I watched Diary of the Dead (2007) last night, written and directed by Romero. Not nearly as good as Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead. While it pains me to say so (not really), the movie would have been vastly improved with some gratuitous nudity and naked boobies. Hell, even gratuitous cleavage throughout would have been a significant improvement.
The current series, The Walking Dead (Season 1 just ended, season 2 pending), is much better. I wanted to still give Survival of the Dead (2009) a look, but after Diary of the Dead I’m really sure it’s worth the time. Anyone seen it that would recommend it?[/quote]
I thought Diary was much bettet than Land. Land was just cliched adventure story. Diary was rawer, cleverer, and overall more fulfilling. The Walking Dead sucked. It could have been really good, but had poor dialogue, leads interchangeable with 50% of the leads on any other similarly genred show, and a story that just didn’t go anywhere. Real pity.
[quote=“GuyInTaiwan”]I watched Hoop Dreams the other day. It was a pretty hyped up movie back in the day, but I wasn’t particularly impressed.
[/quote]
Gotta agree with you there. I was underwhelmed. It wasn’t bad at all, but I was expecting much better as it is generally rated very highly indeed.
I watched Diary of the Dead (2007) last night, written and directed by Romero. Not nearly as good as Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead. While it pains me to say so (not really), the movie would have been vastly improved with some gratuitous nudity and naked boobies. Hell, even gratuitous cleavage throughout would have been a significant improvement.
The current series, The Walking Dead (Season 1 just ended, season 2 pending), is much better. I wanted to still give Survival of the Dead (2009) a look, but after Diary of the Dead I’m really sure it’s worth the time. Anyone seen it that would recommend it?[/quote]
I thought Diary was much bettet than Land. Land was just cliched adventure story. Diary was rawer, cleverer, and overall more fulfilling. The Walking Dead sucked. It could have been really good, but had poor dialogue, leads interchangeable with 50% of the leads on any other similarly genred show, and a story that just didn’t go anywhere. Real pity.[/quote]
And Survival of the Dead?
Interesting take on The Walking Dead. What I liked about it is that it keeps following the story, the hopelessness and not just a 90 minute, “Ah shit! The dead are walking the Earth!! We’re all f*cked!!!” I’m interested to see where it’s all going to go.
Steamboy (2004) Fun and very well drawn Japanese steampunk anime. I loved the steampunk world, and the machines, but the plot was a bit unbalanced and certainly drawn out at the end. Still well worth watching.
Blonde Cobra (1963) I’m not usually into experimental cinema, but this half hour piece was fun. No plot or sense - just some crazy dude messing around in a flat; weird images, ramblings and songs.
A Short Film About Love (1988) This was good, but I don’t think it added anything to the episode of The Dekalog, that it is an expanded version of. The Dekalog itself is brilliant though.
Hitler’s Britain (2002) A British TV documentary which speculates about what might have happened had Hitler managed to successfully invade the British Isles. The details of the actual ‘invasion’ are shaky and not really based on any solid military history, but there are interesting parts based on real historical documents and interviews. It speculates about how the invaders would have interacted with the public, what sort of government they would have formed and what would have happened to ‘undesirables’, based on comaprison with other Western European countries, the Channel Islands, and written military plans. It also explores the possible actions of special British resistance units which is very interesting.
Klute (1971) Good movie about a hooker and a detective trying to find out what happened to one of her ex-clients. Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda play the leads. It’s very 70s which is both a plus (greast 70s indie movie vibe) and a negative (it seems dated). Not bad, but not one fo my favourites from the era.
House of Games (1987) Excellent con movie, seriously marred by some apalling acting. Apparently, director Mamet wanted ‘wooden’ acting as part of his ‘style’, but it was a serious mistake. And you can see some things coming a mile off, but it’s still a real fun movie in the con game genre.
I watched Gladiator Days tonight, which is a documentary about a man who committed homicide when he was 18 and then went on to commit another (race-related) homicide in prison. It features prison footage and interviews with various people, including the subject of the documentary. Again, I was underwhelmed with both how graphic it was (it was supposedly pretty hard-going) and also where the documentary actually went. The more interesting character for me was the accomplice in the second murder. That man had been convicted of forging a cheque and had been sent to a maximum security prison. Within six months, he was leading a prison riot and within a eighteen months, he’d become a neo-Nazi and helped hold down another inmate while another inmate (the “star” of the documentary) stabbed him 67 times. Of course, after avoiding the death penalty, he inevitably found Jesus… Jesus! Anyway, his story might have been more interesting, or the documentary could have been a deeper investigation into, and reflection on, violence, gangs, or rehabilitation in the American prison system. Instead, it turned out to be an indulgent, meandering series of interviews with one man with a lot to say, but not much worth hearing. A little disappointing, really.
