Recently viewed movie thread - Rental Edition (1 Viewer)

[Hammered Finz]

Charlie Wilson's War

Decent... Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman (hilarious) were good.. HATED the Julia Roberts character..

Story was a little slow, and at times unbeilevable 3/5

 

[doughboydeluxe]

Deja VuMeh - Not a lot going for it in any way.

I really liked that one.

What did you like? I didn't dislike it, I just though there wasn't a whole lot that drew me in.

What killed this movie for me was how preposterous the technology was. I usually have an easy time suspending disbelief for movies, but this was so far out there even I couldn't let it slide.

 

[jdoggydogg]

Two movies this weekend:

I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With

Pretty amusing indy film written and directed by Curb Your Enthusiasm actor Jeff Garland. Also has Sarah Silverman. Not great, but a few laughs. Doesn't hurt that Silverman appears in skimpy lingerie

28 Weeks Later

Generally well made, but there's a scene so offensive in this movie I would recommend the movie to anyone.

mytagid = Math.floor( Math.random() * 100 );document.write("

When Robert Carlyle gets infected and murders his wife, that was the most horrible, gratuitous thing I've seen in a movie in a long time. No thanks.

*** SPOILER ALERT! Click this link to display the potential spoiler text in this box. ***");document.close();

 

[KarmaPolice]

Two movies this weekend:

I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With

Pretty amusing indy film written and directed by Curb Your Enthusiasm actor Jeff Garland. Also has Sarah Silverman. Not great, but a few laughs. Doesn't hurt that Silverman appears in skimpy lingerie

28 Weeks Later

Generally well made, but there's a scene so offensive in this movie I would recommend the movie to anyone.

mytagid = Math.floor( Math.random() * 100 );document.write("

When Robert Carlyle gets infected and murders his wife, that was the most horrible, gratuitous thing I've seen in a movie in a long time. No thanks.

*** SPOILER ALERT! Click this link to display the potential spoiler text in this box. ***");document.close();

 

[Statorama]

I wasn't as big of a fan of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. The acting was very good, although Ethan Hawke's overacting really annoys me at times. I didn't like the way it played with the chronology of the story because I didn't see a really good use for it. I love movies that play with chronology when it adds to the storytelling (Memento) or when it does so in such a unique way (Pulp Fiction). I found that in this case they did it in order to jazz up a pretty standard caper-gone-wrong story. There is no need to show scenes twice if the second time adds nothing new to the story or to the viewer's understanding of what is happening. It just felt gimmicky to me. Overall, it was still a pretty good flick but not even in the same ballpark as NCFOM or TWBB. Not even close. 6/10

This was a case where they tried to get cutesy with the timeline and it wound up distracting from what might have been an ok linear drama.The acting was a little brutal...even Phil Hoffman seems annoyed here.There are 3 VERY candid shots of a topless Marisa Tomei that are fantastic.

 

[Statorama]

Walk Hard: Dewey Cox -- This was really bad. I thought it was going to be like a Wil Farrell movie but instead it was like a bad Naked Gun or Airplane or something. It wasn't funny at all. I didn't even finish it.

Actually a movie I was looking forward to and it was really, really bad. Seemed like one long SNL skit (with alot more male junk shown than I needed to see). Cloverfield is good for what it is. I liked it.I looked forward to the DVD hoping for some insight as to monster. The people complaining about the jumping are probably the same people complaining about there being too much violence in a Rambo flick.

I'll echo the bad vibes for Walk Hard, unwatchable even as a straight-up parody.

 

[joffer]

Deja VuMeh - Not a lot going for it in any way.

I really liked that one.

What did you like? I didn't dislike it, I just though there wasn't a whole lot that drew me in.

What killed this movie for me was how preposterous the technology was. I usually have an easy time suspending disbelief for movies, but this was so far out there even I couldn't let it slide.

which movie about time travel had a less preposterous technology?

 

[doughboydeluxe]

Deja VuMeh - Not a lot going for it in any way.

I really liked that one.

What did you like? I didn't dislike it, I just though there wasn't a whole lot that drew me in.

