I've been derailing threads all over the board. I'm sorry. So let's make one thread where we can discuss all nature of film.

I will say that I'm aware everyone has their own opinions. I think the advantage of having a film journal is that I can explain why I like or dislike things in great detail. However, the main reason negative reviews are so rare in my journal is that I feel no shame in turning the things off. There are days where I go through four movies but only write one review, because I simply can't take whatever-it-is. Generally, if I watch a movie I hate all the way through, it's because either I'm seeing it in the theatre or there's a real reason to watch it, such as my annual Oscarpalooza watching. (Lord, I hated Transformers and Surf's Up.)

I consider myself to be designing my own private film school. After all, I've got the time.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Have you thought about posting some/most/all of your reviews in a blog format to share with others?

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"It's over you head now. Time to get some professional help." - My fortune cookie from lunch

Ned Wright's Cosmology Tutorial

Usenet Physics FAQ

Wow Gillian, I think this is the first thread I've seen you start since I joined BAUT. I don't know a whole heck of a lot about film... I rarely find myself able to sit though a movie because by halfway through, I generally just don't care. If I sit though a bad movie, it's because of an attempt to spend time with the 'ol g/f...and let me tell you, she has awfull taste in movies.

Now I do have some artistic training in that I went to school for and at one point aspired to be a computer animator a-la Pixar (is it ironic that a guy who openly admits his lack of attention span to at the same time be able to spend hours behind a computer making the very same movies he can't suffer through to watch?). So I have at least some understanding of film composition and lighting and such...but much less than many of you.

As for actors/actresses...I'm awfull with names. Aparently not as bad as my g/f... but not good none the less.

Oh, and to show how up I am on the "classics", my g/f made me watch Sixteen Candles for the first time Monday night. I thought it was the 80's version of Can't Hardly Wait (yes, obviously Sixteen came first).

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

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Means all things to do with films and those that love them.

Everybody has an opinion on particular films, which is great. And which is why I really like Rotten Tomatoes. When you take an average of a whole bunch of opinions and present them in a tomato meter format, I think the results are morely likely to identify the good films and the bad.

The FlickFilosopher is good, too.

worst movie I ever sat all the way through:

The Man Who Fell To Earth. It sure as hell seemed a lot longer than 139 minutes. I thought it was longer than Kurasawa's Ran, (which I enjoyed).

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In your rush to call everyone "entrenched" or closed-minded or "limited" you fail to note that the "limit" here has a very natural boundary: that point at which the evidence stops. - JayUtah

Science fiction was never meant to be an educational tool. - Editor Amazing Tales

What a patient fellow (!)---I walked out of "8 1/2" after 10 minutes and met my date outside the theater afterwards.

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*

Can't be worse than 2001: A Space Travesty. Yes, I sat through it all. Leslie Nielsen, I thought.... it's bound to get better.

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"A witty saying proves nothing" Voltaire.
"All your bias are belong to us" Ara Pacis.

"Thought about"? That's where they've always been! I'm at Rotten Tomatoes over at http://www.rottentomatoes.com/vine/j...urnalid=246086 and have been for quite some time. I'm at 650 entries right now. Two are duplicates (I just didn't check to see if I'd done the movie before, though it is interesting to compare what I had to say about it each time), and some aren't reviews, but there are also a fair number of multi-movie entries. Another one's coming up--when I get to Deep Impact, I'm going to double review it with Armageddon, even though I haven't seen it in years.

I'm not sure you'll like my Man Who Fell to Earth review, Don, though I'll freely admit that I pretty much watched it for naked David Bowie. (And I'm not ashamed!) I didn't think it was great, but as I keep saying in my reviews of things, I could list worse movies, but we'd be here a while.

No, Fazor, I don't start many threads. But since I've diverted at least three into general movie discussion in about the last week, I felt it was time.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

As opposed to "buffyry" which means all things to do with The Slayer and those who love her.

The worst film I ever sat through (the worst I ever saw is mentioned here) I cannot remember the name... probably a good thing. I remember it was set in ancient Greece and was a typical "buff guys and girls in skimpy costumes" period piece. (Uh, buff and skimpy apply to both guys and girls.) It "starred" twin brothers who were professional wrestlers; they were certainly not actors. Hey, I was working out of town and it was $1 movie night. How could I go wrong?

