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Just saw Babel!

(I'm a conscientious pirate in that I only download DVD rips of movies I wouldn't bother seeing in the theater.)

I guess it didn't suck!

I wonder, though -- a police officer named Lieutenant Mamiya and a kid named Haruki -- someone's read Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle!
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Well, it isn't trying to be "Traffic".

If you compare the film to "Crash", however, it's a fucking masterpiece.

Go ahead, give it a try!
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Miami Vice and Children of Men are downloaded!

True story: Children of Men's Japanese title was "Tomorrow World".

No fuckin' joke! There were no commercials for it on TV at all. Just a huge poster with a picture of an exploding sun and a guy screaming and the title in katakana. I thought it was some kind of Dianetics propaganda, for serious. So I didn't bother.

Didn't realize it was a movie I was seriously excited about until, well, it was already on DVD and I could read the back of the case. What a joke.

In other news! After seeing the "Ocean's 13" 1080p trailer on the PlayStation Store the other day, I downloaded "Ocean's 12", and watched it last night.

Holy hell! I remember a friend of mine went to see this in the theater with his girlfriend, back when I was homeless. His assessment of the film was "It's just a sequel, man" accompanied with a little nose-laugh. I kind of wrote the movie off, though hey! Now that I've watched it, I do think it's pretty good!

Roger Ebert wrote a pretty awesome review of it, too, if you want to check that out.

As Ebert says, it really is something of a "meta-film", though not quite.

For more very excellent Soderberg -- if you haven't seen "The Limey", you most seriously probably should! "Out of Sight", too, is excellent. Probably one of my favorite movies of all-time.

I really like George Clooney T-T
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Watched "Children of Men" the other day!

Excellent staging! Nice Orson Welles-esque camera riffing! Long cuts! Cameras sliding through walls!

Nice story! Nice structure! Excellent command of set-piecing! Way to fill every frame with as much awesome happening stuff as possible! Good drama!

Absolutely terrible dialogue that sounds like it's being read by a blind man three buildings away. If this movie were an FPS released in 1999, it would probably be the greatest thing ever. :(

Once the belligerent mustached beret-wearing dood who referred to himself in third-person stepped on, that was when I started to think "Is this a film . . . or a first-person shooter?"

Also, is there an Ebert Movie Glossary term for a monologue regarding Something Completely Different, which character C suddenly begins speaking to the (main) character (A) as he looks out into the distance at character B (or some quietly awesome sight)?

This movie had one of those, and it was pretty wacky.

Also, very good computer-generated sunsets and sunrises. They almost looked real. Almost! The sun coming up during the long cut in which dude gets the preggo into the car was a pretty awesome touch.

So reminded of long takes, I'm going to watch "Rififi" tonight. Yeah!!
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so yeah i just watched "old boy".

man, that's a pretty good movie!

man!
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i read the manga a couple years back and really liked it. i wonder why i never watched the movie!

man!

i wish this director would do a film version of deathnote like uhhhh yesterday :(
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here

look at this page

http://www.apple.com/trailers/newline/rushhour3/

(dont bother with the trailer)

first person to point out the ONE THING i find most ridiculous about the imagery contained in the above link wins a photograph of a cookie
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on a whim (mostly thanks to that delightful youtube video), i downloaded the nicolas cage version of THE WICKER MAN and have just watched the first twenty-seven minutes.

man. it's, uhhh, kind of depressingly bad. not nearly as hilarious as the laugh-a-second youtube video makes it out to be :(
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You might as well go for the full house and watch Bottle Rocket, then :(

I'm watching Clint Eastwood's "THE GAUNTLET" over here right now. It's not very good!

Which makes it kinda great.
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Okay, I've just about watched a hundred movies in as many days, over here, and I'm still not satisfied.

I kind of want something that's between "Gone with the Wind" and Stanley Kubrick's heist film "The Killing". The closest film I can think of to the one I want to see is "The Talented Mr. Ripley", though I've already seen that one too many times. "Out of Sight", another of my favorite films of all-time, for example, is a little too joyous for what I'm looking for. "Jackie Brown", another masterpiece (and probably my absolute favorite film ever), is slightly too glib for my current thirst.

I want something that has charm and grace and elegance, though also some kind of intrigue that persists despite of or perhaps because of some cloudy, vague, "wrong" feeling. I'd also like something with some trickery in or about the ending! Moderate length (90 to 100 minutes) is ideal!

Tips are appreciated!!

This is all part of my pop-culture research. I won't bother saying what it's research for -- just that it's very important.
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Guys, "GRINDHOUSE" is being released as two separate movies in Japan. Which is really, really sad.

"DEATHPROOF" is coming out first, and then "PLANET TERROR" in October.

Luckily, my favorite theater in Tokyo will be playing both films together on August 24th -- which is a whole week before the release of "DEATHPROOF". So fuckin' thank god.

My only question is this -- the website for the films lists each of them as 100 minutes in length. What's the deal? Is this just the Japanese film industry lying through their teeth again? (They do it a lot.)

Because they could be, I don't know, padded out with extra, Japan-exclusive fake trailers, or something.

Also, I have downloaded GATTACA and will watch it soon.

