Be Excellent To Each Other

OK then I watched THE WOLF OF WALL STREET last and this really, really, isn't what the film is, or does.

I'm not going to labour through a point-by-point rebuttal (and others have already put the other side of the story quite adequately in the last few pages of this thread), so I'll limit myself to saying.

1) It's a superb film.
2) Jordan Belfort is absolutely not presented as a hero, nor is he glorified in any way. He is however given space to be a human being, albeit a deeply flawed one. He's basically a drug addict sociopath with what is ultimately an empty and unfulfilled life, and my takeaway from the film was that he didn't 'win' at all.

It's a similar story to Goodfellas in a lot of ways, with obvious parallels in the storytelling, and in a way it's up to the viewer to make their own mind up, Scorsese tells the story, he doesn't moralise and IMO that makes it more powerful.

It's a really good film, I wasn't intending to watch it all in one sitting as it was late when I started, but I had to get to the end once I'd started, even if that meant still watching it at 1am on a school night.

All the 'DOES IT GLORIFY A HORRIBLE MAN?' (Hint - No) stuff aside, it's a massively entertaining film which even at three hours long doesn't feel as if a minute is wasted.

9.5/10 - One of Scorsese's best.

The Carrier - John Cusack is in a motel room waiting for a mysterious courier to arrive. Terrible. Turned it off after 48 minutes and MrsA since banned from choosing films EVER AGAIN. The Holiday is 15 times better. No, 20x.

I was wondering that as you wouldn't watch Wolf because of your hatred of capitalism, if you would watch something about racism.

Yes, I understood the question. I just thought you might actually like to see what a real life black person thought of the glut of slavery films we've had recently.

The thing is, that's just one opinion. Strangely, there's a spread from one extreme to the other.

Yes but there are plenty more out there that say the same thing. You are welcome to find them yourself if you so wish.

And there are others who like their history perhaps being a bit more broadly acknowledged.

Not sure this really says anything.

Red Army: documentary about the Soviet Ice Hockey team, super dominant during the 80s. Not sure what the director's original thoughts were, but a promised 15 minutes with the captain at the time, Fetisov, turned into 18 hours over 3 days or so, and he wisely chose to hang the film on him. It's excellent, had me gripped. Short, too - 83 mins. I am disappointed that I didn't know how good they were, I could easily have been tuning in to whatever coverage there was of the 84 and 88 olympics. There's some extraordinary early footage - though whether there's some weird story there about some loon deciding to film as much of Fetisov's life as possible or something, I don't know. And the short bits of ice hockey are mesmeric - essentially, and perhaps counter-intuitively, the North American teams played brutal one-dimensional hockey, the Soviets, creative, free-thinking (albeit rooted in a team ethic) stuff.

I watched "What We Do In The Shadows" last night.

Excellent stuff. Highly recommended.

It's Jermaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords and friends in a mockumentary about vampires.

It's on Netflix for ease of viewing.

Werewolf focussed sequel in the works.

I watched Youth the other day. Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel and others worry about age and what they've done with their lives. While it does lose it's way quite a bit nearer the end, the first two thirds is absolutely worth the price of entry. For that time it's structured almost like a series of sketches with each scene lasting no more than a couple of minutes and almost all of them being incredibly funny (in a very dry and subtle way). The plot and characters is developed through these 'sketches' so they're not stand-alone unrelated scenes or anything, but it seemed very noticeable to me that it wasn't put together like a normal film in that respect. The whole thing is also incredible to look at with each shot framed beautifully, although the alpine hotel setting would be very difficult to make look bad admittedly.

tl;dr: most very funny and beautiful looking, people should watch it.

This is on my list (and indeed my NAS), I'll be watching it in the near future I imagine.

Last night's film for me was BLACK MASS with your man Johnny Depp in it doing proper acting for a change instead of dressing up like a pirate.

It's a familiar gangster yarn in a lot of ways, elevated above the ranks of the average by a splendid cast, and it all looking and sounding very nice, superbly directed and filmed. Narratively speaking it's not fantastic, compressing too much real time (twenty years plus coda) into a two hour running time, this is one of those rare films that would have benefited from being longer IMO.

Still, a fine watch and a great film. And it has Juno Temple in it playing a prostitute. Although after KILLER JOE there's not much new to see there. I do like Juno Temple.

8.5/10 - Bald Johnny Depp.

Black Mass is the true(ish) story of Whitey Bulger, read a few books from people who were around at the time so doubt I'll bother with this as I know the story.

Whitey Bulger did a runner in 1994 when I assume this film ends and was only captured in 2011, he got life without parole at the age of 81.

Might give that a look tonight as TV shows that the wife likes are thin on the ground.

3096 Days.

I really don't know why I seem to pick films that are difficult to watch but as difficult goes this one was impossible and did prove too much. At times I had to reach for the remote to forward past scenes of the nudity and rape of a very young girl. I actually felt sick at points of the film and the first thing I did this morning was do an IMDB check on the actress that plays Natascha. Thankfully she's well into her thirties but is sickeningly skinny.

Honestly if you thought London To Brighton was a tough watch then really don't watch this.

I only watched it all because I was desperate to see the nasty cunt get his comeuppance and he did, but it should have been far more graphic (he committed suicide by lying on a train track).

So yeah, just be warned that this really is a stomach turning film.

Mi rogue nation is surprisingly enjoyable. Teeny tiny tom cruise is just about the right amount of tom cruise. Ditto Simon pegg. The car bike chase bit put that tedious supercar bollocks in spectre to shame. Liked.

