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Same here, mostly because I saw Oblivion and I was still very so-so about seeing another Cruise-fronted sci-fi film. It has become my favorite sci-fi film since District 9.
 
MrKnickerbocker said:
Oblivion is ok, but did you see Cruise's other awesome sci-fi, The Edge of Tomorrow? It's amazing.
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I haven't seen it, no. Had too much stuff going on, so I missed the DVD-release completely. Cruise is always among my favourite actors, and he's doing well in sci-fi - Minority Report (2002) is one of the best sf-films of the 2000's, and he almost single-handedly made the War of the Worlds-remake (2005) worthwile. Great actor. Bring on more Tom Cruise SF!
 
Sounds promising, will watch it.

Watched Fury (2014) tonight. Not near a perfect film, but in the end a very moving and gripping one. I felt it tilted towards the too depressing in the first half (without a clear moral focal point to relate to), but quickly became better as it turned into a more direct survival story in the latter half or so.
 
Maturin said:
Watched Fury (2014) tonight. Not near a perfect film, but in the end a very moving and gripping one. I felt it tilted towards the too depressing in the first half (without a clear moral focal point to relate to), but quickly became better as it turned into a more direct survival story in the latter half or so.
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I disagree. The strength of the film was the portrayal of the American soldiers in the first half not as larger-than-life, self-sacrificing liberating heroes as had still been done in the Spielberg productions, but as regular people in war, driven to moral ambiguity by the circumstances they were thrown in and couldn't fully grasp. When it became a survival story of five guys against a Waffen-SS battalion, it threw that overboard and completely fell apart, becoming worse than Private Ryan in every respect. If the film starts out critical of war and the ones thrown into it, this criticism becomes unbelievable - and worse, hypocritical - if it evolves into an adventure film with larger-than-life heroes.
Moreover, there were two personal gripes I had. First, there was the oversimplification of the Germans in the film. It was well-intended, saying the bad guys were the Nazis (here, the SS) and not the Germans in total. But things weren't remotely that simple. I know that in a case of historical drama, things need to be simplified for narrative purposes, but I still think it could have been handled better than that. If Tom Cruise - incidentally one of my least favourite actors - could pull it off beliavably in Valkyrie, I can't see why Fury couldn't. All it would have taken was an old woman in the town who is portrayed as a convinced Nazi, or a brief partisan ambush somewhere by people who didn't wear SS uniforms.
My second problem may seem as nitpicking, but it really fucking annoyed me: In the 2010s, it should pose no problem to find a few native German extras to portray Germans in a Hollywood film. You only need four or five people to shout out the handful of lines you have for them. But no. With the single exception of the SS commander in the end, every German soldier in the film spoke German with an atrocious American accent. It was obvious that they had no clue how to properly intonate German, and that they didn't know what they were saying. There is no reason for that. There are enough young German men who would be happy to be on the screen with Brad Pitt. My guess is that all the extras were American re-enactors. That's fine, but if you're going to have people actually say things in the film, why can't those four or five people be native speakers? It's sloppy, lazy and took me out of the film completely. It gets even worse when you consider that they actually did cast noted German actresses for other scenes, so it couldn't have been that much more of cost and effort.

In conclusion, I don't think it was a terrible film, but it fell significantly short of its ambitions and does not add anything new to the topic of the Second World War in the cinema.
 
See, this is a problem with me.
When someone puts as much thought into something and articulates it as well as Perun does above, it makes me want to go see the film, even when the verdict is thumbs down. :oops:
 
Sounds interesting @Perun
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/14/german-culture-berlin-wall-deutschland-83

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Germans fascinated by life on either side of the Berlin Wall

Books and a hotly awaited TV series, Deutschland 83, tap into the growing interest in the years of a divided country

Welcome to Germany in 1983, a country divided since the end of the second world war.

Moritz Stamm is a West German army officer, with a love of music, dancing and hanging out with his friends. Martin Rauch is an East German border guard with a close family and a desire to change the world. The twist? Moritz and Martin are the same person, an East German spy sent to infiltrate the West German army and report on its military secrets.

That’s the premise behind Germany’s most eagerly awaited drama, Deutschland ’83, an eight-part series previewed at the Berlin film festival last week which aims to transform German television.

“It’s totally new for German TV,” said Anna Winger, the American novelist who co-wrote the show with her German husband Jörg. “In Germany, the most popular programmes are still TV movie events, which air over a couple of nights in the week or long-running procedurals. There aren’t really drama series like this.” ...
 
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Watched The Equalizer (2014) on DVD tonight. Knew nothing the film beforehand other than that Antoine Fuqua directed it and that it starred Denzel Washington. It started out seeming like a gritty and realistic drama/action, which made me expect another film in the style of Training Day or Brooklyn's Finest, but then it turned to an over-the-top dark and violent action film. Nothing else than a mess of tones in a film that seemed to decide what it was as it progressed. Very mediocre.
 
Forostar said:
Sounds interesting @Perun
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/14/german-culture-berlin-wall-deutschland-83

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Germans fascinated by life on either side of the Berlin Wall

Books and a hotly awaited TV series, Deutschland 83, tap into the growing interest in the years of a divided country

Welcome to Germany in 1983, a country divided since the end of the second world war.

Moritz Stamm is a West German army officer, with a love of music, dancing and hanging out with his friends. Martin Rauch is an East German border guard with a close family and a desire to change the world. The twist? Moritz and Martin are the same person, an East German spy sent to infiltrate the West German army and report on its military secrets.

That’s the premise behind Germany’s most eagerly awaited drama, Deutschland ’83, an eight-part series previewed at the Berlin film festival last week which aims to transform German television.

“It’s totally new for German TV,” said Anna Winger, the American novelist who co-wrote the show with her German husband Jörg. “In Germany, the most popular programmes are still TV movie events, which air over a couple of nights in the week or long-running procedurals. There aren’t really drama series like this.” ...
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That does sound interesting, thanks. ". It was announced last week that US cable channel Sundance would co-produce the show, making it the first full-length German TV series to air on US television"


Watched the first 3 episodes of Bosch (Amazon Prime show, there are 10 episodes total). Good show so far, Cop show that looks like the entire season will focus on 1 case. The Man in Black from Lost is Bosch.
 
I have never understood the sit-com concept with live acting and laugh tracks. It seemed retarded to me when I was 5 (I remember seeing stuff like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air), and it seems retarded to me now. Big Bang Theory is always on Swedish television, and probably very popular, so it doesn't have much to do with a particular cultural taste and upbringing either. I am however a big fan of The Simpsons, but that's very far from the Two and a Half Men-school of comedy in my point-of-view.

I'll maybe watch V for Vendetta tonight, saw it was on TV.
 
Just came back from The Imitation Game. Powerful, dramatic film. Recommended.
(Lots of it has not happened though. I know this wasn't a documentary, and the made up stuff added a lot of drama, but for the people interested in the real Turing, it could be good to know what happened and what did not)
 
Parks & Recreation is ending tonight :( My all-time favorite comedy show, only rivaled by first 5 and half of 6th seasons of How I Met Your Mother...
 
Watched Heat (1995). Brilliant as always. The big shootout scene is one of the best ever. Michael Mann is great with action sequences - whether it's this one, Public Enemies (2009), Collateral (2004), or Miami Vice (2006) they always convey a sense of total chaos. You don't feel like you're watching a gunfight - you feel like you're in one. And that's cool. Then we can discuss how realistic they actually are, like or dislike the camera work etc.
 
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