[Shapermc]

I recently watched The Prestige and The Science of Sleep. Both were good.

The Prestige was much better than I expected it to be. I liked how the director set up the revelation of the plot much like how a magic trick is set up. Perhaps the ending reveals a bit too much, but it's a good ride, and Bowie did an amazing job.

The Science of Sleep was also very good. Probably one of the best dream movies I've ever seen and has an uncanny ability to make you question what's dream and what's the main character being crazy in real life. Probably the best combination of reality and dreamality combination since Brazil. I really want to watch this again now.
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The bad sleep well at The Gamer's Quarter

[Ebrey]

[rabite gets whacked!]

oh, shaper (and everyone else. Everyone.)

if you didn't know yet, Criterion's releasing Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff in May. It's probably the best movie I've ever seen. Be there.

[Tim]

Black Sheep looks nice.
http://www.blacksheep-themovie.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMp8mSRiHow

[Dracko]

Fuck me in reverse, they're doing a Harlan Ellison movie.
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[Ebrey]

[Dracko]

Only to you.
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[boojiboy7]

Well, it is pretty clear he is involved in the movie.

And yeah, the guy is a douche, but believe me, among a lot of people, he is much more known as a writer. Yeah, internet nerds know him because he got in a fight with X Y and Z, but they thankfully are not everyone.

Oh, and you can thank Cleveland for Ellison. Man, this place spawns some odd shit.

[Ebrey]

[boojiboy7]

Part of the problem you have is that Ellison didn't write novels. He wrote a lot of fucking amazing short stories. Like short stories so amazing you cannot be a sci fi fan and not read them.

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is a good start, but fuck, there are a ton out there.

You need ot realize that much of sci fi is in short story form. Hell, PKD wrote some amazing ones, as did Heinlein and Asimov. To have not read Ellison (at least his best stuff) is kinda a shame.

For you to only have heard of him from PA makes me sad. Actually, that whole PA thing made me really depressed for awhile. Ellison is letting the movie call him a monster because he knows he is one. He won't lie about that at all. He is just a moster that thinks that he is right. He wouldn't pretend he wasn't mean to the PA guys, but he also felt they deserved it. I don't necceessarily agree with the guy; I don't really have a stance on it, but to judge his output on the basis of his actions is to miss a lot of good stuff, and is entirely hypocritical to say the least. PKD was a good writer, but from what I have read on his life, he was kinda a dick too (no pun intended), just not as vocal a one.

Ellison has been remembered across the decades already. I Have No mouth has long been regarded as a classic short story, and was originally published in 67. Will he be rememberd at the level of Asimov? No, probably not, but he could easily end up with a PKD-like status is the sci-fi canon. Hell, he already pretty much has that with many sci fi people I know. Just because you haven't heard of him doesn't lessen his abilities at all.

[sync-swim]

PKD is the closest thing the U.S. have to a perennial icon of New Wave SF. Literary critics would rather forget that J.G. Ballard started out writing and editing for New Worlds and Michael Moorcock and M John Harrison are as unknown in the States now as they were in the 60s.

Harlan Ellison is the only other U.S. New Wave patriarch, save maybe Zelazny. Ellison has a bit of a psychotic complex about intellectual property, though.

[Ebrey]

[Predator Goose]

[boojiboy7]

So it's Ellison's fault that nobody has made any movie out of his stuff? That means he has aged poorly? I am not quite understanding what you are saying there. And it isn't like all the PKD movies have exactly been wonderful. He does make fertile ground for movies, though, but reading I Have No Mouth or Deathbird, I can see why no one has tried to film them. Doesn't make them not good stories.

And yeah, some of PKD's books haven't aged particularly well and aren't regarded as classics, hence why they fell out of print for quite some time while his general popularity waned. Yes, Androids has been a perenial favorite of sci fi and film fans, but he wrote something like 50 novels, and all but about 5 of them disappeared for a decade or so there.

What I am trying to say is give some Ellison a try. While he has written quite literally over a thousand short stories, he himself has participated in making "The Essential Ellison" which is about as good a place to start reading him as any. As a short story writer, he is generally regarded up there with Dick by fans of the genre and form.

