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Earlier today I saw Brazil, Terry Gilliam's black comedy about a thoroughly bureaucratized totalitarian world, ruled by endless paperwork administered in a cold, heartless manner and badly maintained machinery. It's a rigid society where a simple mistake can have enormous repercussions, which is how the story begins: a squatted fly lands on a typewriter and a single letter is misprinted, causing the arrest of an innocent man rather than a terrorist. When the mistake becomes apparent, it falls on Sam Lowry, a young man trying to find a woman who appears in his dreams and whose work is an exercise in mind-numbing red tape, to correct it.

Throughout the film, Gilliam fuses dream sequences with reality, creating surrealistic and sometimes rather disturbing imagery. Lowry uses his imagination to escape the harsh reality of his life, and towards the end, as he is overwhelmed by the inescapable, impersonal social structure, whose villains are really just mechanically doing their jobs, his dreams begin to intersperse with the real world.

The acting is continually strong. Jonathan Pryce is brilliant as Lowry, capturing his timidness and his will to be a hero. Robert De Niro is memorable as the sought-after terrorist, as is Michael Palin as Lowry's friend, a torturer who becomes a key character in the end when he is forced to choose between his loyalty to his friends and his loyalty to the system.

I was very impressed by the film. It might be a love/hate thing, but I'd say it's worth seeing.
 
LooseCannon said:
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Thanks Natalie.  Thanks a lot.
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Anytime Loosey, anytime :).

No seriously, sorry about that but I thought most people had either seen it or weren't interested.
 
It's Easter and the "classic" Easter flick was on last night, The Ten Commandments. I love watching that movie. Charleton (Charlton? I forget hehe) Heston is outstanding as Moses! Without commercials it's like 4 hours. The fact it was on the local station made it rough because they took commercials every 10 minutes. It was almost 5 hours. Oh well. But it's an awesome movie.
 
Brief overview of some movie I've watched recently.

1. Rendition -- a good movie about secret torture, ahem, information gathering sites USA has off-shore.  There are two independent, yet intertwined plots about a terrorist attack in Egypt and one of the suspected is an Egyptian-born American citizen.  A great movie that has a point to make about how to pursue justice and whether torturing suspects begets more terrorists.

2. That most recent lawyer-y George Clooney movie that is not worth your time because it ends up having GC pat his vain ego on the back and nothing more.  The title is not important even if I did remember it... which I didn't.

3. I Am Legend -- I was hoping for more action, but it was still good.  I've watched it on HD and it looked great.  The zombie story is fairly old, but this one had some new things, I thought.  There were some tense moments like when Will Smith explores a darkened building.

4. No Country For Old Men -- despite ending strangely, this movie's antagonist is something else with his queer talk and weird morality.  Great acting and story line.  The movie is about a bunch of people chasing stolen loot, with amusing and deadly consequences. 
 
Genghis Khan said:
4. No Country For Old Men -- despite ending strangely, this movie's antagonist is something else with his queer talk and weird morality.  Great acting and story line.  The movie is about a bunch of people chasing stolen loot, with amusing and deadly consequences. 
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Great thriller! I enjoyed it very much, though
I didn't get the end that well. Very sudden end as well.

I was very amazed by There Will Be Blood. Very good acting, and the films's cinematography is superb. But the script
of the film left me with an uncomfortable feeling and pretty critical thoughts. The oil baron doesn't let anyone get in his way, he even kills for it. He mocks the church. He drinks. He treats his sons worser and worser.

Fine. Point taken.

But why portray these facts thoughout the whole damn picture (more than two and a half hours!!) without any change in the storyline? Most films have some clue, or a change. This just kept going on the same and the same and the same. The only "change" in the story was the part about the fake brother.

To be honest, I still had a pretty good feeling about the film up til the very end, when he suddenly beats the brains out of the young priest.

End of film.

Why an end like this? Purely to shock? To make people wonder? To state that "oil barons are bad people?"
Well, to me it looks like a lack of imagination, and ignorance of storytelling. Perhaps I tend to think too much it, but I find the film highly overrated.
 
