droid

Well-known member
Hereditary. Tons of hype about this earlier in the year. Similar to Rosemary's baby in some ways. For most of the film its a family drama with creepy undertones and some awful displays of grief and anguish. Goes batshit crazy towards the end with a goetian necromantic twist. Expects a lot from the audience, but attentive viewers are rewarded. A long way from being the 'new exorcist', but definitely a decent horror film with some unexpected twists and a few layers to peel back.
 

luka

Well-known member
Anyone seen a film called LORD OF ILLUSIONS?
I bought it on dvd a year or two ago but forgot to watch it. Looks pretty cool.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah that was on telly recently and we watched it for the second time. I didn't find it quite as effective as the first time maybe cos I still remembered enough to take away the visceral reaction of surprise I had the first time but on the whole it still worked and was a good film.
 

catalog

Well-known member
i like the fact that as a dystopian vision of the UK, it feels spot on. something about the unrelenting greyness and morning/twilight. And also the general ocuntryside. Cos we're so used to seeing american visions of the future? I feel like it's one of the best 'landscape' films about the UK since witchfinder general
 

version

Well-known member
Enemy of the State was on last night, interesting to see something from '98 dealing with the NSA, surveillance and privacy given what came later. Apparently the NSA weren't particularly pleased with it.

An episode of PBS' Nova titled "Spy Factory" reports that the film's portrayal of the NSA's capabilities are fiction: although the agency can intercept transmissions, connecting the dots is difficult.[12] However, in 2001, then-NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden, who was appointed to the position during the release of the film, told CNN's Kyra Phillips that "I made the judgment that we couldn't survive with the popular impression of this agency being formed by the last Will Smith movie."[13] James Risen wrote in his 2006 book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration that Hayden "was appalled" by the film's depiction of the NSA, and sought to counter it with a PR campaign on behalf of the agency.[14]

In June 2013 the NSA's PRISM and Boundless Informant programs for domestic and international surveillance were uncovered by The Guardian and The Washington Post as the result of information provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. This information revealed capabilities such as collection of Internet browsing, email and telephone data of not only many Americans, but citizens of other nations as well. The Guardian's John Patterson argued that Hollywood depictions of NSA surveillance, including Enemy of the State and Echelon Conspiracy, had "softened" up the American public to "the notion that our spending habits, our location, our every movement and conversation, are visible to others whose motives we cannot know."
 

version

Well-known member
i like the fact that as a dystopian vision of the UK, it feels spot on. something about the unrelenting greyness and morning/twilight. And also the general ocuntryside. Cos we're so used to seeing american visions of the future? I feel like it's one of the best 'landscape' films about the UK since witchfinder general

28 Days Later had something similar going on.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yesterday we were just about to go to bed when a film started with the credits saying it was directed by James Franco and based on a book by Cormac McCarthy- now (I realise that I'm probably in the minority here) I really rate Franco and I'm a big fan of McCarthy but I'd never heard of this film so we had to stay up until 6am and watch it to the end. The film is called Child of God and MILD SPOILERS FOLLOW it's utterly bleak, more so than pretty much any film I can immediately think of in fact. The first scene reduces the main character to a state of utter heartrending defeat leaving him abject and screaming as land he believes belongs to him is auctioned off. From this position at the bottom of society he heads lower, falling into a desperate existence living in a hut and trying to steal food from local homesteads while avoiding persecution from the sheriff... and then it gets worse... and worse and worse. The inevitable and tragic trajectory is always downwards to total barbaric depravity. The film has reviews best described as mixed - which seems harsh, to me the film turns entirely on the performance of the main guy and I found him convincing and also effective at winning you over to his side rather than that of the society that has rejected him, even when he has degenerated to the stage of killing women and raping their corpses... nice soundtrack of mainly instrumental Appalachian (I think) folk stuff too. On the whole it reminded me of the Herzog film where he goes to America and everything gets worse and then he kills himself, or maybe Balabanov's adaptation of Morphine - basically films in which things get to a terrible situation and then get worse and which leave you the viewer feeling trapped and desperate. So if you wanna be depressed and have nightmares I unconditionally recommend this film.
 

droid

Well-known member
Im ambivalent on the Coen brothers at the best of times, but the new one is outstanding. Funny, beautiful and incredibly bleak.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I'm not without ambivalence about the Coen brothers but I'm not without ambivalence about many artists whose work I enjoy and cherish.

So with all qualifications implicit (apart from James Franco, the bum note for me, perhaps unfairly, based on what I know about him) I thought "Buster Scruggs" was really great, especially on a second viewing. The enigmatic quality of each story invites me to try to work it out, and of course working it out is what we all always try to do and never quite manage to do. The appropriate literary comparison would be Kafka, who I'm sure must have inspired them.

Sometimes their humour comes off too arch and sneering, even misanthropic (a charge I suppose they're rebuking in the first scene with the wanted poster), but then there are moments of great emotional power in this movie - the wagon trail story is practically a "straight" western, and genuinely affecting. One moment violence is shockingly comic (but just cruel and gory to make the laughter uneasy), the next flatly tragic.

I suppose these stakes - of life and death - are what draw them to the west, along with the rich cinematic history to pillage, take the piss out of and pay homage to. In any case, for a fan like me, their films sit in the American West (modern and early) have been some of their best. This wasn't as good as No Country for Old Men to me, but I don't think any of their films are either.
 

droid

Well-known member
It was like a horror anthology, each piece as an illustration of a vice or a sin that leads to a different demise, with the last featuring the storytellers themselves in a liminal zone between life and death.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
The first time I watched it I was so stoned that I missed a lot of quite obvious stuff, like how the final story wasn't set in a "real" stagecoach with "real" bounty hunters in it. Also didn't really appreciate the significance of the introductory quotations (e.g. "the quality of mercy is not strained..." before 'Mortal Remains". (Oh, and in that story I somehow assumed the actor was the impresario's son on my first viewing, which changed everything. But perhaps that's what you're supposed to think at first?)
 

droid

Well-known member
I dont know if he was his son either, its never clear, but seems possible. Also, was he a savant? He never speaks outside the performance.

Its not getting a lot of love but I rated that one. Fantastic acting from the young fella, and Nesson's walk in the final frames was fantastic.
 
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