What's the difference between trying to be pretentious and arty, and simply being pretentious and arty? I found his wipes difficult to adapt to at first; then I realised just how original it is. Which other filmmaker uses transitions in a way where you notice them? The only other example that comes to me quick is Godard's use of the jump-cut in A bout de souffle, or Lucas's wipes in Star Wars.

Enzo, Belleville Rendezvous was a co-production of France, Belgium, the UK and Canada.

Stalker
Andrei Tarkovsky 1979 USSR (2nd time)
A mysterious man named Stalker leads two men, Writer and Professor, beyond an industrial city into the Zone, where they search to find the Room, wherein desires come true.
Fascinating examination of the human condition on its darkest levels; it gently tears away the layers of abstraction with which we mask ourselves to reveal our inner truth, exposing the heart of darkness with poetic ferocity. It is, with its stunning visuals, nightmarish sounds, and methodic pace, an atmospheric, fantastical, philosophical masterpiece.

Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie)
Luis Buñuel 1972 France/Italy/Spain (1st time)
Three bourgeois couples attempt to dine together, and keep getting set back by interruptions.
Buñuel's surreal masterpiece is a series of episodes building to a finale which is, due to the Chinese box narrative before it, neither reality nor fantasy. In this sense, one dream follows the other so as to become a running reality that these characters are living masked from truth: indeed, they are blind to their own prejudices, and choose not to acknowledge the adulterous affairs going on between them.

2001: A Space Odyssey - (Stanley Kubrick;1968;UK/USA)
In 1999 a monolith is found on the moon that sends a signal to Jupiter. In 2001 a mission is set to investigate Jupiter until the computer HAL 9000 causes problems.
Seeing this again felt just as great as the first time. Everything deserves praise from Kubrick's precise direction, the classical music, absorbing and hypnotic cinematography, and the whole mythos behind the film, depicting the evolution of man while questioning our future. Kubrick's best film and one of the ten best ever. I can't see any criticism in this.

Final Destination 2 **

This was basically the exact same movie with a different cast. I'm hoping the third isn't just another repeat but I am almost positive that I'll be disappointed. Oh well, in any case at least the death scenes in this were better. SPOILER However I was pissed that they killed off Ali Larter's Clear River character END OF SPOILERS

TRUE LIES (1994) - **1/2

Enjoyable if unremarkable lightweight big-budget blockbuster picture that surprisingly came from James Cameron, who probably wanted an action/comedy, but whatever that quest was acheived or not, who knows.

North Country ** 1/2

I did want to see this in the theaters but never got around to it and also I had no one who was interested in seeing it. It's a good thing I didn't because I was somewhat disappointed. The movie is good (if nothing else it showed how "men are pigs") but this movie just wasn't as great as I was hoping for/thought it'd be. From the previews I'd thought it'd be awesome and it had a great cast to it. Nothing special stood out to me in the cast department except of course for Charlize Theron who did a fine job. Other than that the movie isn't as great as the previews lead you to believe.

First Blood - (Ted Kotcheff;1982;USA)
After a Green Beret drifter is assaulted by small-town cops, he retreats into the forrest.
While being an action film that spawned two shit cliche sequels, this one proved to be a pretty good film. There are great moments and cliche moments but overall the final product is good, and is probably the only good Stallone action movie. The original ending would've been better though.

Domino ***

I really enjoyed this more so the 2nd time around. I had high expectations seeing it in theaters and was a little disappointed but all of that was cast aside upon a 2nd viewing. Keira Knightley did a great job as Domino Harvey and I'm probably the only person on the board who thinks so (well maybe not THE only one) but I like Tony Scott's "MTV" directing style.

You rate DOMINO over YOJIMBO?