Yes, he makes an ass of himself regularly. Oh well. The fact that he only gets mentioned as such proves to me how so few people are actually well read on sci fi. I can understand his intellectual property worries, given that his primary group of readers are dorks who use the internet to get lots of stuff fo free. Arehis worries misplaced? maybe, but again, oh well.

[CubaLibre]

300?


300.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[rabite gets whacked!]

Recent additions:

Seven Swords (Tsui Hark, 2005), a colossally epic legend of a movie. I think there's a conscious realization by Hark that with an ensemble of 9+ characters, certain given elements of film can just be neglected entirely. So he skips over the traditional exposition of "how did they get there?" instead just cutting from the leaving to the having arrived, with all introductions removed.
Instead, he spends time taking all his characters out to watch the sunrise, accompanied by some of the most dramatic pieces of the score. He spends about 10 seconds giving backstory to one of the swordsmen (but an entirely effective 10 seconds that fully reinforces everything we see of the character), and 5 minutes on one of the village horses.
I saw a review that called this movie the preeminent example of the sentimentality of wuxia, and though I don't have much background in the genre it certainly read that way to me. It's a very alien experience for my western self, admittedly, and it's one of few movies that's struck me with a desire to comb through all the commentary I can find. A fascinating study of violence.

Flushed Away (some dudes who aren't Nick Park, unfortunately, 2006), which is about 30% Aardman and 70% Dreamworks, a percentage I really wish was reversed. Couldn't they at least have ingratiated themselves with Pixar or something?

Stray Dog (Akira Kurosawa, 1949), I'm not sure there's much to say about this except it's great. The ending in particular, in its sudden departure from the city, which reminded me quite a bit of elements from Rashomon, which I'll really need to rewatch soon. But hey, right up there with Seven Swords in that whole condemnation of the effects of violence on man.

The Transporter 2 (Louis Leterrier, 2005), which is just violence all the time, most haphazardly. It references the first a few times, but kinda halfheartedly, and it never approaches the heights or depths that one did. So at least they ditched the romance aspect and the HK wimp-out of the ending (same thing Leterrier failed with in Unleashed), but the whole movie was a little generic and lacking and it totally underutilized Jason Statham. He remains best represented by Crank. Leterrier will apparently be making a Hulk sequel next year, and unless he figures a few things out before then I'm thinking it'll be trash on the level of Daredevil & co.

[Wall of Beef]

Electra Glide in Blue (1974) : Robert Blake plays a motorcycle cop in Arizona, desperatly wanting to become a Homicide detective he gets his chance when he impresses a detective when he belives that a hermit who was thought to have killed himself, was actually murdered.

The movie is a pretty awesome, much more different than I thought it was going to be. Not a standard cop movie at all, lots of "counter culture" film stylistic choices, music ques, and shot set ups.

First thing I have ever seen with Robert Blake in it, I was impressed.
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[Shapermc]

To the patrons of this thread heed my words:

Since I’ve already made my order and you can’t take my extra stock of criterion films, I might as well let you in on the 40% off sale for Criterion Collection DVDs over at Deep Discount DVD. My haul includes many films which I’ve been looking at getting for a while but not for $30+

Beauty and the Beast
Bicycle Thief
Branded to Kill
Double Suicide
Good Morning
High and Low
Le Samourai
Lower Depths: Two Films By Akira Kurosawa / Jean Renoir
Naked Lunch
Peeping Tom
Sanjuro
Tokyo Drifter

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The bad sleep well at The Gamer's Quarter

[winkerwatson]

Peeping Tim had quite a bad print if I recall.

The barebones R2 was better in this regard and there is an imminent special edition too you know dogg
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tim?

[Shapermc]

[CubaLibre]

Black Snake Moan: just when you think music can't save souls any more.

Wonderful.