I’m not doing too well with documentaries this week.
Oh yeah. That’s why I was so keen on the series to start with. I’d love to see an ongoing story covering the long-term of a zombie apocalypes - the old British show ‘Survivors’ plus zombies. But Walking Dead just seemed to miss. Maybe it’ll get better though. I’m going to try Season 2.
As for ‘Survival of the Dead’ - I didn’t even know it existed until you mentioned it.
Hitler’s Britain (2002) A British TV documentary which speculates about what might have happened had Hitler managed to successfully invade the British Isles. The details of the actual ‘invasion’ are shaky and not really based on any solid military history, but there are interesting parts based on real historical documents and interviews. It speculates about how the invaders would have interacted with the public, what sort of government they would have formed and what would have happened to ‘undesirables’, based on comaprison with other Western European countries, the Channel Islands, and written military plans. It also explores the possible actions of special British resistance units which is very interesting.
This looks worth checking out…wasn’t there a novel written about this called “Fatherland”?
[quote=“Dougster”]Hitler’s Britain (2002) A British TV documentary which speculates about what might have happened had Hitler managed to successfully invade the British Isles. The details of the actual ‘invasion’ are shaky and not really based on any solid military history, but there are interesting parts based on real historical documents and interviews. It speculates about how the invaders would have interacted with the public, what sort of government they would have formed and what would have happened to ‘undesirables’, based on comaprison with other Western European countries, the Channel Islands, and written military plans. It also explores the possible actions of special British resistance units which is very interesting.
This looks worth checking out…wasn’t there a novel written about this called “Fatherland”?[/quote]
There was a movie made of Fatherland too, but it’s quite different. It’s a fictional story where there was some sort of detente bewtween Hitler and England, and is set a couple of decades after Nazi victory with a cop investigating a cover-up of the final solution.
Hitler’s Britain has some fictional segments based on guesswork, but most of it is documentary exploring what may have really happened in the scenario of a defeat of Britain.
There was a movie made of Fatherland too, but it’s quite different. It’s a fictional story where there was some sort of detente bewtween Hitler and England, and is set a couple of decades after Nazi victory with a cop investigating a cover-up of the final solution.[/quote]
Yep, Faterlandis a even more different I think, with neither an invasion nor detente happening. In that alternate history, Nazi Germany learns about the broken Enigma codes, manages to destroy the UK fleet and starves the UK until an armistice is reached. After that a pro-German puppet government is installed, while the wartime government goes into exile.
Thanks for mentioning Hitler’s Britain. It sounds interesting, gotta try to get a copy somewhere once I am back to Europe.
Rio was surprisingly good. In fact, it was very good.
Limitless was well written, well acted, but the rather amoral story line was disturbing to my delicate sensibilities.
Lincoln Lawyer was a legal thriller about a professionally honest, personally corrupt lawyer with a heart of gold. Well done. It’s best feature was that it reminded me of why I didn’t go to law school. (It’s hard to keep your soul intact as a lawyer.)
All that for 130nt/person in a reasonably nice, well air-conditioned theatre in the Daan area.
Red Psalm (1972) This Hungarian director had an amazing talent for taking incredibly long long takes with giddying moving cameras, and having a dazzling array of vibrant actors - on foot, on horseback, singing, dancing, costumed, naked - move in and out of shot with perfection, and yet, somehow, turn these amazing ingredients into an awfully dreary litany of communist drivel.
3 idiots (2009) This movie has become the highest-grossing Bollywood movie of all time, yet I heard about it due to its huge popularity amongst Taiwanese. It’s a very entertaining movie.
October (1927) Eisenstein’s intellectual montage-style film of the Russian Revolution. Pretty good, but I liked Potemkin and Strike better.
No Man’s Land (2001) Excellent film about a Bosnian and a Serb stuck together in no man’s land during the war. Great unexpected appearance by the excellent Katrin Cartlidge at the end too, just before she died.
