[Closed] Recent Viewing Part III

Few do. Yet later in life you'd like to be remembered for something special you created.

Yes, probably!

Because of the quality of the movie I was half expecting the shark and the croc to have their own names at the end!

Nabonga a film with a very very young Julie London

For the older generation I watched Swamp Fire with Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weissmuller the Tarzan duo. You would think you have the makings of a pretty good picture wouldn't you? Nope. Pine Thomas made this one very ordinary.
Tom

I've always wanted to see The Last Man On Earth.

How To Train Your Dragon

Enjoyed this. A very frequently-told story when you strip it down, but it's so frequently-told because it works. The accents irritated me throughout. Why do adult Vikings sound Scottish (and some of them were atrocious attempts at sounding Scottish) and child Vikings sound American? Anyway, never mind. Nice film. Not Pixar-quality, but certainly the best Dreamworks animation.

which one did you see?

I'd recommend Das Experiment, the original German movie from Oliver Hirschbiegel. Still not perfect (it derails in its final act, most notably) but a much better exploration of this intriguing concept nonetheless.

Another physical therapy session which I'm not looking forward to.

Thanks guys, I'll try to find the original then.

Peter

The Terror an Edgar Wallace thriller.

POTC: on stranger tides. I loved the previous three, i felt cheated in this one. They tempted people to go into the cinema because of a confident franchise and, well, Johnny Depp, but this story is inexistent, the characters are all numb and bored, the music is notoriously disturbing and loud copy-pastes from the previous scores without the slightest new material, all a big monotonous trip to nowehere. Snoozefest. Bring Verbrinski back.

That is a better idea, on 1 2nd thought.

Just saw: THE TREE OF LIFE (Terrence Malick) ****

Or: my most anticipated film in recent years. And it's a strange experience to watch a Malick film in a packed theatre, all watching silently yet feeling some sort of collective WTF? dawning on the unsuspecting audience. After being introduced almost worldlessly to the sorrows of a small American family, Malick shifts to the emergence of life in the cosmos, the universe, before switching back to a boy growing up under the watchful eye of an increasingly strict and firm father.

Sure, it's a film with its problems. Even though the surreal scenes (including the emergence-of-life sequence) create the film's most astonishing moments you can't shake the feeling The Tree of Life would've been a less uneven film when it would've concentrated about just that small family. Especially since Malick abandons the whole universe after the first act entirely, it almost seems he added this framing well into production because he felt the family on itself didn't provide enough meat for his philosophic tendencies. In short: it doesn't gell well.

Yet Malick created the cinematic extension of that "we are such tiny specs of life when seen in the grand scheme of things" feeling you get while watching the stars in the backyard. It's also a visual poem, a meditation on choices you make in life, and an experiment in how far you can go with neglecting a hired composer without officially rejecting his work. It's a film you definitely need to let sink in before you can start thinking about judging it as a film, yet the sheer audacity of the project and it's ambition is enough to rate it highly.

It may not be for everyone, yet if this sort of film appeals to you, it's a definite recommendation.

Just for the record, it wasn't the build up towards the emergence-of-life sequence that bugged me (a bit!), because the whole first half an hour is near perfect. It's more the fact that after this sequence he abandons that surreal mood for a long period of time before returning to it towards the end, probably because those portions of the film were, for me, the awesomest.

It's like the film peaked too early. And before the sequence, the cosmos and nature is very much present in a subtle way, I felt he could've maintained that during the full duration. But I might be proven wrong on repeated viewings. And let's not be too negative, because it's a unique and brilliant experience!



Well, when he (finally) returned to that surreal mood in the end, which should be interpreted symbolically, was a return to that orgasm. It was like I had left the church without singing in the first half an hour, to return to the church in it's final climactic moments. I didn't care how out of this world it was, it was some kind of ethereal dream which I loved and I wanted it to keep going and going. And as an emotional climax, it felt very right to me. Even though you do need to search as an audience to find its meaning.