movies What's the last film you watched? And rate it!

Dragon Lord directed by Jackie Chan - 8/10
I think this is an incredibly underrated Jackie Chan film, it is kind of a transitional film between Jackie's early films and his more mature works that he directed on his own. For me it just works, it has the episodic structure that I like from many Hong Kong films, some good broad humor, and amazing fight/sport choreography and I'd consider the final fight scene to be a masterpiece. I just love the energy in this film, and I love hanging out with these characters. It may be considered to be a minor Jackie film but I honestly prefer it to Drunken Master and The Fearless Hyena.

sfoster said:

Network 3/5
I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!

Ahh so that is where this line comes from

Click to expand...

I think thats paul thomas anderson favorite film

Oculus--6/10

The lead actress was excellent(she boosted the rating) I haven't seen her in anything, but she's famous for Dr.Who, I believe.


The movie wasn't boring, but it was a letdown. Too many horror blogs and critics pumped it up like it was a tremendous movie.

Also, the writer/director did a movie called Absentia which I really liked, and this wasn't anywhere as good as that.

I'd recommend Absentia over this one for people who like supernatural/horror.

It was filmed in a limited space, as was Absentia, so that might be of int erst for filmmakers looking for inspiration for limited locales.

----

Network--- I remember not liking it that much when I first saw it, but I've seen it a few times since and I ended up enjoying it more. Faye is a great, underrated actress, and of course the Howard Beale speech is a classic.

I have 5 films left on the AFI top 100..

Annie Hall .. tried watching this but hated it after 15 minutes and stopped. Never been a woody allen fan.

King Kong, Intolerance, Nashville, a night at the opera

Annie Hall was ok, but if you have been hearing about it for years, then it will be a let down. His best films are probably: Manhattan, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and Her Sisters, Annie Hall, Mighty Aphrodite, Match Point.

Dianne Keaton is not charming at all, and the bit I still find funny is him pulling Marshal out from behind a poster to correct a woman.



Altman: Never liked Nashville. too rambling. the worst of what he does best. His best: 3 women, California Split, Thieve Like Us, Short Cuts, Gosford Park, Mash....even Gingerbread Man was good even though it didnt look like he was involved in it.


Kong is great. Don't know why Peter Jackson ever tried to mess with it. One of the few classics that don't need retouching.

I loved Annie Hall! That's one of my favorite films, I think it's one of the best relationship movies and romantic comedies. Manhattan may be a better film, but I love Annie Hall more.

Feature films:
"Guardians of the Galaxy" 8/10 (I loved this film! But I honestly feel as though it could been done ever so slightly better.)

"Amazing Spider-man 2" 8/10 (I loved this film as well. The main characters were great. But there were so many villains trying to be "the main antagonist", one of them only got a few minutes of screen time."

Miniseries:
HBO's "Band of Brothers" 10/10 (One of my all time favorites. I've recently started studying this, for a script I'll be writing someday. I only wish I could find the script to at least one episode!)
HBO's "The Pacific" 9.5/10 (Even though this is set during WW2 (and I love learning about that time period) I just prefer "Band of Brothers" more.)

Finally caught up with some of the comic movies I've missed:

Captain America 2: 7/10
I liked it FAR more than I liked the first, but that said, of the Phase 2 Marvel films, it's still my least favorite. Still, mention of Stephen Strange!!! More leadup to the next Avengers!

Amazing Spider-Man: 5/10
While it was fun to watch the action, I found the film mostly pretty boring and dull. Maybe I'm just sick of the spider-man origin story. Between comics, films and cartoons, I've seen that story far, far too many times. I've always been a bit apathetic towards spidey, it seemed like the movie felt the same way.

Amazing Spider-Man 2: 7/10
Now, this is more like it. Garfield finally figures out what character he's playing. Spidey's still not my favorite, but the film is a lot more engaging than the first was. Because I've read too many comics, Also this version of Harry Osborn has the distinct advantage of not being played by James Franco, so nothing but pluses there. Were we living in a different time, I would be very excited about these films (probably why I liked the last Spider-Man films as much as I did at the time). But as it stands, there are so many other great comic films that I like much better. So fun, but I don't know how often I'll re-watch it.

The Servant directed by Joseph Losey - 8/10
I was disappointed by this one at first but then I got sucked in by the psychological aspects of the film. The cinematography and editing is just perfect but I didn't get into the characters until a quarter of the way in. I think this is an interesting film though, I have to re-watch it, it may be a masterpiece.