*RRA then sees that God killed a kitten*

Week End - (Jean-Luc Godard;1967;Italy/France)
A middle class married couple driving to Oinville for a will encounter a huge traffic jam, dead road rage victims, and many eccentrics, including cannibalistic hippies.
My first Godard film and a very fascinating one at that. The film gradually strips down society through violence, political speeches, and ultimately degradation to the point of cannibalism. This is a great film, although there are moments where it drags. It does manage to blend violence from an angry director with some nice humor in some moments. The French countryside also provides some wonderful cinematography. Ultimately this is a disturbing jab at society that is still relevant today.

I know I know. As we all know I rate movies based on entertainment (which we've already beaten this discussion to a dead horse). But watching Domino last night again for the 2nd time really turned my head and I enjoyed it so much more than I did the first time. I'm thinking about buying the Akira Kurosawa Four Samurai Box Set (with The Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortrest, Yojimbo, Sanjuro), so hopefully I'll enjoy them after a 2nd viewing as well. The only one out of them that I've seen twice is The Seven Samurai. I do enjoy Akira Kurosawa's work, don't get me wrong. However, and I think I put this in my The Hidden Fortrest review but his movies just seem to drag on for me. Domino is about 2 hours and that movie (more or less, except for maybe the last 20 miunutes or so) FLEW by like nothing. When I watch an Akira Kurosawa movie I'm constantly looking at the clock wondering when the thing's gonna end.

To be fair I wouldn't go so far as to say that Domino is a better movie than Yojimbo and I'd say with confidence that Yojimbo has and always will be a more "important" film if you will than Domino ever will become. However, my rating does reflect that I did enjoy Domino more.

Finding Forrester
Gus Van Sant 2000 US/Canada (1st time)
A teenager with a talent for basketball and English strikes up a friendship with a reclusive writer.
Van Sant further lending himself to studio filmmaking, and the result is perhaps as solid a film can get when full of the old-fashioned clichés of such dramas. A thematic rehash of Good Will Hunting, with a few variations here and there, it is difficult to believe the director made Gerry a year later.

Mystery Train
Jim Jarmusch 1989 US/Japan (1st time)
Various lost souls spend the night in separate rooms at a Memphis hotel.
A film which explores nothing in particular while working on many levels. Jarmusch has a look and pace of his own, and the humour is deadpan enough to often bewilder some yet to adapt; in this wry, episodic piece, he seems to be splashing many cultures onto the canvas with the same brush, complimented by Robby Müller's vibrant explosions of colour.

The Beat that My Heart Skipped(2005)
I rented this after Film Comment gave it a pretty good review, but I didnt find it to be all that great. There were too many small tangents and nothing got developed. It did get very good SPOILER WARNING after Tom's father died END SPOILER WARNING but unfortunately that was only about 10 minutes.Up until that point, the film just seems to skirt around what its actually trying to say.
Average

Le Cercle Rouge - (Jean-Pierre Melville;1970;France/Italy)
One man escapes going to prison the same day a man is released, they team up with an alcoholic ex-cop to pull off a jewelry heist.
Like Le Samourai, this is an excellent Neo-Noir crime film that is very taut. The cast is great, especially Delon. It's meticulous direction injects that cool feeling to the characters that also made Le Samourai the film it is. It's films like these we need today crime-wise. The heist scene is among the great scenes in cinema.

King of New York.

Bram Stoker's Dracula ** 1/2

Wow, I don't know if I've ever seen Gary Oldman more on top of his game than in this movie. Truly an amazing performance as Count Dracula and I tried to pay attention but I don't believe I saw him blink on screen either. Winona Ryer and Anthony Hopkins did very good as well. One of the better Dracula/vampire movies

Super Troopers (2001)

God I love this film. Sadly, the other movie I've seen by the makers (Broken Lizard) was poor compared to this. I am looking forward to next year's Beerfest though.

A local state troopers force face being shut down with the local cops taking over. But solving a big drug importing scam before the cops could save their jobs...

Stupid. That's one word to describe this movie. And it is, but funnily stupid. The state troopers are idiots and are all about goofing around. Brian Cox as the captain is outstanding. I can watch him in anything. The plot sounds corny but works well and the movie has the one thing all modern comedies should have - quotable lines.