What killed this movie for me was how preposterous the technology was. I usually have an easy time suspending disbelief for movies, but this was so far out there even I couldn't let it slide.

which movie about time travel had a less preposterous technology?

My point is that took time travel too seriously and tried to make it seem like it was technologically possible. Give me time travel in a DeLorean and I'm happy and entertained. Give me this giant government computer that can look exactly 4 days and 6 hours back in time and even transport people and I call BS. I dunno - that's just me. Maybe I'm the only one that had trouble suspending disbelief for that movie.

 

[joffer]

Deja VuMeh - Not a lot going for it in any way.

I really liked that one.

What did you like? I didn't dislike it, I just though there wasn't a whole lot that drew me in.

What killed this movie for me was how preposterous the technology was. I usually have an easy time suspending disbelief for movies, but this was so far out there even I couldn't let it slide.

which movie about time travel had a less preposterous technology?

My point is that took time travel too seriously and tried to make it seem like it was technologically possible. Give me time travel in a DeLorean and I'm happy and entertained. Give me this giant government computer that can look exactly 4 days and 6 hours back in time and even transport people and I call BS. I dunno - that's just me. Maybe I'm the only one that had trouble suspending disbelief for that movie.

well, it was a "serious" movie, not an action/comedy like Back to The Future. I agree it's preposterous, but I'm not sure how you avoid it.

 

[saintfool]

which movie about time travel had a less preposterous technology?

"primer"

 

[cstu]

Funny Games U.S.

Um, well...

 

[doughboydeluxe]

The King of Kong: Has been discussed here a lot, so I'll just agree with those who loved it. Classic good vs. evil, great characters, suspense, everything great about a documentary. 4.5/5

Watched this tonight. What a great little film. You couldn't make this stuff up. As much as people loved this movie here, I was afraid it wouldn't live up to expectations, but it more than it did that.

 

[jdoggydogg]

The King of Kong: Has been discussed here a lot, so I'll just agree with those who loved it. Classic good vs. evil, great characters, suspense, everything great about a documentary. 4.5/5

Watched this tonight. What a great little film. You couldn't make this stuff up. As much as people loved this movie here, I was afraid it wouldn't live up to expectations, but it more than it did that.

 

[El Floppo]

which movie about time travel had a less preposterous technology?

"primer"

Indie doesn't make it less preposterous. ... decent movie though.

 

[El Floppo]

TWBB... I get the comparisons to NCFOM- both seem to put craft in front of story-telling. That keeps both from being flat-out fantastic movies, but I'll take both gladly. TWBB was really beautifully made... each scene was almost painterly in terms of the use of light, composition and color. DDL was amazing, IMO- no problems with his accent for me since he was acting the lights out of that very slight part. That's the real problem there for me- Plainview's arc wasn't terribly interesting for me, and we weren't given much depth to his character. Certainly not enough to stretch the movie as long as it stretched.

That the line "I drink your milkshake" will be the thing I mostly likely remember the most from this, might not speak so highly for my take on it, but I still thoroughly enjoyed watching it.

 

[Hov34]

Saw half of Southland Tales. I'm still scratching my head at that one.

I wanted to like it but couldn't. It was a discombobulated piece of claptrap.Avoid at all costs - plus it was over 2 hours long.

 

[Darth Cheney]

Saw half of Southland Tales. I'm still scratching my head at that one.

I wanted to like it but couldn't. It was a discombobulated piece of claptrap.Avoid at all costs - plus it was over 2 hours long.

I've read up on in a bit...and it makes a bit more sense. Originally it was supposed to be solely a satire of Hollywood....but then after 9/11, he took the existing script and modified it to be more of a commentary on the war and the Patriot Act. This current version of Southland Tales is two decent ideas jumbled together and half assed written. After this, I'm getting ready to write this director off. Donnie Darko was excellent.....the Director's Cut was insulting to the viewer and rambling and now this.The sad thing about this guy was that I thought he had a great idea for a story (about a recently unearthed time capsule that had children's drawings of various disasters of the past so many years....with one more picture of an unbelieveable disaster that has yet to happen) that never saw the light of day.

