Movie Reviews part 13: How many movies will Jessica Chastain star in?

[lazarus]

I

I can't even begin to touch the torture debate. It doesn't explicitly endorse, but by not outright condemning it could appear to some to endorse because it depicts what was a successful end, even if that end was never achieved by torture (and in fact torture produces bad information).

Right, but considering Chastain's apparent state of mind

Spoiler

at the end of the film (not to mention Jason Clarke's halfway through),

the viewer is left with a "At what cost?" question more than a "Torture works! Go USA!" message.

 

[joyfulgirl]

like the book?

I actually tried to go back and edit after that post to say 'the story' instead of 'the movie' but it was too late and I figured nobody really gave a shit. I didn't read the book but I realize it probably wasn't just the movie.

 

[Dalton]

So, I'm seeing a movie this week for the first time in awhile. Should I see:

1. Zero Dark Thirty
2. Lincoln
3. Silver Linings Playbook.
4. Gangster Squad
5. Django
6. The Impossible
7. Life of Pi
8. Skyfall

 

[purpleoscar]

So, I'm seeing a movie this week for the first time in awhile. Should I see:

1. Zero Dark Thirty
2. Lincoln
3. Silver Linings Playbook.
4. Gangster Squad
5. Django
6. The Impossible
7. Life of Pi
8. Skyfall

Skip Gangster Squad. The rest are worth it.

 

[Dalton]

But Los Angeles is my destiny.

 

[anitram]

Right, but considering Chastain's apparent state of mind

Spoiler

at the end of the film (not to mention Jason Clarke's halfway through),

the viewer is left with a "At what cost?" question more than a "Torture works! Go USA!" message.

Spoiler

I think her state of mind at the end of the movie has nothing to do with "torture at what cost" and everything to do with a woman who gave up all manner of personal life for 12 years, who seemingly has no friends, no family, no partner and whose sole professional focus is over. I very much interpreted her inner struggle as "what do I do now" which I think is reinforced by the fact she couldn't answer the pilot when he asked her where she wanted to go. Didn't see any connection to the torture at all.

 

[deep]

So, I'm seeing a movie this week for the first time in awhile. Should I see:

1. Zero Dark Thirty
2. Lincoln
3. Silver Linings Playbook.
4. Gangster Squad
5. Django
6. The Impossible
7. Life of Pi
8. Skyfall

best thing on the list is Django
and Squad is probably the worst

 

[deep]

Ed Asner Adds His Voice to 'Zero Dark Thirty' Protest - NYTimes.com

interesting
this is a bit of a rorschach test

the movie is very middling with or without the torture, it is there, no doubt, it did happen and much worse than what is depicted.

of course the last 30 minutes are most exciting, it was exactally as I had seen it depicted before,

 

[bono_212]

Ed Asner is still alive? Awesome.

I haven't seen many of the nominated movies this year. Playing at our local theater is:

Gangster Squad
Zero Dark Thirty
A Haunted House
Django Unchained
The Hobbit
Promised Land
Texas Chainsaw
Les Mis
Parental Guidance
This is 40
The Guilt Trip
Lincoln


What should I go see after the game, or should I go rent Moonrise Kingdom from the Red Box?

 

[deep]

moonrise is pretty good, i had to see it a second time to more fully appreciate it.

I will just warn you off the disappointing movies, the two that are least deserving of your money and time are Gangster Squad and Promised Land

I would put these in the less deserving
A Haunted House
Parental Guidance
This is 40
The Guilt Trip


all the others have strong support from a good portion of the public.

 

[bono_212]

All signs point to Texas Chainsaw.

 

[lazarus]

Spoiler

I think her state of mind at the end of the movie has nothing to do with "torture at what cost" and everything to do with a woman who gave up all manner of personal life for 12 years, who seemingly has no friends, no family, no partner and whose sole professional focus is over. I very much interpreted her inner struggle as "what do I do now" which I think is reinforced by the fact she couldn't answer the pilot when he asked her where she wanted to go. Didn't see any connection to the torture at all.

I agree that yours is the main reading. She can't answer the pilot's question in the literal or figurative sense.

However, I think there's a subtext there when you consider how many people died or were harmed during the film.

 

[lazarus]

So, I'm seeing a movie this week for the first time in awhile. Should I see:

1. Zero Dark Thirty
2. Lincoln
3. Silver Linings Playbook.
4. Gangster Squad
5. Django
6. The Impossible
7. Life of Pi
8. Skyfall

You'll probably have the most fun at Django.

 

[lazarus]

I agree that yours is the main reading. She can't answer the pilot's question in the literal or figurative sense.

However, I think there's a subtext there when you consider how many people died or were harmed during the film.

Basically, I'm talking about a "hollow victory" theme.

 

[Irvine511]

it was exactally as I had seen it depicted before,

really? where?

