[Shane]

Watched Brokeback Mountain, and aside from very good performances from Heath and Jake, not sure it lived up to the hype as a "groundbreaking" film

[Crudblud]

Watched Brokeback Mountain, and aside from very good performances from Heath and Jake, not sure it lived up to the hype as a "groundbreaking" film

It isn't groundbreaking in any cinematic sense, the hype comes entirely from the subject matter.

[Dionysios]

'The Great Debaters'


Just ordered several interesting communist books by Sol Auerbach (using the pseudonym James S. Allen) from the 1930's including his history of Reconstruction and his 1936 book advocating an autonomous black communist South in the USA comparable to the Soviet autonomous regions.

Denzel Washington's character in this movie brought to mind Sol Auerbach's work in the fascist south around the late 1920's and early 1930's.

[Blanko]

The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)

This is Malick's retelling of the story and mythology of Pocahontas, as well as the founding of Jamestown, Virginia. The subject matter might already be familiar to most, so it's not surprising that the main point of interest is Malick's particular style of filmmaking, which, as is very usual for him, makes or breaks the film. As a huge fan of his style, it definitely makes it for me. The sheer authenticity and uncompromising vision places this among his finest work, but the fact that he picked such an oft retold story (the more mythological melodramatic elements included) does place a slight creative restraint on him, which is why in my mind it doesn't reach the sheer brilliance of The Thin Red Line, but it is nonetheless very good. 9/10

Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015)

How do I even talk about this film? I always run into the same issue with Weerasethakul's films, regardless of how much I enjoy them, which is that I find his films incredibly difficult to talk about. They tap straight into primal sensation, they invite you to share the ambiguous nature of reality as it is portrayed with you, and they almost require you to view them on their own terms - as meditations, experiences that flow over you. It doesn't always work, but when it does it's absolutely mesmerizing and possibly unlike anything else in cinema.

This film is one such case. It's ostensibly about a group of soldiers who have fallen ill to a strange sickness that makes them sleep for extremely long periods of time. The film follows a middle-aged woman who befriends one of these soldiers, and what follows is a series of social encounters between the two that blur the lines between past and present, wakefulness and dreaming, reality and myth, and culture and spirituality. Weerasethakul is incredibly disciplined and eloquent in how he accomplishes this, so much so that the whole fabric of uncertainty invokes the sensation of being somewhere between awake and dreaming, just as it does with the characters in the film itself. It's not a film to be deconstructed and analysed from the outside, it's a film that invites you to live in its world and sense what the characters sense. And for that, Weerasethakul is a master of the craft. 10/10

[Roundy]

Black Mirror (Season 1, Episodes 1-3 / Various directors, 2011)

An anthology series much like Twilight Zone, though generally facing much more real (or possibly soon-to-be-real) scenarios. This season is only three episodes long, but they're each 40-60 minutes and each exceptionally well done. I don't want to say much about it, because I really suggest you give this a shot knowing nothing about each episode. If you just want one to check out, I'd recommend either episode 3 or 2, since I find those two the most harrowing and fascinating, but they're all amazing. Give it a go.

Ooh, wait til you get to "White Bear".

God, 'White Bear' is terrifying - it's exactly the sort of grisly revenge-fantasy porn that I can imagine The Daily Mail campaigning for.

My favourite is a really close toss-up between 'White Bear', '15 Million Credits', and 'White Christmas' the end to all three sub-stories and the arc are horrific, like, keep you up all night thinking about the consequences horrific.

That's what makes them so engrossing.  I actually just watched "White Christmas" for the first time a couple weeks ago and I was fairly blown away, which of course is nothing unusual for this show.  What really gets me about it and "White Bear" is the way it makes you sympathetic for characters that just don't deserve it (and there were two such characters in "White Christmas", although to be fair I guess one of them wasn't quite real, but still...).

I still give the edge to "White Bear" because it really punches you in the gut, and then before the episode is over it punches you in the gut again.  I don't think I've ever seen anything so unsettling on TV before.  There's a breezy, humorous quality to "White Christmas" that makes its more disturbing implications a bit easier to take.  But these are definitely my three favorite episodes as well.  I wish they would make more already (damn British TV scheduling, 3 episodes a season?!?).  I know they were planning to produce more episodes for Netflix.

Also I wish more people watched it.   

[Shane]

Watched both seasons of daredevil. Was okay

[Ghost Spaghetti]

That's what makes them so engrossing.  I actually just watched "White Christmas" for the first time a couple weeks ago and I was fairly blown away, which of course is nothing unusual for this show.  What really gets me about it and "White Bear" is the way it makes you sympathetic for characters that just don't deserve it (and there were two such characters in "White Christmas", although to be fair I guess one of them wasn't quite real, but still...).