He Ain't Heavy, He's My Father directed by Peter Chan and Lee Chi-Ngai - 7/10
Pretty much the Hong Kong version of Back To The Future except it's less sci-fi blockbuster and more sentimental family drama (and not just family, neighbors too). This film has a lot of heart, and I always love the fact that Peter Chan tried to do something different with Hong Kong cinema, but unfortunately he does give into too much sentimentality and his films have this tone that make me feel like his cinema is like the Hong Kong version of Oscar films, which are not quite art films but also not really genre films, and they are generally safe in style and content. What makes this film stand out for me is an incredible large group of characters (all with great performances), I really loved the film's community, and the way that Tony Leung Chiu-Wai's character grows. It is also notable that this features both Tony Leungs: Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (Little Tony) and Tony Leung Ka-Fai (Big Tony). This film basically plays on the same theme that I saw in Zhang Yimou's The Road Home in the way that it re-contextualizes the main character's (and our) view of parents, but I wish it would have been handled more subtly as in Yimou's film. Overall, a good interesting Hong Kong film that is different from what you usually get from that national cinema, but I don't think it's a masterpiece (hopefully it gets a restoration though, those shots of the moons are really incredible!).

That Man From Rio directed by Philippe de Broca - 8/10
So much fun, this is essentially a James Bond film starring Jean-Paul Belmondo except that it is crazier as it is somewhat of a spoof, mixing elements of the spy genre, adventure genre, and silent comedy. Some parts didn't really work for me but the best action scenes are as great as any, the best jokes get huge laughs, and the overall film is just entertaining. Only a French New Wave style 'Bond' film can make Jean-Paul Belmondo calling his girlfriend's name every time he sees her get huge laughs. The ending is hilarious as well. But part of the film doesn't match up, I feel like a half an hour or so should have been cut.

Written On The Wind directed by Douglas Sirk - 9/10
Being a huge fan of melodramas (thanks to Mikio Naruse, John Woo, and other Asian filmmakers) I finally decided to start exploring the work of Douglas Sirk. I really think Sirk is an incredibly gifted director in the way he works with melodrama by making his narratives really tight, having the right mix of developing his characters with subtlety and with over the top elements, and just having a brilliant visual style. I saw this at a live screening at the Museum of the Moving Image, and I hated how many times people laughed at the most dramatic and saddest moments, they laughed for over half of the film! This is a film about brokenness and I think that for the most part Sirk was being sincere with the film (although there is definitely some intentional humor). Sirk handles everything quite well even though I think the film could have gotten a bit deeper, I look forward to watching more of his work. Watching this film made me appreciate melodrama even more, I wish people would take the genre a little more seriously.

Voices Of A Distant Star directed by Makoto Shinkai - 6/10
Okay I have very mixed feelings about this film. On one hand, the film has really great animation (it's incredible that Shinkai did this all by himself on his Mac computer), and I think that the overall film is enjoyable. But on the other hand, the story is trite, the characters are somewhat underdeveloped, it lacks the charm of Shinkai's other early films, it's too long and too short, and it resorts to too much sentimentality. I say so many bad things about this film because I think artistically it doesn't match Shinkai's other work, but the craftsmanship is just very beautiful. I suppose some anime fans that love the more sentimental side of anime may like this film a lot, and it isn't a bad film, it's a good film that supports a story that I think is throwaway. Fortunately, Shinkai put his great animation and directing talents to better use in other films.

Tom, Dick And Hairy directed by Peter Chan & Chi-Ngai Lee - 8/10
Tom, Dick And Hairy is by far one of the best Hong Kong comedies I have seen. It isn't so much the humor (although if you love Hong Kong's brand of broad comedy you will laugh a lot with this film), it's the way that the film makes us care about the characters and the almost melodramatic sections of the film. I noticed that this film does a great job at mixing Peter Chan's slightly more serious approach (in terms of camerawork, editing, and use of music) with the great Hong Kong style of spontaneous episodic narrative structure. It also helps that the film has three great leads with a lot of chemistry (including both Tony Leungs). I think that the overly sentimental music works here more than in Peter Chan's most serious work, Comrades: Almost A Love Story because it is counterpointed by the humor. I think there is some very inventive use of staging here, some great characterization, and many memorable scenes. Unfortunately, there are some real plot holes and I think the ending of the film was pandering to the sort of audiences that watched films like Johnnie To's Seven Years Itch. While there are some major flaws, I still think the film is just too enjoyable and Peter Chan pulls the right strings at the right moments for the most part, I think it's done so well that I'll rank it just a hair below Chan's magnum opus Comrades: Almost A Love Story (a near masterpiece ruined by the music and the length; it could have been a long epic or a nice short tale but instead the film drags on without giving us either).