 

[Irvine511]

Basically, I'm talking about a "hollow victory" theme.

i don't think the film was at all triumphalist -- it nicely stayed away from any sort of jingoism and turned it into a professional endeavor, which it is for CIA agents. i also did note that once the hideous Bushies left office in 2008 that we did a much, much better job of decimating Al Qaeda, and the decision to end the torture program likely helped (since torture doesn't work, it gives you bad intel).

 

[joyfulgirl]

I just watched the documentary How to Survive a Plague. Really amazing.

 

[bono_212]

Well Django's pretty fantastic. Probably a bit more violent than I was comfortable with (this coming from a pretty huge horror movie fan), but all in all, likely my 2nd or 3rd favorite of his films.

I really really want a gif of

Spoiler

Tarantino getting blown up by that dynamite.

 

[LemonMelon]

I can't really say anything about Django that hasn't already been said, I just found it extremely entertaining and well-acted, without as much dead space as Inglorious Basterds despite being a bit long itself. Surprisingly likable and sympathetic characters for the most part, and I actually found the violence fairly tame and mostly good "clean" fun when taken over the top, as is the Tarantino way. Kill Bill and Reservoir Dogs were much more brutal, though the body count here was insanely high.

Spike Lee's missing out.

 

[bono_212]

A few other thoughts of note, I thought Waltz was the best character in the film. You always knew that Foxx was on the edge, he wore his anger on his sleeve, but there were all of the subtleties from Waltz throughout the film. You could kind of sense that he either had no heart, or one that was far too large, and he just couldn't hold things in much longer.

Spoiler

Obviously it ends up being the latter, and when he shoots Leo and then delivers that line, "I couldn't resist" and the way he looks so sad, that is likely joining the pantheon of favorite film moments, for me.

 

[Saracene]

Les Miserables

I've never seen the stage show (though I read the book ages ago), and to be honest I'm not a huge fan of musicals in general, but I quite enjoyed this. Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman were fantastic (even if Hugh struggled a bit with the high register at times), and I felt that once the film switched the focus from them to the revolutionaries and the young lovers and too many sappy love songs my interest dipped somewhat. But then it picked up again so that was ok, and the final scenes had me seriously tearing up. I know that Russell Crowe copped some criticism, but for me the only real meh performance was the girl who played Eponine. Yes she can sing but I just found her acting really flat, which is a shame considering the tragic character she plays.

Spoiler

When she died, it was the only big death in the movie that left me completely unmoved.

 

[mobvok]

Parachuting in with a late (late!) review of The Hunger Games

This is a laz quote from last March

The film looked like crap, too, from the photography to the unimaginative design. Costumes were a joke.

Now, I'm not exactly a production design aficionado, but good lord did that lack of imagination hurt this film.

There was one great scene anchoring THG. During the pre-games festivities, amidst the green screen CGI and self-consciously "weird" costumes, the mood felt very antiseptic, like every aesthetic decision had passed through four layers of studio management, and really lacking a sense of dread. And then Katniss steps into the last room, alone with Lenny Kravitz, and the two of them just knock it out of the park with quiet panic once the final countdown starts, she steps back and forces herself to walk into the elevator, glances back at Kravitz, until she's pulled away up into the light......

....Only to have us wait for another 45 second countdown. 45 seconds! Sorry, I thought we were building momentum there for a second; carry on.

I know its a bit hacky, but I thought the movie suffered by choosing not to rely on first-person narration from Katniss- instead of letting us into her thoughts, having the announcers stare directly into the screen helpfully drop exposition about Super Bees was the worst of all worlds. If you're going to do that, you have to rip off The Truman Show: Ed Harris was a bastard, but he and his technicians were characters. Instead we cut away to Technician D in the control room pulling up a holo-Boar and tossing it around the screen like an Apple tablet commercial from 2020 and the Controller nods and smiles ominously and I know what function this scene serves, adapted from the novel, but now we're wasting time chewing through plot points rather than using precious screen time to say anything about the choices Katniss is making.

There were missed opportunities for potential, I guess is what I'm saying. Hopefully the series pulls out a Harry Potter-like renaissance now that it's a proven movie franchise.

Anyway. Jennifer Lawrence is awesome. Pick Liam Hemsworth, not the doughy-faced lummox.

 

[powerhour24]

i don't think the film was at all triumphalist -- it nicely stayed away from any sort of jingoism and turned it into a professional endeavor, which it is for CIA agents. i also did note that once the hideous Bushies left office in 2008 that we did a much, much better job of decimating Al Qaeda, and the decision to end the torture program likely helped (since torture doesn't work, it gives you bad intel).

Yemen and several countries in Africa beg to differ with the "decimated al Qaeda" song and dance the Obama administration sells, there's also a good number of militants who were at the very least trained by them if not currently involved (who knows really) fighting in Syria. Yeah, I'd say things are going swimmingly. Meanwhile we're making more enemies than ever and creating dangerous new precedents for warfare with our total drone war and cyber warfare. I'd like to believe we've put torture behind us, but even if that's true renditions haven't ended, so we're just letting allied countries torture suspects instead. Not to mention that Obama had his Attorney General publicly defend his right to kill US citizens they designate as enemy combatants without trial, and uses that power overseas.

