films you've seen recently and would NOT recommend

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Wrong thread to bring this up in I suppose but I watched(albeit lazily) 'Capote' recently and it reminded me how good Philip Seymour Hoffman was. Mannered, yes, as most actors are, but unique in being able to expose his vulnerability and despair on camera.

Decent film, too, and made me pick up In Cold Blood again.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Anyone seen Sorry to Bother You (I guess most of our Stateside members will have)? I was sorely disappointed - the idea was fascinating but I'd much rather read an interview with Boots Riley about politics tbh. The whimsical parts sat really badly with the subject matter - at times (it wasn't this bad but) it was like Wes Anderson or the Coen Brothers. No emotion, no 3D characters. By all means be didactic if the subject matter deserves it, but mixing it with whimsy is just awful. Too bad, as Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson would make a dream pairing with a better script.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
Breaking a long silence to chip in and say that Baboon aint being hyperbolic - at least about 21 Grams as a whole, it's one of the worst films I've ever seen too. I hate that director in fact, he's the guy who did Babel (awful) and Amores Peros (almost as bad), in short he just consistently produces stupid bollocks that thinks it's clever but isn't which is one of the worst things art can do.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I finally got round to Mother by Aaronofsky the other day. I started to watch it previously and got interrupted but this time we sat through the whole stinking shebang. I dunno why I keep trying with this guy, I hate all his films even though they often sound interesting on paper. I think it's cos (kinda like Gaspar Noe) I feel that he is one of the few directors out there actually trying hard to make good films - a lot just seem to have given up. Unfortunately (also like Noe) he just doesn't know how to do it. But maybe one day eh? But not this time.
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
Bohemian Rhapsody - it felt so superficial, like they took the Wikipedia pages for Queen and Freddy Mercury and went paragraph by paragraph, and made a scene out of each without putting an ounce of thought into how any of this played out in real life. It's an underdog story with little or no resistance as they rise to fame and glory, or what resistance they encounter is tongue-in-cheek. Plus the director is a known pederast and probable sexual predator (Bryan Singer), but where is the #MeToo outrage directed at him. Instead he gets multiple Academy Award nominations for a vapid, by the numbers, "against all odds" biopic (haven't we seen enough of these? Jesus) where we receive no insight into Freddy Mercury's psychology or the friendships, fallouts, and relationships within the band.

Plus, I'm hetero but I would love to see a real-seeming romance between two gay men in a major Hollywood release. I mean, we have been enjoying gay love songs for decades, I think we can handle seeing it with our eyes. Instead we get a greatest hits album masquerading as a film so dumbass audiences can hear stuff like "SCARAMOUCH" and say "I know what that is!" Eh that's what happens when MBA's control a cultural industry: it is all about brand recognition.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
At the weekend we watched Gaspar Noe's Climax and Von Triers' The House that Jack Built. Climax was terrible, another disappointment from a director who always flatters to deceive. I always start his films with high hopes, always finish them depressed and moaning. This one was particularly boring (which is a crime I can't forgive) and hamstrung from the start by the decision to use non actors (dancers) and a lot of improvised dialogue which they clearly weren't capable of doing well. The film is about a kind of descent into chaos but really it just has two modes - slow and super fast - and there is no progression, I guess the director realised this and tried to hide it with flashy tricks, most notably putting the credits in the middle so you don't notice there is no middle. One day he will make a great film but it's a while away yet.
THTJB wasn't great but comparatively it was much better. Again a bit dull enlivened with some moments of humour and some grubby violence (if you like that kind of thing) - the ending was from out of leftfield (although it did use the same framing kind of gimmick as Nymphomaniac) and was probably the best bit. More ok than terrible, especially after Climax.
 

version

Well-known member
I love Noe's stuff from a sonic and visual - even if a lot of it does feel lifted from Eyes Wide Shut - perspective, but he can't write a story, script, characters for shit.

When your finest hour is a credits sequence then you should probably be making music videos, ads and whatnot, not feature-films.
 

version

Well-known member
I often find that there's moments I enjoy, but they're surrounded by an hour or more of filler. The first hour or so of Enter the Void was decent, but then there's like another hour and twenty minutes of essentially the same all over again. You'd get some pretty, swirling shot of a softly glowing room, the camera would wander around then it would zoom into a light bulb or something and it would happen over and over and over. It just became tedious.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
In a nutshell that's it.
I met Gaspar Noe at a party in Paris just after Enter the Void had come out. I didn't venture my opinion. To be honest he was much more interested in the impossibly beautiful girl that he turned up with. It did make me laugh shortly after when that I saw a statement from him in the news when he said that he liked Paz de La Huerta for his films cos she was hot and didn't mind getting naked - next day this girl put a picture of herself on facebook completely naked. I don't think she got in any of his films though.
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
I love Noe's stuff from a sonic and visual - even if a lot of it does feel lifted from Eyes Wide Shut - perspective, but he can't write a story, script, characters for shit.

