Mesrine - Public Enemy No.1 Part 2 of this epic crime movie and its mostly more of the same with Mesrine getting into scraps, committing daring robberies, getting sent to prison and then busting out one way or the other. The movie with both parts put together runs to about 3 and a half hours and it would have been boring if not for Vincent Cassel's absolutely magnetic performance. When this man's on screen it's almost impossible to be even slightly bored. Not a must watch but entertaining if you like the crime movie genre and held together by a fantastic performance from Vincent Cassel.

Saw The Asphalt Jungle, a damn good heist-gone-wrong movie from the great John Huston. The opening scene with the police radio chatter inspired the similar beginning to Johnny Gaddaar.

^^ oh yeah, deadly movie. what do you like better? rififi or this one?

saw White Diamond a documentary from Werner Herzog about a slightly mad scientist who's building a giant balloon to float over the tree tops and canopies of south America to study the wildlife. The scientist is battling many personal demons including a disastrous previous balloon flying experience which ended in death and is hyper and comes across slightly pseudo but along the way Herzog gets distracted by a sad and lonely native Mark Anthony and the documentary almost shifts focus to him and his musings about the rain forest, his home and family who abandoned him to migrate to Europe, his rooster and a bunch of other random ramblings. While Herzog manages to focus on these two very interesting people he also manages to capture the rain forest in all of its dangerous glory. There's are some absolutely fantastic shots of the forest and the wildlife on this one with the swifts diving down to their home behind the waterfalls being just superb. Overall, another excellent documentary from Herzog and his ability to let the camera just stay on a person and capture him is just bloody genius. Awesome documentary and highly recommended.

General Knowledge wrote:
^^ oh yeah, deadly movie. what do you like better? rififi or this one?
Ooh I haven't seen that. Haven't seen Night & The City either. Deficiencies that must be soon addressed. Btw I also ordered a Raymond Chandler and a Dashiell Hammett collection (3 novels in each) from Amazon. Am I on some kind of trip? ;)

ravenus wrote:
General Knowledge wrote:
^^ oh yeah, deadly movie. what do you like better? rififi or this one?
Ooh I haven't seen that. Haven't seen Night & The City either. Deficiencies that must be soon addressed. Btw I also ordered a Raymond Chandler and a Dashiell Hammett collection (3 novels in each) from Amazon. Am I on some kind of trip? ;)

Oh yeah, Night and the City's quite good and Out of the Past if you haven't seen that one yet is a must watch. You will be tripping if you move on to Jim Thompson when you're done with Chandler and Hammet. :)

Saw The Ghost Writer last night. About a ghost writer who gets hired to finish the autobiography of a former British PM whose earlier ghost writer went to a watery grave. The acting is fine all through this movie and it works mainly because it's very tightly held together. There's a fair bit of political intrigue and if you're familiar with stuff by Ludlum and Le Carre and all those guys then the ending shouldn't be difficult to figure out but in spite of all that, I enjoyed this movie a good deal.

Saw Fedora a movie I was forbidden from seeing when I was a kid/fell asleep through I don't remember which. What I do remember was the film had a brilliant first scene - a woman running in the path of an oncoming train and jumping towards it as a voice screams FEDORA! A recent viewing reveals the film to be a solid if slightly overexplained thriller in the Agatha Christie vein. Fedora is an actress who is said to have retired at 62 and is unaccountably as beautiful as she was in her heyday which was a good 40 years before. A down and out producer whose only chance of a comeback is a movie starring the elusive Fedora tracks her down to an island off Corfu in Greece and attempts to persuade her to return to acting. While he manages to meet her after a whole lot of stonewalling, Fedora (while still beautiful) seems not all there mentally - in a permanently paranoid and hysterical state. The producer takes on her surrogate family full of caretakers including a disgraced doctor and two dubious members of Polish royalty only to discover a bizarre strange truth about Fedora. Very engaging movie even if its not one I'd care to see more than once.

