The Last Movie You Saw...

[scrambledpotato]

Senna


Sorry to spam this thread, but I do want to steer you guys towards this documentary. It's about Ayrton Senna, an F1 driver in the 80's. When you look at Formula 1 and the records kept, it's pretty apparent that Michael Schumacher is the best driver ever. But if you walk down the pit lane and ask the drivers, team owners, F1 corespondents who the best is, Ayrton Senna is the one they all name. The guy was brilliant behind the wheel, absolutely brilliant.


This documentary follows him in chronological order with zero "person on a couch talking" interviews, so it feels like a biopic. To see him grow from a young and supremely talented driver into a force of nature, into his rivalry with Alain Prost (another legend); you see the super-human characteristics he had behind the wheel. But at the same time you watch his very human side, like his temper, and his supreme devotion to his religion.


Just a few things; I have never cried at a movie, but I cried twice at this one. Once when he won the Brazilian GP (his home race) for the first time with a broken gear box. He had to wrestle the car around the corners for the last laps of the race and destroyed his shoulders and arms doing it. Getting out of the car he didn't want anyone to touch him because he was in so much pain, but in the midst of the frantic celebration around he called out to his dad to come hug him because he won the race. The other time I cried was that horrible day in Imola.


As an F1 fan, I felt they could have done more to show how borderline super-human he really was. He was amazing in the rain, absolutely amazing- at Donnington Park he made up 5 places in the opening lap. It looked like CGI when he did it. The other time was during a race a driver crashed into a wall - Senna stopped his car, jumped out and ran to help. In the middle of a race.


If you love Formula 1, then you've probably seen this already, honestly. If you don't love F1 but love racing, then this movie will be an amazing glimpse into a culture you might only know in passing. If you don't like racing then you still need to see what happens when we as humans somehow transcend what our peers are capable of, and show off the potential of what we can do.


Highly recommended.

[Deke]

@Scrambled


I also enjoyed 6 Days to Air. I always noticed South Park was very topical, but I never knew that was why. It was crazy to see that process.


Also, Senna has popped up on Netflix for me multiple times, but I've yet to check it out. I'll definitely have to now!

[scrambledpotato]

@Deke I knew South Park was done relatively last minute, but it's mind blowing that they get that show out like that every time. I wonder how high the employee turnover rate is because of the stress.


And I can't recommend Senna enough. My wife and I drove 3 hours to Detroit just to see it in theaters because it wasn't playing near me.

[Cannon]

WATCHMEN


This was my third viewing, but I hadn't watched it since its 2009 Blu-Ray release so this was a big refresher. It is way better than I remember. I loved it then for being an R-rated superhero film that's source material was a beautifully dark statement about humanity. The film is gorgeous to look at thanks to Zack Snyder's visual fidelity to the original comics while loading the screen with lush color and dark texture that wasn't in the graphic novel. The rain, Dr. Manhattan's skin, the slow-motion splintering of breaking doors, and the cracking of bones are showcased in rich style. Zack Snyder noted Se7en as an inspiration for the transfer process of taking the graphic novel into his film (which runs 3 hrs 6mins in its Director's Cut form). This comparison is a welcomed and fair influence based on how dark and grotesque the film is willing to be, all while loading an endless amount of quotable philosophy and distress into the script. The unforgettable title sequence, featuring Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" over scenes of American pop culture in the Watchmen timeline (such as who filmed the moon landing or who really shot JFK), received universal acclaim.

The film clearly had a focus on its audio as well. The majority of the film's soundtrack was selected based on songs actually referenced in the graphic novel and Tyler Bates crafts a hard-boiled , thoughtful, and melancholy score that gets to the pensive doubts and steps effortlessly into the very well-recorded kicks, gunshots, and crowd riots.