And Justin Timberlake didn't suck! I'm really starting to like that kid. He could go places.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[winkerwatson]

[Wall of Beef]

Riki Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991): This is based on the version of the DVD that Netflix sent me, which may not be the "best" version, considering how awful the dubbing was and the fact that the name is spelled two different ways on the disc, but pronounced different from those both in the movie. But I would not want it any other way, this movie was FUCKING RAD DUDE! Ricky/Riki-oh/Rikiho, kicks the living shit out of a whole bunch of gang member prisoners, guards, and wardens. Some prisoners are SUPER PRISONERS have abilities beyond what normal prisoners have. Either way Ricky/Riki-oh/Rikiho punches through them as if they were made of Cake, cake filled with red kool-aid. One guy gets the top half of his head punched off, its lands on the floor with a brain sliding out of it. Ricky/Riki-oh/Rikiho also takes massive damage, and just heals up, they don't explain that, he just does. The dubbing in this movie is awesome too, from what I can tell they had a total of maybe 4 voice actors. When prisoners talk to each other its just one guy talking to himself, sometimes plugging his nose or just talking louder. Its great.

Oh and a dog gets kicked in half!
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[PianoMap]

Oh FUCK YES RIKI OH.

My favorite bit is when he gets his arm slashed in battle, and digs out his cut tendons so he can tie them back together with his teeth.
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[Shapermc]

I've been commenting on the criterion haul over at my live journal if anyone feels like following them. So far I've only done peeping tom.
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The bad sleep well at The Gamer's Quarter

[parkbench]

Just saw A Scanner Darkly tonight with my girlfriend. It was fantastic. I can only say that it touched me deeply--or at least, jilted me deeply. It dredged up bad memories. I practically cried at the end.

I'm a huge fan of this kind of meandering, surrealist style. I definitely have to watch this over again, and I'm pissed at myself that I have to mail this thing back so soon.
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metafilter vs. youtube comments

[evnvnv]

[parkbench]

Yeah, the book was 'overall' a better experience, perhaps, but Darkly was a visual orgy for me.

I agree that I was kind of irked by Downey and Harrelson's characters. I'm not going to say they were 'miscast' necessarily, but they definitely could have done a better job. When I found out Linklater did Dazed & Confused too, I understood this more.
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metafilter vs. youtube comments

[kiken]

[Ebrey]

[remote]

I just got around to watching Serenity the other night. When viewed from afar, you know, this movie appears to be a fairly cliched bundle of sci-fi trappings -- drawing most significantly from anime like Cowboy Bebop and Outlaw Star, and (if you want to skew this in a really bad way) other live-action movies like The Fifth Element, Equilibrium, and Oblivion -- yet it wins me over because it has its own heart and a cast of characters that I had already come to love in Firefly. This cast is what sets it apart from its influences and makes it so much better. Nathan Fillion alone had totally won me over with his role in Slither last year, so catching up with Mal, the character that he is now most widely recognized for, was a lot of fun -- he brings a distinct, mischievous personality to his characters.

This is actually a little bit strange, because I don't think I've ever cared much for Joss Whedon or any of his work before. I enjoyed the first season of Buffy well enough, but I never kept up with it, nor have I ever seen a single episode of Angel. His screenplay for Alien Resurrection was completely out of key with the rest of that franchise (not that the first three films didn't have their own unique aesthetic flavors), which probably should've remained confined to the direction that the comics and novel adaptations had taken after Alien 3. In fact, the crew of Serenity bears quite a bit in common with the crew of the Betty (including the fucked up superhuman stowaways, River and Ripley, and the threats that they pose to their shipmates), and in their own world entirely of Whedon's own creation (not accounting for its inspirations (OK, the reavers may as well be aliens)) they don't seem quite so out of place. What didn't quite work for the Alien universe is right at home here. Whedon's vision of the future is fun, too, where American and Chinese cultures have collided and are the most dominant. Actually, it's pretty simpleminded sci-fi fare, but it's enough to provide a nice background for its characters.

Anyway, I think it's great. It has some nice things to say about love, loyalty, and belief.

Tonight I'll watch The Descent.
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[rabite gets whacked!]

Lately:

The Host (Bong Joon-Ho, 2006)
Had a couple flaws in my mind, mostly to do with overuse of slo-mo and some pacing problems (especially toward the end), but God. Damn. The more I think about it, the more I realize how poignant it was. Even the creature itself was presented sympathetically; playful and natural as something that could have nearly been in a "boy-finds-secret-pet-monster" movie, rather than a "kill kill kill destroy" type of thing. And the presentation and immediate undercutting of so many hollywood stereotypes, and the family movie nature of the whole thing. I have a feeling that the next time I watch it I'll like it even more than Memories of Murder, which is a major statement for me. Bong is now easily among my top 10 working directors.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodóvar, 1988)
And speaking of those 10, Pedro's certainly high on the list as well. WotVoaNB feels like a minor work of his, honestly, with less wild passion than Matador and less zaniness than Law of Desire, there isn't all that much explicitly (punchily?) memorable before the wild climactic setpieces, but it flows pretty well. After the beginning, I was planning on tracking the use of voice throughout, but I got absorbed by the acting and racing pace pretty quickly and just went along for the ride. What a fun ride!