Re There Will Be Blood, I think the point of the story, beyond merely being a showcase for Daniel Day-Lewis, is to show the nature of capitalism and how, reduced to its purest form, it is an amoral system that tends to reward the evil.  Not that I agree with that, but that appears to be the point of the film.  As for the ending scene,
when Plainview kills the priest and exclaims, "I'm finished," it may be meant to represent the fact that the system inevitably leads to madness and lawlessness.  As an aside, the "I drink your milkshake" line has already become an instant classic, at least here in the U.S. 
The notion appears to be that success under capitalism is a zero-sum game: for me to win, you must lose.  Plainview virtually says as much in one speech.  This is hogwash, in my view, but it nevertheless made for an engrossing movie.  It was sometimes uncomfortable, but I couldn't take my eyes off the screen. 

No Country For Old Men it starts off as an almost formulaic, but very well done, suspense/chase thriller.  Then, at one point, the movie abruptly abandons that formula.  No spoiler here, just suffice it to say that when you see the Josh Brolin character start chatting up a woman by a motel pool, wake up and start paying close attention, because the movie is about to change dramatically and rewrite the rules of moviemaking and storytelling.  The book by Cormac McCarthy -- I have written about him elsewhere on this forum, he is the greatest living American author, you must read The Road and Blood Meridian -- does the same thing as the film (now here's a spoiler)
in treating the main character's death unconventionally:  is neither described in the novel nor shown on screen.  In the novel, it occurs between chapters.  In the film, it occurs between scenes.  We view the most critical plot event from the sheriff's point of view, after the fact, trying to figure out what the hell happened and who killed him.  Note: I think it was the Mexican drug dealers, not the Chigurh character.  This defies the literary and cinematic convention of a dramatic confrontation between the good guy and the bad guy.  Real life (and death) doesn't work that way.
 
The film's message appears to be about the inexplicability (is that a word?) of some violence.  There was a recent news report that a mentally retarded pregnant woman in a small Illinois town was apparently tortured by a "friend" of hers for weeks until she died.  A horrific story, and one that defies any rational explanation of human behavior other than that some folks are just plain evil fuckers.  This is the sort of thing that the sheriff in No Country for Old Men sees more and more often, exemplified by the trail of corpses left by Chigurgh and others, and it shatters his understanding of human nature, God and the universe.  The sheriff's description of his dream about his father symbolizes this quite artfully -- again, when Tommy Lee Jones starts talking to his wife at the breakfast table, pay close attention to what he is saying. 
This is the last scene of the film.  I almost didn't put spoiler tags on that sentence, as it is undoubtedly better that you know this going in, but I did just in case someone disagrees with me.  Like Forostar, most people think the ending is abrupt.  It really isn't.  It's actually the perfect closing scene for the movie (unlike the last scene of The Sopranos -- dont get me started).  It's just that people get caught up in the film, they don't realize that this is the last scene, and they are hoping/expecting something more to happen that will wrap things up and make sense of them.  Again, real life doesn't work that way.  If you get a chance to see the movie again on DVD, with the knowledge that this is the last scene, you'll see that it is actually a fitting epilogue to the story.
 
 
I watched 2 great movies over the past 2 days, I'm sure a lot of you have seen one of them anyhow  :D

1. The China Syndrome (1978) John Lemmon, Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas
Lemmon is a shift supervisor at Ventana Nuclear Power Plant in Cali. I don't know if this actually exists IRL, but anyways...Fonda is a news reporter for an LA news station. The news people go to the power plant to give Californians an inside look at how it works. The person giving them the tour says there's to be no filming in the control room. Douglas is the cameraman, and he films what unfolds and no one knows about it. there was an incident and the water level got really low and almost exposed the nuclear core! Douglas secretly took this film to a nuclear engineer and some other guy, a physicist or something, and they agree that all of SoCal would have been in danger if the core was exposed. They called it the China Syndrome. Lemmon and the power plant find out after the fact that the incident was taped, and Fonda goes to him looking for a better explanation. After this incident the power plant was shut down for about a day and a half and when the bosses say everything's OK, they say the plant will be fully operational again at 3PM. Lemmon does further investigation and finds out that the inspectors who were in charge of looking over things when the plant was being built used the same picture of the welding of the nuclear core. There was a faulty weld and that's what caused the incident. He believes the plant should be shut down. But he finds out as the plant is getting ready to get to full power. So he takes matters in his own hands and gets a gun and takes control over the plant! He calls the newscasters in and Fonda and him are in the control room. They go on the air and Lemmon says he has evidence the plant should be shut down. The bosses think he's a lunatic, and one of them ends up shooting him when all hell breaks loose. At the very end, Lemmon's best friend confesses that Lemmon was not a lunatic and that he knows he had suffient evidence the plant should be shut down. It was a very good movie! I recommend it  :ok:

2. This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
The classic heavy metal spoofer!  :lol: I have heard so much about this and I saw bits and pieces of it a few times. Tuesday night I got to watch the whole thing, with commecials and the swearing was edited out. But it was hilarious!! It's like all the English bands rolled up into one. Beatles, Sabbath, Maiden, etc...Nigel looks like Bruce and Dave looks like Janick a bit. The way they bicker kinda reminds me of H and Dave, but I haven't really heard those 2 argue about anything that I'm aware of. Out of all the interviews I've seen, they're pretty...*can't find the word I'm looking for* Anyhow, it was a classic movie. The bass player remided me of Lemmy, and the drummer looked like Clive a bit. I got a howl when Nigel and Dave were explaining on how the drummers somehow died a sudden death by, what did they say, "exploding on stage?" They said 37 people were in the band between 1966-82 or something! :lol: The album covers were awkward too. I just got a kick out of the whole movie. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, you have to!
 
I just saw 10,000 BC. It was a really dumb movie but pretty entertaining nonetheless. If you don't care at all about historical accuracy and want to see the only movie where people get eaten by giant ostriches, you might enjoy it.
 
Giant ostriches?  :bigsmile:  That's crazy stuff.  That's more inventive than using dinos.

@ Cornfed: I did not mean to imply that the ending for 'No Country For Old Men' was bad, just different.  I agree what you said about Tommy Lee Jones' character.  We get clues about the theme of the movie throughtout ALL of his conversations with other police members, within the cafe, etc.  But you have to admit that the ending is not the sort you'd think of when first watching the movie.  I doubt I'll get a chance to see it again any time soon, unless I really want to of course, but I do agree that it would be better second time around.  It was a good movie.

EDIT: There is one part where one of his police buddies says something akin to "yeah nowadays we have kids with green hair and a bone through their noses, things are not like they were when we were growing up".  I add this to show the theme.
 
I just finished watching Highlander: The Source, and I was seriously disappointed.  I am a huge fan of the first movie, and the last one (Endgame) as well as the TV series.  The 2nd and 3rd movies were crap, in my opinion.  This last movie was not so good.  It was a direct to video movie, and was supposed to have taken a long time to work out, however the special effects were worse in this one than the tv series.  It also 'retconned' the premise of the original movie and the series, which is something that don't like at all. 

The plot is set in 'the near future', where the world is becoming a madhouse, with cannibals and little law.  The Immortals, some old, some new, have decided to try to track down the 'source', which is supposed to be the reason Immortals are immortal.  The rest of the film shows their fight to reach the source, and not get killed or eaten along the way. 

Character development is weak, the plot is wanting, and the 'franchise' is not treated well.  I was hoping for a good continuation of 'Endgame' and was, instead, handed something that I hope I can forget.

Also watched the 1980 version of 'Flash Gordon'.  Same basic plot as most Flash shows/comics/movies-- Ming the Merciless try's to destroy the earth, and Flash finds himself trying to save it.  Meeting new and really weird friends and allies along the way, he inspires all the meet him.  It is campy, but a cult classic.  If watching, don't expect to be dazzled by special effects or meaningful dialog, but it is a good fun flick.  And, the soundtrack by Queen really gives it some 'umph'.
 
cornfedhick said:
Re There Will Be Blood,
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Yes, your explanation makes sense, but
it doesn't answer my questions. Was this last scene really necessary? This story (your explanation) could have been told in a film, twice as short. And we already knew, before this scene, that Plainsman was an evil, sadistic & selfish man, capable of killing. So it was overdone.

About NCFOMen
I find that explanation (or the thoughts of the film makers) too much philosophy for a suspense thriller.

"Like Forostar, most people think the ending is abrupt.  It really isn't.  It's actually the perfect closing scene for the movie (unlike the last scene of The Sopranos -- dont get me started). It's just that people get caught up in the film, they don't realize that this is the last scene, and they are hoping/expecting something more to happen that will wrap things up and make sense of them."

abrupt = unexpected (perhaps not in the dictionary, but you know what I mean)

Somehow the feeling creeps into me that the movie was only made for people who have read the book. No one would understand or even appreciate such an end without knowing beforehand about it. If the film makers really meant to do that, then I find that a wrong conception, because a film should stand on its own, without needing any knowledge beforehand.
 