It did have one memorable scene, though. The bad guy had just reanimated the corpses of hundreds of long dead warriors. As he led them out of the catacombs and after the brothers, a parade of Vestal Virgins went by. The warriors, walking along like zombies, paused. They looked at the young women, at the brothers, at the women... and started going after the women.

One brother turned to the other and said, "Hey, they've been dead for 300 years. What do you expect?"

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

It was. The Hollywood Plot Recycler grinds on...

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Like Jodie Foster in Death Wish? Eh, I mean The Brave One?

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In your rush to call everyone "entrenched" or closed-minded or "limited" you fail to note that the "limit" here has a very natural boundary: that point at which the evidence stops. - JayUtah

Science fiction was never meant to be an educational tool. - Editor Amazing Tales

Gillian,

Does that mean your reviews contribute to the tomatometer calculation? Or is that just professional critics?

I'm not sure if I'd qualify as a buff. I've watched a fair number of movies and reviewed some, but these days my main motivation is to learn the craft so I can apply it to my spec scripts.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

My brother has a saying that every film - including the very worst - has something of merit in it. Whether it is a particularly photogenic shot when someone opens a car door, or a surprisingly credible character moment, or an unexpected funny line, or whatever, there will be at least one in every film.

Incidentally, when talking about the very worst films, I tend to draw a distinction between those with virtually no budget and which hardly anybody has ever heard of (Plughead Rewired, anybody?) and those made by people who should know better (The Grudge 2, AI, The Time Machine (2002)).

Regarding films mentioned, Surf's Up - Clare and I tend to go to see any film with penguins in, and we thoroughly enjoyed March of the Penguins and Happy Feet. I also liked the spin-off from the rather boring Madagascar (yeah, I know it's a children's film but so is Happy Feet). But Surf's Up was very poor. Basically a teen movie with the human characters replaced with penguins who generally don't behave in a penguine* manner.

I think The Man Who Fell To Earth is one of the very few good SF films. Of course, it helps to be a bit of a Bowie fan, and to enjoy the weirdness, but the whole seeing-our-world-from-an-alien-pov was very well done, I thought.

Films I've most enjoyed recently include the Lord of the Rings (but let's hope this thread doesn't become another "it did/didn't do the books justice" thing), 24 Hour Party People, Everything Is Illuminated, The Simpsons Movie and (to my surprise) Music and Lyrics.

Hoping to get Control (another Joy Division film) soon.

Enjoyable but forgettable include Pan's Labyrinth, The Fountain, Casino Royale and whatever that last Harry Potter film was called.

Very disappointing include The Gelding Compass.

*Pronounced peng-wine.

The worst movie I have seen (by worst I mean it would be more enjoyable to perform genital nullification on myself than to ever watch it again) would be any Uwe Boll movie.

Well, you know what they say about great minds... Cool, I'll check it out.

Yes, me too! I was very pleasantly surprised when I saw it.

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"It's over you head now. Time to get some professional help." - My fortune cookie from lunch

Ned Wright's Cosmology Tutorial

Usenet Physics FAQ

I'm having a hard time coming up with the last movie I saw that I really loved. Not that I'm a complete humbug, there's plenty of movies that I liked or enjoyed...but few that really grabbed me in the same magical way that the Indianna Jones series (or yes, the original SWs) did.

I did very much enjoy Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Pan's Laberynth (the former moreso than the later)

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

Alas, just the pros. There is a secondary and seldom-checked Tomatometer based on user data, and I contribute to that, but mostly, I just do it for me. A friend asked as a favour that I'd start it, and I find it soothing, in a lot of ways.

The last movie I loved . . . the last movie I gave a 10 to was Crash, but I don't think I loved it. I think that's the wrong feeling it inspired. Alternately, I loved Clue, which we watched the other day, but it wasn't good. Not really. I think the last movie I really loved that was also really good was the '46 Cocteau Beauty and the Beast. I've got another Bogart sitting in my bag, and I'm looking forward to that--and I've got a Fellini, and I've never watched any Fellini.

The last bad movie I watched, on the other hand, was The Damned Don't Cry, with Joan Crawford. Ah, Joan Crawford.

I'm pretty much with your brother, Paul, and I try to find it. Sometimes, though, I think you'd have to watch it a second time to see that moment, and in the case of a lot of these movies, I simply can't stand to do that.