Ride the High Country (Sam Peckinpah, 1962)
I'm starting my Peckinpah journey with this one, kind of his first "real" film ('61s The Deadly Companions was edited to ill effect by the producer after Sam was fired). It pulls a fast one, starting with a "grizzled old timers return to the game for one last shot" standard setup, but the requisite young buck they hire turns out to be the center of the movie, as it turns into an education in morality and redemption and the follies of youth, and the original job is abandoned entirely in favor of a more important mission. The end is just beautiful austerity.


The Beach (Danny Boyle, 2000)
I've been avoiding this for years, because I have great respect for Boyle and, as I'd never heard a single good thing about it, I feared being tremendously let down. I can only chalk up the hate to post-Titanic Leo backlash, cause it was really, really good. It's really Apocalypse Now, with the military replaced by tourists, and an awareness of the sillyness of that very concept, and it works. The critics seem to have lost track of fact that this is an indictment of its tourist characters (much as Apocalypse Now) is of the military) as their assert their ego in the destruction of the provincial third world.
Also: fantastic video game sequence alert!

Election (Alexander Payne, 1999)
This is pretty good. I might have enjoyed it more had I not recently seen Todd Field's phenomenally more interesting treatment of Tom Perrotta's writing with Little Children. Much like his later Sideways, the main actors all nail their parts, but the whole thing kind of feels like Payne lacked much imagination to go beyond the script. But anything in Perrotta's world has this addictive nasty glee, and that comes through well, even if it feels here a bit too much like the MTV production it is. I'm going to have to read some of his books soon.
PS: Apparently there's another (made for TV) Perrotta adaptation by Peyton Reed, of the delicious Down With Love and Bring It On. I must see this!
PPS: Apparently Peyton Reed dropped the ball entirely and directed that Jennifer Anniston bullshit The Break Up. What the fuck, dude?

[shrugtheironteacup]

I hope your Peckinpah journey takes you through Straw Dogs, rabite gets whacked!

One of my all-time favorite movies, and I'm always interested to hear someone's opinion of it.
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[rabite gets whacked!]

Indeed it shall! It'll take me through just about everything but Major Dundee, I expect. I actually look forward to getting to Convoy most (I'm taking them chronologically), because I do so much like the idea of a psychedelic flameout piece on truckers in the desert!

[Ebrey]

[remote]

Oh what come on how can you not like Kaylee
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[Wall of Beef]

[Dracko]

A classic in every sense of the word. Though I'm more of a fan of Cross of Iron.
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[CubaLibre]

I thought Serenity was fantastic. Far from being a collection of cliches, I thought it pretty much went out of its way to controvert cliches before they happened, or even suggest them and then turn them on their heads for humor. ("If I'm not back in twenty minutes, you take this ship... and you come and rescue me.")

It's also best if you don't think of it as science fiction, because it isn't really, except in appearance.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[sawtooth]

my favorite riki-oh scene is where ricky gets tortured by getting set in a ring of nails while razor blades are stuffed in his mouth and he gets slapped until they start poking out of his cheeks. It's a pretty rad movie!

I liked the prestige well enough. It's only as half as clever as it thinks it is, though.

A scanner darkly was... okay. I really wanted to like it, having no history with linklater or philip k dick (aside from knowledge about the latter and having watched some of his other book-to-movie adaptations, which hardly count). I liked the laid-back drug paranoia and silliness, but it all felt really meandering and unfocused (apparently linklater left out the funniest scenes?)(because yeah, even at its funniest it wasn't very funny). I wanted more plot to it—you're barely aware that arctor is supposed to cracking up over the fact that he has to surveil himself 24/7.
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[shrugtheironteacup]

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