The characters are all at the most intense moments of their lives, but the original novel is perhaps best praised for the creative and compelling alternate 1985 that they live in. Nixon is going strong, the nuclear war is coming, and vigilantes were once a fixture of global justice. This could have been taken in the direction of the average PG-13 summer comic book films that elect for enormous spectacle, but never go into depths of darkness, harsh dialogue, sexuality, and savagery thanks to their limits in trying to appeal to the market. While The Dark Knight calls on true questions of character that make me love it as a crime film instead of a comic book film, Watchmen answered greater curiousities for myself as horrifying the audience was sometimes exactly what it needed to do and successfully did.

I love the film more than I ever expected after my most recent viewing. The film conveyed that their world was a nightmare, unless they were willing to reap the toll needed to change it.

Dr. Manhattan is haunting, The Comedian's parody is noteworthy to any of us, and the rest of the love in a hurricane, moral ruins, and questionable beauties of society play out marvelously and stylishly like no other.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRMjr1UKa5k

[james2]

Ddjango Unchained. awesome.

[sanjaygolf]

Ddjango Unchained. awesome.

Are both the Ds silent? Hehe

[Leslie Chow]

One 'D' for Jaimie Foxx, the second one for Franco Nero, who made an appearance in the film.

[james2]

lol that's good stuff

[Cannon]

Last Year in Marienbad

It's gorgeous. It's haunting, dark, romantic, rich, European, love, and opulence. I just loved watching it. I really enjoy the ornamental decor of French and European palaces. The film is set at some sort of spa hotel in the countryside, apparently a former palace. The camera work is just excellent at highlighting how it the style inside and out drips with beautiful art from a bygone era. There's such an old and lost sense to the oversized halls and it makes it somewhat frightening to see how little the activity of the guests does to liven up the frozen luxury palace.

It is eery, desirable, mesmerizing. So many things that I enjoyed seeing. Like

The film is very intense with a dark and heavy pounding organ score throughout the entire film. The sweeping views of the hall suddenly seem like they are leading you to a crash or horrific crime around the endless corridors instead of allowing a sense of certainty in the design.

The people are all dressed in formal attire as if there is a ball or concert at any given minute during the day. It sometimes looks like the creepiest Armani ad from the 60s you could imagine. Chanel designed the female leads dresses, with an intention to create the look of past silent films with an uneasy distance. They strike such photogenic poses that are so clearly unnatural as they hold still for several shots and stand silent. Like watching photographs of a ballroom that burned down a few hours after they were taken.




The film's influence is still prevalent, having inspired a recent Chanel collection by Karl Lagerfeld, Lars Von Trier's Melancholia, and the imagery of Lana Del Rey's Château de Fontainebleau shoot for her "Born to Die" music video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bag1gUxuU0g

[Idle_Hands]

Last Year in Marienbad

Marienbad's great--this makes me want to see it again--but potential viewers should be forewarned that there's very little plot to speak of and lots of ponderous dialogue and camera-work. But please don't be put off by this fact: the film is so engaging that watching it is actually a pretty good way to get used to watching "difficult," art house-type films if you're not used to doing so.

[Cannon]

Marienbad's great--this makes me want to see it again--but potential viewers should be forewarned that there's very little plot to speak of and lots of ponderous dialogue and camera-work. But please don't be put off by this fact: the film is so engaging that watching it is actually a pretty good way to get used to watching "difficult," art house-type films if you're not used to doing so.

Very true. The screenwriter sort of sums up the two groups of viewers that come out of seeing the film -

Robbe-Grillet in the introduction to his screenplay: "Two attitudes are then possible: either the spectator will try to reconstitute some 'Cartesian' scheme - the most linear, the most rational he can devise - and this spectator will certainly find the film difficult if not incomprehensible; or else the spectator will let himself be carried along by the extraordinary images in front of him [...] and to this spectator, the film will seem the easiest he has ever seen: a film addressed exclusively to his sensibility, to his faculties of sight, hearing, feeling."

Largely due to having seen Melancholia and with "Born to Die" being my favorite video thanks to some gorgeous light manipulation in the French palace, I came in with an appreciation of the scenery and visual design as if stepping into a non-linear montage or a showcase that preceded any understanding of the story to come. As the film went on, I came to catch that there was not a right way to outline what "happened".