Indian guy about the cops: "They think I'm Mexican".

After pulling a guy over, seeing how many times they can get away with saying meow: "Meow, what's so damn funny?"

"License and registration... ...Chicken fucker!"

"Am freaking out man"

Glad you saw it. What do you think it was trying to say? Don't you think Romain Duris' performance was excellent? Best of last year, for me. I didn't like the "two years later" coda.

---

Krótki film o milosci (A Short Film About Love)
Krzysztof Kíeslowski 1988 Poland (3rd time)
A young man spies on an older woman in the opposite block of flats, and becomes infatuated with her.
Beguiling study of loneliness more than anything, and the obsession which individuals place on the idea of being wanted. The love of the title is shown as an ultimately destructive force, but there is a clear, defined relationship throughout: that between director and his medium, with Kíeslowski playing mesmerising games with perspective and gaze.

House of Games
David Mamet 1987 US (1st time)
A writer and psychiatrist becomes obsessed with a confidence trickster, and becomes involved in a series of elaborate cons.
Obvious questions arise throughout: who's playing whom and all that. It's a highly unsettling film in which you never really feel comfortable in any of the scenes; Mamet concentrates on storytelling, the kind which, thanks to the subject matter, allows him to get away with Chinese box affairs and slight cop-outs. The acting is either atrociously robotic or effectively artificial, depending on taste.

Small Time Crooks
Woody Allen 2000 US (1st time)
A bumbling thief hitches a plan to rob a bank by setting up a cookie store and tunelling through; the plan fails, but the cookies take off.
Amid all the broad humour, which regrettably spells things out to us more often than necessary, there is are subtle jabs at the idea of hgih culture and art appreciation; moralistic and convincing.

"The color of money" Scorsese.
Couldn't sit through. Very boring even for player that I am. And Cruise is

Er, what? Cruise is brilliant in that film, I think. Really energetic.

You say you "play" pool? Cool. Me too.

Maybe I just dislike Cruise in general?
I play Russian Classical. Very difficult, but I have experienced friends who take me in guidance and company. Tried Pool too, sure, but after Russian table looks such a small thing!

Taxi Driver
Martin Scorsese 1976 U.S.A.

There's really nothing I can say that hasn't been said already, so I won't bore you with details. This is American film making at its best. I've probably watched it a dozen times, and I'm still blown away. Quite possibly the greatest character study in film history. You are doing yourself a huge disservice if you haven't see this yet.

Crimes and Misdemeanors
Woody Allen 1989 US (2nd time)
An unsuccessful director and eye surgeon deal with their marital crises in different ways.
Allen on top form, a subtle comedy with cynical undertones; at the heart of it all, there is the sense of tainted love, and how the human condition rationalises in its indecisive, almost tragic hesitance.

The War of the Worlds
Byron Haskin 1952 US (1st time)
Martians invade Earth.
Colourful if charmless sci-fi action very much of its time (comparisons to the Cold War phenomenon may seem too obvious), just short enough to maintain interest.

Northern Soul
Shane Meadows 2004 UK (3rd time)
The failed attempt of a wannabe wrestler who wants to make it big.
A mockumentary typical of Meadows: even at twenty minutes, it's far too long.

Maybe I just dislike Cruise in general?
I play Russian Classical. Very difficult, but I have experienced friends who take me in guidance and company. Tried Pool too, sure, but after Russian table looks such a small thing! [/b][/quote]Cruise is easy to disslike. However, I can't say the same for his films. He has somegreat ones... Anyone who does not enjoy Magnolia is a sub-human beast with no emotions that must be shot to death.