The car chase in Spectre was awful. How did they make it so dull?

Last night's film was BRIDGE OF SPIES a.k.a. SPY BRIDGE and STOP OR MY BRIDGE WILL SHOOT.

It's absolutely as Spielbergian and Hanksian as you could possibly imagine, so expect lots of talking and acting and many historical details like OLD CARS along with it being about INTERESTING THINGS THAT REALLY HAPPENED. (Sort of.)

I much enjoyed it, in a very PROPER FILM and America is the best thing ever sort of way.

8/10.

New Jason Bourne movie? Come on, who asked for that then?

So before watching the trailer you might be thinking "Christ, didn't they ruin the stellar first film with some garbage bullshit sequels? That escape from the bank was incredible and needed little more than Matt Damon walking about like a robot and disarming baddies effortlessly like an assassin should. I hope they've gone back to the original direction. I hope they haven't done more bollocks to further ruin the series like the first bunch of sequels did and then Taken imitated with more crap sequels."



Happy with what you've seen much?

Oo-rah!

Oooh!

I'm quite looking forward to London has Fallen too.

Ah, they're doing a Terminator. Make three blockbuster films, lose the star for the fourth, then realise it was shit and get him back for the fifth.

Terminator 3 didn't bust no blocks, fool.

It was only $85m behind T2 ($433m to $519m). T1 made $71m.

It's not exactly small change

Surprisingly, Alien³ made the most money of the Alien films.

If you don't count Prometheus, which made as much money than the rest of them combined :|

Is all that adjusted for inflation, though?

I hate everything.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/franchises ... =alien.htm

Check the adjusted gross... better

Having watched it three times, I have come to the conclusion I quite like Prometheus.

I thought it was all right. It's very beautiful and very hard to follow and the "chase scene" is stupid, but other than that it's okay.

Bit like your mum.

I've heard a lot of criticisms of it but hard to follow's not one I've come across before; what aspects are you thinking of when you say that?

It would be better if they'd let it be an Alien film.

More about how it ties into the Alien universe than the film as a whole. It needs to be discussed over a pint or three, really

I know it's kind of the point that the crew members on Prometheus are idiots, but I cannot look past the fact that two scientists, one of whom is a biologist - even if they were crap - "play" with an alien creature that is clearly showing aggression.

That and the guy that uses the fancy holographic mapping tool to map out the cave then gets fucking lost and doesn't think to look at the map that he created.

Hnnngh.

Spotlight: pretty good stuff. I was worried it would be pretty heavy-going given the subject matter (news reporters investigating a systemic cover up of peadophiles in the Catholic church) but it played out like political/legal detective story and was very engaging. If I had a criticism it would be that the story seemed to end without any real sense of crescendo but it's a true story so they can't really fuck around with the narrative structure too much. It's got a really, really good cast though and it's a pleasure just watching them work to be honest.

Zoolander 2: pretty much utter balls. There are a couple of funny moments but it confuses 'utterly stupid' with 'funny' and rarely do the two intersect here. I didn't really have a strong opinion of it coming out of the cinema but the more I think about it the more I realise how just shit it was.

Fair enough, I'm not the biggest Alien fan so when watching it I was never considering continuity with the existing films in any great depth.



This is really my biggest problem with it, it's a textbook example of having characters actions bending to the needs of the plot rather than them acting in ways consistent with how they've been presented up until that point. Pretty much everyone in the film gets hit with it to some degree but your examples there are the most obvious.

Yeah, but it looked like a large worm. I mean I’m in a big suit, it’s a little worm, what’s the harm, right? Remember, these guys haven’t watched Alien.



Yeah, that I can’t get over.

Probably because it makes no fucking sense at all.

So just like Zoolander 1 then.

Seriously, there were about 3 good jokes in the entire thing.

I just watched that video for the elveentytith time.

Prometharse.

Holy shit, the word Prometharse is in my autocorrect dictionary. Awesome.

The Danish Girl. Beautiful, some glorious scenery shots which aren't lingered too long over. I find Eddie Redmayne irritating outside of a film, and it takes a while for that voice not to do my head in, but he's a good enough actor that after a while I go with it. And given that the film covers him coming to terms with his body and identity, a bit of growing to accept him is fitting.

But why Male Models?

Cheaper than flying?

Trailer for that looks very good!

Killer: A Journal of Murder (1996).

Having read two books about Carl Panzram I was amazed to see this pop up on Prime the other night. I've done extensive research into Panzram and at no point did I notice they had turned the book into a film. The first thing I thought when seeing they had done so (especially in 1995) was "Haha they won't even go near to describing what he did to people in a film that old" and I wasn't wrong. The film tends to lean heavily on Lesser's part of the book than Panzram's. Understandable really. So when the fim reached that part (Panzram's own writings) it very gingerly skipped through it with things like "I killed every one I got my hands on" and so on without actually going into detail. It lasted about two minutes.

But it was still good and a decent portrayal of Henry Lesser rather than Carl Panzram. I noticed this morning that there's a newer film about Panzram I may have to dig that out and have a watch.

There is a sort of sequel planned to Prometheus in 2017 called Alien Covenant (for now)



Sure this plot will change before the film is out, but doesn't look like the film will explain any of the questions from the first one at this point!

2 hours of a close up of Fassbender explaining the first movie.

I'd pay to see that.

Everyone should go and watch the trailer for Grimsby because I think it might be in the running for the worst fucking thing I've ever seen in my life.