[Blanko]

Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou, 1991)

Set in 1920s China, this film is an exquisite exploration of the social dynamics and customs behind a wealthy family with concubines and servants. It follows a 19-year old woman who becomes the fourth wife of a wealthy man, as she has to learn to live with the other wives, fight over her husband's affection and control her new-found position of power over the lower class of servants. It expertly utilises the customs of the era as both dramatic and visual storytelling devices, without ever having to seem too dry-cut or documentarian.

The real stand-out aspect of the film is the visuals. Its excellent cinematography is further complemented with the beautiful architecture the film uses as its setting, and the set design for interiors is nothing short of top notch as well. If you're looking for a visually stunning film, this one is definitely a must see. 9/10

[beardo]

this one is definitely a must see.

But it sounds boring.

[Blanko]

this one is definitely a must see.

But it sounds boring.

That's fine, my recommendation wasn't directed at you.

[beardo]

this one is definitely a must see.

But it sounds boring.

That's fine, my recommendation wasn't directed at you.

Since you didn't specify who it was directed at, I had to assume it was directed at everyone, which includes me.

[Blanko]

Since you didn't specify who it was directed at

But I did.

If you're looking for a visually stunning film

How convenient that you managed to exclude that portion in your quote.

You watch movies with network television tier visuals, so no, this obviously is not directed at you.

[Crudblud]

City Lights (Charlie Chaplin)

Classic silent film from the legendary Chaplin. One of his most famous films, it follows Chaplin's iconic Tramp persona through his interlinked relationships with two people, a millionaire who is his best friend when drunk but claims not to recognise him when sober, and a blind woman who sells flowers to pay the rent on the house where she lives with her grandmother. By taking advantage of the millionaire's drunken generosity, he tries to help the blind woman with her rent and eventually a revolutionary new eye-surgery that will cure her blindness.

While at first it comes across as a fluffy romantic comedy full of pratfalls and some almost magic-realist elements (no prizes for guessing where Woody Allen got a great deal of inspiration from) the film deals with the subjects of wealth and class in a serious manner, mocking the hedonism of the rich, lamenting the miseries of the poor, and, through the blind girl, exploring to some degree the phenomenon of the nouveau riche. The film's ambiguous climax is sudden and abrupt, and forgoes the easy path of the happy ending, doing so with great flair and poignancy.

While the skeleton of the film, its plot (no matter how far-fetched), its themes and its overall charming presentation go a long way to "justifying," in lieu of a better term, its classic status, its comedy scenes, for all their great timing and inventiveness, have a tendency to exhibit diminishing returns, as each gag doubles over on itself in a sort of ABA theme/modulation/recapitulation. This is all good and well as a technical exercise in comic theory, but as an actual piece of on-screen entertainment it has quite little reason to be there in that form, and my feeling is that a little more economy and concision would have served the story much better. If there is a failing of the film it is simply its need to prove that it is despite all else still a comedy, where in the works of Chaplin's great contemporary Buster Keaton the comedy is natural, ineffable, a permanent and self-assured fixture that one never doubts. Indeed, Keaton was the greater comedian, Chaplin the greater social commentator.

It's certainly hard not to like City Lights. It's a truly charming picture which, for all its romantic naivete, remains near enough believable for the viewer who has a healthy willingness to go along for the ride. While some scenes may drag here and there the 70 minute runtime is breezy enough, and the relationship between the Tramp and the Blind Woman, in particular its not-quite-conclusion, is beautifully depicted ─ the film is well worth watching for this alone. While the comedy is, as I have said, somewhat ungainly owing to its need to proudly display itself, rather than playing for greater subtlety, the film remains fresh thanks to its starkly original and wonderfully ambiguous ending, and its themes of social inequality are still very much relevant today.

[Saddam Hussein]

I've watched the first season of Fargo, and I have to say that I haven't felt this conflicted about the overall quality of a show in a very long time.  It does a lot of things right - it's brilliantly directed, adopts an appropriate Coen-esque atmosphere and style, and the cast and characters are mostly excellent.  But the story is so lazily-stitched together that it's almost impossible to maintain one's suspension of disbelief.  Almost every major plot advancement relies heavily on a series of implausible coincidences and contrivances.  It's hard to go into specifics without giving away large parts of the story, but I'll just point out the biggest example of this, which happens, many, many times over the course of the story - whenever a character is searching for another character, or whenever the plot needs to have certain characters meet, they almost always end up coincidentally bumping into each other through pure chance.

