Films

[KipWellsFan]

Watched Green Street Hooligans tonight. Didn't know much about it before watching and was pleasantly surprised. Elijah Wood is a weird choice for the character but the rest of the characters are great.

 

http://imdb.com/title/tt0385002/maindetails

[Rowand44]

We are Marshall is absolutely fantastic.

[Controlled Chaos]

Only movie in theaters I am interested in going to see is "The Good Shepherd".

Big Thumbs Down for me.

[SoxFanForever]

Anyone see Blood Diamond? I wasn't expecting much and I really liked it. One of my favorites this year.

[bmags]

the good shephard gets a big thumbs up from me.

[Chisoxrd5]

the good shephard gets a big thumbs up from me.

 

I give it a Thumbs Up as well. Good movie to watch once, probably not so good to rent. But overall I enjoyed the story and it kept me interested throughout.

 

Anyone see Blood Diamond? I wasn't expecting much and I really liked it. One of my favorites this year.

 

Other new movie I recently saw was Blood Diamond. It was exactly what I thought it was...and somehow I actually bought DiCaprio as an african diamond smuggler. Solid movie, nothing groundbreaking

 

Last movie I recommend is Slither. Totally funny, ridiculous movie.

Edited January 7, 2007 by Chisoxrd5

[GoodAsGould]

I give it a Thumbs Up as well. Good movie to watch once, probably not so good to rent. But overall I enjoyed the story and it kept me interested throughout.

Other new movie I recently saw was Blood Diamond. It was exactly what I thought it was...and somehow I actually bought DiCaprio as an african diamond smuggler. Solid movie, nothing groundbreaking

 

Last movie I recommend is Slither. Totally funny, ridiculous movie.

 

Now I cant take your advice on the other 2 movies anymore. For someone to enjoy Slither lol....

[Chisoxrd5]

Now I cant take your advice on the other 2 movies anymore. For someone to enjoy Slither lol....

 

I feel more sorry for those who don't 'get' what Slither was trying to do...I watched it with six people, three liked it, and three found it dumb. It's enjoyable because its ridiculous. The plot sucks, the special effects are meh, the gore is over the top, the cast is horrible...but the movie works.

[Flash Tizzle]

Has anyone seen Pan's Labyrinth yet? I've read numerous reviews which list it as one of the year's best films.

[Controlled Chaos]

the good shephard gets a big thumbs up from me.

I kinda of agree with this review on the movie.

 

The Good Shepherd"

Robert De Niro's pic about one man's role in the birth of the CIA is all cloak and no dagger.

 

By Stephanie Zacharek

 

Dec. 22, 2006 | Sitting through boring movies is part of a critic's job, and it becomes second nature to forge ahead stolidly. But the first 20 minutes of Robert De Niro's "The Good Shepherd" were so dull -- so aggressively, brain-freezingly dull -- that I wondered how I'd make it through the remaining 140.

 

Thankfully, this elephantine epic, a fictitious saga (written by Eric Roth) detailing one man's role in the birth of the Central Intelligence Agency, gets slightly more interesting as it lurches forward -- either that, or the thing somehow lulled me into a state of drugged compliance. You can hear the movie's impending themes thundering through the forest before their massive heads even start poking through the trees, chief among them the idea that duplicitousness in the name of duty -- particularly when you're working for the U.S. government -- can poison not just your heart but your whole family. This is a somber, weighty, gray picture, one that pays clear tribute to the "Godfather" movies as it tries to scale some very rocky moral territory. But it's so unsatisfying to watch that even its biggest, most meditative right-and-wrong quandaries come to seem puny. De Niro can't sustain the necessary tension from scene to scene: The picture feels slack and wrinkled, even when, maybe especially when, it needs to be taut. And nearly all the characters -- not just the secretive, CIA-employed ones -- are so unformed and hard to read that it's tough to have an emotional stake in what happens to them. "The Good Shepherd," soft when it needs to be sharp, is all cloak with very little dagger.

 

We first meet the lead character, Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), in the early 1960s, around the time of the Bay of Pigs. He's one of those anonymous, vague-looking, bespectacled men who spend their nights hunched over a hobby table (he's expert at building little ships in bottles) and their days shuffling along long, underlit hallways with other men dressed just like they are, in plain, drab suits and shapeless raincoats. You just know these guys are up to no good, partly because one of them is played by William Hurt, who has grown into the No. 1 casting choice whenever a movie calls for a seemingly benevolent baddie. These men enter each other's offices and throw manila file folders on one another's desks; John Turturro skulks about ominously. The most exciting moments in the first 1/20th of "The Good Shepherd" involve dim, grainy footage of two people rolling around in bed, with a psych-ward drone on the soundtrack; my heart leapt at even these halfhearted David Lynch references -- at least they were something.