I saw "Pirates of the silicon valley"

it's the parallel stories of Billy Gates and Steve Jobs
I had no idea that Gates was such a thief  :mad:
since that film I'm seriously thinking of purchasing an apple

the film is mediocre, quite a cheap production, but if its mission was to hit Gates then, mission accomplished
 
____no5 said:
I saw "Pirates of the silicon valley"

it's the parallel stories of Billy Gates and Steve Jobs
I had no idea that Gates was such a thief  :mad:
since that film I'm seriously thinking of purchasing an apple

the film is mediocre, quite a cheap production, but if its mission was to hit Gates then, mission accomplished
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Well, that film is quite a shallow overlook of the history of modern computing if anything. Being quite anti-MS myself, even I find that picture to be over-dramatized and imbalanced. There is loads more to the history of modern operating systems than what is presented here, but many of the facts presented are true. Jobs and Woz were potheads/crackers (hackers by today's terms), Gates was an over-craving geek and Balmer was an ass. Some of these still hold true, the latter the most.

The business today looks a lot different than it did back then, though, with Gates retired and Jobs back at the helm of Apple. Balmer is doing his best to drive every penny out of every customer while delivering sub-standard, miles-behind products full of imitations while trouncing anyone who dares to glance at his company's precious "intellectual property". Look up the Novell-Microsoft deal for more on that.

Jobs, on the other hand, is one the rise, with the ipod being his biggest gust of wind. Apple have had a huge uprising in sales (still no real challenge to MS, but the curve is rising), and their products present an all-in-one package, where you purchase something that Apple put together all by themselves, guaranteed to work, hardware and software, it's all one big bundle. With MS it's an OS only, the hardware is your problem. And I emphasize problem. The thing with Apple's approach, though, is that they seem to be driving even harder lock-in tactics than Microsoft. Where MS "simply" force you to use only their document format for ie. school papers, Apple have gone as far as forcing their music format on you. Now, mp3 was never really an open format in the legal sense, but at least, everyone used it, and everyone knew how to work with it it. Not so with AAC. Other than that, Apple seem to be all but denouncing their Open Source heritage; the mach kernel powering OSX is based on BSD, but the promised open-source "Darwin" port of OSX (kernel+subsystem only) never really took form.

If you're really serious about having a long, hard look at what you use on your computer and what it stands for, Windows and Mac is merely the gateway; there's a whole myriad of other OS'es out there to be toyed with, the most popular one being Linux. Add to this *BSD, BeOS, Solaris, and the countless continuations of older OS'es such as OS/2 and amigaOS, which might not be active projects anymore, but are still maintained from community contributions and are even capable of running on most modern hardware.

My OS of choice, after long considerations and probably to be changed at some point, is Ubuntu Linux, since it's one of the best suported Linux'es out there at the moment, and it does what I need from it. I have a spare copy of XP on my HD, but I only ever boot that for the occasional gaming session. Sadly, Games are one thing that MS succeed in binding to the Windows platform. In my ideal (computing) world, we are not divided by what OS we use, but by what we produce with these OS'es.

The most important thing for me, and the thing I'd like to see people standing up for, is open standards. If we all had one way to listen to music, one way to save a text file, one way to work on any document, I wouldn't really care what machine it was done from. Windows users can keep their vira and spyware, mac users can stay smug and self-content (yes, I'mriding on stereotypes here), and I'll stay geeky with my Linux PC. It's too difficult over here anyway, you're best off without it. Let's just share content ant stay OS-agnostic.

I am sorry, I guess this turned into a bit of a rant  :innocent: - but I hate to see people taking stances based on being subjected to one side of the story. This merely scratched the surface of the rants I have on this subject, so if anyone wants more, please do start a topic  :p
 
Well Said Hozz! I agree that the uniformed public is fucked only knowing about MS and Mac (and to a lesser extent Linus). As far as what we produce with it I also agree, The reason I pic my Mac over MS (besides stability) it is their digital suite iLife, perfect amateur applications to show case creativity without having to shell out thousands of dollars for pro apps.
 
great post Hozz  :ok: thanks  ;)

to tell you the truth, during the film
I had the impression like the production was financed by apple's people  :ninja:
 
I saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall last night and it was just what I expected, a good, if not solid, consistent comedy. Joel Segel is better known for the show How I Met Your Mother, but I like the new crop of comedians like Seth Rosen, Segel and the kids from Superbad (one of them is in this movie as well as the other dude that played a cop).