To Each His Own Cinema directed by various directors - 4/10
What happens when you get 36 of the greatest living directors in the world to make short films on their feelings about cinema, you just get a ton of mediocre short films. I'd say that few of the films are as bad as my rating seems to suggest, but just seeing mediocre short film after mediocre short film for 2 hours really makes this a bad experience for me. But this isn't unusual, so far all of the films that are made like this (several short films by great directors) have disappointed me. I can only recommend this to completists (like me) who want to watch all of the works by their favorite directors.

Picture Bride directed by Kayo Hatta - 7/10
To me, there are really some cinematic mysteries like what ever happened to the other guys that directed In Our Time and The Sandwich Man (aside from Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien respectively), why did Lung Kong and Patrick Tam stop making films so early, why didn't Peter Chan continue making more great serious films after Comrades: Almost A Love Story, and this film presents me another mystery. Why wasn't Kayo Hatta more successful? The film is good enough, it tells a unique story in a conventional manner, it has good cinematography, and the film has a lot of heart. It's no masterpiece but it stands out as a truly globalized production on the Asian-American experience, it features Toshiro Mifune in a cameo role, and it's by no means a bad film (in fact I think this is the kind of foreign film that casual audiences would embrace). I don't know why this couldn't be just a nice debut to a great career a la Ang Lee, but no, Kayo Hatta never went on to make another feature, her shorts are not well known at all, and she died of drowning in 2005. I love this film's heart and it's a very entertaining film, it's not a perfect film but anyone into Japanese dramas should check it out. Anyone wanting to watch films about the Asian-American experience has to watch it since there are so few films on the subject since Wayne Wang and Ang Lee decided to start making American studio films.

inside llewyn davis - 4.5/10, I love me some coen brothers, but their other starving artist piece (barton fink) is just overall a better movie. I enjoyed this a lot, but it's far from a masterpiece.

The Sacrament---6/10

Basically a movie about Jonestown. The PBS documentary was better.

The cast were mumblecore familiars. Joe Swanberg, Amy Semietz, and the main guy.

Not scary and didn't have the cool look of Ti West's other stuff (Cabin Fever 2, House of Devil, Innkeepers).

Semitz is always good. Swanberg, who I usually don't like, was fine.

The guy who played Father was really good. Reminded me of The Captain from Cool Hand Luke. He stole the show.

It was shot as a supposed "found footage" Vice doc.

if you like horror, or "found footage" stuff, then it would be worth it.

MiniJamesW said:

Picture Bride directed by Kayo Hatta - 7/10
To me, there are really some cinematic mysteries like what ever happened to the other guys that directed In Our Time and The Sandwich Man (aside from Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien respectively), why did Lung Kong and Patrick Tam stop making films so early, why didn't Peter Chan continue making more great serious films after Comrades: Almost A Love Story, and this film presents me another mystery. Why wasn't Kayo Hatta more successful? The film is good enough, it tells a unique story in a conventional manner, it has good cinematography, and the film has a lot of heart. It's no masterpiece but it stands out as a truly globalized production on the Asian-American experience, it features Toshiro Mifune in a cameo role, and it's by no means a bad film (in fact I think this is the kind of foreign film that casual audiences would embrace). I don't know why this couldn't be just a nice debut to a great career a la Ang Lee, but no, Kayo Hatta never went on to make another feature, her shorts are not well known at all, and she died of drowning in 2005. I love this film's heart and it's a very entertaining film, it's not a perfect film but anyone into Japanese dramas should check it out. Anyone wanting to watch films about the Asian-American experience has to watch it since there are so few films on the subject since Wayne Wang and Ang Lee decided to start making American studio films.

Click to expand...

Damn, you watch a lot of films - how do you have time?
I'm trying to get more into Asian cinema, any recommendations?

Holocene said:

Damn, you watch a lot of films - how do you have time?
I'm trying to get more into Asian cinema, any recommendations?

Click to expand...

I had a ton of time before because I was a very good high school student, so I could finish homework during lunch/recess then come home and watch at least one movie a day lol.

Now I'm a college student with a job, so it's a lot more difficult but I am in the cinema studies department so I have access to super rare films and I watch films during some of my courses!

You're in luck since East Asian cinema is my primary interest. It is important to note that there are different great national cinemas in Asia each with their own tradition (hell even China has three separate traditions) so let me mention them.