One other thing I want to criticize is the humor.  A few of the black comedy moments work well, but the comedians they brought onto the show, presumably to serve as comic relief, fail terribly.  Bob Odenkirk is normally a very funny guy, but he's wasted here as the dopey police chief whose shtick is little more than his dopiness.  Still, he's nowhere near as bad as the horror show that is Key and Peele as a pair of similarly-dopey FBI agents.  I'm sure they're fine comedians in their own right, but they have nothing here but nonstop markjokes.

tl;dr: If you're a fan of the Coens, and you don't mind switching your brain off, you'll probably like this.

[garygreen]

But the story is so lazily-stitched together that it's almost impossible to maintain one's suspension of disbelief.  Almost every major plot advancement relies heavily on a series of implausible coincidences and contrivances.  It's hard to go into specifics without giving away large parts of the story, but I'll just point out the biggest example of this, which happens, many, many times over the course of the story - whenever a character is searching for another character, or whenever the plot needs to have certain characters meet, they almost always end up coincidentally bumping into each other through pure chance.

tl;dr: If you're a fan of the Coens, and you don't mind switching your brain off, you'll probably like this.

The hallmark of a Coen brothers story is the contrast of extremes: extreme tedium punctuated by brutal violence; exception genius in close-quarters with equally exceptional ineptness; gallows humor; larger-than-life events in a banal setting.  Their lack of correspondence to reality isn't a function of being lazy; it's a storytelling device.

I think that's the whole point of the opening line: to identify and prime this theme for the audience.  Of course it's not a true story.  Malvo would have been caught years ago; no police chief in the world is this dumb; of course that one dude would realize immediately that he'd been drugged with amphetamines; hit-men probably don't go out of their way to be as conspicuous as possible; Lester murders his wife instead of just yelling at her or getting a divorce or whatever; the list goes on and on.  But it's not trying to be Law & Order.  It's trying to be a Coen brothers story.

[Snupes]

Black Mass (Scott Cooper, 2015)

A good movie. Can't say there was really anything new here, anything that hadn't been done before or that I hadn't seen before, but it was done well. The highlight of the movie is the performances, mainly the one from Johnny Depp. During more than a couple parts, he made me feel genuinely very uncomfortable. It's nice to see him in something good after so long, to remind everyone what an amazing actor he really is. The accents in the film are hilarious, particularly Cumberbatch's weird Brit-attempting-midwesterner-attempting-Bostonite accent he's got going on.

So yeah, good movie.

[Saddam Hussein]

The hallmark of a Coen brothers story is the contrast of extremes: extreme tedium punctuated by brutal violence; exception genius in close-quarters with equally exceptional ineptness; gallows humor; larger-than-life events in a banal setting.  Their lack of correspondence to reality isn't a function of being lazy; it's a storytelling device.

I think that's the whole point of the opening line: to identify and prime this theme for the audience.  Of course it's not a true story.  Malvo would have been caught years ago; no police chief in the world is this dumb; of course that one dude would realize immediately that he'd been drugged with amphetamines; hit-men probably don't go out of their way to be as conspicuous as possible; Lester murders his wife instead of just yelling at her or getting a divorce or whatever; the list goes on and on.  But it's not trying to be Law & Order.  It's trying to be a Coen brothers story.

I won't claim that Coen brothers movies are intended to be particularly realistic, but none of them have asked its audience to accept plot events nearly as contrived and unbelievable as the ones in this show.  It's not their outlandishness that I take issue with; it's how lazily they're written.  The writer clearly put a lot of effort into the dialogue and the specific setpieces, but he didn't seem to be interested in connecting all these scenes together into a cohesive overall story.  Instead, we just got a lot of vague handwaving whenever a situation needed to be justified by any means other than quirky dialogue or brutal violence.  I mentioned before all the miraculous coincidences - Lester coincidentally runs into Malvo twice, Gus coincidentally runs into him three times, Molly manages to interrupt Lester when he's about to do or in the middle of doing something bad multiple times, etc.  And another annoying example is the police being extremely inattentive whenever it's convenient to the plot - not merely dumb or incompetent, but inattentive to the degree that you'd wonder if they even have functioning eyes and ears.  Nobody in the police station notices Lester shrieking and thrashing about in his cell when Mr. Wrench and Mr. Numbers torture him.  Nobody in the SWAT team is even a little suspicious that the guy they just shot is gagged and bound to a chair and an unloaded gun.  And my personal favorite, Key and Peele don't notice the giant fucking shootout happening just across the street from them.  I guess their witty banter drowned all the gunfire out?