When your finest hour is a credits sequence then you should probably be making music videos, ads and whatnot, not feature-films.

i liked his movies for the same reasons: it's visual qualities. also, i don't care so much for plot or narrative so have never been bothered by a lack of story. in fact, if climax would be a 90 minute long dance choreography i think i would have liked it better. what started to bother me more and more is the grim misogynistic violence in his movies. goes for lars von trier as well. like the world is shit enough already don't wanna see the horrors magnified and zoomed in on a screen.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I watched it on the same day as Climax in fact. I was really getting ready to be horrified but it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. I mean, it wasn't a walk in the park and a couple of scenes were truly uncomfortable but overall it was more.... boring I guess. I think I would have probably liked it less if I hadn't just seen Climax, compared to that it was good. The final scenes were even quite interesting in their own right.
I should say that there are several different versions I think, maybe I downloaded one with the worst bits cut out. If so it's the version I'm stuck with cos I'm not watching it again.
Melancholia was on telly here the other day and I watched it again cos I remember quite enjoying it the first time but this time round I found it pretty boring. That set me thinking about what films of his I like, I think really the only one is Nymphomaniac. Others have good bits but I'm not sure there are many films that are actually GOOD films from start to end.
You're not wrong to compare Noe and Von Trier in my opinion - not even so much cos they're both (probably) misogynistic arseholes but rather because, in my mind, they are both guys with interesting ideas who set out to make films that are truly art and which challenge the Hollywood system and which are just original and distinctive works but, sadly, neither of them are actually much good at making films which leads to this situation where I (and probably loads of others) will always check out their new films with high expectations and leave disappointed.
 

DLaurent

Well-known member
Sean's pretty unbearable but was good in "Milk" and "Mystic River".

I like Penn. At Close Range I've gone back to watch a few time and saw/read The Falcon and The Snowman recently which is another decent film. I rate Noe as well for Irreversible and Enter the Void, but the only other one I've seen is I Stand Alone which was just a bad film. The House That Jack Built was just too long, I guess that was part of the point of it, to test the audience, but I almost switched it off.

Saw Days of Eclipse by Sokurov recently, based on a Strugatsky novel. Not averse to slow cinema at all but nothing really happened in this especially in the second half, boring. Apparently it was one of his early films and so he found his footing later as it's not a masterpiece.
 

DLaurent

Well-known member
White Dog 1982.
Fuller is usually gritty and wise cracking in a way that appeals to Tarantino fanboys. This is easily the worst film of his I've seen. Bordering on exploitation with awful B movie aesthetics and telling to the racial values of the time.

Butterfly 1982.
It has Pia Zadora. More famous for burning down Pickford Mansion than her shortlived film and pop career. Orson Welles as a drunk judge on a perverted case. Not even Morricone's average score could save this one.

Freeway. 1988.
Another overated B movie thriller about a killer priest shooting people on a 'freeway' with another model turned Darlanne Fluegel ("To Live and Die in L.A."). It's directed by Francis Delia and synth scored by Joe Delia who scored a lot of films for Abel Ferrara, another hack.

La Luna 1979.
Italian art house schlock from Bertolucci with a very questionable plot where a mother devises a ploy to get her son of heroin. Overlong.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Seems like you've had a run of bad luck there cos some of those sound like winners from the description.
Tell me about Days of Eclipse? Sokulov is slow I guess, I've not seen many of his, remember liking his version of Faust well enough.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Just came back from the cinema after watching The Beach Bum. Thinking about it, it was probably slightly smarter than it originally appeared but even so it wasn't much fun to watch for the most part and really do you need an hour and a half to say what we all know - that hippies are wankers?
 

DLaurent

Well-known member
Seems like you've had a run of bad luck there cos some of those sound like winners from the description.
Tell me about Days of Eclipse? Sokulov is slow I guess, I've not seen many of his, remember liking his version of Faust well enough.


Days of Eclipse I probably should watch something else by the same director before writing about. It was just an empty film

A lot of those Russian art house directors are slow, sometimes it works. This started well, almost a paean to rural soviet Turkmenistan to begin with shots of ethnic traditions it felt as though it was going to turn more lively, instead it peters out; not in a weird or bleak way I think more a criticism of censorship way.

I've seen some great films recently too. The french prison film Le Trou comes to mind.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Didn't Sokurov do Russian Ark? It's the kinda archetypal slow film. I remember a period where I watched some of his films and I sort of looked through his back catalogue to see which others I should check and they all looked really really boring so I never did. I know that's me being a total philistine cos good films transcend their description, they even transcend what they're about... but life's too short. Even though I do really like a lot of those Russian directors to which I assume you're referring.
 

DLaurent

Well-known member
The other russians I mean Luposhansky, Aleksei German. I can stomach them as they're atmospheric and slow. Seen others I'm less keen on, festival type films, so not a great criticism of Sokurov. It says on wiki he was deeply influenced by Zerkalo. The other guy that worked with Tarkovsky, Konchalovsky, he took some of that atmosphere with him even when he went to Hollywood. Something in the Soviet water.
 
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