Films you last watched?

[Vendaval Este]

In my absence from here I can tell you I have seen a shitload of films, but the last one would be the 203-minute version of Apocalypse Now, in which nothing accurately describes seeing that film in a cinema.

[zombi1978]

Where Eagles Dare.
A fine spy film set in WWII, and yes Invid, I did not regret the entire running time.

[Vendaval Este]

Let's see...

The Good, The Bad, The Weird
G@me
Three Outlaw Samurai

There are lots more, but those are the most recent three. I've ended up seeing a lot of films in the past week. TGTBTW is a must-see Three Outlaw Samurai is a pretty damn solid piece of 60s samurai cinema, G@me is atrocious.

[zombi1978]

Watchmen. Bloody good comic adaption.

[zombi1978]

Blue Tornado - or rather called 'Italian Top Gun meets Close Encounters of the Third Kind'.

Casshern, -in my opinion- the worst manga adaption since Devilman.

[Vendaval Este]

I need to re-watch Casshern, I remember watching it when I was younger and thinking it wasn't too bad. Granted, I have no idea what the original source material is like. It was however, LIGHTYEARS better than the wretched Devilman movie.

[zombi1978]

Please, re-watch it AFTER you have seen the original material. I knew the original OVA long before I watched the live-action film. But hey: The Devilman 'film' will always be an unloved stepchild to me.

[loadrunner81]

I saw Let Me In a couple of nights ago. I usually don't like vampire movies, but I enjoyed this one. I also saw Red Riding Hood, which sucked hard.

[zombi1978]

Me and two good buddies had a 'Cannon' film night on yesterday and we watched Murphy's Law, Cyborg Cop and Avenging Force all in a row. It's freaking funny when you're drunk too.

[Vendaval Este]

Super 8

A great movie, really can't praise this enough, I feel very happy that this was a big budgeted film I immensely enjoyed. Abrams has outdone himself.

[zombi1978]

I was living the dream yesterday. Rearry.

[fokkusu]

Just watched Cache. Absolutely the worst "artsy" film I've seen yet.
Instead of leaving us with several related ways to interpret the meaning like a good movie would, it nearly beats you over the head with Euro-guilt. That is, guilt over European colonialism. No matter what your opinion is on Euro-guilt, you can't say that this sort of thing hasn't already been done to death in just about every medium imaginable.
Also, the thing is, you have to capture your audience before you try to make them think. Otherwise, you're left with uninterested people wondering why they paid $10 to go to a 2-hour philosophy lecture on film. There's nothing remotely interesting in Cache that captures the audience. The first few minutes show a glimmer of hope for a coherent and well-paced plot, but that quickly falls apart, as the movie takes about 2 hours to go almost nowhere. The shots are almost unbearably long- A single, unmoving shot of a street can take 3-4 minutes; and show up several times in the film. Bad idea if you want to keep the audience interested and make them take you seriously. I honestly do not understand why the movie isn't 1.5 hours instead of 2. It might actually have been *better* if it were shorter- It certainly would have had more impact, as you'd be more likely to remember the whole plot (half-baked as it is) instead of being lulled to sleep by drawn-out still shots.
Finally, the ending. Or rather a lack of one. Sure, there are hints at the end as to what really happened throughout the film, but bringing the whole plot to a grinding halt just as it was starting to get a tiny bit interesting is extremely anti-climactic and a total rip-off. I kept waiting and waiting for something interesting to happen, as the movie bulids up a smidgen of tension by the end, but I was severely disappointed when the credits rolled after nothing happened.

Avoid this one. If you want a GOOD artsy film that's interesting with lots of possible but related meanings, go watch Eraserhead. As long as you can handle nightmare fuel. Seriously though, I'd rather watch Eraserhead than Cache. Freaky as it is, Eraserhead is at least interesting without being pretentious.

[Vendaval Este]

I quite enjoyed Cache when I saw it, I found the painfully static long takes to be one of its great strengths.

[fokkusu]

Thing is, in the context of the film, there's really no point in having 5-minute still shots of the street. IMO, it's trying way too hard to be artsy and ends up being dull and pretentious instead.

Another thing is, if the meaning of the film was more ambiguous, I might not have thought it pretentious; but it clearly wants the viewer to compare the main character's childhood relationship with his "almost-brother" to relations between France and Algeria. The comparison felt flat to me, as it is totally one-sided; you are supposed to feel bad for Algerians and hate the French. I'm sure that some of the French did terrible things to some Algerians, but the comparison is black-and-white and clumsy at best. This is furthered by the fact that you don't know who sent the videos, and it probably wasn't the Algerian man. And like I said before, it's an exercise in white guilt, which isn't always a bad thing in a movie; but it's been done to death in artsy films and therefore isn't the best main topic. It feels like they're beating a dead horse. Even if an artsy film really wants to tackle the subject again, there are much better ways of doing it.

I did like In My Country, which isn't an art film really... But while it does make one feel bad (and rightly so) about the events in South Africa mainly caused by whites; it does a good job of emphasizing that there are good whites and bad whites, and good blacks and bad blacks. A scene that really demonstrates this was when a white civillian described how a black soldier murdered his family in front of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a white female journalist left the Commission because she was laughing hysterically in surprise and shock at realizing that cruelty knows no race.

SUMMARY:
I guess I really just don't like it when issues are presented as "all X are evil and all Y are victims." Because that's not the way the world works.

Sorry for the tl;dr comment.

[fokkusu]

Saw Apollo 18 Friday night and really liked it. However, it's definitely going to be an acquired taste for a lot of people: I suspect only people really into real-life space science and/or the space-horror genre will really like it on the first watch.

Since this is a newly-released film, I won't post a review because there's no way I could give an in-depth analysis with no spoilers.