 

[saintfool]

finally sat down to watch roman polanksi's "knife in the water" last night. it was his first feature film and definitely felt like it. it's still a pretty good film although with plenty of room for improvement. i especially liked the ending. not a film for most people likely.

 

[acapella]

OK. I must be missing something. I watched There Will Be Blood last night and was bored out of my skull. Lewis did a fine job portraying the oil baron, but my goodness, I kept waiting for something interesting to happen and it never really did. I give it a 2/10, and would have given it a 1/10 but for the performance by Lewis.

 

[Thundarr]

I just rented the Alien Vs. Predator sequel. I remember the trailer being real good and it looked promising. Yeah, not so much.

 

[Whiplash Inc.]

I guess I was the very last person on the planet to hear about the movie Apocalypto....

Watched it the other night on a movie channel at a friend's house. Very good movie and very graphic.

 

[El Floppo]

OK. I must be missing something. I watched There Will Be Blood last night and was bored out of my skull. Lewis did a fine job portraying the oil baron, but my goodness, I kept waiting for something interesting to happen and it never really did. I give it a 2/10, and would have given it a 1/10 but for the performance by Lewis.

Some people are happy just watching beautifully made movies, some need more of a story. Some need both.You didn't care about the look of the movie? I kinda fall into the first camp- I was happy watching that thing go by, but ultimately won't really care about the movie because of what you wrote.... so I guess I'm really in the third camp.

 

[Hov34]

I just rented the Alien Vs. Predator sequel. I remember the trailer being real good and it looked promising. Yeah, not so much.

They say you can tell how bad a movie is by the number of hellicopters in the movie. This movie had a hellicopeter as a main character. And it was the best actor in the movie.

 

[doughboydeluxe]

I thought The Brave One was below average, approaching well below average. Just couldn't get into it. Jodie Foster goes from "scared to leave her house" to "super vig" in like three seconds. Don't waste your time on this one.

I also had trouble buying Jodie Foster interested in a man.

 

[LHUCKS]

We Own the Night

Not bad, not terribly original, but definitely worth a rental.

 

[dude]

Kill Zone aka Saat Po Lang - 5/5. Classic fight scene between Donnie Yen & Wu Jing.

follow this up with Fatal Move(4/5) and you have a nice double feature.

 

[dude]

Saw half of Southland Tales. I'm still scratching my head at that one.

I wanted to like it but couldn't. It was a discombobulated piece of claptrap.Avoid at all costs - plus it was over 2 hours long.

I was confused and pissed after a first viewing. Went and d/led the prequel comics that cleared up the missing pieces. Watched it again afterwards and enjoyed it . Gave it a final grade - 4/5.

 

[The Juggernaut]

Resurrecting the Champ: The story of a hungry newspaper journalist's report on a down and out former Heavyweight boxing contender that is now living on the streets of Denver. Strong father/son themes. A bit ham-fisted story telling. Interesting performance from Samuel L. Jackson. Alan Alda is good. I didn't hate Josh Hartnett. 3/5

 

[saintfool]

i watched "the red balloon" last night through on-demand. some of you old FBGs may remember it from grade school back in the day. it's a simple film (barely 30 mins long) about a small boy who has the red balloon become his kind of companion. it was made back in the late 1950s and is almost completely without dialogue (which is interesting because it won the oscar for best original screenplay). at first, i was awash with nostalgia when i watched it again for the first time in maybe 30 years. this might be the first film i remember as a child in fact. the ending absolutely killed me and i was moved to tears by the end of it.

 

[krista4]

i watched "the red balloon" last night through on-demand. some of you old FBGs may remember it from grade school back in the day. it's a simple film (barely 30 mins long) about a small boy who has the red balloon become his kind of companion. it was made back in the late 1950s and is almost completely without dialogue (which is interesting because it won the oscar for best original screenplay). at first, i was awash with nostalgia when i watched it again for the first time in maybe 30 years. this might be the first film i remember as a child in fact. the ending absolutely killed me and i was moved to tears by the end of it.