Udaan was a good example of strong performances lifting weak scripting and cliched plot. After being expelled from school for watching Kanti Shah's Angoor on the sly (if there's any further proof of the degeneration of the education system, I don't know what it is. In my time, children who watched the equivalent of Kanti Shah's Angoor were immediately made Overall Prefect of the school, mighty personages that even the school principal had to report to), Rohan returns to Jamshedpur to an autocratic father that he has no pleasant memories of. The father (played brilliantly by TV wallflower Rohit Roy) straight away decides to make a man out of the wimpy and sensitive Rohan. He (justifiably) mocks Rohan's poetry (which truth be told is really fucking awful)and his ambitions to be a writer, and insists he become an engineer. The film goes through the motions of Rohan making weak stabs at rebellion by smoking, drinking and hanging out with the finest louts Jamshedpur has on offer (all of whom speak Bombay Hindi and who generally drag the film down with their leaden performances). One of the most effective scenes in the film is one in which Rohan discovers his father actually approves of him smoking because its a manly thing to do and forces his son to smoke. The sheer joylessness of smoking under duress and having one of his escapes in life so brutally vitiated is captured quite brilliantly. Finally, Rohan decides to stick it to dad and stand up for himself and his perpetually terrorised six year old brother.

I liked this movie mostly because of it could have fucked up in so many ways but didn't. Apart from the overlong running duration (literally! A lot of footage is chewed up by Rohan and his dad jogging around Jamshedpur), I didn't have too many problems with the film. For instance, there's no great redemptive arc for the father - he's a selfish, loutish asshole who is, if possible, even more of a selfish, loutish asshole when he's trying not to be one.

Saw Happy Accidents, which from the blurb sounded like a romantic chick flick but I still watched it simply because it had Marisa Tomie. This was a pleasant surprise and it turned out to be an extraordinary love story. The movie starts with Marisa explaining to her psychiatrist why she wants to leave her boyfriend and why things went sore between them. While the first 20 minutes or so is no different from most chick flicks it gets into weird terrain once the boyfriend starts explaining his real past. Explaining more would be spoiling the movie but defnitely worth watching.

Richard Schieb's review here.: www.moria.co.nz/index.php?option=com_con...id=1726&Itemid=0

Saw The Maltese Falcon (1941). Plot's more serviceable than anything, but the dialog and the performances (especially Sidney Greenstreet and Humphrey Bogart)! Climax is awesome: movies had balls then.

Finished with Dev Anand's autobiography which is totally awesome for people that have been keeping up with his movies. He's also very frank about all his sexual dalliances. Assuming there was no ghost writer, his style is also quite lucid and breezy, and some parts, like the surreal dream sequence he had while recovering from a hernia operation are tremendously well written.

Tere Bin Laden

This is one of the films you go to with zero expectations and get pleasantly surprised. Not to say that it is some undiscovered classic, but if you like the idea of a bunch of fresh guys running with an idea and having some fun with it, this could amuse you. Plot is set in Pakistan, revolving around an America-obsessed TV journalist who comes up with a scheme to fund his immigration by selling a fake Osama Bin Laden video clip made using a local lookalike.
There is no real political satire or particularly brainy humor here, most of the jokes fall in the juvenile category but that doesn't stop this from being a fair bit of harmless fun, somewhere between 'Chalo America' and '99', which is still more worth than most of the stuff that comes out of the Hindi film industry.

Night of Fear

Funded in part by the Australian Film Development Corporation, which appears to have been a lot more adventurous than our NFDC, this movie turned out to be a pretty damn good predecessor to Texas Chainsaw Massacre. An unidentified redneck type goes about raping and murdering women that land up in his vicinity. There are several parallels to the events in TCM and it seems quite probable that Tobe Hooper saw this film and used it as a template to TCM, significantly upping the intensity.