Segel Plays Peter Bretter, a musician that is working on a musical, but in the meantime writes the score for a cop drama starring his girlfriend, Sarah Marshall. She breaks up with him at the beginning of the movie and the rest of the movie is your standard romantic comedy... GOOD romantic comedy.

I also watched E.T for the first time since I was five and I found it EXTREMELY religious. Let me explain. E.T is not from this world, neither is Jesus. E.T had healing and levitating powers, so did Jesus. While E.T befriends one little boy and becomes his best bud, the overall message is one of friendship and LOVE... E.T becomes "one" with Elliot, Catholics supposedly become one with Christ during communion. As Elliot's vital signs stabilize, E.T's crash essentially saving Elliot's life, but he dies only to rise again and "ascend" back to his homeworld... eerily similar, huh? And to drive the point home just look at the cover of the movie: http://www.impawards.com/1982/posters/e_t_the_extra_terrestrial_ver3.jpg and compare it to say this: http://www.netpagz.com/bryce/sistinechapel/CreationofAdam.jpg Anywho that is just my very catholic religious major mind imprinting its preconceive notions on E.T :D

And last but not least I also saw Charlotte's Web. Another movie I saw and loved as a child, but unlike E.T this one fell flat on its ass. I HATED IT. A pig is spared his life by a girl old enough to know what farm life is like, yet she acts like it's the first time they kill a pig on her fucking farm. Then he is sold and he is going to be killed again and he starts whining like a little bitch, "I don't wanna die" Oh boo, fucking, hoo. So Charlotte tells him to shut the fuck up, writes "Some Pig" on her web and the stupid rural red necks are mezmerized by it and instead or realizing the special one is Charlotte for being a literate spider, they are astounded by Wilbur (the pig) who hasn't done JACK SHIT. God what a stupid, emo kiddie movie... We are supposed to sympathize with a pathetic, needy, codependent, whiny pig? Give me a break.
 
I saw several movies in the last little while.

Black Book -- Originally a German title.  A great movie about WWII Holland during the Nazi occupation.  It is about a Jewish woman fighting with the resistance and has examples of both double crossings and moral redemption.  Great acting by Carice van Houten and her gorgeous breasts did not hurt things either.  ;)

Layer Cake -- Daniel Craig stars in this movie about a drug dealer who gets in over his head.  It has many plot twists and great lines.  If you like 'Snatch' you'll probably like this one too.

There are others... maybe another time.
 
Genghis Khan said:
I saw several movies in the last little while.

Black Book -- Originally a German title.  A great movie about WWII Holland during the Nazi occupation.  It is about a Jewish woman fighting with the resistance and has examples of both double crossings and moral redemption.  Great acting by Carice van Houten and her gorgeous breasts did not hurt things either.  ;)
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What? Was it presented like that, or told in some local Canadian media?

That's a Dutch title. With all respect for German cinema: the first German director to make a film about German occupation in the Netherlands (apart from propaganda-footage), and especially from a Dutch point of view, still needs to be born. (I'm waiting for Perun to correct me ;) )

There's a couple of German actors (however only one major one, namely Sebastian Koch) in them but most leading parts are Dutch (including Carice van Houten, of course).

Director Paul Verhoeven is the most famous living filmmaker from the Netherlands, he had a long career in America as well (e.g. RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct). After about 20 years of working and living in the States he returned to the Netherlands for the shooting of Zwartboek ("Black Book" in Dutch).

If you liked Zwartboek I'll surely recommend Verhoeven's "Soldier of Orange" (Soldaat van Oranje).

DVD_Soldier_of_Orange.jpg


This film is set during the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II, and shows how individual students have different roles in the war. The story is based on the book Soldaat van Oranje by Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, who lived the story himself.
 
Forostar said:
That's a Dutch title. With all respect for German cinema: the first German director to make a film about German occupation in the Netherlands (apart from propaganda-footage), and especially from a Dutch point of view, still needs to be born. (I'm waiting for Perun to correct me ;) )
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Do Austrians count?
 
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