Final Destination 3 **

As I said in my review of Final Destination 2, "this was basically the exact same movie with a different cast." They could have stopped after part 1 and should have stopped after part 2. The movie wasn't any better or worst just the same story with new kids in a new town. Anyone who doesn't "believe" the girl with the visions, dies. It's been done now stop it. We can only pray there won't be a Final Destination 4

On Her Majesty's Secret Service **

Sorry to say but I don't think George Lazenby was an adequate substitute for Sean Connery. Also, the fight scenes were pretty bad in this movie. Too cut up and choppy. Compared to the first 5, this one sucked. SPOILERS However, I couldn't believe James actually got married and I loved that it ended with her being assassinated END OF SPOILERS

So I’ve actually managed to watch a couple of movies in the theater this week and see a movie that I’ve been wanting to watch for some time now so I thought that I would commemorate the occasion by spewing forth strings of words in a somewhat sentence like fashion. I’ll go in chronological order starting with…

Firewall, now I believe that this movie is being marketed as a thriller where Harrison Ford plays a network security designer for a bank and Paul Bettany is a mastermind thief. There are so many problems in this movies it is really just poor in every aspect. The story is…well I mean it is a simple concept establish a good guy introduce slick bad guy who seems to have an angle for everything and is as ruthless as he is intelligent. Good triumphs over evil, made more impressive by the caliber of bad guy and there is your movie. Yet they managed to fuck that up. Every aspect of above mention formula is followed just with the precision of one-handed surgeon performing an appendectomy with a pair of safety scissors. Ford’s character never really feels concrete where as Bettany’s never really feels all that calculated, don’t get me wrong it is never a question that Bettany is playing the main bad guy but he seems to be at times haphazard it keeps his character from attaining any footing in the upper echelon of movie bad guys or really middle men as far as I’m concerned. I like his (Paul’s) portrayal-his voice, cadence, and look but the character was just poorly written. On the other hand watching Harrison Ford’s “performance” in this movie is a little like being raped by your best friend’s father. You don’t really want to turn him in, but that old man just fucked you. Basically the best performances in this movie are from a couple of the people in Bettany’s crew two of which actually manage to generate a feeling of malice and the other the only character that I can say honestly made any emotional attachment to the audience. (well the little boy too, but that doesn’t count)

I don’t really have a counterpoint type argument the only reason that this movie gets any points is because I really like any movie that has theft in it, I don’t know why I just like to watch shit get stolen. Right after the movie I would have given it a grade of a C-, because of my love of theft and Paul Bettany now I fail to see a reason to even give it a D- plus I seem to have grown oddly cynical and jaded in the last few weeks so I give you Firewall F+

Final Destination III

Do you really need me to run through the plot on this one, being that this is the second sequel it is getting pretty thin but a group of teens get on a roller coaster and one of them has a premonition and freaks out forcing a number of them off. Then the coaster does in fact crash and now Death is after them, armed with pictures of how they are going to die and knowing the order they try to evaded death’s icy cold grip.

Not the most original thing to come down the pipe by no means but not the most un-enjoyable either. Being a Final Destination movie you know that you will have some of those improbable sequence of event death scenes which are still pretty fun to watch, but actually in the deaths in Final Destination II are superior. It has a cast of young actors, but again not the greatest cast gathered for Final Destination movie.

What it does have is the backbone of the series with a known gimmick that could have seemed really stale at this point. In lesser hands it might of, I’m not saying that James Wong is a master of cinema but there are several missteps that could have been taken that weren’t. He kept it running at a good clip, not trying to weigh it down with expanded mythology making it clunky. It also played rather loose knowing that you knew the gist of it and what was going to happen but not going into that realm of over parody. This movie is as fun as you will let it be.

So I think that sums up that this is not the greatest movie to ever exist but then again they all can’t be can they. It’s fun and though no aspect of it particularly shines it doesn’t grate on you either(well me at least, but I seem to have an affinity for bubble gum movies). Thus I give you Final Destination III B probably got a slight bump just from the pedigree of the series.

Audition ** 1/2

It was a fine movie until about the last 20-30 minutes. The flash backs/quick cuts made it difficult for me to follow after that point. Not as "distirbing" as I had previously heard but well paced.

Since all in all I enjoyed Magnolia but totally disliked the final froggy rain and consider it to be an unbearable snobbish intellectualism, what should I get? Life emprisonment?