House of Long Shadows

Another of those films that's not essential to watch but appealing to those with a liking for classic horror cinema. This one is mainly notable for its bringing together those solid old-world Gentlemen of the genre - Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and John Carradine - for one last hurrah (none of them were ever paired up for a movie again).
The plot takes the Old Dark House Template. A bestselling American author (Desi Arnaz) takes on the challenge of writing a brooding emotional novel to best "Wuthering Heights" within 24 hours in a supposedly uninhabited manor in Wales, but he finds his work interrupted and the manor not quite uninhabited. To quote "There appears to be more happening here than in Times Square". Enter the heavyweights who bring with them a class and gentility that than offsets the weaknesses of the plotting. Nobody is straining any acting muscles but everyone appears happy to be amongst old friends. It also helps that the secluded Gothic setting of the film protects it from being overly sullied by modern touches, and even the parodying of genre cliches is done with affection and respect. Fans of the classic Hammer and Corman films will appreciate this.

Encounters at the End of the World Werner Herzog goes to Antartica with a film crew and comes up with a documentary that is absolutely stunning. He interviews the people who live there for 6 months in a year as parts of various research groups and also some amazing under water/ under ice photography capturing the life on the ocean bed. This is fantastic.

A Serbian Film Yes, I finally saw it so the rest of you don't have to. The story is about an out of work porn star in post war Serbia who gets a job offer to star in an arty farty porn film for a lot of money. He's basically asked to go with the flow and has no clue whats expected of him and the tasks predictably get more and more extreme. this is a pretty sick film and there are a couple of absolutely horrendous scenes. There are themes here that are a little more extreme than the blood and gore of Inside or the depravity of Frontiers but overall the movie doesn't work as horror or shock cinema. This is not in the league of Man Bites Dog in terms of sheer hopelessness and negativity and not even close to the horror of the above mentioned films. Overall, this is mostly like "I Spit on your Grave" for the Hostel generation. Exploitation taken as far as the filmmakers could think and then hidden under the guise of topical cinema where the depravity on screen is a metaphor for the cold hard lives of the people of Serbia. If there's anything that absolutely pisses me off, its exploitation movies pretending like they have something more to say than the blood, sex and gore. Absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever and a movie that really shouldn't be seen.

Was sick this weekend and so saw a lot of movies while zoning in and out of fever/pill induced sleep. In no particular order

Farewell to the Ark Very self consciously arty Japanese film that is supposedly inspired by 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's most overrated book. I don't remember anything of the book now, other than it bursting to the seams with Joses, Arcadios and Buendias and endless permutations and combinations of these names. I gave up halfway through, totally pissed off, wondering which Jose, Arcadio or Buendia was being referred to at a particular point of time. While not as aggravating as the book, the film lets some of its really good ideas get diluted somewhat by its pretensions. Sutekichi lives with his wife Su-e (also his cousin) and is constantly frustrated in his sexual pursuits by the chastity belt that she wears. He also is a perennial source of mirth for the rest of the village who think he's impotent. After being mocked shortly after winning a cock fight (not what you think!), Sutekichi stabs his brother/cousin Daisaku. In a state of panic, he flees the village accompanied by Su-e. After travelling three days and nights, they find themselves back where they started. Sutekichi begins to be haunted by Daisaku's ghost who suggests he write down and name everything he comes across lest he forget what they are called and what they are for. Sutekichi totally loses it, labelling everything including himself and Su-e. At this point, you wonder if the chastity belt is itself not just a figment of Sutekichi's imagination.

Interspersed with this principal narrative arc is a lot that can only be filed under random weird stuff - all the clocks in the village save one being destroyed and a popular belief that instead of just telling time, a clock creates time (this results in a huge brawl later on in the film when a second clock emerges, leaving people confused as to what the 'real' time is); a wood nymph that Sutekichi dreams about but can never touch for the fear of being killed; a large hole in the middle of the village used to send letters to the world of the dead; some kid falling into said hole and crawling out of it to become alpha male of the village. It's interesting enough while it lasts but a little too WTF for my comfort. Nowhere near as bad as recent films by David Lynch, though.

