagine those events.

It stuck to my ribs, too. You might be interested to know that Chinese director Zhang Yimou has also made a film about the Rape of Nanking. It's called The Flowers of War, stars Christian Bale, and looks completely unlike The City of Life and Death. Zhang, of course, used to make masterful period dramas like Raise the Red Lantern, To Live, and The Story of Qiu Ju, but this new war movie seems closer to the showman's pageantry of his more recent work.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ7eBs6YbT8

[Oil Can Boyd]

It stuck to my ribs, too. You might be interested to know that Chinese director Zhang Yimou has also made a film about the Rape of Nanking. It's called The Flowers of War, stars Christian Bale, and looks completely unlike The City of Life and Death. Zhang, of course, used to make masterful period dramas like Raise the Red Lantern, To Live, and The Story of Qiu Ju, but this new war movie seems closer to the showman's pageantry of his more recent work.

Thanks for the heads up. I am a fan of Zhang's films, although I have not seen any of his more recent work.

[PopTodd]

Midnight In Paris

The perfect balance of whimsy and thoughtfulness that only Woody Allen seems to be able to strike. I was in love with this movie from the opening montage of Paris street scenes that seemed to be able to give me a real feel of what the city is actually like, even never having been there. A masterful piece of filmmaking. Owen Wilson is pitch-perfect, and maybe even BETTER than Woody as the Woody character, as you can actually believe Wilson as a romantic lead. Probably my favorite movie of the year. Should get a best picture nod, if there is any justice.

[IRememberDBoon]

damn Todd! Thats just the film Ive been wanting to see!!

[choo-choo-charlie]