The Bin Laden raid was trumpeted as this great victory during the election when it's probably the biggest fuck-up the current administration has had. It was all about grabbing a symbolic victory. The CIA used a Pakistani doctor undercover as a public health worker for an NGO to confirm Bin Laden's identity, didn't collaborate with Pakistan and then conducted a military operation on their soil without notifying them when they had confirmation it was Bin Laden. Pakistan isn't stupid, they wouldn't have harbored him. Instead of collaborating & taking him alive to stand trial we pulled the trigger on an op that essentially handed Afghanistan to the Taliban and left the people of Pakistan to suffer. Pakistan threw that doctor in prison for 30 years (he's lucky, under their law most expected him to be executed), closed the NATO supply lines to Afghanistan and began persecuting and killing NGO workers (who provide almost 100% of services to the people of Pakistan) sending established aid organizations fleeing. It made me sick to watch people trumping it up as some glorious moment of the past 4 years.

This administration inherited a shit situation, but it's more hawkish than ever and not doing us any favors diplomatically. Not to mention that we continue the bullshit reasons for military operations and leave horrendous situations like Syria to fester to the point where Assad's likely to use chemical weapons against his own people. We're such a shining example on the world stage.

 

[powerhour24]

So I think I'm sufficiently enough through my list of 2012 titles to see to declare Oslo, August 31 my favorite film of last year (and yes I get that it's technically a 2011 film, but it wasn't available then). For the second year in a row it's kind of hard for me to tell whether or not my personally-relating to a film has pushed it over any other films, but in both instance the filmmaking is also first class so it's not a controversial choice in any case.

As long as I can remember I've always had a complete disdain for drowning ones' problems in any sort of intoxicants, and you could I suppose reduce what he's suffering from to "upper-middle class problems", but I can relate almost completely to what drove the main character in this to that kind of lifestyle, I just chose to bear it in a different way and outside of the drug-element I've had nearly the same conversation he has with his best friend in the park, so that was eerie. But besides that, the acting of all involved is completely natural, the lighting, editing and camerawork minimalist enough to let the weight of the story and the performances do the talking, and the writing manages to imply so much history and exposition without the false detail-sowing writing that the majority of mainstream and even most independent narratives suffer from. It's a gut-punch of a film, but so well done.

 

[CrashedCarDriver]

killing bono

based on neil mccormick's story about how his life revolved around him and his brother Ivan, who jammed with Larry Mullen's then unnamed formative band

Although I should read the book, apparently the movie does no justice to the book

 

[U2Fanatic4ever]

A few other thoughts of note, I thought Waltz was the best character in the film. You always knew that Foxx was on the edge, he wore his anger on his sleeve, but there were all of the subtleties from Waltz throughout the film. You could kind of sense that he either had no heart, or one that was far too large, and he just couldn't hold things in much longer.

Spoiler

Obviously it ends up being the latter, and when he shoots Leo and then delivers that line, "I couldn't resist" and the way he looks so sad, that is likely joining the pantheon of favorite film moments, for me.

I frickin love Waltz in this and IB too.. wow...

 

[lazarus]

Finally got around to popping in my Criterion disc of Jacques Tati's Play Time, simply one of the greatest things I've ever seen.

I can't imagine how one can even begin to appreciate what's going on here by seeing this on a small television; if you don't have a large-screen TV or a projector there might not be any point.

This is like a feature-length version of one of those satires of technology/modern convenience cartoons made in the 50's and 60's that would run in-between Tom & Jerry episodes. While not really a silent film, there's very little dialogue between people and most of the lines are just part of the overall soundtrack (brilliantly dominated by sound effects). Tati's iconic Mr. Hulot is the default main character, but he's really part of a large ensemble of French locals and American tourists trying to function amidst the labyrinths of metal and glass.

There's not really a plot either, though the film is divided into clear sections: an airport terminal, an office building, a showroom for new gadgets/furniture, a modern apartment, a new restaurant (the longest and funniest part of the film), and a traffic circle.

Back to the size of the frame: Shooting in 70mm and never going in for close-ups, Tati packs his images with so much information, your eyes are just free to dart around and pick up all the little character work and gags happening at once. I imagine the more you see this film the more you'll notice. I laughed out loud more times than I can remember, and was constantly marveling at the design and choreography of what was going on.

A one-of-a-kind film that I can't imagine anyone today being able to pull off.

 

[Lancemc]

Wait, first time seeing it ever or just the Criterion disc?

 

[lazarus]

Never seen it at all.

I have seen Mon Oncle and parts of M. Hulot's Holiday.

 

[Lancemc]

Surprising. It's definitely my favorite Tati film, and by a considerable margin. Mon Oncle has some good visual gags, but it's a little too dry, lacking much of the romanticism of Playtime. M. Hulot's Holiday is a lot better, but something like the little brother to the former. Slight, but in a charming way. Of course anything comes off as slight compared to Playtime. Trafic, I found forgettable, couldn't tell you how that holds up.