I still give the edge to "White Bear" because it really punches you in the gut, and then before the episode is over it punches you in the gut again.  I don't think I've ever seen anything so unsettling on TV before.  There's a breezy, humorous quality to "White Christmas" that makes its more disturbing implications a bit easier to take.  But these are definitely my three favorite episodes as well.  I wish they would make more already (damn British TV scheduling, 3 episodes a season?!?).  I know they were planning to produce more episodes for Netflix.

Also I wish more people watched it.   

I'm actually ok with them being incredibly short series. With this kind of series, it would be all too easy to become desensitised to them, or just pack a longer series run with padding.

[Roundy]

I'm actually ok with them being incredibly short series. With this kind of series, it would be all too easy to become desensitised to them, or just pack a longer series run with padding.

Point taken.  I guess it would be unreasonable to expect a show like this to be so consistently excellent if there were twenty or even ten episodes produced a year.

[George]

X-Men: Apocalypse (Bryan Singer, 2016)

More like Crapocalypse.  This wasn't great.  The story is completely by-the-numbers and predictable, and the writing is never more than passable.  There's also a major problem with clashing tones here, like when they try to do another fun slow-motion scene with Quicksilver (wearing a much better wig this time around, thankfully) set to a pop song...right in the middle of what's supposed to be a dramatic scene in which a character dies.  Apocalypse himself isn't really all that cool, and there's very little that poor Oscar Isaac can do to, you know, act while he's buried under that ridiculous costume.  Jennifer Lawrence yawns her way through her performance, and both she and Nicholas Hoult spend most of the movie in their human forms, because they're popular right now and the studio has to capitalize on that.  I suppose I liked a few of the younger characters they (re-)introduced to the series.  And to reiterate a complaint I've made on IRC numerous times - most of the returning cast don't look anywhere near as old as their characters ought to be.  And apparently the next movie is going to hop yet another decade and land them all in the nineties.

Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)

Generic fantasy.  Should have had Zack Snyder direct it.  No, this was actually great.  Tragic and beautiful.  I really can't come up with any words to describe it better than the rest of the world already has, but suffice it to say that I wholeheartedly agree.

[juner]

X-Men: Apocalypse (Bryan Singer, 2016)

More like Crapocalypse.  This wasn't great.  The story is completely by-the-numbers and predictable, and the writing is never more than passable.  There's also a major problem with clashing tones here, like when they try to do another fun slow-motion scene with Quicksilver (wearing a much better wig this time around, thankfully) set to a pop song...right in the middle of what's supposed to be a dramatic scene in which a character dies.  Apocalypse himself isn't really all that cool, and there's very little that poor Oscar Isaac can do to, you know, act while he's buried under that ridiculous costume.  Jennifer Lawrence yawns her way through her performance, and both she and Nicholas Hoult spend most of the movie in their human forms, because they're popular right now and the studio has to capitalize on that.  I suppose I liked a few of the younger characters they (re-)introduced to the series.  And to reiterate a complaint I've made on IRC numerous times - most of the returning cast don't look anywhere near as old as their characters ought to be.  And apparently the next movie is going to hop yet another decade and land them all in the nineties.

Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)

Generic fantasy.  Should have had Zack Snyder direct it.  No, this was actually great.  Tragic and beautiful.  I really can't come up with any words to describe it better than the rest of the world already has, but suffice it to say that I wholeheartedly agree.

Saddam is correct about both of these films.

[Dionysios]

'Desperate Journey'
(1942)

Wartime movie about escape from a prison camp and traversing enemy territory starring Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x207e3g_desperate-journey-1942-errol-flynn-ronald-reagan-nancy-coleman-feature-action-drama_shortfilms

[Roundy]

Recently watched Gone With the Wind (1939) for the first time.

I've been exposed to it in dribs and drabs my entire life on account of it being my mom's favorite movie of all time.  I bought it for her Christmas two years ago (a deluxe package of it, obviously) and threw out the idea of watching it with her.  I'm not usually one for romances, but this being the all-time classic it is, I thought it might be worth it anyway.  Then last week I asked her about watching it.  It turns out she's been waiting to watch it until I watched it with her, because I brought up watching it with her.  Which I thought was touching.  We watched it last Saturday.

So... Overall, I enjoyed it a surprising amount.  The last hour or so was a snooze (just a misery congo, basically, to show how being as awful a person as Scarlett was can have a negative effect on your life, I guess, never mind the added melodrama of having her daughter die) but up to that point it was fairly engrossing.  Although its portrayal of the Old South is hugely romanticized (and besides that the inhumanity of slavery is completely sidelined), it's still an interesting portrait of life in the region at the time, and its portrayal of the misery inflicted on the South by the Civil War is quite poignant. 

It's a breathtaking beautiful movie, almost worth the four-hour investment just for how pretty it looks.  It does however suffer from a problem you see in a lot of movies from this era, in that the actors look like they're acting.  Vivian Leigh is incredibly hammy at times, Clark Gable practically winks throughout the entire movie, and there are spaces where Olivia de Haviland is almost comically weak and helpless.  Not to mention that all of the black actors would look at home in a minstrel show, but this is another regrettable issue that is fairly prevalent in films from this era.  Nonetheless Hattie McDaniel deserved the Oscar win as Mammy.  She was fabulous.