[Jura-Glenlivet]

So let me get this right, you didn't like it?

[garygreen]

Seinfeld is filled with miraculous coincidence and happenstance.  Usually the grand/final punchline to the episode is based entirely on a contrived coincidence combined with, or sparked by, completely unreasonable behavior.  But the point of the show isn't to construct a convincing narrative about how such events could reasonably occur or explaining why anyone would behave so unreasonably.  The show's purpose is different from that.  Not everyone will love what they're trying to do, but labeling the writing as lazy for relying on such contrivances isn't really fair.

I won't claim that Coen brothers movies are intended to be particularly realistic, but none of them have asked its audience to accept plot events nearly as contrived and unbelievable as the ones in this show.  It's not their outlandishness that I take issue with; it's how lazily they're written.  The writer clearly put a lot of effort into the dialogue and the specific setpieces, but he didn't seem to be interested in connecting all these scenes together into a cohesive overall story.  Instead, we just got a lot of vague handwaving whenever a situation needed to be justified by any means other than quirky dialogue or brutal violence.

I don't think Fargo is a crime drama or police procedural, although I agree this would be a fair criticism if it were.  I think Fargo is a parable.  I think that's one of the reasons that so many characters end up telling a parable in the show.  Fargo is a series of modern parables.  Parables aren't about rationalist narratives and plot details.  They use caricatures to tell moral tales.  How each character gets from A-Z isn't the important part.  In fact, getting bogged down in those details would detract from what the show is trying to do.

Also, my prior point wasn't that the hallmark of a Coen story is a lack of realism.  My point was that it's the contrast of extreme elements: extreme tedium punctuated by brutal violence; exceptional genius in close-quarters with equally exceptional ineptness; gallows humor; larger-than-life events in a banal setting.  The remarkableness of the coincidences and happenstances that occur to these small-town folk in their tiny locale is part of that contrast.  It fits thematically with everything else in the show.

Maybe what I mean is that, like them or not, I don't think these coincidences were written like "fuck how do we make these two meet...whatever just have them run into each other because i'm hungry for lunch."  I think that miraculous coincidence was an intentional feature of the story from the beginning, like "let's write a story about a completely unbelievable unfolding of events in a setting where that would be funny."

I mentioned before all the miraculous coincidences - Lester coincidentally runs into Malvo twice, Gus coincidentally runs into him three times, Molly manages to interrupt Lester when he's about to do or in the middle of doing something bad multiple times, etc.  And another annoying example is the police being extremely inattentive whenever its convenient to the plot - not merely dumb or incompetent, but inattentive to the degree that you'd wonder if they even have functioning eyes and ears.  Nobody in the police station notices Lester shrieking and thrashing about in his cell when Mr. Wrench and Mr. Numbers torture him.  Nobody in the SWAT team is even a little suspicious that the guy they just shot is gagged and bound to a chair and an unloaded gun.  And my personal favorite, Key and Peele don't notice the giant fucking shootout happening just across the street from them.  I guess their witty banter drowned all the gunfire out?

But these things all have a purpose.  It's hardly laziness.

1.  The whole plot of the story is based on a chance meeting between lawful good and chaotic evil (and the effect Malvo has on Lester simply by entering his life).  That's the parable.  There literally isn't a story if Lester can't coincidentally run into Malvo on the day Hess beats him up.  This is sort of what I mean about a unbelievable unfolding of events.  That's what's funny about it.  Malvo rolls into this tiny town, get's mixed up with everyone and causes evil chaos, and this tiny little tundra town is shoved unwillingly into modernity.

2.  The police are caricatures.  Everyone is, but the police are especially so.  As I mentioned, of course no police force would be so incompetent.  Malvo obviously would have been caught years ago.  That's the funny contrast: this tiny tundra town is basically out of time.  They all live in this idyllic, isolated little village with no crime, and suddenly the most evil human alive drives through and decides to fuck around.  Part of what makes it funny is how totally unprepared the police are to even understand what's happening to them.  And also because if Malvo and Lester get caught in the second episode then the show would be over and there would be no parable.

