LR's MOVIE OF THE NOW

[Apocalyptus]

I'm not even marking any of this as spoilers. Because you all need to be warned.

Okay, just don't tell us if they end up reaching dry land at the end or not.

[Kimra]

I'm not even marking any of this as spoilers. Because you all need to be warned.

Okay, just don't tell us if they end up reaching dry land at the end or not.

I like that you're ignoring that I mentioned that in my first post. Well done.

[Apocalyptus]

That, or I have a terrible memory/am a lazy reader. Well done me!

[Liriodendron_fagotti]

Thanks for the review. I just flew back from Cairns (to Sydney) and was debating between Noah and the other flicks Qantas provided. I went with Divergent, which ended up being a fairly dreadful film, but at least I watched a different dreadful film!

It's based on the book of the same name (which I have not read) and is pretty much a mash-up of teen dystopia and cliché romance novels. The premise itself isn't too bad, but some pretty major motivational holes, creepy student-instructor romance, and a poor story in general crippled that a fair bit. Hans Zimmer did the soundtrack, but even that wasn't very good.

[Liriodendron_fagotti]

Boyhood

Twelve years in the life of a family using the same cast. Pretty interesting idea, and the movie and actors live up to it. The director plays on a lot of parenting fears, like bullying, underaged drinking, car crashes, teen pregnancy, etc. but he just gets us tensed up before moving on another year. If most other directors has made this movie, most if not al of the fears would have come to fruition, but that never happens. There's plenty of shitty stuff in these kids' lives (mainly the stepdads), but overall, we get a faaairly "typical" childhood and adolescence for a kid today. The titular boy aged pretty well. His older sister (the daughter of the director) didn't seem to 'fit' quite as well as the years went by.

It's worth seeing, even if just for the concept, but I still feel ill from some parts.

[smiley_cow]

Chicken Run - I'd seen it before when it first came out (when I was about 14) but not since. This movie might be perfect.

[Sahan]

Chicken Run was interesting because they I think they dropped their more typical Wallace and Gromit style and humour and specifically catered it instead to an American movie-going audience. They did it fantastically well though. Seeing what they did with The Curse of the Wererabbit, when they felt a bit freer to do as they pleased, was a bit of a shock after that, particularly with the amount of sexual innuendo they decided was appropriate for a children's movie.

[DonRetrasado]

Chicken Run - I'd seen it before when it first came out (when I was about 14) but not since. This movie might be perfect.

Chickens go in, pies come out!

EDIT: Also somehow never realized that Wallace and Gromit was a British show, I guess because I'm not great with context clues

[Kaharz]

BoyhoodThe titular boy aged pretty well. His older sister (the daughter of the director) didn't seem to 'fit' quite as well as the years went by.

What was it about the sister that didn't seem to fit as well? I haven't seen the movie, but was fairly interested after hearing a review of it. I like that Linklater actually shot it intermittently over 12 years so the aging is real. Although I feel kind of bad for the kid who had to work for twelve years before finishing his "breakout" role. He did a few other things during that time, but nothing major.

[Kimra]

EDIT: Also somehow never realized that Wallace and Gromit was a British show, I guess because I'm not great with context clues

Or accents it would seem.

[Liriodendron_fagotti]

BoyhoodThe titular boy aged pretty well. His older sister (the daughter of the director) didn't seem to 'fit' quite as well as the years went by.

What was it about the sister that didn't seem to fit as well? I haven't seen the movie, but was fairly interested after hearing a review of it. I like that Linklater actually shot it intermittently over 12 years so the aging is real. Although I feel kind of bad for the kid who had to work for twelve years before finishing his "breakout" role. He did a few other things during that time, but nothing major.

The main actor is only 19, so he didn't suffer too much. The aging works fantastically well for all the other characters, but after a couple years it becomes really clear that the daughter/sister doesn't look anything like the rest of the family and scenes with her don't feel as realistic. She's actually Linklater's daughter. I think he started using her less as the years went by when it became really apparent she didn't fit as well.

Still very worth seeing.

[Lethal Interjection]

I remember really enjoying Chicken Run. Which was not typical for me, as I stopped caring about kid's movies from a pretty early age.


Anyways, on Friday I saw:

Lucy- It was probably my least favourite movie I've seen in theatres for a long time. The trailer seemed to indicate that it might be up my alley. And it ultimately was, but it was done rather poorly. For those unfamiliar with the plot it is that a woman is coerced into smuggling a new drug internally, and the bag rips open unexplicably (or rather they show that she was beat up and kicked in the side, but they seem to have skipped over why that happened, at least from my recollection). Now the following contains pretty minor spoilers, but I will blank them out anyways. The problem with the film is that the drug gives her increasing power over her brain capacity. So essentially Lucy increasingly gains brain power throughout the movie. And the closer she gets to 100%, the closer she gets to omniscience. And the issue with this is simply that we don't have the story-telling capacity to be able to adequately represent omniscience. You can focus in on one thing or another, but you can't represent the whole thing. So there were holes galore in the plot. There were a few other stylistic things I disliked. Primarily a number of scenes that were cut with what was basically nature footage, but with virtually no explanation as to why (other than to potentially make certain points even more clear?).
Anyways, it did get me thinking, but I wouldn't recommend the movie.

I also unintentionally watched a beat generation trifecta. Howl, On The Road, and Inside Llewyn Davis. All are based around the late 40s, early 50s. Unintentionally in the sense that I had them all in my Netflix list. I did watch On The Road a week after Howl, remembering the semi-biographical nature of the former. However seeing another movie in the same period was a surprise.
Howl was okay. It was a stylistic piece that kind of told a short bio on Ginsberg interspersed with the obscenity trial re: Howl. When pieces of Howl were read there were often animations to go with it, which were neat enough. I didn't care about the movie so much, but I did feel like I knew a little more about Ginsberg and the attitude of the time, so there's that.
On The Road was also okay. I didn't love the book, I didn't love the movie. But both were okay. I must say that my dislike for Dean in the book carried over very well into the movie. Which is probably the thing I most remember from both.
Inside Llewyn Davis was mostly boring, but well done.

[Apocalyptus]

So I watched What We Do in the Shadows recently, which is a New Zealand mockumentary about a vampire sharehouse that has both Jemaine and Murray from Flight of the Conchords in it.



The first few minutes were a bit cheesy, but it got funnier and funnier and overall was a hilarious movie, at least to my tastes.

[Lethal Interjection]

Good to know. I have seen the trailer, and wasn't sure whether I was terribly interested, but it is likely I'd see it if it came up on Netflix or somewhere else I'd see it and remember to watch it.

[Edminster]

The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi

I knew going into it that it was a Beat Takeshi movie, but even that wasn't enough to prepare me for it. It's a story about the legendary Zatoichi, but told with such weird interludes that when it ended in a massive tapdance routine I was wholly unsurprised.