I just love this movie. Found it odd that there would be a sequel, or rather an homage, made this year, with dialogue, but it has been generally well reviewed (77% at Rotten Tomatoes).

 

[valhallan]

The Lives of Others - 8.5/10

Shows just how Orwellian things really were in communist East Germany. I was saddened to find out that the actor that played Wiesler, Ulrich Mühe, died of cancer this past year.

Not sure if we all talked about this or not, but I recently talked with an old family friend who used to be one of the LA Times movie reviewers- mentioned how much I liked this film. She forwarded his obit from the UK- pretty amazing marriage of truth and fiction...

London Daily Telegraph

Ulrich Mühe

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 27/07/2007

Ulrich Mühe, the German actor who died of cancer on Sunday aged 54, became known to British cinema-goers as the hard-line Stasi captain in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's psychological drama Das Leben der Anderen ("The Lives of Others"), which won an Oscar for best foreign film earlier this year.

Mühe gave a breathtaking performance as Gerd Weisler, a by-the-book Communist who is given the job of bugging the apartment of an East German playwright (Sebastian Koch) and his actress girlfriend (Martina Gedeck), but becomes increasingly uncomfortable with what he is doing after discovering that the government minister who ordered the surveillance did so for sexual rather than political motives.

Set in East Berlin in the mid-1980s, the film traces the tense, moving and dangerous relationship that develops between Weisler, his seedy and sweatily obedient boss, Lieutenant-Colonel Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), and the playwright and his girlfriend.

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Almost as extraordinary as Mühe's complex and understated portrayal of the repressed secret service agent whose heart moves gradually from contempt and envy to compassion, was that Mühe himself had found evidence, from Stasi files opened after German re-unification, that he been under surveillance not only by four of his fellow actors in the East Berlin theatre, but also by his former wife, the actress Jenny Gröllmann.

Like the playwright and his girlfriend in the film, Mühe and Jenny Gröllmann had once been East Germany's golden couple: stars of the Berlin stage who fell in love while making a film (a love story) and got married in 1984. The Stasi file on Mühe recorded in meticulous detail the meetings which Jenny Gröllmann, allegedly a Stasi "inoffizielle Mitarbeiter" (registered informer), had with her controller over several years.

The story was pertinent because the climax of The Lives of Others centres on the pressure exerted by the Stasi on the playwright's girlfriend to make her betray him as the author of - to them - a treasonous exposé of covered-up GDR suicide rates.

In a book accompanying the film, Mühe spoke about the sense of betrayal he felt when he found out about his former wife's alleged Stasi role.

But the affair took a bizarre turn after Jenny Gröllmann's real-life Stasi controller claimed that he had made up many of the details in the file and that the actress had not known that she was speaking to a Stasi agent.

After a highly public and acrimonious battle in the courts, Jenny Gröllmann, who died last August, won an injunction preventing the book's publication. In the film Weisler, too, fakes his reports - in order to hide what is really happening in the playwright's apartment from his Stasi superiors.

When asked how he prepared for his role in the film Mühe replied simply: "I remembered."

The son of a furrier, Freidrich Hans Ulrich Mühe was born on June 20 1953 at Grimma in Saxony, then part of the German Democratic Republic. After leaving school, he trained as a construction worker before serving in the Volksarmee as a guard at the Berlin Wall. He then studied acting in Leipzig at the Hans Otto Theaterhochschule.

He made his professional stage debut at Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chimnitz) in 1979 as Lyngstrand in Ibsen's Lady from the Sea. The East Berlin playwright and director Heine Müller cast Mühe in a production of Macbeth at East Berlin's Volksbühne Theater.

In 1983 he joined the ensemble of the city's Deutsches Theater, where his versatility in both comic and serious roles led to his becoming its star. On screen he co-starred with his wife Jenny Gröllmann in Herman Zschoche's biopic Halfte des Lebens (1984, "A Half of Life"), about the poet Hölderlin.

Mühe played a leading role in orchestrating the demonstrations that preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the same year he achieved international recognition in Bernhard Wicki's Das Spinnennetz ("Spider's Web"), as a lieutenant who sleeps and murders his way to professional success following a near fatal injury during the Kiel sailors' mutiny of 1918.