3.  Did you really not laugh at all when the dude got shot up by SWAT?  Or during that Key and Peele scene?  I mean, that was funny!  The whole point was to be funny about how inattentive and bad at their jobs they were.  Obviously it wasn't realistic.  It's not meant to be.  It's meant to be funny caricature.  These two dudes are so bad at their jobs that they don't even notice that the building they're watching is getting shot up by Evil McSatan.


this got way longer than i meant it to be tbh tbh tbqh.  it doesn't really matter to me if anyone else does or doesn't like fargo, i just think this particular criticism is odd.  i don't think fargo was ever trying to be a show that is so fastidious about the plot.  i think it's just trying to tell a funny story, and i think the kind of fastidiousness you're talking about would only make the story worse. 

Another good example of what I mean is the final time Gus runs into Malvo.  Sure, Gus just happens to drive by Malvo's place and see his car.  But it isn't because of lazy writing.  There's a point to it all.  Part of the parable of Fargo is the effect that Malvo has on everyone and the qualities he brings out in them: Lester becomes evil, Vern dies, Molly becomes brilliant, Bill becomes irrelevant, etc.  Gus becomes a predator.  That was the symbolism of the wolf on the road: Gus turns a corner and realizes that he can't protect his family without becoming a predator like Malvo.  They could have written their confrontation many different ways, but they chose to write it with Gus stalking Malvo, setting a trap, and hunting him.  So, from the perspective of the writers, the point really isn't to come up with the most convincing way to have Gus find Malvo; it's just to make it happen at the right time in the story to show the transformation and resolve other parts of the plot.

[beardo]

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (Tommy Wirkola, 2013)

It's dumb, it's stupid, it's cheesy as fuck, but pretty entertaining. With Hawkeye shooting at witches with a big gun and Peter Stormare playing a douchebag. 7/10, was good.

[Snupes]

Everest (Baltasar Kormákur, 2015)

Pretty good movie, if way too long. Could've done with a fifteen or thirty minute trim. It would be one thing if Kormákur had used that time to show the tedium and dreadfulness of being stranded, as I thought he would, but that was unfortunately not the case. Instead, there was a lot of hanging around plot points with no new information, pretty much everything going on longer than necessary. Every plot point repeats itself various times, either with the same character or with others, and by the end it's exhausting.

On the bright side, though, it was a desolately pretty film. Very nice to look at. And the characters were all pretty decently-developed, even if only a handful of them felt like real characters by the end. Everything was done pretty well, but I don't think there was anything that was done superbly.

Honestly, that's about all I can offer on it because nothing stuck out too much, it was just a slightly-above-decent movie.

[Saddam Hussein]

I just finished the second episode of Narcos.  It's quite good so far.  I think it struggles a little bit to make the narrator someone I care about.  At this point I'm only in it for Pablo.  The narrator is a little bit too generic for me so far.  Beyond that, though, it's executing really well.

I, too, have watched the first couple of episodes of Narcos, but I don't think I'll be watching any more.  Pablo Escobar was no doubt a fascinating figure, and I'm sure there's a great story to tell about him, but it's not to be found here.  The fucking narration just kills this show.  This guy is seriously just the blandest, whitest, most clichéd and predictable cowboy-cop stock character they could have possibly put into this show.  Everything about him, from his exaggerated accent to his attempt at adopting a too-cool-for-school, none-of-this-fazes-me attitude feels incredibly forced and inauthentic.  It's wannabe Scorsese, basically.  But at least Scorsese's use of narration is intended to tell you just as much about the characters as the story itself, by letting you compare how the characters describe the events going on to what you actually see happening on the screen.  Here, it's pure exposition.  Telling rather than showing.

I've also watched Cop Car, the film from newcomer Jon Watts that impressed Marvel so much that they decided to let him direct the upcoming Spider-Man movie.  It's a solid thriller, and Watts definitely proves his talent as a director with every tense moment he wrings out of it.

[Blanko]

The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2015)

Hou marks his return with eight years having passed since his last release. This latest feature is as slow and enigmatic as you would expect from him, despite the clear influences from the wuxia genre. Sure enough, there's some action here - very stylish at that - but it's mainly there to punctuate the long periods of quiet and the action scenes are always over very quickly. All in all, there's probably less than three minutes of fighting in this film, so it's certainly not an action film, despite what you may be led to expect. Instead it's a very minimalistic story of political conflict and family bonds, and it's sadly not that effective.