Android A very interesting science fiction film that's let down a good deal in the last 10 minutes or so by too pat a resolution and a very bogus 'surprise' end. Max works on a space station with an eccentric irascible scientist (played brilliantly by Klaus Kinski). The lonely and horny Max spends his time watching old b/w films, playing videogames and getting aroused by tepid instructional videos on sex. And then, much to his (and the professor's) delight, three visitors, including a woman, arrive at their space station. It turns out all three are fugitives from the law, and one of them is smart enough to realise that if they play their cards right, they can leave a lot richer than they arrived. Things go downhill rather quickly, with the scientist's latest creation serving as a catalyst. For fans of Metropolis (which it liberally references) and Philip K Dick, provided you are willing to forgive a contrived, silly conclusion (something that PKD himself was no stranger to, on occasion.)

Calamity of SnakesDon't watch this if you like snakes. Don't watch it if you hate snakes. I'd go so far as to say, try to avoid this film entirely and pretend it doesn't exist. This is a production from the early 1980s - plumb in the middle of the most badass and bloody period in the history of cinema and from a place (Hong Kong) that was the absolutely uncivilized unregulated badlands of moviemaking. This is the industry that gave us tasteless trashterpieces like 'Crippled Masters' a standard order revenge kung-fu flick that distinguished itself by using a genuinely armless and limbless duo as its heroes. While that film was almost classy, and in its own way, very thought provoking (can you still sympathise with handicapped people when they can kick your ass just as soon as look at you?), Calamity is just distateful. Director William Chang seems like the guy who would laugh his ass off at the people who put up the 'no animals were harmed during the making of this film' notices, and then probably slaughter and eat their pets right before their eyes. Anywhoo, LOTS of snakes die horrible painful deaths in this film. A conservative estimate from me would put the number at around 400. It's quite possibly 10 times that number if Chang went in for multiple takes.

A corrupt builder discovers a CALAMITY of snakes (this really should be the collective noun) on the site of his latest project. While the vaguely liberal hippie architect makes ineffectual noises about relocating the critters, the builder leads by example, leaps into the cabin of an earth mover and begins to quash them to death. The ones who escape are slaughtered via shovel and stick. The only positive thing that can be said for this grotesque spectacle is that a LOT of the footage is reused - so derive from that what little consolation you can. The scene shifts to a bar where snake meat and blood are the principal items on the menu. More graphic snake slaughter ensues as the workers from the previous scene gorge themselves. Soon, the snakes have had enough of this shit and launch attacks masterminded by a couple of boa constrictors who are, in this film's warped reptilian cosmology, the Gods of all other snakes. By the end, vast acres of snakes have been burnt, beaten, bitten, kung-fu punched and gassed to death.

I am going to ramble here for a while, so feel free to skip. In spite of everything against it, (and there's LOTS just in terms of pointless snake slaughter; there's also super annoying comedy sequences) this still manages to be a fairly entertaining film. You are almost always wondering how the fuck the director pulled it off, considering almost every single principal character in the film (and megalithic fucktons of minor characters) are literally covered in snakes for large parts of it. In terms of sheer numbers of animals slaughtered, this film makes Cannibal Holocaust look like a Disney movie. And yet I consider Cannibal Holocaust the worse of the two. If anything, it's because (apart from the restaurant scene), the characters seem a lot less mean spirited and seem to derive no great joy from killing snakes. It's just something to be got over and done with. And some of the scenes are genuinely spectacular: like the fire department (dressed in weird silver suits, for some reason) filling corridors that are practically choked with snakes, with an enormous white cloud of poison gas, sending the critters cascading off the walls and the ceiling. While Chang seems quite fucked up and mad, it is nothing short of incredible that he managed to pull such a film off almost entirely devoid of special effects.

Massacre Mafia Style More like Lunch: Mafia Style. I stumbled on this film after seeing the awesome trailer for Gone with the Pope (WARNING: NSFW). Duke Mitchell a cadaverous badass who looks like cancer after a bad haircut walks around with his Luciano Pavarrotti lookalike buddy killing people seemingly at random. It turns out Mimi (Mitchell) is the son of the old Godfather who was exiled back to Italy by the rest of the mob. He announces his return to America in style, by kidnapping one of the most respected mafiosos and chopping his thumb off. And then shows up at the guy's son's wedding reception, giving the ransom money as a gift. Strangely enough, instead of ventilating him, the rest of the rich Italians laugh like this was a funny if slightly off-colour joke and welcome him into their fold. It turns out that Mimi is the only really bloodthirsty Italian left. The rest of the mob has gone 'legit' and frankly can't be arsed. They keep talking about how the cops have gotten tough but considering Mimi never gets so much as a parking ticket and mows down more people than there are in Bhutan practically every day, one is really not so sure.