Afterwards he appeared in numerous films, television series and plays in Germany and further afield. In Michael Haneke's thriller Funny Games (1997) he and his second wife Suzanne Lothar played a husband and wife held captive in their holiday cabin by two psychotic young men who force them to play sadistic "games" with one another.

In 2002 he was chillingly convincing as Dr Mengele in Costa-Gavras's Amen. Last year he appeared at the Barbican in Thomas Ostermeier's production of Sarah Kane's Blasted, playing a middle-aged journalist whose edgy encounter with a young girl leads to the precipitate eruption of civil war in a Leeds hotel room.

Ulrich Mühe is survived by his wife, Susanne Lothar, by their son and daughter, by a daughter by his marriage to Jenny Gröllmann and by two children from an earlier marriage.

Fantastic movie. I thought the best scene was the elevator sequence with the little boy. Wiesler becomes human right there on the spot.That's very sad about Ulrich... I plan to check out some of his other work.

 

[saintfool]

i watched "the red balloon" last night through on-demand. some of you old FBGs may remember it from grade school back in the day. it's a simple film (barely 30 mins long) about a small boy who has the red balloon become his kind of companion. it was made back in the late 1950s and is almost completely without dialogue (which is interesting because it won the oscar for best original screenplay). at first, i was awash with nostalgia when i watched it again for the first time in maybe 30 years. this might be the first film i remember as a child in fact. the ending absolutely killed me and i was moved to tears by the end of it.

I just love this movie. Found it odd that there would be a sequel, or rather an homage, made this year, with dialogue, but it has been generally well reviewed (77% at Rotten Tomatoes).

the movie made me believe that something special could happen to me, just like that little boy. i think i grew up really believing that something would happen. that's the thing i cherish most about this film maybe.

 

[doughboydeluxe]

***Hijack Warning***

If any of you have HDNet, I have become addicted to their three movie trailer shows, Nothing But Trailers, Trailerama, and The Ultimate Trailer Show. The first two usually show the same trailers over and over, but movie critic Robert Wilonsky hosts The Ultimate Trailer Show and usually has new trailers each week. I just love seeing a trailer for a new movie and getting all jacked up about it.

Off the top of my head, here are some trailers I have seen there that I am really looking forward to:

Son of Rambow

Righteous Kill - DeNiro and Pacino - I am so afraid this movie is going to be absolute crap, but with those two guys in it I won't be able to pass it up

Tropic Thunder

Dark Knight

Paranoid Park

Young at Heart

***Hijack Over***

 

[Drifter]

Love the Trailer shows.

Also love The Red Balloon. That, Nosferaturu and the stop action movie about the peanuts that herd silverware were regular library checkouts (on reel to reel) when I was a kid for sleep overs and such.

 

[jdoggydogg]

***Hijack Warning***

If any of you have HDNet, I have become addicted to their three movie trailer shows, Nothing But Trailers, Trailerama, and The Ultimate Trailer Show. The first two usually show the same trailers over and over, but movie critic Robert Wilonsky hosts The Ultimate Trailer Show and usually has new trailers each week. I just love seeing a trailer for a new movie and getting all jacked up about it.

This site has a ton a good trailers:http://www.comingsoon.net/trailers/

 

[Statorama]

If you can put your brain on autopilot for 90 minutes, August Rush aint half bad.

I thought the casting of Robin Williams was a little bizarre, but if you put someone totally menacing in that role I think the movie would take a darker tone that it would want to have. Williams in that role reminds you that it's just a fairy tale.

 

[Kraft...]

Watched the DocumentaryThe Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo on HBO the other night. Very disturbing but well done.

 

[KarmaPolice]

Watched two very good movies today: The Orphanage and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Been trying to catch up on my foreign movies and neither of these disappointed. I am a fan of the thriller/ghost stories, so really loved the Orphanage and got into that one quite a bit. Really wish Hollywood would stop spending so much time trying to rip off the foreign thriller/horror movies and infuse them with crappy CGI effects and take the time to study what makes the originals effective - story and build up/pacing (imagine that)

Still have a bunch on deck- Pan's Labrynth, Lives of Others, The Host, Downfall and a few others - just wanted to get a couple of the newer ones out of the way for some reason.