 

Then, through flashbacks, we learn that Edward is a Yale-educated lover of poetry who, thanks largely to his collegiate affiliation with the supersecret Skull and Bones society, found himself working first for the OSS and later for the organization that sprang from its loins, the CIA. The women who drift through Edward's shadowy life include a sassy debutante named Clover (Angelina Jolie, who jazzes up the movie considerably when she enters it, although the indistinctness of her role eventually grinds her down) and -- no fooling -- a beautiful deaf girl named Laura (Tammy Blanchard, who squeezes some sparks out of her blandly beatific character).

 

Edward never set out to be an operative; it just happened that way. But before long he becomes a favorite of the extra-secretive Bill Sullivan (played by De Niro), who will engineer what will become the CIA. The guy has some serious foot problems and ends up in a wheelchair; at a big Christmas party, filled with other sneaky-looking government guys, he gets wheeled right up to a baptismal font of eggnog, so you know he must be important.

 

Damon's Edward spends most of the movie struggling with his conscience, a state that Damon plays with an array of muted shadings: He gives a gently shaped performance in a difficult, oblique role. In fact, most of the actors here do pretty well, even when they're asked to deliver ridiculous Cold War-code dialogue. (Talking on the phone, or just in casual conversation, characters are given to uttering flat non sequiturs like "The best-laid plans of mice and men.") Michael Gambon and Alec Baldwin have small roles, and they whip the picture into a state of semi-liveliness whenever they're on-screen.

 

De Niro -- this is the first film he has directed since 1993's "A Bronx Tale" -- shapes some individual scenes beautifully (including several in which Edward's awkward love for his son, played by a young actor named Tommy Nelson, comes through so tenderly that you can't help feeling sympathy for both characters). De Niro seems to be good with actors but less successful at stringing a movie together, and keeping it together, scene by scene. He doesn't have good instincts about what to keep in and what to cut out: One interminable sequence features many, many close-ups of hairy masculine knuckles turning dials and fiddling with various surveillance thingamabobs. The whole picture has a dull, worthy sheen (it was shot by Robert Richardson, in gray-flannel-suit tones), and it sends us home stooped with the weight of its life-and-death questions. By the end, "The Good Shepherd" has us fully convinced of the banality of evil. But does it have to come dressed in clothes from Robert Hall?

 

Below is an interesting review by a poster commenting on the article..

 

 

Ok. Let's go over the things we learned in this movie (in no particular order):

 

The dehumanizing torture techniques employed by the CIA are a natural evolution from naked collegiate frattish hazing. Thus a fairly straight line can be drawn from snobbish frat hijinks to Abu Ghraib (and worse). File this insight under 'the enemy is us' and in the 'the personal is the political' folder.

 

The Cold War, like the War on Terror, were (are) self-perpetuating constructs that have little and dubious external reality. These things instead are all really about a sort of autonomous unceasing autistic hunger for power. There are no 'real' enemies except ourselves (and maybe the Nazis in the beginning - more on this below).

 

Matt Damon's listless vacant performance - part of deconstructing the WASP - is meant to show baddie anglo-saxons are pretty much soulless vis a vis other ethnicities. Is this movie really about deconstructing the CIA or rather WASPs themselves? We are primed to have an eerie creepy thrill whenever we are cued with imagery of thin-lipped Ivy-leggers in large groups with cocktails.

 

The model battleships in the bottle? clumsy-handed take on the idea of imperialism in a vacuum. Moreover, savor the hints here that we are just carrying on the colonialism/imperialism of the bad old UK under new name and management - hence the Brit and pirate flags on gift to son - the movie's Rosebud.

 

Early emphasis on Nazis in the beginning is there to act as shadowy counter-weight (to the later CIA) and provide balance to the old canard 'you eventually become the monster you seek to destroy.' Though by the end of the film, I think we are supposed to see the CIA as closer to the KKK than to the Nazis per se - i.e. the CIA is behind a sky-high 'lynching' of a black woman that has the temerity to marry into the sanctified white inner circle. Who would have guessed this film would have funhouse reflections of Birth of a Nation?

 

As with Munich, the gray topsy-turvy world of espionage is the stage par excellence for postmodernism and relativistic games. Hence no accident, that Wilson is lit major. The whole thing can be read as a kind of literary gag. I'd like to see the drowning professor as the old critical analytical methods drowning in Deconstructionism - if only the old fraud wasn't set up as a deconstructionist himself.

[shipps]

Has anyone seen Pan's Labyrinth yet? I've read numerous reviews which list it as one of the year's best films.

I have only seen the poster advertisement for it,I am hoping its the remake of the Labyrinth the was made in the 80's with David Bowie.That is one of my all time favorite movies even though I havent seen it in a while.

[knightni]

I have only seen the poster advertisement for it,I am hoping its the remake of the Labyrinth the was made in the 80's with David Bowie.That is one of my all time favorite movies even though I havent seen it in a while.