Overall I was surprisingly pleased with how much I enjoyed this.  But I'm not sure I'll ever invest the four hours to watch it again.

[Ghost Spaghetti]

Just finished Daredevil Series 2 and I can't say I particularly enjoyed most episodes past the half-way point.

Don't get me wrong, the fight scenes were as epic as always, Frank Castle was brilliant, the whole question about how far a vigilante should be allowed to go was interesting, and the cameo by you-know-who was great. All of it, however, was overshadowed by how awful Elektra was and how little I cared about the battle between The Hand and The Chased. The decision to have the Elektra plot and the Punisher plot in the same series was a strange one. I understand that they did that in order to stretch Matt to the point where he has to decide to give up on a persona, but the two plot lines seemed so vastly disconnected it was like being interrupted by another program.

The whole ancient war between the Hand and the Chased and the mystical ninjas didn't fit into the dark, gritty, realistic world that the Netflix Marvel shows have been building. I'd much rather they had simply jettisoned that entire plotline and just concentrated on Castle and the gang war which erupted after Fisk's arrest. If you wanted to show Murdoch stretched to his limit then he could have been fighting the Yakuza and the Irish gangs, trying to clean up the wake of The Punisher's executions, showing how impotent he feels fighting against a beast which just keeps coming back, and his helplessness in the light of Frank Castle's brutal style of 'justice.'

[beardo]

Elektra a shit.

[Crudblud]

Marvel's Jessica Jones

Yeah, it was alright.

[George]

That is not a review, Crudblud.

Just finished Daredevil Series 2 and I can't say I particularly enjoyed most episodes past the half-way point.

Don't get me wrong, the fight scenes were as epic as always, Frank Castle was brilliant, the whole question about how far a vigilante should be allowed to go was interesting, and the cameo by you-know-who was great. All of it, however, was overshadowed by how awful Elektra was and how little I cared about the battle between The Hand and The Chased. The decision to have the Elektra plot and the Punisher plot in the same series was a strange one. I understand that they did that in order to stretch Matt to the point where he has to decide to give up on a persona, but the two plot lines seemed so vastly disconnected it was like being interrupted by another program.

The whole ancient war between the Hand and the Chased and the mystical ninjas didn't fit into the dark, gritty, realistic world that the Netflix Marvel shows have been building. I'd much rather they had simply jettisoned that entire plotline and just concentrated on Castle and the gang war which erupted after Fisk's arrest. If you wanted to show Murdoch stretched to his limit then he could have been fighting the Yakuza and the Irish gangs, trying to clean up the wake of The Punisher's executions, showing how impotent he feels fighting against a beast which just keeps coming back, and his helplessness in the light of Frank Castle's brutal style of 'justice.'

Chaste, not Chased.  But I largely agree with this.

[Crudblud]

That is not a review, Crudblud.

When did I say it was a review?

[beardo]

Warcraft
9/10, was gr8.

[George]

3 Dev Adam [3 Giant Men] (T. Fikret Uçak, 1973)

This was both amazing and baffling.  Captain America and Santo travel to Turkey to take down the gangster "Spider," who's into stealing rare artifacts and counterfeiting money.  The movie has a couple of sex/nude scenes, some very violent deaths, and of course almost nothing in common with the source material for these characters beyond some really shitty costumes:



It's objectively terrible, of course, but I'd be lying if I claimed I wasn't thoroughly entertained by the spectacle.  Forget Civil War, this is the real capeshit throwdown you need to see.

[George]

Apocalypto (Mel Gibson, 2006)

Beautifully filmed, with exciting action, a simple but effective story, and a fascinating look at the Mayan civilization (albeit with plenty of anachronistic details meant to present more of a "greatest hits" portrayal than that of any one time period).  It's extremely grisly, but if you can handle that, then I definitely recommend watching this.  I was surprised to discover that it had such mixed reviews overall, until I realized that it had come out shortly after Gibson's DUI episode, and so many of the negative reviews were simply ranting about what a racist jerk Gibson was rather than actually examining the movie itself.  I feel there's some irony in this situation, as I've spent a lot of time this year mocking certain subsections of the Internet for reacting poorly to the negative reviews of highly-anticipated geek movies like BvS and Warcraft (and in the case of Ghostbusters, reacting poorly to the positive reviews).  Maybe...they were right all along!

12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995)

Not Gilliam's finest film, but still a very interesting one.  The story is a little jumbled, which I think they could probably have alleviated by explaining how time travel worked a little bit earlier, and I didn't really like the eventual reveal that Brad Pitt and the Army of the Twelve Monkeys were just a red herring - seriously, that's an awful lot of screen time to devote to a fake-out.  But aside from that, it's great.