 

[dude]

Watched two very good movies today: The Orphanage and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Been trying to catch up on my foreign movies and neither of these disappointed. I am a fan of the thriller/ghost stories, so really loved the Orphanage and got into that one quite a bit. Really wish Hollywood would stop spending so much time trying to rip off the foreign thriller/horror movies and infuse them with crappy CGI effects and take the time to study what makes the originals effective - story and build up/pacing (imagine that)

Still have a bunch on deck- Pan's Labrynth, Lives of Others, The Host, Downfall and a few others - just wanted to get a couple of the newer ones out of the way for some reason.

5/5 on both. (Pans & Lives)Random foreign reommendation: Cidade dos Homens (4/5). Not on the same level of City of God but definitely worth a rental.

 

[17seconds]

Juno - was looking forward to it, but the girl's personality threw me off. She always had to have some hip, smart new term for everything. They overdid it. But still a good movie.

No Country For Old Men - Loved it.

 

[Mr. Mojo]

Deja VuMeh - Not a lot going for it in any way.

:(I really liked that one.

What did you like? I didn't dislike it, I just though there wasn't a whole lot that drew me in.

What killed this movie for me was how preposterous the technology was. I usually have an easy time suspending disbelief for movies, but this was so far out there even I couldn't let it slide.

which movie about time travel had a less preposterous technology?

My point is that took time travel too seriously and tried to make it seem like it was technologically possible. Give me time travel in a DeLorean and I'm happy and entertained. Give me this giant government computer that can look exactly 4 days and 6 hours back in time and even transport people and I call BS. I dunno - that's just me. Maybe I'm the only one that had trouble suspending disbelief for that movie.

I agree that the time travel just didn't work. I think it was the "Oh we can't send someone back" and then a few minutes later it was "Oh, you want to go back, go for it".The girl was sure attactive - reminded me of Halle Berry.

 

[El Floppo]

Watched two very good movies today: The Orphanage and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Been trying to catch up on my foreign movies and neither of these disappointed. I am a fan of the thriller/ghost stories, so really loved the Orphanage and got into that one quite a bit. Really wish Hollywood would stop spending so much time trying to rip off the foreign thriller/horror movies and infuse them with crappy CGI effects and take the time to study what makes the originals effective - story and build up/pacing (imagine that)

Still have a bunch on deck- Pan's Labrynth, Lives of Others, The Host, Downfall and a few others - just wanted to get a couple of the newer ones out of the way for some reason.

We just got The Diving Bell... really looking forward to seeing it, as I was doing almost everything in my (pretty limited) powers to catch it in the theaters. Does it count as a foreign movie, with Julian Schnabel directing- was it made in France? I'm always amazed by people like Schnabel who have the balls to just go out and make things they want, regardless of medium... pretty sure he's dabbled in architecture as well, the *******.

 

[El Floppo]

i watched "the red balloon" last night through on-demand. some of you old FBGs may remember it from grade school back in the day. it's a simple film (barely 30 mins long) about a small boy who has the red balloon become his kind of companion. it was made back in the late 1950s and is almost completely without dialogue (which is interesting because it won the oscar for best original screenplay). at first, i was awash with nostalgia when i watched it again for the first time in maybe 30 years. this might be the first film i remember as a child in fact. the ending absolutely killed me and i was moved to tears by the end of it.

I just love this movie. Found it odd that there would be a sequel, or rather an homage, made this year, with dialogue, but it has been generally well reviewed (77% at Rotten Tomatoes).

the movie made me believe that something special could happen to me, just like that little boy. i think i grew up really believing that something would happen. that's the thing i cherish most about this film maybe.

Very, very well put, sf! Without remembering, or maybe even ever knowing it- reading your words made me realize that's exactly how I felt as a kid too. And IIRC, the parade of balloons at the end... just not quite the same as having the red balloon back, right?