Since I wasn't trying to make it into a story that it wasn't, I just enjoyed the impressions immensely throughout the film.

Melancholia



"Born to Die"

[Cannon]

The edit timer is a bit short for me. Anyways, I think these have stunning imagery that is clearly inspired by the film and I recommend them all if you appreciate the film itself.


Château de Fontainebleau - "Born to Die"
Melancholia Trailer

[Cannon]

The Hobbit

The film is not about humanity or morality like Lord of the Rings, but rather a more simple accepting unity and bravery for an adventure. I have doubts that this trilogy will garner awards, universal acclaim, or even viewer's tears by the time it ends because there just seems to be something much sillier, shallower, and cinematically low about the essential pieces of the presentation.

It lacks the emotional depth and successfully serious tones of its predecessor, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. There's too much CGI, the dwarf prosthetics are distractingly over-the-top, and there's a cartoonish nature to many of the scenes as the characters are thrown about and bumping into things. The sky was plagued by the awful mistake of The Dark Knight Rises, being unrealistically colored using CGI. It actually outdoes the peachy autumn sun of The Dark Knight Rises by creating the blaze of a poorly oversaturated Photoshop job while the shadows of the scenes are given a contrasting blue tint. The frequency of this effect removes the pleasing nature of those complimentary colors and instead draws my mind to the impossibility of the scene colorings.

Being shot far more in-studio and with less set mini-models and actors, the goblins lose some believability, and the backgrounds are never too present. There's a very frequent sense that, like the cheesy techniques used by most superhero films now, such as The Amazing Spider-Man, the filmmakers didn't mind not really filming all that much of an actual series of events. Instead, the actors are sitting in pieces of a set, and then a forest or overly bold sky is placed in the background.

Perhaps thanks to the new 3D and 48fps format, the film also struggles with even remotely convincing night cinematography. There is a tint of heavy false blue with an artificially harsh spotlight effect on the characters. Since 3D requires much brighter filming, with darkness added in post-production, I wonder if the outcome was by mistake or design.

The story is disappointingly light as well. It feels like there wasn't enough of a beginning to tell, so they showed the entire beginning of a story and started gnawing at the journey which left it at a somewhat less compelling end. The characters are much more in line with children's film dialogue and there's little dark content for their internal selves to deal with.

But all those cartoonish setbacks aside, the movie is a youthful film with heart in that universe, and an unbeatable group of cameos from the legendary trilogy. I sure miss the real New Zealand / Middle-Earth sunny days and dark nights, but I'll be on board for the next two parts despite the stretching of film-able material it is clearly going to take for them to manifest.

[LesserBlackDog]

I saw The Hobbit last week and actually thought it was a much more enjoyable film than any of The Lord of the Rings movies (which I really liked when they first came out). The film certainly looked better than a lot of modern sci-fi and fantasy movies, undoubtedly owing to the use of mostly real landscape backgrounds and a blend of CGI and traditional special effects rather than 100% CGI. I really don't agree with you on the fakeness of the movie's look - but then, I watched it in plain ol' 2D. I refuse to watch any movie in 3D because of how lousy it makes the film look.

Overall I thought the tone was much more appropriate to the subject matter - the movie was more lighthearted and didn't take itself nearly as seriously as The Lord of the Rings movies, which often felt both pompous and ponderous. Having re-read the book this fall (never liked it when I was a kid... enjoyed it slightly more as an adult), I was pleasantly surprised by how true the movie was to the relatively small number of scenes that actually came from the book.

I still feel it was a mistake to try to stretch a children's book into three full-length films. Two might have been more plausible, but I have a really hard time seeing how much more stuff they're going to find to fill up the dead space in the next two films.

[greg_s]

The only newer movie I've seen recently was Django. Pretty standard Tarantino in my opinion. Not my favorite of his, but it was enjoyable. He is one of the few people that could successfully make a movie like Django, much like Inglorious Basterds.