Japan (this one is usually mentioned alongside the US and France as the most important cinematic nation)
Mainland China
Taiwan
Hong Kong
South Korea
and most recently Thailand (I'm less familiar with this cinema, but it's led by Apichatpong Weerasethakul) and the Phillipines (I'm also less familiar with this cinema, but it's led by Lav Diaz)

I can talk about Asian cinema all day but I'll just try to mention my favorite directors with my favorite film by them (sometimes I'll just mention films if I don't think the directors are too notable overall), and if you are interested in one of them then I'll give you more specific recommendations. I threw in a bit of everything I'm familiar with since you didn't tell me what kind of preferences you had. I'm only mentioning films I've actually seen, so I know there's a lot of essentials missing just because I haven't seen them yet due to the fact that Criterion DVDs are super expensive.

Japan
Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story)
Kenji Mizoguchi (Ugetsu)
Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon)
Mikio Naruse (Morning's Tree-Lined Street or Wife! Be Like A Rose!)
Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away)
Sadao Yamanaka (Sazen Tange And The Pot Worth A Million Ryo)
Kaneto Shindo (great director and writer of The Ball At The Anjo House)
Teinosuke Kinugasa (A Page Of Madness)
Hirokazu Kore-eda (Maborosi)
Isao Takahata (Only Yesterday)
Shunji Iwai (All About Lily Chou-Chou)
Kon Ichikawa (The Burmese Harp)
Satoshi Kon (Millennium Actress but you should probably start with Perfect Blue)
Takashi Miike (Audition)
Tokyo Sonata
Keisuke Kinoshita (I've only seen his early films but I already know he's talented)
Mamoru Hosoda (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time)
A Letter To Momo
Tadashi Imai is also good but I find him to be overrated by obscurists like me, yet underrated by people that only stick to canonized directors. Still, I think only diehard postwar Japanese cinema fans should watch his stuff.

Hong Kong
Wong Kar-Wai (In The Mood For Love)
John Woo (The Killer, but I would say you should start with A Better Tomorrow just the way that Hong Kong fell in love with John Woo's brand of action/melodrama and Chow Yun-fat)
Johnnie To (The Mission)
Ringo Lam (City On Fire, watch this especially if you are a fan of Reservoir Dogs which borrowed a lot from this film)
Tsui Hark (Shanghai Blues)
Jackie Chan (Police Story series and many others)
Sammo Hung (Winners & Sinners)
Patrick Lung Kong (Teddy Girls)
Patrick Tam (My Heart Is That Eternal Rose)
Peter Chan (Comrades: Almost A Love Story)
Mambo Girl
Infernal Affairs

Taiwan
Edward Yang (That Day, On The Beach)
King Hu (Dragon Gate Inn)
Tsai Ming-liang (What Time Is It There?)
Hou Hsiao-hsien (The Boys From Fengkuei)
Ang Lee (Father Knows Best trilogy, the most accessible of them is The Wedding Banquet but they are all accessible films)

China (mainland)
Fei Mu (Spring In A Small Town)
Yuan Muzhi (Street Angel)
Zhang Yimou (Raise The Red Lantern)

South Korea
Lee Chang-dong (Poetry)
Hong Sang-soo (The Day A Pig Fell Into The Well)
Kim Ki-duk (Bad Guy)
The Man From Nowhere

Guilty Pleasures
Executioners
Hou Hsiao-hsien's first and third film
A Moment Of Romance
As Tears Go By
The Happy Ghost series
The 2nd and 3rd Lucky Stars films
Bruce Lee films (great martial artist, mediocre at best filmmaker)
The Quiet Duel
Pom Pom
Island Of Fire
Picture Bride
He Ain't Heavy, He's My Father
Young Cops

(A)sexual directed by Angela Tucker - 6/10
I thought this would be an interesting documentary about something that is rarely talked about, but it turns out there wasn't too much compelling content. I also found it strange that the main person advocating for asexuality turns out to kind of change his opinion in the end, I wish the film would have explored this more. As it is, this is just a slightly interesting documentary, not bad, but not great.

Jubilation Street directed by Keisuke Kinoshita - 7/10
Alright, now I have to say that Kinoshita may be one of the great Japanese masters. Kinoshita's great directing skills elevate this mediocre propaganda film into something kind of special. Well the story isn't all bad, it has a lot of interesting little plots with several characters, but the propaganda aspects really harm an otherwise good film. I really ended up caring about the characters and I thought it was cool that the film somewhat undermined its propagandistic purpose (even though unfortunately the end scenes had to come to remind us how amazing militarist Japan is). I can't wait to go on to Kinoshita's later works as I'm starting to change my mind, he's a good director that had to work with mediocre to bad material in his early days (I used to think he was really overrated but now I don't).