I brought this movie up a few months ago when they rereleased it and were showing it at the Film Forum here in NYC... waxed nostalgic about it to the wife who looked at me like I was crazy and dropped some hypberbole along the lines of "only hippies from Northern CA would've seen that thing growing up". She'd never seen or even heard of it. Nice to hear non-hippies watched it too. I feel like my school played it at least once a year until 8th grade.

 

[El Floppo]

Resurrecting the Champ: The story of a hungry newspaper journalist's report on a down and out former Heavyweight boxing contender that is now living on the streets of Denver. Strong father/son themes. A bit ham-fisted story telling. Interesting performance from Samuel L. Jackson. Alan Alda is good. I didn't hate Josh Hartnett. 3/5

Wasn't this based on a true story?

 

[KarmaPolice]

Watched two very good movies today: The Orphanage and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Been trying to catch up on my foreign movies and neither of these disappointed. I am a fan of the thriller/ghost stories, so really loved the Orphanage and got into that one quite a bit. Really wish Hollywood would stop spending so much time trying to rip off the foreign thriller/horror movies and infuse them with crappy CGI effects and take the time to study what makes the originals effective - story and build up/pacing (imagine that)

Still have a bunch on deck- Pan's Labrynth, Lives of Others, The Host, Downfall and a few others - just wanted to get a couple of the newer ones out of the way for some reason.

We just got The Diving Bell... really looking forward to seeing it, as I was doing almost everything in my (pretty limited) powers to catch it in the theaters. Does it count as a foreign movie, with Julian Schnabel directing- was it made in France? I'm always amazed by people like Schnabel who have the balls to just go out and make things they want, regardless of medium... pretty sure he's dabbled in architecture as well, the *******.

It counts because all the dialog is in French, and there are those word thingys at the bottom of the screen. Really enjoyed the movie- let us know when you watched it.

 

[KarmaPolice]

Juno - was looking forward to it, but the girl's personality threw me off. She always had to have some hip, smart new term for everything. They overdid it. But still a good movie.

No Country For Old Men - Loved it.

That was my take as well. To me it felt like the writer was trying too hard to show how funny/witty/sarcastic she could be or is. Seemed too "in-your-face" and I got tired of it about 1/2 way through the movie. I liked that it wasn't the typical movie that comes out, but still don't know why it was up for best picture.

 

[Shermanator]

28 Weeks Later

Generally well made, but there's a scene so offensive in this movie I would recommend the movie to anyone.

mytagid = Math.floor( Math.random() * 100 );document.write("

When Robert Carlyle gets infected and murders his wife, that was the most horrible, gratuitous thing I've seen in a movie in a long time. No thanks.

*** SPOILER ALERT! Click this link to display the potential spoiler text in this box. ***");document.close();

Just watched this sequal yesterday, and I couldnt agree more. I liked 28 Days (although I thought the movie lost something when it switched to the military compound towards the end.)This scene didnt make any sense at all. Not to spoil any of the movie, but the "zombies" are supposed to be ravenous, mindless killers. There was nothing mindless about this scene. More like "Im gonna think of the most grueling way to kill someone, and do it".

Im sure the director was going for the "shock" value of the moment. But it didnt make any sense in the movie.

Overall I liked both flicks. They are like the "Night of the Living Dead" flicks on steroids.

edited do delete some plot points

 

[krista4]

The Savages: Meh. Good performances. Nothing much to recommend for or against it. 2.5/5

 

[SmoovySmoov]

Juno - was looking forward to it, but the girl's personality threw me off. She always had to have some hip, smart new term for everything. They overdid it. But still a good movie.

It works if you are also a lifelong sarcastic smart ###.

 

[The Juggernaut]

Resurrecting the Champ: The story of a hungry newspaper journalist's report on a down and out former Heavyweight boxing contender that is now living on the streets of Denver. Strong father/son themes. A bit ham-fisted story telling. Interesting performance from Samuel L. Jackson. Alan Alda is good. I didn't hate Josh Hartnett. 3/5

Wasn't this based on a true story?

I believe so.