I find that Hou's style of storytelling works at its best when it's used in settings and scenarios that are immediately relatable and familiar to the viewer, such as the modern urban settings in Millennium Mambo or Café Lumiere, but here in Tang Dynasty-period China with pseudo-fantastical elements, there's too much backstory and context to simply gloss over without any exposition. As such it's difficult to relate to the characters because you don't know who exactly they are and what exactly the conflicts are about.

I'm still going to have to give this film a positive grade, because while the story didn't really pull me in, the visuals sure as hell did. Hou's storytelling may be too obtuse for his own good, but this film in my mind cements him as the current best working director. It's clear that this is his biggest and most ambitious project yet - everything from the beautiful expanses of Chinese landscapes to the finely crafted mise-en-scene of the interiors looks stunningly beautiful with Ping Bin's masterful cinematography, and under Hou's direction it makes for near shot-for-shot visual perfection. It is hands down one of the most beautiful and well shot films I've ever seen.

To me this film falls into the same camp as Flowers of Shanghai, with its story leaving something to be desired, while I'm still left completely enamoured by the masterful direction. The problem isn't necessarily that the story is bad, I just want more of it. This film, for better or for worse, feels like a small excerpt from a much bigger story. 8/10

[garygreen]

You can bet your ass that this post will soon be edited with my thoughts on the season premiere of Homeland.  Fuck yes.

I have mixed feelings about the season premiere.  I guess I'll have to see how it plays out, but I'm worried that this season is going to be too thematically similar to the last season.  Without giving away the events of the episode, they're setting things up to keep exploring what they've already covered: the effect of violence on the "soul," the extent to which spy-crafting is an addiction from which most of the protagonists cannot free themselves, and the hopelessly unending cycle of violence that enables and feeds the addiction.  Those are interesting themes, but they've done it already.

Frankly, I wish they'd take a season off from trying to say something and just give me another version of the cat-and-mouse drama that was season 1.

I, too, have watched the first couple of episodes of Narcos, but I don't think I'll be watching any more.  Pablo Escobar was no doubt a fascinating figure, and I'm sure there's a great story to tell about him, but it's not to be found here.  The fucking narration just kills this show.  This guy is seriously just the blandest, whitest, most clichéd and predictable cowboy-cop stock character they could have possibly put into this show.  Everything about him, from his exaggerated accent to his attempt at adopting a too-cool-for-school, none-of-this-fazes-me attitude feels incredibly forced and inauthentic.  It's wannabe Scorsese, basically.  But at least Scorsese's use of narration is intended to tell you just as much about the characters as the story itself, by letting you compare how the characters describe the events going on to what you actually see happening on the screen.  Here, it's pure exposition.  Telling rather than showing.

I found the narrator completely uninteresting as a character (except to the extent that he mirrors his IRL counterpart), but I enjoy Pablo so much that I didn't have much trouble watching the series.  Could be selective memory, but I don't even recall him being around a ton. 

I'm most disappointed that season 1 doesn't wrap up the whole Escobar story.  I was hoping that it would be serialized and dramatize the life of a different narco in each season.  That would have been badass.

[Saddam Hussein]

Meant to reply to this:

So let me get this right, you didn't like [Fargo]?

I'd say the good outweighed the bad for the most part.  I enjoyed it reasonably well, and I'm looking forward to the next season's premiere on Monday, which has gotten excellent reviews so far.  I'm also pleased to see that Noah Hawley has split the writing duties up this time around.  You can't have one person writing every single episode of a TV show.  Television is a team effort far more than books or films are, and if we're constantly getting hour after hour in one writer's voice, with their style, their quirks, and their flaws, it's going to get stale after a while.  That's a big part of what tripped up True Detective, and while Hawley is a much better writer than Nic Pizzaplanet, he's not immune to this.

[Pete Svarrior]

and while Hawley is a much better writer than Nic Pizzaplanet, he's not immune to this.

pls stop shittalking Nic Pizzaplanet. He and Joshua Planetstein are the greatest artists of all time.

[Saddam Hussein]

The Raid: Redemption and The Raid 2 (Gareth Evans, 2011/2014)

(Fine, I'll use this format.)

Fucking awesome.  If you haven't seen them already, do so now.