The film is sadly not as saturated with violence as one would've liked it to be - mainly because Mitchell was shooting with NO budget at all. A lot of the film has a home video feel to it with people sitting around tables eating, while Mitchell launches into these weird rants. These rants leave your mind well and truly fucked since they effortlessly straddle the yawning gulp between the unintentionally hilarious and genuinely affecting. The last rant is particularly spectacular: Mitchell rails against Free Love and how its really put a damper on the pimping business; on how the blacks have taken over crime; how the mafia is just a joke and subject for books and films and how no fear of death, god, religion or family is a very very bad thing. A movie that's weighed down by its lack of budget and some dull bits, but nevertheless one well worth tracking down.

Night of Fear A film that predates The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and strips its already stripped down plot to its absolute bare minimum. A woman spends around 40 minutes of the film's 50 minute running time being terrorised by a bearded maniac with a spade. There is NO dialogue - only shrieks from the woman, grunts from the man and the squealing and chittering of his pet rats. The conclusion is one of the most shocking, cynical and mean-spirited things I've ever seen.

House of Long Shadows A kindly hilarious romp through the cliched haunted house/cursed family chestnut. A writer looking to win a bet shows up at an apparently abandoned castle in Wales only to be periodically interrupted by the arrival of an increasingly strange assortment of characters, most of whom seem to know each other. Stars Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Vincent Price, with Price totally stealing the show. A last hurrah for the more gentlemanly sort of horror before the 80s, with its infinite variants on the slasher theme took hold totally.

Tere Bin Laden Surprisingly funny film on a down and out TV journo trying to make it to the US by faking a video recording with Osama. It has a LOT of subtle blink and you'll miss them jokes that poke fun at both our terrorist state of a neighbour and the highhandedness of American foreign policy. This film looks to have spent a while in the cans, though, given most of its references are to George Bush.

Salt was a very entertaining film with some cool, kickass moments. Angelina Jolie gives a superb performance that makes this well worth a watch.

General Knowledge wrote:
A Serbian Film Yes, I finally saw it so the rest of you don't have to.
Heh. Thanks for that. Though, after reading the summation of the shocker scenes, it was pretty clear that I wasn't going to watch this anyway.

Forgot to mention, I tagged along with my sister to Knight and Day and as expected, that turned out to be quite the nothing movie. Well, a couple of things actually got across:
1) Tom Cruise can't play suave. His voice is just too nasal and whiny.
2) Cameron Diaz hasn't aged well.

On the TV front, I've been indulging in:

Louie, which is Louis CK's new show, not to be confused with Lucky Louie, his earlier sitcom. It's largely based on his real-life character and is presented in a mix of stand-up, interactions with other comics and some situational comedy. If you've heard his stand-up, you'll already be familiar with the gist of this show. Good stuff so far.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars Animated series set in the middle of Episodes 2 and 3. Not to be confused with Star Wars: Clone Wars, the 2003 series. Or Star Wars: The Clone Wars the movie. Ok, that is confusing. Art and animation is more stylised and child-friendly than hi-tech, and the script is serviceable, but this will probably do a better job fleshing out the characters than the movies did.

Futurama has been improving with the last few episodes.

HathyaSaiBaba wrote:
Massacre Mafia Style More like Lunch: Mafia Style. I stumbled on this film after seeing the awesome trailer for Gone with the Pope (WARNING: NSFW). Duke Mitchell a cadaverous badass who looks like cancer after a bad haircut walks around with his Luciano Pavarrotti lookalike buddy killing people seemingly at random.

Nicely done. Thanks da, had totally forgotten about this movie. Was super entertaining and I haven't seen anything this bad since Birdemic.