Nobody Knows (2004) Great film from the Japanese director Koreeda who has made a couple of other films I have loved (After Life and Maborossi). Based on a true story about a mother who abandoned her four kids in their apartment leaving them to fend for themselves. The story unfolds extremely well, not giving out details all at once.
Capturing Reality (2008) Mildly interesting documentary about documentaires. It was good for some very interesting pointers towards films that look good, though.
I watched King of Kong last week and forgot to include it. It’s about guys who compete to have the world’s highest score on the vintage arcade game Donkey Kong. It’s absolutely hilarious at how retarded and petty some of these guys are in defending their turf. They’re absolute cardboard cutouts of themselves. Funny movie.
Last night, I watched Triump of the Will, the propaganda movie about the 1934 Nazi Party Congress. It has some interesting historical footage (though the footage of incredibly Aryan kids playing and laughing is even more sinister than any time Hitler spends on screen – they must have chosen the creepiest kids in all of Germany for that film). However, 90% of it is boring beyond belief because it’s just a giant circle-jerk by guys taking themselves way too seriously and the other 10% is Hitler doing his thing and taking himself way too seriously. How the rest of the world didn’t know even back then that Hitler was seriously off his chops and very dangerous is beyond me, which is to say the rest of the world didn’t watch this and then take Hitler and cronies seriously enough.
This morning, I watched Jesus Camp which is about evangelical Christianity and kids going to Jesus camp. It is, at turns, as creepy as Triumph of the Will and just really, really cringeworthy. There’s one scene where a preacher is asking a couple of kids about how they were born again and she (a middle-aged fat woman) must say “that’s so cool” in a Valley Girl kind of way at least a dozen times. I just wanted to throw up.
I just watched Mugabe and the White African. Decent, but no real surprises there. It was obviously a polemic of sorts, which is fair enough given what a shitty state of affairs that country is in, but it wasn’t one of those documentaries that reveals something previously unknown and seemingly of non-importance and then leaves you spinning afterwards and wondering how anyone came up with that idea for a documentary or how they managed to put together that kind of grand narrative. That’s the kind of stuff I like in a documentary.
So far, I’ve done marginally better on documentaries this weekend.
Yes, Men Who Stare At Goats is VERY enjoyable. And I have to admit that I thought the King’s Speech was bound (by allegedly trying too hard to please the Oscar judges) to be not good - which in fact, it was. Very nice acting I feel, and also quite funny to see a king struggling with being treated as more or less just any other human being.
PS: Fornication!
Just too true. I was pleasantly surprised last week though when I read some random history stuff, and there were some contemporary comments talking about as how ridiculous some people perceived Hitler’s speeches etc. I was already seriously wondering if they only come across so madly stupid, brainless and creepily inept because I just didn’t grow up being indoctrinated in the spirit of that time, or if even back then it was a very strange sight. Seems it was, to some. Good. Too few, though.
It’s a pity most of those Nazi movies are not available publicly in Germany (“Vorbehaltsfilm”). I wonder who really thinks they would even nowadays make people believe in the bullshit they depict. Morons.
Recently I’ve enjoyed Limitless and The Adjustment Bureau which I enjoyed a lot and last night I watched the remake of Arthur which was a bit gooey and weak but watchable.
I also went retro and watched Total Recall and Falling Down. Both worth watching. Falling Down is a classic and it’s cool to see how huge Cellphones were in those days.
Little Fish is definitely worth a watch. Not as good as I was expecting it to be, but Hugo Weaver and Cate Blanchett are, unsurprisingly, amazing. A heroin drama/suspense movie - with some of the characters trying to be clean, the rest not so much. The grittiness of addiction and love are certainly there. The pain is also certainly there. Stunningly filmed. Some of the plot turns are unlikely, but the last 30 minutes were spectacularly tense. Anyone else seen this?
Also just watched The Sixth Sense again, as I am teaching a workshop on “Superstition” next weekend (thought I’d freak the citizenry out suitably before ghost month arrives). Damn fine movie - flawed, like everything else, but the mother/son, mother/therapist, and dead/living themes are so nicely done. It’s my own personal bit to be irritated by movies that posit an afterlife (like Eastwood’s the horrendous Hereafter;I throw up somewhat during TV shows like Ghost Whisperer), so my enjoyment of this movie is a reminder that a good suspense movie is a good suspense movie, whatever your beliefs.