 

You'll be disappointed, then.

[GoodAsGould]

I feel more sorry for those who don't 'get' what Slither was trying to do...I watched it with six people, three liked it, and three found it dumb. It's enjoyable because its ridiculous. The plot sucks, the special effects are meh, the gore is over the top, the cast is horrible...but the movie works.

 

Unless they were trying to make a bad movie, it was a complete failure. All you could do during the movie is say it just gets worse and worse, I can understand the concept they were trying to make it super ridiculous on purpose but they just went 2 far on that department for it 2 be enjoyable.

[LosMediasBlancas]

Sean Penn is solid as usual in 'The Assasination of Richard Nixon'. Saw it for the first time last night, I can't believe I snoozed on this film for so long.

[beautox]

Anyone see Blood Diamond? I wasn't expecting much and I really liked it. One of my favorites this year.

 

yeah, i was pleasantly surprised.

[LosMediasBlancas]

'Pan's Labyrinth', 'Pan's Labyrinth, everyone's talking aboout 'Pan's Labyrinth'. Well, I watched it last night and my wife put it best when she said "if they took out the swearing and the violence (and there really wasn't much of either) it would make a great kid's movie. Faries, fauns, fantasy and kind of a simple, empty message in the end. Don't rush out to see it, don't even rush out to rent it.

[bmags]

well, i don't really know what you were expecting then.

 

and also,recently i gave domino the prize of being the worst directed major movie of all time. I don't think its story gives it worst of all time but it is also bad. I think at one point i counted 21 cuts in 25 seconds. IT is the most obnoxious thing i've ever seen. It gives me motion sickness. Ugh, i think i only continued watching because it was on HBO and because i wanted to see what else i could laugh at. Tony scott is f***ing awful. This is the same reason i hated man on fire. The man couldn't do an extended take if you threatened to cut his finger off.

[knightni]

"Pan's Labryinth" should have been edited to PG-13.

 

 

I saw the review said "R", and thought to myself that basically it will be the film's kiss of death in the box office.

 

I mean, why have a "fairy tale" rated R?

Edited January 11, 2007 by knightni

[Soxy]

"Pan's Labryinth" should have been edited to PG-13.

I saw the review said "R", and thought to myself that basically it will be the film's kiss of death in the box office.

 

I mean, why have a "fairy tale" rated R?

Honestly, I think most "original" fairy tales would have been rated R, like the brothers Grimm and stuff. We're just so used to the sanitized crap we think that's what fairy tales are all about: happy endings. Not people cutting off toes or turning into sea foam or whatever.

 

 

 

Oh, and I saw Stranger Than Fiction last night. It was actually a lot better than I was expecting. Cute, fun, etc. There was a damn boom mic in damn near every frame, though, and that drove me up the wall.

[Chisoxfn]

well, i don't really know what you were expecting then.

 

and also,recently i gave domino the prize of being the worst directed major movie of all time. I don't think its story gives it worst of all time but it is also bad. I think at one point i counted 21 cuts in 25 seconds. IT is the most obnoxious thing i've ever seen. It gives me motion sickness. Ugh, i think i only continued watching because it was on HBO and because i wanted to see what else i could laugh at. Tony scott is f***ing awful. This is the same reason i hated man on fire. The man couldn't do an extended take if you threatened to cut his finger off.

Wow, Man on Fire is such an awesome action movie. You are the first person I've ever heard knock it.

[LosMediasBlancas]

Honestly, I think most "original" fairy tales would have been rated R, like the brothers Grimm and stuff. We're just so used to the sanitized crap we think that's what fairy tales are all about: happy endings. Not people cutting off toes or turning into sea foam or whatever.

Oh, and I saw Stranger Than Fiction last night. It was actually a lot better than I was expecting. Cute, fun, etc. There was a damn boom mic in damn near every frame, though, and that drove me up the wall.

 

Good point.

PL is too adult for kids and too simple for adults. Not sure who the target audience is supposed to be.

[southsider2k5]

Good point.

PL is too adult for kids and too simple for adults. Not sure who the target audience is supposed to be.

 

Gage?

[SoxFan1]

Jackass Number 2 might have been the funniest movie I have ever seen in my life. So glad I got the DVD with all the extra scenes and clips.

[LosMediasBlancas]

Just got back from 'The Last King Of Scotland'. Based on a Scotish doctor's experiences as Idi Amin's personal physician/advisor. Very, very good.

[knightni]

Honestly, I think most "original" fairy tales would have been rated R, like the brothers Grimm and stuff. We're just so used to the sanitized crap we think that's what fairy tales are all about: happy endings. Not people cutting off toes or turning into sea foam or whatever.

 

I realize that.

 

I read some of the originals.

 

 

The movie has no audience with an R rating though.