"Le Samourai" just finished coming in as well. Shit yeah!
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Not only is my favorite theater playing the full-length GRINDHOUSE -- they're playing it next Friday night at FUCKIN THREE AM

fuck yeah

also, i have officially succeeded at downloading and burning the DVD ISO of "RIPLEY'S GAME". man, the first 4.22 GB downloaded in about six hours, and then the last .01 GB took three whole days. even though the two seeders with 100% were online the whole time.

torrenting is a weird business!!

i'm really looking forward to "RIPLEY'S GAME", for whatever that's worth.

going to watch LE SAMOURAI tonight after dinner!!

last night, i watched GATTACA, due to someone mentioning it in this thread and my remembering that i'd never seen it.

i . . . guess it was okay.

i also watched RONIN last night, deep into the night, for whatever reason. i guess RONIN is as good a movie to watch before LE SAMOURAI as anything else. i mean, they both take place in france and both have japanese-ish titles and are both about crooks, yeah?

RONIN is hella silly, though. i really like sean bean's character, and how he's dealt with so early in the movie without being killed. the whole circumstances around that scene are pretty great.

i love seeing bobby deniro speak french and steal shit -- "THE SCORE" had a pretty hella awesome theft sequence in it, too. and that took place in montreal, yeah, so more french.

when the man dies, that should be on his tombstone:

"ROBERT "BOBBY" DENIRO: SPOKE FRENCH, STOLE SHIT"
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Before I went to sleep, this torrent for THE PRESTIGE in 720p!!!!!!!!!!! was going at about 2 kb/s with an ETA of something like 27 days. now that I'm awake, it's done!!

wow!!

man!! i can't wait to watch this. mostly for the 720p, though yeah. man, 720p.

i have a window of it, actual size, open here on my desktop.

it's amazing, for the first time, to truly see how many pixels go into 720p. i guess 1080p really is, uh, a lot bigger.

i think i should burn this to a DVD just so i can watch it on my PS3.

kinda really wanted to see this movie when i saw some trailers last year. what with christopher nolan and michael caine and huge ackman and all.

okay, i don't really care for huge ackman, though i like spelling his name that way.

i also torrented ZODIAC.

i literally woke from sleep at about six in the morning thinking "yeah! those are two movies i can torrent!" i set up the torrents and went back to bed.

hell yeah.
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I kind of liked "The Prestige".

I kind of liked "Zodiac" a lot more.

Time to watch "The Fountain" tonight.

I don't exactly have super-high hopes.

Man, what other movies do I download now . . . !?
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To be perfectly honest, I'd rather Hollywood be playing with a magnetic poetry kit than continue to write screenplays using Microsoft Excel (Pirates of the Caribbean 3, et cetera).
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still haven't seen "there will be blood" or "no country for old men"

fucking japan

fucking japan, for god's sake

also, do you SONS OF FUCKERS realize

that indy 4 is being released

EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD on may 21st-23rd

. . . and then being released in japan on june 21st

what the fuck? seriously? who the fuck do they think they are!

link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0367882/releaseinfo
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watched "the assassination of jesse james by the coward robert ford" last night.

much, much better than i expected it'd be -- which is kind of saying a lot, seeing as i expected more out of it than i usually do from movies.

that is to say -- lately, i don't read anything about movies before obtaining and watching them. i just check ebert's star rating. if a movie gets four stars, i download it when it's on DVD.

in the case of "jesse james", you've got, uhh, the whole story curve right there in the title.

the flow of it is really nice. the pace is perfectly slow, until it's not.

the music is by nick cave!

that's something, right there.
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it (wild zero) is "good" in five minute stretches, or while hideously drunk.

i am a pretty huge guitar wolf fan, and even i find that film pretty damn exhausting.

check out TOKYO ZOMBIE if you want another fucking ridiculous japanese indie film. it's about a man (played by tadanobu asano) who uses the power of JUDO to survive a zombie outbreak in tokyo caused by an avalanche of a mountain of garbage, and how he is eventually drafted into a life of fist-fighting zombies in a battle arena for the entertainment of the rich citizens of tokyo.

there's one character who gets bitten by a zombie and doesn't realize that the zombie actually had dentures, so technically he wasn't really bitten by a zombie; he becomes a zombie anyway, though only psychologically.

it's kind of fucking retarded, though hey, it's based on a manga drawn by the guy who does the album covers for my friend's band (kama boiler being the name of the band). the title of the manga is, yes, taken from the blue hearts song "tokyo zombie", which is actually about pachinko.

another retarded film, called "mayonaka no yaji-san, kita-san", is about two samurais making the voyage from kyoto to tokyo at the end of the warring states period (in 1600) -- on board harleys. the music in said film is by ZAZEN BOYS, and is transcendentally excellent.

DVD box looks like this



soundtrack CD looks like this



actually, shit, that's not the soundtrack CD case! it's actually much simpler font than that, with no shadows! i guess it didn't meet amazon's "quality" standards, so they brushed up the "design" to make it look "flashy". it even says at the bottom "this is not the actually album art".

huh.
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can't wait to see iron man!

coming to japan in march 2009!!

wooooo yeah!!
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I just watched David Mamet's "Spartan". It was pretty excellent!

In addition, "The Spanish Prisoner" is one of my favorite films ever.

His "Heist" and "Glengarry Glen Ross" are also particular favorite films of mine.

"Ronin" doesn't count, really, though I like it too.

I am now watching Mamet's "House of Games", which I'd never seen before, and oh man, it's just delicious.

Deliciously delicious.

If there was a television channel that showed movies of this precise caliber 24/7, I'd pay for cable.
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