And Ara Pacis, I have to say that I think you have to really love the artform in order to make good movies. Sometimes, I feel as though I'm drowning in film, but I still love watching them. I watched two movies about the death penalty and one about Hitler yesterday (I didn't write a review of the Hitler one, because there's already, like, half a dozen Holocaust movies in my journal, including at least two with much of the same footage), and I still had a really good time. Admittedly, this morning, I'm watching the last four episodes of My So-Called Life, but I just got the series again, and I've missed it so. And I have to say, I'm seeing it through new eyes--and loving it even more. The scene I'm watching right now could almost come out of a noir, except there's no Venetian blinds. Just a pattern of rain reflected on the wall behind the married man and the woman he might end up having an affair with. Even if you don't like the show, there's your one moment.

I will watch just about anything, or at least, the first fifteen minutes of just about anything. Sometimes, I'm hypnotized by what I'm watching simply because it is that bad, and I sit through the whole thing in a sort of rapture of awfulness. Sometimes, I don't notice the time passing until suddenly, the movie is over--those are the movies I love. And, yes, watching movies with good friends is better than watching them alone. But I have more time and more inclination to watch movies than most of my friends.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I also like CLUE. More so than friends think I should. However, what trumps it and I recommend(if you haven't already seen it) is MURDER BY DEATH. Neil Simon's send up of the detective genre is a blast. While it could have been a simple parody, spry and clever dialogue betrays a sincere appreciation for the trappings of the literary sources. Peter Sellers is his fantastic chameleon self and Peter Falk is hilarious as Sam Diamond, but it's really Maggie Smith and David Niven who steal the show as Dick and Dora Charles. Their banter(as Smith did with Michael Caine in CALIFORNIA SUITE) is priceless. Alec Guinness' blind butler is a beautiful glimpse of subtle Brit comedic style. Plus Truman Capote's a hoot and it's great to see Elsa Lanchester again.

Simon(and director Robert Moore) did a follow up in 1978, of sorts, called THE CHEAP DETECTIVE. It takes off on the hardbolied Bogey pictures. It's got some great sequences but it's not quite as satisfying.

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random youtube observation #83:
Nana Mouskouri without glasses is like peanut butter without jelly, like yin without yang, spic without span...

Seconded. Hilarious movie.

"Excuse me, have either of you seen a small, white..." I don't think I'd better finish that quote.

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SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2009 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

Gillian, just curious, is there a way to search your RT page for a particular movie review? I couldn't find a way, but that doesn't mean there couldn't be a big red flashing "SEARCH HERE" button that I didn't see.

And, the reason I was asking was I was curious to see if you had reviewed 2007's Stardust. I gather that new releases are far outnumbered by "older" movies...but I've been debating whether or not to order this while it's on "On Demand". (And anyone else that has seen it, of course your opinions are welcome aswell).

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

My opinion was that it was okay: There wasn't anything about it that seemed especially memorable or great, but I didn't hate it either.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

My impression was that it was a surprisingly faithful conversion that only fell short by missing the language of Gaiman in full Lord Dunsany mode.

And Gillians review of it is on the second page of the fantasy/sci-fi reviews, just after the one of Dogma.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

I haven't read much Gaiman, so I had no idea of what to expect when watching this movie.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

I'm a fan of the book Stardust and I highly enjoyed the movie.

There is no higher compliment I can bestow.

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Carl Matherly

Offical Battlestar Galactica Apologist

Named Time Magazine's 2006 "Person of the Year"

Okay--yes, I've seen Murder by Death, but not in a very long time. I love Truman Capote's appearance in it.

And on my journal, there's a thingie at the top labelled "ratings." You click on that, and it gives you a complete list of my movie reviews. (There are separate categories for other things, and I've done a few other reviews, but mostly what I've done is movies.) You can then click on "Title" or "Rating" or "Date" in order to have my reviews put in any of those orders.

But yes, I quite liked Stardust, and, yes, I've read the book. It's not the best adaptation I've ever seen, but I liked what they'd done with it. I don't think they could've fit large amounts of the story into anything less than a miniseries, even if they'd cut the Robert De Niro plot down to the approximate length in the book. (Some seven pages.)

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I think the worst movie I have ever seen is Eraserhead (David Lynch), and the worst movie I have seen recently is Birth (Nicole Kidman). Blech.

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Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

How old were you when you saw it? It might be one of those things that you have to experience at the right time. I saw it aged about 22 and I was blown away by it. I read Catcher In The Rye when I was about 42 and was bored to tears by it. Had the ages been swapped, I might have loved Salinger and hated Lynch.

I finally saw that last year, after knowing of it for decades, and was
surprised that I wasn't disappointed at all.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves